A Baldwin County man is on death row for the 1996 murder of an off-duty state parole officer. Robert Earl Butts is scheduled to die by lethal injection Thursday night.
Investigators say in March 1996, Butts and another man, Marion Wilson, asked Donovan Parks for a ride at a local Walmart.
Parks drove them to Felton Street in Baldwin County and the men shot him once in the back of the head. Then, Wilson and Butts drove away and torched Parks' car.
"It troubled me, I had to write about it, I had to talk to people about it," says Thomas Collins, a friend and former classmate of Parks. "Someone I knew intimately ceased to exist very abruptly."
In 1996, the Baldwin County Sheriff's office said Parks' murder appeared to be a gang initiation.
Both men were convicted and sentenced to death and they've both lost several appeals.
"If I could go to the prison and give them a dose of truth serum, I would ask him, 'Why did you kill Donovan? Why didn't you break into a businesses and steal something? Why did you have to take a man's life?'" says Collins.
No execution date has been set for Wilson. Butts is scheduled to die Thursday night, but that could change.
Tuesday, Butts' lawyers filed a clemency petition arguing that false testimony put him on death row and that Wilson is the one who pulled the trigger.