South Carolina executes killer who left bloody message, marking third firing-squad execution this year
(CBS NEWS) – CBS reports, a South Carolina man convicted of killing three people over five days more than 20 years ago was executed by a firing squad on Friday evening.
Stephen Bryant, 44, was executed for killing a man in his home and writing “catch me if u can” on the wall with the victim’s blood. He was pronounced dead at 6:05 p.m. following a firing squad. Three prison employees, all with live ammunition, volunteered to carry out the execution. Bryant is the third man this year to die by South Carolina’s newest execution method.
Bryant chose to die by firing squad instead of lethal injection or the electric chair. Bryant made no final statement. He briefly glanced at the 10 witnesses before the hood was placed on his head.
The shots rang out about 55 seconds later. Bryant made no noise. The red bullseye target that marks the location of his heart flew forward off his chest. He had a few shallow breaths and then a final spasm a little over a minute later. A doctor checked him with a stethoscope for before he pronounced Bryant dead.
Lawyers for Bryant filed a last-minute appeal, arguing the sentencing judge never considered the severe brain damage he suffered due to his mother’s drug and alcohol use during pregnancy. The Supreme Court declined in October to review Bryant’s death sentence.
Bryant was convicted in the 2004 killing of a man in his home, and investigators said he burned Willard “TJ” Tietjen’s eyes with cigarettes after shooting him and painting on the wall with the victim’s blood.
Prosecutors said he also shot and killed two other men he was giving rides to as they were relieving themselves on the side of the road during a few weeks that terrorized Sumter County in October 2004.
In March, South Carolina carried out the nation’s first execution by firing squad in 15 years. The state has used a firing squad to put to death three of five inmates this year.
Bryant is the seventh person put to death by South Carolina in 14 months after the state had a 13-year pause in executions when it couldn’t obtain lethal injection drugs.
South Carolina turned to the firing squad as it struggled to find alternative methods to execute condemned inmates. By the early 2010s, the state had run out of lethal injection drugs, and no manufacturer would sell more without anonymity, a condition the law didn’t permit. Judges refused to schedule executions if electrocution was the only option. As a result, executions halted for 13 years, and death row cases began to stack up.
No South Carolina governor has offered clemency since the death penalty resumed in the United States in 1976.
Death row executions in the U.S. are on the rise, after creeping upward since the pandemic, when the country’s use of the death penalty reached a historic low.
Forty-three executions have been carried out so far in 2025 and three were scheduled for this week, but only two took place: one in Florida and Bryant’s in South Carolina. An execution was scheduled in Oklahoma on Thursday, but Oklahoma’s governor commuted the sentence of the inmate condemned in his state. At least 14 others are scheduled to be put to death during the remainder of 2025 and next year.
