At 10:33 a.m. on Wednesday, March 19, Aaron Gunches died by lethal injection in Arizona as punishment for the murder of Ted Price in 2002. Gunches’ execution was attended by five media witnesses, members of Ted Price’s family and legal advisors for both Gunches and Price’s family. Gunches was transferred to the Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence on Tuesday night after his last meal, which consisted of a double western burger, spicy gyros, onion rings and baklava, the Arizona Mirror reports. On Wednesday morning at 10:02, Gunches was brought into the execution chamber and laid down on the table by five corrections staff members. Four members of a medical team, their identities shielded by masks and white hoodies, inserted IVs in both of his arms. At 10:14, he was asked if he had any last words. Gunches only shook his head. An executioner in another room injected pentobarbital into lines that led to the IVs. Gunches barely moved and squeezed his eyes shut. He exhaled hard seven or eight times and then remained motionless.
His heart stopped and he was pronounced dead at 10:33. Media witnesses and members of Ted Price’s family, in addition to Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes discussed the execution at a briefing. “The family of Ted Price has been waiting for justice for more than two decades,” Mayes said. “They deserve closure.” The execution was “the final chapter in a process that has spanned nearly 23 years,” Ted Price’s sister, Karen, said. Gunches was sentenced to death for the November 2002 murder of Price, the ex-boyfriend of a woman Gunches did drugs with. Price, 40, was staying at the woman’s apartment while waiting to receive student grant money. The two got into a violent argument, and the woman threw a telephone at him, hitting him in the face and dazing him so badly he couldn’t stand up. Gunches arrived and berated the man, holding a gun to his head. Then, with one of the girlfriend’s roommates driving, he took Price first to the bus station to send him home. When he found he didn’t have enough money to pay for a bus ticket, Gunches had the roommate drive to a remote spot off the Beeline Highway where he shot Price four times. Price’s body was not found for nearly a month, and Gunches was not apprehended for two months, when he got into a gunfight with a state trooper in La Paz County after a routine traffic stop. The shootout landed him in prison. He was not charged with the Price murder until 2004. But through two trials (one sentence was thrown out by the Arizona Supreme Court), Gunches insisted on acting as his own attorney and then refused to offer any defense at all, committing what one judge called “suicide by jury” and being “the architect of his own disaster,” according to one of his former court-appointed attorneys.
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