MI MI - Muriel Stoepker, 77, Grand Rapids, 8 Sept 1991

A convicted killer was executed by lethal injection for the abduction, rape and strangulation of a 38-year-old woman in 1994.

Shortly before Rodrigo Hernandez, 38, lapsed into unconsciousness, he said: 'This stuff stings, man,' according to a spokesman for the Department of Criminal Justice spokesman.

It was the ultimate punishment for Hernandez who was arrested eight years after the murder of Susan Verstegen when DNA linked him to the killing.
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Hernandez told the San Antonio Express-News in an interview published this month he didn't kill Verstegen and will 'take that to the grave.'

But Verstegen's mother, Anna Verstegen of San Antonio, said this week she hoped Hernandez would, before he died, feel sorry for what he did to her daughter, who left behind a 15-year-old son

'It's never too late,' she said. 'We're just praying for him. The kind of God I believe in can forgive.'
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Minutes before Rodrigo Hernandez, 38, was executed for the 1994 rape and murder of a single mother in San Antonio, he reportedly confessed to that killing and the 1991 slaying of a homeless woman in Grand Rapids, Mich., to a Texas Ranger, Michigan authorities said.

He agreed to talk to a Texas Ranger assigned to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's Huntsville unit as the state prepared to lethally inject him Thursday evening, according to a Kent County, Mich., news release. Hernandez was executed for raping and strangling Susan Verstegen, 38, but while he was on death row, authorities in 2009 determined his DNA matched evidence from the 1991 shooting death of Muriel Stoepker in Michigan.
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