A South Carolina man who killed his ex-girlfriend?s parents with a baseball bat was executed by firing squad Friday, the first U.S. prisoner in 15 years to die by that method, which he saw as preferable to the electric chair or lethal injection.

Three volunteer prison employees used rifles to carry out the execution of Brad Sigmon, 67, who was pronounced dead at 6:08 p.m.

Sigmon killed David and Gladys Larke in their Greenville County home in 2001 in a botched plot to kidnap their daughter. He told police he planned to take her for a romantic weekend, then kill her and himself.

Sigmon?s lawyers said he chose the firing squad because the electric chair would ?cook him alive,? and he feared that a lethal injection of pentobarbital into his veins would send a rush of fluid and blood into his lungs and drown him.

The details of South Carolina?s lethal injection method are kept secret in South Carolina, and Sigmon unsuccessfully asked the state Supreme Court on Thursday to pause his execution because of that.

On Friday, Sigmon wore a black jumpsuit with a hood over his head and a white target with a red bulls-eye over his chest.

The armed prison employees stood 15 feet from where he sat in the state?s death chamber ? the same distance as the backboard is from the free-throw line on a basketball court. Visible in the same small room was the state?s unused electric chair. The gurney used to carry out lethal injections had been rolled away.

The volunteers all fired at the same time through openings in a wall. They were not visible to about a dozen witnesses in a room separated from the chamber by bullet-resistant glass. Sigmon made several heavy breaths during the two minutes that elapsed from when the hood was placed to the shots being fired. (AP, excluding headline)

? FILE PHOTO: This undated photo shows viewing chairs in the witness room of the execution chamber in the Broad River Correctional Institute in Columbia, S.C. (South Carolina Department of Corrections via AP)

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