Read more: State, Crime, Texas, Huntsville, Inmate, Death Row
HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) - A Dallas-area man convicted of slaying a Brazilian engineer whose wife was also killed in an attack at their Texas apartment was set to receive a lethal injection on Tuesday, the third execution of the year in the nation's busiest death penalty state.
Michael Sigala, 32, was condemned to death for the August 2000 fatal shooting of Kleber Santos, 28, who was killed along with his wife at their apartment in Plano, a suburb of Dallas. Sigala also was charged with the wife's slaying but was not tried.
Sigala was on probation for robbery and allowed to leave a Dallas-area substance abuse treatment center for the day to look for a job when the slayings happened.
He would be the third Texas inmate to receive lethal injection this year and the first of four scheduled to die this month in the state.
The U.S. Supreme Court last week refused to review his case and no new appeals have been filed.
Work brought Santos to Texas in January 2000, a month after he got married. His wife, Lilian, remained in Brazil to continue her veterinary studies at the University of Sao Paulo and was visiting during a school break that August.
Authorities said Sigala, from Plano, entered the couple's apartment and shot Kleber Santos in the head and then tortured Lilian Santos, 25, raping her before also fatally shooting her several hours later. Her hands were tied with telephone wire and a phone cord was around her neck.
Their bodies were found by a neighbor after Santos didn't go to work as a software developer for a cell phone manufacturer in nearby Richardson. Authorities say they don't know why Sigala targeted the couple.
"So often in criminal cases people will sometimes put themselves in bad circumstances. But this one, these people seemed completely blameless. It was really hard to see their family out there dealing with what went on," Debbie Harrison, a Collin County assistant district attorney who prosecuted the case, said last week.
Police arrested Sigala two months later after items from the apartment, including the couple's wedding rings, were found at area pawn shops and traced back to him.
Sigala declined to speak with reporters before his execution. After his arrest, he denied killing the couple but later told police he shot them in self-defense because Kleber Santos hit an accomplice with a baseball bat. Sigala also claimed he and his accomplice were at the apartment to sell Santos some heroin.
Authorities found no evidence Santos or his wife ever used drugs or that there was a second attacker.
Another convict, Adam Lay, was arrested for helping sell the stolen items but was not charged in the slayings. He received 35 years in prison for violating his parole on a previous aggravated robbery conviction.
At Sigala's trial, defense attorneys argued unsuccessfully for a life sentence, saying Sigala's drug use and upbringing contributed to his criminal activity, which began as a juvenile and included theft, marijuana possession and burglary.
When he was arrested, Sigala, an 11th-grade dropout, was on 10 years probation for a 1999 robbery conviction.
Next week, an Indiana man, Joshua Maxwell, 31, is scheduled set to die in Texas for the abduction, robbery and fatal shooting Rudy Lopes, an off-duty Bexar County Sheriff's Department sergeant, in 2000.
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On the Net:
Texas Department of Criminal Justice death row information http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/deathrow.htm
(Copyright 2010 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
