The children of San Antonio convenience store owner Hasmukh "Hash" Patel did not want Christopher Young to be executed for the murder of their father—but Texas executed him Tuesday night anyway. Young, 34, received a lethal injection after lawyers failed to win a last-minute reprieve from Gov. Greg Abbott, the San Antonio Express-News reports. He shot the 53-year-old Patel during an attempted robbery in Nov. 2004. In his final statement, he addressed Patel's two children, Mitesh Patel and Rinal Doshi. "I want to make sure the Patel family knows I love them like they love me," Young said. “Make sure the kids in the world know I’m being executed and those kids I’ve been mentoring keep this fight going."
Patel and Doshi had sought to have the sentence commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The man executed was not the same person who killed their father, they said in a statement. "Christopher was a father to his daughters, and a man who desired to break the chain of gang violence through mentorship," they said. Young recently told the AP that he joined the Bloods street gang after his father was shot and killed in a robbery when he was 8, and he hoped to prevent others going down the same road. Before the 2004 robbery, Young raped a woman in front of her three children. She said Saturday that she did not support calls for clemency. "I can’t say I would spare his life," she told the Houston Chronicle. (More Texas stories.)
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