JUST IN: Oklahoma Executes Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez — His Final Statement Before the Last Moment Revealed

Nearly 23 years after a gruesome murder, an execution date has been set for the next inmate on death row in Oklahoma.  Evan Onstad from Koco has been investigating this, and Evan, this is for a man who killed his wife. Carlos Quesada Rodríguez was arrested in 2003 after shooting and killing Olympia Fisher, 43.

  It is now scheduled to be executed on August 13.  This was a chaotic and horrifying scene.  Police say the victim’s adult daughter heard the gunshots and found Fisher with a gunshot wound to the eye.  This video is from our Koco 5 archives. The daughter tried to fight Quesada Rodríguez with a bat.  Finally, she escaped and called 911 from a neighbor’s house.

  Police believe Fisher survived the first shot to the eye, but say her husband shot her again with police outside.  There you can see the police taking the suspect away.  That was after a 3-hour standoff in which police stormed in and found Fisher’s body.  Quesada Rodríguez told the police that he believed she was cheating on him.

4:41 in the morning.  Southwest of Oklahoma City.  Two officers are standing outside a house on 47th Street. They have been on the scene for 90 seconds.  Inside, a woman is screaming.  They can listen to it.  You can hear her banging on the bedroom window over and over again trying to get out.  She can’t.

  Every window in that house is covered with security bars.  Each door.  The same bars that keep her inside, keep them out.  An officer throws himself with all his weight against the front door.  It doesn’t move .  Try again.  Then, from inside, a single shot.  And the screams stop.  It will be another 3 hours before anyone enters that house.

  23 years later, a man sits in front of a camera at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester.  A translator sits in the chair next to him for people watching from a room 130 miles away.  They are there to decide if he will live.  He speaks Spanish throughout his statement. Every word.  Until the end.  Then he switches to English, looks at the camera and tells them he doesn’t want mercy.

  The man in charge of that room had entered, ready to save him. Welcome to The Final Sentence.  In today’s case, a woman entered a police station 11 days before she died and then left again.  A jury heard 16 reasons to forgive the man who killed her.  And a hearing in July of this year where he stood up and argued against his own life.

  Before we begin, subscribe to the channel and tell us in the comments where you’re watching from.  We read everyone.  Now, let’s get down to business.  To understand what happened in that room at 4:30 in the morning, we have to go back about a year, to the day two names appeared in the same documents.

  There is a house on Southwest 47th Street in Oklahoma City. Single-story.  Ordinary. The kind of house you walk past without a second thought.  Two people bought it together.  Olympia Caridad Fisher was one of them.  Her daughters called her hardworking, generous, the kind of woman who helped anyone who asked and most of those who did n’t.

  She had two daughters, Katia and Cynthia.  The other name in that house was Carlos Quest Rodriguez.  They had been together long enough for the courts to later call her his common-law wife.  Enough time to do what couples do when they decide the relationship is permanent.  They bought a home.  Katia moved in with them.  An adult daughter living with her mother and the man her mother had chosen.

  Because that was the whole story.  Three people in a house on the southwest side.  Nothing worth mentioning.  Olympia worked for a moving company.  She was a packer .  It’s exactly what it looks like.  You go to someone else’s house, wrap their life in paper, and put it in boxes.  It’s physical work.  It’s an unpredictable job.

  The schedule depends on what the job dictates.  And she accepted the hours.  All of them.  This is where things start to change.  Because in the year after buying that house, Carlos Cuesta Rodriguez began to do his own calculations.  She wasn’t there at night.  I was arriving home late. She arrived tired.  And he decided he knew what that meant.

  He decided she was seeing someone else. Not just in a bad moment. Constantly.  It became the fixed idea through which she ran the household.  Every hour she was not in that house had to be justified. Every absence had to be explained. So he started asking questions.  When Olympia went out, he wanted to know where she was going and what she was doing.

When Katia went out, he wanted to know where she was going and what she was doing. Understand what that means.  It’s not a man asking his partner a question .  It’s a man questioning his daughter about her mother’s movements, making the daughter a witness, making the front door a place where you had to give explanations before you were allowed to pass.

  Years later, a court would analyze everything that happened in that house and write down what had gone wrong in it. They mentioned two things: their long working hours and his fear that she would be unfaithful to him.  That is the driving force behind this whole case, and it was in plain sight the entire time. Now, this is what the file doesn’t tell us, and what any reasonable person would wonder.  She was working.

That’s what the evidence shows. A woman with a mortgage and a moving schedule, taking turns as they arrived.  There was never a conclusion that she had been unfaithful.  Not even at the trial.  Not even on appeal.  Not even in 23 years of review .  The hours he interpreted as betrayal appear to have been nothing more than hours.  The same nights.

  Two completely different stories about what they meant.  And only one of those stories had anything to back it up .  By the spring of 2003, the agreement had completely ceased to function .  He wanted her to leave the house.  She wanted him to leave the house.  Neither of them left. Think about what that really looks like from the inside.

  Two people who have decided that the other must leave.  The same kitchen.  The same hallway.  The same entrance door.  Night after night waiting for the other to give in and leave.  That’s no longer a relationship.  That’s a countdown. And it all took place that spring in a house on 47th Street, with a daughter in the back bedroom listening to everything.

  So, on May 20, Olympia Fisher stopped waiting for it to sort itself out.  He got into his car and drove to a police station.  May 20, 2003. The Santa Fe Station of the Oklahoma City Police Department.  Olympia Fisher enters through the front door to file a domestic violence complaint.  Stop and think about what it takes to get there.

  He spent months in a house where he had to explain his movements.  Where they question her daughter about where she is going.  Where the man with whom she bought a house has decided , and will not stop deciding, that she is lying to him.  And now he’s standing in a police station saying it out loud to a uniformed stranger. That stranger was Officer Jeffrey Hawk.

  Hawk did what officers are trained to do on a domestic violence call.  He looked and there was something to see.  Bruises on the upper part of his right arm. Bruises on her abdomen.  Markings clear enough that an officer at the station could identify and describe them so well that, 4 years later, he would stand in court to tell a jury exactly where they were on his body .

  That’s the point at which this stops happening behind closed doors and becomes something the state of Oklahoma has seen with its own eyes. Then Hawk tells him what will happen next.  He’s going to photograph the bruises.  This is how you turn an injury into evidence.  And then Carlos Quest Rodriguez will be arrested.  That’s not a threat and it’s not a warning.

It’s a police officer telling a woman who just reported an assault that that assault will have consequences.  And that is the moment Olympia Fisher flees.  He doesn’t walk.  He doesn’t ask for a minute.  It doesn’t say that he needs to think about it.  She runs out of the station.

  Returning through the door he entered.  Far from the officer.  Away from the camera that was about to point at his arm.  Far from the complaint that she had just begun to file.  Leave everything behind.  We’re not going to sit here and tell you why he did that.  Some of you watching already know this.  They know exactly what goes through someone’s mind in the half-second between hearing the word “arrested” and reaching the door.

  They have either experienced it themselves or seen someone they love experience it.  And some of you will spend the rest of this video thinking that she should have stayed.  Both reactions will end up in the comments, and we prefer that you discuss it down there rather than us telling you what to think about a woman who isn’t here to explain herself.

  What we can tell you is what those bruises became.  Because Officer Hawk didn’t forget them.  Four years later, when this case went before a jury, he took the stand and told them what he had seen on May 20.  The defense objected.  His argument was that it was a different incident on a different day, and that presenting it to a jury only made his client look like a violent man before anyone had decided anything about the night in question.

  The court of first instance allowed it.  And when the case went to appeal, and a judge named Arlene Johnson reviewed every decision made in that courtroom, she determined that the decision was correct.  Those bruises were not admitted to show the jury what kind of man he was.  They were admitted to prove the motive and to prove the intention.

  Then they returned a second time.  When the same jury was deciding whether she should live or die, the bruises that Olympia Fisher reported on May 20 were part of what the state put before them.  So think about where that leaves us.  She entered a police station.  He showed an officer what they had done to him.

  And then, when the machinery started moving, she walked away and went home.  That complaint never resulted in an arrest.  As far as the records show, those photographs were never taken.  But what she reported that day did not die with her.  She returned to a courtroom four years later and helped the state prove that 11 days after she fled that station, the man she was running from knew exactly what he was doing.  She initiated that case.

She left him behind.  And she survived it .  Before we go any further, please do us a favor.  Subscribe to the channel.  Because the most damaging piece of evidence in this whole case did not come from a prosecutor.  It came from Carlos Quest Rodriguez’s own mouth in a video recording, in an interrogation room with a homicide detective named Steve Carson.

We’ll get to that.  11 days.  That is the time that passed between Olympia Fisher leaving that police station and the last morning of her life.  11 days in the same house, the same hallway, the same front door.  And then, on May 31, he picked up a phone and called her at work.  On May 31, 2003, at some point during that day, Carlos Quest Rodriguez picked up a phone and called Olympia Fisher’s cell phone.

She answered.  She told him she was at work, and he already knew that wasn’t true because he had been at her workplace.  He had gone to look.  He had seen the building where she was supposed to be, and she wasn’t inside.  So, when he made that call, he wasn’t asking a question.  I was preparing for a test.

  In her mind, she completely disapproved of it.  He had spent a year building a case in his own head that this woman was lying to him, and here it was, from her own mouth in real time.  Where she actually was, the record doesn’t say.    It was never established.  What matters for this story is not where she was.  That’s what he believed.

  He believed she was cheating on him.  And this is what he did with it.  He went home.  He did not go to her workplace to confront her.  He never called again.    He did not go out to look for whoever he had convinced himself was with her.  He returned to the house on Southwest 47th Street and drank tequila. Then he went to sleep.

  Around 10:00 that night, Katia arrived home .  The house was dark.  Not in the dark.  In the dark.  Nobody had turned on the light.  He went in and found two things.  An empty tequila bottle and, next to it, a note.  It wasn’t written on paper.  It had been written on the back of an envelope. Whatever thought crossed her mind before going to bed, she grabbed the first thing she could find and wrote on it.

  We’re not going to read it for you.  It was a farewell. It contains offensive language and a word directed at the women of that house;  We don’t need to say it for them to understand exactly what it was.  He wrote a farewell note in the house he had bought with her and left it where they would find it.  Katia read it. Put yourselves in that room for a second.

  10:00 at night, everything is dark, an empty bottle on one side and a farewell note on the other with words addressed to you.  She thought she was alone in the house.  Then he heard him coughing in the other room.  He was still there.  The man who had said goodbye was in the next room, in the dark .

  Katia tried to call her mother on the phone.  He couldn’t locate her.  So he did the only sensible thing he could do.  He went away.  He went to find Olympia in person and met her after work.  And this is where you understand what kind of night it had become, because they didn’t go home. A woman finishing her shift and her daughter who has just left a dark house, and neither of them wanting to go back there.

  So they did what people do when they need to sit in a well-lit place with other people around.  They went to a McDonald’s. They ate something late together.  And at that table, they made a plan.  They were going to pack up and leave.  That was the decision. They had read the note.  They knew what was in the house.

  They discussed it and agreed.  They were going to leave there.  And then they changed their minds. They returned to the house on Southwest 47th Street and decided to stay one more night.  We know exactly what they’re writing right now. Go ahead, write it down.  But first, understand what you are seeing.  That was his house.  Her name was on it.

  Everything they both possessed was inside.    It was late at night.  Packing a life into a car in the dark while the man you’re leaving behind sleeps in the next room is not something anyone does lightly.  And there’s something else .  She had been at this same crossroads 11 days earlier.  She had been in a police station and seen how hard it really is to leave, and she had gotten out of there.  So they went in.

  And they went to sleep.  But nobody in that house slept where they normally slept. Katia went to her own bedroom.  And Olympia did not go to the room she shared with him.  He slept in a third bedroom.  That tells you everything about what it felt like in that house that night.  A woman sleeping at the end of her own partner’s hallway in a spare room in a home they both own, waiting for morning to start packing her life into boxes.

Around 4:30 in the morning, Katia woke up.  Someone was screaming.  Around 4:30 in the morning, Katia Chacón woke up.  In his own bedroom in a house he had already decided to leave.  What woke her up were voices.  Her mother and Carlos Cuesta Rodríguez arguing in the room where Olimpia had gone to sleep alone.

  Now think about what an 18-year-old girl is doing at that moment.  He could have stayed where he was.  She could have covered herself with the blankets and waited for it to calm down, as it had been calming down all spring.  He didn’t do that.  He stood up, walked into the middle of the situation, and did something smart.

  Not brave in the loud sense, but intelligent.  He didn’t try to argue with him.  She did not attempt to reason with a man who had spent a year deciding that this woman was lying to him.  He entered that bedroom and persuaded his mother to return down the hall to her own room.  His reasoning was simple and sensible.  Separate them.

  Put a door between them.  Hopefully, he’ll leave them alone.  It didn’t work because he followed them out of that bedroom, down the hall, to Katia’s room, arguing loudly with Olympia the whole way.  There was no room in that house where he could put his mother that he wouldn’t enter.  And now the three of them are in one bedroom and it’s no longer just two people arguing.

  He is a man standing on both.  Olympia picked up a phone.  That’s the moment. Right there.  Regardless of what he was going to do with it, or who he was going to call, he made the decision in that room that someone outside the house needed to know what was going on.  He snatched it from her hand and threw it away.  Then he pulled out the gun.

  And we’re going to be precise about this weapon because it matters later on and because its details say something about it.  It was a double-barreled, .45 caliber pistol , and it was not loaded with pistol bullets.  It was loaded with two .410 caliber shotgun shells. Two cannons, two cartridges.  A pistol manufactured to fire shotgun cartridges.

  He shot Olympia Fisher in the right side of her face. His daughter was standing in the room .  Now, this is what Kadia Chekone did next, and this is the part of the case that is not told enough.  Her mother had just been shot in the face in front of her.  She is 18 years old. She is pregnant.  She reached under her bed, pulled out a baseball bat, and threw it at him.

  I wasn’t trying to kill him.  It was by his hand, the hand that held the weapon.  An 18-year-old girl trying to disarm the man who had just shot her mother.  He grabbed the bat as she swung it and threw it to the ground.  That was all she could do inside that house.  So he ran.  He left the house on Southwest 47th Street and walked into the darkness, to a neighbor’s house .

  And from that neighbor’s residence , he called 911. One more thing about that bat because it keeps turning up again .  When Carlos Quest Rodriguez sat down with the detectives, he also told them about the bat.  But in his story , the order was different.  He said Kadia hit him with it before he shot his mother.  The same few seconds.  Two different stories about them.

  In one, a man is attacked and a gun is fired. In the other, a man shoots a woman in the face and her daughter takes the only thing she can reach.  When the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals presented the facts of this case , it was Kadia’s account that was presented.  His version appears below in a footnote as something he said.

  Whoever you create changes the type of man who was standing in that bedroom.  Kadia was outside now, using a neighbor’s phone to give the operator an address. Behind her, in that house, her mother was still alive.  This is what was happening inside that house while Kadia was outside on a neighbor’s phone.  His mother was still alive.  We know it, and we know it because of him.

According to his own statement to the police.  Olympia Fisher was alive and conscious after that first shot.  Then he took her out of Kadia’s room and brought her to his own.  A woman who had been shot in the face, moved from her own home by the man who shot her.  And she fought against him.  That’s also in his statement.

  Not in ours.  Despite what they had done to her, she continued to fight and struggle with him in that room.  4:41 in the morning.  The first police officers arrive at the house within 2 minutes of being dispatched by 911. One of them goes to the neighbor’s house, where Kadia is, and begins to gather information from her .  The others go to the house.

  And as they approach, they can hear her.  Olympia Fisher is screaming.  And he’s banging on a bedroom window as if he’s trying to escape.  That’s how the court described it.  Trying to escape.  Minutes after being shot in the face in the room she was taken to, she was at that window trying to get out.  He couldn’t because of the security bars.

  The windows and doors of that house were covered with them.  And here is the sentence that says it all. Those bars not only prevented his escape , they also prevented the police from entering.  The same barrier working in both directions.  She couldn’t get out, and the men who had come to help her couldn’t get in.

  Olympia Fisher was screaming at a window she couldn’t open to officers she could hear, and they could hear her, but there was iron in between. So they went towards the front door.  They tried to knock her down with kicks.  They failed.  And while they were still working on that door, trying to get into the house, they heard a gunshot .  And the screams stopped.

  The officers outside immediately understood what that meant.  The file explains it clearly.  They were sure that she was no longer alive.  Now understand what had just happened in that time.  Between the first and second shots, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals determined that at least 7 minutes passed.  At least seven.

  Seven minutes in which Olympia Fisher was shot, moved to another room, continued to struggle, reached a window and screamed loud enough for police outside a locked house to hear her through the walls and glass.  And at the end of those 7 minutes, he shot again.  Here’s why that matters so much.  Because Carlos Quezada’s version from the beginning was that the first shot was an accident.

  The gun went off while she was trying to take it from him. Let’s put aside for a moment whether you believe that version about the first shot. There was a second shot.  And when the state presented a firearms examiner from the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, a man named Gordon Robertson, he told the jury something about that gun.

  The gun was unusual.  It required several sequential steps to fire a second time.  It wasn’t a pull of the trigger.  It wasn’t a single movement.  A series of actions performed in order before that weapon fired again.  The jury had the right to ask what kind of accident does that.  No. The screams had stopped .  The police were at the door.

  He did n’t go out.  Not even in 5 minutes.  Not even in 20. For 3 more hours.  And they didn’t just wait for it to come out.  The police brought their tactical team.  A hostage negotiator tried to contact him by phone.  When that did n’t work, they used a loudspeaker trying to convince him to leave the house on his own.

  3 hours of that.  The voice of a negotiator outside a house with bars in the early morning and a man inside who did not respond.  In the end, they had to dismantle the house.  The tactical team forced their way in through the security bars of the main door using a specialized hydraulic tool.  Even that was difficult.

  The report states it clearly.  They managed to get in with some difficulty.  Eventually, the facade of that house gave way.  Carlos Quest Rodríguez was arrested and taken to the police station.  At nine fifteen that morning, a detective named Dupuy noticed that he smelled of alcohol.  But that’s not what Dupuy put in his report.

What Dupuy wrote was that Quest Rodriguez seemed only slightly intoxicated.  Remember that.  Because four years later, in court, how drunk this man was would become the entire basis of his defense.  He then sat down with the detectives that day and again the next day.  He admitted to shooting him both times.  And he gave them his explanation.

The gun went off, she said, as she tried to snatch it from his hands.  But in that same series of interviews, he said something else.  He said he acted out of anger towards her because of his belief that she was seeing other men, not because he had been drinking.  He was specific about it.  Anger at what he had convinced himself she was doing.

  He said both things to the same detectives.  An accident and a motive.  Pause the video for a second and tell us in the comments.  He says the gun went off accidentally.  That weapon had to be manually reset before it could fire a second time .  What makes you think that?  4 years old. That’s how long Carlos Quest Rodriguez was in the Oklahoma County Jail before 12 people decided what to do with him.

Oklahoma County District Court, case number CF-2003-3216.  The Honorable Virgil C. Black on the stand .  For the state, two assistant prosecutors, Steve Doitch and Scott Rowland.  Remember that middle name.  Scott Rowland, the man who prosecuted this case, is now the presiding judge of the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, the highest criminal court in the state.

The defense team consisted of two assistant public defenders, Katherine Hammerstein and Cynthia Vile, who were working with virtually nothing because their client had already admitted on video to shooting Olympia Fisher twice.  There was an eyewitness in the room.  There were officers who heard the second shot through a wall.

  If he did it, it was never seriously in doubt.  The question was what was going through his head when he did it.  So they based it on tequila .  The argument was voluntary intoxication, not innocence;  He was so lost that he couldn’t form the intention to kill.  And if a jury accepts that, first- degree murder becomes a lesser offense and the death penalty is ruled out.

  He collapsed under the weight of his own words.  Because when the police asked him, he said he had consumed two or three shots of tequila.  And then he denied that it was enough to get him drunk.  His own defense required that he be incapacitated.    He had already told the detectives that he was n’t.  It got worse.

  Katia Cicone described him that night as stupidly drunk.  But he also told the jury that he stood firm on his feet.  And that he spoke clearly.  Then came Detective Dupuy, who had smelled the alcohol at 9:15 that morning, and who had written in his own report that the man appeared only slightly intoxicated.

  Under Oklahoma law, before a jury is even allowed to consider voluntary intoxication, there must be sufficient evidence to preliminarily show that the defendant was so intoxicated that he was incapable of forming criminal intent.  Judge Black determined that the evidence did not meet that requirement.  The jury never received instructions on the matter.

  The appeals court later added a line that sums up the whole matter.  A man who can give the police a clear and detailed account of the circumstances of a murder is in a bad position to argue that he was too impaired to know what he was doing. There was one more resolution.  The defense had a psychologist, Dr.

 James Choca.  He was prepared to talk to the jury about depression and about a steroid called Depo-Testosterone, which Quest Rodriguez said he injected himself with on the day of the murder, and about what happens when you combine it with alcohol.  The prosecution objected.  Judge Black accepted the objection.

  Choca did not testify in the guilt phase. The appeals court gave two reasons.  Nothing in the guilt phase record actually proved that he had taken the steroid.  And Choca was a psychologist with a doctorate in psychology with nothing in his record that demonstrated training in toxicology or in how drugs interact in the human body.

  Choca would later testify at the sentencing.  But the jury that decided guilt never heard him.  And then, during that trial, something else came to light.  Something that has almost never been reported about this case. Olympia Fisher had an ex-boyfriend and he took the stand.  She testified about the day she broke up with him over Carlos Quest Rodriguez and told the jury a phrase she used.

  She told him that she had set her sights on someone else.  He knew what she meant, he said, because she had used that expression with him before.  It was his way of saying that he was interested in someone.  This is how Olympia Fisher described falling in love with a man.  She said she had set her sights on him.

  Carlos Quest Rodríguez shot him through both eyes.  The jury found him guilty of first-degree murder.  Then came the second half, the part that decides whether a man lives.  The state presented two aggravating circumstances.  Oklahoma requires that at least one instance of guilt be proven beyond a reasonable doubt before considering the death penalty.

  The first was that the murder was especially heinous, cruel, or depraved. The second was that it represented a continuous threat to society.  The evidence for that second part is a list that deserves to be heard in its entirety. A conviction in California for possession of heroin for sale, an arrest for driving under the influence, a girlfriend prior to Olympia who went to court and obtained a protective order against him because he had been drinking, angry and violent.

The bruises on Olympia’s arm and stomach that Officer Hawk had seen at a police station.  And the telephone.  The moment she sought help, he snatched it from her hands, threw it against the window, and shot her.  It wasn’t just one night.  A pattern of years.  Now the defense had one thing left to do. Attenuation.

  This is where a defense team steps in and gives 12 strangers every possible reason not to kill their client.  Hammerstein and Vial gave them 16, and each of them was included in the jury instructions that those 12 people took with them to the courtroom.  He arrived from Cuba in the Mariel boatlift of 1980 along with 120,000 other people.

  He was placed in federal detention in 1983 following his conviction for heroin, and while in custody, he used the time to learn to speak and read English.  When some Cubans in that federal prison rebelled for fear of being deported, he volunteered for repatriation, as it meant seeing his family again.

  He worked at Forest Lumber from 1992 to 2002. 10 years. And the chairman of the board, Dan Fironi, kept him working at his personal residence after he left the company, right up until the time of his arrest.  For 7 years he volunteered on a project called Christmas in April, visiting the homes of elderly and needy people to make them safe and habitable.

  He has a son in Cuba, Carlos Cuesta González.  The investigation told the jury that the young man was studying to be a writer because of the letters his father had sent home over the years.  His family in Cuba appeared by sworn statement and video from a country from which he could not get them out, and he asked 12 people in Oklahoma to save his life.

  The jury was informed that he had suffered severe debilitating depression after beginning his relationship with Olympia Fisher, which was worsened by self-medication.  His mental state deteriorated so much that it was evident to those around him.  That four years of medication in the county jail had stabilized him, relieving the symptoms of depression and delusions.

  That the prison’s medical staff had selected him for a state mental health program and that he had initiated and completed it.  And point 16, the last on that list: that Carlos Quesada feels remorse for having caused the death of Olympia Fisher.  One more thing happened in that room, and it’s worth knowing about.

  When the prosecutor stood up to respond to all of that, he told the jury that what they had just heard for 20 minutes was emotional blackmail.  The defense objected immediately.  The judge ordered him to rephrase his words .  Years later, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals reviewed that moment and stated that the prosecutor had gone beyond what was permitted.

  That court had specifically condemned characterizing mitigating factors as emotional blackmail in a previous case. He determined that this case crossed the line and warned prosecutors in future cases to stop denigrating the defense.  He then ruled that the error was harmless because the evidence supporting the death penalty was very strong.

  The jury took those 16 points and contrasted them with 7 minutes, a gun that needed to be reloaded, and a woman screaming behind a barred window while the police were outside.  On June 12, 2007, they issued their verdict.  The 18 years.  That’s what followed, and it can be told quickly because, for 18 years, the answer never changed.

  He appealed.  21 error claims filed with the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals. They found a mistake.  The medical examiner who performed Olympia Fisher’s autopsy had retired before the trial.  Another doctor took the stand in his place and told the jury what the first man’s report contained .

  The court agreed that this violated Carlos Quezada Rodríguez’s constitutional right to confront the witnesses against him. And then he determined that the mistake was harmless because there was an eyewitness .  Because there was a video confession.  Because the officers heard the screams stop with a gunshot.  Sentence upheld. Sentence ratified.

  In 2010, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case. A second request for post- conviction relief was denied in February 2013 .  The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2019. Every court, at every level, gave the same answer.  Then, on May 14, 2026, the state of Oklahoma requested an execution order.  The Criminal Court of Appeals determined that he had exhausted all available appeals in both the state and federal systems.  A date was set.

  On August 13, 2026, which left only one thing between him and that fate: a mercy hearing.  On July 14, 2026, his lawyers filed a preliminary report.  It came from Emma Rolls, senior assistant to the federal public defender, and it did not argue innocence, nor that the trial had been unfair. He argued that man no longer existed.

  He was no longer the angry, jealous, drug- and alcohol-addicted man he had been in 2003. He was now a 70-year-old man, mentally and physically frail, suffering from various health problems, including, according to the document, dementia.  And that he fully accepted responsibility for the irreversible damage he had caused to Olympia Fisher’s family and his own.

  The Oklahoma Board of Pardons and Paroles has five members.  According to the Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, only four were present that day.  Carlos Quezada Rodríguez appeared via video from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, with a translator by his side. The daughter spoke first.  Cynthia Chacon told the board that it had been 23 years since the word “mom” was removed from her vocabulary.

  She spoke about who her mother was, a hardworking and generous woman, someone who helped anyone in need. So Katia, now she’s Katia Wallace.    I was 18 years old in that room. She has her own children.  And what he told the board was this: that his post-traumatic stress is so severe that he cannot open a jar of cookies on a Sunday morning for his own children because of what he witnessed in that room.

  23 years later, and she still can’t make breakfast for her children.  He confronted the defense directly.  He told them that he was not mentally ill, that he was not ill when it happened, that the evidence in that room showed an obsessive, selfish, and calculating man. And he said one more thing: he wasn’t drunk.

  Then, his lawyers presented their case.  Rolls told the board that he grew up watching his stepfather physically abuse his mother, and that he had been admitted to a psychiatric facility.  That he had suffered a head injury.  That showed symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder.  They presented evidence that he had changed in prison.

  He had become a positive influence on the men around him.  That it represented a low risk of future violence.  A friend of hers, a woman named Carolina Rubio Mac Wright , told the board that they were never asking for her freedom. Understanding only.  Then, the state. Assistant Attorney General Chris Howard summed it up in three sentences.

He acted alone when he murdered Olympia Fisher, and that is indisputable.  A jury sentenced him to death almost two decades ago.  Every court that has reviewed the case has upheld that sentence.  And then Carlos Quest Rodríguez spoke.  He read a statement in Spanish and the translator relayed it in the room.

  He told Olympia Fisher’s daughters that he knew nothing he said would be enough, that it wouldn’t erase their pain, offer them comfort, or bring their mother back.  That he regretted it and felt true remorse from the bottom of his heart.  That his time had come and that he wanted to leave, and he wanted to leave in peace.

  That if he was ever forgiven, then he would be forgiven.  But it was time for him to pay for what he did. All of that in Spanish.  And then in English, so that no one in that room would need explanations, he told the Oklahoma Board of Pardons and Paroles that he did not want any clemency.  That he didn’t want any mercy.

  He said he had come to that hearing to apologize to Olympia Fisher’s daughters.  That was the reason I was there. Not to be saved.  Now, this is what makes this hearing different from almost any other clemency hearing in that state. The chairman of the board is a man named Robert Revis II.  And then, he said aloud what he had been thinking as he came in.

  He was somewhat inclined to vote for clemency, intending to save the man’s life, but he changed his mind.  Not because of the daughters.  Not by the attorney general.  But for what Quest Rodriguez himself asked for.  The vote was three to one.  Clemency denied.  But look at that number because there’s something about it.

  One member of that board voted in favor of granting clemency anyway.  He voted to save a man who had just told them he didn’t want to be saved.  His execution is scheduled for August 13, 2026 at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. We’re recording this before that date.  In cases like this, the courts can intervene at any time, right up to the last moment, and his lawyers have filed a dementia claim that no court has publicly ruled on.

So, whatever happens on the 13th, it will be in the news and in the comments below this video before we can update it.  And that’s where we leave it.  Because this story was never really about him.  There was a woman who put her name on a house on Southwest 47th Street, and then worked the hours necessary to pay for it, and the man whose name was next to hers used those hours against her.

  One morning in May, he walked into a police station and showed an officer the bruises on his arm and stomach, then walked out and went home.  There were two daughters.  Cynthia, who has spent 23 years without her mother, and Kadia, who was in the room, and who still cannot prepare a simple breakfast on Sundays without the memories coming back.

And there was a girl.  Kadia was pregnant that night.  Months after being born in that room while everything was happening.  That girl never met Olympia Fisher.  She stayed in that house because it was hers.  Because both names were in her, and leaving meant giving up everything she had built.

  He stayed one more night.  That was all it took. If this is the kind of story you want to see more of, subscribe and tell us in the comments what you think about a man who asked the board not to save him.  The next case is already underway.  See you there.