On August 5th, 2025, after spending 35 years on death row, Byron Lewis Black was executed by lethal injection in Tennessee. In this video, we’ll uncover what happened, his last meal, and his last words. On Friday, March 25th, 1988, 32-year-old Byron Black walked out of the workhouse at 5:30 p.m. for another weekend furlow.

And by Monday evening, just after 5:00 p.m., he returned as if nothing had happened during those three days. But everything had. That weekend, Byron had killed three people. The bodies just hadn’t been discovered yet. On Sunday night, 29-year-old Angela Clay had just wrapped up another long shift at the Vanderbilt Hospital, clocking out around 1000 p.m.

 Her sister, Lynette Bell, had borrowed her car that weekend and came to pick her up as planned. But Lynette wasn’t alone. Byron, her on and off again boyfriend, showed up, too. Together, they drove to the house of Amelia Bell, who was Angela and Lynette’s mother. There, Byron dropped off Angela and her two daughters, 9-year-old Latoya and six-year-old Lkesha, and left without saying much.

Angela stayed behind a little longer, chatting with her mom and sister before heading home around 11 p.m. Just before leaving, she borrowed an iron and promised to return it the next day. But that would never happen because sometime that night after everyone was already sound asleep, Byron stepped through the door of the apartment where Angela lived with her two daughters.

 Inside he found Angela lying under the covers in the master bedroom. She was curled on her side, fast asleep. She looked peaceful, but that wouldn’t last long. Byron stepped closer, raised a revolver, and fired one single shot straight through the top of her head without hesitation. Angela died instantly. She never saw it coming, never even woke up.

 Byron turned to leave, but then he heard a sound behind him, a small rustle, almost like a gasp. It was Latoya. She had been asleep next to her mother. Maybe the noise had stirred her, or maybe it was just the wrong moment to shift in her sleep. Either way, she moved just slightly, and that was enough. Byron turned back, lifted the gun, and pulled the trigger, hitting her straight through the chest and neck.

 The force shoved her sideways, jamming her between the bed and the dresser. Blood soaked through her pillow and filled her lungs. She didn’t die right away. An autopsy would later confirm that her body had twitched for up to 10 minutes before she finally went still. Byron could have stopped there, but he didn’t. He couldn’t risk leaving a witness behind.

So, he turned, walked down the hall, and opened the door to Lkesha’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 friendly face, and when she saw him, she probably thought everything was all right. She could have thought he would tuck her in again and maybe even read her a bedtime story.

But little did she know this would be the last thing she ever saw. Because as soon as Byron stepped into her room, he raised the gun and fired two more shots. One bullet hit her in the chest. The other struck her near her hip. She fell, but like her sister, she didn’t die instantly. She dragged herself from the bed to the floor, her small hands leaving streaks of blood down the wooden frame.

 Her palms smudged the floor as she tried to move, gripping at anything she could reach. She eventually collapsed beside the bed, face down on the floor. Her blood pulled around her, seeping into the carpet. And then it was quiet again. There were no more witnesses, and Byron walked out, locked the door behind him, and disappeared into the night.

 He looked calm, composed, and right on time to check in from Furlow like nothing had happened. But this wasn’t the first time Byron had 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 connection. Their two daughters and a flicker of unfinished love.

 Benny had hoped they might work things out. He thought they had a chance, but there was one obstacle standing in the way. Byron Black. Angela had started seeing Byron after the separation, but it hadn’t been a clean break from Benny. Some weeks she was still seeing both men. Benny didn’t like it, and he made that known.

 But Byron wasn’t backing down. He wanted Angela for himself, and he wasn’t going to let her go without a fight. By December of 1986, that tension boiled over. It started with an argument, loud, heated, and deeply personal. Benny eventually turned and walked off toward his car. maybe thinking it was over. But Byron wasn’t done.

 He pulled out a gun and started shooting. The first shot slammed into Benny’s car and the second tore through his foot. The third ripped through his shoulder and stopped under his collarbone. Benny tried to run, but Byron chased him, still firing. Benny eventually collapsed in the street, bleeding and cornered. Byron quickly caught up to him and stood over him with the gun still in his hand, ready to finish it. But then Angela appeared.

 She shoved Byron back before he could fire again. And somehow that was enough. Shortly after, Byron was arrested. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a workhouse term with weekend furlows. And that privilege would cost Angela and her daughters their lives. The day after the murders, March 29, Angela’s mother felt something was off.

Angela hadn’t returned the iron like she said she would do, and that was nothing like her. When Amelia called, no one picked up, so she tried again and again, but still nothing. That’s when she sent another daughter over to check on her, but she too didn’t get a response. The shades were pulled down tight, and the house was quiet.

Yet, Angela’s car was parked right out front. It just didn’t feel right. That evening, Amelia and Lynette went to Angela’s apartment themselves. Again, they knocked, but again, there was no answer. At that moment, they knew something was seriously wrong, and they immediately called the police. Officers arrived at the apartment around 9:30 p.m.

 The door was locked, but there was no broken glass and no other signs of forced entry. Officer James pried a screen off one of the bedroom windows and opened it. He raised his flashlight and swept the beam across the dark room. And that’s when he saw it. A child’s body 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 halfway between the mattress and a chest of drawers, was Latoya. She didn’t survive either. And in the second bedroom, Lkesha was found face down beside her bed. She had lived the longest, dying somewhere between 5 and 30 agonizing minutes after being shot. Forensic teams combed through every inch of the scene.

 They recovered bullet fragments from the wall above Angela’s head, from the pillow where Latoya had been sleeping, and from the mattress near Lkesha’s body. But the detail that tied everything together came from the phones. The kitchen phone receiver had somehow ended up in the master bedroom, while the base of that same phone was found in the hallway.

 On it were three fingerprints, two on the hallway phone and another one on the kitchen receiver. And all of them belonged to one man, Byron Black. And to make things even worse, the bullets found at the crime scene matched the same type used in the shooting of Benny the year before. He had survived, but the bullet had stayed lodged in his shoulder ever since.

 But investigators hadn’t forgotten about it. And as they started closing in on Byron, they asked Benny to undergo surgery. The bullet was finally removed. And when ballistics experts examined it, they confirmed it was fired from the same gun used to kill Angela and her two daughters.

 A lead detective later said it was the first time he had ever recovered key evidence from inside a living person and it helped tie everything back to Byron. The evidence against him came together slowly. There wasn’t a trail of blood or a witness who saw it happen, but the cracks in Byron’s story ran deep. Angela’s family said the relationship had been rocky from the start.

 Months earlier, Byron had kicked in her front door after she refused to let him inside. Angela had told friends he once said, “If I can’t have you, nobody will.” And the neighbors had heard it all. Late night fights, banging, shouting. And just 3 weeks before the murders, one neighbor said they saw Byron at Angela’s door again, pounding on the window, and threatening to break in.

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

 But the moment more officers entered the room, something in him changed. The tears dried quickly and his face went blank, 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 1000 p.m., then headed to a friend’s house for dinner. He claimed he stayed there until 11:30, eating and chatting, then drove to his mom’s house and crashed on the couch until morning.

But that story didn’t hold. Charlotte Walden, the woman he had supposedly eaten with that night, remembered it differently. Byron had shown up for dinner around 8:30, stayed for barely an hour, then left by 9:30, and he never came back that night. That small gap, just 2 hours, was enough to unravel everything he told the police.

By Tuesday morning, detectives brought Byron in again, but this time he had his lawyer with him. And with that, his story changed. Now, he said he had gone by Angela’s place later that night, but he claimed she wasn’t there. So, he left. And when he came back later that night, the front door was open.

 And this time, he stepped inside. That’s when he said he found them. All three of them already dead. Angela, Latoya, and Lkesha still in their beds. The blankets pulled over them like nothing had happened. But he didn’t call the police. He didn’t run to a neighbor. Instead, he just stood there. I panicked.

 He told detectives I didn’t want to get involved. Then he turned around, locked the door behind him, and walked away. He never told anyone about what he saw. Not until investigators confronted him. At trial, his defense came down to one thing, his alibi. His mother and his nephew both swore he had been home by 11 p.m. and never left after that.

 But the jury didn’t believe it. not after hearing what he had told the police. And on March 8th, 1989, Lkesha’s birthday, a Davidson County jury gave her family something they had been waiting for. The best birthday present she could have gotten. They returned guilty verdicts on all three counts of firstdegree murder. And the very next day, the sentencing followed.

For murdering Lkesha, the jury unanimously recommended death. But when it came to Angela and Latoya, they couldn’t agree. And Byron was sentenced to two consecutive life terms, plus extra time for weapons charges and burglary. One thing was clear. He would never walk free again. Not this time. Still, Byron kept appealing his death sentence for decades.

 His attorneys argued that he didn’t have the mental capacity to be executed, that he was intellectually disabled and legally unfit for the punishment Tennessee gave him. They claimed that Byron didn’t understand the world around him. When he was young, simple childhood games like red light, green light left him confused, school was a blur, and he couldn’t follow basic rules.

 Doctors later said that damage had started early. Byron had been exposed to alcohol before his birth and to lead in the air and water after he was born. Both left lasting harm before he ever learned to read, especially to his brain’s frontal and temporal loes, the parts of the brain that control memory, attention, and control.

 And he never grew out of it. As an adult, Byron still couldn’t do basic math, and testing showed he functioned well below average. If you would line up a hundred men his age with similar education, 98 of them would perform better. And even though he had married and had a child, Byron never lived independently. He stayed in his parents’ house until the day he was arrested at age 32.

 Over the years, half a dozen experts reached the same conclusion. Byron Black was intellectually disabled. Even the state’s own expert, who once testified otherwise, changed her opinion. With modern diagnostic standards, she acknowledged the truth. Byron met every criteria, and time only made things worse. By the age of 69, Byron’s mental state had deteriorated further.

 Years of brain damage, combined with schizophrenia and later dementia, had stripped away what little capacity he had left. His mind had been breaking down since childhood. And what was left, doctors said, 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 evaluated him for the final time, Byron couldn’t even make change for a $5 bill.

 But to some, that wasn’t something new. That was just who 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 for execution. And in June 2023, the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the sentence. But since then, Byron’s execution has been rescheduled multiple times.

 First by the pandemic, then by temporary moratoriums and technical delays. But eventually, in March 2025, the Tennessee Supreme Court set one more date. Yet, there was one final complication. In May 2024, Byron received an implantable defibrillator, a small device placed in his chest to regulate his failing heart.

It was a last resort for his endstage heart failure, but it created a serious complication when his execution date approached. His lawyers argued that if the device wasn’t turned off, it could mistake the slowing heartbeat from lethal injection as a medical emergency and deliver painful electric shocks. They described it like being kicked in the chest by a horse.

 Each jolt a desperate mechanical attempt to restore his heart’s normal rhythm. The drugs would slow his heart and the machine would resist, possibly turning death into a drawn out and brutal struggle between man and machine. A judge in Davidson County agreed, ordering the device to be deactivated before the execution. But the Tennessee Supreme Court saw things differently.

 They overturned that ruling, calling the deactivation an unauthorized delay of justice. The execution, they decided, would proceed with the device intact, arguing that even if the shocks were triggered, Byron would likely feel nothing. And that was it. The date stood. The night before the execution, Byron was given his last meal, a quiet ritual before the state moved forward.

 He had requested a pizza topped with mushrooms and sausage, donuts, and butter pecan ice cream. On the morning of August 5th, 2025, Byron was led into the execution chamber. He was already strapped to the gurnie when the curtain rose at 10:31 a.m. A sheet covered his body, which was standard, but this time it was pulled unusually high, even covering his hands.

 He faced the witnesses, but when he was asked if he had any last words, he simply said, “No, sir.” He didn’t speak to the victim’s family, who were seated just feet away, and he didn’t apologize. Witnesses said he showed clear signs of distress, heavy breathing, restlessness, and confusion. It looked, they said, like he didn’t fully understand what was happening to him.

 A final mic check was done. His spiritual adviser stood nearby, touching his cheek, praying and offering quiet encouragement. She also told him to focus on his breathing. Byron began sighing and breathing heavily, almost panting, as if fear was overtaking him. When the drug started flowing, he looked around and raised his head, clearly unsettled.

 Witnesses described him as moving more than expected. At 10:33, he was groaning. “I can’t do this,” he told his spiritual adviser. “This is hurting so bad.” The adviser leaned in, calm, but helpless, and said softly, “I’m so sorry.” Then she continued praying. Just a few moments later, he raised his hand one final time, then went still at 10:36 a.m.