The state of South Carolina executed Brad Keith Sigmon by firing squad on Friday evening, March 7, 2025, ending a 23-year wait on death row for the brutal 2001 baseball bat murders of David and Gladys Lark. He was 67 years old, making him the oldest person executed in South Carolina since the death penalty was reinstated.
Sigmon was pronounced dead at 6:08 p. m. at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, roughly three minutes after three volunteer officers fired .
308 Winchester rifles from 15 feet away. Witnesses described a dark red bloom spreading across his chest as the paper targets snapped clean off, followed by shallow breaths that quickly ceased. A doctor stepped forward approximately 90 seconds after the shots and confirmed his death.
Before the firing squad unleashed its volley, Sigmon used his final statement to urge fellow Christians to join him in opposing capital punishment. He argued that the Old Testament phrase “an eye for an eye” had been wrongly used to justify his death sentence, and he quoted New Testament passages emphasizing forgiveness, insisting that nowhere does God grant man the authority to kill another man.
For his last meal, Sigmon requested four pieces of fried chicken from KFC with green beans, mashed potatoes, biscuits, cheesecake and sweet tea. He asked for enough to share with other inmates, though reports varied as to whether prison officials granted that request.
The execution represented a historic and deeply controversial moment in American criminal justice. South Carolina became one of the only states in the nation to carry out an execution by firing squad in modern history, a method Sigmon selected after determining that the electric chair might burn and cook him alive and that lethal injection was equally inhumane.
He had watched fellow death row inmate Marion Bowman die with fluid in his lungs, gasping for air after receiving two doses of pentobarbital, and he did not want that fate for himself. The firing squad, he reasoned, while macabre, would be quicker and less cruel than the alternatives.
The moment of death was clinical and unsettling. A hood was lowered over Sigmon’s head after his final statement, and a paper target was taped over his heart. He made several heavy breaths during the two minutes it took for the execution team to prepare.
At 6:05 p. m. , without warning, the rifles cracked in unison and the bullets tore through his chest.
Some witnesses believed Sigmon mouthed the words “I’m okay” to his attorney just before the shots rang out. His arms jerked tight as the bullets struck. He appeared to take one or two shallow breaths before going still.
A minute later, the doctor began checking for signs of life.
To understand how Sigmon ended up strapped to that chair with a hood over his head, one must return to a quiet patch of South Carolina in 2001, where a bitter breakup between Sigmon and his girlfriend, Rebecca “Becky” Lark, spiraled into unimaginable violence and left two innocent people dead.
Sigmon had been living with Becky in her trailer for three years outside a small town in Greenville County when their relationship turned sour. Becky reached her limit, ended the relationship, and moved in with her parents next door. Her father, David Lark, made the split official by handing Sigmon eviction papers, giving him two weeks to vacate.
Sigmon did not take the rejection well. He begged Becky to reconcile, but she refused. His desperation curdled into obsession.
He began watching her, following her, staring at her front door from across the yard, and growing convinced that she had met someone new. Whether that suspicion was true or not, it pushed him over the edge.
About a week after Becky moved out, Sigmon sat in her trailer with a friend named Eugene Stroo, drinking and smoking crack cocaine. He laid out a chilling plan. The next morning, after Becky left to take her children to school, he would go next door, tie up her parents, and wait for her to return.
Then he would kidnap Becky and flee the state.
Stroo wanted nothing to do with the scheme and left immediately. Sigmon, however, was determined. On April 27, 2001, just after dawn, he watched Becky drive away with her children and then grabbed a baseball bat from beneath her trailer.
David Lark was in the kitchen while his wife Gladys was in the living room. David sensed danger and called out for his wife to bring him his gun, but she never got the chance. Sigmon struck first, swinging the bat at David’s head again and again.
He then chased Gladys into the living room and beat her with the same ferocity.
He went back and forth, first to David and then to Gladys, smashing their skulls until they stopped moving. Each victim received nine brutal blows. A medical examiner later testified that both victims lived for up to five minutes, gasping through their own blood as they died, their hands bearing defensive wounds from desperate attempts to shield themselves.
With the couple dead, Sigmon took David’s gun and waited inside the blood-soaked trailer, watching the driveway. When Becky returned home, he jumped out, aimed the weapon, and forced her into her own car. His plan was to drive off, switch vehicles, and head for North Carolina.
But Becky refused to surrender. She opened the car door and ran. Sigmon fired, the bullet striking her, but she kept running.
Realizing his plan was ruined, Sigmon panicked, jumped into the car and sped away, leaving Becky bleeding in the yard. She survived and somehow managed to call for help.
When officers arrived, Becky told them what Sigmon had said: that he had killed her parents. Officers rushed into the house and found David and Gladys Lark bludgeoned to death, their bodies left behind in a scene of horror. The manhunt began immediately, but Sigmon had vanished.
Days passed until Sigmon made a fatal mistake. He called his mother. Unbeknownst to him, she had already spoken to police and helped them trace the call.
He was arrested soon afterward in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, without a struggle. He confessed quickly to the murders, the attempted kidnapping, and the shooting, telling investigators he had planned to kill Becky and then himself.
Sigmon’s path to that monstrous act was shaped by a lifetime of instability and pain. Born on November 12, 1957, in South Carolina, he was the oldest of five children. His mother Virginia was just 17 when she had him.
His father Ronnie was a military man, and the family moved constantly, from small towns like Taylors and Greer to a stretch in the Philippines.
The home was not safe. Ronnie drank heavily, and when he drank, he beat Virginia. As the oldest child, Brad tried to protect his mother, stepping between his father’s fists and the rest of the family.
He took blow after blow, shielding his mother and siblings. The marriage eventually collapsed, but stability never followed.
Both parents remarried, and young Brad bounced between their homes, never truly belonging to either. By 16, he was working while still in high school, cooking meals and helping to raise his siblings. He never complained, but the strain left deep scars that would eventually define his life.
At 18, Sigmon was arrested for armed robbery in nearby Greer, his first appearance in a police file. It would not be his last. He dropped out of school just nine weeks before graduation in 1977, marrying instead.
He and his wife moved to Manning and had a son. Family members later described him as kind, loving, and gentle, a man who loved his family deeply even as his life spiraled out of control.
The spiral accelerated over the years, marked by a cycle of arrests, mostly for DUI and DWI. He battled addiction and depression, drifting further into instability. On November 17, 1990, he showed up at his estranged wife’s house in Manning, argued with her, and tried to break in.
When police arrived, he refused to back down, and a shootout erupted.
Sigmon was shot multiple times in the stomach. His 12-year-old son, caught in the middle, was struck in the arm but survived. Sigmon was hospitalized and released within a week, then vanished, drifting back to Greenville County where he fell deeper into drugs and alcohol.
That was when he met Becky Lark and moved into her trailer, setting the stage for the tragedy that would consume them all.
Following his arrest and confession, charges stacked up quickly against Sigmon: two counts of murder, burglary, kidnapping, grand larceny, assault with intent to kill, and illegal firearm possession. At trial in 2002, prosecutors presented medical experts who described in graphic detail what the baseball bat had done to David and Gladys Lark.
Their skulls were fractured. They had defensive wounds. They had tried to protect themselves.
They had suffered and died slowly, drowning in their own blood. Sigmon’s defense team did not deny his actions; they asked the jury to understand the man behind them, a childhood marked by neglect, a life of addiction, and behavior that was not violent behind bars.
Sigmon himself testified, expressing remorse and acknowledging that, now that he was sober, he could see the gravity of what he had done. He told the court he probably deserved to die. On July 20, 2002, a jury sentenced him to death for the murders of David and Gladys Lark.
For more than two decades, Sigmon sat in a small death row cell while South Carolina grappled with how to carry out his sentence. The state had halted executions in 2011 after running out of drugs used for lethal injection. Lawmakers later reinstated the electric chair and added the firing squad as a backup method for condemned inmates.
By 2024, Sigmon was forced to choose how he would die. He rejected lethal injection after watching Marion Bowman die painfully. He rejected the electric chair, fearing it would burn and cook him alive.
He selected the firing squad, knowing that . 308 Winchester rounds would shatter his ribs, rip through his heart, and possibly snap his spine, but believing it was the fastest and least cruel option available.
Before the execution, Becky Lark, the woman who survived his attack, spoke publicly about the loss of her parents. “I miss my mama and daddy,” she said. “I didn’t get to see them grow old.
I didn’t get to take care of them. My brothers and sisters, we missed that.”
Her words underscored the enduring pain left in the wake of Sigmon’s violence, pain that no execution could erase. The deaths of David and Gladys Lark, described by family as the heart of a close-knit family with five children and growing grandchildren, left a wound that two decades had not healed.
Sigmon’s death by firing squad marked a rare and grim milestone in American penal history. Before Friday, only three executions by firing squad had occurred in the United States since 1977, all in Utah. South Carolina’s use of the method immediately drew sharp reactions from both supporters and opponents of capital punishment.
For supporters, Sigmon’s execution represented justice delayed but finally delivered for a man who committed an unspeakable act of violence. For opponents, the firing squad symbolized the barbarity of state-sanctioned killing, a point Sigmon himself made in his final statement, calling on Christians to work toward ending the death penalty.
The execution protocol itself was precise and chilling. All three rifles were loaded with live ammunition; South Carolina does not use blanks. The volunteers stood behind a wall with a small opening, invisible to witnesses.
The warden read the execution order, the curtains opened at 6:01 p. m. , and at 6:05 p.
m. , the officers fired.
Sigmon’s jaw was strapped in place with a sling. His arms jerked tight as the bullets struck. Witnesses described the scene as silent, the only sounds being the crack of the rifles and the heavy breathing of the condemned man in the moments before the shots.
Then, stillness.
At 6:08 p. m. , a doctor gave the word.
Brad Keith Sigmon was pronounced dead. The man who had waited more than 20 years to face his fate was gone, his body wheeled away, his name added to the short, grim list of American inmates executed by firing squad.
The state of South Carolina’s first firing squad execution was complete, but the questions it raised about justice, retribution, and the methods by which a society takes a life would linger long after the blood was cleaned from the execution chamber.
