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Texas convicted killer Arnold Prieto to be executed this week Texas convicted killer Arnold Prieto to be executed this week
(about 1 hour later)
A 41-year-old man who was convicted of killing three people during a San Antonio home invasion is set to become the first Texas inmate to be executed this year. A man convicted of killing three people during a robbery at their San Antonio home more than two decades ago was set to die by injection on Wednesday evening in Texas’s first execution of the year.
Arnold Prieto faces lethal injection on Wednesday evening in Huntsville, for the September 1993 murders of 72-year-old Rodolfo Rodriguez; his 62-year-old wife, Virginia; and Paula Moran, their 90-year-old former nanny who lived with them. Arnold Prieto, 41, had originally spurned a plea deal for a sentence of less than life in prison if he would testify against one of his alleged companions, then became the only one to receive the death penalty.
Each was stabbed or cut as many as 31 times with an icepick, screwdriver or knife. “There was a way out,” recalled Michael Bernard, one of Prieto’s trial lawyers. “We just couldn’t get there.”
Prieto and two other men were arrested near Dallas, seven months after the killings. Prieto was the only one of the three to be sentenced to death. No last-day appeals were in the courts to try to halt Prieto’s punishment.
The US supreme court has declined to review Prieto’s case, after a series of lower court appeals. Rodolfo Rodriguez, 72, his wife, Virginia, 62, and Paula Moran, 90, the family’s former nanny who lived at their home, were each stabbed or cut multiple times with an icepick, screwdriver or knife.
Their September 1993 slayings went unsolved for about seven months before an informant’s tip sent San Antonio police to suburban Dallas, where a grandnephew of the slain couple implicated himself, his brother and Prieto.
Authorities said Prieto told them he and brothers Jesse and Guadalupe Hernandez believed the Rodriguezes had about $10,000 cash used for a check-cashing business they operated out of their home.
Prieto told police the three had been using cocaine and continued to do so during their 300-mile drive from the Dallas suburb of Carrollton to San Antonio. Virginia Rodriguez fed them breakfast after they arrived. Then she, her husband and Moran were attacked.
The assailants fled with some jewelry and a purse containing about $300. Back in Carrollton, they split the money and pawned some of the jewelry. Prieto was found with other items taken during the robbery and acknowledged to police his involvement in the attacks, Bernard said.
“Obviously, most of the effort was to keep those statements from the jury … and mitigate his role in order to save his life,” Bernard said of the defense trial strategy.
A Bexar County jury that convicted Prieto heard he previously was jailed for more than a year and received probation for vehicle burglaries. They also were told he was indicted in January 1994 on federal charges of engaging in organized criminal activity for the theft of 163 laptops worth $676,000 from a Dallas warehouse where he had worked.
Jurors then deliberated 13 hours before deciding he should die.
Jesse Hernandez, now 38, is serving a life sentence for the slayings. He was the fiance of Prieto’s sister and father of her child. The killings occurred a day before his 17th birthday, making him too young for the death penalty. Charges against his brother, Guadalupe, were dropped because of insufficient evidence.
At least a dozen other executions are scheduled in Texas in the coming months, including two next week. Last year, 10 condemned inmates received lethal injections of pentobarbital.