Judgment Day

Judgment Day

By

Jamey O’Donnell

One of the most overused phrases people say in life is “I’m going to kill you”

No one ever does kill that person, it’s just something they say when they get really angry.

I’ve even said it, lots of times, but I’ve never said it to someone I’ve actually killed, and since I’ve started killing men, I’ve never said it again. Not even once, because the thought of it now sickens me, and now every time I kill a man, it gives me nightmares.

I didn't know how much longer I could keep doing this.

The money just isn’t worth it, not that I make that much to begin with.

You’d think they’d pay a man more money for doing something like that, but as far as I know, I don’t make anymore than the next guy who has been on duty as long as I have. They treat us all the same, no matter what our job is.

I’m the executioner.

I’m supposed to be detached and matter of fact, not sentimental or weepy when it comes to pulling the switch on “Ol’ Sparky”.

It’s just another day at the office. Some people do intake, some monitor the cell blocks, while others do a series of jobs, such as me, but one of them is to pull the switch on a man sentenced to death by a jury of his peers.

I’d been trained to do this particular task shortly after I first arrived at Florida State Penitentiary. I was 25 years old, fresh out of police academy, and looking for a job in law enforcement. I saw this job as a steppingstone to becoming a police officer, and never thought I’d be doing this as long as I have.

Some people really deserve to die, probably most, if not all that come into that room and get strapped to that chair.

It’s hard to believe there are so many people in this world that do the heinous things that they do, but they do them, some without the least little bit of remorse.

Yes, they need to go spend time with the devil, but I feel like I am sometimes playing a hand I'm not supposed to play, and sometimes messing with creations I didn't create.

At first, I didn’t care to know about what the men did that sat in that chair.

I felt like it was none of my business to know, but I was wrong.

It was every bit of my business if I am the one that ends their life and gives them their last breath. Not knowing what they had done had begun to mess with my brain, thinking that maybe I might be killing an innocent man, that this man flopping in the chair wasn’t supposed to die on that day, and I was contributing to killing someone that could be innocent.

In the last 12 years, I’ve put out the lights of over 70 men, and I can only hope and pray that every single man deserved it, or I’m going to have to answer to the powers that be when that day comes I’m standing at the pearly gates.

In the beginning, before I executed my first prisoner, I remember asking myself why they were giving me such an important job right off the bat, but I quickly found out for myself, with no one having to tell me why that opportunity had been laid in my lap.

It was a job no one wanted.

My first kill was a man that had robbed a bank and shot the teller dead.

Apparently, she was very nervous as she was putting the money in the bag, and made him nervous, and according to his defense, he accidently shot her in the face.

Accident or not, he shot and killed her, and it was him pointing his gun in her face, no one else.

I remember trying to understand what might be going through his mind, sitting in that chair, if it really was an accident, if he was sorry for taking that woman’s life, or if he was sorrier that his life was about to be extinguished.

In my mind, that would be a deciding factor whether he meant to kill her or not, but the mistake I was making was trying to decide if he was innocent or not, because in my mind, I questioned whether he deserved to die if he killed her by accident.

That wasn’t my decision to make, and it was a habit I got into every time I was about to pull the switch. It never stopped me from pulling it, because in the end, that’s why I was there.

To do my job.

And so, I began to find out the name, and possibly see a mug shot of him, and see what the man had done, more than anything else, to feel good about pulling that switch, but no matter how horrifying the crime, I could never get excited about it and walk away feeling good about what I had just done.

About 6 years ago, I had just executed the father of a 3-year-old boy that had died because of the negligence of his father.

The man had taken his son out on the boat to fish that morning and had begun drinking as soon as they got started, and the man had more to drink than he should have.

He ended up passing out at the stern of the boat, leaving the boy up front at the bow to fend for himself.

When he woke, the boy was no longer in the boat, and was presumed dead.

The father had no answers and was out of his mind drunk when he finally reported the boy missing hours later, but there was a sign of a slight struggle at the bow of the boat, with teeth marks and the boy’s blood.

There was also the possibility that he killed the boy.

The best guess was an alligator had probably gone for the boy and pulled him from the boat and ate him, though there was no sign of him or any of his remains in the waters where they had been.

Even if the boy had fallen out of the boat on his own and drowned, the father showed extreme lack of judgment and would have probably gotten life in prison, but because it was presumed that the boy most likely died from a predatory attack or at the hands of his father, the jury saw the case as the father being indifferent to the well being of his son, and they wanted to make an example of him.

I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for the man, even though he was a dumb ass who’s stupidity cost the life of his little boy, because I imagined the guilt and sorrow the man must have felt, and more than most people that sat in Ol’ Sparky, he most likely welcomed death with open arms, as the guilt would have killed him one way or another.

On that fateful morning, the man never said a single word, but instead wept silently, not for himself, but for his son, and I remember almost crying when I pulled the switch.

The night after his execution that morning, I began to have the dreams again.

I was 17 years old when my father brutally beat my mother to death in the kitchen with a hammer, and beat my younger brother David almost to death, then lit the house on fire with my brother still alive in it, and when the fire was put out and he was brought to the hospital burned on 85% of his body, his last words before succumbing to his injuries was to identify our dad as the one who did this to them.

I remember growing up watching my dad beat my mom after drinking, and when I became older, the beatings didn’t happen as much because I would intervene, to the point they became a rarity, but I never forgot how brutal he could be, and I was always scared of him.

He was never found to answer for what he had done to my family and had been on the loose ever since.

I never really got close to my father growing up because I never liked him, so I didn’t know a lot about him. What I did know was that he was a salesman, and he drifted from job to job, selling anything from cars to washing machines.

Shortly after losing my mom and brother, I began to have nightmares, vivid nightmares of the killings, as if I was there and saw it all.

Each time I would wake up screaming, vowing to search for him and kill him if I ever found him.

He was the one man I would have killed after saying I would.

He is also the reason I went into the police academy to be a cop.

I wanted to stop people like him from hurting people like he did to me and my mom and little brother, and to punish them for what they had done.

This was the conundrum for me, and why I had such a hard time pulling the switch against this man that had negligently killed his son, because the difference between him and my dad could not be starker in comparison.

My only salvation I could see was this man would go before his maker, and it would be there that he would be judged by his heart, and would indeed have mercy bestowed on his soul, of this I believed.

My wife is a beautiful woman that has a great deal of compassion for people, the downtrodden, the ones that have fallen through the cracks of society, and even she hates the ground my father walked on, wherever he was.

It was a few months into our courtship when I broke down and told her of my past, only telling her the basics and sugar coating the rest, telling her just enough to know who I was, and it was enough for her to fall in love with me.

She could never have kids, and I did not hold that against her, but instead decided to love her enough for her and the kids we could never have.

It was her that soothed me every time I had one of those horrible dreams, and she always brought me front and center to the reality of now, reminding me that what happened was not a hallmark of who I am, but instead a reminder of who I am not.

Eventually I stopped having those dreams until that execution, until that night I woke up in a cold sweat, fearful they would begin their cycle all over again, and they probably would have had fate not intervened.

It was a month ago when I first heard the name Bobby Pryor.

He was a man the prison was scheduled to execute 3 days ago, which we did.

As was my usual custom, I investigated who this man was, and I wanted to know everything about him that I could, as I did with everyone.

Bobby Pryor was a man in his early 60’s, and he had murdered a man in cold blood after getting caught in the act having sex with the man’s wife.

The man had walked in on them coming home early from work one day, but instead of going off on both of them, the man turned away and walked into the living room, sat on his couch, put his hands in his face, and began to cry his eyes out.

It had to be one of the saddest things a person could ever see, but this was lost on Bobby Pryor.

Instead of just putting on his clothes and walking out of the house, Bobby Pryor went into the living room, picked up a poker from the fireplace, and beat the man to death right where he sat, and in fact, beat the man’s head in well past the time of his death, totally destroying any facial features, and had the man not had his wife there witnessing this, she would not have been able to identify him.

In the process of this happening, his horrified wife picked up a heavy glass statue off of the fireplace mantle and smashed it over Bobby’s head, knocking him out with a gaping wound to his skull, and that is how he was found by the police when they arrested him.

He fought as long as he could in prison to delay his death sentence, but after 7 years when all his appeals were exhausted, he was scheduled for Ol’ Sparky 3 days ago.

Other than this crime, his record was clean as a whistle beforehand, not even so much as a traffic ticket on his record, but on that day, after knocking on that woman’s door trying to sell her a Kirby vacuum cleaner and somehow conniving his way into her bedroom, he snapped and became a craven killer.

Funny how people can change on a dime I thought.

Unlike all the other jackets I had seen, this man’s didn’t come with his photo…not at first. That would come later.

After the last man’s execution, I decided to become super aggressive about finding a job as a cop on a police force.

I applied for the local police department where I lived, the county sheriff’s department, the state patrol, even with the U.S. Marshall’s office, and I finally got a hit with the state patrol, and after a few interviews, I finally got the job I had wanted ever since I left the academy, to be a state patrolman, which I will begin right after this execution I just did, because now I am done with it.

After the execution before that messed with my head, I just decided that I could not do this anymore and keep my sanity.

I finally received the last information I requested on this prisoner we were about to execute, and I almost passed out when I saw his face.

He was older for sure, but there was no way I would ever forget that face, the face that had been the source of my nightmares all these years.

The name was different, but this face belonged to my father.

The name said Bobby Pryor, but whoever Bobby Pryor was, it wasn’t the name of the face of the man I was looking at.

All the hatred came back just as fresh as it ever was.

He had avoided prosecution all of these years, but how?

Yes, his crime was in a different state, but what about his fingerprints?

After looking back in the files I had acquired previously, I noticed something that I hadn’t seen until now. He had no fingerprints. He had either burned them off or they were burned in an accident, but this is how he had been able to avoid arrest and prosecution for all of these years.

He assumed a different identity than who he really was, which was Richard Barlow.

Richard Barlow, father of me, Fred Barlow and killer of my mother and brother.

After seeing this revelation, I had to call off work early, and instead of going straight home, I went and parked in the local Walmart parking lot under a shade tree for most of the afternoon, trying to figure out what it was I was supposed to do.

I was pretty sure I had a responsibility to tell the warden what I knew, who this man really was, and my relation to him, but I knew if I did that, his execution would be delayed for years, if not until he died in prison.

He would be made to stand trial for the murders of his family, dredging up all those painful memories and sorrow to accompany it, and my life would take a turn I was not prepared to take.

What would happen to my new job?

More importantly, who would pull the switch on him eventually? It certainly wouldn’t be me, and of all the men I’ve executed, this would be the man most deserving and the one man I would look forward to pulling the switch on.

Maybe my life in this prison has been to prepare me for that very day,

It had to be me that ended his life, fulfilling my dreams of vowing to kill him for what he had done.

I couldn’t talk to anyone about this, not even my wife. Whatever decision I made, it had to be mine alone.

Just before sundown, I came to the only decision I could have made, and that was to keep this under my hat.

No one had to know, and as long as I never said anything, no one would.

I knew it would be hard not to walk up to him after he was strapped to the chair, pull the hood up over his head, tell him who I was, and explain to him how I was going to electrocute the life out of him, and that I would dance for joy once the doctor declared him dead.

Hard, but not impossible, and this was a decision I would not renege on.

It was a natural end to a very unnatural act, and I would be able to live with myself, with no reservations, so I drove home to my wife and apologized for being late, then ate dinner with a peacefulness in my heart I had not experienced for longer than I could remember, and the sleep I had was commensurate to the feeling I had at the dinner table.

That morning I was early into work, never feeling more alive as I was about to put someone to death.

When he was brought into the room, he was crying like a little baby, so sorry for what he had done, and begging for a last minute pardon that wasn’t coming.

The three guards that had escorted him, unshackled him and placed him in the chair, then strapped him in, tightening all the right screws, wetting the sponge to be placed on his head, then placing the hood over his head so he could not see or be seen.

When asked if he had any last words, all he could do was sob uncontrollably.

Normally I don’t look out the peephole I use to see the killing floor, but this time my eye was glued to the ongoings.

After his last rites were given, I heard my first command, “Roll on One”.

It was then I turned the voltage up to 2500 volts, then my last command.

“Roll on Two”, and that is when I released the electricity that coursed through his body, burning his flesh, bones, and brain, making him bounce and pop in that chair like an involuntary muscle spasm.

This was all in real time for me and I watched every single bit of it, taking it all in for the excellent theatre that it was.

Then I was given the signal to kill the circuit, and for the first time ever, I did not kill it immediately, but let it go on for a few seconds more.

It was always then I would immediately leave my cubicle once the doctor declared the prisoner dead, but not this time.

I stayed to breathe in the burning flesh, until all the spectators had left the viewing room, and until they had lifted the hood off of his head.

I wanted to see him dead, to see the top of his head smoking, and to see his face contorted from the brutal killing he had just received, and I was not disappointed.

I felt fulfilled and felt as I had truly done something wonderful.

After that morning, my nightmares disappeared, and I never had another one.

Had I not gone through with this, I never would have gotten my happy ending I was so desperately seeking. Everything that had led up to this finally made sense to me now, and I could now absolve myself of my past transgressions.