Jessy San Miguel

Jessy Carlos San Miguel, 28, was executed by lethal injection on 29 June 2000, in Huntsville, Texas, for the murder of four people in a fast-food restaurant.

In January 1991, Jessy San Miguel, then 19, and Jerome Green, 17, waited outside a Taco Bell restaurant that had been closed and locked for the night. When an employee opened the door to take out the trash, the pair went inside and forced the assistant manager, Michael John Phelan, 28, to wait for a time-lock safe to open. Then they herded Phelan, employee Theresa Fraga, 16, and Theresa's cousin, Frank Fraga, 23, into a walk-in freezer. Theresa Fraga was also pregnant at the time. The robbers noticed Son Trang Nyugen, 35, a friend of the Fragas who was waiting to take them home, sitting in a vehicle outside and also forced him into the freezer with the other victims. San Miguel and Green then left the restaurant with the money.

A few minutes later, San Miguel decided to go back inside the restaurant and the freezer where his hostages were. Police who took his confession said he "asked them to give him a good reason why he shouldn't kill them", then shot them each in the head at close range with a 9 mm pistol. Phelan and Nyugen were shot once and the Fragas were each shot twice.

San Miguel and Green were stopped about a half a mile from the scene, on suspicion of drunk driving. In their car, police found the gun, two Taco Bell sacks stuffed with $1,390, ski masks, and two pairs of gloves. They began looking for Taco Bell restaurants in the area and found the four victims in the freezer. The first officer on the scene fainted at the sight of the bodies. There was so much blood on the floor, police used a squeegee to find the spent cartridges.

Green was a former part-time employee of that restaurant. San Miguel had applied for a job there but was not hired.

San Miguel had a violent past. He had been arrested nine times and had been accused of shooting a man. At the time of the murders, he was free on bonds totaling $45,000 on four charges of weapons violations and burglaries.

A jail officer testified that San Miguel remarked before his conviction, "The only reason why I killed those people is they couldn't make good Mexican food."

Although San Miguel confessed to all four murders, he was only tried and convicted for killing Phelan. He and his attorney contended he was unfairly convicted because of racial stereotyping. Court records show that the prosecutor uttered a sentence that included various turns of the phrase "run for the border", a Taco Bell ad slogan. They also claim that San Miguel's defense attorney made numerous allegedly biased statements.

Spokesmen for the state of Texas point out that none of the alleged race-based statements were made by state-introduced witnesses or expert witnesses, and claim that the state did nothing wrong during the trial.

"The evidence is so obvious that I had a very unfair trial," San Miguel said in a death row interview. "They did not base their decisions on my history, on my individuality. It was based on me being a Mexican." Of the murders, he said, "there is nothing I could do to stop what happened. People react in the heat of the moment ... when something happens out of instinct, we just do it. We don't do it out of intent, we don't do it on purpose, it just happens."

The Texas Board of Pardons and paroles rejected a clemency request from San Miguel, by a vote of 18 to 0. The Supreme Court rejected his final appeal, and Governor George W. Bush declined to grant a temporary stay.

At his execution, San Miguel urged his family and relatives to be strong and said he loved them. He did not acknowledge the presence of the six members of his victims' families. He was pronounced dead at 6:19 p.m.

Jerome Green accepted a plea bargain and was sentenced to 50 years in prison. He will be eligible for parole in 2004.