Texas Death Row Prisoner Executed For Killing 5-Year-Old, Grandmother At Birthday Party

The state of Texas on Wednesday executed a man convicted of spraying bullets at a children’s birthday party in 2008 as part of an apparent gang retaliation. A 5-year-old girl and her grandmother were killed in the shooting.

Erick Davila, 31, received a lethal injection for using a semi-automatic rifle to shoot at about 20 people, most of whom were children, during a child's birthday celebration in Fort Worth.

Annette Stevenson, 48, and her granddaughter, Queshawn Stevenson, were killed and four others were wounded in the gunfire, the Associated Press reported.

"I may have lost the fight but I'm still a soldier," Davila told the warden when asked if he had any last words. "Take it as it is. To my supporters and family, y'all hold it down. Ten toes down. That's all I got to say."

Davila was pronounced dead at 6:31 p.m. CDT, almost 15 minutes after he received a lethal dose of the powerful sedative pentobarbital, CBS News reported. It was was the ninth execution this year and the 550th in Texas since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

The shooting on April 6, 2008, was in apparent retaliation for a prior confrontation Davila had with the victim's father, who had been at the party during the incident. Davila was a member of the Bloods gang and drove by the party in an attempt to shoot rival Crips gang members, prosecutors said.

Texas said Davila admitted to the killings and told investigators he planned to "have a shoot-'em-up" and kill the father of the slain girl in the attack. Jurors took about four hours to convict Davila during the trial in 2009.

The Supreme Court refused appeals from Davila’s lawyers to block the punishment about a half hour before the injection.

"We don't know what is going to come out of a person's mouth when they're on death row," Tyron Shaw, a relative of the victims killed during the shooting said after watching Davila’s execution. "The damage has been done. ... As I told my family, you just expect the best and prepare for the worst.

"We know that justice has been served, justice has been done. This is something that we would continue to deal with the rest of our lives. We would never get over it. We would never forget it, but we can cope a little bit better."