Texas carried out the death sentence against John Allen Rubio on Thursday night, more than 23 years after the Brownsville murders of three very young children.
Rubio, 46, was pronounced dead at 6:47 p.m. Central at the Huntsville Unit, 21 minutes after the state began the lethal dose of pentobarbital.
The Friday alert below captured the news in a single line, but the execution itself happened Thursday, November 12 — not November 13.
The victims were 3-year-old Julissa Angela Quezada, 14-month-old John Esteban Rubio, and 2-month-old Mary Jane Rubio. Mary Jane was Rubio’s biological daughter, while he acted as a father to all three children.
Rubio and his common-law wife, Angela Camacho, killed the children on March 11, 2003, inside the family’s small, windowless Brownsville apartment. The children were stabbed and beheaded.
Camacho was the mother of all three children. She later pleaded guilty and is serving three concurrent life sentences for her role.
A detailed U.S. District Court order recounts how the case turned on competing explanations for why Rubio committed the murders. Rubio said mental illness led him to believe the children were possessed or affected by witchcraft, while prosecutors argued financial stress was the motive.
The first jury convicted Rubio and sentenced him to death in 2003. That conviction was overturned in 2007 because Camacho’s out-of-court statements had been admitted after she invoked her Fifth Amendment rights, denying Rubio a chance to cross-examine her.
Texas tried him again in 2010. Rubio again entered a not-guilty plea based on insanity.
The jury rejected that defense, convicted him on four capital-murder counts, and sentenced him to death a second time.
Defense experts diagnosed Rubio with paranoid schizophrenia. Prosecution experts disputed that diagnosis, and state and federal courts ultimately rejected his habeas claims.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit denied Rubio permission to continue his federal appeal in 2025. The court said he had not made a substantial showing on claims including his allegation that the state knowingly elicited false testimony from a prosecution mental-health expert.
Rubio’s final November 2026 appeal revived the accusation that false psychiatric testimony had helped secure his second death sentence. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied relief and refused to stop the execution.
He also joined LeJames Norman in challenging Texas’s pentobarbital supply. Their lawsuit alleged that the drug was expired or improperly compounded, but those disputed allegations did not stop Thursday’s execution and were not established as fact by the courts.
The Monitor reported the completed execution shortly after Rubio was pronounced dead.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice published Rubio’s final statement. He thanked friends, relatives, prison staff, and religious supporters, said he was “not the same person I once was,” and apologized to Camacho’s family and his own.
Rubio said ending his life could not change the past or make the victims’ family happy. He said he still loved Camacho and was ready to go to God and be with the children.
Those last words do not erase what happened to Julissa, John, and Mary Jane. The children — not the man who killed them — remain the center of this story.
Brownsville residents made that point in a powerful way. The apartment building where the children were killed was later demolished, and the land became a park and community garden.
KRGV reported that relatives and community members gathered at Tres Angeles Park during the execution to remember the three children.
The Associated Press reports that Rubio was Texas’s eighth execution of 2026. Oklahoma executed James Pavatt, 73, earlier the same day for the 2001 murder of his girlfriend’s estranged husband.
Pavatt’s execution was the 36th carried out in the United States this year. Rubio’s was the 37th, putting the country on pace to exceed 40 executions for a second straight year.
The AP also noted the renewed national attention on capital punishment after Tennessee’s failed execution of Christa Pike in September. That debate did not alter the judgments against Rubio or halt the sentence imposed by the second Texas jury.
Texas currently has another execution scheduled for November 19, when Reinaldo Dennes is set to receive a lethal injection.
For Brownsville, Thursday’s execution ended the legal case. It did not undo the loss of three children whose names deserve to be remembered: Julissa Angela Quezada, John Esteban Rubio, and Mary Jane Rubio.
This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.
The post Texas executes father who decapitated his three children appeared first on 100PercentFedUp.com.
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