HACE 5 MINS: Byron Black fue EJECUTADO | Crimen, Última Cena y Palabras | Pena de Muerte US

 HACE 5 MINS: Byron Black fue EJECUTADO | Crimen, Última Cena y Palabras | Pena de Muerte US

On August 5, 2025, after spending 36 years on death row, Byron Lewis Black was executed by lethal injection in Tennessee.  In this video we will reveal what happened that day, what his last meal was, and what his last words were. [Music] On Friday, March 25, 1988, 32-year-old Byron Black left the correctional facility at 5:30 for another weekend pass.

  And on Monday afternoon, just after 5, he returned as if nothing had happened during those three days.  But everything had changed.  That weekend, Byron had killed three people, only the bodies had not yet been discovered. On Sunday night, Angela Clay, 29, had just finished another long shift at Vanderville Hospital, leaving around 10 p.m.

 Her sister, Lenette Bell, had lent her the car for the weekend and came to pick her up as they had arranged.  But Lenette didn’t come alone.  Byron, her on-again, off- again boyfriend, also showed up. Together they drove to the house of Amelia Bell, Angela and Lenette’s mother. There Byron left Angela and her two daughters, Toya, 9, and Keisha, 6, and left without saying much.

  Angela stayed a little longer chatting with her mother and sister before heading home around 11. Just before leaving, she borrowed an iron and promised to return it the next day, but that would never happen. Because at some point that night, when everyone was fast asleep, Byron entered the apartment where Angela lived with her two daughters.

  Inside he found Angela lying under the covers in the master bedroom. She was curled up on her side, fast asleep.  He seemed at peace, but that wouldn’t last.  Byron approached, raised a revolver, and fired a single shot directly into the top of his head without hesitation.  Angela died instantly.

  She didn’t see it coming, she didn’t even wake up. Byron turned to leave, but then he heard a sound behind him, a slight movement, almost like a sigh.  It was the toy.  She had been asleep next to her mother.  Perhaps the noise had woken her up, or perhaps it was simply the wrong time to move.  In any case, it only moved a little and that was enough.

  Byron turned around , raised the gun and pulled the trigger, shooting him directly in the chest and neck. The force pushed her to one side, trapping her between the bed and the dresser.  The blood soaked his pillow and filled his lungs.  He did not die immediately.  An autopsy would later confirm that his body shuddered for almost 10 minutes before becoming completely still.

Byron could have stopped there, but he did n’t.  He couldn’t risk leaving a witness alive, so he turned around , walked down the hall, and opened the door to the queisha’s room.  The sound of the gunshots had already woken her up and she had gotten out of bed, but to her he was a familiar face and when she saw him she probably thought everything was fine.

  Perhaps he thought he was going to dress her again or even read her a bedtime story, but he didn’t know that would be the last thing he would ever see . Because as soon as Byron entered his room, he picked up the gun and fired two more times.  One bullet hit her in the chest, the other struck her near the hip.

  She fell to the ground, but like her sister, she did not die instantly.  She crawled from the bed to the floor, leaving trails of blood with her small hands on the wood.  Her palms stained the ground as she tried to move, clinging to anything she could reach. Finally, he collapsed next to the bed, face down on the floor.  His blood pooled around him, soaking the carpet, and then everything went silent.

PART2

   There were no more witnesses, and Byron left, locked the door behind him, and disappeared.  At night.  He looked calm, serene, and just in time to show up for work as if nothing had happened.  But that wasn’t the first time Byron shot someone. Angela Clay had been trying to move on .  Her marriage to Benny Clay had ended a year earlier, but they still shared a bond, their two daughters, and a glimmer of unfinished love.

  Benny was hopeful that they could fix things.  He thought there was still a chance, but there was an obstacle in his way.  Byron Black. Angela had started dating Byron after the separation, but it wasn’t a clean break with Benny.  She continued to see both men for several weeks. Benny didn’t like that and made that clear, but Byron wasn’t about to back down.

He wanted Angela all to himself and he wasn’t going to let her go without a fight. By December 1986, that tension exploded.  It began with an intense, noisy, deeply personal argument.  Benny finally turned around and walked to his car, perhaps thinking it was all over, but Byron wasn’t finished.

  He pulled out a gun and started shooting.  The first shot hit Benny’s car, the second went through his foot, the third pierced his shoulder and stopped below his collarbone. Benny tried to flee, but Byron chased him, still firing.  Benny finally collapsed in the street, bleeding and cornered.  Byron quickly caught up with him, stood over him with the weapon still in his hand, ready to finish what he had started.

  But then Angela appeared.  He pushed him away before he could shoot again, and somehow that was enough. Shortly after, Byron was arrested, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to serve time in a correctional facility with weekend furloughs, and that privilege would cost Angela and her daughters their lives. The day after the murders, on March 29, Angela’s mother felt that something was wrong.

  Angela hadn’t returned the iron as she had said she would, and that wasn’t typical of her.  When Amelia called, no one answered, so she tried again and again, but still nothing. Then she sent another of her daughters to check, but she didn’t get an answer either.  The curtains were completely drawn and the house was silent.

  However, Angela’s car was parked right in front.  Something just didn’t feel right. That night, Amelia and Lenette went to Angela’s apartment themselves.  They knocked on the door again, but again there was no answer.  At that moment they knew something was very wrong and immediately called the police. The officers arrived at the apartment around 9:30 p.m.

  The door was locked, but there was no broken glass or signs of forced entry.  Officer James removed a screen from one of the bedroom windows and opened it.  He raised his flashlight and scanned the dark room with its beam of light.  And that’s when he saw it, the body of a little girl on the floor, small, lifeless, and blood on a nearby bed.

In the master bedroom they found Angela dead in her bed and next to her, wedged between the mattress and a dresser, was the toya.  She didn’t survive either. And in the second bedroom, the quisha was found face down next to her bed.  She was the one who lived the longest, dying between 5 and 30 agonizing minutes after being shot.

The forensic teams examined every corner of the scene.  They recovered bullet fragments from the wall above Angela’s head, from the pillow where the towel slept, and from the mattress near the body of the queisha.  But the detail that connected everything came from the phones. The handset of the kitchen telephone had somehow ended up in the master bedroom, while the base of that same telephone was located in the hallway.

  There were three fingerprints on it, two on the hallway phone and one on the kitchen handset, and they all belonged to a single man, Byron Black. And to make matters worse, the bullets found at the crime scene matched the same type used in the shooting of Benny the previous year.  He had survived, but the bullet had remained lodged in his shoulder ever since, but the investigators had not forgotten and as they began to get closer to Byron, they asked Benny to undergo surgery.

They finally extracted the bullet and when ballistics experts examined it, they confirmed that it was fired from the same weapon used to kill Angela and her two daughters.  A lead detective later said it was the first time he had retrieved key evidence from inside a living person, and that helped link everything to Byron.

The evidence against him was gradually built up.  There was no trace of blood nor a witness who had seen the crime, but the cracks in Byron’s story were deep. Angela’s family said the relationship had been troubled from the start.  Months earlier, Byron had broken down the front door after she refused to let him in.

Angela had told her friends that he once said, “If I can’t have you, nobody will.” And the neighbors had heard everything. Night fights, punches, shouts.  And just three weeks before the murders, a neighbor said he saw Byron at Angela’s door again, banging on the window and threatening to come in.

  And just days before she was murdered, someone saw them arguing in public. So when the police found Angela and her daughters dead, they didn’t have to look far.  That night the detectives went to question Byron at the Metropolitan Warhouse.  They told him that Angela and her daughters were dead, and at first he broke down crying intensely and was visibly upset.

  But as soon as more officers entered the room, something about him changed. The tears dried quickly and her face became expressionless, according to detectives. He said he hadn’t seen Angela since Sunday night.  According to him, he dropped her off at her mother’s house around 10 p.m. and then went to a friend’s house for dinner.

  He stated that he stayed there until 11:30 eating and talking, and then went to his mother’s house and slept on the sofa until the next morning.  But that story didn’t hold up . Charlotte Waldon, the woman with whom he had supposedly had dinner that night, remembered it differently.  Byron had arrived for dinner around 8:30, stayed for just under an hour and left before 9:30.

  And he didn’t return that night .  That small difference, just two hours, was enough to unravel everything he had told the police. By Tuesday morning, detectives brought Byron in again, but this time with his lawyer present.  And with that, his story changed.  He now said that he had gone by Angela’s house later that night, but claimed that she wasn’t there, so he left.

  And when he returned later that same night, the front door was open and this time he went inside.   That’s when he said he found the three of them already dead, Angela, Toya and Keisha, still in their beds, the blankets covering them as if nothing had happened.  But he didn’t call the police, he didn’t go to ask a neighbor for help.

  Instead, he just stood there .  I panicked.  He told the detectives.  I didn’t want to get involved. Then he turned around, locked the door behind him, and left.   He never told anyone what he had seen, not until the investigators confronted him. During the trial, his defense was reduced to one thing: his alibi.  His mother and nephew swore that he had been home before 11 and had not left after that.

  But the jury didn’t believe him, not after hearing what he himself had told the police. And on March 8, 1989, Keisha’s birthday, a Davidson County jury gave her family something they had been waiting for.  The best birthday present she could have received. Byron was found guilty on all three counts of first-degree murder. And the next day the sentence arrived.

For Keisha’s murder, the jury unanimously recommended the death penalty, but in the cases of Angela and Lato Toya they failed to reach a consensus and Byron was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences , plus additional time for weapons and robbery charges.  One thing was clear: he would never walk free again.  Not this time.

  Even so, Byron continued to appeal his death sentence for decades.  His lawyers argued that he was not mentally competent to be executed, that he had an intellectual disability, and that he was legally unfit to receive the punishment that Tennessee had imposed on him. They claimed that Byron did not understand the world around him.

  As a child, simple children’s games like red light, green light confused him.  School was a fog and I couldn’t follow basic rules. Later, doctors said that the damage had started early.  Byron had been exposed to alcohol before he was born and to lead in the air and water after he was born.  Both caused lasting damage before she learned to read, especially to the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain, the parts that control memory, attention, and self-control, and she never recovered from that.

As an adult, Byron still couldn’t do basic calculations and tests showed that he functioned well below average.  If you lined up 100 men of the same age and educational level, 98 of them would perform better.  And although he had married and had a son, Byron never lived independently.  He remained at his parents’ house until the day he was arrested, at the age of 32.

Over the years, half a dozen experts came to the same conclusion. Byron Black had an intellectual disability.  Even the state expert herself , who at the time testified to the contrary, changed her mind.  With current diagnostic standards .  He admitted the truth.  Byron met all the criteria, and over time his condition only worsened.

By the age of 69, Byron’s mental state had deteriorated even further.  Years of brain damage, combined with schizophrenia and later dementia, had taken away what little cognitive ability he had left.  His mind had been deteriorating since childhood, and what remained, according to doctors, was a man whose level of functioning was so low that fewer than one in 10,000 people lived at that same level.

  When a forensic psychiatrist last evaluated him, Byron couldn’t even give the correct change for a dollar bill. But for some, that was nothing new. That’s how Byron had always been. In the end, none of that stopped the legal process.  In March 2022, a judge ruled that he was still competent to be executed, and in June 2023, the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the sentence.

But since then, Byron’s execution has been rescheduled several times, first because of the pandemic, then because of temporary moratoriums and technical delays.  But finally, in March 2025, the Tennessee Supreme Court set a new date.  This time for August. However, one last complication arose.

  In May 2024, Byron had an implantable defibrillator placed , a small device in his chest to regulate his deteriorating heart.  It was a desperate measure to treat end-stage heart failure, but it seriously complicated its execution as the date approached. His lawyers argued that if the device was not deactivated, it could interpret the declining heart rate caused by the lethal injection as a medical emergency and administer painful electric shocks.

  They described it as being kicked in the chest by a horse.  Each shock is a desperate mechanical attempt to restore the heart’s normal rhythm. The medication would slow his heart rate and the device would fight against that, possibly turning death into a prolonged and brutal battle between body and machine. A Davidson County judge agreed and ordered the device to be deactivated before the execution.

  But the Tennessee Supreme Court disagreed .  They overturned that decision, calling the deactivation an unauthorized delay of justice.  The execution, they ruled, would continue with the device activated, arguing that even if shocks occurred, it was unlikely Byron would feel anything. And that was it.

  The date was confirmed.  The night before the execution, Byron was given his last meal.  A silent ritual before the state moved forward.  I had ordered a pizza with mushrooms and sausage, donuts, and butterscotch ice cream with walnuts. On the morning of August 5, 2025, Byron was taken to the execution chamber.

  He was already strapped to the stretcher when the curtain was raised at 10:31. A sheet covered his body, which is usual, but this time it was placed unusually high, even covering his hands.  He was standing in front of the witnesses, but when asked if he had any last words, he simply replied, “No, sir.”  He did not address the victims’ family, who were sitting just a few meters away, and he did not apologize.

According to witnesses, he showed clear signs of distress, rapid breathing, restlessness, and confusion.  They said that he did n’t seem to fully understand what was happening to him.  A final microphone test was performed.  Her spiritual advisor was nearby, touching her cheek, praying, and giving her calm words of encouragement.

  He also told her to focus on her breathing. Byron began to sigh and breathe heavily, almost panting, as if fear were taking hold of him.  When they started administering the drugs to him, he looked around and raised his head, visibly disturbed.  Witnesses said it was moving more than expected. At 10:33 he began to moan.

  “I can’t do this,” she told her spiritual advisor.  This hurts a lot.  She leaned towards him, serene but powerless, and replied in a low voice, “I’m so sorry.” Then he continued praying.  A few moments later, he raised his hand for the last time and then lay motionless at 10:36. By that time, he had already received the entire dose.

  The mandatory 5-minute waiting period followed and at 10:43 Byron was declared dead. Byron Lewis Black was 69 years old. What do you think?  Has justice been served? Tell us in the comments.  M.