VARNER, Ark. – As the sun set over the Cummins Unit Monday night, Marcel Williams walked to his death. 

Around 8 p.m., Williams traveled the short distance down the hallway from his holding cell to the death chamber, passing Arkansas Department of Correction staff wearing helmets with face guards, his grim reapers. 

He didn’t look out the narrow window for a final glimpse of the outside world he once knew. 

Instead, the 46 year old looked forward, possibly realizing every little movement and moment would be his last. 

We watched all of this unfold from inside an ADC van. 

Kelly P. Kissel with the Associated Press, Jacob Rosenberg with the Arkansas Times and myself were selected as media witnesses for the state’s third lethal injection in several days. 

We got out of the van at 8:04 p.m. and made our own death march to the execution chamber, joining about 20 others, including civilian witnesses and attorneys, in a small, dim room filled with four rows of chairs. 

It was silent. 

Four windows covered with a thick black curtain divided us from Williams and his executioners. 

We could see our reflections, but when the curtains opened, he wouldn’t be able to see us. 

At 8:17 p.m., two minutes after Williams’s scheduled execution, ADC staff told us there was a 20-minute stay in place, which ticked on for more than an hour.  

Silence quickly filled the room again, quiet enough to hear a pin drop, but instead, we heard Williams’s laugh.

It made one of the staff members smile as she said, “That’s Marcel.”

Soon after, we heard the sound of restraints taking Williams prisoner once more and someone tell him in a muffled voice, “Walk with me.”

Williams retraced his steps down the hallway to what we were later told was a bathroom as we made our way back to the van around 9:20 p.m. 

We were once more fixated on the narrow window, witnessing a flurry of people walking back and forth through the hallway, including Williams’s counsel and a man and woman with surgical caps and masks. 

Almost 15 minutes later, we were back in the execution chamber. 

The further time dragged on, the readier we became for an end, whether that meant a stay or an execution. I wondered if that’s how Williams felt after more than two decades on death row. 

The same could be said for the family of Stacy Errickson, a young mother of two who Williams kidnapped, robbed, raped and murdered, the reason he was there to begin with. 

Williams got an extra two hours of life. 

The curtains parted ways at 10:15, revealing the inmate strapped to a gurney by his head, chest and arms with two IVs in different parts of his right arm, his eyes fixated on the ceiling. 

A white sheet covered all but his head and arms. 

The execution chamber’s bright lights were a stark contrast to our dim room. 

ADC Director Wendy Kelley asked once for Williams’s last words. He held his gaze on the fluorescents above as he prepared to go toward the light. 

Then the first drug, midazolam, was administered at 10:16. Within a minute, Williams’s eyes closed, his right eye remaining partially open throughout the process.

His chest started making large movements up and down. 

A man wearing a headset started performing consciousness checks on Williams and after several minutes, his chest stopped moving rapidly. 

Witnesses in our room fidgeted, all with grave expressions on their faces. 

Even if we wanted to look away, the three of us journalists couldn’t. We could miss something. 

After the man with the headset mouthed something inaudible, it appeared Williams received a second 500 mg dose of midazolam since the official began a second round of consciousness checks that were less thorough than before. 

At 10:30, the official shut off the drugs then called in the coroner. 

After examining Williams with a stethoscope, the coroner declared him dead right after the clock struck 10:33. 

Kelley confirmed the two most important times of the execution, indicating it took Williams 17 minutes to die, and read the court order with his sentence. 

The curtains closed. 

We left the execution chamber before Williams did. 

Our white van drove the same route back to the front of the prison as a black hearse would moments later, an end for some and a beginning for others as darkness fell over Cummins. 

After living more than 20 years in a cell no bigger than a parking space, Williams died on the same gurney as 28 others before him.