JUST IN: David Renteria Executed in Texas For Killing A 5 Year Old Girl— Texas Death Row

JUST IN: David Renteria Executed in Texas For Killing A 5 Year Old Girl— Texas Death Row

After spending more than 20 years on Texas death row, David Santiago Renteria was executed by lethal injection at the Huntsville Unit State Penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas. The date was November 16th, 2023. He was 53 years old, and as the drugs entered his body, he recited a prayer, said he could taste them, and then went silent forever.

But here’s what makes this case different from almost every other execution you’ve ever heard about. The man strapped to that gurney had spent 22 years claiming he was not a murderer. His defense team fought until minutes before the needle went in. A sitting judge tried to stop it. A Supreme Court petition was filed while he was already being prepared for death.

And somewhere in the middle of all of this was a 5-year-old girl shopping at Walmart with her family on a regular Sunday in November. She never made it home. This is the full story of David Renteria, the crime, the trial, the 22 years of appeals, the questions that lingered, and the final 11 minutes that ended it all. Stay with me because this one is complicated.

Before we talk about David Renteria, before we talk about courts, appeals, or gang claims, we have to talk about Alexandra Flores, because she is the reason any of this matters. Alexandra was 5 years old, the youngest of eight children in her family. By every account, she was a normal little girl doing a very normal thing on a November afternoon in 2001.

She was Christmas shopping with her family at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. It was the 18th of November, just over a month before Christmas. Her brother Ignacio, who was 14 years old at the time, was there. Her sister Sandra was there. Her whole family was there. And then, at some point inside that store, Alexandra wasn’t.

The surveillance footage from that Walmart is grainy, the kind of low-resolution video you’d expect from a store camera in 2001. But what it captured was unmistakable: a little girl following a man out of the store, not being dragged, not being forced in any visible way, just following him the way a child might follow an adult who told her something convincing enough to make her go. That man would later be identified as David Renteria.

The next morning, November 19th, 2001, Alexandra Flores was found. Her partially burned body was discovered in an alley approximately 60 miles from the Walmart where she was last seen alive. An autopsy would later reveal that she had endured significant physical trauma before her death and that her body had been set on fire.

There are no words that adequately cover what happened to Alexandra. Her family would spend the next 22 years waiting for the legal system to close a chapter that never truly could be closed. That’s where we begin.

David Santiago Renteria was born and raised in El Paso, Texas. He grew up in the Lower Valley, a member of the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, one of three federally recognized Native American tribes in the state of Texas. He was raised in the Roman Catholic tradition. His childhood, by accounts that emerged during later proceedings, was not easy. His father was reported to be violent and abusive. As a child, Renteria reportedly tried to protect his mother and younger sister from that environment. Whether that background explains anything about who he became, that’s not for me to say, but it’s part of the record.

What is clearly part of the record is this: by the time November 2001 came around, David Renteria was not an unknown figure to law enforcement. He had previously been convicted of indecency with a child in El Paso County, a crime that resulted in a 20-year prison sentence. At the time of Alexandra’s disappearance, he had served that sentence and was on probation.

He was 31 years old. He was a former warehouse worker, and according to prosecution evidence, on the morning of November 18th, 2001, he walked into a Walmart in El Paso and spent roughly 40 minutes moving through that store. 40 minutes. Prosecutors would later argue that Renteria was not there to shop, that he was there looking for a target, and that he found one.

Here is what the prosecution presented as the case against David Renteria. Surveillance footage from the Walmart showed him inside the store for an extended period before Alexandra Flores disappeared. That same footage captured what appeared to be Alexandra following him out through the exit. She was gone. The following morning, Alexandra was found approximately 16 miles from where she was last seen alive.

A medical examiner’s report would later confirm she had suffered significant trauma before her life was taken and that her body had been set alight in what investigators believed was a deliberate attempt to eliminate physical evidence. Now, here’s where the physical evidence comes in, and this is critical. Blood found inside Renteria’s van matched Alexandra Flores’ DNA. And on the plastic bag that had been placed over the child’s head before her body was set on fire, investigators found Renteria’s palm print. His DNA, his fingerprint, his van.

When police brought him in, Renteria did not deny being at the Walmart, but he had an explanation for everything else. And that explanation would become the central controversy of the next two-plus decades.

From the moment David Renteria was arrested, he maintained a consistent story. He did not kidnap Alexandra Flores of his own free will. He did not murder her. According to Renteria, he had been coerced by members of the Barrio Azteca, a notoriously violent cross-border prison gang with deep ties to Mexican drug cartels and El Paso’s criminal underworld.

His account, as it was relayed through court documents and his legal team, went something like this: members of Barrio Azteca, including someone he referred to only as “Flaco,” had threatened him and his family. Under that threat, he said he was forced to lead Alexandra out of the Walmart and hand her over to the gang. He claimed it was the gang members themselves who murdered Alexandra and that they then forced him to help dispose of her body. He said he feared for his family’s life if he refused.

Now, prosecutors pushed back hard on every element of this. They pointed out that his own attorneys never raised the duress defense at his original trial. They noted that the physical evidence—the blood, the palm print, the surveillance footage—pointed to Renteria acting alone. And they argued that the timeline simply didn’t support his version of events.

But here’s where things get interesting. Years after his conviction, 15 years to be exact, the state disclosed that a witness had come forward with information that appeared to corroborate at least part of Renteria’s story. A woman told investigators that her former husband, a Barrio Azteca gang member, had been involved in the death of a girl who disappeared from a Walmart.

His defense team seized on this. They argued it was exactly the kind of evidence that should have been heard in court, evidence that had never been properly examined because of what they described as inadequate legal representation during his appellate process. A federal judge reviewed the woman’s statement in 2018 and called it fraught with inaccuracies, finding it insufficient to establish Renteria’s innocence. But his lawyers weren’t finished.

David Renteria went to trial in 2003. He was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death. But in 2006, something unusual happened. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court, actually threw out his death sentence—not the conviction, the sentence. Their reasoning was specific.

Prosecutors had presented misleading evidence during sentencing that gave jurors the impression Renteria showed no remorse for the crime. His defense had pointed to a statement Renteria made to police shortly after his arrest in which he expressed sympathy for Alexandra’s family and called her death a tragedy that should never have happened. The appeals court acknowledged that statement existed, but said it was made in the context of minimizing his responsibility, not as genuine remorse. They ordered a new sentencing hearing.

In 2008, that resentencing trial concluded. The jury sentenced him to death again. From that point forward, David Renteria sat on Texas death row at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas. And the appeals continued.

In the years leading up to his scheduled execution, Renteria’s legal team made a focused effort to obtain one thing: the prosecution’s complete case file. They argued that buried inside those documents were records that could support the gang involvement theory, information that, in their view, had been deliberately kept from them. What made their argument particularly pointed was this: the El Paso District Attorney’s Office had, in at least one other capital case, voluntarily handed over similar files to defense attorneys. In Renteria’s case, they refused.

His attorneys filed motions. They argued it was a constitutional violation, a breach of his rights to due process and equal protection. In August of 2023, a state district judge in El Paso, Judge Monique Velarde Reyes, agreed with them. She granted a stay of execution. She ordered the DA’s office to hand over the documents. She postponed his execution date indefinitely. For a brief moment, it looked like Renteria had bought himself more time.

Then, El Paso District Attorney Bill Hicks appealed. He questioned whether the district judge even had the authority to postpone an execution. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals agreed with him and overturned Judge Reyes’ order, reinstating the execution date. The appeals court’s language was blunt. The lower court, they said, had no “freewheeling jurisdiction” to safeguard Renteria’s rights without a proper legal basis before it.

Renteria’s team took it federal. A US District Judge denied their motion. They appealed further. On the morning of November 16th, 2023, the day of his scheduled execution, his attorneys filed an emergency petition to the United States Supreme Court. The Supreme Court declined, twice. Once over the documents issue, once over a separate claim that the pentobarbital, the execution drug, had degraded and would cause Renteria pain and terror in violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Both denied.

The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles had already voted 7-0 against commuting his sentence. They also rejected a request for a 180-day reprieve to investigate the new evidence. Every door had closed.

On the morning of November 16th, 2023, David Santiago Renteria was at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas, the facility that houses Texas death row inmates. Death watch records show he was allowed to speak with fellow inmates at 7:30 in the morning. He met with visitors from 8:00 a.m. until 11:30 a.m. Then he was transferred, as is standard procedure, from Polunsky to the Huntsville Unit, the facility where Texas carries out its executions.

In between those milestones, he lay in his cell. He watched television through the bars. He slept. His sister, Cecilia Esparza, had traveled to Huntsville. A close friend accompanied her. Alexandra Flores’ family was also there. Her sister, Sandra Frausto, and her brother, Ignacio—the 14-year-old boy who had been at that Walmart 22 years earlier—made the journey to witness the execution.

Also present was a victim from a different criminal incident involving Renteria and her mother, a reminder that this case did not exist in isolation from his prior convictions. 14 state law enforcement and governmental officials attended. Two separate witness viewing rooms. Two families separated by glass waiting for the same moment to arrive from completely different places of grief.

Before witnesses were brought into the chamber, Renteria was already praying. He sang a hymn in Spanish. He prayed with a spiritual advisor standing next to him. When the witnesses entered and took their positions at the window, just a few feet of glass separating them from the man on the gurney, he sang again. This time, a hymn in English.

At 7:00 p.m. Central Standard Time, the lethal injection process began. He received a dose of pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate sedative. Before the drugs were administered, David Renteria was given the opportunity to make a final statement. He addressed everyone in that room.

To the family of Alexandra Flores, he said, “To the victims of the family, there is not a day that goes by that I do not think about that fateful event of that day and what transpired. There are no words to describe what you’re going through, and I understand that.”

To those watching who had supported his execution, he said, “I’m sorry for all the wrongs I have done. And for those who have called for my death, who are about to murder me, I forgive you.” He then cited Abraham Lincoln. “Like Abraham Lincoln said once, mercy bears richer fruits than any other attributes. I have learned there is no redemption above forgiveness.”

To his sister, Cecilia, who had collapsed when she first walked into the viewing room and had been brought a chair, he looked through the glass and said, “I love you all. I truly do. I’ll see you in the next life.”

And then, with everything said, he turned to the warden and spoke his final words: “I’m ready, warden. Send me home.”

As the pentobarbital began to flow, Renteria started reciting the Apostles’ Creed, one of the foundational prayers of the Catholic faith. He stopped mid-prayer. “I taste it,” he said. “I taste it.” And then, there was silence.

At 7:11 p.m. Central Standard Time, 11 minutes after the injection began, David Santiago Renteria was pronounced dead. He was the eighth person executed by the state of Texas in 2023, the 23rd execution carried out in the United States that year.

Ignacio Frausto walked out of that prison holding a photo collage of his little sister. He had been 14 years old when she disappeared. He was now a grown man who had spent nearly his entire adult life working in the El Paso District Attorney’s Office, the very office that prosecuted the man who killed her. He spoke to reporters.

“I want to recognize her, not forget about her,” he said. “It took 22 years, but the time came. It is done. We can finally and really begin to heal. 22 years of wondering what was going to happen.”

Earlier, before the execution, he had been asked what he wanted to say to Renteria. He repeated what he had said in his victim impact statement at the original trial. “I remember telling him, I will not forgive him. Only God will forgive them.” And he spoke about the way Renteria would die, peacefully, by injection, compared to what his 5-year-old sister endured. “He gets to die peacefully. From what we learned on the case, my little sister suffered. And I’m not saying make him suffer, because I’m not the type of man, but he has it easy.”

The Renteria case is a reminder of how complicated the machinery of capital punishment really is. It is not a fast system. It is not always a clean one. And it rarely offers the kind of closure that families deserve, or the kind of certainty that justice demands.

What it offered the Flores family on a cold and rainy Thursday night in Huntsville, Texas, was an ending. After 22 years, an ending. Whether it was the right one, that’s a question that will live with this case for a long time. Alexandra Flores was 5 years old. She was the youngest of eight children. She was Christmas shopping with her family. Remember her name.