2007: John Joe “Ash” Amador
4 comments August 29th, 2013 Headsman
On this date in 2007, John Joe “Ash” Amador died of lethal injection in Texas.
Amador, age 18, and a 16-year-old cousin, hailed a taxi in San Antonio in the dark predawn hours of January 4, 1994, directed it on a long drive to a dark street in Poteet, Texas, and abruptly shot the cabbie in the head with a .25 caliber handgun. Amador’s cousin shot the cab driver’s ride-along companion.
It’s possible to get unusually up close and personal with Amador — both the man himself, and the gears of the death penalty process at the anticlimax of 13 long years.
To begin with, journalist Dave Maass interviewed Ash Amador a month before the latter’s execution, and posted 52 minutes of audio on Archive.org.
And in a more outre vein, a team of British filmmakers crafted a surreal and digressive but frequently touching documentary of Amador’s end, most especially through the eyes of the condemned man’s wife and family. As Maass put it, they’ve “given the man one wicked afterlife.”
If that teaser intrigues, the entire documentary is freely available online here — complete with an amazing scene of a death mask being cast from the freshly-executed, just-body-bagged Ash.
On this day..
- 1929: John Fabri, condemned - 2020
- 2014: Zhou Youping, serial kinkster - 2019
- 1941: Henri Honoré d'Estienne d'Orves, the first martyr of Free France - 2018
- 1741: John Ury, schoolmaster - 2017
- 1354: Fra Moriale, condottiero entrepreneur - 2016
- 1783: William Wynne Ryland, court engraver - 2015
- 1865: Gerardo Barrios, Salvadoran statesman - 2014
- 1890: Otto Leuth - 2012
- 1541: Cristóvão da Gama, Portuguese crusader in Ethiopia - 2011
- 1938: Bela Kun, Hungarian Communist leader - 2010
- 1906: Zinaida Konoplyannikov, assassin - 2009
- 1966: Sayyid Qutb - 2008
Entry Filed under: 21st Century,Arts and Literature,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,Disfavored Minorities,Execution,Lethal Injection,Racial and Ethnic Minorities,Ripped from the Headlines,Texas,USA
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