By DON FLETCHER
News Staff Writer
A Mississippi man who killed six Citronelle residents, including an unborn child, with an axe just eight years ago, will apparently pay the ultimate price for his crime in mid-October.
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey announced in a letter to Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner John Q. Hamm that she had set a 34-hour time frame for the execution of Derrick Ryan Dearman, which will be carried out by lethal injection at some point between midnight Thursday, October 17, and 6 a.m. Friday, Oct. 18.
Dearman, 35, who lived in Leakesville, Miss. at the time, was found guilty of 12 counts of capital murder and was sentenced to death for the August 2016 shooting, then axing, of Shannon Randall, Joseph Turner, Robert Brown, Chelse Reed, Justin Reed, and the death of the Reeds’ unborn baby.
According to court documents, Mobile County Sheriff’s Office investigators labeled the slaying as the worst in county history at that time.
All the people in the house, located on Jim Platt Road in a rural area west of Citronelle, were slaughtered except Dearman’s girlfriend, Laneta Lester, and the 3-month-old child of Shannon Randall and Joseph Turner.
They were taken to Dearman’s sister’s home in Greene County, Mississippi, then to Dearman’s father’s home, from which Lester was able to escape and alert Citronelle police to the crime.
The suspect told authorities he was on methamphetamine at the time of the murders, blaming the drug for the carnage he created.
If it is carried out, the execution of Dearman, who signed a waiver of his right to appeal, will represent one of the quickest resolutions to a death penalty case in modern times. The condemned man has been held on Death Row at William C. Holman Correctional Facility outside Atmore since 2018.
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