Michael Anthony Rodriguez

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Michael Anthony Rodriguez is one of the infamous Texas Seven, a group of seven convicted felons who collectively escaped from the John Connally Unit near Kenedy, Texas on December 13, 2000.

On Christmas Eve, while robbing an Irving, Texas Oshman's sporting goods store, the Texas Seven severely wounded Irving police officer Aubrey Hawkins during a shootout, then pulled him from his vehicle and dispatched him with shots to the head and back at close range. They then climbed into their getaway vehicle and ran over him, leaving him for dead. The gang, subject of a nationwide manhunt, finally was caught a month later in Colorado.

Michael Anthony Rodriguez admitted pulling the officer from his patrol car.

Rodriguez escaped while serving a life term for hiring a hit man to kill his wife, Theresa, 29, to collect on her $250,000 life insurance policy. She was gunned down in 1992 getting out of her car outside their San Antonio home. The trigger man, Rolando Ruiz, also is on death row.

As of November, 2007, Michael Rodriguez had requested that all appeals on his behalf be discontinued. Due to the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision to review the death penalty as currently enacted in most states (lethal injection), Rodriguez was not given an execution date.

However, with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on April 16, 2008 that essentially allowed executions to be scheduled, Rodriguez was assigned an execution date of August 14, 2008.^[1]