INDIANAPOLIS — Joseph Corcoran, the man convicted of killing his brother and three others in 1997, was executed Wednesday after decades of sitting on death row.
"Would you pray it would be painless," said Pastor David Leitzel, who met with Corcoran an hour before his execution.
According to the Indiana Department of Correction, Corcoran's last words were, "Not really, let's get this over with."
However, Leitzel said, in the chamber, Corcoran said something else.
"I took hold of his hand and you'd almost have to hear it, Joe and I talked and joked all the time and Joe said this with humor, 'Ah, don't hold my hand,' and then he kind of settled in and right after that he said, 'Just pray for me,'" the pastor recalled.
Leitzel said he knew Corcoran longer than just the hour he spent with him before his execution, but for decades, even sharing these pictures with 13News that he took in 1989.
In them, Leitzel said a teenaged Corcoran is in school and at his church's youth camps.
He said over the last 26 years he'd visit him in prison, where Corcoran would ask Leitzel to be with him come execution day.
"I've known him too long. I've known his family. I couldn't imagine leaving him to go through that alone," said Leitzel.
On the other side of the execution chamber, watching from a two-way mirror, were Corcoran's wife and her adult son.
"It was obviously very somber in that room and it was very serious moment within that chamber as well," said Casey Smith, a reporter with the Capital Chronicle.
Smith was the only journalist invited to witness Corcoran die by lethal injection.
"The only real movement that I saw from him during that time when the blinds opened up initially, you could see some slight head movement and his eyes were open and he was blinking. A few minutes later, he did have a movement in his left hand and then once that stopped, he did not move anymore," said Smith.
Corcoran was the first inmate to be executed by the state since 2009.
As 13News previously reported, Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita is asking the state's supreme court to set an execution date for Benjamin Ritchie. Ritchie was convicted and sentenced to death in 2002 after killing Beech Grove police officer William Toney in 2000.
According to Rokita's office on Wednesday, it has yet to set a date for Ritchie's execution.