A man who killed his girlfriend’s 3-year-old son because he wet the bed has been executed by lethal injection by the state of Oklahoma.
Richard Stephen Fairchild, who turned 63 on Thursday, received a lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester and was declared dead at 10:24 a.m.
Fairchild, an ex-Marine, was convicted of killing Adam Broomhall after the child wet the bed. Prosecutors say Fairchild held both sides of Adam’s body against a scorching furnace, then threw him into a table. The child never regained consciousness and died later that day.
“The method of Adam’s murder can only be described as torture,” prosecutors from the Oklahoma attorney general’s office wrote to the state’s Pardon and Parole Board, which voted 4-1 last month against recommending clemency for Fairchild.
Attorneys for Fairchild argued that he was abused as a child, was mentally ill and was remorseful for his actions.
“As Richard Fairchild’s brain has deteriorated, he has descended into psychosis, a fact well-documented in his prison records,” Emma Rolls, one of Fairchild’s attorneys, said in a statement to the board. “Yet despite having lost touch with reality, Richard remains remorseful for his crime and continues to have an unblemished prison record. There is no principled reason for Oklahoma to execute him.”
Fairchild’s execution is the seventh since Oklahoma resumed carrying out the death penalty in October 2021.
