A Texas man convicted of killing a pastor in his own church during a robbery, days after being released from a court-order anger-management program, is slated to be executed Wednesday.
Steven Lawayne Nelson was sentenced to death for the 2011 murder of Rev. Clint Dobson, 28, who was beaten, strangled and suffocated with a plastic bag inside NorthPointe Baptist Church in Arlington. Nelson allegedly suffocated Dobson by putting a plastic bag over his head as he was sitting in his office writing a sermon.
He was captured after going on a shopping spree using the victims’ stolen credit cards, Fox Dallas reported.
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“It is hard for me to fathom that you did what you did for a car and a laptop and a phone,” Dobson’s father-in-law, Phillip Rozeman, said in a statement after the sentencing. “The world is going to miss a leader. It’s sad to know all the people that won’t be helped because Clint is not here.”
Nelson is expected to receive a lethal injection Wednesday evening at the state penitentiary in Huntsville.
Three days before the killing, Nelson was released from a court-ordered anger-management program as part of a deal with Dallas County prosecutors after he was arrested for aggravated assault on his girlfriend.
Nelson previously served prison time for theft, and spent much of his teen years in juvenile facilities after committing various crimes.
After the sentencing for Dobson’s killing, he was accused of angrily breaking a sprinkler head in his holding cell, which flooded the courtroom.
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He also regularly unshackled his handcuffs and ankle restraints by using a key he was hiding in his genitals.
In addition, while awaiting trial, he was indicted for allegedly killing another inmate. He was never charged after receiving the death sentence for the Dobson murder.
During his murder trial, Nelson testified that he waited outside the church for about 25 minutes before going in and seeing that Dobson and Judy Elliott had been beaten. He insisted Dobson was still alive.
Nelson said he took Dobson’s laptop and that one of the other two men who participated in the robbery gave him Elliott’s car keys and credit cards.
The victims were later found by Elliott’s husband, the church’s part-time music minister, who didn’t immediately recognize her because she had been so severely beaten.
Despite his insistence that he merely acted as lookout, prosecutors presented evidence of Nelson’s fingerprints and pieces of his broken belt at the crime scene and drops of the victims’ blood on his sneakers.
His attorneys appealed the conviction, claiming he had bad legal representation at his trial, saying they failed to challenge the alibis of the two other men and didn’t present mitigating evidence of a troubled childhood in Oklahoma and Texas.
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