Man Tells Relatives He Loves Them Before Execution
A Missouri inmate who was executed for killing two children and their mother mouthed "I love you" to his brother and sister-in-law as he was being put to death.
A Department of Corrections spokesman says Mark Christeson was pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. CST, eight minutes after the lethal injection.
The February 1998 killings of 36-year-old Susan Brouk, her 12-year-old daughter, Adrian, and 9-year-old son, Kyle, traumatized the rural area around the south-central Missouri town of Vichy.
Harley Brouk, the half-sister of the two children who were killed, said, "There's not a day that goes by that I do not miss them, and I wish that they were here."
She fought through tears to read a poem that Adrian had written not long before her death. "Our love will always be there even when fate is not fair," the poem reads in part.