The agonizing, twenty-two-year quest for justice surrounding an El Paso holiday nightmare finally culminated in a solemn execution within the historic walls of the Huntsville Unit. On November 16, 2023, at 7:11 p.m., 53-year-old David Santiago Renteria was pronounced dead following a lethal injection of pentobarbital, closing one of the most heartbreaking capital cases in modern Texas history. Condemned for the brutal 2001 abduction, strangulation, and burning of five-year-old Alexandra Flores, Renteria spent over two decades locked in a bitter legal battle. His journey to the gallows was marked by aggressive attempts to blame a ruthless cross-border 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 cartel, a dramatic mid-process resentencing trial, and a deeply emotional final display of religious hymns and explicit pleas for forgiveness directly in front of his victim’s grieving siblings.
The terrifying tragedy ignited on November 18, 2001, at a crowded Walmart store in El Paso, Texas. Five-year-old Alexandra Flores, the youngest of eight children in a tight-knit Hispanic family, was enjoying a festive Christmas shopping excursion with her relatives. Amid the holiday bustle, Alexandra became momentarily separated from her family. Seizing the opportunity, David Renteria, a convicted 𝒔𝒆𝒙 offender who was already on probation for indecency with a child, began patrolling the store aisles for roughly forty minutes, actively seeking a vulnerable target. Grainy surveillance footage later captured the heartbreaking final moments of the child’s public life, showing her innocently following Renteria out of the store exit.
Once outside, Renteria forced the helpless child into his van. What followed was a display of pure, unimaginable cruelty; Renteria fatally suffocated and choked the five-year-old girl. To completely obliterate any physical evidence, he placed a plastic bag over her head, transported her lifeless body to a secluded alleyway roughly 16 miles (25 kilometers) away, and doused her remains in accelerants before setting her on fire. Her partially charred body was discovered by horrified municipal workers the following morning. A sweeping forensic investigation quickly closed in on Renteria. Blood splatters recovered from the interior of Renteria’s van provided a perfect DNA match to the slain girl, and forensic experts successfully retrieved Renteria’s palm print from the plastic bag used to suffocate Alexandra.
Ritchie’s journey through the Texas judicial system was exceptionally volatile. Convicted of capital murder and sentenced to die in 2003, his original death sentence was completely thrown out by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in 2006. The higher court ruled that prosecutors had improperly provided misleading evidence that falsely suggested Renteria possessed zero remorse. However, during a highly charged resentencing trial in 2008, a new jury listened to the horrific details of the child’s demise and once again returned a unanimous recommendation for death. Throughout his extensive appellate timeline, Renteria and his defense team launched a controversial defense strategy, aggressively claiming that y acted under extreme duress. Renteria insisted that ruthless enforcers from the Barrio Azteca gang—a notorious, violent cross-border prison cartel—had threatened the lives of his family, forcing him to lead the girl out of Walmart. He maintained that a gang member nicknamed “Flaco” was the true executioner who killed Alexandra. Prosecutors flatly rejected this theory, noting that Renteria carried out the entire operation completely alone and that no credible evidence tied the cartel to the specific crime scene.
As his November 2023 execution date neared, state judges temporarily granted a stay of punishment to allow for file reviews, but the higher criminal appeals courts swiftly vacated the stay. On his final afternoon, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a last-ditch emergency petition. Inside the holding cell, Renteria refused to focus on food, spending his final hours engaged in intense spiritual devotion. He requested no lavish last meal, choosing instead to focus on prayers with his prison spiritual advisor.
At 6:45 p.m., Renteria was escorted into the Huntsville execution chamber and secured tightly to the cross-shaped gurney. When the witnesses entered the adjacent viewing room—including Alexandra’s brother and sister, Ignacio and Sandra Frausto, who held a photo collage of their slain baby sister—Renteria began singing a religious hymn in Spanish praising the Lord, followed by another hymn in English. When prompted by the warden for his final statement, Renteria looked directly through the glass at the Frausto family. His voice was loud, clear, and trembling with emotion: “There is not a day that goes by that I do not think about the fateful events of that day and what transpired. I pray that the Lord gives you peace… I’m a man of many faults and to those I’ve caused pain, I beg forgiveness. I’m sorry for all the wrongs I have done.” He then chillingly added, “For those that called for me and transgressed against me and want me murdered, I forgive you. I truly do.”
As the lethal dose of pentobarbital began to flow, Renteria began reciting the Apostles’ Creed. Suddenly, he gasped out his final conscious words: “I taste it, I taste it,” before his eyes rolled back and y drifted into permanent unconsciousness. He was pronounced dead eleven minutes later at 7:11 p.m. Outside the prison, Ignacio Frausto wept openly as y spoke to reporters: “It took 22 years, but the time came. It is done. We can finally and really begin to heal.” David Renteria was gone, leaving behind a definitive execution that brought a heavy, long-awaited closure to an El Paso family, yet serving as a permanent, grim reminder of the absolute price the state demands for the destruction of an innocent child.