After spending 12 years on death row, Cedric Allen Ricks was finally executed on March 11th, 2026, shortly after 6:00 p.m. at the Huntsville unit in Texas by lethal injection. Stay until the end because in this video, I will tell you about the terrible crime that led him to be sentenced to death, how his execution was carried out, what his last meal was, and what his final words were before he died.

Cedric Allen Ricks was born on September 8th, 1974 in Chicago. In his adult life, he projected an image of stability working in the field of construction management. However, his problematic behavior had begun much earlier. When he was between 8 and 9 years old, he was already experiencing serious problems at school  due to episodes of aggression.

Despite these early issues, over the years, he managed to receive professional training in the healthcare field, where he worked for a period of time in the state of Illinois. After losing his job and his home during the financial crisis that affected Illinois, Ricks decided to move to Texas in search of new opportunities.

There, he began working again in the healthcare sector, this time in the city of Bedford. It was there that he met Roxanne Diane Sanchez, a medical assistant who worked at an obstetrics and gynecology clinic called The Women’s Group. Over time, they began to develop a friendship. At that moment, Roxanne was married, but as time passed, her marriage deteriorated and she eventually separated from her husband.

Shortly afterward, Cedric and Roxanne began dating. According to people close to the couple, >>  >> the attraction between them was immediate and the relationship progressed quickly. It did not take long before they made their relationship official. In many ways, the relationship seemed like something out of a movie.

 A story that, at least on the surface, appeared to be a dream. Cedric presented himself as a man very different from Roxanne’s ex-husband. He was not jealous, and he appeared loving, attentive, and affectionate. The relationship progressed until Ricks moved into Roxanne’s apartment in the Colonial Village complex.

 There, he became part of the household where she was already raising her two older sons, Marcus  and Anthony. At that time, Ricks assured her that he would raise the boys as if they were his own. Under the laws of the state of Texas, their relationship was legally recognized as a common-law marriage. But once Ricks seemed to have everything Roxanne could offer, his attitude began to change completely.

Shortly afterward, he started showing increasingly controlling behavior. He tried to isolate Roxanne from her closest friends,  began to show constant jealousy, and adopted a dominant attitude within the relationship. Despite this situation, Roxanne became pregnant by Cedric, and in 2012, their son,  Isaiah Cedric, was born.

The arrival of the child created hope for the couple, who believed this new chapter might improve their relationship. However, the conflicts only intensified. The arguments became more frequent, and Cedric’s behavior grew more aggressive. Over time, episodes of physical abuse began, to the point that he started hitting Roxanne.

Eventually, after reaching that limit, Roxanne decided to end the relationship and requested an emergency protective order against him. The night of May 1st, 2013, would become a decisive moment. Around 8:00 p.m., Cedric Allen Ricks, who was 38 years old at the time, was at the Colonial Village Apartment Complex, the same place where he had lived with Roxanne just months earlier.

That day, he arrived at the apartment without warning, completely ignoring the protective order Roxanne had obtained against him. Ricks went there looking for her, but when he realized that Roxanne was not in the apartment, he erupted in anger. Convinced by intense and unjustified jealousy that she was seeing someone else, he became increasingly agitated.

Shortly afterward, Roxanne returned to the apartment complex. She had just finished doing the month’s grocery shopping at Walmart with her three children, Marcus, Anthony, and the baby Isaiah. Cedric was waiting for her outside the complex, since he no longer had the new keys to the apartment.

 From the exterior stairs, he began shouting insults at her. The situation was intense enough that a neighbor heard the shouting and noticed Roxanne’s distress as she quickly entered the apartment with her children. Inside apartment 1400, the children went into a bedroom while Roxanne carried the grocery bags inside. From outside, Cedric continued shouting.

As he approached the apartment, the insults  did not stop. When Roxanne tried to close the door, Ricks stopped her by placing his foot in the doorway to prevent it from closing. At that moment, the situation quickly escalated into a physical fight in the living room where both began hitting each other.

The confrontation ended when  Ricks pushed her to the floor and began punching her while manually strangling her. Hearing the screams, Roxanne’s older sons, Anthony and Marcus, came out of the bedroom to try to intervene and break up the fight. The two boys jumped on Cedric from behind, hitting him in an attempt to stop the attack on their mother.

However, Ricks pushed both of them to the floor and continued beating Roxanne with blunt force, causing severe head trauma until she was left motionless on the floor. In a particularly brutal moment, Ricks paused briefly and looked at the scene. The children on the floor crying and Roxanne lying motionless. He then stood up and walked to the kitchen where he took a knife from a drawer.

He returned to the living room and began  stabbing Roxanne repeatedly, inflicting a fatal wound to her neck that severed her cervical spine. >>  >> In total, he attacked her with around 30 stab wounds. While Anthony and Marcus watched in horror, Anthony,  the younger son who was only 8 years old, in a desperate act of love for his mother, lunged at Ricks in an attempt to stop him and defend her.

Ricks turned on the boy, pushed him to the floor, and began stabbing and cutting him more than 40 times. One of the wounds penetrated his skull and reached the temporal lobe of his brain. Before dying, Anthony made a sound described as a gurgle caused by hemorrhagic asphyxiation, and he died beside the couch.

Marcus, the older son, ran in terror to his bedroom. There, he hid inside the closet and called 911 with his cell phone. But Ricks forced the door open. Marcus dropped the phone, and when Ricks tried to attack him with the knife, the boy  grabbed the blade with his hands to defend himself, suffering severe cuts.

Ricks chased him back into the living room, knocked him down, and began stabbing him repeatedly, inflicting around 25 stab wounds to the back of his neck, head, chest, back,  and hands. In an extreme act of survival, Marcus decided to remain completely  still, pretending to be dead. Ricks finally stopped attacking him, believing the boy was dying or already dead.

While all of this was happening, the couple’s baby, Isaiah, remained unharmed in his crib. After the attacks, Ricks showed calculated coldness. He went to the kitchen where he washed his hands that were covered in cuts. He then showered in the main bathroom, changed into clean clothes, bandaged his wounds, and packed a suitcase with some belongings.

Before fleeing, he picked up the baby, kissed him, spent a moment playing with him, and finally placed the baby back in his crib before leaving the scene in Roxanne’s car, also taking her cell phone. Police took approximately an hour to arrive at the apartment. It appears that Marcus did not have enough time to provide a full address to the 911 operator during the emergency call.

By the time officers finally arrived at the scene, Cedric Ricks had already fled. While driving along the highway, Ricks called a cousin and told her, “I just messed everything up.” He then added,  “I killed Roxanne and her two sons.” He then asked her to go to the apartment to get the baby.

 He also told her that his hands were full of cuts because of all the stabbings. When his cousin insisted that he should turn himself in to the police, Ricks replied that he would rather die than go to prison. After ending the call,  the woman immediately contacted 911 and told authorities everything Ricks had confessed to her.

Once at the scene, Bedford police found Marcus bleeding heavily near the door of the apartment. Because of the severity of his injuries, he was urgently airlifted to Cook Children’s Medical Center where he eventually made a full recovery from his wounds. Baby Isaiah was found unharmed in his crib.

 Meanwhile, investigators issued a nationwide report for the stolen vehicle belonging to Roxanne. With the help of the phone company Sprint, they were able to track Ricks’s cell phone and determine that he was traveling through the area of Ardmore, Oklahoma. Local authorities in Oklahoma were alerted. Around 10:30 that same night, approximately 3 hours after the crime in Texas, state troopers located the vehicle and conducted a traffic stop without incident.

 Cedric Ricks was arrested at that moment and later transported to a hospital due to the severe cuts on his hands. During the following weeks, Ricks tried to avoid his extradition back to Texas, but authorities eventually managed to transfer him. Before that happened, while he remained detained in a jail in Oklahoma, he was attacked by other inmates and severely beaten, which forced officials to transfer him once again to a hospital.

When he finally returned to Texas, he requested to be housed in a single cell with little or no contact with other prisoners because he feared for his life. Official reports never fully clarified why he was attacked inside the Oklahoma jail. Ricks was charged with two counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder.

>>  >> Ricks decided to testify in his own defense. He admitted to the killings, but claimed he acted in a rage he could not control, and falsely alleged that the children had attacked him first with a knife, forcing him to defend himself. One year later, on May 8th, 2014, a jury found him guilty of capital murder, and on May 16th, he was sentenced to death.

Since then, he has remained on death row in Texas. In total, he spent nearly 12 years there, a relatively short period compared to many other cases where the average time on death row is often around 30 years. Finally, in October 2025, a court order set the execution date for Cedric Allan Ricks, establishing that the sentence would be carried out on Wednesday, March 11th, 2026.

Ricks woke up at 6:00 a.m., took a shower, and had a spiritual visit. He was then given the standard prison meal. According to reports, he appeared somewhat nervous about the time of his execution. So, at 2:00 p.m., he was given a tranquilizer to help him remain calm and cooperate with the execution process.

At 5:30 p.m., he was transferred to the execution chamber, where he was strapped to the gurney and the intravenous lines were placed in his arms. Witnesses were then brought into the viewing area. At 6:00 p.m., the execution began. When the lethal drugs were administered, Ricks appeared to complain or show signs of discomfort for around 30 seconds before his body gradually became still.

At 6:14 p.m., Cedric Allen Ricks was officially pronounced dead. Ricks did not give any final words before his execution. According to press reports, Marcus, the boy who survived the attack, went to live with his biological father. Meanwhile,  the baby Isaiah Ricks was placed in the custody of his maternal grandparents, Roxanne’s  parents.

They publicly stated that they plan to adopt him and legally change his last name so that he would carry their family name. And this is today’s video. Let me know what you  think about this case in the comments.