The last meal was a bucket of fried chicken intended for a crowd. The final dollars in his commissary account were given away to inmates who had become his congregation. And in the hours before a firing squad extinguished his life, Brad Sigman pressed a worn Bible into the hands of a friend, a final offering from a man who had spent 24 years on death row trying to become someone else.
On March 7th, 2025, at 6:08 p. m. , South Carolina executed Brad Sigman.
He was 67 years old. He became the first person in the United States in 15 years to die by firing squad.
But the story of how that day ended is inseparable from how it began. Inside the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, the morning did not start with chains or a countdown. It started with a glass wall.
Sigman stood on one side. His siblings and his son stood on the other. They could see every line on his face, every tremor in his hands, but they could not touch him.
The pane of glass between them was thick, unmovable, and it defined everything that followed. That visitation was the last time Sigman would look into the eyes of someone he loved.
What makes the final hours of Brad Sigman’s life so quietly devastating is not the violence of the method he chose, but the peace with which he carried the weight of his own past. Sigman never denied the crime. In 2001, he killed his ex-girlfriend’s parents with a baseball bat.
He admitted that guilt at trial and said he carried the burden of that act every single day for over two decades. He did not spend his final hours trying to prove his innocence. He spent them trying to comfort the people who loved him, and trying to give away everything he still possessed.
Between 9 a. m. and 11 a.
m. , Sigman sat with Reverend Hillary Taylor, the executive director of South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, and another spiritual adviser. They had two hours.
Taylor later said that Sigman did not use that time to panic or grieve. He used it to talk about how he could support his family and friends through the ordeal they were about to endure. A man hours away from strapping into an execution chair asked how he could make the day easier for the people he was leaving behind.
Taylor described a man who expressed remorse every single day of his incarceration, not just on execution day, not just when anyone was watching.
That transformation, quiet and consistent, was visible in the smallest gestures. Sigman’s last meal request was for three sharing buckets of KFC, enough fried chicken, green beans, mashed potatoes, biscuits, cheesecake, and sweet tea to feed the other men on death row with him. His attorney, Bo King, confirmed the intent.
Brad wanted his last meal to be a shared meal. Whether the full request was granted varied by account, but the act of generosity was unmistakable. He was thinking about his neighbors on the row, men he had lived alongside, prayed with, and quietly guided through their own darkest moments.
He gave away every dollar in his commissary account, everything he had accumulated over years inside. He had nothing material to leave the world, so he gave away what little he had. King described Sigman as someone who served as an informal chaplain to the guys on death row, someone who tried to be as supportive, loving, and kind as possible to everyone around him, whether that was a fellow inmate, a corrections officer, or a pen pal.
That was not the behavior of a man performing remorse. That was the behavior of someone who had rebuilt himself from the inside out, one quiet day at a time, inside a place most people never come back from.
The choice of method tells a darker story about the system that held him. Sigman chose the firing squad. But calling it a free choice is misleading.
The options were the electric chair, lethal injection, or the firing squad. His lawyers argued that the electric chair would cause extreme physical suffering. Regarding lethal injection, Sigman had watched what happened to the men executed before him in South Carolina’s recent resumption of capital punishment.
Marion Bowman Jr. had been administered two doses of pentobarbital and was later found to have had fluid in his lungs, a detail that pointed to a terrifying final experience. Sigman begged the courts for information about the lethal injection drugs.
He wanted to know if they had expired, been diluted, or spoiled. The state refused to disclose it. Without answers, Sigman made the only calculation he could, and he chose bullets over the two options that frightened him more.
His attorney put it plainly, Brad was forced to choose between three methods no human being should ever have to weigh against each other.
The final hours moved with a grim inevitability. The Supreme Court of the United States denied Sigman’s final appeal on the afternoon of March 7th, just hours before the scheduled execution. Governor Henry McMaster had already denied clemency.
Every door had closed. At 6:01 p. m.
, the curtain separating the witness room from the chamber was lifted. Behind bullet-resistant glass stood Sigman’s attorney, family members of the victims, a sheriff’s investigator, a representative from the prosecutor’s office, and three members of the press.
Sigman was dressed in a black jumpsuit. Officials noted that the dark clothing reduced visible staining. He wore black croc-style shoes.
His ankles were shackled. On his chest, over his heart, prison staff placed a white target with a red bullseye. That is the image that witnesses carried out of that chamber, a 67-year-old man strapped to a chair with a target placed over his heart, waiting in the specific kind of silence that only exists when everyone in the room already knows what comes next.
Before the hood was placed over his head, Sigman turned his eyes toward Bo King, sitting in the front row. They held each other’s gaze through the glass. King stood and read Sigman’s final statement aloud to the room.
I want my closing statement to be one of love and a calling to my fellow Christians to end the death penalty. That is how it opened. Not with anger.
Not with bitterness. With love and with purpose. Sigman quoted scripture from Matthew and John, pushing back against the reasoning that had been used to justify his sentence.
He said that at the time of his trial, he had been too ignorant to challenge it. He said that nowhere in the New Testament does God grant man the authority to take another human life. He said he was standing now under grace and mercy, not law.
In his very last seconds, witnesses reported that Sigman appeared to try to speak, to reach through the silence toward his attorney or his adviser with some final words that no one in the room could make out. King held his gaze until the hood came down and covered his face completely. A prison employee opened the shade that concealed the three volunteer shooters positioned 15 feet away, the same distance as the free throw line to the basket on a basketball court.
Sigman made several audible breaths during the two minutes of silence that followed. There was no warning. There was no countdown.
The rifles fired without any signal the witnesses could anticipate. The sharp crack startled everyone in the room. Sigman’s arms briefly tensed.
The target was struck. A visible stain appeared and spread across his chest.
A doctor entered approximately one minute later, conducted an examination lasting 90 seconds, and declared Brad Sigman dead at 6:08 in the evening.
Outside the gates of the prison, as news of the execution reached the crowd that had gathered, Reverend Hillary Taylor stood in the evening holding something in her hands. It was a Bible, worn, well-read, highlighted throughout. Not her Bible.
Brad’s. He had given it to her before the execution, pressed it into her keeping as one of his final acts. She stood there in the dark and read from it while the crowd around her called out the words he had asked them to carry forward.
That was the last thing Brad Sigman gave away. Not money. Not a meal.
His Bible. The one thing that had traveled with him through more than 20 years on death row. The one he had read every day.
The one that had shaped whoever he had become in that place. He handed it to someone who would keep using it because he believed the words inside it still mattered even after he was gone.
His legal team released a statement that night. It said that South Carolina had ended the life of a man who had devoted himself to his faith, to ministry, and to the service of everyone around him. It acknowledged that he had admitted his guilt at trial and shared his grief with his jury and with everyone who knew him in the years that followed.
His brother described the aftermath in the most honest terms he could find. He said it felt like living somebody else’s life now, because they used to be a family, and that part of it was just gone.
Brad Sigman was 67 years old. He had spent more than a third of his entire life on South Carolina’s death row. He became the first person in the United States in 15 years to be executed by firing squad, and the first in South Carolina’s history.
He shared his last meal. He gave away his last dollar. He gave away his Bible.
And in his final statement to the world, he used what remained of his voice to ask that 28 more men on that same row be spared what he had just been through. Whatever you believe about justice, whatever you believe about what Brad deserved, the story of March 7th, 2025 does not fit neatly into any single verdict. The image that stays long after everything else fades is not the chair, and it is not the target placed over his heart.
It is that glass. That cold, thick, unmovable pain in the visitation room where Brad Sigman stood and looked at the faces of the people who loved him. And they looked back at his, and not one of them could reach through.