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Jury Sentences Jason Thornburg to Death for Killing Three People in a Euless Motel Room

Thornburg called David Lueras, Maricruz Mathis and Lauren Phillips sacrifices and burned their remains in a Fort Worth dumpster in 2021, prosecutors said.

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Jason Thornburg escorted into a Tarrant County courtroom

A Tarrant County jury sentenced Jason Alan Thornburg to death on Wednesday, December 4, 2024, for killing three people in a motel room in Euless, Texas, cutting their bodies apart and burning what was left of them in a Fort Worth dumpster. The jurors, who had convicted him of capital murder in November, began deliberating that afternoon and returned shortly after 4 p.m. They chose death over life in prison without parole. He was 44.

The victims were David Lueras, 42, Maricruz Mathis, 33, and Lauren Phillips, 34. According to the Tarrant County District Attorney's office, Thornburg said in September 2021 that the three needed to be sacrificed for religious reasons. Over seven days at the Mid City Inn in Euless, he brought each of them separately into the room he was renting. Prosecutors said he slit the throats of Lueras and Mathis and strangled Phillips, then mutilated the bodies, ate part of Lueras's heart and sexually assaulted Phillips's remains. He cut the bodies apart in the motel bathtub and kept the remains in trash bags under his bed.

Early on September 22, 2021, the district attorney's office says, he carried the remains in plastic storage tubs to a dumpster on Bonnie Drive in Fort Worth, set them on fire and drove away. Then he cleaned the tubs and returned them to the store where he had bought them. Firefighters put out the fire, and police traced Thornburg through video that caught his Jeep Grand Cherokee in the area at the time. Before the killings, the office said, he could be seen reading the Bible in a chair outside his room.

That faith was at the center of both sides' closing arguments. Prosecutors said he told investigators he had been called by a higher power to "commit sacrifices," and they argued he used scripture to disarm vulnerable people. "He will be the friend who gives you a place to sleep, right before he cuts your throat," said Assistant District Attorney Amy Allin. The defense called its last witness that morning, Thornburg's uncle, who described his upbringing on a Navajo reservation and his mother's drug addiction while she was pregnant with him. Defense attorney J. Warren St. John told the jury that Thornburg was mentally ill and believed he was doing right. "It's the voices he heard, which are not justified, they are evil… but he believed it was correct," he said. Prosecutors answered by reading Thornburg's own words about why he had used a knife instead of his chainsaw and how he had planned to move the bodies, and they told jurors he had still been making weapons in his cell while the jury was being chosen. "There is no answer for justice (in this case) other than the death penalty," Assistant District Attorney Kim D'Avignon said. "I will never say that lightly."

The families spoke after the sentence was read. "The life of my brother is precious… and it was snuffed out by Jason Thornburg in 2021," said Lauren Dunfee, Lueras's sister. Norma Harris, Mathis's sister, told him that Mathis would never see her son graduate from high school. "I just don't see what she did to deserve what you've done to her," she said. Phillips's aunt, Debra Curry, remembered her niece as "a giggler" who could make anyone laugh, the first grandchild in the family and her parents' only child.

The jury also heard during the punishment phase about two other killings for which Thornburg was not on trial. Police say he confessed to murdering his roommate, Mark Jewell, in May 2021, and his girlfriend, Tanya Begay, in Arizona in 2017. Begay's cousin, Jackie Reynolds, who grew up with her on the Navajo reservation, told the court the family still did not know where she was. Begay was a mother and a grandmother. "In the end, you are just a man. Nothing powerful," Reynolds told him.

The deaths of Mark Jewell and Tanya Begay are described here only as police say Thornburg confessed to them; he was not on trial for either in this case. Some reports spell Maricruz Mathis's surname "Matthis"; this story follows the district attorney's spelling.

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