COLUMBIA -- Minutes before the state executed him Friday evening, Shawn Paul Humphries turned to two Greenville County sisters of his victim and said he was sorry.

"That was the greatest gift I could ever have received," Kathy Carpenter, one of the sisters of Mendel Alton "Dickie" Smith, said afterward.

Humphries, 34, slipped quietly into death as a lethal injection of drugs stopped his heart, the third man to be executed by the state this year.

Prison officials pronounced Humphries dead at 6:18 p.m., 11 years after a jury convicted him of shooting Smith in the head during a botched robbery at the Max Saver store Smith owned with his brother in Fountain Inn.

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"We're here tonight for Dickie," Carole Smith Cooley of Fountain Inn, Smith's other sister at the execution, told reporters tearfully. "For what his life stood for, for the legacy that he left. We know this will not bring us closure or joy or excitement. We hope that peace will come."

Humphries spent time Friday watching "The Wizard of Oz," talking to family and friends on the phone and eating a last meal including a McDonald's hamburger and a Dr Pepper.

His family gathered Friday and prayed, said his aunt, Terri Piotrowski, who lives in Belton.

"Please pray for us and Shawn and the Smith family," she said in an email.

Officers transported Humphries on Thursday from the state's death row near Charleston to the capital punishment facility in Columbia. Confined to a spartan cell, Humphries requested permission to watch "The Wizard of Oz" and was given a TV and VCR, said his lawyer, Teresa Norris, who brought him the videotape Friday morning.

Officials said he played the tape, though he spent much of the time talking to family and friends on the telephone.

Officers later served Humphries his requested last meal of a McDonald's hamburger, fries, broccoli and cheese, some oat cereal, milk and Dr Pepper, officials said.

He then awaited his call to walk to the chamber about 30 feet away.

Sometime before 6 p.m., officers moved Humphries to a gurney in a room behind the execution chamber. Prison staff strapped him down, then attached two intravenous lines, one to each outstretched arm.

As prison workers prepared Humphries for death, six witnesses somberly filed into an adjacent room outfitted with eight upholstered chairs facing the chamber. A deep red curtain blocked any view of the chamber.

The witnesses included the two sisters and Smith's widow, Patricia Smith, and three news reporters. A State Law Enforcement Division agent also sat in the room.

Shortly before the curtain opened, Patricia Smith left the room, saying, "I can't do this."

At 6 p.m., the curtain opened, revealing Humphries in a creased white sheet, his gurney positioned perpendicular to the witnesses.

Cooley and Carpenter sat about a foot from the paneled and barred windows in front of the chamber. Brick walls enclosed the room. In the back of the room hung another red curtain. Fluorescent fixtures cast a harsh light.

Humphries, dressed in a green prison jumpsuit, turned to look toward the women, with Carpenter closest to his face. He mouthed, "I'm sorry" and she nodded.

He also apologized to the Smiths in a statement read by Norris, his lawyer. He also used his final statement to debate the death penalty, taking issue with its supporters.

"We are all sinners," Norris read. "So what gives you the right as a sinner to take away a gift that God gave? He gave me the gift of life. So who are you to say his gift is worthless, so worthless that you are throwing it away?"

Humphries said he was praying for those who "misuse" Scripture "just to gain or sustain their position of authority."

As Norris talked, warden Bill White, equipped with a telephone headset to relay what was happening to various officials, and warden Raymond Reed stood in the back of the chamber.

In a smaller adjacent room, equipped with a heart monitor connected to the inmate's chest, two executioners begin their task by triggering the flow of three drugs into the inmate's arms.

Though some have gone to their death in the chamber singing hymns, Humphries was mostly silent, though he told Carpenter a second time that he was sorry.

Within a minute after Norris was seated in the room facing Humphries, the condemned man's eyes stopped blinking, and he gulped and blew air out his mouth as the first of the drugs, pentothal, put him to sleep.

After a couple of minutes, his breathing appeared to stop. A second drug, procurium bromide, is used to paralyze the inmate's diaphragm and lungs. As the inmate's breathing stops, a third drug, potassium chloride, flows into his blood and stops his heart.

For about 10 minutes, witnesses watched silently, the only sound coming from a ticking clock above. The two sisters kept their eyes fixed on Humphries. Norris thumbed through a Bible.

A doctor walked into the chamber from a side door, lifted Humphries' eyelids and listened to his chest with a stethoscope. He nodded to warden Raymond Reed, who turned to witnesses and announced Humphries' death.

The witnesses were escorted out of the room.

"I hope there will be comfort and peace for the Humphries family and also for our family," Carpenter said afterward.

About 25 people protested the execution with pickets outside the entrance to the prison system's complex on Broad River Road.

His death was the 1,001st execution since the death penalty was reinstated nationwide by the Supreme Court in 1976. The 1,000th execution took place 16 hours earlier in North Carolina.

Edward Blackwell, who joined Humphries in the ill-fated New Year's Day 1994 robbery attempt, is serving a life sentence for his part in the crime.

Humphries and Blackwell hatched the robbery idea during while drinking that night after stealing a 9mm pistol from a truck, according to court testimony. Humphries shot Smith after he saw Smith reaching for a gun under the counter. The crime was caught on video.

Smith, 43, was described by family members as hard-working and generous. He was survived by a wife and then-5-year-old daughter, who is now 17 and supports capital punishment.

Humphries last-ditch appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court failed Thursday, and Gov. Mark Sanford turned down a request for clemency Friday morning.

"It goes without saying that death penalty cases are tragic for everyone involved," said Joel Sawyer, a Sanford spokesman.

"That having been said, the governor's legal counsel found nothing to warrant the governor overturning the outcome of an exhaustive legal process. And he has decided not to grant clemency in this case."