Firing squad witness describes horror of watching execution unfold: ‘Target disappeared in blood’

Brad Sigmon sat strapped to a metal chair, his hands bound, a thick black hood covering his face. The room was silent, save for the steady hum of the prison lights. Across from him, three anonymous marksmen stood behind a curtain, their rifles loaded, their sights fixed on the red bullseye stitched to his chest. There was no warning. No countdown. Just the sudden, deafening crack of gunfire. The target disappeared in blood.
The 64-year-old convicted murderer jolted violently as the bullets tore through him. Blood bloomed instantly where the target had been, a jagged wound the size of a fist opening on his torso. His chest heaved two, maybe three times. Then—nothing.
This was the first execution by firing squad in South Carolina’s historical past and solely the fourth in the US since 1960—and one which left seasoned Associated Press reporter Jeffrey Collins shaken. The state revived the brutal follow as half of its aggressive push to renew capital punishment after a 13-year hiatus, forcing condemned inmates to decide on between electrocution, deadly injection, or the firing squad. Sigmon, convicted of the 2001 bludgeoning murders of David and Gladys Larke, had picked bullets over electrical energy—fearing that the state’s untested deadly injection medicine may result in a sluggish, agonizing demise.
A witness to demise
Collins, who has coated executions for greater than 20 years, was amongst those that watched the demise. He had seen males die by electrocution. He had watched the sluggish, medical drift into demise by deadly injection. But this—this was one thing else.
“You think you can prepare yourself,” he wrote later, “but it’s impossible to know what to expect when you’ve never seen someone shot at close range, right in front of you.”
Collins had spent days studying about firing squads, finding out the harm that bullets do to a human physique. He had pored over post-mortem stories from Utah’s final execution by gunfire in 2010, making an attempt to brace himself. But nothing may examine to the uncooked violence of the second itself.
“My heart started pounding as Sigmon’s lawyer read his final statement,” Collins wrote. “Then the hood came down. A prison employee yanked open the black shade shielding the shooters. And two minutes later, it was over.”
A plea for mercy—too late
Sigmon’s final phrases weren’t of protest, nor of defiance. Instead, they have been a plea—one not for himself, however for an finish to the system that was about to kill him.
“I want my closing statement to be one of love,” he wrote in a message shared by his attorneys. “An eye for an eye was used as justification to the jury for seeking the death penalty. At that time, I was too ignorant to know how wrong that was.”
His authorized crew had fought to cease the execution, arguing that forcing inmates to decide on their very own technique of demise was “barbaric.” They had demanded extra transparency concerning the medicine used for deadly injections, fearing that botched executions may depart prisoners writhing in agony. The courts disagreed.
Sigmon had no extra appeals left. No extra time. Only the purple goal on his chest, ready.
A return to the outdated methods
The revival of South Carolina’s demise penalty has ignited a nationwide debate over capital punishment. After years of delays as a result of state’s incapability to acquire deadly injection medicine, lawmakers handed a invoice in 2021 that made the electrical chair the default technique of execution but additionally gave inmates the choice to decide on the firing squad.
Sigmon was the second man executed below the brand new regulation in simply six months. The first, James Terry, had chosen the electrical chair in December—a technique many argue is much more brutal than the firing squad.
But even because the state pushes ahead with executions, activists proceed to combat. “We are sliding backward into an era of barbarism,” mentioned one human rights advocate after Sigmon’s demise. “The world is watching.”
For those that witnessed Friday’s execution, the controversy is not theoretical. It is actual. It is visceral. And it’s one thing they’ll always remember.
“I won’t forget the crack of the rifles,” Collins wrote. “Or the way Sigmon mouthed something to his lawyer—trying to let him know he was okay—just before the hood came down.”