You know, some of the things I was doing in the world and I’m I’ve been a gang member all my life. And so I’m like on a collision course for death out there and not caring. Uh I think that if I would have never came to death row I wouldn’t be the individual I am today. I wouldn’t be as mature. I wouldn’t be able to like uh explain to my daughters life like the appreciation of it cuz I didn’t have any appreciation for life.
Uh I wouldn’t be able to uh explain to them that there’s a world out there and not just a city, you know. Uh I wouldn’t have been able to do any any of that without death row. After spending more than 12 years on death row, Christopher Anthony Young was executed in the Texas death chamber on July 17th, 2018. In this video, we are going to cover his crimes, his last words, and his last meal.
But to understand why the state of Texas had to put a 34-year-old man to death, we have to go back. We have to go all the way back to the beginning because this story does not start in a convenience store. It does not start with a gun or a trigger or a pool of blood spreading across a tile floor.
This story starts with a little boy in San Antonio, Texas who could hear a musical note once and play it back perfectly on the violin. A boy who moved chess pieces across a board with the kind of quiet confidence that made adults stop and stare. A boy who had every reason to become something extraordinary. And then his father was murdered and everything that followed, the gang, the violence, the drugs, the women he hurt, the man he killed, the 12 years he spent trying to become someone different, and the needle that ended it all.
Everything traces back to that one moment. An 8-year-old boy standing in the ruins of the only stability he had ever known with no one to pull him back from the edge. This is the story of Christopher Young. And I want you to stay with me until the end because this one is going to challenge you.
It is going to make you angry. It’s going to break your heart and it is going to leave you with a question that doesn’t have an easy answer. Drop a comment when we get there. I want to know what you think. Christopher Anthony Young came into this world already carrying weight he didn’t ask for. He was born the second child of a mother who had her first two babies before she turned 18.
Stability was not something the family had in abundance. His mother moved between San Antonio and Wisconsin cycling through relationships, uprooting the children each time, carrying everyone forward on sheer survival instinct. It was not a peaceful childhood, but there was one constant. One thing that made Christopher feel like the ground was solid beneath his feet.
His father, Willard Young. When Christopher was in San Antonio, he got to be with Willard. And Willard was different from the chaos around them. He was Christopher’s anchor, the one person who made the boy feel seen, feel safe, feel like the world had a place in it specifically for him. Christopher thrived around his father.
That was where the violin came out, where the chessboard came out, where the quiet, curious, brilliant version of this child got to exist. In 1991, Christopher Young was 8 years old. Willard Young was shot and killed on the street allegedly during a drug deal tied to his gang affiliations. He died the way so many men in that world die, suddenly, violently, with no warning and no goodbye.
Christopher was not there when it happened. But the impact hit him like a physical force. The anchor was gone. The ground disappeared, and nobody, not a counselor, not a teacher, not a family member with the right tools, nobody sat that little boy down and helped him process what had just happened to him. He was just supposed to keep going.
And so he did. But the direction he went in was the only one that made sense to a grieving child with no guidance and no protection. He started looking for a father figure anywhere he could find one. He found one in an uncle who ran with a gang. That uncle was eventually sentenced to 50 years in prison for murdering a rival gang member.
But before that happened, he had already done his damage. Christopher followed him in, and there is something else that came out in court records that the public coverage of this case largely glossed over. Christopher’s childhood was not just shaped by his father’s death. It was shaped by abuse inside the home.
Court records and family testimony revealed that one of his mother’s former partners had raped Christopher’s sister. Another had abused Christopher himself. This was not a household insulated from violence. Violence was the weather in that home. It was what the air felt like. And a child who grows up inside that weather learns to carry it, to absorb it, to eventually become it.
Not because he is broken beyond repair, but because no one ever showed him another way. By the time Christopher was 12 years old, the Bloods had claimed him. The red bandana wasn’t glamorous to him. It wasn’t about looking tough or impressing girls. It was a family. It was a set of rules that brought order to a world that had felt disordered since the day his father died.
It was older men who looked at him and said, “We see you. You matter. You belong here.” For a boy who had been starved of exactly that, it was irresistible. His teacher saw what was happening and felt helpless. They remembered him as one of the sharpest minds they had encountered. The violin, the cello, the bass, he could hear something once and reproduce it.
The chess, he played at a level that surprised adults who had been playing for decades. There was a version of Christopher Young who could have gone to college, who could have been an artist or a musician or a scholar. That version was still in there, but talent needs air to breathe and Christopher was suffocating. He dropped out after ninth grade.
His record began to accumulate the way these records do, slowly at first, then all at once. Marijuana possession, evading arrest. Three separate convictions for assault with bodily injury and according to testimony presented at his capital murder trial, he had assaulted and injured his own mother twice while he was still a juvenile.
His own mother, the woman who had carried him, who had tried in her fractured way to hold the family together. He put his hands on her. That tells you who Christopher Young was becoming by the time he reached adulthood. Not a misunderstood kid who made one bad choice. A young man with a deepening pattern of violence, a pattern that had already touched the people closest to him before it ever touched a stranger.
And it was about to touch someone very close to him in the worst possible way. Her name was Challa Riley. She was his girlfriend in 2004 and by September of that year, she was eight months pregnant with his child. Eight months pregnant. Her body was carrying a life that was half his. And Christopher Young beat her.
He beat a woman who was eight months pregnant with his baby. She stayed. Women in those situations often do for reasons that are complicated and human and deserve more understanding than judgment. But she eventually reached her limit. The night before everything fell apart, the night of November 20th, 2004, Challa told Christopher it was over.
She was done. She was leaving him. He’d beat her again. That is the man who woke up on the morning of November 21st, 2004. Not the prodigy, not the potential. A 21-year-old with bloodshot eyes and cocaine and alcohol flooding his system, who had just beaten his pregnant girlfriend the night before, who had three prior assault convictions, who’d been running with a gang for nearly a decade. He hadn’t slept.
He hadn’t eaten. He was coming apart at the seams and he was armed. What happened that Sunday morning unfolded in three stages and all three of them matter. All three of them have victims. I need you to understand that before we go any further because the story of this day is not just about Hasmuhk Patel. It starts somewhere else entirely.
It starts with a woman named Daphne Edwards. Daphne lived in a small efficiency apartment on the east side of San Antonio, just one block from the Mini Food Mart. She was a mother. She had three daughters at home. The oldest was 7 years old, the youngest even smaller than that. On the morning of November 21st, she left her apartment for less than 5 minutes to walk to the store and buy cigarettes.
Her girls were at the breakfast table when she left. When she came back and stepped through her front door, they were still there. Eating breakfast, safe. Almost immediately, there was a knock at the door. Daphne thought it was her sister. She opened it. Christopher Young was standing in the doorway with a silver revolver pointed directly at her head.
Before she could react, he pushed his way inside. He demanded money. She opened her purse and gave him everything she had, $28. He looked at it and told her it wasn’t enough, that she was going to have to give him something else. Her three little girls were in the room. There was no other room to send them to. It was a single room, nowhere to go.
Those children sat in that apartment and witnessed what happened next. And no amount of careful language changes what that means or what it cost them. Christopher Young sexually assaulted Daphne Edwards at gunpoint while her daughters were present. At one point during the assault, he fired a shot at her feet because she wasn’t complying fast enough.
The sound of that gunshot in that small apartment with those small children in the room is something I want you to sit with for a moment. DNA evidence would later confirm what Daphne reported to police. Christopher Young, from his prison cell years later, denied it ever happened. The DNA did not agree with him.
After the assault, he told Daphne to put on something sexy, clothing he selected for her without underwear, because they were leaving together. She told him she was not leaving her children. He looked at her and said, “You did it before. I saw you.” Then he did something that has stayed with everyone who has followed this case.
He walked over to each of Daphne’s three little girls. One by one, he leaned down and kissed each of them on the cheek. He told them their mommy would be back. Then he forced their mother out the door. He had Daphne drive her red Mazda Protégé to the front of the apartment complex. Then he decided he wanted to drive himself.
As he was making his way around to the driver’s side, the passenger door was still open. Daphne saw people in the parking lot. The moment he was stepping in, she ran. She ran screaming toward her cousin’s apartment, and she did not stop. Christopher Young drove away in her stolen car. He drove exactly one block. He pulled into the parking lot of the Mini Food Mart, the same store Daphne had walked to 30 minutes earlier for cigarettes.
The store owned and operated by 55-year-old Hasmukh Patel, a man his neighbors and regular customers called Hash. Hash Patel had come to America from India and built something real through years of honest labor. That store was not just a business. It was the physical proof of everything he believed.
That hard work meant something. That community meant something. That showing up every morning and serving the people around you was a life worth living. He knew his customers by name. He was behind the counter every morning before the city was fully awake. He was there at 9:37 a.m. when a man in a black shirt and light-colored shorts walked through his door.
The surveillance camera captured everything. Christopher Young approached the counter and told Patel to give him the money. Patel moved toward the register. The gun stayed on him. Young repeated the command. Patel kept moving. And then the gun went off. One shot. Then another. Patel had managed to hit the panic button before he fell.
The store alarm screamed through the building. Christopher Young moved toward the register, then turned and walked out of the store, concealing the weapon under his clothing as he left. He got into Daphne Edwards’ stolen red Mazda and drove away. Outside in the parking lot, a regular customer named Hattie Helton had been sitting in her car scratching lottery tickets when she heard the shots. She looked up.
She called out to Hash inside the store. He didn’t answer. She went to the payphone and called the police. Another regular customer, Raul Vasquez Jr., had pulled into the lot just as the robbery was happening. He heard the gunshots through his truck window and looked up in time to see a man leaning over the counter firing.
He watched him walk out, get into a small red car, and leave. He tried to follow. He couldn’t keep up. He called the police and gave them the clothing description and a partial plate number. Hasmugh Patel died from a gunshot wound to his chest. He had done nothing wrong. He had been exactly where he was supposed to be, doing exactly what he had always done.
He had a wife. He had a son named Mitesh, who was in his early 20s. He had a community that depended on him and a dream he had built with his own hands. And Christopher Young took all of that from him for a robbery he didn’t even complete. At approximately 11:00 a.m., a San Antonio police officer spotted a red Mazda parked outside a crack house several miles away.
The partial plate number matched. The man behind the wheel was wearing a black shirt and light-colored shorts. A prostitute was in the passenger seat. Christopher Young was arrested where he sat. His hands tested positive for gunshot residue. His shirt tested positive. The steering wheel of the car tested positive. Patel’s blood was found on one of Young’s socks.
Both Hattie Halton and Raul Vasquez identified him without hesitation at trial. The surveillance footage showed his face, his movements, the gun in his hand. In February 2006, after a trial that lasted less than the time it takes to watch a movie, the jury deliberated for 2 hours. They came back with a verdict of capital murder.
The judge sentenced Christopher Anthony Young to death. He was 23 years old. He sat in that courtroom and stared straight ahead. Not shocked, not angry, just a young man watching a door close forever. He was shackled, loaded into a transport van, and driven to the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas. Death row.
He expected it to be a war zone. He had spent his whole life inside violence, and he He this would be no different. Gang politics, stabbings, turf wars with concrete walls around them. He braced himself for all of it. What greeted him instead was silence. 23 hours a day inside a 60 square foot cell. A steel door that opened once a day for 1 hour of solitary recreation.
A food tray that slid under the door three times daily. No contact with other inmates in any meaningful way. Just the cell, the walls, the hum of fluorescent lights, and his own thoughts bouncing off every surface with nowhere to go. For a man who had spent his entire life running from stillness, it was devastating.
He fought it at first. He raged. He did push-ups until his arms failed. He punched walls. He carried his blood identity in here like armor, like it still meant something. It didn’t. Nobody on death row cared what set you ran with on the outside. In here, the only thing that mattered was surviving yourself. Surviving your own mind.
Surviving the weight of what you had done to Daphne Edwards and Chala Riley and Hasmukh Patel and your own mother and everyone else your hands had touched with violence. That reckoning was coming for Christopher whether he wanted it or not. And then he met Reginald Blandon. Reg was from San Antonio. Same neighborhood, same kind of upbringing, same gravitational pull toward the streets.
He was a [ __ ] On the outside, he and Christopher would have been enemies by definition. In here, the old rules didn’t apply. What drew Christopher to Reg wasn’t toughness. It was something he had almost never encountered in his life up to that point. Peace. Reg carried himself like a man who had made a decision somewhere deep inside and wasn’t going back on it.
He wasn’t angry anymore. He wasn’t trying to prove anything to anyone. He was just present, calm, reading, thinking, talking slowly and deliberately. Christopher watched him from his cell and couldn’t figure him out. One day he asked Reg for a book. He was expecting something from the streets, a gritty novel, something familiar.
Instead, Reg handed him a thin volume called As a Man Thinketh by James Allen. Christopher almost set it aside. The language was old, almost poetic, but something made him read it and then read it again. Your thoughts shape your life. For a man who had never once been asked to examine his own thinking, who had been told by the streets and by his circumstances and by the system that he was exactly what he appeared to be and nothing more, that idea landed like a detonation.
He began reading everything Reg gave him. They passed books under the gap at the bottom of their cell doors. They wrote notes to each other. They argued about what they read, pushed each other’s thinking, challenged each other to go deeper. Reg taught Christopher how to breathe through anger instead of becoming it, how to respond rather than react, how to sit with pain without turning it into violence.
He showed him that the things that had happened to him as a child, the murder of his father, the abuse in his home, the absence of anyone who could show him a different way, those things were not his fault, but what he did with them from this point forward was entirely his responsibility. Christopher heard that. He actually heard it. He began to change.
Not for the parole board, not for a judge, not for public image or a clemency petition that hadn’t even been filed yet. He changed because for the first time in his life, he understood what he had been and what it had cost everyone around him, and he couldn’t live with that understanding and stay the same. In 2009, Reginald Blandon was executed by the state of Texas.
Christopher lost his father at eight. Now he lost his teacher, his brother, the man who had broken him open and shown him what was inside. The grief was enormous. It would have been so easy, so completely understandable, to let that grief curdle back into rage. To close the door that Reg had opened and go back to the only identity Christopher had ever known.
He didn’t. He became what Reg had been for him. He started mentoring younger inmates who arrived on death row the way he had arrived, angry, lost, armored in a street identity that meant nothing in here. He talked men down through the vents before confrontations turned violent. He stepped in when a fellow inmate was about to assault a guard.
He talked another man back from the edge when he was about to take his own life. He helped guards de-escalate situations that were moments away from turning dangerous. 12 inmates would later sign sworn statements testifying that Christopher Young had become a genuine force for peace on death row. Not a saint, not a performance, a man who had done the hardest kind of work, the internal kind, and was now using what he had learned to keep other people from destroying themselves the way he once had. He wrote letters to youth
programs on the outside. He developed a curriculum from his cell that he called Reaching Our Young from the Inside Out, a program designed to have direct, honest conversations with kids who were standing at the same crossroads he had stood at when he was 12 years old. He wanted to give them the conversation nobody had ever given him, the one that might have changed everything.
He maintained contact with his daughters through letters and phone calls. There were three of them now. He wanted them to know the man he was becoming, not just the man who had failed them before they were old enough to remember. And then something happened that no one expected. Mitesh Patel, the son of the man Christopher had killed, made a decision.
Mitesh had been carrying his father’s murder for over a decade. He had grown up without Hush Patel, had watched his mother grieve, had felt the absence of his father at every milestone. That kind of loss does not simply resolve itself. It lives in you. It shapes you. And it had shaped Mitesh in a direction that surprised everyone around him.
He did not want Christopher Young to die. Mitesh started attending rallies organized by Christopher’s legal team. He spoke to reporters, local and national, about why he was asking the state of Texas to spare the man who had taken his father from him. He submitted personal testimony to the clemency petition. He called the prisons victim services division to request a face-to-face meeting with Christopher.
They told him it wasn’t possible. So, he wrote a letter instead, and staff brought back Christopher’s recorded response. Our journey, he killed my dad, you’re killing him. Two wrongs don’t make a right. My my dad was doing positive things, all right? And Chris took that opportunity away from my dad. Now, um I look at Chris wanting to do something positive.
If the state takes that away from him, they’re no different than Chris. The son of the murdered man was fighting to keep his father’s killer alive. That is not a small thing. That is one of the most profound expressions of forgiveness this case, or perhaps any case, has ever produced. Mitesh said it plainly to anyone who would listen.
The man on death row today is not the man who walked into my father’s store. My father was a man of peace. He would not want this. With that support, Christopher’s legal team filed their clemency petition. They laid out everything, the transformation, the mentorship, the youth curriculum, the specific interventions he had made on death row, the testimony of 12 fellow inmates and multiple prison staff members.
And at the center of it all, the voice of Mitesh Patel asking the board to hear what his father would have said if he could. On July 16th, 2018, Christopher Young sat before the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. His hands rested on the table in front of him. His voice did not shake. He had made peace with the possibility that he was going to die tomorrow, but he was going to say what needed to be said before that happened.
He talked about the boy he had been, the father murdered at 8, the gang that filled the silence, the violence he had absorbed and carried and eventually unleashed on people who did not deserve it. He did not minimize Daphne Edwards. He did not minimize Challa Riley. He did not minimize what he had done to Hasmukh Patel and to Patel’s family and to his own daughters and to everyone his choices had damaged.
And then he raised the name that had become the center of his legal argument, Thomas Bart Whitaker. Thomas Whitaker was a white man from Sugar Land, Texas. In 2003, he had sat down and carefully, deliberately planned the murders of his entire family, his mother, his father, and his brother in order to collect their inheritance.
He hired someone to carry out the killings. His mother and his brother were shot and killed inside their own home. His father was shot and wounded, but survived. Whitaker was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death. He sat on death row for years. In February 2018, just 5 months before Christopher Young’s scheduled execution, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted to recommend commuting Thomas Whitaker’s death sentence to life in prison.
The primary basis for that recommendation was an appeal for mercy from Whitaker’s father, the same man Whitaker had tried to have killed. Governor Greg Abbott accepted the recommendation. Thomas Whitaker was taken off death row. He would never be free, but he would live out his natural life. Now, sit with that comparison. Thomas Whitaker sat in a room and planned the murder of three members of his own family.
He paid someone to do it. His mother and brother died. His own father, the man whose appeal saved Whitaker’s life, had a bullet put in him by someone Whitaker hired. That is premeditated. That is cold. That is calculated in a way that Christopher Young’s crime, fueled by addiction, by a spiral of untreated trauma, by a morning of cocaine and alcohol and violence, simply was not.
Christopher Young killed once in chaos, in a state that toxicology and his own history of untreated trauma can at least partially explain. He never denied it. He never minimized it. And he spent 12 years doing work inside a cage that most free people will never do in a lifetime. Thomas Whitaker planned three murders and lived.
Christopher Young committed one and was about to die. One man was white. One man was black. Christopher’s attorney David Dow filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in the days before the execution and stated it plainly. Race appeared to be the driving force. The state of Texas pushed back and said the cases were different, that Young’s petition was weaker, that his prior record and the sexual assault of Daphne Edwards made him a less sympathetic candidate for clemency.
But Daphne Edwards was not in Christopher’s clemency petition because his lawyers omitted it. She was not a secret. She was in the court record. She had been weighed by the system from the beginning. And yet Thomas Whitaker, who plotted the deaths of three people including his own father, was spared. The board looked at Christopher Young across that table on July 16th.
And the chairwoman delivered their decision without visible deliberation. Unanimous. No commutation. He was going to die tomorrow. Back at the Polunsky Unit that afternoon, his daughters came to see him. His three girls, the oldest was 17, the younger two were 13. The visiting room was bright, almost brutal in how ordinary it looked for what was happening inside it, but there was no glass between them, no barrier.
He could hold their hands. He could feel how much they had grown into themselves, these girls he had loved imperfectly and from a distance for most of their lives. He kept his voice steady for them. He needed them to leave that room carrying something useful, not just grief. “Be better than me. Stay off the streets. Use every gift God gave you.
Don’t let this world tell you who you are before you get the chance to figure it out yourself.” They didn’t collapse. They held onto his hands, and they memorized him in that light. And when the visit was over, they walked out carrying everything he had given them and everything he had taken from them simultaneously.
That evening, Christopher was offered his final meal. He did not make a special request. He ate the standard prison fare, meatloaf, mashed potatoes, corn, a slice of bread. He ate slowly, the way a man eats when he understands that each bite is one fewer remaining. He wrote letters through the night, to his daughters, to Mitish Patel, to the young people he had been mentoring, the ones he would never see again.
His cell stayed lit long after the rest of the unit had gone quiet. He prayed. He sat with himself and with everything he had done and everything he had tried to become and everything he was about to leave behind. On the morning of July 17th, 2018, he was transferred to the Walls Unit in Huntsville, where Texas has carried out its executions for generations.
The walk to the death chamber is short, but the sound of chains makes it feel like miles. Witnesses gathered on the other side of the glass. Journalists, state officials, members of the Patel family who arrived not in celebration, but in the grief of people who had been trying to stop this from happening and had failed.
Christopher was strapped to the gurney. The restraints went across his wrists, his chest, his ankles. An IV line was placed in his arm. He turned his head toward the witness window as far as the restraints would allow. He spoke. He said he didn’t know about death row when he arrived. He said it needed to be talked about.
He said nobody was talking to the kids and somebody needed to. He asked that the children of the world be told he was being executed. He asked the young people he had been mentoring to keep the fight going. He told the Patel family he loved them like they loved him. Then the warden gave the signal. The drugs entered the line.
The first, then the second, then the third. A few seconds passed and then Christopher Young whispered four words that no one in that room forgot. I taste it in my throat. Tears slid from the corners of his eyes. His chest rose once more, slowly. Then it stopped. At 6:39 p.m. on July 17th, 2018, the warden’s voice filled the chamber.
The sentence has been carried out. Daphne Edwards woke up on a Sunday morning to buy cigarettes and came home to have her life violated in front of her children. She’s a victim of this story and her name deserves to be said clearly and remembered fully. She did not choose any of what happened to her. She carried it anyway.
Challa Riley was 8 months pregnant and still felt his fists. Her child came into the world through that. Hasmu Patel went to work and never came home. He was a man who believed that honesty and hard work and showing up for your community were enough. He was right about everything except the danger of that particular morning.
And Christopher Young, the boy who could play anything he heard, who moved chess pieces like a prodigy, who lost his father at 8 and never recovered from it, and never got the help he needed, and became genuinely, documentably dangerous before he ever found the tools to become something else, died at 34 strapped to a gurney in Huntsville, Texas, asking children he would never meet to learn from his mistakes.
His three daughters grew up without a father, just like he did. The question this case leaves behind is not whether Christopher Young was guilty. He was. The question is not whether he deserved punishment. He did. The question is what we actually mean when we talk about justice, whether transformation counts for anything inside a system built to punish, whether a black man in Texas ever gets the same mercy that a white man gets for worse, whether death penalty is about the crime or about something else entirely.
Thomas Whitaker is alive today. Christopher Young is not. I’ll leave that with you. Drop a comment below and tell me what you think. Did the state of Texas get this right? Was justice served or was justice uneven? And if you are new here, welcome to True Crime Matter. Subscribe and turn on your notifications because we go deep on every case, and we don’t look away from the hard questions.
I’ll see you in the next one.
