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Alabama Executes Demetrius Frazier With Nitrogen Gas for the 1991 Murder of Pauline Brown

Frazier, sentenced to life in Michigan for the 1992 murder of 14-year-old Crystal Kendrick, was put to death at Holman prison in Atmore on February 6, 2025.

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Illustration: empty prison visiting room with phone booths and glass partitions

Alabama put Demetrius Frazier to death on the evening of February 6, 2025, at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, more than three decades after he shot Pauline Brown in her Birmingham apartment. Attorney General Steve Marshall cleared the execution to begin at 6:10 p.m., and Frazier was pronounced dead at 6:36. He was 52. Alabama had now carried out four executions with nitrogen gas, and his was the fourth in the nation by that method.

Brown was 41. Prosecutors said Frazier, then 19, broke into her apartment in November 1991 while she was asleep, demanded money and raped her at gunpoint after she gave him $80 from her purse, then shot her in the head. In the attorney general's account, he had seen a light in her ground-floor apartment, removed the screen and let himself in, and before leaving with less than $100 he stopped to eat bananas in her kitchen.

Brown was not his first victim, or his last. According to the attorney general's office, Frazier had raped a woman in her Detroit home that September and then left Michigan, apparently for California, before ending up in Birmingham. Back in Detroit in the early morning hours of March 8, 1992, the office says, he forced 14-year-old Crystal Kendrick into a vacant house at gunpoint. When she ran, he chased her across the street and shot her in the head. A passing driver found her body.

He was arrested in Detroit a few days later. While he was being questioned, the attorney general's office says, he confessed to killing Brown, and he confessed again in a recorded statement to a Birmingham detective who traveled to Michigan to interview him. In 1993 he was convicted in Michigan of the crimes against Kendrick and the Detroit woman and received four life sentences. An Alabama jury later convicted him of capital murder in Brown's death and recommended, by a vote of 10 to 2, that he be sentenced to death. He stayed in Michigan until 2011, when, under an agreement between the governors of the two states, he was moved to Alabama's death row.

That arrangement became the center of his last fight. Frazier's mother and death penalty opponents asked Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to take him back to serve his life sentence in a state that has no death penalty. Whitmer told The Detroit News before the execution that her predecessor, Rick Snyder, had "unfortunately" agreed to send Frazier to Alabama and that the matter was in the hands of officials there. A federal judge had refused the week before to block the execution after defense attorneys argued that the method did not work as quickly as the state had promised. Marshall called the push to return him to Michigan "antics" and said they were unsuccessful.

Hours before the execution, Frazier visited with his mother, his sister and his legal team. In his final words he said, "First of all, I want to apologize to the family and friends of Pauline Brown. What happened to Pauline Brown should have never happened." He criticized Whitmer for failing to step in and suggested that his confession to the Michigan girl's killing was false. He finished, "I love everybody on death row. Detroit Strong."

After the execution began at about 6:10, Frazier, strapped to the gurney with a gas mask covering his entire face, moved his outstretched palms in slow circles for a minute or two. At 6:12 he grimaced, quivered and took a gasping breath, and a minute later he raised both legs off the gurney. His breathing slowed to sporadic breaths, and by about 6:21 he had stopped moving. Corrections Commissioner John Hamm said the gas flowed for about 18 minutes, that instruments showed no heartbeat 13 minutes after it began, and that he believed Frazier lost consciousness quickly and that the later movements were involuntary.

Some of Brown's relatives watched the execution and declined to speak to reporters. "For more than three decades, the family of Pauline Brown has waited for justice. Tonight, that wait is over," Marshall said. Gov. Kay Ivey said, "Rapists and murderers are not welcome on our streets, and tonight, justice was carried out for Pauline Brown and her loved ones."

The attorney general's office dates Brown's murder to November 26, 1991, and says Frazier was tried in Birmingham in 1995. The Associated Press, citing prosecutors, gives November 27, 1991, and reports that an Alabama jury convicted him in 1996. Neither the day of the killing nor the year of the trial is settled here.

Sources