A Warning to All: If You Ain’t Serving the Lord, You Serve the Devil – The Derek Dearman Story
This is what evil in your life gets you. Just let this be a warning to somebody for a change. It don’t bring nobody closer to us. We’re going to suffer the rest of our lives.
On October 17, 2024, Derek Ryan Dearman was executed by lethal injection at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama. He was 36 years old. He did not fight it. He did not beg. He did not ask for mercy. In fact, he was the one who asked the state to kill him.
He had been on death row for six years, and even there he never stopped using drugs. He used methamphetamine as recently as a week before his death. In the end, the man who once said drugs made him see things that weren’t there walked calmly into the execution chamber and told the state to finish what he had started.
This is the full story of Derek Dearman: who he was, what he did in the early morning hours of August 20, 2016, how he was caught, how he was tried, and exactly what happened in that execution chamber on October 17, 2024. We will hear his last meal, his final words, and the voices of the families he destroyed. This is not an easy story. But it is an important one.
A Life Unraveling
Derek Ryan Dearman was born on September 14, 1988, in Greene County, Mississippi. He grew up in the small, quiet town of Leaksville, about 90 miles north of the Gulf Coast. On the surface it looked ordinary. Underneath, it never was.
By adulthood he had built an extensive criminal record in Mississippi. His ex-wife described him as having “a temper, especially when he doesn’t get his way.” They had two children together. The central thread running through his entire adult life, however, was methamphetamine. His own parents would later testify in court that his long-term drug abuse was the defining problem of his life.
He also had a girlfriend, Lenita Lester. Their relationship was violently unstable. Acquaintances said Dearman would take Lester into the isolated woods of southeast Mississippi and beat her repeatedly. “He was taking her out there and beating the crap out of her,” one man who knew him for years stated plainly. Lester eventually fled.
In August 2016 she ran to her brother’s house in Citronelle, Alabama, roughly 30 miles north of Mobile. Her brother, Joseph Adam Turner, 26, lived there with his wife Shannon Melissa Randall, 35, their three-month-old son, Shannon’s brother Robert Lee Brown, 26, and a young married couple, Justin Caleb Reed, 23, and his pregnant wife Chelsea Marie Reed, 22. Chelsea was five months pregnant.
This house full of young people, a newborn, and new life was where Lenita Lester went seeking safety. She was wrong.
The Night of Horror
In the days before the murders, Dearman had actually been at the Citronelle property helping scrap a metal trailer. His behavior made everyone uneasy. Shannon Randall eventually told him he could work during the day but could not stay overnight; she did not want him near her infant. He left, returned to Mississippi, injected methamphetamine, and learned Lester had fled to her brother’s house.
Something inside him snapped.
On the evening of August 19, 2016, Dearman began showing up at the Citronelle home. He was turned away four times. Joseph Turner called the police. Officers searched the wooded property but found nothing. A 911 call at 1 a.m. brought another patrol; again, nothing. Around 3 a.m. the officers left. The house went quiet. Everyone went to sleep.
Robert Lee Brown was in the living-room recliner. Lenita Lester was on an air mattress nearby. Joseph and Shannon were in their bedroom with their baby. Justin and Chelsea Reed were in the other bedroom.
Derek Dearman had never left. Investigators later determined he had been awake for six straight days on methamphetamine, hearing voices and believing people were coming for him. None of that excuses what came next. What he did was methodical, deliberate, and unspeakable.
In the early morning hours of August 20, he broke through two locked sliding-glass doors. He picked up an axe from the front yard and carried it inside. He found Robert Brown asleep in the recliner and struck him in the head multiple times. He moved to the master bedroom, attacked Joseph Turner and Shannon Randall while their infant lay beside them. The baby was not touched. He then went to the second bedroom and attacked Justin and Chelsea Reed. Chelsea, five months pregnant, was struck repeatedly. Justin fought back; there was a struggle over a gun. Dearman ultimately seized the weapon.
With his victims severely injured and bleeding, he methodically shot each one to make sure they were dead: Chelsea Reed, Justin Reed, Joseph Turner, Shannon Randall (shot in the back of the head as she lay beside her baby), and Robert Lee Brown. He walked past Lenita Lester on the air mattress and left her untouched. He took the car keys and walked out.
Behind him lay five bodies and one unborn child. Alabama authorities would later call it the worst mass killing in Mobile County history. The sentencing order described the crime with two words: “especially heinous, atrocious.”
Dearman forced Lenita Lester and the three-month-old infant into the car and drove to his father’s house in Leaksville, Mississippi. Lester was beaten further. A ransom was demanded and paid. Once freed, she immediately contacted police.
Back in Citronelle, officers arrived at the dead-end dirt road to find five people dead. Dearman’s father eventually convinced him to turn himself in at the Greene County, Mississippi, police station. As he was being escorted back to Alabama in a bright yellow jail uniform, Dearman told reporters, “Drugs were making me think things that weren’t really there.”
Trial, Sentence, and the Long Road to the Death Chamber
Alabama charged Dearman with six counts of capital murder — five for the victims and one under the state’s fetal-homicide law for Chelsea’s unborn child — plus kidnapping. He was assigned two court-appointed attorneys. In mid-2017 the state requested a full mental evaluation. Dearman objected. His own lawyers warned in writing that his mood disorder, suicidal thinking, and brain dysfunction were impairing his decisions and that he would likely self-sabotage to secure a death sentence.
They were right. He fired his attorneys and represented himself. On August 31, 2018, he pleaded guilty to five counts of capital murder during a burglary and five counts of murder as part of one scheme or course of conduct.
Even with a guilty plea, Alabama law required a jury to hear evidence and decide the sentence. Dearman initially planned to present no mitigating evidence at all. His family intervened. Eleven relatives testified about his lifelong struggles with addiction and mental illness. They begged the jury to spare his life. The jury unanimously recommended death. On October 12, 2018, Circuit Judge Rick Stout sentenced him to death.
Later appeals vacated four convictions on double-jeopardy grounds, leaving six capital-murder convictions. The death sentence stood.
Controversy and the Decision to Die
The case was not without fierce debate. The Equal Justice Initiative argued that Alabama courts never properly evaluated Dearman’s mental competency to plead guilty, waive counsel, or drop his appeals. They pointed to a documented lifetime of severe mental illness, suicidal ideation dating to childhood, mood disorder, and brain dysfunction — all in the record, yet never fully addressed. They contended the sentencing court failed to weigh his mental-health history as a reason for life without parole, violating Supreme Court precedent.
Dearman himself addressed the issue directly. In interviews he insisted he was competent: “Yes, I’m confident I’m in my right mind. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be trying to think about the victims’ families and their feelings.” His spiritual adviser, Reverend Dr. Jeff Hood — an outspoken opponent of the death penalty — said Dearman viewed his choice as a spiritual decision, not a political one.
For almost six years Dearman allowed appeals to continue for his family’s sake. In April 2024 he ended it. He wrote nine handwritten letters to the governor, attorney general, and judges declaring he was done fighting. He gave his first and only media interview to NBC News, saying it was time for the victims’ families to have justice and closure. In a letter to the court he wrote: “I am guilty. I plead guilty. I was found guilty. I was sentenced to death, and I 100% agree with the sentencing and believe it is fair.”
On September 3, 2024, the Alabama Supreme Court issued the death warrant. The execution was set for October 17.
The Final Hours
In his last two days Dearman received visitors and spoke by phone with friends and relatives. He chose Reverend Dr. Jeff Hood as his spiritual adviser but ultimately asked him not to enter the chamber; he would face it alone. The night before, he wrote goodbye letters to his family.
On October 17, 2024, his last meal was simple: a seafood platter. At 5:58 p.m. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall cleared the execution to proceed. Strapped to the gurney with IV lines in both arms, Dearman was given the chance to speak.
He turned toward the victims’ families and said: “Forgive me. This is not for me. This is for you. I’ve taken so much.”
He paused, then looked toward his own family: “To my family, y’all already know I love you.”
From the witness room his father cried out, “Derek, no… Derek, don’t go.”
At 6:01 p.m. a consciousness check was performed. His arms moved slightly — an involuntary reaction to the drugs, officials later explained. The curtains closed at 6:08 p.m. Behind them, his father sobbed and called his son’s name repeatedly. At 6:14 p.m., Derek Ryan Dearman was pronounced dead.
Aftermath and Unanswered Questions
The victims’ families spoke after the execution. Bryant Henry Randall, father of Chelsea Reed and brother to Shannon Randall and Robert Lee Brown, lost three children and a grandchild that night in 2016. In a statement read by the prison commissioner he wrote: “Today, goodbye will be easy for me because we have all heard the horrific things that Derek Dearman did… I so long for a final goodbye to my daughter. And I would have loved to meet my grandchild, Chelsea’s unborn baby… the one the family never got to hold.”
Robert Lee Brown’s father stood outside the prison with no prepared statement, only raw truth: “This don’t bring nothing back. I can’t get my son back or any of them back.”
Alabama Governor Kay Ivey stated: “Six lives, including an unborn baby, were gruesomely taken by Mr. Dearman in 2016. The state has obliged and justice has been served.” Attorney General Steve Marshall called it appropriate for “justice and finality for the families.”
The Equal Justice Initiative released a statement mourning what they called a system that ignored Dearman’s lifelong mental illness.
A few weeks after the 2016 murders, the house in Citronelle burned to the ground. It no longer stands.
Derek Dearman was Alabama’s fifth execution of 2024. He was 36. His victims were 22 to 35 years old. An unborn child never drew a breath.
In one of his final recorded statements, Dearman described the night of the murders: “It was like someone else had the steering wheel.” His spiritual adviser said Dearman was deeply remorseful and believed volunteering for execution was the only meaningful way left to prove he was sorry.
So here is the question this case forces us to sit with: When a man who committed a crime of staggering brutality voluntarily gives up every appeal and asks the state to kill him — is that justice? Is it remorse? Or is it something for which we still don’t have the right word?
Five families still live with empty chairs at the table. A three-month-old boy grew up without his mother and father. A grandfather never met the grandchild he was promised. And in a small execution chamber in southern Alabama on an October evening, the man responsible closed his eyes for the last time.
If you ain’t serving the Lord, you serve that devil. This is what you get for evil in your life.
Let this be a warning.
