Georgia executes man who killed college students

JACKSON – A 38-year-old inmate convicted of killing two college students in 1995 was executed Thursday in Georgia. He apologized to the families of the two students and was then executed in a state prison.

Andrew Allen Cook was pronounced dead at 11:22 p.m., about 14 minutes after he was injected with the lethal drug.

In his final words, he apologized to the families of Mercer University students Grant Patrick Hendrickson (22) and Michele Lee Cartagena (19), who were shot multiple times while sitting in a car at Lake Juliette. He said what he had done was senseless.

“I’m sorry,” Cook said as he was strapped to a stretcher. “I’m not going to beg your forgiveness. I can’t do it myself.”

He also thanked his family for “their support, for being with me, and I’m sorry for taking so much from all of you.”

The Georgia Court of Criminal Appeals on Wednesday temporarily stayed Cook’s execution to consider a challenge to the state’s lethal injection procedure, but the Georgia Supreme Court lifted the stay on Thursday, and all other appeals have been exhausted.

Cook was the first inmate to be executed since the state changed its execution method from a three-drug combination to a single dose of the sedative pentobarbital in July.

Cook’s lawyers argued at various stages of their appeal against the death sentence that he suffered from mental illness and had been receiving treatment for depression until his death.

Mary Hendrickson, the mother of one of the victims, recently told Macon television station WMAZ-TV that she has been waiting for justice for 18 years.

“I think that’s it: the devil’s work,” she said. “When all this happened, I just thought, ‘Well, the devil is not going to win. He’s not going to win my heart. He’s not going to win.'”

The injection of the only drug began at about 11:08 p.m. Cook blinked a few times and his eyes soon became heavy. His chest rose and fell for about two or three minutes as he closed his eyes. Not long afterward, two doctors examined him and nodded, and Carl Humphrey, warden of the state prison in Jackson, pronounced him dead.

Shortly before the execution was scheduled to begin, corrections officials said Cook received a visit from his family on Thursday and ate the last meal he had ordered – steak, baked potato, potato wedges, fried shrimp, lemon meringue pie and lemonade.

A jury in Monroe County sentenced Cook to death after he was found guilty of the January 2, 1995, murders at Lake Juliette, about 75 miles south of Atlanta. Cook was not charged until more than two years later. He confessed to the crime to his father, an FBI agent from Macon, who eventually testified at his son’s trial.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation contacted John Cook in December 1995 because they were interested in speaking with his son. When he called his then 22-year-old son to tell him that the GBI wanted to speak with him, he had no idea that the younger man was considered a suspect.

“I said, ‘Andy, the GBI is looking for you in connection with the Lake Juliette murder case. Do you know anything about it?'” John Cook testified at his son’s trial in March 1998. “He said, ‘Dad, I can’t tell you. You’re one of them. … You’re a cop.'”

Eventually Andrew Cook told his father that he knew about the murders, that he had been there and that he knew who had shot the couple, John Cook recalled.

“I felt like the world was falling down on me. But I had a feeling that maybe he was there and just saw what happened,” he said. “Then I asked, ‘Did you shoot her?’

“After a pause on the phone, he said, ‘Yes.'”

As a police officer, John Cook said he was forced to call his supervisor and contacted the Monroe County Sheriff.

As the distraught father left the witness stand during the trial, he mouthed “I’m sorry” to the victims’ families seated in the front row of the Henry County courtroom. Several members of both families accepted his apology.

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