Execution Report: Gustavo Garcia

Gustavo Garcia, 43, was executed by lethal injection on 16 February 2016 in Huntsville, Texas for the robbery and murder of a store clerk.

On Sunday, 9 December 1990, Garcia, then 18, and Christopher Vargas, 15, entered a Plano liquor store. Armed with a single-shot .20-gauge sawed-off shotgun, Garcia ordered the clerk, Craig Turski, 43, to give him money from the cash register. At the same time, Vargas took beer from the store and put it in their car. A customer walked into the store, saw the robbery, and immediately left. Garcia then shot Craig in the abdomen at close range. Turski fled outside the store. Garcia pursued him, reloaded the shotgun, and shot him in the back of the head. The robbers then left.

The customer who had seen the robbery returned to the store with her husband. They called the police. Turski was taken to the hospital, where he died.

About a month later, on 5 January 1991, Garcia, Vargas, and Garcia's girlfriend, Sheila Loe, 15, drove to a gas station in Plano. Garcia and Vargas entered the store with a shotgun while Loe pumped gas. The clerk, Gregory Martin, 18, was on the phone with his girlfriend. When Martin saw the two males enter, he told his girlfriend that he thought he was about to be robbed and asked her to call the police. He was then taken to a back room and shot in the back of the head at point blank range.

Alerted by Martin's girlfriend, the police arrived to find Garcia, Vargas, and Loe still present. Vargas was found standing over the victim's body. He claimed to have just entered the store and found the victim lying there. Police found the shotgun, then found Garcia hiding in a beer cooler near the shotgun. He, Vargas, and Loe were arrested.

Garcia gave oral and written confessions in which he admitted to the murders of Craig Turski and Gregory Martin. His signed statement regarding Turski's murder read, in part:

"I had the clerk go to a little room next to the cash register & I had him get on his knees. A customer, a white woman walked in the store & saw me & she walked back out. I then panicked and I shot the clerk with the shotgun. The clerk started coming at me & threw a chair at me and then he ran outside. I loaded the shotgun & shot the clerk again outside the store. The clerk had jumped over the fence & was in some grass when I shot him the 2nd time."

Two firearms experts testified at Garcia's trial that the shotgun found at the gas station was the murder weapon in both crimes.

Bobby Flores testified that he was at Vargas's house the night of Turski's murder. He testified that Vargas and Garcia left the house and then returned with beer and a lot of money. Flores asked Garcia where he got the beer and money. Garcia answered that he went to a store, took the beer and money, shot the clerk, and left.

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