A man convicted of murdering his mother was executed on Wednesday (November 9) - though not before he uttered some chilling last words.
Tracy Beatty, 61, spent nearly 20 years on death row after being convicted of strangling and burying his mom, Carolyn Click.
The pair had a fiery argument at her East Texas mobile home in November 2003 which resulted in Beatty killing and burying his 62-year-old mother before blowing her money on drugs and alcohol.
After years of appealing his death sentence on the grounds of mental illness, Beatty's lawyers were eventually defeated in the Supreme Court. He was executed at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, where he received a lethal injection of pentobarbital.
According to a report by The New York Post, Beatty choked up and began to sob when a warden asked if he had any final words.
The inmate's voice broke as he addressed his wife, who watched him from behind glass in a viewing room.
"I just want to thank…I don’t want to you leave you, baby," he said.
"See you when you get there. I love you," Beatty added as he blew her a kiss.
He then addresses his fellow death row inmates, naming a few and saying: "I love you, brothers. See you on the other side."
Beatty was pronounced dead at 6:39PM. He is the fourth inmate to be executed in Texas this year, and the 13th to be executed nationwide.
According to prosecutors, Beatty had a "volatile and combative relationship" with his mother, who told neighbor Lieanna Wilkerson that he had once "beaten her so severely that he had left her for dead."
During Beatty's trial, Wilkerson testified that the pair were arguing daily in the run-up to Click's murder. "Several times [Beatty] had said he just wanted to shut her up, that he just wanted to choke her and shut her up," she testified.
Beatty's own legal team claimed that he was "clearly psychotic and has a complex paranoid delusional belief system". Despite their petition to the supreme court citing a medical expert's diagnosis of Beatty, it failed to overturn his death sentence.