Gunman who killed 3 in staged, drug-related Houston robbery is executed Tuesday night

Texas executes hit man in Houston triple slayings

HUNTSVILLE, Texas — A convicted hit man was executed Tuesday evening for a triple slaying in Houston nearly 14 years ago.

Christopher Coleman, 37, was condemned for his part in a scheme by a Colombian man who hoped to eliminate a drug debt by staging a robbery. Four people were shot in a car on a dead-end street. Three of them, including a 3-year-old boy, died.

Coleman was pronounced dead at 6:22 p.m. CDT, eight minutes after lethal drugs began flowing into his arms.

The lethal injection, the 18th this year in Texas, was carried out after Coleman’s lawyers lost last-day appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Coleman was one of three men convicted in the case. The other two, Enrique Andrade Mosquera, 44, and Derrick Graham, 40, received life in prison.

Prosecutors said Mosquera owed $80,000 for four kilos of cocaine he received from Hurtado Heinar Prado, 34, but didn’t want to pay. Instead, he hired Coleman and Graham to stage a robbery during the payoff.

Hurtado Heinar Prado was in the front seat of a car driven by Jose Mario Garcia-Castro, 33, when they met the three men on Dec. 14, 1995. Elsie Prado, Prado’s sister and Garcia-Castro’s girlfriend, and her son, Danny Giraldo, were in the back seat.

Testimony showed Coleman approached the car’s passenger side, said something to the two men in the front and opened fire. Only Elsie Prado survived. She identified Coleman as the gunman.

Coleman was arrested at a Lawrenceburg, Tenn., motel a week later. He told police he was at the shooting scene but denied being the gunman.

His execution was one of two scheduled this week in Texas. Kenneth Mosley, 51, was scheduled to die Thursday for fatally shooting a police officer in a Dallas suburb in 1997.

On the Net:

Texas Department of Criminal Justice execution schedule www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/scheduledexecutions.htm