Texas plans to execute Harris County man responsible for five murders

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Texas is scheduled to execute Garcia White on Tuesday for several murders he committed between 1989 and 1995.

White, 61, was convicted in 1996 of murdering 16-year-old twin sisters Annette and Bernette Edwards. Her mother, Bonita, was killed in the same incident, but he was not charged with that crime.

A jury sentenced him to death after learning that he also killed Greta Williams in 1989 and Hai Pham, a supermarket worker, in 1995, but he was not tried for either crime.

Since then, White has been on death row and has made several unsuccessful appeals in state and federal courts. His latest appeal to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals was rejected Sunday, and a request to stay his execution was pending in the U.S. Supreme Court as of Tuesday morning.

He would be the fifth person to be executed in Texas in 2024 if he does not receive a stay of execution. The state plans to execute another inmate, Robert Roberson, on October 17.

According to court documents, the bodies of Bonita, Annette and Bernette Edwards were found in their home in December 1989, each with multiple stab wounds to the neck and chest.

Their murders remained unsolved for around six years. A break in the case came in 1996 when White's friend Tecumseh Manuel told police, during an interview about Pham's killing, that White had admitted to killing the Edwards and Williams family.

White initially denied any involvement in the Edwards family's murder and later told police that he and a man named Terrence Moore went to the house to do drugs and have sex with Bonita. White said a fight broke out when they didn't want to share the drugs with Bonita and Moore stabbed her and her two daughters.

Upon further investigation, law enforcement discovered that Moore had been killed four months before the crime. When confronted, White confessed to killing all three women himself.

During White's sentencing phase, prosecutors presented evidence that White confessed to killing Williams and Pham in addition to the Edwards family.

Pham was a Vietnamese immigrant who ran a supermarket in Houston. His 16-year-old son testified at sentencing that two men, including a white man, came into the store in July 1995 and fatally beat his father before leaving with cigarettes.

Williams was found in an abandoned house in November 1989. She had been beaten to death and wrapped in a carpet.

“Five murders in three cases, including two teenage girls, is simply too much bloodshed and carnage to ignore,” Joshua Reiss, head of the post-conviction division at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, said Friday. “This is the type of case for which the death penalty is appropriate.”

In his efforts to prevent his execution, White tried to use Texas' 2013 junk science law, a landmark provision that allows people to get new trials if the science used to convict them is compromised has been changed or has fallen into disrepute. In 2015, he received a temporary stay according to the law.

White said he obtained DNA evidence that pointed to another unidentified man at the scene where he killed the Edwards girls. He also argued that he was suffering a cocaine-induced psychotic break when he killed the Edwards family and that scientific studies since the crime have shown the effects of heavy cocaine use on the brain.

Had these factors been known to the jury at the time, White's attorneys argued, they would have recommended a sentence other than the death penalty.

A divided Texas criminal appeals court rejected that argument, with the prevailing opinion that the junk science law applied only to altered science at the sentencing phase of a trial and not at the sentencing phase. The Texas House of Representatives passed a bill to amend the junk science law, which also applies to the sentencing phase, but the measure failed to pass in the state Senate.

White also argued that under the latest psychiatric guidelines he was considered mentally disabled and therefore ineligible for the death penalty.

“Mr. “The White case illustrates everything that is wrong with the current death penalty in Texas,” his lawyers wrote Friday in their appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. “He has evidence that he has a mental disability, which Development denied him the CCA He has significant evidence that could lead to a sentence other than the death penalty, but cannot present it or develop it further in a new court decision.

His lawyers added: “None of this ever saw the light of day before a jury and none of this was allowed to be developed or presented.”

The state, meanwhile, argued that these claims have been properly examined by the courts since White's conviction.

“White presents no reason to further delay his execution date,” the state wrote to the U.S. Supreme Court. “The Edwards family – and the victims of the other murders of White, Greta Williams and Hai Pham – deserve justice for his decades-old crimes.”

Patrick McCann, White's longtime attorney, said that White – who is now a grandfather and was selected for the death row program – spent the last 28 years in prison “for all the right reasons, for him to become a better man.” “Family and for the people he loves.”

McCann argued that executing White three decades after his crimes would serve no deterrence or retaliatory purposes and that he was “a different man today than he was 30 years ago.”

“Any murder should not be ignored,” McCann said in an interview. But he added: “The guy they were trying to kill was probably having a psychotic episode at that point and is not the guy who's up there today. “That's just not him.”

Pham's survivors included his wife and four children under 21 – who immigrated to Houston from Vietnam less than a year ago – as well as family still living in their home country. Pham, who had served in the South Vietnamese Navy, traveled to the United States in 1986 after the Vietnam War, according to his son Hiep Tuan Pham, who was 17 at the time of his father's death.

“His goal was for us to have a better life in the States,” Hiep, now 47, said in an interview.

His father's plan at the time was to move the family to California, where he believed he could have a better life. On the day of his murder, Hiep said his father was “so happy” because preparations for their move had just begun. Then he was killed.

The family did not yet speak English and Hiep remembered knocking on his neighbors' doors to ask for donations for his father's funeral. It would be years before Hiep learned what Father's Day was. He mourned that he would never be able to celebrate this day with a beer with his father.

“I do not know him. I don’t know why he killed my father,” Hiep, who plans to attend the execution with his wife, said of White. “I just hope he knows that we have suffered through all of this for a very long time.”