Texas jury deliberates whether to give death sentence to man convicted of beheading 3 children

Texas jury mulls death sentence for child-killer

EDINBURG, Texas — A jury on Thursday began deliberating whether to sentence to death a 29-year-old man convicted of beheading his common-law wife’s three children.

John Allen Rubio faces execution or life in prison with an opportunity for parole after 40 years. Judge Noe Gonzalez must follow the jury’s decision.

Jurors on Monday found Rubio guilty on four counts of capital murder — one charge for each child and one for the children together.

“What mercy did (Rubio) show these three little children?” prosecutor Charles Mattingly said, showing jurors photographs of the kids. “Imagine the last 10 minutes of each of these children’s lives with the man they knew as father butchering them.”

Rubio was previously convicted of murdering the children in 2003 and sentenced to death. But a court overturned his conviction in 2007 because statements from the children’s mother — Angela Camacho — were wrongly allowed as evidence during the trial. Camacho pleaded guilty and is serving a life sentence for her role in the murders.

At his current trial, Rubio pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but the jury rejected his defense and convicted him.

Rubio’s attorneys do not deny Rubio killed the children. But one of them, Nat Perez, said something must have gone terribly wrong in his client’s life for him to have done so. As a final indignity, no family members came to support Rubio, Perez said. “And we called them yesterday to come testify and they didn’t show up,” he said.

During the sentencing phase, prosecutors called witnesses who portrayed Rubio as a remorseless killer and a troublesome prison. Even inside prison, Rubio would continue to be a threat to others, witnesses said.

Rubio’s attorneys argued that it’s unlikely that a man convicted of killing three children under the age of 4 would pose a threat in prison. With the exception of setting several fires while on death row, Rubio never attempted to assault inmates or guards, they said. Their experts testified that Rubio’s childhood — filled with violence at home, “toxic” parents, drug use and prostitution — damaged him developmentally and set him on a path for failure.

Police discovered the bodies of 3-year-old Julissa Quesada, 14-month-old John E. Rubio and 2-month-old Mary Jane Rubio on March 11, 2003, in a windowless, downtown Brownsville apartment.

Rubio said he believed the children were possessed and tried to smother and stab them before ultimately decapitating them.

The apartment was a step up for a family that had lived on a park bench and in an abandoned building. The state had taken away the children and returned them when Rubio and Camacho enrolled them in government assistance programs.

Jolie Brams, a clinical psychologist who evaluated Rubio for the defense, said he preferred fantasy to reality as a youngster and only slipped further from reality as he began using drugs and prostituting himself at his mother’s urging.

“(Rubio) was mentally ill at the time of the offense,” Brams testified Wednesday.

Alan Brantley, a former FBI supervisory special agent who now consults on the future dangerousness of criminals, declared Rubio “emotionally unstable” and said that instability would only be exacerbated by the pressures of living in a general prison population. If sentenced to life in prison, Rubio would be placed in the general population of a prison where it is easier to obtain drugs and weapons and where he would be more vulnerable to sources of stress, Brantley said.

“That is like throwing gasoline sometimes on a fire … a lethal combination,” he said. “I think the probability for adjustment problems in the general population for this individual is high.”