Jail Break Leader Gets Death Penalty

The ringleader of the biggest prison breakout in Texas history was sentenced to death Wednesday after unexpectedly pleading with a jury to give him the death penalty for killing a policeman while on the run.

“I don’t want to just exist anymore like an animal in prison,” George Rivas, 31, said in a courtroom filled with relatives of the slain officer. A jury had found Rivas guilty of murder Aug. 21.

The jury took less than two hours to grant Rivas’ wish.

Rivas was the first of the seven escaped convicts to be tried in the slaying of Irving Officer Aubrey Hawkins, who was shot 11 times and run over twice during a holdup Christmas Eve at a Dallas-area sporting goods store.

The slaying took place two weeks after the inmates broke out of a maximum-security prison.

Rivas’ attorneys had been trying to get him a life sentence, saying he never intended to murder Hawkins. But as the penalty phase wrapped up Wednesday, Rivas, in a surprise twist, asked the jury to give him a death sentence.

“What you call the death penalty, I call freedom,” he said, speaking haltingly. “I can finally be free. I’m telling you right now I don’t want another life sentence.”

After the verdict was read, Hawkins’ wife and mother told Rivas he had destroyed their lives and that of the officer’s young son, Andrew. Both demanded that he look directly at them.

“You sit there with no remorse on your face and you make me sick,” said the officer’s sobbing wife, Lori Hawkins. “I will never forgive you. You will never take back what you’ve done to my life and Andrew’s. The day that you die I will be there to watch you die the way you watched Aubrey die.”

The Dec. 13 breakout near San Antonio touched off a nationwide manhunt. Never before had so many inmates actually made it outside the walls of a Texas prison during a breakout.

The gang allegedly committed three armed robberies, including the one in Irving where Hawkins was shot. Rivas testified that he never intended to kill Hawkins and tried to limit bloodshed.

The gang was caught in Colorado.