Slain Girl’s Story Advances a Cause

Before dawn broke Tuesday, Erin Runnion traded her squeaky brown seat in the front row of a Santa Ana courtroom for a spot in the glare of television lights.

After running a gantlet of media interviews in the hours after a jury decided Monday that her daughter’s killer be put to death, Runnion rested for two hours. Then she donned another dark suit in preparation for a full day on the national talk show circuit, focusing on 5-year-old Samantha’s short but inspired life.

“Good Morning America” recorded her for five minutes at 3:40 a.m. Half an hour and a steaming cup of coffee later, she taped a segment with Katie Couric from the “Today” show. A seven-minute break preceded another interview, this one with MSNBC.

She has mourned her daughter for three years and will for the rest of her life, she said. But her job Tuesday was to use her time in the limelight to prevent other children from meeting Samantha’s fate. She has no room for anger at her daughter’s killer, just hope that his name will fade from the public’s memory while her daughter’s name lives on as a reminder to parents to be cautious.

“There is no right or wrong way to handle this situation,” she said between television interviews. “But not every crime gets the attention that Samantha’s has. I feel a responsibility not only to Samantha, but to all the victims we never hear about.”

It’s the same schedule she faced in the days after the 2002 arrest of Alejandro Avila, a factory worker who lived in Lake Elsinore. Avila was convicted two weeks ago of kidnapping, sexually assaulting and murdering Samantha and is set to be formally sentenced July 22, a few days before the girl would have turned 9.

Throughout the morning, the 30-year-old remained composed. She chatted with the crews between tapings about the scarcity of coffee available before sunrise, cellphone gadgets and her packed schedule.

“It goes all day today. Hopefully we just keep going,” said Runnion, sitting in a makeshift studio in a hallway at the Orange County Sheriff’s Department in Santa Ana, across the street from the courthouse. She cleared her scratchy throat and counted to five for a mike check. One minute later, an interviewer 3,000 miles away started piping questions into her right ear.

Runnion talked in easy sound bites about the Joyful Child Foundation she started after her daughter’s abduction, and its child safety program, Samantha’s Pride. More than 80 such groups nationwide have been formed.

Her message was simple: Adults need to better monitor children so that pedophiles and kidnappers won’t risk getting caught. But vigilance doesn’t mean locking children inside their homes, she said.

“I want to give our children freedom to be children, but in a safe way,” she told one interviewer. The message is straightforward. For Erin Runnion, the grief process is not.

“The pain becomes a part of who you are,” she said. “It doesn’t ever go away.”

She mourns the child she has lost. She will not be able to see Samantha grow older, turn 20 or 40 or have children. Worse, during the pretrial hearings and the six-week trial itself, has been the misery of listening to the details of her daughter’s death.

She said she heard things in court she had not heard before. There was the woman who testified that she heard the screaming of a little girl as she and her boyfriend drove by the Cleveland National Forest the night Samantha was kidnapped. Later that night, a witness said, the killer spent the evening at a Comfort Inn in Temecula.

Even more agonizing was listening to the prosecution’s timeline about what Avila did after he snatched Samantha as she played near her family’s Stanton condominium. As witnesses testified about when Samantha probably died and the sexual assault she suffered, the mother said, her imagination ran wild.

When they talked about DNA extracted from Samantha’s fingernail scrapings, Runnion could envision her daughter clawing at Avila. During testimony of DNA consistent with the child’s tears that was found inside Avila’s car, Runnion visualized her daughter sobbing as she prayed for someone to rescue her.

“I’ll never know whether she suffered for three hours or 10,” she said. It was a “huge relief” to learn that the child could have been killed as early as 8 p.m., less than two hours after she was abducted.

“That was nice,” she said, laughing ruefully at using such a word to describe any aspect of the trial.

She has a steno pad packed with notes from the testimony, jotted down in an attempt to keep the trial “academic” rather than gruesome. Then each night, she said, she would put to sleep her three other children -- two stepchildren from her husband, Ken Donnelly, and the third an 18-month-old girl they have together -- then let her feelings wash over her.

“Samantha deserves to be grieved,” she said. “It’s all worth grieving for.” The end of the trial doesn’t change that.

“There’s no celebration in this at any point for me,” she said. “It doesn’t give me any peace at all that he’s going to die.”

She worries that death penalty opponents will find sympathy for Avila. She believes he should die. “If you believe in the death penalty,” she said, “this guy is a poster kid for it.”

Runnion says she continues to draw strength from her memories of Samantha: the child’s precocious notes to family members coaxing them to “be brave.” The way she would run to the garage every night when her mother came home from work, waving her arms like a police officer directing traffic, and the little dance she performed after learning how to push open the patio door when she was 2. Samantha’s curiosity about scientific phenomena and the eating habits of the Tyrannosaurus rex, and her disarming way of admitting she sometimes didn’t know all the answers.

“She would say, ‘I don’t know. I’ll have to learn more about that,’ ” her mother recalled.

It was a delight to mother such a child, Runnion said.

Outside the Sheriff’s Department, a group of women smoked while waiting outside the jail next door for friends to be released. Balloons bobbed from a black stretch limousine ready to carry home two inmates.

As the television crews inside dismantled their temporary sets, coiling wires and rearranging chairs, Runnion took a seat at a stranger’s desk and picked up the phone. She had a radio interview at 5 a.m. She wished there were more.

It was Samantha’s time to shine, and her mother wanted to grab it.