JACKSON – During the early evening hours of Sunday, Oct. 18, 1998, Wesley Reid had just finished eating dinner with his wife, Glenda, and her two kids from a previous marriage, 11-year old Dylan and 16-year old Erica. Dylan’s friend, 12-year old Heath Pounds had joined them at their mobile home on Shiloh Firetower Road in Foxworth, in Marion County.
Erica soon saw a familiar face, when her dad, Benny Joe Stevens, stepped out of his truck into their yard.
Wesley opened the sliding back door of his house just wide enough to say, “Benny Joe, Can I help you?” Stevens responded by shooting Wesley four times with two different guns.
Erica told authorities as she ran to look for her brother, she heard Wesley begging God to help him.
She heard more shots in the background. Wesley died from his injuries.
Erica made a frantic effort to find her brother and his friend, Heath, but her father shot her in the back. She managed to hide in the trailer’s master bathroom as she watched her mother, Stevens’ ex-wife, Glenda, beg him to spare their children. Before he shot her in the head, Stevens told Glenda he came through on a promise, that one day he was going to kill her.
As Erica climbed through the small bathroom window she heard more shots. Her brother Dylan was shot and killed and police later said his friend, Heath, had been shot twice, once in the face and a shot to the chest so powerful it severed his spine.
Even though she had been shot in the back, Erica ran as fast as she could to her neighbor’s house where she collapsed at the door.
In a matter of moments, her stepfather, her mother, her brother and his friend were dead – and her father was to blame.
On Tuesday, May 10, the State of Mississippi has determined that Benny Joe Stevens will pay the price for his crimes as he is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection.
Stevens has fought to block his execution with one of his last efforts coming last week when his attorney argued prison officials erred when they failed to publicize that they were switching to a different lethal injection drug.
In April 2011, the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) said they were going to use a different drug, pentobarbital, for future executions due to a nationwide shortage of one drug it has used in the past.
Prior to the shortage, Mississippi used a three-drug mixture for its lethal injections, but one of those chemicals, an anesthetic called sodium thiopental, is in short supply, forcing states, like Mississippi, to consider other options.
Attorneys for Stevens’ and two other inmates scheduled to die this month, Rodney Gray and Robert Simon Jr., argued that since MDOC failed to make this known publicly, as required by the 2003 Administrative Procedures Act, the executions of Stevens, Gray and Simon should not go forward.
The Mississippi Supreme Court disagreed.
Mississippi’s Attorney General Jim Hood said a Hinds County circuit court judge had already dismissed a similar complaint last month ruling that MDOC’s execution procedures were exempt from the Administrative Procedures Act.
Unless some other stay is granted in Stevens’ behalf before May 10, his execution at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman will go forward.
“We have notified the victims’ families of this coming action,” said Attorney General Hood. “They are first and foremost in our thoughts and prayers.”
Gray is scheduled to be executed on May 17 and Simon on May 24.
Court documents showed that Stevens’ motive in the murders was that he would have to pay Glenda back child support from his pending worker’s compensation claim. After the murders, Stevens reportedly went home to his current wife, Lauren, and confessed to the killings.
In December 1999, Stevens was sentenced to death for killing Wesley, Glenda, Dylan and Heath, and 20 years in prison for shooting Erica.
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