A spiritual advisor to the first prisoner to be executed with nitrogen hypoxia has shared horrifying details about the how he died.
On Thursday (January 25), Kenneth Eugene Smith was put to death for the 1988 murder of Elizabeth Sennett - who suffered eight fatal stabbings to her chest and two to her neck.
After spending more than three decades behind bars, the 58-year-old inmate had his final meal which was steak, eggs, and hash browns, before being taken to the execution chamber.
He was strapped to a gurney and had a gas mask placed over his face before a stream of 100 percent nitrogen gas suffocated him. Smith was officially pronounced dead at 8:25PM local time, 22 minutes after the nitrogen gas was first administered, according to Daily Mail.
Onlookers who witnessed correctional authorities administer the death penalty at Alabama's WC Holman Correctional Facility said the prisoner shared some chilling final words with his family and those watching through a glass window.
Smith reportedly said: "Tonight Alabama causes humanity to take a step backward... Thank you for supporting me. Love you all," as cited by The Independent. "I’m leaving with love, peace, and light," before turning to his family and signing "I love you."
The late convict's spiritual advisor, Rev. Jeff Hood, also watched the frightening 22-minute death, telling The New York Post that prison staff could not hide their shock at the "horror show" taking place in front of them.
"They were told this is going to be quick, easy, and painless. They kept saying this is the most humane way society has ever figured out how to execute people," he told the outlet. "The whole thing was just horrific. It’s a scene that will never leave me. Some of [Smith’s] struggles looked produced for Hollywood.
"If you had taken me in there and not told me I was at an execution I would think I was on a movie set, some sort of horrible creation gone amok," he continued.
Smith was sentenced to die after prosecutors said he was one of two men who were each paid $1,000 by Charles Sennett, the pastor of the Westside Church of Christ in Sheffield, Alabama, in 1988, to forcefully take his wife's life, per CBS News.
At the trial, he confessed to roughing Elizabeth up but denied intending to kill her. The jury voted by 11-1 to give him a life sentence, but they were overruled by the judge who sent him to death row.
In November 2022, the inmate survived a botched execution attempt using lethal injection as prison officials failed to find a vein and had to call off the execution after four hours.
Almost 14 months later, and after several last-ditch attempts to spare Smith's life by attorneys, the killer met his demise - but this time he was administered nitrogen hypoxia.
Rev. Hood shared that from his point of view inside the chamber, he had a clear view of the staffers overlooking Smith’s death and caught an unmistakable change in the facial and body expressions in everyone - including corrections officers and Alabama Department of Corrections Regional Director Cynthia Stewart-Riley.
"In that circumstance, it’s hard to know what is what, but I know what I saw in terms of the horror on the faces of people in front of me," he expressed. "When the execution started and he began to writhe, it was noticeable that staff members began to shift around."
Hood revealed that Smith "looked like a fish out of water, flapping over and over again," adding: "As all of that happened [Stewart-Riley] was behind the gurney to his right.
"She was so disturbed and nervous that she kept tapping her feet over and over again, like how when you’re disturbed by something you fidget and are unable to sit still," he continued, remarking that the sounds of her shoes sounded "like tap dancing".
Following the execution, one of the five members of the media present in the death chamber spoke out about the haunting event and said they had never seen an execution unfold like Smith's did.
"I've been to four previous executions and I've never seen a condemned inmate thrash in the way that Kenneth Smith reacted to the nitrogen gas," Lee Hedgepeth told BBC. "Kenny just began to gasp for air repeatedly and the execution took about 25 minutes total."
However, Alabama Corrections Commissioner John Hamm explained that the "thrashing" reaction was expected as part of the side effects of nitrogen hypoxia as breathing it in causes cells in the body to break down which leads to death.
Hamm also remarked that "nothing was out of the ordinary from what we were expecting," but, Hood disagreed and criticized him by saying: "I think he’s a liar. [Alabama Attorney General Steve] Marshall said the same thing. They’re liars.
"They said all along that this was going to be nearly instantaneous. That he would be gone, unconscious, in seconds. What we saw last night was minutes, minutes, and minutes of a horror show," he concluded.
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