Posted on 12/07/2005 3:35:04 PM PST by SmithL
One victim was a young convenience store clerk and military veteran who moved back to California to fight for custody of his daughters. The other three were family members who owned a motel they were hoping to sell because the neighborhood had grown too rough.
For all four, plans to change their lives were cut short by the sawed-off shotgun of Crips co-founder Stanley Tookie Williams during a pair of 1979 robberies in Los Angeles County that have put him on death row.
Their stories are part of the pitch prosecutors have made to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to deny clemency and let Williams die by lethal injection on Tuesday, but most of the news coverage has focused on the criminal, not the crime.
Family members say too much attention is being paid to Williams and too little is focused on their loved ones who got no second chances, no opportunities to turn their lives around.
With the help of prosecutors and victims' rights advocates, they plan to urge the governor Thursday to consider their loss — store clerk Albert Owens, 26 and motel owners Yen-I Yang, 76 and Tsai-Shai Yang, 63, and their daughter Ye-Chen Lin, 43, who left behind shattered families and changed lives.
Williams claims he's innocent and his supporters say he is more valuable alive than dead as he works behind bars to keep young people away from gangs. They want Schwarzenegger to reduce Williams' death sentence to life in prison without parole.
Williams, 51, co-founded the Crips gang in Los Angeles with a high school buddy when he was 17. He has since renounced his gangster past, spoken to community groups by phone from San Quentin State Prison and co-written a series of children's books warning them about the dangers of a criminal life.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Tookie Williams, however, is a major figure. A Celebrity in his own right with counter-cultural cachet to spare. He is an intellectual in that he not only reads books, he has written one as well. He is ready to take his rightful place in The Pantheon of the Fabulous if only Arnold Schwarzenegger, a fellow Celebrity and also Governor of the State of California, would see fit to spare his life.
Tookie killed these people because killing was a way to establish his credibility within his criminal gang. Even by the standards of idiot criminals, these killings were completely unnecessary.
May he burn in Hell.
Not to mention he set such a great example for his own son, who is now serving time in prison for killing someone.
I spent a little time browsing on tookie.com. This is what he regrets:
"I also didn't expect the Crips to end up ruining the lives of so many young people, especially young black men who have hurt other young black men. . . . So today I apologize to you all -- the children of America and South Africa -- who must cope every day with dangerous street gangs. I no longer participate in the so-called gangster lifestyle, and I deeply regret that I ever did.
As a contribution to the struggle to end child-on-child brutality and black-on-black brutality, I have written the Tookie Speaks Out Against Gang Violence children's book series."
There isn't a word of sympathy for his victims, or other innocent victims of gang crime. His sympathy is for the gang members. He regrets their -- and his own -- self-destruction -- that is all.
I think Tookie is still the same racist he was when he murdered whites and Asians in cold blood, laughed about their suffering, and stated that he wanted to kill all whites.
Put another way, his "redemption" is really just self-pity -- extended to those he views as being like himself.
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