Jesus Flores

Jesus Flores, 25, was found by a corrections officer about 4 a.m. Tuesday at the Polunsky Unit of the Texas Department Crimnal Justice, home to the state's male death row.
Agency spokeswoman Michelle Lyons said Flores was pronounced dead about an hour later.
"He had lacerations on his throat and forehead," she said.
Flores apparently tried to use his own blood to scribble a message on the wall.
"It was illegible," Lyons said.
Flores was convicted of capital murder for the May 2001 death of Harris County Sheriff's Deputy Joseph Dennis, 35, who was shot in the head during a struggle. Flores was 19 at the time of the shooting.
Flores had been on death row since December 2001. His case was still on appeal before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which already had upheld his conviction and death sentence. He never had an execution date.
On a Web site devoted to prisoners seeking pen pals, Flores said that he was a drug addict and had smoked marijuana, drank alcohol and used cocaine when he took a car belonging to his sister, who was in the military. He said he also had taken the prescription drug Xanax and vaguely remembered the night he was arrested by Dennis.
"He spreads my legs and does a search of my body," Flores wrote. "What he failed to do was find a gun I had in my back right hand pocket... I got scared, panicked, angry. I don't know, but I wasn't myself.
"At the time he places the cuff I reach for the gun in my back pocket, pull it out and turn and raise the gun and by the time I fully turned around I had fired one shot. I just see this man fall.
"I know that I did something so bad," he added. "I took a man's life."
Flores still had the deputy's handcuffs clamped to his left wrist when he was taken into custody.
Dennis was responding to a call from Flores' own family who reported he took his sister's car without permission, kept it out all night and returned it damaged. He stopped Flores about a mile from the family home.
A day after his arrest, Flores showed up in court with his left wrist heavily bandaged because of what authorities said was a suicide attempt.
Flores is the first Texas death row suicide since October 2006, when Michael Johnson killed himself the same day he was supposed to be executed for the slaying of a convenience store clerk near Waco.
Flores becomes the eighth condemned man in Texas to take his own life since death row reopened in 1974.

Posted in: Texas