Two days before South Carolina’s scheduled execution of Freddie Eugene Owens, his co-defendant in the robbery and murder of a Greenville convenience store clerk says Owens was innocent.
Stephen Golden, the man prosecutors said robbed the store with Owens, signed a statement Wednesday saying Owens was not the person who shot Irene Graves on Halloween night 1997.
“Freddie Owens is not the person who shot Irene Graves at the Speedway on November 1, 1997,” Golden said in the sworn statement filed to the South Carolina Supreme Court. “Freddie was not present when I robbed the Speedway that day,” Golden said.
Owens is scheduled to be executed at 6 p.m. Friday at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia.
Owens was convicted of murdering Graves and received the death penalty In 1999. During court proceedings, prosecutors said Owens and Graves walked into the gas station to rob the store. Minutes later, they said Owens shot Graves in the head.
Despite not having forensic evidence, detectives during the trial used statements from Golden and Owens’s girlfriend to implicate him in the murder. Owens pled innocent during the trial and told law enforcement he was at home in bed at the time of the robbery turned murder.