Ricky Gray’s Last Meal: Final Words and Contested Execution

Ricky Gray refused a last meal before his execution on January 18, 2017, at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Virginia. Offered the chance to pick any items from the prison’s standard menu, he declined. Asked for final words moments before the lethal injection began, he answered only, “Nope.”¹

What Virginia Offers on the Last Day

Under Virginia’s execution procedures, a condemned inmate is transferred from Sussex I State Prison to Greensville and placed in one of three cells next to the death chamber. He can select any meal or combination of items from the institution’s standard 28-day cycle menu. The meal has to be finished at least four hours before the scheduled 9:00 p.m. execution time.²

Gray took none of it.³ The refusal drew attention because Virginia, unlike some death-penalty states that limit or have abolished the tradition, still made the offer.

Final Words and Time of Death

Gray was pronounced dead at 9:42 p.m. on January 18, 2017. His single-word reply when asked if he wished to say anything, “Nope,” stood as his final statement on the record.¹

Six days earlier, on January 12, his attorneys had released an eighteen-minute video in which Gray addressed the family of his victims. “Remorse is not a deep enough word for how I feel,” he said in the recording. “I robbed them of a lifelong supply of joy. I’ve stolen Christmases, birthdays and Easters, Thanksgivings, graduations, weddings, children. There’s nothing I can do to make up for that.”⁴

Why Gray Was on Death Row

Gray was sentenced to die for the murders of two young sisters during a home invasion on New Year’s Day 2006. He and his nephew, Ray Dandridge, were driving through the Woodland Heights neighborhood of Richmond looking for a house to rob when they saw an open door at the home of Bryan and Kathryn Harvey. The couple was preparing to host a dinner party with their daughters, nine-year-old Stella and four-year-old Ruby.⁵

Gray and Dandridge forced the family into the basement, bound them with electrical cords, and taped their mouths shut. Gray then cut the throats of all four with a razor knife and beat each of them in the head with a claw hammer. After the family stopped moving, he poured wine around the basement and set the house on fire. The two men left with a computer, Bryan Harvey’s wedding ring, and a basket of cookies.⁶

Days later, Gray and Dandridge murdered 21-year-old Ashley Baskerville along with her mother, Mary Baskerville-Tucker, and her stepfather, Percyell Tucker. Gray also confessed to killing his own wife, Treva Terrell Gray, in Washington, Pennsylvania, in early November 2005.⁷ A Philadelphia SWAT team arrested him on January 7, 2006, hiding behind a water heater in an unlit basement. He signed a confession detailing the Harvey killings.⁶

A Richmond jury convicted Gray on five counts of capital murder. Jurors returned death sentences for the murders of Stella and Ruby, and life sentences for those of Bryan and Kathryn. The Supreme Court of Virginia affirmed the convictions and sentences on June 8, 2007, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined review in 2008.⁸

The Clemency Petition

Gray’s clemency petition to Governor Terry McAuliffe drew support from more than fifty mental health professionals, two former commissioners of the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health, and the Virginia Catholic Conference. His lawyers cited severe childhood physical and sexual abuse, PCP use beginning at age eleven or twelve, and a neuropharmacologist’s opinion that Gray was under the influence of PCP during the killings.⁹¹⁰ McAuliffe denied the request on January 17, 2017, saying he found “no such circumstances” warranting intervention and that the trial had been “fair and impartial.”¹¹

A Contested Execution

The execution that followed Gray’s refused meal became a matter of controversy in its own right. It was the first known instance of a U.S. state using midazolam sourced from a compounding pharmacy rather than a conventional pharmaceutical manufacturer.¹² Gray’s attorneys had petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court and the governor to halt the procedure, arguing that the three-drug protocol of midazolam, a paralytic, and potassium chloride created a risk of “chemical torture” because midazolam is a sedative, not an anesthetic. The Supreme Court declined to intervene.¹³

A 2016 Virginia law shielded the identity of any compounding pharmacy supplying execution drugs. An Associated Press public records request later showed the state paid $66,000 for the midazolam and potassium chloride used in Gray’s execution, though the pharmacy’s name was redacted. One reporter said the price represented roughly sixty-three times the normal cost.¹⁴

On July 6, 2017, Dr. Mark Edgar, a pathologist at Emory University School of Medicine, released a review of Gray’s official autopsy report. He concluded that Gray had suffered acute pulmonary edema during the execution, with liquid in his upper airways and blood entering his lungs while he was still breathing. “The anatomic changes described in Ricky Gray’s lungs are more often seen in the aftermath of a sarin gas attack than in a routine hospital autopsy,” Edgar wrote. If the midazolam had not rendered Gray fully unconscious, he added, the sensation of fluid flooding the lungs would have caused “panic and terror.”¹⁵ Edgar also said the compounded drugs “may have lacked potency or been impure.”¹⁴ Witnesses had reported movement and heavy breathing during the execution.

Edgar’s findings were cited by attorneys for William Morva, another Virginia death row inmate, who sought a reprieve to investigate the protocol. Governor McAuliffe denied the request, and Morva was executed with the same drugs. Witnesses reported he made a loud noise and experienced sharp abdominal contractions after the midazolam was administered. Edgar went on to review autopsy reports from other states, finding signs of pulmonary edema in a majority of the 27 midazolam executions he examined.¹⁵¹⁶

1
WSLS. Ricky Gray Executed for 2006 Murder of Richmond Family
2
NBC Washington. Facts About Virginia’s Death Row
3
WRIC. Ricky Gray’s Attorneys Concerned Execution Caused Pain and Suffering
4
WRIC. Ricky Gray Apologizes Ahead of Scheduled Execution
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CBS News. Ricky Gray Execution for Harvey Family Murders
6
FindLaw. Gray v. Commonwealth, Record No. 062659
7
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Why Is One Killing Worth Less
8
Virginia Courts. Gray v. Commonwealth Habeas Opinion
9
Amnesty International. Ricky Gray Clemency Report
10
Death Penalty Information Center. Mental Health Professionals, Religious Leaders Join Ricky Gray’s Plea for Clemency
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WDBJ7. Gov. McAuliffe Will Not Intervene in Ricky Gray Execution
12
NPR. Virginia Moves Forward With Execution Drug From Anonymous Compounding Pharmacy
13
CNN. Ricky Gray Executed in Virginia
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WVTF. Controversial Drug Used in Virginia’s Latest Executions
15
Death Penalty Information Center. Independent Pathologist Says Autopsy Reveals Problems With Virginia’s Execution of Ricky Gray
16
The Intercept. Death Penalty Lethal Injection Midazolam Ohio