Andre Thomas UNOPENED 15x10 Brown Kraft envelope. Sealed. Contents unknown. Item in package is rigid. 8.6 oz. Signed. Dated May2, 2016.
Andre Lee Thomas (born March 17, 1983) is an American convicted murderer and death row inmate known for removing both of his eyeballs in separate incidents and ingesting one of them. In 2004, Thomas killed his estranged wife Laura Boren, his four-year-old son and her one-year-old daughter in Sherman, Texas. He cut open the chests of all three victims, and he removed the two children's hearts.1
When a skinny, shaking and psychotic Andre Thomas arrived at a Texas Department of Criminal Justice psychiatric facility in December 2008, he told mental health staff that his wife – whom he had murdered, along with her two children, four years earlier – he was still alive.
“I keep seeing her”, he said, an attempt to explain why he had pulled out and eaten his left eye on death row, rendering himself blind. “I want out of this false reality.”
Thomas had pulled out his right eye in 2004, just days after stabbing to death his wife, Laura Boren, their 4-year-old son, Andre Lee Boren (known also as Andre Jr.), and her 1-year-old daughter, Leyha Hughes, in an effort, he said, to obey God and purge demons from their hearts. He ripped out the children's hearts and in a failed attempt to remove their mother's heart, removed part of her lung. After failing to also kill himself, Thomas put the organs in his pocket and walked home.
In Polunsky, he was wearing mittens to prevent him from ripping out the other eye. He tried slitting his wrists and once cut his throat. On Dec. 1, 2008, he threatened to hang himself. Eight days later, Thomas gouged out his left eye and ate it.
Thomas lived for three years in ad seg on death row before he removed his second eye. His eyelids are now surgically closed over his empty eye sockets. He has lived at the Jester IV Unit, one of three psychiatric units in the state’s prison system, each housing about 550 mentally ill convicts.
Thomas said: “I myself have slowly developed issues; cut my wrist a few times, battled with depression, am now forced to take medication to help out that,” he wrote. “I’ve been able to keep most of my sanity because of my wife and children.” And, “Imagine all the cruelty you put me through,” he said. “You sentenced them to death, but you didn’t sentence them to be punished every day until you put them to death.”2
Thomas is scheduled to be executed on April 5, 2023.
1 Andre Thomas - Wikipedia (2023). Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andre_Thomas (Accessed: 12 February 2023).
2 Andre Thomas: A Struggle for Sanity Behind Bars (2013). Available at: https://www.texastribune.org/2013/02/25/andre-thomas-part-5/ (Accessed: 12 February 2023).