Posted on 03/19/2004 8:17:20 AM PST by chance33_98
Execution
By CAROLYN SUMA (CHINCOTEAQUE, VA -- WMDT) 3/18/2004
Photographer: Michelle Bambary
On January 27th 1994, Brian Cherrix lured Tessa Van Hart to deliver a pizza in a remote location on Chincoteague Island. It was there he raped and shot the young mother of 2 in the head- leaving her to die in her car.
"And then when they found her, you heart just sank and I couldn't believe it. Disbelief was really big and tension throughout the air and you just wouldn't believe someone in the community could have something like that," says Chincoteague Resident Kelly Fox.
Cherrix was convicted of Van Hart's murder. The 30-year-old will be executed tonight at nine o'clock by legal injection at the Greenville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Virginia. Some on the island, like Kelly Fox, say Cherrix deserves it.
"It's a terrible thing that he did but that's part of society I mean when you do that kind of thing here in Virginia that's what you have to face," says Fox.
She says nothing like this has ever happened on Chincoteague before. It's all anyone's been talking about today. And emotions are still raw.
"Well for a little town like Chincoteague for something like that to happen, was very tragic. Tess was a very hard worker and a very nice lady," says a close friend of Van Hart.
Many didn't want to talk on the record, because many know both the Cherrix and the Van Hart families in the small town. But resident Fox summed up her feelings.
"I really feel sorry for the family, the Van Hart family, for what they had to go through and the children are going to have to suffer all the rest of their lives because they have no mother. But the Cherrix family's suffering too because now they're going to lose a son and a grandson and it's going to be hard on them but it's bad all the way around," Fox says.
The Van Hart family went down to see the execution. Her mother Ida Bell Ward says "Cherrix will finally pay for what he did, it's an eye for an eye."
Over ten years for justice to be served. The death penalty is a deterrent to crime. It is the painfully slow application of the death penalty that prevents it from being a deterrent.
Better in the neck, so he has a few minutes to feel it and think about it.
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