Just in:Texas to Execute James Broadnax In 5 days.He Killed Two Men for $2.Execution Date 25-04-2026

Just in:Texas to Execute James Broadnax In 5 days.He Killed Two Men for $2.Execution Date 25-04-2026

I shot him. Like, stumped a bit. Shot the uh the driver. He hit the ground, you know what I’m saying? But, he like leaned up like he was finna try to get back up. So, I shot him in the head.

Then, his homeboy, I shot his again, you know what I’m saying? But, he was still trying to run off. But, I knew he was going to die anyway, but just to make sure, pop pop shot.

In the early morning hours of June 19th, 2008, two men were shot dead in a parking lot outside a Christian recording studio in Garland, Texas. The victims were Matthew Butler, 28 years old, the owner of Zion Gate Records, and his best friend Steven Swan, 26 years old, a musician and audio engineer who had spent years helping Matthew build the studio from scratch.

Both men were shot multiple times as they walked to their vehicles after finishing a late session. What made this crime particularly devastating was not just the violence of it, but the senselessness. Two men with no enemies and no connection whatsoever to the people who killed them. Shot dead in a quiet parking lot in a quiet suburb for $2 and a car.

When police arrived, Matthew Butler was already dead. Steven Swan lay nearby with multiple gunshot wounds. Both died at the scene. A passing bicyclist found them at 1:20 in the morning and called the Garland Police Department. The lot had no witnesses, no cameras, and no immediate leads.

Then, a woman in a Southeast Dallas apartment turned on the television, saw the news report, looked at a dead man’s driver’s license being passed around the room by a 19-year-old who was bragging about what he had done, and picked up the phone. Within hours, James Broadnax and Demarius Cummings were arrested in Texarkana, 150 miles away, driving the dead man’s car.

Within days, Broadnax sat across from television reporters in the Dallas County Jail and described the murders in explicit detail, expressed no remorse, said he hoped for the death penalty, and warned that if he did not receive it, he would kill again.

He was convicted. He was sentenced to death. He has been on death row ever since. That should have been the end of the story. But 17 years later, with an execution date set for April 30th, 2026, just days away now, this very month, the man who was never convicted of pulling the trigger signed a sworn declaration saying that he was the one who shot Matthew Butler and Steven Swan.

That he had obtained the gun. That he had planned the robbery. And that he had convinced his cousin James to take the blame. The DNA on the murder weapon had always pointed to Cummings and not to Broadnax. The jury that convicted Broadnax had 11 white members and one black member after prosecutors struck seven black prospective jurors using a spreadsheet that listed every black juror’s name in bold type.

The 40 pages of rap lyrics read to that jury at sentencing were written by a teenager who wanted to be a rapper, presented as proof that he deserved to die. James Broadnax confessed on camera to a double murder, laughed at a victim’s mother in court after receiving his death sentence, and has spent 16 years on death row writing poetry and mentoring other inmates.

He is also a man whose only direct evidence of being the shooter is a confession given while high on PCP, a powerful dissociative drug that alters perception, strips away inhibition, triggers hallucinations, and in some users produces a complete break from reality. This is the story of James Broadnax, Demarius Cummings, Matthew Butler, and Steven Swan.

If you are drawn to stories where justice and truth do not always travel the same road, subscribe and turn on notifications. This is where true crime meets truth. Real cases, real consequences. James Garfield Broadnax was born in Texarkana, Texas. Texarkana sat on the state line between Texas and Arkansas, a mid-size city divided by geography and by the economic gaps that ran through its neighborhoods.

For many families living on the Texas side of the city, steady work was hard to find and stability was harder to keep. The city had its good areas and its struggling ones, and the part of it that James grew up in belonged firmly to the latter. James was raised primarily by his grandmother. She beat him regularly.

She withheld food as punishment. The home she ran was not a place of safety for the people living in it. It was a place where the person responsible for care was the source of harm. James’s mother, Audrey Kelly, was not in a position to provide stability. She had grown up in difficult conditions herself, moved through relationships that brought more disruption than security, and the household she had come from and the one she was part of were both defined by instability.

His aunts and his sister were in and out of the picture. They saw what the home was like. They knew what was happening to James. Outside that home, people who knew him in those years described him as good-natured. A cousin saw a young person who was fundamentally decent. His brother-in-law saw someone who looked after the younger ones in the family without being asked, who stepped into responsibility when the adults around him failed to.

James attended school through the 10th grade. In his earlier school years, he was not a persistent troublemaker. But as the conditions at home wore on him, his ability to focus wore down with them. By the time he reached his mid-teens, he had stopped going to school entirely. There was no single dramatic moment that ended it.

He simply stopped showing up, and no adult with authority in his life required him to return. After leaving school, James found work as a kitchen worker. The pay was low, and the work offered no future, but it was income, and it was something to do. He moved between the homes of various family members in Texarkana with no fixed address, no savings, no plan.

He had nothing ahead of him that he could see clearly. During this period, James connected with the Gangster Disciples. The gang had a significant presence across the southern United States and a visible one in the Texarkana area. What it offered James was something the rest of his life had not, a sense of belonging, a structure, a set of people who recognized him as part of something.

He began drawing gang symbols in notebooks and writing rap lyrics alongside them. He had a genuine passion for music. He filled those notebooks with verses and believed that rap was a way out, a path to something better than kitchen work and borrowed couches. Alongside the gang involvement came drug use.

He started with marijuana and moved into phencyclidine, PCP. PCP is a dissociative drug that alters perception, strips away inhibition, and in some users triggers paranoia, aggression, and psychotic episodes. James used it regularly, and it became woven into the texture of his days. By his late teenage years, James had moved from Texarkana to southeast Dallas.

He was staying with family members in an apartment in that part of the city. He had no stable income, no fixed plan, and no structure to his days. He spent his time writing lyrics, using drugs, and spending time with his cousin Demarius Cummings, who had made his way to the Dallas area around the same time. James and Demarius filled the hours with talk and drugs, and the particular restlessness that comes from having no money and no clear direction.

James was 19 years old in the summer of 2008. He had one entry on his criminal record, a marijuana possession charge, nonviolent and minor. He had never been arrested for anything serious. He was a young man going nowhere, living on someone else’s floor, with a notebook full of rap lyrics and a body full of PCP, trying to figure out what came next.

And the person he was trying to figure it out with was Demarius Cummings, his cousin, his closest companion in that apartment, and a young man who had already crossed lines that James had not. Demarius Dwight Cummings grew up in Texarkana, Texas. He and James Broadnax were born within months of each other, raised in the same struggling circles, and bound by blood and by the shared experience of coming up in a place that offered very little.

The household Cummings came from was unstable. The adults around him were managing their own difficulties and were not positioned to steer him toward anything better. The streets of Texarkana filled the gaps that his home life left open, and what the streets taught him was built on taking rather than earning.

By his late teens, Cummings had already been convicted of burglary on multiple occasions. He had moved through the legal system, charged, processed, released, and none of it had redirected him in any meaningful way. He knew how the system processed people like him. Each encounter with it made him more calculating about how to operate, not more cautious.

Cummings thought in terms of angles. He assessed situations by asking what was in it for him and how to limit his own exposure. He was not reckless in the way that someone acting purely on impulse might be. He weighed things, even if the things he was weighing were fundamentally wrong. This was simply how he moved through the world.

By mid-2008, Cummings was spending most of his time in Dallas with James. The two cousins shared the same apartment space in Southeast Dallas, the same substances, and the same absence of forward motion. Cummings smoked marijuana and used PCP alongside James. The drug use was not occasional or experimental.

It was woven into the structure of their daily lives. Cummings had a criminal record that James did not. This distinction mattered to him in a practical way. He understood that if the two of them were ever caught doing something serious, the courts would treat them differently based on their histories. James had only a marijuana charge on his record.

Cummings had multiple burglary convictions. The difference in how the legal system would respond to each of them was clear to Cummings, and he kept that awareness close. In the conversations the two cousins had about making money, Cummings drove things forward. He was the one with street experience.

He was the one who had already crossed serious lines. The dynamic between them was not one of equals planning together. It was closer to one person leading and another following, and Cummings was the one in front. The talk between them moved gradually from vague ideas towards something more concrete. They wanted to rob someone.

They wanted to do it outside of Dallas, somewhere they were not known. Garland came up. James said later that they chose Garland because they believed it was where the money was. Where people with more than them lived and moved. Cummings obtained the gun, a .380 caliber pistol, small and easy to carry. He had it in his possession.

He knew what it was for. On the evening of June 18th, 2008, the two cousins were in the apartment in Southeast Dallas. They smoked marijuana laced with PCP. They talked. At some point, the talking gave way to movement. They left the apartment and walked to a dark train station. The Dallas Area Rapid Transit System ran northeast out of the city toward the suburbs.

They boarded the train. Outside the windows, the city moved past them. The neighborhoods they knew giving way to stretches of road and light they did not. The train carried them through the dark toward Garland, a suburb neither of them had spent any time in, a place they had chosen specifically because it was unfamiliar territory where no one would recognize their faces.

Cummings had the gun. James was beside him. Both of them were high. The train moved northeast through the June night, and neither man on it was thinking about consequences in any meaningful way. They were thinking about money, about the person they were going to find when they got off, and about what they were going to take.

The train reached Garland. They stepped off onto the platform and moved into the quiet streets of a suburb that was shutting down for the night. Downtown Garland at that hour was still. The streets had emptied. There were no obvious crowds, no easy targets moving through a well-lit commercial strip. The two men moved through the area looking for an opportunity.

Then they came upon a parking lot. It sat in front of a small building in downtown Garland. The sign on the building read Zion Gate Records. Outside in the lot, two men were wrapping up a late night at the studio and making their way to their vehicles. Cummings and James moved toward them. One of the men walking toward his car that night was Matthew Butler.

He was 28 years old, the owner of Zion Gate Records, and he had spent the evening doing exactly what he did most nights, working on music in the studio he had built from nothing. Matthew was born and raised in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas. He grew up in a household grounded in Christian faith, a family where church was not a weekend obligation, but a genuine center of life.

His mother, Teresa Butler, was a woman whose faith ran deep, and she raised her son inside that same orientation. Matthew carried it with him into everything he did. He had a passion for music from an early age. He had a natural ear for it, and more than that, the drive to turn that love into something real.

As a teenager, he taught himself the technical side of audio recording, how to produce sound, how to shape it, how to build the kind of environment where other artists could create freely. He studied it with the same seriousness that other people brought to formal education, and by the time he reached his mid-20s, he had developed genuine expertise.

His path had not been entirely smooth. Matthew dealt with bipolar disorder, a condition that brought its own weight, and required real effort to manage. He worked through it with the support of his faith and his family, and he did not allow it to become the defining fact of his life. Instead, he channeled his energy into building something.

In 2005, Matthew opened Zion Gate Recording Studio in downtown Garland, Texas. It was a modest space, not a large commercial operation, but it was his. He built it into a working business through consistent effort and commitment. The studio specialized in contemporary Christian music, and became a genuine presence in the North Texas Christian music community.

Matthew ran it with practical generosity. The door was open to most artists who came through, secular acts included, with the single boundary that he would not record music he considered spiritually harmful. His colleagues described him as compassionate in ways that showed up in ordinary moments. He was known to give away his own possessions to people he felt needed them more.

He was someone who noticed others. His friend Jamie, who worked alongside him at the studio, said that when you met Matthew, you immediately sensed something genuine. He was not performing warmth. It was simply who he was. Matthew was also a father. He had two young ones at home, a daughter just over a year old, and a son who had just turned two.

He and Jamie were building a family life alongside the business. Zion Gate was not just his livelihood. It was his contribution to the music world he loved, and the foundation on which he was building a future for his family. By the summer of 2008, Zion Gate had been operating for 3 years. It had a reputation in the Garland area as a reliable, professional recording space.

Matthew had put in the hours to make it work, managing the business side alongside the creative side, keeping the lights on, and growing the studio’s standing in the community. June 18th, 2008 was a working night like any other. Matthew and Stephen Swan were at the studio doing what they always did, working on music, spending time in the space they had built together.

Stephen Lewis Swan had been Matthew Butler’s closest friend for years. Before he was an engineer at Zion Gate, before the studio existed, before any of what Matthew had built in Garland had taken shape, Stephen Swan was simply a young man from the Dallas area who loved music the same way Matthew did, completely and without reservation.

He was born on July 13th, 1981 in the Dallas area of Texas. His parents, Jean and Craig Swan, raised him in a household where faith and creativity occupied the same central space. Church was not a formality in the Swan home. It was a genuine part of how the family understood the world, and Steven grew up shaped by that foundation.

He was a musician from an early age. He sang, he played instruments, and his love for music went beyond performance into the technical side of how sound was made and shaped. He was drawn to the process of recording, the engineering, the mixing, the transformation of a raw performance into something finished and real.

That interest in the craft of sound was what eventually connected him to Matthew Butler, who carried the same combination of artistic passion and technical curiosity. The friendship between the two men had formed in the North Texas Christian music community, and had grown into one of the most consistent relationships in either of their lives.

Steven worked as an engineer at Zion Gate, applying his skills to the recordings Matthew produced. They had developed the kind of professional shorthand that only comes from years of working closely with someone you trust completely. They communicated without needing to explain themselves at length. Sessions ran smoothly because the two of them had long since figured out how to work together.

Those who knew Steven described him with consistent warmth. He was remembered as someone who laughed easily and made the people around him feel at ease. He was not a person who sought attention or positioned himself for recognition. He showed up, he did the work, and he supported the artists who came through the studio with the same steady reliability every time.

Outside of music, Steven gave his time and money to the Texas Border Volunteers, an organization that assisted law enforcement in monitoring sections of the Texas-Mexico border. It was not a cause that came with any public spotlight. It was simply something he believed in and participated in quietly, without making much of it to anyone around him.

He lived in Carrollton, a suburb north of Dallas, and maintained close relationships with his family. His mother Jean was a constant presence in his life. His sister Deborah was someone he stayed in regular contact with. The Swan family was tightly connected, and Steven was at the center of that connection. He had no enemies.

He had no conflicts with anyone in his life that those close to him knew about. He was a working musician who spent his nights at a studio he loved, doing work that mattered to him alongside a best friend he had built something real with. On the night of June 18th, 2008, the two men finished their session, secured the studio, and walked out into the parking lot to their vehicles.

Neither of them carried any significant amount of cash. Matthew had a 1995 Ford Crown Victoria parked outside. The car was unremarkable, an older model, not the kind of vehicle that announced wealth or invited attention. Matthew and Steven had no idea anyone was watching them. They were doing what they did every time they finished a late session, walking out to the parking lot, talking, getting ready to drive home.

Matthew’s 1995 Ford Crown Victoria was parked in the lot. The two men moved toward their vehicles with the easy familiarity of people who had made this same walk dozens of times. Cummings and Broadnax moved toward them. The confrontation was brief. Cummings had the .380 caliber pistol. The two producers were stopped before they reached their vehicles.

What the two cousins had come to Garland to do, rob someone, lasted only seconds before it became something worse. Matthew Butler and Steven Swan were both shot multiple times. Both fell in the parking lot. Neither of them got up. Cummings and Broadnax went through their pockets. The search produced $2 in cash.

They took the keys to Matthew’s 1995 Ford Crown Victoria and drove away from Zion Gate records in the dead man’s car. The parking lot was empty and silent. At approximately 1:20 in the morning, a passing bicyclist came upon the lot. Two men were on the ground. The bicyclist called the Garland Police Department. Officers arrived and confirmed what the bicyclist had found.

Matthew Butler and Steven Swan had been shot multiple times. Both were dead at the scene. The Garland Police Department secured the area and began working the crime scene in the early hours of June 19th, 2008. Officers documented the physical evidence in the lot and began the process of identifying the victims.

Matthew Butler’s name was on the studio. Steven Swan’s connection to Zion Gate was established quickly through the relationships Matthew had built in the North Texas music community over 3 years. Investigators began working outward from the scene. The studio had not been broken into. There was no sign of forced entry anywhere on the property.

Whatever had happened had happened outside, in the open lot, in the middle of the night. The only witness was the bicyclist who had found the bodies. The circumstances of the shooting were, for the time being, unclear. Garland Police Lieutenant Joe Harn described the case as one that shocked the department.

Two young men killed in a parking lot in a quiet part of downtown Garland, a neighborhood that did not regularly produce violent crime of this kind. The victims had no criminal history. There was no obvious motive visible at the scene. The studio had not been burglarized. Nothing inside the building had been touched.

Whatever had happened was tied to the two men and not to the property. Investigators began canvassing the area. They looked for cameras, for anyone who might have been in the vicinity in the hours around midnight, for any evidence that could establish who had been in that lot and when. The parking lot offered limited physical evidence beyond what was immediately visible.

The surrounding streets had been empty at that hour. The crime scene was processed through the early hours of the morning. Notifications went out to both families before dawn. Teresa Butler, Matthew’s mother, received the call that her son was dead. Jean Swan received the same call about Steven.

Both women were in the Dallas area. Both absorbed the news in the darkness before sunrise without any information yet about who had done this or why. The notifications gave them the fact of the death and nothing else. Teresa Butler had two grandchildren at home. Matthew’s young ones, a daughter just over a year old and a son who had just turned two, who would wake up that morning without knowing that their father was not coming home.

The Swan family made the same journey through that morning. Jean Swan and her daughter Deborah Burkhart sat with a loss that had no explanation attached to it yet in the early hours of June 19th, 2008, waiting for information that investigators were still working to piece together. Meanwhile, in the apartment in Southeast Dallas, James Broadnax came back through the door with Matthew Butler’s Crown Victoria parked outside and Steven Swan’s driver’s license in his hand.

He moved through the apartment showing the license around telling the people there that he had hit a lick. He was not quiet about it. He was not distressed. He was boastful moving through the room with the license held out as if it were something worth admiring. He and Cummings told those in the apartment that they were going to sell the car.

They left again shortly after arriving taking the Crown Victoria with them. The tools that had been sitting in the vehicle, a set belonging to Steven Swan, went with them. Before leaving the Dallas area entirely, they stopped and pawned Swan’s tools for cash. Then they drove east on the highway toward Texarkana, 150 miles away.

Back in the apartment, the woman who was a friend of Broadnax’s aunt sat in front of the television. The news report came on covering the discovery of two men shot dead in a parking lot outside a recording studio in downtown Garland. She looked at the screen. She thought about the license James had been showing around the room.

She thought about the boasting and the car and the way he had come through the door. The connection was not difficult to make. She picked up a phone and called the Garland Police Department. That phone call made from an apartment in Southeast Dallas in the early hours of June 19th, 2008 was the moment the investigation turned from a scene with no witnesses into a case with a direction.

The woman gave investigators what she knew, two names, a description of the car, and the information that the two men had left heading toward Texarkana. The woman in the apartment in Southeast Dallas who called the Garland Police Department on the morning of June 19th, 2008 made a decision that would determine the course of the entire investigation.

She had seen James Broadnax come back to the apartment with another man’s driver’s license, heard him bragging about a robbery, and then watched the news report about two men found dead in a Garland parking lot. She put those pieces together and made the call. Garland investigators received the tip and immediately moved it to the top of their priorities.

The information pointed them toward two young men from Texarkana, James Broadnax and Demarius Cummings, and toward a tan 1995 Ford Crown Victoria that belonged to one of the victims. The two cousins had left the Dallas apartment shortly after returning from Garland, telling people in the apartment that they were going to sell the Crown Victoria.

They drove out of Dallas and headed toward Texarkana, approximately 150 miles to the east. Police departments across the region were alerted. The Crown Victoria’s license plate and vehicle identification number were circulated. Law enforcement in Texarkana was given the information and began watching for the vehicle.

That evening, police officers in Texarkana responded to a disturbance call at a residence. The suspect in the disturbance fled before officers could make contact. A short time later, officers stopped a car matching the description of the disturbance vehicle. When they ran the license plate, it came back registered to a different car.

The plates had been switched. Officers then ran the vehicle identification number of the car itself, and the result came back immediately. The Crown Victoria belonged to one of the Garland murder victims. Three people were in the car at the time of the stop. James Broadnax, Demarius Cummings, and an 18-year-old man named Lonnie Harris.

All three were taken into custody and held while Garland investigators were contacted. Harris had a large amount of drugs in his possession when he was arrested. Garland detectives drove to Texarkana that night, arriving around 2:30 in the morning. They took custody of the suspects and began the process of investigating their involvement in the deaths of Matthew Butler and Steven Swan.

Lonnie Harris was questioned and released. Garland police subsequently confirmed that Harris had nothing to do with the murders. He was cleared entirely and not charged in connection with the killings. James Broadnax and Demarius Cummings were transported back to Dallas and booked into the Dallas County Jail.

Both faced capital murder charges. Each was held on $1 million bond. The community in Garland and across the North Texas area reacted with shock when the story began to circulate. The victims were not public figures in the conventional sense, but they were known and respected within the Christian music community.

Matthew Butler’s studio had been part of the musical fabric of the Garland area for 3 years. Steven Swan was remembered by everyone who knew him as a warm and committed person who had done nothing to invite what happened to him. The motive, as it became clear through the investigation, made the reaction even more difficult to process.

Two men had been killed for $2 and a car. There was no history between the victims and the perpetrators. Broadnax and Cummings had not known Matthew Butler or Steven Swan before the night they approached them in the parking lot. They had taken a train across the city looking for someone to rob, and the two producers had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The pawn shop records that investigators pulled in the days following the arrest added another element to the picture. On the same day as the murders, June 19th, 2008, Broadnax and Cummings had pawned a set of tools belonging to Steven Swan. The tools had been in the Crown Victoria and had been taken along with the car.

They had pawned them for cash on their way out of Dallas. $2 from the victims’ pockets. A set of tools pawned the same day. A car that led police directly to them 150 miles away. That was the return on two lives. What happened next was unusual by any standard of criminal proceedings. Broadnax agreed to speak with the media.

Over the course of several days following his arrest, he gave recorded interviews to four different Dallas area television stations. He was 19 years old in a jail cell facing charges that could result in the death penalty. And he sat across from reporters and talked freely about what had happened in that parking lot in Garland.

He confirmed in these interviews that he and Cummings had taken the train to Garland with the intention of robbing someone. He stated that they had targeted the area because they believed it was where people with money lived. He described the shooting in explicit detail, walking reporters through the sequence of events in the parking lot with a detachment that left the reporters visibly affected.

When a reporter from NBC 5, Ellen Goldberg, asked him whether he had any remorse for what he had done, Broadnax looked at her and responded with a question of his own. Do I look like it? In another interview, he went further. He said that he hoped the jury would sentence him to death. He stated that if he did not receive the death penalty, he would kill again.

He was not distressed when he said it. He said it flatly as a statement of fact about himself. He said the victims’ families could expect nothing from him in the way of sympathy. When asked what he would say to them, his response was two words that could not be broadcast on television.

Cummings, in his own separate jailhouse interview with CBS News reporter Steve Pickett, took a different posture. Cummings showed remorse. He said he felt bad about what had happened. He admitted to being present and to conspiring to rob someone, but he drew a clear line at the shooting itself.

He looked at the camera and said, “They say I’m looking at the death penalty, and I didn’t kill nobody, and I want them to know I didn’t kill nobody.” He said it twice for emphasis, his voice unsteady. He wanted it on record. The contrast between the two jailhouse appearances was stark.

Cummings presented himself as someone caught up in something that went further than he intended. Broadnax presented himself as someone who had done exactly what he intended and had no feelings about it. Neither was making a formal legal statement through these interviews. They were speaking to reporters with cameras, and every word they said was being recorded.

Investigators and prosecutors watched these interviews carefully. What Broadnax had given them on camera was more than they could have expected to obtain through formal interrogation. He had confessed in explicit detail without prompting, without coercion, to a reporter with a microphone. The televised confession became the centerpiece of the prosecution’s case before formal charges had even been finalized.