HUNTSVILLE, Texas, Aug. 18 (UPI) -- A 35-year-old gang leader convicted in the murder of two teenage girls in Houston was executed by lethal injection in Huntsville, Texas, Tuesday.
Peter Anthony Cantu, who spoke no final words, stared at the ceiling in the death chamber at the state prison in Huntsville, and then took a deep breath and closed his eyes, the Houston Chronicle reported.
Cantu was pronounced dead at 6:17 p.m., the newspaper said.
Cantu did not acknowledge the parents of the two victims -- Jennifer Ertman, who was 14, and Elizabeth Pena, who was 16, when they were rushing home along railroad tracks to beat curfew June 24, 1993.
As part of a new member initiation into a gang Cantu led, he and other gang members pulled the girls into a woods and sexually assaulted them before beating, strangling and stomping them to death.
Cantu was the third gang member to be executed in the girls' murders. Two others had their death sentences commuted to life in prison based on a Supreme Court ruling forbidding capital punishment for those who commit crimes before they turn 18.
"We can say it's the end, but it's never going to be closure," Adolfo Pena, Elizabeth's father, said after witnessing the execution.
Pena, standing with his wife, Melissa, wore a white T-shirt with a photo of the two girls on the front.
"We think about those girls every day," he said.
A sixth member of the gang, who was 14 and did not participate in the murders, received the maximum sentence in juvenile court, the Chronicle said.
