(Texas Department of Criminal Justice/NBC5)

From The Associated Press:

Texas has executed a man convicted in the slaying of a 12-year-old boy whose throat he slit before drinking his blood.

Pablo Lucio Vasquez told police he was drunk and high when voices persuaded him to kill David Cardenas in 1998 in the Texas border town of Donna, about 225 miles south of San Antonio. He hit the seventh-grader in the head from behind with a pipe, cut his throat and lifted the still-conscious victim so blood would drip on then 20-year-old Vasquez’s face.

Pablo Lucio Vasquez

“Something just told me to drink,” Vasquez said in a videotaped statement to police.

Vasquez, 38, was executed by lethal injection Wednesday evening. He was the 6th Texas inmate to be put to death this year and the 11th nationally.

The punishment was carried out after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a last-day appeal contending there were jury selection improprieties at his trial.