Man Who Laughed at a Grieving Mother—James Broadnax Is Scheduled To Be Executed In Texas
“You killed two young men now.” “Better their life than mine.”
“Do you have any remorse?” “None whatsoever. Do it look like?”
“What do you think’s going to happen to you now?” “Whatever they throw at me. Hopefully, they’ll kill me.”
“Hopefully?” “Yeah.”
“Why do you hope they kill you?” “Give me life, I’m going to kill somebody else. Straight up. I’m telling you right now. I can’t do no [expletive] life. I’m going to go crazy.”
“So you want the death penalty?” “They better. Pick one. Or you going to have some more bodies.”
A Date with the Executioner
On April 30th, 2026, after spending 17 years on death row, James Garfield Broadnax will be executed by lethal injection at the Huntsville State Penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas. He will be 37 years old. He was 19 when he did it. Two men shot to death outside a Christian recording studio in Garland, Texas. Left on the sidewalk. The total amount stolen from their pockets was $2.
Days after the murders, Broadnax sat down with a television reporter from his jail cell. He admitted everything. He described the shooting in detail. And when the reporter asked him if he felt any remorse for the two men he had just killed, he said he didn’t even think he had a conscience.
This is the story of James Broadnax, the two men he murdered, and what 17 years on death row did or didn’t change about the teenager who pulled that trigger.
The Two Men Who Didn’t Go Home
Before we get to James Broadnax, we need to talk about two men who don’t get talked about enough. Because this story isn’t really about the man who pulled the trigger; it’s about the two men who never got to go home that night.
Matthew Butler was everything you’d root for. He grew up with a love for music, specifically Christian music, and somewhere along the way, he turned that love into something real. In 2005, he founded Zion Gate Records in Garland, Texas, a recording studio dedicated to contemporary Christian music. It wasn’t some big corporate operation. It was a passion project, his dream built from scratch with his own hands. He was 28 years old. He had a wife. He had two young children. And on the night of June 18th, 2008, he was exactly where he was supposed to be: at his own studio, doing the thing he loved most in the world.
He had absolutely no idea that across the city of Dallas, two teenagers had just stepped onto a commuter train with a loaded gun and a plan.
Steven Swan was Matthew’s audio engineer and close friend. The two of them had built something together at that studio—a shared creative space, a shared vision. Steven’s mother would later testify in court about her son, about how he had taught himself everything: how to write songs, how to sing, how to play instruments. She said it with a kind of quiet, devastated pride that only a mother can carry into a courtroom. “He worked all his life to get to that level of accomplishment and ability, and it just got cut off.”
Steven Swan drove a 1995 Ford Crown Victoria. That car would come up again, because it’s the car that ultimately got James Broadnax caught.
The Night of the Murders
On the night of June 18th, Matthew and Steven wrapped up their work at the studio. They stepped outside into the parking lot together. It was around 1:00 in the morning, and that’s when everything in both of their lives ended.
Let’s back up, because what happened in that parking lot didn’t start in that parking lot. It started on a train. James Broadnax and his 19-year-old cousin, Demarius Cummings, both originally from Texarkana, Texas, boarded a DART commuter train in Dallas that night. They weren’t going anywhere specific. They had a plan, and the plan was brutally simple. They were going to rob somebody.
In his own words—and we’ll hear a lot of his own words, because Broadnax was extraordinarily willing to talk—he said they rode that train out to Garland because, and I quote, “That’s where all the rich white folks stay at.”
So, they rode the train. They had a gun. Cummings later told a television news station exactly how they got it: “We traded an AK-47 as collateral for a pistol to use during what I thought would just be a robbery.” Just a robbery. That’s what Cummings called it. But then, he kept talking. And this next part is important because Cummings later tried to distance himself from what happened. He tried to say he didn’t know it would turn violent. But in the same interview, he said this:
“We didn’t plan to shoot nobody and nothing like that. No, I take that back. I did tell him we’d probably have to pop them a few times or whatever. I did. But still, I didn’t think he was going to do it.”
So, before they ever stepped off that train, violence had already been discussed. The gun was already loaded with intent. Cummings himself put it on the table. They arrived in Garland. They walked. And eventually, they spotted two men stepping out of a building late at night. They had no idea who these men were. They didn’t care. Cummings walked up to one of them and asked for a cigarette. A cigarette. That was the pretext. Just something to close the distance. And then James Broadnax drew the pistol.
What I’m about to read to you, these are not a reporter’s words. These are not a prosecutor’s reconstruction. These are James Broadnax’s own words from an on-camera interview he gave willingly to a news station days after the murders. He described what happened that night with a level of casual, matter-of-fact detail that stunned everyone who heard it:
“I shot him and he stumbled back. I shot the driver. He hit the ground. You know what I’m saying? But he leaned up like he was going to try to get back up. So I shot him in the head. Then his homeboy, I shot him again. You know what I’m saying? But he was still trying to run off. I knew he was going to die anyway, but just to make sure, pop pop.”
The man he called the driver was Steven Swan, 26 years old. The man he called his homeboy was Matthew Butler, 28 years old, father of two, whose wife was waiting for him to come home.
The prosecutors at trial later laid out what the forensic evidence confirmed about Matthew Butler’s final moments on this earth. Matthew Butler didn’t die instantly. He was shot in the arm. He was shot in the chest. He was shot in the back. He was crawling. He was crawling on the ground trying to survive, and Broadnax shot him again. When asked about it afterward, Broadnax said it plainly: “I made sure they was dead.”
And then, after two men lay bleeding on the sidewalk outside their recording studio, Broadnax and Cummings crouched down and went through their pockets. They found $2. They also grabbed the keys to Steven Swan’s Crown Victoria, got in, and drove away. They left the bodies on the sidewalk. They didn’t call anyone. They didn’t hesitate. They just left.
Around 1:20 in the morning, a passing bicyclist found Matthew Butler and Steven Swan lying on the sidewalk in front of Zion Gate Records. Both had been shot multiple times. Both were already dead.
The Arrest and the Interview
After the murders, Broadnax and Cummings drove Swan’s stolen Crown Victoria toward Texarkana, about 170 miles away, the city they had both grown up in. Along the way, they pawned some tools they found in the back of Swan’s car. They switched out the license plates with fake ones. They were trying to cover their tracks. It didn’t work.
On June 20th, two days after the murders, a routine traffic stop caught them. Officers noticed the fictitious plates. They ran the vehicle identification number on the Crown Victoria and found it matched a vehicle connected to a double homicide in Garland. Broadnax and Cummings were arrested on the spot. Both were charged with capital murder. Both were held on a $1 million bond each. A third man in the car was later cleared of any involvement.
And then, in a decision that would define the entire trajectory of this case, both men agreed to give television interviews from the Dallas County Jail.
Now, plenty of people have given jailhouse interviews. Some proclaim their innocence. Some show remorse. Some try to explain themselves. James Broadnax did none of those things. He didn’t just admit to the murders; he described them in detail on camera with no visible emotion whatsoever. And when reporters asked him the most basic human questions a person can ask someone who has just killed two people, he answered in a way that made people watching at home physically recoil.
When NBC 5 reporter Ellen Goldberg asked him whether he felt any remorse at all for killing two men, he looked at her and said, “Do I look like it?” When she asked what he would say to the families of the victims, he told her he had nothing to say to them. Nothing at all. He dismissed them without a second thought. When asked if what he had done mattered to him in any way: “Not no more. I ain’t got no reason to live.”
And then came the line that prosecutors would play for a jury and let hang in the air of that courtroom. The line that perhaps said more about James Broadnax than anything else ever could. When pressed about whether he felt any guilt at all, he told the reporter that he didn’t even think he had a conscience. Not that it was buried. Not that it was damaged. Not that he was struggling to find it. He said he didn’t think he had one at all.
His own defense attorney, the man whose entire job was to keep James Broadnax alive, later said something that may be the most honest statement made by anyone connected to this case: “I’ve never seen a guy talk his way onto death row before, but we have now.”
The Trial and The Laugh
James Broadnax went to trial in Dallas in 2009. He was 20 years old. The prosecution had an extraordinarily powerful case, and a significant portion of that case was James Broadnax himself. His jailhouse interviews were played for the jury. The rap lyrics he had written about murder, drug dealing, and specifically about not leaving witnesses behind were introduced as evidence. A gang detective testified that Broadnax had flashed gang signs during his media appearances, that his drawings and writings reflected deep gang allegiance, that this was not a young man who had stumbled into violence by accident.
The defense pushed back. They argued that on the night of the murders, Broadnax was under the influence of PCP, and that this should be weighed as a mitigating factor. They built a portrait of a young man who had grown up in circumstances that made brutality feel ordinary, who had never been given a real chance at anything different. They argued for his life.
And there was a moment, a genuinely surprising one, when a different side of James Broadnax seemed to surface. From jail, he had written letters to both victims’ families. Real letters expressing regret. Matthew Butler’s widow, Jamie Butler Cole, addressed the court during the sentencing phase. She said she had received his letter. And she said, remarkably, with a grace that stopped the room, that she forgave him.
But Teresa Butler, Matthew’s mother, had something very different to say. She stood before the man who had shot her son multiple times and watched him crawl. And she said what every mother in that room understood in their bones: “You stole our son.” And then, looking directly at him: “I couldn’t say it better than you said it yourself. It would have been better if you’d never been born.”
And James Broadnax laughed.
Sitting with his back to most of the room, he laughed. The prosecutor, David Alex, watched it happen in real time. “Even at this point, after seeing how many people he’s affected, he’s still over there laughing.”
The jury deliberated for 8 hours over 2 days. Juror J. Williams spoke for them afterward: “We just took our time going through all the evidence. We came to the decision without any reservations, with a very clear conscience.”
James Broadnax was sentenced to death. He was 20 years old. He was placed on Texas death row on September 2nd, 2009.
The Appeals and Racial Bias Claims
Death row in Texas is not the end of the legal road. In many ways, it is the beginning of a new one. In the years following his conviction, Broadnax’s attorneys filed appeals raising 56 separate points of error from the 2009 trial. 56. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reviewed every single one and rejected them all.
Then came the federal courts, and this is where the case gets complicated. The central argument was racial discrimination during jury selection. The prosecution used nearly half of its peremptory strikes—the ones that let attorneys remove jurors without giving a reason—to eliminate all seven Black prospective jurors from the pool. The trial judge actually found a Batson violation—the legal standard that bars racially motivated jury strikes—and noted on the record that Black jurors had been removed at a disproportionate rate. One Black juror was reseated as a result.
But the most damaging piece didn’t surface until federal court: a spreadsheet created by prosecutors during jury selection that specifically bolded the names of Black prospective jurors and only them. It had never been disclosed to the defense. Texas courts refused to admit it as evidence because it wasn’t part of the original state record. The Fifth Circuit upheld the conviction in 2021. His attorneys then took it to the Supreme Court, where two justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, publicly stated they would reverse the judgment. But the full court declined to hear the case. The petition was denied in 2024.
And then there is the issue of Demarius Cummings, Broadnax’s cousin. The man who was on that train, the man who discussed shooting the victims before they ever arrived, the man who was standing right there while two people were murdered. Cummings received a significantly lighter sentence. He was not given the death penalty.
Time on Death Row
James Broadnax has been on Texas death row for over 17 years. He arrived as a 20-year-old with no visible remorse, no apparent conscience, and a public image built entirely on contempt—contempt for the victims, contempt for their families, contempt for the entire process of being held accountable for what he had done.
17 years is a long time. Long enough, apparently, for something to shift. Or at least that is the claim. From his cell, he wrote letters to both victims’ families. He told his attorney repeatedly that he regretted what he had done. Matthew Butler’s widow received one of those letters. She said she forgave him, though she also acknowledged she could not fully speak to what was truly in his heart. Teresa Butler, the mother who watched him laugh at her in open court, has not publicly said the same.
And here is the part of this case that does not resolve neatly, no matter how many times you turn it over. The teenager who told a television reporter that he didn’t have a conscience is now a 37-year-old man who has spent nearly two full decades inside a cell. He has had nothing but time. Time to think. Time to sit with what he did. Time to understand—in whatever way a person can come to understand something like this—the full weight of the two lives he ended for $2.
Whether that man is genuinely different from the one who said “pop, pop, just to make sure,” only he knows.
The Final Chapter
The law has decided at every level that it does not change what comes next. On April 30th, 2026, after 17 years on death row, James Garfield Broadnax will be executed by lethal injection at the Huntsville State Penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas. He will be 37 years old. He will have spent more of his adult life on death row than outside of it.
Texas does not offer a last meal. Whatever he eats that day will be whatever the prison cafeteria serves to everyone else. He will be given the opportunity to make a final statement before the execution is carried out. Whether he takes that opportunity and what he chooses to say in those final moments, no one knows yet. His execution is expected to mark the 600th carried out by the state of Texas since capital punishment was reinstated.
Advocacy groups are currently circulating petitions asking Governor Greg Abbott to grant a stay of execution or consider clemency. They point to the racial bias claims, the spreadsheet that was never disclosed to the defense, and the sentencing disparity between Broadnax and his cousin. Whether any of that gains political traction between now and April 30th remains to be seen.
And somewhere beneath all of it, behind the legal arguments, the petitions, the scheduled date on a calendar, there are two families who have been living with the reality of what happened outside Zion Gate Records since the night in June 2008. Eighteen years through grief that doesn’t follow a schedule, through trials and appeals, and unexpected letters from a man who did it.
But I want to know what you think. Does time change anything? Does remorse matter when two people are dead and the only thing taken from them was worth $2? Is what a person becomes after a crime enough? Or does it not move the needle at all? Drop your thoughts in the comments below.
