Georgia executes man convicted in triple killing
ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia has executed a man convicted in the April 1998 killings of a trucking company owner and his two children during a home burglary.
Daniel Anthony Lucas was declared dead at 9:54 p.m. Wednesday at the state prison in Jackson following a lethal injection.
Lucas, 37, was sentenced to death for the April 1998 killings of 37-year-old Steven Moss, his 11-year-old son Bryan and 15-year-old daughter Kristin, who interrupted a burglary at their home near Macon in central Georgia.
Lucas and another man, Brandon Rhode, broke into the Moss home in April 1998 looking for drugs, cash or things they could sell to get money for drugs, according to court filings.
Bryan Moss saw them through a front window, and entered through a back door armed with a baseball bat, prosecutors have said. They say the two then wrestled Bryan to a chair and Lucas shot him in the shoulder.
Lucas then led the boy to a bedroom and shot him multiple times, prosecutors have said.
Rhode met Kristin as she got home from school and forced her to sit on a chair and shot her twice with a pistol, according to court records. Rhode then ambushed Steven Moss when he arrived home, shooting him four times with the same pistol. Lucas later shot all three victims again to make sure they were dead.
Moss' wife, Gerri Ann, discovered the bodies when she returned home from work.
Rhode, who was also convicted for the killings, was executed in September 2010.
Lucas' death brings the number of court-ordered executions in Georgia this year to five. That would tie a record, set in 1987 and matched last year, for the most executions carried out by the state in a calendar year since the death penalty was reinstated nationwide in 1976.