July 24:   

1974: Huntsville Unit (Walls) - Inmate Fred Gomez Carrasco, Rudy Dominguez and Ignacio Cuevas take over the Education Department of the Huntsville Unit at 1:00 p.m. They have three pistols and ammunition that have been smuggled in to them. They take eleven employee hostages. Initially there are inmates who are also hostages and later released. The inmates barricade themselves inside the education department and make demands to the prison system's director W. J. (Jim) Estelle. The siege lasts eleven days and ends with the deaths of librarian Julie Standley and teacher Yvonne Beseda. Carrasco and Dominguez also die. The third inmate, Cuevas, will stand trial for murder and received the death penalty. He will die at the Huntsville Unit, also, in the death chamber 17 years later.  

July 28:  

1931: Huntsville Unit (Walls) - His face wreathed in a smile, Will Jenkins, 46-year-old Harris County negro, calmly walked to his death in the electric chair here early Tuesday morning. Fearful throughout the day, and refusing to eat, the negro apparently grew courageous as the end drew near. Jenkins was executed 
for attacking a 12-year-old negro girl in Houston last year. Before entering the execution chamber, Jenkins marched down the condemned row, shaking hands with the other inmates, and talking in a loud, but quivering voice. As he entered the death chamber, he walked briskly to the chair and was asked if he had anything to say.  He turned and faced the small audience. "I want to say that I have been living in sin for 40-odd years. I'm not afraid of the chair and I hope to meet all of you folks in the here-after. To you newspaper men who have been writing about my sins, I want you to say that I have professed faith and now write about me as I die." This is over, he stepped to the chair and the guards quickly strapped him in. The first charge struck his body at 12:05 a.m. Twice more the current was applied. The doctor pronounced him dead at 12:11 a.m. When interviewed an hour before going to his death, Jenkins refused to talk of his crime. Jenkins previously served two terms in the state penitentiary for burglary and another for criminal assault, he said. He was convicted in Houston las October (Staff Correspondent, Olen W. Clements. Houston Post Dispatch, July 28, 1931)