Man who killed 5 kids in fire faces execution

July 13, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

COLUMBUS

A federal appeals court on Monday refused to delay the execution of an Ohio man who killed five children in a 1992 apartment fire he started to destroy evidence of a burglary.

William Garner, 37, had asked the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati to postpone today’s execution so he could argue that his death sentences should be thrown out because he had the mental age of a child when he set the fire. The denial by a three-judge panel of the court cannot be appealed.

Earlier Monday, the Ohio Supreme Court declined to hear a similar mental-age argument.

Gov. Ted Strickland has denied clemency.

Garner’s attorney, Kelly Schneider, said no additional appeals would be filed. She had argued in a circuit court motion that Garner’s “developmental disabilities, limited IQ and the horrors of his life caused him to function on the level of a fourteen year-old child.”

Garner was 19 when, in the pre-dawn hours of Jan. 26, 1992, he gained access to Addie Mack’s Cincinnati apartment after stealing keys from her purse while she received care in the emergency room of a nearby hospital.

Six children, ages 8 to 13, were at the apartment alone.

Garner had told police that he had noticed a bedroom “full of girls,” and that one of the girls had asked him for water, which he provided. He also said he had been in another bedroom where two boys slept.

Garner, who stole a television, VCR, telephone and radio, admitted throwing a lighted match on a couch in an attempt to destroy evidence of the burglary and said he thought the children would escape.

Only one escaped. Rod Mack, who was 13, heard his sisters screaming and watched his best friend open a door to a fire-filled hallway before he climbed out a window, barefoot and crying on the cold January morning.

Both Addie and Rod Mack plan to watch Garner’s execution, along with seven other relatives of the children, who all died of smoke inhalation.

Garner was moved Monday morning from death row at a central Ohio prison to the prison in southern Ohio that houses the state’s lethal injection execution chamber. He was to receive a special meal to include a porterhouse steak, onion rings, fried shrimp, barbecue ribs and wings, potato wedges, sweet potato pie, chocolate ice cream and red Hawaiian Punch.

He spent the day watching television and talking on the telephone and visited with relatives and his legal team. Garner’s niece, an attorney and an investigator planned to watch the execution.

Garner has said a secondary motivation for setting the fire was to draw attention to the children’s squalid living conditions. Besides the mental-age argument, his attorneys have argued that Garner should be spared the death penalty because he has a brain impairment from lead poisoning and was a victim of violence and sexual assault as a child.

If the execution goes forward, Garner will be the sixth person executed in Ohio this year, and the 39th put to death by the state since it resumed the death penalty in 1999.