In early August
, on the one-year anniversary of his father’s death, Samson Childs invited his godfather out to eat at a Wingstop on Nashville’s south side, not far from where his dad grew up. Hanging out with his godfather was a way for Childs to feel close to his father, Byron Black, who died at 69. “We talked and we cried and he gave me good memories – just old stories of my dad, him growing up, and how they stuck together,” Childs said.
Black spent more than three decades on death row before he was killed by lethal injection on August 5, 2025, at Tennessee’s Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. He’d been convicted in 1989 for killing his girlfriend, Angela Clay, along with her two young daughters. Black insisted he did not commit the horrific murders, but was swiftly found guilty and sentenced to die.
Over the decades that followed, Black’s lawyers argued that his intellectual disability should have barred him from facing the death penalty. The DA’s office that convicted him even conceded that they were right, but the courts disagreed. By the time Tennessee
prepared to kill him
, Black had been diagnosed with dementia, kidney disease, and congestive heart failure.
“How would I feel knowing that this is my last day on earth?”
Defense attorneys argued that Black’s poor health put him at serious risk of a tortuous execution, raising specific concerns over his implanted heart defibrillator and pacemaker. Experts warned that the device could deliver painful shocks before he died. To their dismay, Black
did suffer
on the gurney – although not for the reasons they most feared. Prison staff struggled to insert an IV in Black’s arm, spilling blood on the floor. The drug that was supposed to kill him – a massive dose of the fast-acting barbiturate pentobarbital – did not work as intended. Media witnesses said they could hear Black moaning in pain.
Childs was not at the prison on the morning his father was killed. He was at home in Nashville after a sleeple
… [more]
