Texas Executes Quintin Jones For Killing Great Aunt In 1999

CBS Dallas/Fort Worth

May 20, 2021

A Texas man convicted of fatally beating his 83-year-old great aunt more than two decades ago was executed Wednesday evening, despite requests from some of the victim’s family to spare his life.

Quintin Jones received the lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville for the September 1999 killing of Berthena Bryant. Prosecutors said after Bryant refused to lend Jones money, he beat her with a bat in her Forth Worth home then took $30 from her purse to buy drugs.

Reporters from The Associated Press and The Huntsville Item, the local newspaper, were scheduled as media witnesses to the punishment but never were escorted by corrections agency officials from an office across the street from the prison. There was no immediate explanation for the media exclusion. Jones became the 571st inmate to receive lethal injection in Texas since the state resumed carrying out capital punishment in 1982 and the first without a media witness.

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