HUNTSVILLE, Texas β Gary Green was pronounced dead at 7:07 p.m. Tuesday after a 33-minute lethal injection procedure at the Walls Unit execution chamber, ending a 13-year wait on death row for the brutal 2009 murders of his wife and her 6-year-old daughter.
The 51-year-old condemned man used his final moments to look directly at the relatives of Lovetta Armstead and Jasmine Montgomery through the execution chamber glass and apologize for the violence that shattered their family nearly 14 years ago.
“I apologize for all the harm I have caused you and your family,” Green said in his final statement. “We ate together, we laughed and cried together as a family. I’m sorry I failed you.”
The execution was the fourth in Texas in 2023 and the 63rd carried out on a Dallas County convict since 1982, a statistic that places the county second only to Harris County in the state’s total number of executions.
Green’s downward spiral began long before the deadly morning of September 21, 2009, rooted in a childhood marred by severe domestic violence. Court records show his father beat him as a child and physically abused his mother repeatedly, a pattern of trauma that attorneys later argued rewired how Green saw the world.
He struggled academically, performing in the bottom 10 percent of his class, and exhibited signs of serious mental deterioration throughout his adult life. He spoke of attempting suicide, claimed to hear demons, and told people he believed vampires were following him.
Before Lovetta Armstead, Green had a documented history of violence against women that prosecutors used to paint a portrait of a persistently dangerous man. Court testimony revealed he had stabbed and strangled one ex-girlfriend and strangled another to the point of unconsciousness.
Both women survived those attacks, but they served as a chilling preview of what Green was capable of when a relationship crumbled. His attorneys argued his entire adult life showed the unmistakable fingerprints of severe, untreated mental illness.
In the summer of 2009, Green discovered that his wife of a short time was seeking to have their marriage annulled. Lovetta Armstead was 32 years old and had three children from a previous relationship, two sons and 6-year-old Jasmine Montgomery.
On the morning of her death, Lovetta wrote two letters to Green, telling him she loved him but needed to do what was best for herself and her children. She asked him to move out. She was not threatening him.
She was trying to end the relationship cleanly.
Green responded with an angry, rambling letter of his own, expressing his belief that Lovetta and her children were conspiring against him. He wrote a line that would later be read aloud in court: “You asked to see the monster, so here he is, the monster you made me. There will be five lives taken today, me being the fifth.”
Later that day, Green picked up Jerome, 12, and Jared, 9, from church and brought them back to the family home. What the boys witnessed upon arrival was incomprehensible. Lovetta had been stabbed more than two dozen times.
Green then took Jasmine into the bathroom and drowned her in the bathtub. The 6-year-old never made it to her next birthday, described by those who knew her as her mother’s daughter.
After the murders, Green confronted the two boys at knifepoint, stabbing Jared in the abdomen. He forced both children to look at the bodies of their mother and little sister and then made a fatal miscalculation that would define the rest of his legal case.
The boys talked him out of killing them. A 9-year-old and a 12-year-old, standing in a room with their dead family members, pleaded with a knife-wielding killer and somehow found the words to survive.
Green told the older boy not to call police until after he was gone, saying he planned to ππΎππ himself. He then fled the scene and attempted suicide by consuming a large quantity of Tylenol and Benadryl before turning himself in to police hours later.
When questioned by officers, Green said he believed the family had been plotting against him. The trial in 2010 concluded on November 22 with a jury sentencing him to death, a decision based on the overwhelming evidence and testimony about his prior violence.
The prosecution argued Green would remain a future danger to society, a finding required under Texas law before a death sentence can be imposed. The defense countered that he suffered from schizoaffective disorder and was in the grip of an acute psychiatric episode.
Green was transferred to the Polunsky Unit, where he would spend nearly 13 years awaiting execution. His attorneys fought for more than a decade to keep him alive, centering their appeals on issues of intellectual disability and mental illness.
His lowest IQ score on record was 78, just above Texas’s threshold of 70 for intellectual disability, a fact his attorneys argued still placed him in borderline intellectual functioning. They requested additional testing before the execution moved forward.
On the mental illness front, his legal team argued that his schizoaffective disorder had never been properly presented to the jury. Attorney Michael Mola said Green’s mental state at the time of the crime was heavily influenced by severe and persistent mental illness.
Less than two weeks before the scheduled execution, Green’s attorneys wrote to Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot, who had previously signed a letter pledging to seek relief for death row inmates with cognitive challenges. He did not respond.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld Green’s conviction and death sentence, and courts declined to halt the execution. No last-minute appeals for a stay were filed in the final days before March 7.
On the evening of his death, Green received the same meal served to the general prison population, as Texas eliminated special last meal requests in 2011. There would be no final indulgence for the condemned man.
He had requested that a Buddhist spiritual adviser be present in the execution chamber, and that request was granted. The adviser stood at his feet and said a brief prayer before the warden asked Green for his final statement.
Green continued his apology, saying, “I took not one, but two people that we all loved, and I had to live with that while I was here. We were all one, and I broke that bond.”
His final words turned to the survivors, asking for forgiveness not for his own sake but for theirs. “I ask that you forgive me, not for me, but for y’all. I’m fixing to go home, and y’all are going to be here.
I want to make sure you don’t suffer.”
As the pentobarbital began flowing, Green shifted his attention to thanking prison administrators and chaplains, calling the residents of the Polunsky Unit “all the beautiful human beings.” Then his breathing changed, followed by nine snores and silence.
The execution process lasted approximately 33 minutes, longer than usual because technicians had difficulty locating veins. They ultimately used a vein in Green’s right arm and another on the top of his left hand.
On the other side of the glass, several of the victims’ relatives hugged each other and cried. Jasmine’s father, Ray Montgomery, attended the execution as a witness and told reporters afterward he was not cheering for Green’s death.
Montgomery called it the justice system doing what it was supposed to do, not triumphant and not celebratory, just justice. Lovetta Armstead was 32 when she was killed, a mother of three trying to leave a relationship that had become dangerous.
Jerome and Jared, Lovetta’s surviving sons, had to live with what they witnessed that day. They were the ones who persuaded a killer to spare their lives while the bodies of their mother and sister lay nearby, a burden no court case or execution can undo.
Green was buried as a number in a statistic, the fourth execution in Texas that year, one more data point in a country that continues to debate what justice is supposed to look like. The record shows two women were stabbed and strangled before Lovetta, then Lovetta was stabbed over two dozen times, then a 6-year-old girl was drowned in a bathtub, and then two boys found words to save their own lives.
Nearly 14 years later, a man on a gurney in Huntsville asked the family he had destroyed to forgive him, not for his own peace but so they could heal. Whether they did, whether they could, is something no camera captured and no court ruling decides. That part belongs to them alone.