Ohio uses execution drug, for the last time, on killer

Associated Press

LUCASVILLE, Ohio

A white gunman who spewed racial slurs before fatally shooting a black man and a police officer in a 1994 rampage that prosecutors called one of Ohio’s worst crimes was put to death Wednesday with the state’s last dose of its execution drug.

Before the drug began to flow, Harry Mitts Jr. asked the families of his victims — John Bryant and Garfield Heights police Sgt. Dennis Glivar — to forgive him and not to hold hatred for him in their hearts.

Glivar’s widow, Debbie, wept as the 61-year-old Mitts said from a prison gurney that he’d carried the burden of his crimes with him for 19 years. “I had no business doing what I did,” he said.

Mitts was pronounced dead at 10:39 a.m. by lethal injection. Prisons director Gary Mohr said the state is on track to tell a court next week how its executions will proceed now that its drug supply has expired.

Mitts was convicted of aggravated murder and attempted murder in the August 1994 rampage against random neighbors and responding police officers at his apartment complex in a Cleveland suburb.