While they were still doing their work, 20-year-old Emmanuel Antonia Littlejohn[a] and 25-year-old Glenn Roy Bethany entered the store and held Meers at gunpoint, with the intention of robbing him.

[3] At that time, Littlejohn, who had a long criminal record, had just come out of prison for burglary, robbery, and assault, and Bethany was a drug dealer.

[7] Littlejohn remained on the run for about five days before he was apprehended in Wichita, Kansas, and extradited back to Oklahoma to be charged and tried for killing Meers.

[8] In a separate case, together with William Arnold Penny, Littlejohn was also charged with robbery with a dangerous weapon, two counts of first-degree rape and kidnapping.

[10][11] A year after Bethany was convicted and sentenced, Emmanuel Littlejohn stood trial in early 1994 before a jury at the District Court of Oklahoma County.

On December 31, 1998, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the convictions of Littlejohn for the robbery-murder of Kenneth Meers, but his death sentence for the murder of Meers was vacated in favor of a re-sentencing hearing due to the need to reconsider the evidence so as to determine if the aggravating factors made Littlejohn eligible for either death or life without parole.

At one point while awaiting to be re-sentenced, Littlejohn allegedly heard a fellow prisoner named Christopher Jordan confessing to the 1999 murder of Paul Howell, a crime for which his accomplice Julius Jones was sentenced to death.

[23] Jones, whose execution was scheduled to occur on November 18, 2021, had protested his innocence throughout the years and pointed to Jordan as the real killer.

[32][33] Prior to the rescheduling of Littlejohn's execution, convicted rapist-killer Richard Norman Rojem Jr. was put to death on June 27, 2024, for raping and murdering his stepdaughter 40 years ago in July 1984.

Reverend Jeff Hood, a spiritual advisor for death row prisoners, and Abraham Bonowitz, co-founder of an anti-death penalty group, conducted a media conference and both of them stated that Littlejohn deserved mercy given that there was no conclusive evidence to prove that Littlejohn was the killer and that his guilt was not clear-cut.

They said it would be an injustice if Bethany were the real killer and Littlejohn was executed for the fatal shooting of Meers despite not pulling the trigger.

[39] Additionally, Littlejohn's mother, who was 15 when she gave birth to him, pleaded for mercy for her only son, whose death sentence caused her to quit her drug addiction, a problem she struggled with since her adolescent years and pregnancy.

[41] Bill Meers, the victim's brother, expressed both his disappointment and anger at the decision, and stated that he wanted the death penalty to be carried out.

[47] On the eve of Littlejohn's scheduled execution, the family of the late Kenneth Meers spoke up in the media about the case.

Bill stated that he would not forgive Littlejohn for murdering his brother, whom the prosecution described as a man who "simply did not have a mean bone in his body".

In his statement, Stitt said that as a "law and order" governor, he had difficulty with unilaterally commuting the death sentence of Littlejohn, which was issued by the jury and affirmed by the higher courts in multiple appeals, and hence chose to not grant clemency and hoped that the families affected by the murder of Meers could find closure.

[51][52] On the morning of September 26, 2024, 52-year-old Emmanuel Antonia Littlejohn was put to death via lethal injection at Oklahoma State Penitentiary.

Littlejohn was reportedly administered with a three-drug lethal injection of midazolam, vecuronium bromide and potassium chloride, and later pronounced dead at 10:17am.

In the statement, the Meers family expressed their appreciation and gratitude for the efforts of the state authorities to bring Littlejohn to justice.

[56] On the other hand, abolitionists condemned the execution, and among them, Don Heath, a member of the Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, criticised Stitt for his failure to notify Littlejohn until the last minute that he refused to grant clemency, which amounted to "a needless infliction of emotional distress" in Heath's words.

[57] Prior to the execution, Littlejohn had requested a meat pizza, Coca-Cola and two slices of cheesecake as his final meal.

According to anti-death penalty activist Jeff Hood, Littlejohn had his final meetings with his mother and stepfather, and made last phone calls to his daughter and granddaughter.