Baytown Man Scheduled For Execution

AUSTIN, November 11, 2005 – Shannon Charles Thomas, is scheduled to be executed after 6 p.m. Wednesday, November 16, 2005. Thomas was sentenced to death for the 1993 Christmas Eve capital murders of two children in their Baytown home.

In the early afternoon of Christmas Eve in 1993, Shannon Charles Thomas shot and killed 10-year-old Maria Rios and her 11-year-old brother, Victor Rios, in the upstairs portion of their Baytown home. Thomas and an accomplice, Keith Clay, had just killed the children’s father, Roberto Rios, in the downstairs area of the home. The father was severely beaten, shot three times and stabbed in the neck with a pair of shears. The children were shot once in the head through a pillow as they lay side by side on the floor.

The father’s brother, mother and other family members discovered the victims about 7 p.m. that day.

The motive for the killings was robbery and the elimination of witnesses. The disabled father sold small amounts of marijuana from his home. Thomas bought marijuana from the father at the home on several occasions before the killings.

A friend of the victims testified he briefly visited the victims’ home at around noon on Christmas Eve to leave some Christmas gifts for the children. The children went upstairs after receiving their gifts. The friend saw a white car with tinted windows parked in front of the home. Keith Clay owned a white Cadillac with tinted windows which he reported stolen the day after the murders.

A postal worker delivering mail to the victim’s home at “around noon” on Christmas Eve also noticed a “beige-looking, maybe white” car parked in front of the victim’s home. As he delivered the mail, he saw two men walking down the victim’s drive way. They got into the car parked in front of the victims’ home and left. The postal worker contacted the police the day after the murders and reported what he saw. The postal worker could not remember the license plate number of the car parked in front of the victims’ home. At trial the postal worker identified Thomas as one of the men he saw walking down the driveway of the victims’ home.

The case remained unsolved for over a year. Thomas and Clay did not become suspects in the murders until after the police arrested one of Thomas’ friends on a narcotics violation and the friend provided the police with information implicating Thomas and Clay in the murders. Thomas was arrested soon thereafter.

At trial, Thomas’ friend testified that Thomas told him shortly after the murders that he shot and stabbed the father and shot the children.

Another one of Thomas’ friends, who at the time of trial was in prison for murder, testified that Thomas and Clay came to his apartment in Houston on the afternoon of the murders. Harris testified they told or intimated to him that they had killed the father and the two children.

CRIMINAL HISTORY AND PUNISHMENT EVIDENCE

During the punishment phase of Thomas’ trial, the prosecution presented evidence that when Thomas committed the killings, he was on probation for the felony offense of delivery of a controlled substance. A motion to revoke his probation was pending when the murders occurred.

The prosecution presented more evidence that Thomas participated in another capital murder on January 4, 1994. A witness testified that he, Thomas and Clay stopped at a convenience store and that Clay shot and killed the clerk during a robbery while Thomas sat in the car “rapping’ to a song on the radio.

Give us your Feedback about this story!