Alabama’s oldest state prison inmate has died.

Floyd Lee Coleman, 106, died Wednesday at UAB Hospital, according to the Jefferson County Coroner’s Office.

Coleman was serving a life sentence for the slaying and rape of a 7-year-old girl in Bessemer.

Chief Deputy Coroner Bill Yates said Coleman was taken from William Donaldson Correctional Facility to UAB Hospital on May 19 with medical complications.

He was pronounced dead at the hospital at 6:09 p.m. Wednesday.

Yates said there was no evidence of trauma or foul play.

Coleman was originally sentenced in 1979 to die in Alabama’s electric chair for the slaying and rape of the girl.

But the Alabama Supreme Court in 1981 ordered a new trial because of the state’s new death sentence statute.

Before the second trial, Coleman pleaded guilty and he was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole in August 1984.

Coleman, according to the judge’s original sentencing order, was 60 years old when he saw the victim, 7-year-old Quintina Steele, on a Bessemer street on Dec. 3, 1978.

He led her to his bedroom at a nearby rooming house – an old hotel – where he strangled her to death.

“In addition to those aspects of the defendant’s heinous, atrocious and cruel misconduct stated above, the court finds that the defendant during his commission of the charged capital felony, heartlessly and savagely beat and battered the person of the helpless and defenseless seven year old female child, Quintina Steele …,” Acting Circuit Judge Russell McElroy stated in the order.

Coleman denied the claims and testified he was heavily intoxicated at the time of the crime.

He served more than 45 years in prison.