A Phoenix diocesan priest shares his spiritual journey accompanying Catholic death row inmate Leroy McGill in his final hours before execution in Arizona.
Newsroom (25/06/2026 Gaudium Press ) On the morning of May 20, as the Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence prepared for the execution of Leroy McGill, a Catholic priest entered the facility not to witness a death, but to accompany a soul.
Fr. Estevan Wetzel, director of prison ministry and restorative justice for the Diocese of Phoenix, celebrated Mass with McGill hours before the condemned man received a lethal injection — the culmination of more than two decades on death row following his conviction for first-degree murder, a crime reportedly committed under the influence of methamphetamines. By the time McGill died, local press described him as “by all accounts, a changed man.”
In a candid conversation with The Pillar, Fr. Wetzel opened up about what it means to minister at the intersection of life and state-sanctioned death — and the surprising peace he found there.
“You Know It’s Going to Be 10:00 on a Wednesday”
For most priests, accompanying the dying is a ministry of vigil and uncertainty. Not so in the execution chamber.
“When my dad was dying, or when grandma’s dying, you’re kind of guessing,” Fr. Wetzel said. “But with an execution, you know it’s going to be 10:00 on a Wednesday.”
That precision, he explained, transforms the nature of pastoral preparation. Walking into a hospital, Fr. Wetzel said he typically senses a space already marked by prayer — rosaries being prayed, family gathered. The execution chamber of Arizona was different. “I just got a sense that I should say some extra prayers, because I don’t know how many people have ever prayed in this building.”
Yet beneath those differences, Fr. Wetzel found a deep theological common ground. Drawing on St. Paul’s letter to the Romans — “the wages of sin is death” — he described arriving at every prison ministry encounter, including this one, with a sense of personal solidarity rather than clerical distance.
“My heart is filled with a kind of hope, and with solidarity, knowing that I need a savior just as much as this person,” he said. “They’re not some sort of second-class Christian.” He pointed to the brokenness present even among Scripture’s greatest figures — St. Paul’s complicity in the stoning of St. Stephen, Moses’ killing of an Egyptian, David’s role in the death of Bathsheba’s husband. “But God is bigger than our sins.”
Prayers in a Waiting Room
On the day of the execution, Fr. Wetzel celebrated Mass with McGill using readings that seemed almost providentially suited to the moment. The day’s Gospel included Christ’s words: “Now I am coming to you. I speak this in the world so that they may share in my joy completely. I gave them your word. Keep them from the evil one.”
Afterward, Fr. Wetzel waited in a separate room — praying the rosary, the Divine Mercy Chaplet, and what he described as “deliverance prayers” from a book he had specifically brought.
“It’s weird to be participatory in an evil,” he said, speaking with uncommon directness about the moral weight of his presence. “Someone is going to be killed, and that’s a crazy thought. I’m not praying for the event to go smoothly. I’m not blessing the event.”
His prayer, he explained, was singular in focus: that no spiritual obstacle would stand between Leroy McGill and the possibility of salvation in his final moments.
When the moment of execution arrived, Fr. Wetzel prayed Psalm 23, the apostolic pardon, and the “Go Forth, Christian Soul” prayer drawn from the Anointing of the Sick rite. “There was no dread,” he recalled. “The Lord was with me, and I did what I needed to do.”
Preparing Body and Soul
In the days leading up to the execution, Fr. Wetzel made deliberate choices to quiet his interior life. He turned off his phone, stepped back from social media and news, and paid closer attention to the daily lectionary readings — which he said seemed to speak directly to what he and McGill were facing.
One passage from the Acts of the Apostles particularly struck him: St. Paul declaring, “The Holy Spirit has been warning me that imprisonment and hardships await me, yet I consider life of no importance to me if I only finish my course and the ministry I received from the Lord Jesus.”
“It’s like the Lord is already showing his grace to let the scripture, the lectionary speak for that moment,” Fr. Wetzel said.
The night before the execution, he faced a small but telling decision: whether to fast. Then he remembered that McGill’s last meal — cottage pie, onion rings, and chocolate cake — had been posted online. He chose solidarity instead of abstinence. At roughly the same time McGill was eating his final meal, Fr. Wetzel sat down with his own favorite: tripas tacos.
“Just as some sort of spiritual lifting up of the heart,” he said, “and an appreciation of life and preparation for the next day.”
A List of Prayer Requests
Among the details Fr. Wetzel shared, one proved unexpectedly moving. In a prior visit, he had written out a list of prayer intentions and passed it to McGill — requests for family members, for the diocese’s prison ministry, for healing and reconciliation among those affected by crime.
On the morning of the execution, McGill still had that list tucked inside his Bible. He showed it to the priest.
“It just kind of moved my heart,” Fr. Wetzel said quietly. Unlike a hospice patient who may be unconscious or distracted by pain, McGill was fully present — and Fr. Wetzel found himself making a request of the man about to die.
“There was this inner peace within my soul and almost a confidence that, ‘Hey, whenever you get to heaven, make sure to pray for these things.'”
Processing What Remains
In the days following the execution, Fr. Wetzel said the dominant feeling was not grief, but gratitude — gratitude for a vocation that had led him precisely to this moment.
His path had not been conventional. He spoke of growing up in circumstances marked by police raids on his home and an “incarcerated-affected background” that, viewed through the lens of his priesthood, now made a certain sense.
“My priesthood has been unfolding to be in this moment,” he said. “Now I’m on the other side, and it’s just a joy to be there.”
He was careful not to claim emotional immunity. “I’m open to understanding that this will affect me deeper, or it might come in waves,” he acknowledged, noting that a prayer retreat and his priestly support group helped sustain him in the days that followed.
But the spiritual anchor he returned to was simply the constancy of God. “To whom shall we go, Lord? You have the words of eternal life.”
Justice, Dignity, and the “Poorest of the Poor”
As the Diocese of Phoenix’s head of both prison ministry and restorative justice, Fr. Wetzel occupies a space where the Church’s dual commitment — to victims and to the incarcerated — must be held simultaneously.
He described restorative justice not as a softening of accountability, but as a recovery of dignity. “While justice requires that we take responsibility for our sins, our dignity is never lost,” he said. “Those who are incarcerated, and also family members of the incarcerated, and also victims, at times have been so wounded that they forget or they seemingly lose the dignity of how precious they are in the eyes of the Lord.”
He invoked Mother Teresa’s language of the “poorest of the poor” to describe those on death row — not to minimize the gravity of their crimes, but to insist on the universality of grace.
“No one is a second-class Christian, if we choose to repent and return to the Lord,” he said. And in the prison setting, he has witnessed that repentance take root in unexpected ways.
“Many times in prison, once things have settled down and you’re outside of the world, you come to a freedom that you could never have on the outside,” he said. “There’s a permission to fall completely in love with Jesus and to be redeemed by him.”
For Fr. Wetzel, Leroy McGill appeared to be one of those cases — a man who, after more than 20 years, had found exactly that freedom, and carried it with him to the end.
- Raju Hasmukh with files from The Pillar
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