Jury Calls for Death Penalty in Slayings of Ex-Grid Star’s Family

Darren Charles Williams should die in the gas chamber for the 1984 execution-style slayings of the mother of former pro football star Kermit Alexander and three other relatives, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury recommended Tuesday.

The panel, which began deliberating May 21, took three votes before reaching a verdict, according to juror Karen Ragan, 34, of Downey.

Ragan, a secretary, said jurors based their decision in part on the “viciousness of the killings. The two women, the two children, murdered in bed--they never stood a chance.”

Williams, 26, a reputed gang member, was convicted last Dec. 15 of four counts of first-degree murder in the Aug. 31, 1984, slaying of Ebora Alexander, 58; her daughter, Dietra, 24, and her grandsons Damani Garner, 13, and Damon Bonner, 8.

Mrs. Alexander was shot dead as she drank her morning coffee in her South-Central Los Angeles home; the others were killed while they lay in bed.

A new jury had to be impaneled for the penalty phase after the original jury deadlocked 10 to 2 on whether Williams was eligible for the death penalty.

In May, 1986, Tiequon Aundray Cox, believed to have been the triggerman, was sentenced to the gas chamber. The third defendant, Horace Burns, is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

In seeking the death penalty, Deputy Dist. Atty. Sterling E. Norris argued that, although it is unclear whether Williams fired any of the shots, he was the “go-between” who was hired for $50,000 to $60,000 to arrange the killings.

“But for him, the other two guys wouldn’t have been in the house,” the prosecutor said.

Prosecutors believe that the Alexander family members were murdered by mistake, after the contract killers went to the wrong address. The individual believed to have masterminded the killings has never been charged, but the investigation remains open, Norris said.

Co-defense attorney H. Clay Jacke said his client should have been spared the death penalty.

“I thought that his prior activities in the community were such as to have entitled him to the benefit of the doubt,” Jacke said. “ . . . He had worked with kids, and with youth movements and disturbed children and had gotten all kinds of awards.”

Superior Court Commissioner Florence-Marie Cooper set sentencing for June 30.