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A South Carolina man on death row is scheduled to be executed next month for killing a man, burning his eyes with cigarettes and taunting police by painting “catch me if u can” on the wall with the victim’s blood more than 20 years ago.
Stephen Bryant, 44, is set to be put to death on Nov. 14 after the state Supreme Court issued the death warrant on Friday, rejecting a request from Bryant’s lawyers for a delay because they work with the federal court system and the U.S. government is shut down.
Bryant is scheduled for execution for one killing, but prosecutors said he also fatally shot two other men he was giving rides to as they were urinating on the side of the road in Sumter County in October 2004.
He will have until Oct. 31 to choose if he wants to die by lethal injection, firing squad or the electric chair. Since the state resumed executions last year following an involuntary 13-year pause due to trouble obtaining lethal injection drugs, four inmates have selected lethal injection and two have died by firing squad.
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Bryant confessed to killing Willard “TJ” Tietjen after stopping by his home in rural Sumter County and saying he had car trouble.
After Tietjen was shot several times, candles were lit around his body.
The corner of a potholder was dipped in Tietjen’s blood and “victem 4 in 2 weeks. catch me if u can” on the wall, according to officials.
Tietjen’s daughter, Kimberly Dees, called him several times and grew worried when he did not answer. She testified that a strange voice answered on her sixth call to her father.
She demanded that the person at the other end of the line allow her to speak to her father.
“And he said ‘you can’t, I killed him.’ And I said, ‘this isn’t funny, who are you?’ He said, ‘I’m the prowler. And I said, ‘excuse me, who are you?’ He said, ‘I’m the prowler,’” Dees said before a judge who determined Bryant’s sentence.
Prosecutors said Bryant also killed two other men, with one before Tietjen’s murder and one after. He gave the two men rides and shot them in the back when they exited the vehicle to urinate on the side of rural roads.
Bryant’s lawyers said he had been sexually abused by four male relatives when he was a child, which troubled him in the months before the killing. His lawyers said he begged a probation agent and his aunt to get him help because he could not stop thinking about the abuse.
“He was very upset. He looked like he was being tortured. It’s like his soul was just laid wide open. In his eyes you could see he was hurting and suffering and he was living the abuse over again as it was coming out,” his aunt, Terry Caulder testified.
Bryant resorted to using meth and smoking joints he sprayed with bug killer to help himself through the pain, his attorneys said.
The six inmates put to death in South Carolina since the state restarted executions in September of last year had argued ahead of their deaths that the state’s methods amount to cruel and unusual punishment.
Attorneys for the inmates say the three volunteers with rifles in the second firing squad execution nearly missed Mikal Mahdi’s heart. They said Mahdi was in agonizing pain for three or four times longer than experts say he would have been if the bullets had hit his heart directly.
The lethal injection procedures have also been criticized by death row inmates. The state appears to now use two doses of the sedative pentobarbital, with the attorneys saying the inmates drown in a rush of fluid into their lungs but are paralyzed and cannot react.
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Once one of the busiest states for executions, South Carolina had a 13-year pause in executions before resuming in September 2024 due to trouble obtaining lethal injection drugs after its supply expired because of pharmaceutical companies’ concerns that they would have to disclose that they had sold the drugs to state officials.
But the state legislature later passed a shield law allowing officials to keep lethal injection drug suppliers private. The firing squad was also added as an execution method.
Bryant is set to be the 50th person put to death in South Carolina since the state restarted the death penalty in 1985 and the seventh executed since the state resumed executions a year ago.
Across the U.S., a total of 39 men have been executed so far this year. At least five other executions are scheduled in the U.S. for the remainder of the year.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.