Missouri inmate set for execution next month hospitalized due to “medical emergency”
ST. LOUIS (AP) — A Missouri inmate who is due to be executed next month has been hospitalized because of a “medical emergency,” a spokeswoman for the Missouri Department of Corrections said.
David Hosier, 69, is scheduled to be put to death June 11 for killing a Jefferson City couple, Angela and Rodney Gilpin, in 2009. His attorney, Jeremy Weis, said a prison doctor diagnosed Hosier with heart failure this week. Hosier’s sister, Barbara Morrill, said he has atrial fibrillation, which causes an irregular heartbeat.
Morrill said her brother fell ill about a week and ago and has gotten worse, with leg swelling and severe pain. She wondered why it took so long to move him out of his cell.
“He’s in a lot of pain,” she said. “He can’t walk. He can barely talk.”
Karen Pojmann, spokeswoman for the Missouri Department of Corrections, said she could not release further information, citing privacy requirements.
Hosier’s spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeff Hood, said at a news conference on Friday that Missouri faces the prospect of executing a man who is critically ill.
“His family has been told that he is in acute heart failure,” Hood said. “The question becomes: How sick does a person have to be to not be executed in the state of Missouri?”
It wasn’t immediately clear if the state would postpone the execution. Hosier has always maintained his innocence, but police and prosecutors say the evidence against him was overwhelming.
Hosier is the son of a murder victim — a police officer killed in the line of duty. Indiana State Police Sergeant Glen Hosier was fatally shot by a murder suspect in 1971, when David Hosier was 16. Other officers killed the gunman.
On the night of his father’s shooting, David Hosier was awakened to find a trooper at his bedside. “I heard mom downstairs crying and when that happens, you know what it usually means,” he recalled in an interview with The Associated Press last week, before he became ill.
Hosier was sent to military school and later joined the Navy, where he spent four years in active duty. He was visiting his sister in Missouri in the late 1970s, met a woman who would become his first wife, and they settled in Jefferson City. He worked for several years as an EMT and firefighter.
Hosier acknowledged that in 2009, he had an affair with Angela Gilpin. She ended it and reconciled with her husband. Not long after that, in September 2009, they were shot to death near the doorway of their apartment.