A Texas man who killed his strip club manager and another man, later prompting a massive lockdown of the state prison system when he used a cellphone smuggled onto death row to threaten a lawmaker, was executed Thursday night, the Associated Press reports. Richard Lee Tabler, 46, was given a lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville. “There is not a day that goes by that I don’t regret my actions,” Tabler said, strapped to the death chamber gurney, looking at relatives of his victims who watched through a window a few feet away. “I had no right to take your loved ones from you, and I ask and pray, hope and pray, that one day you find it in your hearts to forgive me." After apologizing several more times and saying this was the beginning of a new life for him in heaven, he told the warden: “I am finished.”
Tabler — the second person executed in Texas in a little over a week, with two more scheduled by the end of April — was condemned for the Thanksgiving 2004 shooting deaths of Mohammed-Amine Rahmouni, 28, and Haitham Zayed, 25, in a remote area near Killeen in Central Texas. Rahmouni was the manager of a strip club where Tabler worked until he was banned from the place. Zayed was a friend of Rahmouni, and police said both men were killed in a late-night meeting to buy some stolen stereo equipment that was actually a planned ambush. Tabler also confessed to killing two teenage girls who worked at the club. Earlier Thursday, Florida executed James Dennis Ford for the savage murders of two young parents in front of their toddler daughter in 1997. Ford, 64, was executed by lethal injection at the Florida State Prison in Raiford, becoming the first inmate to be put to death by the state in 2025. Ford and Tabler were the fourth and fifth inmates to be executed this year in the U.S.
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