Tiana Krasniqi poses for a photo while wearing her wedding dress at Tigerville Park in Livingston, TX, Tuesday, April 14, 2026. Earlier in the day, Krasniqi married James Broadnax, a death row inmate scheduled to be executed on April 30, at the Allan B. Polunsky Unit.
Juan Figueroa/The Dallas Morning News
LIVINGSTON — It’s almost time for the ceremony, and Tiana Krasniqi is changing into her wedding dress in the back of her Kia Soul, parked in the prison lot.
She grabs her marriage license and her vows Tuesday evening before heading inside; first through security, then to visitation, where James Broadnax is standing behind a pane of plexiglass. Krasniqi recalls catching the sheen in his eyes, tears building at the sight of her in an ivory gown.
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Tiana Krasniqi talks on the phone with James Broadnax, a death row inmate scheduled to be executed on April 30, while wearing her wedding dress at Tigerville Park in Livingston, TX, Tuesday, April 14, 2026. Earlier in the day, Krasniqi married Broadnax at the Allan B. Polunsky Unit.
Juan Figueroa/The Dallas Morning News
The groom is set to die in 16 days.
Krasniqi likens his execution date — April 30 — to a storm cloud hanging over their heads. She feels it most when they exchange their vows over phones on either side of a visitation booth, an officiant and two corrections officers in the room.
For better, for worse, in sickness and in health … what good does it do to make promises for a life that might never see May?
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Instead, they add: In this life and the afterlife.
Two years ago, Krasniqi and Broadnax forged a friendship through letters, when Krasniqi was living in London and working toward a master’s degree in human rights law. She found Broadnax while researching racial disparities on death row, wanting to understand how being a Black man could make a callous system even more unforgiving.
It took only a few months, she said, to fall in love. The more Krasniqi and Broadnax wrote, the more they found in common, from their childhoods to their humor.
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Broadnax proposed to Krasniqi on a Saturday last spring. She remembers how it felt to leave him at the prison, how she stopped at the end of the driveway and sobbed, rolling the window down to hold her hand out and pray.
Tiana Krasniqi wears her wedding ring at Tigerville Park in Livingston, TX, Tuesday, April 14, 2026. Earlier in the day, Krasniqi married James Broadnax, a death row inmate scheduled to be executed on April 30, at the Allan B. Polunsky Unit.
Juan Figueroa/The Dallas Morning News
Krasniqi decided to forgo her degree to focus on Broadnax’s case. She leaves England for weeks at a time, traveling between Little Rock, Ark., where Broadnax’s family lives, and the Allan B. Polunsky Unit in Livingston, where he has spent nearly 17 years in solitary confinement for all but two hours a day.
This much is undisputed: In 2008, when Broadnax and his cousin Demarius Cummings were both 19, they set out to rob two music producers outside their Garland studio. By the time they left, Stephen Swan and Matthew Butler were dead, and the cousins had $2 and a 1995 Ford to show for it.
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There was never reason to believe anyone but Broadnax was to blame. He confessed to the killings from jail in interviews eternalized on video. He told reporters at the time he had little to live for, and even fewer regrets.
In March, faced with an imminent end to his cousin’s life, Cummings decided it was time to clear his conscience. In a signed declaration, Cummings explained the reason only his DNA was found on the murder weapon was because he was responsible for the shooting.
It was his idea, he said. The burglary, the gunfire, the lies. All of it.
Cummings said he persuaded Broadnax to take the blame on the foundation of a misguided hope: That no court would send a 19-year-old, one with nothing more than a marijuana charge, to his death.
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Texas’ highest criminal court discarded Cummings’ statement earlier this month, arguing it held little weight when Broadnax had never recanted his own admission.
“Who would have believed him?” Krasniqi, 31, asked during an interview with The Dallas Morning News this week, sitting on a park bench overlooking Lake Livingston. “It would have been his word against Demarius’. It was always a losing game.”
Tiana Krasniqi and James Broadnax pose for a photo in the Allan B. Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas.
Courtesy of Tiana Krasniqi
To feel closer to a man she can’t even touch, has never touched, Krasniqi took herself on a road trip through Broadnax’s life. She traveled to Bramble Courts, the apartment complex in Texarkana where he lived with his mom. To the patch of land in Hope, Ark., where his grandmother’s house once stood, and the hiding spot Broadnax would run to when he needed an escape.
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Sometimes, Krasniqi would happen upon people who remembered him. A neighbor in Texarkana told her Broadnax was a kind kid who struggled a lot, that it was clear he wasn’t being taken care of. A clerk at the store where Broadnax used to buy his grandmother’s groceries described him fondly. A sweet boy, he said. Never caused any problems.
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So many people, Krasniqi recalled, said they wished they had taken him in. They wonder now if all of this could have been prevented. Maybe, they think, if Broadnax had known how it felt to be loved, he never would have ended up in Garland that day.
Because he did, the state plans to strap Broadnax, 37, to a gurney inside the death chamber at the end of the month in Huntsville. They’ll ask him for his final words and push a lethal solution into his veins.
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His wife will serve as his witness.