Firing squad executes Brad Keith Sigmon in South Carolina in ‘bloody spectacle’

A firing squad in South Carolina executed Brad Keith Sigmon on Friday for the beating deaths of his ex-girlfriend’s parents, marking the first firing squad execution in the state in modern history and the first in the U.S. since 2010.

Sigmon was strapped to a specially made chair and had a hood over his head while three volunteer corrections staffers aimed loaded rifles at his heart and each fired off live rounds, according to several news media witnesses who spoke at a news conference afterward. He was pronounced dead at 6:08 p.m., the witnesses said.

“Brad’s death was horrifying and violent,” Gerald “Bo” King, Sigmon’s attorney and an execution witness, said in a statement. “It is unfathomable that, in 2025, South Carolina would execute one of its citizens in this bloody spectacle.”

The execution came shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court denied Sigmon’s last remaining appeal, and Republican South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster declined to grant him clemency.

Sigmon, 67, was convicted of the 2001 murders of Gladys and David Larke, who were beaten to death with a baseball bat in their small-town home in northwestern South Carolina. Sigmon, who chose the firing squad over lethal injection or the electric chair, always admitted to killing the Larkes.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I am guilty,” Sigmon told jurors at his trial, according to archived coverage in the Greenville News, part of the USA TODAY Network. “I have no excuse for what I did. It’s my fault and I’m not trying to blame nobody else for it, and I’m sorry.”

During his last words Friday, Sigmon listed four Bible quotes that he said showed that “nowhere does God in the New Testament give man the authority to kill another man.”

“I want my closing statement to be one of love and a calling to my fellow Christians to help us end the death penalty,” Sigmon said through his attorney. “We are now under God’s grace and mercy.”

Sigmon’s ex-girlfriend, Rebecca Armstrong, told USA TODAY − in her first interview in the 24 years since her parents’ murder − that Sigmon’s actions ripped her family apart but that she didn’t agree with his execution, saying death should be in God’s hands.

Here’s what you need to know about Sigmon’s execution, including more about the rare firing squad method and what else his victims’ family has to say.

How the firing squad execution method worked

Sigmon was seated and restrained in a metal chair, a hood over his head, in the corner of a room shared by the state’s electric chair, according to the execution witnesses.

The firing squad team − three voluntary corrections staff − were standing behind a wall with loaded rifles 15 feet from Sigmon. The wall has an opening for the weapons.

A small target was placed over Sigmon’s heart, after which his attorney read his last words, the warden ordered the execution and the team fired, the witnesses said. The bullets all seemed to hit his chest over his heart, said Associated Press reporter Jeffrey Collins.

“It was instantaneous,” Collins said. “When the shots were fired, it was very loud, it was very jarring … I think at that point everyone in the room flinched … There was only one place where I could see any damage so that makes me think they (the bullets) were all clustered.”

Sigmon chose the firing squad over the electric chair or lethal injection, with his attorney citing “prolonged and potentially torturous deaths” caused by the state’s recent execution drug and the barbarity of an “ancient electric chair, which would burn and cook him alive.”

“He chose the firing squad knowing that three bullets would shatter his bones and destroy his heart,” King said Friday. “But that was the only choice he had.”

The state has defended the constitutionality of all its execution methods in court records but the South Carolina Attorney General’s Office has not answered multiple requests from USA TODAY for further comment.

South Carolina firing squad: Is the ‘barbaric’ method making a comeback?

What is the modern history of the firing squad in the U.S.?

Five states − South Carolina, Mississippi, Utah, Oklahoma and Idaho  − have legalized firing squads as an execution method, most recently Idaho in 2023.

The last inmate in the U.S. to be killed by firing squad before Friday was in 2010, when Utah executed Ronnie Lee Gardner for killing a man during a robbery. Both other firing squad executions were in Utah, Gary Mark Gilmore in 1977 and John Albert Taylor in 1996.

Among the witnesses to Gardner’s execution was an Associated Press reporter who said that five volunteer prison staff members fired at him from about 25 feet away with .30-caliber rifles, aiming at a target pinned over his chest as he sat in a chair. One of the rifles had a blank so none of the volunteers knew whether they fired a fatal bullet, AP reported.

King, Sigmon’s attorney, said in a statement ahead of Friday’s execution that with it, “there is no justice.”

“Everything about this barbaric, state-sanctioned atrocity − from the choice to the method itself − is abjectly cruel,” he said. “We should not just be horrified – we should be furious.”

He had argued that Sigmon was a “tortured” man at the time of the killings because of an undiagnosed mental illness that caused “irrational and impulsive episodes,” something he tried to treat with street drugs.

“And that Brad, who was already struggling with organic brain damage and grief from his violent childhood, succumbed to a psychotic break,” King said. “The jury that sentenced him had no idea of how severely compromised his mental health was, or that he was probably incompetent even to stand trial.”

After the execution, he said that in 23 years on Death Row, Sigmon had not committed any violence and “devoted himself every day to prayer and repentance.”

“Brad spent hours kneeling on the floor of his cell so he could write letters to the family and friends for whom he has been a wellspring of love and support,” King said. “Brad’s love for his brothers (on Death Row), his family, his friends, and the men and women who have guarded him is undeniable. It is a shame that South Carolina has not lived up the example that Brad has set for all of us during his final days.”

Who is Brad Keith Sigmon? More about the South Carolina man who chose the firing squad

What was Brad Keith Sigmon’s last meal?

Sigmon’s last meal was fried chicken, green beans, mashed potatoes with gravy, biscuits, cheesecake and sweet tea, the corrections department said.

King said that Sigmon had requested three buckets of Original Recipe Kentucky Fried Chicken so that “he could feed the men locked up with him” but “that request was denied.”

What was Brad Keith Sigmon convicted of?

On April 27, 2001, Sigmon showed up at David and Gladys Larke’s house with a plan that he hatched while doing crack cocaine the night before: He was going to tie them up and kidnap his ex, he told police.

Instead, he beat the couple to death with a baseball bat, hitting each of them nine times, according to police and a medical examiner’s report. Sigmon kidnapped Armstrong in his car but she jumped out of the moving vehicle and was able to escape, though Sigmon shot her once in the foot before his gun ran out of bullets, according to court records.

Sigmon told jurors at his 2002 trial that he had no excuse for what he did, saying that when Armstrong fell out of love with him, it “set me off,” according to the Greenville News.

“I was obsessed with her,” he told jurors. “Did I love her? More than anything else in the world.”

He continued to tell jurors that the death penalty was probably appropriate in his case, saying: “I hate what I did.”

“Do I deserve to die? I probably do,” he said. “I don’t want to die … I just want to live for my family’s sake.”

Who were Gladys and David Larke? The small-town parents of 5 killed by Brad Keith Sigmon

The Larkes’ family says they were their ‘glue’

Armstrong told USA TODAY this week that her parents were simple country folk who had five children and were always looking out for everyone. Her mom, who was 59 when she was killed, loved cooking up a feast for the whole family. Her dad, who was 62, “had a good heart” who was quick to forgive and ask forgiveness.

“They were the glue of the family,” Armstrong said, adding that they’ve missed the births of some of their eight grandchildren and five great-grand children since they were murdered. “He took that away.”

She did not attend the execution, saying that she was eventually able to forgive Sigmon through God’s love and the counseling of a Christian psychiatrist.

“The Bible tells you, I know it says ‘an eye for an eye’ and ‘a tooth for a tooth’ but if you read on down in there it says, ‘Revenge is not mine, says the Lord, revenge is God’s,” she said. “I don’t think somebody being put to death is gonna bring me closure.”

But, she added, she was hoping it would bring some relief.

”I miss my momma and daddy,” said Armstrong, who had broken up with Sigmon before the killings and has never given an interview about the crimes until she spoke with USA TODAY this week. “I didn’t get to see them grow old. I didn’t get to take care of them. My brothers and sisters, we missed that.”

Sigmon was the second inmate executed in South Carolina this year and the sixth in the U.S.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Firing squad execution: Brad Keith Sigmon executed in South Carolina