HUNTSVILLE, Texas — Gary Green looked through the glass at the family he had shattered, apologized for taking two lives, and then asked the survivors to forgive him — not for his sake, but for theirs. Then the lethal drugs began flowing, and at 7:07 p. m.
on March 7, 2023, Green was pronounced dead inside the Walls Unit execution chamber at the Huntsville State Penitentiary. He was 51 years old. The execution ended a 14-year journey from a bloody crime scene in a Dallas-area home to a gurney with a single microphone hanging overhead.
But the story that led him there is one of violence, mental illness, childhood trauma, and two young boys who somehow found the words to save their own lives while standing in a room with the bodies of their mother and little sister.
Gary Green did not appear from nowhere to commit a random act of murder. His path to death row was paved long before the morning of Sept. 21, 2009.
According to court filings and statements from his defense attorneys, Green grew up in a home defined by unrelenting violence. He was beaten by his father as a child. He witnessed his father physically 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 his mother repeatedly and severely.
Experts later testified that this kind of domestic violence does not just leave bruises — it rewires how a child sees the world and their place in it. Green struggled in school, consistently performing in the bottom 10 percent of his class. As he got older, he showed what attorneys and mental health experts would later describe as clear signs of paranoia.
He spoke about attempting suicide. He claimed to hear demons. At one point, he told people he believed vampires were following him.
These were not exaggerations that emerged only at trial. They were a consistent pattern documented across his life.
Green worked as a general laborer. His only prior criminal record was a 1989 conviction in Dallas County for possession of cocaine, for which he received four years of probation. By most measures, he was not a man who had been incarcerated frequently or had spent years cycling in and out of the prison system.
But the warning signs were there. Before Lovetta Armstead, Green had been involved with other women. During his trial, it came out that he had previously stabbed and strangled an ex-girlfriend.
He had also physically abused and strangled another ex-girlfriend to the point of unconsciousness. In both cases, those women survived. In both cases, it was a preview of what he was capable of when a relationship fell apart.
Green’s attorneys would later argue that his entire adult life showed the fingerprints of severe, untreated mental illness. A man who, instead of receiving proper psychiatric care, was left to spiral quietly until the worst possible moment.
That moment came in the summer of 2009. Mid-September of that year, Gary Green made a discovery that would set off a chain of events with deadly consequences. He found out that his wife, Lovetta Armstead, was working to have their marriage annulled.
Lovetta and Gary had married not long before this. She was 32 years old. She had three children from a previous relationship: two sons, Jared, age 9, and Jerome, age 12, and a daughter, Jasmine Montgomery, who was 6 years old.
Jasmine’s father, Ray Montgomery, was not in the household. The marriage, by accounts at trial, had deteriorated quickly. When Green learned of the annulment, his mental state, already fragile and unmedicated, began to collapse in a very specific direction.
Not toward grief, not toward withdrawal, but toward paranoia and rage. Toward the belief that the family was not just leaving him — they were conspiring against him.
On the morning of Sept. 21, 2009, Lovetta Armstead wrote two letters to Gary Green. In one, she told him that although she loved him, she had to do what was best for herself and her children.
She asked him to move out. She was not attacking him. She was not issuing threats.
By every account, she was trying to end the relationship as cleanly as she could. Green responded with a letter of his own. It was described by prosecutors as angry and rambling.
In it, he expressed his belief that Lovetta and her three children were involved in a plot against him. And then he wrote something that would later be read aloud in court — a line that became central to understanding just how far gone he was at that moment. He wrote: “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.” He had written out a plan to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 Lovetta, all three of her children, and then himself.
Later that day, Green picked up Jerome and Jared from church. He brought them back to the house. What they witnessed when they arrived is something no child should ever have to see.
Lovetta Armstead had been stabbed more than two dozen times. Then Green went further. He took 6-year-old Jasmine Montgomery and drowned her in the bathtub.
After the murders, Green confronted Lovetta’s two sons. He held them at knife point. He stabbed the younger boy, Jared, in the abdomen.
He forced both boys to look at the bodies of their mother and their little sister. And then something happened that no one fully expected. The boys — a 9-year-old and a 12-year-old — talked Gary Green out of killing them.
They pleaded with him. They reasoned with him. And somehow, in that moment, it worked.
Green told the older boy not to call police until after he was gone. He told them he planned to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 himself. Then he left.
His plan to take five lives had stopped at two.
After leaving the house, Green attempted suicide by consuming a large amount of Tylenol and Benadryl. Hours later, he turned himself in to police. When officers questioned him, he told them he believed the family had been plotting against him.
He was charged with capital murder. Gary Green’s trial took place in 2010 and concluded on Nov. 22, 2010, when a jury sentenced him to death.
The prosecution’s case was straightforward in many respects. Green had written a letter announcing his intentions before the murders. He had turned himself in and confessed.
The physical evidence was overwhelming. And crucially, the jury heard testimony about his prior violence against women — the stabbing and strangling of two other partners — which the prosecution used to argue that Green was not just dangerous, but that he would remain dangerous for the rest of his life. Under Texas law, jurors in capital cases must find that a defendant poses a future danger to society before imposing the death penalty.
In Green’s case, the jury made that finding.
The defense argued that Green’s mental illness was the central factor in the murders. They presented expert testimony that Green likely had schizoaffective disorder, a condition that combines features of schizophrenia and a mood disorder, and that can significantly distort a person’s perception of reality. They argued that he had received a diagnosis just weeks before the killings, could not afford the medication meant to stabilize him, and had committed these crimes while in the grip of an acute psychiatric episode.
The jury heard all of it, and they still returned a death sentence. Green was transferred to the Polunsky Unit, the Texas facility that houses men on death row, where he would spend nearly 13 years awaiting execution. For more than a decade, Green’s attorneys fought to keep him alive through the courts.
Their arguments evolved over time, but they centered on two main issues: intellectual disability and mental illness.
The U. S. Supreme Court, in its 2002 decision in Atkins v.
Virginia, prohibited the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. Texas defines that condition using three criteria: a low IQ score, with 70 generally considered a threshold; limited adaptive functioning; and evidence that these deficiencies existed before the age of 18. Green’s lowest IQ score on record was 78, just above Texas’s threshold of 70 for intellectual disability.
His attorneys argued that still placed him in borderline intellectual functioning and requested additional testing before the execution moved forward. On the mental illness side, they argued that schizoaffective disorder had never been properly presented to the jury — that his original defense team failed to show how deeply the condition had shaped his life and his actions on the day of the murders. His attorney Michael Mola put it directly: “Green’s mental state at the time of the crime was heavily influenced by severe and persistent mental illness filtered through significant cognitive limitations.”
Less than two weeks before his execution date, Green’s attorneys wrote to Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot, a man who had previously signed a letter pledging to seek relief for death row inmates with cognitive challenges, and asked him to help delay the execution. Creuzot did not respond. He did not join the motion.
The execution stayed on schedule. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld Green’s conviction and death sentence. The courts declined to halt the execution.
There was also a separate ongoing civil lawsuit in which Green was one of six Texas death row inmates challenging the state’s practice of extending the use-by dates on lethal injection drugs — a practice that inmates argued made the execution process potentially more painful and constituted cruel and unusual punishment. That lawsuit was still pending when Green was executed. His attorneys did not file any last-minute appeals seeking a stay of execution in the final days before March 7.
On the evening of March 7, 2023, Gary Green ate whatever was being served to the general prison population that day. In Texas, there are no special last meal requests. The tradition was eliminated back in 2011 after a separate high-profile incident involving a condemned inmate who ordered an enormous final meal — chicken fried steaks, a triple patty bacon cheeseburger, a pound of barbecued meat, an entire pizza, a pint of ice cream — and then was too nervous to eat any of it.
When the story hit the papers, a Texas state senator called it government waste and coddling of the condemned. The policy was changed. Since then, whatever is on the menu for everyone else is what the condemned receives.
So on the last day of his life, Gary Green had no special meal, no final request, no last indulgence.
As the hour of his execution approached, Green was prepared for transfer to the Walls Unit, the historic facility in Huntsville where Texas carries out all of its executions. He had requested that a Buddhist spiritual adviser be present with him in the execution chamber. That request was granted.
Inside the chamber, the tie-down team did exactly what its name implies. Green was secured to the gurney. Above him, a single microphone hung from the ceiling so that his final words could be heard by everyone in the room.
On the other side of the glass, two viewing rooms were filled with witnesses. On one side, the families of Lovetta Armstead and Jasmine Montgomery. On the other, members of the media and any witnesses Green had designated.
The Buddhist adviser stood at his feet and said a brief prayer. Then the warden asked Green if he had a final statement. He did.
Gary Green looked through the glass at the relatives of the people he had killed, and he began to speak. “I apologize for all the harm I have caused you and your family,” he said. “We ate together, we laughed and cried together as a family.
I’m sorry I failed you.” He kept going. “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.” And then, in his final words, he turned to the survivors, the people left behind. And he said something that has stayed with many who reported on the case.
“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.
You have to forgive me to heal and move on.”
As the lethal dose of pentobarbital began flowing, Green shifted his attention. He started thanking prison administrators, chaplains. He called the residents of the Polunsky Unit — the death row facility where he had spent 13 years — “all the beautiful human beings.”
Then his breathing changed. Several quick breaths, then a deeper, slower rhythm, then snoring. Nine snores, and then nothing.
Gary Green was pronounced dead at 7:07 p. m. on March 7, 2023.
He was 51 years old. The process from the moment the drugs began to the moment movement ceased lasted approximately 33 minutes, longer than usual, in part because technicians had difficulty locating veins. Instead of inserting intravenous needles in each arm, they used a vein in Green’s right arm and a vein on the top of his left hand.
On the other side of the glass, several of the victims’ relatives hugged each other and cried.
Lovetta Armstead was 32 years old when she was killed. She had three children. She was trying to leave a relationship that had become dangerous.
She wrote letters on the morning of her death. She told Gary Green she loved him. She told him she had to do what was best for herself.
She did not know it would be her last day alive. Jasmine Montgomery was 6 years old. She was described as her mother’s daughter.
She died in a bathtub in the home she lived in because the man her mother had married could not accept being left. Jasmine’s father, Ray Montgomery, attended the execution as a witness. Afterward, he told reporters he was not cheering for Green’s death.
He called it “the justice system doing what it was supposed to do.” Not triumphant, not celebratory, just justice. Jerome and Jared, Lovetta’s two surviving sons, had to live with what they saw that day.
They were the ones who persuaded Gary Green not to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 them. A 9-year-old and a 12-year-old who talked a man out of ending their lives while the bodies of their mother and sister were feet away. What they carry from that day is something no court case, no execution, and no closure can undo.
Green was the fourth person executed in Texas in 2023 and the 63rd person convicted in Dallas County to be put to death since 1982. Dallas County ranks second in the entire state behind only Harris County in the total number of executions carried out. On March 7, 2023, at 7:07 in the evening, Gary Green was pronounced dead.
He was buried as a number in a statistic — the fourth execution in Texas that year, the 63rd from Dallas County since 1982. One data point in a country that continues to argue decade after decade about what justice is supposed to look like. What the record shows is this: Two women were stabbed and strangled by Green before Lovetta.
Then Lovetta was stabbed over two dozen times. Then a 6-year-old girl was drowned in a bathtub. Then two boys watched their world end and somehow found words to save their own lives.
And then nearly 14 years later, a man on a gurney in Huntsville, Texas, looked through a pane of glass at the family he had destroyed and asked them to forgive him — not for himself, but so they could heal. Whether they did, whether they could, is not something any camera captured. It is not something any court ruling decides.
That part belongs to them.