JUST IN: Texas Executes Franklin Alix — He Killed 4 People During a 5-Month Houston Crime Spree
On the evening of March 30th, 2010, in a small sterile room inside the Huntsville Unit in Huntsville, Texas, a 34-year-old man named Franklin DeWayne Alex was strapped to a gurney by corrections officers. His arms were extended out to his sides. Tubes were inserted into his veins. A curtain on the other side of a glass window was pulled back.
And in the witness room beyond it sat two families. The mother and sister of a 23-year-old man named Eric Bridgeford. The father and sister of a 34-year-old man named Christopher Thomas. Both families had driven to Huntsville that evening for the same reason. They needed to watch it end. Franklin Alex looked toward the window where his own witnesses sat.
Friends, people who had known him before all of this. And he opened his mouth and spoke his last words on this earth. He said he was not the monster they had painted him to be. He said he had made lots of mistakes that took their son. He said he had messed up and made poor choices. He said he would take it to the grave.
He said he had peace in his heart. At 6:13 in the evening, the drugs entered his system. At 6:20 p.m., 7 minutes later, Franklin DeWayne Alex was pronounced dead. He declined a last meal now. Before we talk about what kind of man ends up strapped to that gurney at 34 years old, before we talk about four murders and two rapes and six-month crime spree that terrorized the southwest side of Houston, Texas, we need to talk about where this story actually begins.
Because the beginning of this story is not a parking lot. It is not a stolen car. It is not a gun. The beginning of this story is a little boy standing in a church choir in Harris County, Texas singing gospel music while the congregation clapped along. That boy’s name was Franklin Dwayne Alex and he was born on August 6th, 1975 in Harris County, Texas.
He grew up in what he himself described as a strict household. His family was serious about their faith. Church was not an occasional Sunday morning obligation in his home. Church was the center of life. The kind of church where you go on Sunday morning, Sunday evening, Wednesday night, and every other occasion the doors are open.
Franklin was not just a face in the pew. He was active. He sang in the choir, which means he rehearsed. He showed up. He stood in front of a congregation and lifted his voice alongside other children and adults who took that music seriously. And he taught Sunday school. Think about what that means. This was a child who stood in front of younger children and taught them scripture, explained right from wrong.
Explained what God expected of the people he made. That is not a boy being dragged reluctantly through religious obligation. That is a boy who was embedded in a moral community, who was trusted with the spiritual education of other children, who by every external measure was being shaped into something good. And then something went wrong.
Something that the official record never fully explains. There is no documented abuse in Franklin Alex’s case file. There is no single traumatic event the courts pointed to. No expert witness who explained on a stand the precise moment the trajectory changed. The record goes quiet on his childhood and picks back up again when he is 17 years old and already in trouble.
That silence, that gap between the choir boy and the criminal, is one of the most disturbing things about this entire case because it offers no comfort. It offers no clean explanation we can point to and say, “Well, it just happened and we have to sit with that.” What we know is this. By the early 1990s, Franklin Alex was a teenager in Houston, Texas and the strict household and the church choir and the Sunday school classroom had not been enough to hold him.
In September of 1992, when Franklin was 17 years old, he decided to steal a bus. Not a car, not a bicycle, a full-size Alamo shuttle bus. He climbed behind the wheel and drove it and when the police spotted him and tried to pull him over, he did not stop. He led them on a 10-minute high-speed chase through the streets of Houston before they finally got him.
Now, in the grand scheme of things, stealing a bus is almost absurd. It sounds like the kind of story that gets told at family gatherings with disbelief and laughter. But the courts did not laugh. They gave Franklin Alex 6 months for theft and sent him home. 6 months. He was 17 and he had led police on a chase in a stolen commercial bus and they gave him 6 months.
The lesson that teaches a 17-year-old is not the lesson the system intended. He served the 6 months and walked out and laid low for about a month because on April 8th, 1993, barely 30 days after his feet hit free ground, Franklin Alex was back at it. This time he drove through a residential neighborhood in Houston and spotted a woman’s car sitting in her driveway.
She was inside her house getting ready to go somewhere. He walked up to her driveway in broad daylight, got in her car, and drove away. The woman came outside, found her car gone, and called the police. Later that same day, Houston police spotted the car with Franklin behind the wheel, pulled him over, and arrested him on the spot.
He had not even made it 24 hours before getting caught. This time, the courts gave him 3 years for unauthorized use of a motor vehicle. He was sent to prison, and he served the full sentence, coming out in 1996 at 20 years old. Here is the thing about those 3 years. Prison did not fix Franklin Alex. It did not break him, either.
It just held him still for a while. Because the moment he got out in 1996, he was back in Houston with no job, no real plan, and a growing appetite for shortcuts. Not long after his release, Houston police stopped him for jaywalking on the street. Jaywalking, one of those laws that exists on the books, but barely anyone enforces.
But the officers who stopped Franklin Alex that day had reason to look closer. And when they searched him, they found an illegal firearm on his person. He was a convicted felon carrying a gun on a public street, and he got 70 days in county jail. 70 days. And then they let him go. You have to understand how significant that is.
Every time the system had a chance to interrupt what was building inside Franklin Alex, it gave him the minimum and turned him loose. 6 months, 3 years, 70 days. Each sentence handed back to the world a man who had learned very little, except that the consequences for his choices were manageable. That you could do the thing and survive the punishment and come back and do the next thing.
The system was not rehabilitating him. It was not deterring him. It was just briefly inconveniencing him between escalations. By 1997, Franklin Alex was 21 years old. He was living in the Sunny Slope area of Southwest Houston. He had no stable employment. According to what he told investigators after his arrest, he had run up a debt of a couple of thousand dollars to a friend.
Money he owed and could not pay back through any legitimate means. He said the debt had gotten out of control and that going out into the streets to get it back the only way he knew how it seemed like the answer. That is the explanation he carried for the rest of his life. A debt. A few thousand dollars. That is what he said launched what came next.
Whether you believe that explanation or not, what happened next is documented in court records across multiple volumes of testimony, forensic evidence, and witness statements. Between August of 1997 and January of 1998, Franklin Dwayne Alex went on one of the most sustained and violent individual crime sprees in Houston’s history.
He was not working with a crew. He was not connected to an organization. He was one man moving alone targeting people who were simply going about their lives in the apartment complexes and residential streets of Southwest Houston. He killed four people. He raped two women. He robbed at least nine individuals at gunpoint.
He shot a security guard in the back and left him for dead. He shot a female security employee in the face. He forced multiple victims into the trunks of their own cars. And he did all of this in 5 months without being caught, moving from complex to complex, neighborhood to neighborhood, always with a gun and always willing to use it.
Let us walk through it, all of it, because the victims in this case deserve more than a list of charges on a court document. August 8th, 1997. Southwest Houston. A man named Gregorio Ramirez was 41 years old. He was going about his life that evening, coming or going from the apartment complex where he lived, doing nothing more than existing in the place where he was supposed to be safe.
When Franklin Alex approached him in the parking lot, Alex had his gun. He told Ramirez to hand over what he had. Ramirez complied. He gave Alex everything on him, and Alex shot him anyway. Gregorio Ramirez died in that parking lot on August 8th, 1997. He was 41 years old. His widow survived him and later identified Franklin Alex as the man who killed her husband.
Gregorio Ramirez was the first person Franklin Alex murdered. He would not be the last. And what tells you everything you need to know about where Franklin Alex’s head was at in that moment is what happened next. He did not run. He did not hide. He did not process what he had just done. 7 days later, he was back on the streets. August 15th, 1997.
1 week after leaving Gregorio Ramirez dead in a parking lot, Franklin Alex drove to a Sunmart gas station in Houston, driving a car he had stolen from someone, and filled up the tank. Then he drove away without paying. Gas was still pump first, pay later in 1997, and drive-offs were common enough that it had not yet changed.
But the owner of this particular station was watching when Alex pulled out of the lot without coming inside. The traffic on the street outside was backed up that day, and Alex had barely gone anywhere before he was stuck behind other cars sitting right in front of the station. The owner walked out. He went up to the car window and told Alex to come back inside and pay for the gas.
Alex got out of the car. The owner probably expected him to follow him back to the register. Instead, Alex drew back and hit the man twice, knocked him down on the pavement in front of his own station, got back in the stolen car, and drove away through the traffic. He left the gas station owner lying in the street.
No gun this time, just fists and a willingness to hurt a man over a tank of gas. September 2nd, 1997. The crimes are getting worse now. Franklin Alex is in the parking lot of yet another apartment complex in Southwest Houston, and he clips a woman’s car as she is pulling in. She gets out of her vehicle the way anyone would get out after being rear-ended, expecting to exchange insurance information, expecting a normal human interaction, expecting the kind of inconvenient but manageable situation that a fender-bender represents.
The moment she stepped out of that car, Franklin Alex grabbed her, threw her down on the concrete, and put his gun to her head. He robbed her of everything she had on her. Then he hit her once. Then he hit her again. She was on the ground screaming, screaming loudly enough that a woman in one of the apartments above heard it and came to her window and shouted down that she was calling the police.
Alex got up off the woman, left her on the pavement with her injuries and her terror, and walked away into the dark. September 29th, 1997. 4 weeks later. Another apartment complex. Another woman pulling into her parking spot and getting out of her car at the end of a normal day. Franklin Alex was waiting in that parking lot.
He came out of the shadows with his gun and forced this woman to get back into her car. Then he made her get into the trunk and he closed the lid on her with her inside. He drove. She was in complete darkness in the trunk of her own vehicle, unable to see, unable to know where she was being taken, able to hear everything and control nothing.
He drove to somewhere secluded, somewhere where there would be no witnesses and no one to hear anything. He stopped the car. He opened the trunk. He pulled her out and he raped her. When he was done, he put her back in the trunk and drove back to the apartment complex, left her in the car, and walked away into the night.
October 5th, 1997. A man named Selamawi Tewolde was at his apartment complex on the southwest side of Houston. His name suggests he was an immigrant, a man who had found his way to America and to Texas and to a life in this city. A man who was as entitled to walk through a parking lot unmolested as anyone else.
Franklin Alex approached him, robbed him at gunpoint, and shot him dead. Selamawi Tewolde became the second person Franklin Alex murdered. He was never tried for this killing. Tewolde’s death appears in the court record as a a phase exhibit. Evidence of the kind of man the jury was dealing with. And then the record moves on. That is nearly all that survives of him in the official documents.
October 13th, 1997, another man, another parking lot, another gun. This time the victim was robbed and left alive. By this point in the spree that counts as a good outcome. November 30th, 1997, a man was getting out of his car at an apartment complex when Alex appeared and robbed him. This time, after the robbery, Alex forced the man into the trunk of his own car and left him there in the parking lot and walked away.
It was not until someone else walked through that parking lot sometime later and heard a man’s voice from inside a car trunk, muffled and panicked, beating against the metal from the inside, that anyone knew to call the police. They came and opened the trunk and the man climbed out. December 6th, 1997. An apartment complex on the southwest side of Houston had a security guard on duty that night.
Top Flight Security is what it was called in the neighborhood. A uniformed guard whose job was to make the residents feel safe. Alex walked up to this security guard and put his gun in the man’s face. The guard, understanding immediately that this was not a situation he was equipped to win, did what his instincts told him to do. He cooperated.
He offered no resistance. When Alex told him to run, the guard turned and ran, and Franklin Alex shot him in the back. Shot a man who was running away from him, who had offered no resistance, who had done exactly what he was told. The guard survived, but only because the bullet did not hit anything it could not miss.
Later that same night, Alex showed up at a different apartment complex and robbed another man at gunpoint before disappearing. December 19th, 1997. Alex broke into the management office of an apartment complex and was going through the desk drawers and filing cabinets when a female security employee walked in on him.
She was just doing her job, making her rounds, when she opened that office door and found him inside. He looked at her and grabbed her and shot her in the face. She went down and she survived. Whatever Franklin Alex thought he had done to her, she lived through it and she was later able to describe what happened.
Two people shot in the face in December of 1997, both left for dead, both miraculously alive. The neighborhood was terrified. People were watching their mirrors in parking lots. Women were calling ahead before leaving buildings at night and the man responsible was still out there, still moving, still choosing targets.
And then came January of 1998. And this is the part of the story where everything collapses into one night and one family and one death sentence. January 3rd, 1998. A Sunday evening in Southwest Houston. A 19-year-old young woman named Carol Bridgeford was coming home. She lived in a townhouse with her parents and her brothers in a neighborhood on the southwest side.
She pulled into her parking spot and was getting out of her car when Franklin Alex stepped out of the dark. He had his gun. He pointed it at her and told her to get in the trunk. She was 19 years old, alone in a parking lot with a gun in her face and she did the only thing she could do. She got in the trunk. He closed it.
In total darkness in the trunk of her own car, Carol could feel every turn and every stop as Alex drove. He stopped somewhere and opened the trunk and demanded money. He wanted her to take him to an ATM. She told him the truth. Her cards were maxed out. She had no money available. She could not remember her PIN even if she did. She was trying to think.
Trying to survive. She told him that if he took her back to her house, he could take whatever he wanted. Electronics, televisions, anything in the apartment that he could pawn for cash. She was negotiating for her life with whatever she had available. But before he drove her back home, Alex stopped the car somewhere away from witnesses.
He opened that trunk. He pulled Carol Bridgeford out of it, and he raped her. A 19-year-old woman who had done nothing except come home on a Sunday evening. When it was over, he put her back in the trunk and drove to her family’s townhouse. He pulled her out of the trunk in front of her own home. He put the gun in her face and looked her in the eyes and told her directly, “Do you see this? Anything goes wrong in here, and I will kill you and anyone else in the house.
” Then he walked her through the front door of her own family’s home and began going through the rooms. Two televisions, a VCR, a Nintendo, stereo equipment. He was piling up what he could carry when the front door opened. Carol’s brother Eric Bridgeford came home. He was 23 years old, and he walked into his family’s townhouse and found a man with a gun loading their belongings into bags while his sister stood in the room looking like everything had already been taken from her.
Eric had a friend with him. Both of them saw the gun. Both of them ran. Eric ran out of the house and into the street and Franklin Alex went after him. He caught up with Eric Bridgeford outside in the street and he shot him once in the back. Eric hit the ground. He died from that single bullet. He was 23 years old. His friend got away.
Franklin Alex left Eric Bridgeford dying in the street, went back and finished loading what he could carry, and drove away. Later that same night he robbed someone else. He simply moved on to the next one. January 4th, 1998. The morning after killing Eric Bridgeford, Franklin Alex started the day by robbing a man who was walking into his own townhouse.
Just a man trying to get inside his front door who found a gun in his face instead. Alex took what he had and left him alive. That afternoon, a 34-year-old man named Christopher Thomas was sitting in his car in his driveway. He was listening to music. Just sitting with the radio on, maybe decompressing after a long day, enjoying a few quiet minutes before going inside.
Franklin Alex appeared at his car window and demanded his money. Christopher Thomas told him the truth. All he had was his keys. His wallet was inside the house. Alex shot him. Christopher Thomas died in his own driveway, in his own car, listening to music. When police arrested Franklin Alex two days later on January 6th, 1998, Christopher Thomas’s chain was still hanging around Alex’s neck.
Houston police arrested Alex on January 6th. They searched him. The chain was right there. They brought him to the station and sat him in front of a camera, and Franklin Alex confessed on video to killing Eric Bridgeford. He told them where he had hidden the gun. They went and found it. A ballistics expert matched the bullet recovered from Eric’s body to that weapon.
The case was built in days. The state of Texas announced it would seek the death penalty. While he sat in county jail waiting for trial, Alex got into fights with two different inmates, one in April and one in May of 1998. He was moved into isolation. The man could not stop. The trial opened in August of 1998 in Harris County.
Prosecutor Vanessa Velasquez stood before the jury with a case that was almost too complete. She had a survivor, Carol Bridgeford, who had been in that trunk, who had been raped, who had watched her brother go to the door and not come home. She had a videotaped confession. She had the murder weapon with a ballistics match.
She called Franklin Alex the poster boy for the death penalty. She was not being dramatic. She was reading the record. Alex’s defense tried to argue that the sex with Carol was consensual. That the electronics were gifts. That Eric had charged at him and the gun went off by accident. He was looking to rob, he said, not to kill. But once you put yourself in a situation like that, things happen.
You play with a gun, somebody gets killed. That was the argument. And while his lawyers were making it, Alex was disrupting the courtroom with outbursts from the defense table. The judge had him removed at one point. The trial continued without him. The jury watched the outbursts. They listened to the defense.
They deliberated for 5 hours and on August 26th, 1998, they found him guilty of capital murder on all counts. The sentencing phase put the full 6 months of carnage in front of that same jury. Every victim, every crime, the four murders, the two rapes, the nine robberies, the kidnappings. The security guard shot in the back, the female employee shot in the face.
All of it laid out in sequence. The defense called witnesses who said Franklin had been a good kid, that he had been kind. That the person being described in that courtroom did not match the boy they had known. The jury deliberated 3 hours. On September 2nd, 1998, they sentenced Franklin DeWayne Alex to death. He was 23 years old.
He went to death row at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas. Inmate 999286. And he sat there for 12 years while the appeals process moved through its stages. In 2003, a major scandal hit the Houston Police Department Crime Lab. An independent audit found that employees were under trained, documentation was unreliable, and DNA samples across dozens of cases had been contaminated.
Out of 102 samples retested during the investigation, 23 produced results that contradicted the original findings. In Alex’s case, the DNA that had been used to connect him to Gregorio Ramirez’s murder came back ambiguous on retest. The original chemist’s testimony was ruled unreliable by the trial court in post-conviction proceedings.
His attorneys pushed hard. They argued the contaminated evidence had tainted the sentencing phase and that without it, the jury might have weighed his future dangerousness differently. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reviewed it. The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals reviewed it at the federal level. Both courts said the same thing.
It did not matter. The rest of the evidence, the confession, the weapon, the surviving victims, the chain still around his neck when they arrested him, 12 other documented violent crimes was so overwhelming that no reasonable jury would have returned a different sentence based on the DNA question alone. Every appeal was denied.
In the months before the execution date, Alex gave a final interview to the Associated Press from his death row cell. He was quieter than he had been in that courtroom 12 years earlier. He said he knew he had messed up. He said they had made him look like a drug-crazed addict in court, and that if he had not known himself and had seen that portrayal, he would have hated himself, too.
He admitted to killing Eric Bridgford. He still said the gun went off when Eric came at him. He denied the rapes. He denied the other murders. He said a debt had spiraled out of control, and he had gone into the streets to fix it the only way he knew how. He said he had wanted to do right by his life. He said the wrong crowd had gotten hold of him.
He declined a last meal. On the evening of March 30th, 2010, the families of Eric Bridgford and Christopher Thomas sat in the witness room at the Huntsville Unit and watched the curtain open. Alex spoke his last words, told them he was not a monster, told them he had peace. So, 7 minutes later, he was gone. Eric’s mother, Janie Bridgford, stood outside afterward and told reporters that their lives were forever changed, but that they needed to go on.
She said it was hard and that she had taken no pleasure in what she watched. She said she had forgiven him. She said she had not expected a verbal apology and understood he might never come clean about everything. Christopher Thomas’s sister, Frenalifa Jolivet, stood beside her and said she had to accept it and forgive it in order to find peace.
She said, “If you do not forgive, it will consume you. It will eat you alive.” Four people dead. Gregorio Ramirez, 41 years old, shot in a parking lot on August 8th, 1997. Selamawit Wold, shot and killed on October 5th, 1997. Eric Bridgeford, 23 years old, shot in the back outside his family’s home on January 3rd, 1998. Christopher Thomas, 34 years old, shot in his own driveway on January 4th, 1998.
All of them ordinary people. All of them in the wrong place when a man with a gun and no brakes on his worst instincts came looking for someone to take from. And the question that sits at the center of this case, the question that has no clean answer, is the one this story started with.
Franklin Alex sang in that choir. He taught those Sunday school classes. He stood in that church and he knew the words and he meant them at one point in his life or he would not have been trusted with the spiritual education of other children. So, what happened? Was the church life a mask that was never real? Was there something in his home or in his circumstances that the record simply never captured? Was it the drug, the the fluid laced marijuana they called fly in Houston that finally dissolved whatever internal limit he had left. Or is the answer the
most unsettling one of all? That sometimes a person simply becomes what they become and no choir and no Sunday school and no strict household is strong enough to stop it. I want to know what you think. Leave your answer in the comments. I will be reading every single one.
