Oklahoma is prepared to execute Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez on August 13th, 2026, for a murder that prosecutors described as calculated and cruel: the shooting of Olympia Cardena Fisher through both eyes, with a deliberate pause between the two gunshots
Cuesta-Rodriguez, now 71 years old, has spent nearly two decades on death row at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. In his final appearance before the state Pardon and Parole Board, the condemned man made no plea for mercy. “My time has come,” he said
“I want to go peacefully.”
The case against him rests on a trail of documented violence, obsessive control, and a gruesome sequence of events that unfolded in May 2003. The story begins not with the murder itself, but with a marriage built on suspicion that deteriorated into a lethal confrontation.
Cuesta-Rodriguez was a Cuban immigrant living in Oklahoma City. Before 2003, he entered a relationship with Fisher, an adult woman with a daughter named Katia Chacon. The three lived together in a home that Fisher and Cuesta-Rodriguez had purchased as a shared investment, a gesture that was supposed to signal permanence and stability.
For a time, that arrangement likely felt secure. But the foundation cracked when Fisher took a job at a moving company, working long hours packing boxes for other families’ relocations. Her demanding schedule triggered something in Cuesta-Rodriguez, who grew increasingly suspicious of her whereabouts and her time away from the house.
Whenever Fisher or her daughter left, he demanded a full account of their destinations and activities. The questions became relentless. The less control he exerted over her schedule, the more aggressively he pushed to reclaim it.
By early 2003, the couple’s mutual resentment had a single aim: both wanted the other gone.
The house they had bought together, meant to be a foundation, became a trap neither could escape without a fight. Eleven days before Fisher died, she attempted to seek help. On May 20th, 2003, she walked into a police station to report domestic abuse.
An interviewing officer documented bruising on her right upper arm and stomach.
The officer prepared to take the report seriously, photographing the injuries and initiating a process that could lead to Cuesta-Rodriguez’s arrest. But Fisher realized the consequences her report would trigger. She understood the implications: arrest, a criminal record, exposure.
She fled the station before photographs could be taken.
The paper trail that might have protected her was never completed. The court record does not reveal her precise reasoning, whether it was fear of retaliation, a desperate hope for reconciliation, financial dependence, or the twisted bonds of love. What the record does show is that this was no sudden outburst of violence.
There was a documented pattern on file with police just 11 days before the murder. On May 31st, 2003, that pattern reached its violent conclusion. Prosecutors used the abuse report at trial to establish not only Cuesta-Rodriguez’s capacity for violence, but also that Fisher had tried to leave, and that he knew it.
The defense objected to the testimony, arguing it improperly introduced evidence of other crimes that could bias the jury. The trial court allowed it, ruling the prior assault was directly relevant to motive and intent. On appeal, that ruling was upheld, with the court finding the incident was essential context for the jury.
May 31st, 2003 began like any other day of suspicion. That afternoon, Cuesta-Rodriguez called Fisher on her cell phone. She told him she was at work.
He knew that was a lie, having driven by her workplace earlier and found her absent. Convinced she was cheating, he went home, opened a bottle of tequila, drank, and went to bed.
Around 10:00 p. m. , Katia Chacon arrived home to a dark house.
On the counter sat an empty tequila bottle beside a note scrawled on the back of an envelope. It read: “Fuck you and putas. Goodbye.”
Chacon understood the note’s gravity immediately. Cuesta-Rodriguez was home, and something was deeply wrong.
She tried calling her mother to no avail, so she left the house to find her. Chacon met Fisher as she got off her shift that night, and the two walked home together, unaware the house had already become the site of a decision Cuesta-Rodriguez had made hours earlier. What happened next unfolded rapidly, and it unfolded before Fisher’s daughter’s eyes.
Cuesta-Rodriguez shot Fisher through one eye. Then, not in the same instant or the same struggle, but minutes later, he shot her again through the other eye. That gap between shots became the cornerstone of the prosecution’s case, a detail that would echo through trial and clemency hearings alike.
A struggle over a firearm ends in one shot, perhaps two in rapid succession. This was different. There was time between the first shot and the second, time in which prosecutors argued Cuesta-Rodriguez made a second deliberate choice.
Police arrived quickly and found a house transformed into a barricade.
For three hours, Cuesta-Rodriguez refused to come out. Officers held the perimeter, negotiators worked the phones, and a tactical response team gathered outside what had been an ordinary address. Meanwhile, Fisher’s body lay where she had fallen inside.
Three hours is long enough for negotiation to succeed, but it did not happen here.
Commanders eventually made the call that continued talks would not end this peacefully. A tactical team forced entry and took Cuesta-Rodriguez into custody. Only then did officers move through the house to confirm what many already suspected: Fisher was dead.
In interviews, Cuesta-Rodriguez admitted to the shooting but offered a narrower version of events.
He claimed the first shot was an accident, discharging when Fisher tried to grab the gun during a struggle. He never offered any account of the second shot, the one fired minutes later into her other eye. At trial in Oklahoma County before Judge Virgil C.
Black, his defense leaned entirely on the accidental discharge story, characterizing the killing as tragedy rather than intent.
The jury did not believe it. Prosecutors built their case on the sequence of events: the documented abuse report, the note left on the counter, the lied-about whereabouts, and most damning, the gap between the two shots. A struggle explains one gunshot, but it does not easily explain two fired minutes apart, each aimed at an eye.
The jury convicted Cuesta-Rodriguez of first-degree murder. In the sentencing phase, they went further, finding two statutory aggravating factors beyond a reasonable doubt: that the murder was especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel, and that Cuesta-Rodriguez represented a continuing threat to society. Either alone is sufficient under Oklahoma law; the jury found both.
In 2007, Cuesta-Rodriguez was formally sentenced to death. He appealed, raising 21 separate claims of error, ranging from the admission of prior abuse testimony to broader challenges of trial conduct. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals reviewed each claim and rejected all, affirming both the conviction and the sentence.
The case then moved into the federal court system.
His legal battle in federal courts lasted years, allowing the case to outlive an entire chapter of Fisher’s family’s lives. His attorneys built their clemency case around a mental state they argued the original trial never fully addressed: profound, long-standing brain damage and untreated psychosis. They pointed to a difficult childhood as foundational context.
They also brought forward witnesses who knew him in prison, including a close friend named Carolina Rubio-MacWright, who testified that he had changed, becoming a stabilizing, positive influence on other inmates. “We were never asking for freedom,” she told the board, “but for understanding.” The state’s response was direct and unsparing.
Assistant Attorney General Chris Howard argued that Cuesta-Rodriguez killed Fisher for a simple reason: he could no longer control her, and rather than accept that, he ended it excruciatingly. Attorney General Gentner Drummond went further, telling the board that Fisher’s final moments were hell. “He didn’t lose Olympia,” Drummond said.
“He took her. He’s not a widower, he’s a murderer.”
Fisher’s daughters delivered their own devastating testimony. Cynthia Chacón told the board it had been 23 years since “the word mom was ripped from our vocabulary.” Her sister, Claudia Wallace, described a loss that still shapes their family’s daily life.
“He took a great person who didn’t deserve to die,” she said.
When Cuesta-Rodriguez addressed the board through an interpreter, he apologized to Fisher’s daughters directly, including the one who had watched the murder happen. He described himself as suffering, broken, and filled with remorse. Wallace was not convinced.
“I believe it’s a facade,” she said. “I know him. I lived with him.”
Notably, Cuesta-Rodriguez himself did not ask the board to spare his life. He told them plainly that he did not deserve clemency and did not want it. He said he was ready to go and wanted to go peacefully.
On July 22nd, 2026, the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted three to one to deny clemency.
If the execution proceeds as scheduled, Cuesta-Rodriguez’s final day will follow the uniform protocol Oklahoma applies to every death row inmate. In the roughly 12 hours before the execution, access to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary narrows sharply, limited to approved staff and a defined list of witnesses. The evening before, he will be offered a last meal.
The last meal is typically served between 5:00 and 7:00 p. m. Other Oklahoma inmates in recent years have made small, human choices in that final request, comfort food from childhood or simple fast food: fried chicken, a Big Mac, a Baconator.
On the day of execution, he is permitted up to two hours of in-person visitation with his attorney.
Phone access and general visitation end the night before. Corrections officials are required by protocol to photograph and formally document every execution drug, its name, its lot number, and its expiration date. This level of paperwork exists directly because of what went wrong in 2014 and 2015, when Oklahoma’s execution procedures came under intense scrutiny.
Cuesta-Rodriguez is permitted to request up to five personal witnesses and two members of clergy. Media witnesses are capped at five, and under Oklahoma law, surviving victims have the right to witness the execution with the option to bring one support person. Fisher’s family retains that right.
At the appointed hour, Cuesta-Rodriguez will be strapped to a gurney in the execution chamber and given roughly two minutes to speak before the lethal injection process begins. It will be his final chance to say whatever he decides needs to be said to whoever stands on the other side of the glass.
Barring a last-minute stay from the courts or an intervention from Governor Kevin Stitt, the state of Oklahoma will carry out the sentence a jury handed down nearly two decades ago. Cuesta-Rodriguez has now spent nearly as many years on death row as Fisher spent alive beside him. At 71, he says he is ready to die.
He is not fighting for his life in these final weeks, but asking instead to be allowed to go peacefully, the same peace he denied her in her final moments. The state says the sentence stands, and stands for good reason. Unless something changes, it will be carried out at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester.
Here is the question that lingers: when a man stops fighting for his own life and asks instead to die peacefully, is that accountability finally arriving, or is it just the last thing he is left to control?
