Kevin Green is scheduled to die by injection tomorrow night for the 1998 capital murder of a Dolphin woman during a robbery.
Green shot Patricia L. Vaughan four times inside Lawrence’s Grocery, a small business that she and her husband, Lawrence T. Vaughan, opened in 1981 in the small community where they grew up in rural Brunswick County.
Green’s execution is set for 9 p.m. at the Greensville Correctional Center, unless the U.S. Supreme Court or Gov. Timothy M. Kaine intervenes.
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It is unclear when the justices will act on Green’s request for an appeal. Frequently, the high court waits until the day of the execution. Governors typically wait to act on clemency petitions until after the Supreme Court does so.
Green’s would be the 99th execution in Virginia since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the death penalty to resume in 1976. Only Texas, with 405 executions, has conducted more.
Vigils are scheduled across the state, including in a field near the prison on Tuesday evening. A full schedule of vigils can be seen on the Web site of Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty: www.vadp.org/attend-a-vigil.html
And why is the Fredericksburg City Public School System allowing an employee, Claudia Vandermade, to use county resources (e-mail) to organize a vigil for a capital murderer?
The victim, Patricia L. Vaughan, and her husband, Lawrence T. Vaughan, owned and operated a small grocery store in Brunswick County. As part of their grocery store operation, the Vaughans regularly cashed checks for employees of several nearby businesses, including a lumber company that paid its employees on Friday of each week. Consequently, Mr. Vaughan routinely went to a bank on Fridays to obtain sufficient currency to cash payroll checks for the lumber company employees. And, he did so on Friday, August 21, 1998. Upon returning from the bank on that Friday, he placed $10,000 in a bank bag that he kept in a cabinet underneath the cash register, another $10,000 elsewhere in the store, and the remaining cash in a safe.
On the day in question, as Mr. Vaughan was starting to eat lunch and to file an invoice, two men entered the store. Mr. Vaughan saw them and recognized the taller of the two men as Kevin Green, the defendant. Green had worked for the lumber company for approximately eight to ten weeks during the preceding spring, and had frequented the Vaughans’ grocery store at lunchtime, after work, and on Fridays to cash his payroll checks.
When the two men entered the store, Mrs. Vaughan had her back to the door and was standing five or six feet from Mr. Vaughan. Thinking that the shorter man was going over to the “drink box,” Mr. Vaughan turned around to finish his filing. As he did so, he heard his wife scream, “Oh, God.” At trial, Mr. Vaughan described what he then heard:
It was four bangs. Bang, bang and I was hit. I didn’t know where I was hit, but I was hurt. I turned a complete turn and fell on the floor, sit [sic] down on my right foot and broke my right ankle. And about [the] time I went down, I looked up and I realized it was a gun being fired. I could see him, he shot toward my wife with the fourth shot. I saw his hand with a pistol in it. He was holding [it] like he was target practicing.
Mr. Vaughan testified that Green, after firing the four shots, walked back to the door and stood there “as a lookout” while the other man came around behind the counter and tried to open the cash register. When the drawer on the cash register jammed, Green directed the shorter man to look under the counter. Upon doing so, he found the bank bag containing approximately $9,000 in cash and Mr. Vaughan’s pistol, which he then used to shoot through the key hole in the cash register drawer. Taking the bank bag and the pistol, the shorter man exited the store, but Green walked a few steps over to where Mrs. Vaughan was lying on the floor and pointed the gun at her again. According to Mr. Vaughan, the gun misfired, and Green ejected a live cartridge onto the floor. Green then fired two more shots in the direction of Mrs. Vaughan. Lowering his head, Mr. Vaughan heard the gun “snap” one more time, but he did not know whether Green was pointing the gun at him or his wife. Only then, when the gun was empty, did Green leave the store.
After Green left, Mr. Vaughan dragged himself approximately five feet across the floor of the store to a telephone and dialed the “911” emergency number, but he was too weak to reach his wife who was still lying on the floor. One of the first police officers to arrive at the scene testified that he observed “puddles of blood just pouring out of [Mrs. Vaughan’s] nose, her mouth, [and] her head.” A local volunteer medical examiner determined that Mrs. Vaughan had died at the scene of the shooting.
A subsequent autopsy of Mrs. Vaughan’s body revealed that she sustained four gunshot wounds. One bullet penetrated the left side of her head, passed through the temporal and frontal lobes of her brain, and lodged in the inner frontal sinus of her face. Another bullet entered the right side of her chest and went into the upper lobe of her right lung. A third bullet penetrated the left side of her back. This was the only non-lethal wound. The fourth bullet entered the right side of Mrs. Vaughan’s back and penetrated two lobes of her right lung. According to the forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy, Dr. Jose Abrenio, this wound caused hemorrhaging in her thoracic cavity, which led to difficulty in breathing and had the effect of suffocating her. Dr. Abrenio also opined that Mrs. Vaughan survived “seconds to minutes” after she was first shot.
Four days after the murder, a warrant was issued to search Green, his residence, and automobile. During the search of his home, six bullets were retrieved from the trunk of a tree in his yard. The bullets were found behind a “makeshift target” hanging on the tree. Forensic testing on those six bullets and the four bullets recovered from Mrs. Vaughan’s body during the autopsy revealed that all ten “caliber 25 Auto full metal jacketed bullets” had been fired from one weapon. About 35 to 50 feet from the tree, 16 25-caliber empty cartridge casings were also recovered.
After Green was arrested, he executed a form waiving his Miranda rights and agreed to be questioned by law enforcement officers. During that interrogation, Green admitted that he and his cousin, David Green, robbed the Vaughans’ grocery store and that he selected their store because he knew the Vaughans kept a lot of money there. Green and his cousin had originally planned to wear masks to conceal their faces. However, they discarded the masks after they had to wait behind the store in their automobile for about an hour because other people were in the grocery store. Green also admitted that he shot both of the Vaughans, hitting Mrs. Vaughan four times.
B. PENALTY PHASE
During the penalty phase of the trial, the Commonwealth presented testimony from several correctional officers who had supervised Green’s incarceration at different times and facilities. Much of their testimony described incidents during which Green exhibited disruptive behavior, refused to obey instructions, and made threats to the officers. For example, one officer testified that Green “clinched” the bars of his cell and said, “I’ll get you, I will get you.” Another officer stated that, when Green had to be placed in isolation because of his disruptive conduct, Green started throwing anything he could find, flushing the toilet, and throwing water into the hallway. Green then told the officer that he was going to make the officer’s life “a living hell.” Other personnel described incidents in which Green threw food, trash, and feces on the floor and refused to take his medication.
In addition to this testimony, the Commonwealth called Clement Leon Cleaton, an acquaintance of Green. Cleaton testified that Green had threatened to rob and kill him and that he had heard Green threaten to rob a man selling ice cream from a truck. Cleaton also related an incident in which Green had shot several times toward Cleaton’s “hog pen” while Cleaton was feeding his hogs. Cleaton had asked Green not to shoot in that direction.
Why the heck is someone holding a vigil for a piece of scum that shoots a man and a woman, robs her and her husband, and then shoots the woman two more times to make sure she dies?