A Mississippi man who murdered his estranged wife and sexually raped his stepdaughter during an eight-hour standoff with police in 2010 was executed on Wednesday, according to local media.

David Cox, who fired his counsel and withdrew his appeals in the case in 2018, stating he deserved the capital penalty, became Mississippi's first prisoner executed in nine years.

He was declared dead at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman at 6:12 p.m. central time (0012 GMT Thursday), according to the Clarion-Ledger newspaper.

"I want to tell my children that I love them very, very much and that I was a nice guy once," the sentenced man stated in his dying words, according to Mississippi Department of Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain.

Cox was the eighth convict executed in the United States in 2021 and the first in Mississippi since 2012. Mississippi is one of the states in the United States that has recently experienced difficulty obtaining lethal injection medications from pharmaceutical firms hesitant to sell them for executions.

Cox had petitioned the Mississippi Supreme Court to remove all counsel from the case and to cease any appeals on his behalf. Cox wrote to the court's top justice in 2018 that he was "a guilty man worthy of execution."

On May 14, 2010, Cox purchased a rifle and traveled to his sister-in-Sherman, law's Mississippi, house, where he resided with his divorced wife Kim, their two children, and his stepdaughter. Prosecutors claimed Cox fired his way into the house and held his wife and two children hostage for more than eight hours.