Nation IN BRIEF : TEXAS : Practical Joker Gets Death for 2 Murders
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From Times Staff and Wire Reports
A 35-year-old man, whose idea of a joke was to remove the screws from his disabled mother’s crutches, was sentenced to death for the Christmas Eve, 1987, murders of a friend and the man’s 4-month-old son, in a rampage that also left two other people dead. A witness testified that James Eugene Bigby of Kennedale, Tex., had laughed when the defective crutches caused his mother to fall. Last week, Bigby had grabbed a gun from a courtroom desk drawer and held it to the judge’s head before he was subdued.
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