Louisiana’s oldest death row inmate dies ahead of scheduled execution
Christopher Sepulvado leaves the DeSoto Parish Courthouse in 2018.
By KTBS News Staff
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BATON ROUGE, Louisiana (KTBS) — A DeSoto Parish man who tortured and killed his stepson more than 30 years ago has died while on death row. Christopher Sepulvado, 81, was scheduled for execution on March 17. He died Saturday from terminal illness at Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. Sepulvado was convicted of the brutal murder of his 6-year-old stepson, Wesley Allen Mercer, in 1992. A DeSoto Parish judge two weeks ago signed an execution date after Gov. Jeff Landry announced protocols for the use of nitrogen gas had been completed. Doctors determined days before that he was terminally ill and needed to be put on hospice care. His attorney, Shawn Nolan, said Sepulvado suffered physical and cognitive decline in recent years. Gangrene in a leg led to sepsis, and he was sent to a New Orleans hospital last week for amputation. However, he was returned to the prison in the middle of the night Friday. Nolan called Sepulvado’s case a “sad comment on the state of the death penalty.” Sepulvado was described as a “tiny, frail dying old man” who faced being forced to breathe “toxic gas into his failing lungs” as “simply barbaric.”
Wesley was a small child who was in kindergarten at Mansfield Elementary at the time he was killed. Sepulvado and his wife, Yvonne Sepulvado, withheld food from him from the time he got home from School on Friday until his death on Sunday. Wesley was made to sleep on a chest at the end of his bed during that time. On Sunday, Sepulvado beat Wesley in the head with a screwdriver. He then placed him in a bathtub filled halfway with scalding water, causing the skin to slough off his body. Sepulvado’s trial also included testimony from his older children about physical abuse. Other witnesses testified about sexual perversion and bestiality. “Justice should have been delivered a long time ago for the heinous act of brutally beating then scalding to death a defenseless six-year-old boy. The state failed to deliver it in his lifetime, but Christopher Sepulvado now faces ultimate judgment before God in the hereafter,” Attorney General Liz Murrill said in a statement Sunday. Yvonne Sepulvado served seven years in prison for manslaughter.
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