Last words before execution: 'I'm just grateful to be a servant of God'

It happened yesterday in Tennessee.

The state of Tennessee executed Nicholas Todd Sutton by electrocution Thursday.

“I’m just grateful to be a servant of God, and I’m looking forward to being in his presence, and I thank you,” Sutton said before the executioner turned on the electric chair.

Sutton, 58, was pronounced dead at 7:26 p.m. CST at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. He became the seventh man executed by the state since Tennessee resumed capital punishment in August 2018, the 139th inmate put to death in Tennessee since 1916 and the only Tennessean ever executed for killing a fellow inmate.

His full statement:

I would like to thank my wife for being such a good witness to the Lord for me, and my family and many friends for their love and support as they have tried so very hard to save my life.

Don’t ever give up on the power of Jesus Christ to take impossible situations and correct them.

He can fix something that’s broken. He’s fixed me.

I want to uplift the name of Jesus Christ, Lord of Lords, King of Kings.

I’m just grateful to be a servant of God, and I’m looking forward to being in his presence. And I thank you.

Sutton was 18 years old when he killed three people in 1979. He didn’t receive a death sentence until he fatally stabbed Carl Estep, a convicted child rapist, at age 23.

Sutton first landed in prison after he knocked his grandmother Dorothy Sutton unconscious and threw her into a river to drown in East Tennessee’s Hamblen County. After jurors found him guilty of murder, the teen confessed he had already killed John Large, his 19-year-old friend, and Charles Almon, a 46-year-old man, in North Carolina.