AP / Cara Owlsey, The Cincinnati Enquirer A hearse carrying the body of convicted murderer Robert Van Hook leaves the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility after he was executed Wednesday in Lucasville. Van Hook was put to death, more than 30 years after he stabbed a man to death in his Cincinnati apartment.

LUCASVILLE — A weeping inmate apologized for choking and fatally stabbing a man he met in a bar in 1985 moments before he was put to death Wednesday in the first Ohio execution in nearly a year.

The execution of Robert Van Hook by lethal injection was carried out at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility with three members of the victim’s family watching on the other side of a viewing window.

During the execution, Van Hook, crying, told his victim’s sister, brother and brother-in-law, “I’m very sorry for taking your brother away from you.”

He then recited a Norse prayer and began to sing after finishing, stopping after about two minutes when the drugs took effect.

The execution proceeded without any apparent problems, with the inmate’s chest rapidly rising and falling for a few minutes and Van Hook wheezing and puffing his lips in and out before he went still. The death appeared to take about 14 minutes.

Van Hook, 58, had no remaining appeals, and Republican Gov. John Kasich rejected his request for clemency without comment.

Also out of appeals is convicted double-murderer Charles Lorraine, 51, who is scheduled to die March 15, 2023, for the 1986 slayings of 77-year-old Raymond Montgomery and his bedridden wife, Doris, 80, inside their Warren home on Haymaker Avenue NW.

The state on June 15 set the execution date for Lorraine, who on May 6, 1986, used a butcher’s knife to stab Raymond Montgomery five times and then Doris Montgomery nine times.

Lorraine, who was 19 when he committed the murders, was sentenced to die in December 1986. Since then, he filed several motions and tried different legal maneuvers to avoid the death penalty, including that he was intellectually disabled, but he exhausted his appeals.

Another death row inmate from Trumbull County, Danny Lee Hill, could find himself resentenced to life in prison if the U.S. Supreme Court doesn’t agree to hear an appeal of a lower court’s ruling overturning the death sentence and ordering him to be resentenced.

A three-judge panel of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in February state court judges and mental health experts who declared Hill is not intellectually disabled were wrong, and there is clear evidence he is mentally disabled.

Hill was 18 when he brutally attacked Raymond Fife, 12, in a wooded area near Palmyra Road SW. Fife died two days later.

In Van Hook’s case, the family of victim David Self supported the execution, telling the parole board last month that he is missed every day. Self’s sister, Janet Self, said her brother had been reduced over the years to “a gay man in a bar,” when he in fact he was so much more.

Authorities say Van Hook met Self at the Subway Bar in downtown Cincinnati on Feb. 18, 1985. After a couple of hours, they went to Self’s apartment where Van Hook choked the 25-year-old Self to unconsciousness, stabbed him multiple times in the neck and then cut his abdomen open and stabbed his internal organs, according to court records. Van Hook stole a leather jacket and necklaces before fleeing, records say.

In September 2017, the state put Gary Otte to death for the 1992 murders of two people during robberies over two days in suburban Cleveland.

The state is next scheduled to execute Cleveland Jackson on Sept. 13 for the 2002 shooting of a 17-year-old girl in Lima during a robbery.