Published: January 31, 2007 12:15 am            

Convicted killer dies without giving final statement

Christopher Jay Swift offered no words before receiving the lethal injection Tuesday night.

Friends offered their tears and prayers as they watched.

“Look at his face. His face is completely at peace. He is going to see Jesus,” one friend said.

Swift had insisted on receiving the death penalty for his crimes.

“He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in prison,” said Jerry Cobb, one of his trial lawyers. “If convicted, he wanted the death penalty. He made that very clear to everybody.”

He ordered no appeals to be filed to stop the lethal injection.

Swift was convicted of the 2003 strangling his 29-year-old, eight months pregnant wife, Amy Sabeh-Swift, to death with his hands inside their recreational vehicle in Irving. He then took his 5-year-old son to a mobile home park in Lake Dallas and strangled his mother-in-law, Sandra Stevens Sabeh, 61, at her home.

The 5-year-old boy was found the next day, April 30, 2003, wandering the lobby of a Days Inn in Irving where his father had rented a room, then left after the child fell asleep. Hotel staffers fed the boy breakfast and let him watch cartoons in the lobby but then called police after no one claimed him and he was getting frightened.

The child made a startling disclosure to officers.

“Basically he was saying: ’Daddy killed mommy and he killed grandma, too,”’ former Denton County Assistant District Attorney Lee Ann Breading said.

Officers found his mother dead, then his grandmother. Within hours, Swift was under arrest.

“He said from the start he had done it,” said Earl Dobson, another prosecutor who tried the capital murder case.

Derek Adame, another of Swift’s trial lawyers, described the experience as frustrating because Swift insisted there be no serious defense.

“Obviously, it’s an uphill battle, but you’d at least like to be able to fight for the guy,” Adame said. “I thought we did the best we could, but I have to do what my client tells me.”

Adame and Cobb presented psychiatric testimony contending Swift was insane.

“The state put on psychiatric testimony he was not, and jurors found he was not,” Cobb said. “After the case was over, then he was through. He didn’t want to do anything.”

Swift’s wife worked as an aide at the Denton State School for the mentally disabled and the couple had been married six years although at one point Swift had filed for divorce.

Four days after their wedding, he started a four-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to assaulting a Texas state trooper in 1996 and a Denton County woman in 1997. He also pleaded guilty to an assault charge for shoving and choking his wife in March 1996, driving while intoxicated and fleeing a police officer. In 1992, he pleaded guilty to evading arrest.

Prosecutors said Swift, who had a history of alcohol abuse and drug use, quit his job at a concrete company because they asked him to take a drug test. When he came home, his decision sparked an argument with his wife that led to the slayings, prosecutors said.

Another Texas inmate is scheduled to die next week. James Jackson, 47, is among at least 11 Texas prisoners with execution dates. Jackson was condemned for the 1997 slayings of his two stepdaughters at their Houston home. Jackson’s wife, the mother of the girls, also was killed.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

        

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