OHIO LAST MEAL
SCOTT MINK
July 20, 2004

...finished everything except the broccoli...

Last Meal:   Mink's last "special" meal was a T-bone steak; baked potato with sour cream and butter; steamed broccoli and cauliflower; a hamburger with cheese, onion, lettuce, tomato, ketchup and mustard; french fries with extra salt and Pepsi.

Mink finished everything except the broccoli.

On Tuesday morning, Mink smoked cigarettes and drank coffee but didn't eat.

The prison served him waffles, cereal, milk, coffee and apple juice.

The Skinny:   Scott Mink, 40, was executed by lethal injection for the September 2000 murders of his parents. 

When his parents hid the keys to his blue Isuzu Trooper to keep him from going out to buy drugs, Mink snapped. He got a claw hammer out of his father's toolbox on the porch and then walked into the bedroom of his sleeping parents.

The father and mother, 79 and 72, were bludgeoned with the hammer, stabbed with kitchen knives and beaten with cutting boards. The mother also was strangled, her neck broken with an electric cord.

Scott Mink then bought drugs by selling his parents' possessions, including pictures off the walls of the upstairs duplex where the three lived.

Four days later, Mink turned himself in to police and confessed to killing the couple.

More skinny:   Mink never married and lived with his parents most of his life. Tired of their son's growing crack habit, the Minks had set a 10 p.m. curfew and sometimes hid the keys to his truck. Mink complained that his parents treated him like a child and that his father would only give him $10 or $20 at a time for spending money. 

After the deed:    After the attack on his parents, Mink found his keys.

He took $7 and his father's ATM card.

Mink withdrew $10 with the ATM card because there was only $12 in the account and bought a fake substance he thought was crack.

The next day Mink sold his father's Ford Escort for $50 to $100 worth of crack.

The day after that, he traded his parents' television for $30 in drugs.

He later sold a lounge chair, a clock and pictures off the wall for money to buy drugs.

No Trial:  Mink waived a jury trial, plead guilty and waived his right to present any evidence on his behalf.

Thomas Martin, a court-appointed psychologist who evaluated Mink, said Mink told him he did not fear death. "I have a firm belief that I still have a chance of getting into heaven; God can forgive," Mink said.

The day before:   Mink sipped coffee and watched television.  He was relaxing and talking with prison staff, a prison spokesman said. "He's pleasant, he seems comfortable, and he's in good spirits."

He slept soundly until he was awakened at 6:05 a.m. by prison staff. He declined to shower or eat breakfast, instead splashing his face with water and having coffee and a cigarette.

Last words and such:  "I just thank you for giving me the chance to make a final statement," Mink told Warden James Haviland as he lay strapped to the execution table. "I have made peace with my family and God."

The execution of Mink, 40, was unusually lengthy because it took prison medical staff more than 20 minutes to install intravenous receptacles in Mink's veins. Tom Stickrath, assistant prisons director for Ohio, said Mink's veins were "brittle and they kept collapsing" as staff attempted to insert the shunts. Mink winked and gave his family, seated behind a glass window, a thumbs-up sign from the execution table.

Throughout the process, Mink closed his eyes, his legs crossed at the ankle. Stevens read Romans 8:38-39 from the Bible: "I am convinced that neither life, nor death ... will be able to separate us from the love of Christ Jesus." He was reading from a book entitled, If Grace Is True: Why God Will Save Every Person. 

His remains will be cremated and given to his family.

Factoids:   Mink's execution--three years from when he was convicted--was the fastest an Ohio inmate's death sentence was carried out since the state re-enacted the death penalty in 1981.

Mink also would be the first inmate executed who pleaded guilty, and the first put to death for killing family members.

Mink was the sixth death-row inmate executed this year, putting Ohio behind only Texas in the number of executions in 2004. Texas has executed 10 inmates, and Oklahoma has executed five.

Ohio has 207 inmates on death row.

At the moment there are no more executions scheduled in Ohio this year.

Mink was the...
 
35th murderer executed in U.S. in 2004
920th murderer executed in U.S. since 1976
6th murderer executed in Ohio in 2004
14th murderer executed in Ohio since 1976