Name Steven Oken | ||
 | ||
Born January 22, 1962 Baltimore, Maryland Criminal charge Two counts of homicide and one count of first-degree murder Criminal penalty Death by lethal injection Died June 17, 2004, Balti, Maryland, United States | ||
Criminal status Capital punishment | ||
Steven Howard Oken (January 22, 1962 – June 17, 2004) was an American murderer who was executed in Maryland by lethal injection in 2004.
Contents
The crimes
On November 1, 1987, Steven Oken, then 25, murdered Dawn Marie Garvin (nee Romano). She was found by her father on the bed in her White Marsh apartment, naked, with a condiment bottle protruding from her vagina and blood streaming from her forehead. Despite efforts of her father and paramedics to administer CPR, she was dead. An autopsy later revealed that she had died as the result of two contact gunshot wounds; one of the bullets entered at her left eyebrow and the other at her right ear.
Less than two weeks after Oken murdered Dawn Garvin, he sexually assaulted and murdered his sister-in-law, Patricia Hirt, at his White Marsh townhouse, dumping her body along White Marsh Boulevard. He then fled to Kittery, Maine, where he murdered Lori Ward, the desk clerk at the motel in which he was staying. He was arrested in Maine on November 17, 1987, and was ultimately convicted and sentenced to life without parole in Maine for the first-degree murder of Ward. Oken was then returned to Maryland where he faced separate prosecutions for charges arising out of the other two murders.
Trial and execution
Oken was found guilty and sentenced to die for the killing of Dawn Garvin on January 18, 1991. Following his conviction for Garvin's murder Oken pleaded guilty to killing Patricia Hirt, and received an additional life sentence. On June 17, 2004, Steven Oken was executed by lethal injection at the Metropolitan Transition Center in Baltimore at age 42. His last meal was a chicken patty, with potatoes and gravy, green beans, marble cake, milk, and fruit punch – the regular prison meal that day.
Personal life
Oken was adopted by a Jewish family, and attended Randallstown High School.