Texas death row prisoner rips his eyeball out and eats it

January 9, 2009...7:26 pm

Texas death row prisoner rips his eyeball out and eats it

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By Calvin Palmer

A prisoner on death row in Texas tore out his one remaining eyeball with his fingers and ate it, the state’s department of criminal justice said today.

“We don’t know how it happened,” said Jason Clark, a spokesman for the department. “There are no indications that he used anything other than his hands. Thomas said he pulled out his eye and subsequently ingested it.”

Andre Thomas has a history of mental problems. While awaiting trial in 2004, in Grayson County Jail, in Sherman, for the murder of his estranged wife, their young son and her 13-month-old daughter, Thomas plucked out his right eye. A judge subsequently ruled Thomas was competent to stand trial.

Thomas had stabbed his victims and ripped their hearts out. He was convicted and condemned for the infant’s death.

A death-row officer at the Polunsky Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice found Thomas in his cell with blood on his face and took him to the infirmary.

Thomas was treated at East Texas Medical Center in Tyler after the December 9 incident. Then he was transferred and remains at the Jester Unit, a prison psychiatric facility near Richmond southwest of Houston.

“He will finally be able to receive the mental health care that we had wanted and begged for from day one,” Bobbie Peterson-Cate, Thomas’ trial attorney, told the Sherman Herald Democrat. “He is insane and mentally ill. It is exactly the same reason he pulled out the last one.”

At his trial, defense lawyers also argued he suffered from alcohol and drug abuse.

Thomas does not have an execution date.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in October upheld his conviction and death sentence for the death of 13-month-old Leyha Marie Hughes. His wife, Laura Christine Boren, 20, and their son, 4-year-old Andre Lee, were also killed on March 27, 2004.

Thomas, from Texoma, walked into the Sherman Police Department and told a dispatcher he had just murdered the three and had stabbed himself in the chest.

Thomas told police how he put his victims’ hearts in his pocket and left their apartment, took them home, put them in a plastic bag and threw them in the trash.

Court documents described the three victims as having “large, gaping wounds to their chests.”

[Based on reports by Associated Press and Reuters.]