Before the sun set Tuesday, convicted killer and problem inmate Steven Lawayne Nelson was at his new home on Texas' Death Row.
Nelson, 25, had created havoc in the Tarrant County Jail ever since his arrest for the March 2011 robbery and suffocation death of Clint Dobson, a 28-year-old pastor at NorthPointe Baptist Church in Arlington, and the brutal attack on church secretary Judy Elliott.While in the county jail, Nelson repeatedly flooded cells, fought with jailers, and is even accused of using a blanket to strangle to death a mentally ill inmate earlier this year. Minutes after a jury sentenced him to death Tuesday, he broke a fire sprinkler in his holding cell, sending water flooding into the courtroom.It would be his last act of defiance here.Within a short time, Nelson was transported by sheriff's deputies without incident to the Polunsky Unit in Polk County where Death Row inmates are housed, said Terry Grisham, a spokesman with the Tarrant County Sheriff's Department.There, Nelson was handed over to a reception committee from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice who had been on standby awaiting his arrival, Grisham said."The carpet was still wet in the courtroom when he sat down for his first lovely meal on Death Row," Grisham said.While other convicted felons are usually tranported to prison within 45 days, Grisham said the jail routinely strives to transport all inmates sentenced to death on the same day of their sentencing whenever possible."We're certainly not going to miss him," Grisham said.
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