Hours before facing a Tennessee execution chamber, Philip Workman had one final request: to give away his final meal, a vegetarian pizza, to someone sleeping rough on the streets of Nashville.

Prison officials at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution refused. “We can get some special things for the inmate, but the taxpayers don’t really give us permission to donate to charity,” a prison spokeswoman said.

Unable to donate the pizza, Workman — put on Death Row for killing a police officer in a bungled 1981 robbery of a Wendy’s fast-food restaurant — skipped his final meal and was executed in the early hours of Wednesday morning. The $20 (£10) budget for his “special meal request” went unspent.

But there was something about Workman’s small, thwarted gesture of kindness, and perhaps also about the pizza itself, a staple of the blue-collar American family — that moved the people of Tennessee.

As daylight broke over Nashville, and as news of Workman’s final request spread, the biggest homeless shelter in the city was inundated with 150 donated veggie pizzas, worth $1,200. The money was raised by Donna Spangler, 55, who delivered them in person with a friend. She was not the only one who felt to compelled to act: other donors, mostly anonymous, delivered 40 or so other pizzas to either the same or other shelters in the area.

From the grave, Workman got his final request.

Workman, 53, was a self-confessed heroin addict when he decided to rob a Wendy’s restaurant — with a gun — for drug money. But an employee activated a silent alarm, and the police arrived quickly on the scene. Workman insists that his gun was “involuntarily discharged” when he was hit on the head by a police officer, with the bullet striking and killing Memphis police lieutenant Ronald Oliver.

Workman’s defence lawyers used ballistics evidence to argue that Lieutenant Oliver was in fact killed by “friendly fire”. They have also pointed to the recanted statement of a witness who now says that he lied when he said he saw Workman shoot the police officer.

But none of this was enough to convince any court to overrule the death sentence.

“Philip Workman was trying to do a good deed and no one would help,” said Mrs Spangler, who recruited a co-worker to help her to make the huge delivery. “I knew my husband would have a heart attack. I put some of it on the credit card. But I thought we’ll find a way to pay for them later. I just felt like I had to do something.”

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