Alabama man convicted of killing 5 people asks to be executed: ‘It’s the right thing to do’

He was convicted of killing five people, including a pregnant mother, and spent years trying to avoid the death penalty. Now this Alabama death row inmate says he’s asking the state to execute him.

Derrick Dearman says he wants to live. The 35-year-old inmate on Alabama’s death row has spent almost six years fighting his sentence after being convicted of killing five people, including a woman who was pregnant. But now, he says he’s asked the state to execute him. It’s time, he says, for “justice to be delivered,” and “it’s the right thing to do.” “I don’t want to die,” Dearman told CNN in a phone interview Friday from a prison in Atmore, Alabama. “But I feel it in my heart that this is the only option that would help the victims’ families get the closure they need to move forward.” “I made peace with my decision.” In the early morning hours on August 20, 2016, Dearman broke into a home in small-town Citronelle, Alabama, according to a sentencing order filed in the case. He made his way through the house, attacking five of the occupants one by one, using an ax, a .45 pistol and a shotgun. Shannon Melissa Randall, Robert Lee Brown, Justin Kaleb Reed, Joseph Adam Turner and Chelsea Marie Reed, who was five months pregnant, were left dead. Dearman fled the scene, taking his sometime girlfriend and the infant son of two victims with him.