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Aaron Gunches had spent 20 years asking the State of Arizona to kill him.
Finally, at 10:33 a.m. on March 19, he got his wish.
As he lay strapped to a gurney in the execution chamber and a lethal dose of pentobarbital coursed through his body, I waited nearby in a prison classroom while my colleague, Michael Kiefer, and roughly 15 other people watched him die.
In the months before he died, I was one of the few journalists Aaron spoke to in any capacity.
We began exchanging texts through Securus, a messaging system that allows incarcerated people to communicate with people in the outside world, in October 2024 and ultimately spoke on the phone a few times.
Aaron said that he didn’t trust journalists, but he also didn’t think that he had anything valuable to say publicly about what he experienced. I disagreed with him over and over, though it didn’t change his mind.
But I still think he was wrong, and the things he told me about being an incarcerated person on death row will stay with me forever. While he was alive, we agreed that I wouldn’t publish what he told me.
But it’s important that people understand how he viewed his life and his choice to die, and with his death, I feel obligated to provide a more complete understanding of how his execution came to pass.
Since 1976 — when executions were reinstated federally by the U.S. Supreme Court — roughly 1,000 people have been executed. Aaron was one of roughly 150 people who volunteered for their executions.
Aaron was the first incarcerated person I ever spoke to. And it wasn’t until one of my friends who covered incarceration told me that just about anyone can message incarcerated people through apps that I thought he might have a story to tell.
I don’t have the original message I sent to Aaron, which was deleted by Securus. I asked if he would be willing to talk to me about his experience on death row.
I didn’t expect a response, but a few days later, he wrote back, asking to see a list of possible questions I’d want to ask him.
What would I want to ask someone on death row? Especially someone like Aaron, who fought to represent himself at trial and presented no mitigating evidence against what he described as “the ultimate penalty.”
I sent him a list of questions back, and offered to talk on the phone as well. We went back and forth until Dec. 2, when my phone rang while I was driving. It was Aaron.
We had recently texted about the dismissal of retired federal magistrate judge David Duncan, whom Gov. Katie Hobbs had hired to investigate Arizona’s execution practices and abruptly fired in November 2024. Weeks later, on Nov. 27, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes announced that her office would seek an execution warrant for Aaron.
After that conversation, Aaron said he’d think about giving an on-the-record interview before he died. On Dec. 20, Aaron asked to see a copy of Duncan’s draft report, which Hobbs released against his wishes.
Aaron, like many other incarcerated people, struggled to get access to information from the outside world. They have tablets that they can use for communicating with loved ones and legal advisors, but beyond that, their worlds end at the prison walls.
I sent Aaron a news article I had written about the report, which concluded there was no safe or humane way to conduct a lethal injection execution.
“Same shady lab, same shady drugs, same non-transparency. Hilarious,” Aaron messaged me back. “I could file a bunch of things to expose it but, nuh-uh, that might hold things up again.”
In November 2022, Aaron filed his first request for his own execution.
“Petitioner Aaron Gunches hereby requests the AZ Supreme Court issue an immediate death warrant for his execution, so that justice may be lawfully served and give closure to the victim’s family,” the handwritten request reads.
Aaron submitted a withdrawal for that request in January 2023, saying that executions in Arizona were “carried out in a way that amounts to torture” after reading an Arizona Republic story.
“Aaron Gunches would not have filed his motion had he known this stunning news, and now seeks to withdraw,” he wrote in neat handwriting in capital letters.
Before Aaron withdrew his request, Arizona’s former attorney general, Mark Brnovich, approved it and had begun the process of issuing an execution warrant. When Gov. Katie Hobbs and Mayes took office that January, the request was stalled.
One of the questions I had for Aaron that was never answered was whether he regretted withdrawing his request, which effectively delayed his execution by two years.
“I’m just hoping they push it through with no delays,” he wrote in December. “By the way, the ONLY reason I did file that withdrawal was because I absolutely did not want to go on a 35-day (death) watch that didn’t result in the execution. I did not change my mind, nor get scared. That watch scenario is horrendous…a week in hell is better than a month-plus.”
Aaron had spoken to me briefly about the death watch. In a period before people on death row are executed — anywhere between a week to a month — they are put in an isolated cell with 24/7 surveillance so they don’t kill themselves before the state can execute them.
The more I spoke to Aaron, the more his desire to be put to death felt like assisted suicide. Gunches was convicted for Ted Price’s murder in 2008, sentenced to death and re-sentenced in 2013 after the Arizona Supreme Court concluded that his first sentence didn’t meet the requirements to justify death.
Gunches consistently objected to his legal advisors defending him during his trial, and was so strident that he deserved the death penalty that his trial court judge accused him of committing “suicide by jury.”
In our conversations, though, Aaron sometimes mentioned that he didn’t think his legal advisors did their jobs.
“My fight for survival was trying to get the damn attorneys to do their jobs, and they wouldn’t,” he said in a call on Feb. 13. “After that, I said, ‘Screw it. I think death is better than being in prison.’”
This is not how his former advisor Marci Kratter remembered their conversations. Aaron would fight with Kratter, and when she tried to come to his defense, he told her to “sit down and shut up.”
Even after Joseph Wood took two hours to die during his execution in 2014, and Arizona put a pause on executions that lasted until 2022, Aaron still submitted his handwritten request for an execution warrant.
We exchanged a few more text messages, but it was rare to hear from him.
Aaron had a flippant way of talking about his execution. I guess it would eventually become normal to me, too, if I represented myself in court and had to write extensively about the process of allowing myself to be lethally injected.
We talked on the phone a few days later. We spoke about the death watch period, and about what Aaron missed from the outside world.
“It’s the little things,” he said. “Smoking a cigarette or eating edible food, being with a woman or going to a movie. It’s just not available here.”
One of the things that surprised me about Aaron is that he loved fantasy novels. He mentioned them to me a couple times.
“I wanted to read my favorite series before the end, so right now I’m reading ‘The Wheel of Time,’” Aaron said. “I’m on book 13 right now, and I’ve read the whole series probably 20 or 30 times… I love history books, too, so I borrow those all I can get, but the library here is just horrifying.”
My last conversation with Aaron was on Feb. 14.
On December 30, Aaron had filed another handwritten request for an execution warrant to have his “long overdue sentence carried out.” He requested for his execution to be on Valentine’s Day. The state wanted to set a briefing schedule — Aaron wanted to get it done.
The Arizona Supreme Court denied his request on January 8, but two days later, his 20-year wish was granted. The state filed a motion for a warrant of execution.
In our last conversation, in his irreverent way, Aaron talked about an incarcerated man on death row who died by suicide in August 2024, and about the lack of mental health resources available to people on death row.
“As soon as the warrant hit, they’ve been really hyperaware,” Aaron said. “I guess it freaks them out that I’m not freaking out.”
Aaron’s understanding of how his own death would likely play out, and his honesty in talking about the dynamics of death row, fundamentally changed how I view the systems I’ve been covering for my entire career.
“They like to say that (death row) is the worst of the worst, but that’s just a sound byte,” Aaron said in our last call.
While I waited in the classroom with the dozen or so reporters in the media pool, my mom texted me. She’s a veterinarian. She was headed to euthanize a dog using the same chemicals that had coursed through Aaron’s body just minutes before.
I was in middle school when my mom’s brother Frank suddenly died from a heart attack. He had an open casket funeral in a beautiful Methodist church in South Carolina, where my mom is from.
I remember the stiff cardboard feel of the memorial service program. I remember sitting in the wooden pew, looking out the stained glass windows and playing with my cousin Brandon afterwards.
I remember feeling the presence of Frank’s body as it lay in a casket at the front of the church. I didn’t want to see it. I refused to go anywhere near it. I lingered near the doorway, afraid I’d catch a glimpse of Frank’s very dead face.
After Frank died, my grandfather died, then my grandmother. My grandfather died from long-term complications after a stroke, but he also died of grief. My grandmother died several months later.
They, too, had funerals in beautiful Methodist churches. I came to both, sitting in the pews and listening to my family talk about my grandparents. My mom asked if I wanted to come up to the casket. Even closed, the presence of death felt overwhelming.
Speaking with Aaron often brought me back to my uncle Frank’s funeral. Death was right there, and I stood in the doorway.
In one of our earliest conversations, Aaron texted me to ask if I believed in the death penalty. It felt like a trap — what would someone who spent 20 years trying to convince the government to kill him want me to say?
I didn’t answer, and I never got a sense of just how Aaron felt, either. All I had were the clues in his often cryptic thoughts that he’d give me while he stood outside in the prison yard, the desert wind blowing hard on the other end of the call.
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