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Texas Executes Daniel Hittle, a Paroled Murderer, for Killing a Garland Police Officer

Hittle, 50, had served eleven years for murder in Minnesota. He was put to death for shooting Officer Gerald Walker during a 1989 traffic stop.

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Illustration of a man walking past a brick prison wall in a small Texas town at dusk. Not an actual scene from the case.

Daniel Joe Hittle had already served eleven years in a Minnesota prison for murder when, five years after his parole, he shot a police officer on a street in Garland, Texas. On Wednesday, December 6, 2000, the state of Texas executed him for that killing by lethal injection in Huntsville. He was 50.

Officer Gerald Walker, 48, had been with the Garland police for seventeen years. On November 15, 1989, he stopped Hittle for speeding near the intersection of Saturn Road and Lexington Drive and was shot and killed. Officers chased Hittle's vehicle and ran it off the road. According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Hittle fired at least two shots at the officers, fell to the ground with his hands beneath him, refused orders to show them, and gave up only after a police dog was sent in twice.

Walker was not the only person who died that day. Hittle was accused of killing five people on November 15, 1989, among them a 4-year-old girl, but he was tried only for the officer's death. He was convicted in Dallas County and arrived on death row on August 16, 1990, at the age of 40. Before Texas, there was Minnesota, where he was convicted of murder and served eleven years, from 1973 to 1984, before he won parole.

His last statement, as the prison system recorded it, was three words: "Santajaib Singh Ji."

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