A man who killed his two young daughters at his Dallas apartment in 2001 while the girls’ mother listened on the phone and heard the fatal gunshots and her children’s screams, was executed in Texas on Thursday, prisons officials said.
John Battaglia, 62, a former accountant was put to death by lethal injection at the state’s death chamber in Huntsville after the execution was delayed for several hours for federal courts to consider last-minute appeals to spare his life. His execution was the third this year in the United States, all of them in Texas.
At the time of the shooting, Pearl was seeking to have him arrested for violating a protective order by threatening her.
According to court documents, shortly before Battaglia was scheduled to host his daughters for a regular dinner, a police officer informed him by phone he needed to surrender for violating his probation.
The officer asked him to turn himself in so that police would not have to take him into custody while he was with his daughters, court documents showed.
After the girls arrived at his apartment, he left a message on his wife’s phone. When she called back, he put the phone on speaker and demanded that his wife speak with daughter Mary Faith.
The daughter then asked: “Mommy, why do you want Daddy to go to jail?” and could be heard a few seconds later saying: “No, Daddy, please don’t, don’t do it.”
It took a jury about 20 minutes to convict him.
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