Angry Families of Victims Still Wait for Justice

Exasperated with a court system that has refused to pronounce Robert Alton Harris’ case finally over, the families of the two boys he killed said Tuesday it was too much to hope that Harris actually would be executed as soon as March or April.

“After 11 years, I’m not bringing out the Champagne yet,” said John Mayeski’s mother, Kathryn Mayeski Sanders, 68, a former civilian electronics technician with the Navy.

Steve Baker, Michael Baker’s father, said he shares that caution. “There have been so many appeals, and the thing has dragged on for so long, I’ve told reporters before that I won’t get excited until I get my plane ticket up to Frisco” to witness the execution at San Quentin, said Baker, a San Diego police detective.

Still, the families welcomed Tuesday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision removing one of the last legal roadblocks to Harris’ execution.

“When this is finally over, it will all get put to rest,” said John Mayeski’s uncle, William Stalder, retired after 28 years as a gardener for San Diego city schools.

Harris was arrested July 5, 1978, by Steve Baker, then a patrol officer, who did not know that earlier in the day Harris had killed Baker’s son and Michael’s friend, John.

The 16-year-old boys had been eating hamburgers in the parking lot of a Jack in the Box in San Diego’s Mira Mesa neighborhood when Harris kidnaped them at gunpoint so he could steal their car and use it in a bank robbery.

He ordered them to drive to a canyon near Miramar Reservoir, where he killed them. Later, he ate their lunch.

The California Supreme Court upheld Harris’ death sentence in 1981. The U.S. Supreme Court refused Tuesday to hear the latest of Harris’ appeals of that sentence, the fourth time the high court has turned down an appeal in Harris’ case.

Earlier this month, Harris filed yet another appeal, this one with the California Supreme Court, urging a reversal of his death sentence. In that appeal, Harris argued that it would be cruel and unusual punishment to kill him because he had changed for the better in prison.

“You want a rebuttal to that? It was cruel and unusual and unnecessary punishment to take another person’s life, two person’s lives,” said Stalder, John Mayeski’s uncle. “Why should (Harris) have life and another person not? The Book says an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

Stalder’s sister, Sanders, who has remarried and moved to rural North San Diego County from the Mira Mesa neighborhood where she raised John Mayeski, said she is “disgusted with the system, for the simple reason that it’s taken so long.”

“I can understand that sometimes the wrong person can be accused, but when a man admits it six times, and they know he did it, I don’t know what the holdup is,” Sanders said.

Steve Baker, 47, now a San Diego police robbery detective, said he wishes Harris’ appeals had been “taken care of in a year’s time.”

“The bottom line for myself, and I think for most of the public and police officers, is you do a crime, you do the time,” Baker said. “I think the bottom line with what’s wrong with the system is that it’s run by attorneys. An attorney’s job is to talk you to death.

“The more they drag this out, the more money somebody’s making on it. Enough’s enough. This is ridiculous. Let’s get this thing done.”

Harris’ prosecutor, now an appellate court judge, said he can understand that the appeals process in Harris’ case has produced extreme frustration.

“I think that obviously one wants to very carefully examine any capital case,” said Richard Huffman, former chief deputy district attorney and now a judge on the 4th District Court of Appeal in San Diego.

“You want to make sure that, not only is the decision correct but it was correctly arrived at, but I think realistically we’ve known that in Robert Harris’ case since the California Supreme Court affirmed the decision in 1981,” Huffman said.

“I, like a lot of people, will just be glad the review process appears to be winding down,” Huffman said.

Baker said he has been “guaranteed” to be one of the official witnesses at Harris’ execution, should it occur.

Stalder said he’d “like to go up and watch it. I’ve put in my bid for it. Hell, I’d pull the switch.”

But Kathryn Mayeski said she is not interested in watching Harris go to the gas chamber for her son’s death.

“If I was a man, I’d go,” she said. “But I think I’ve gone through enough.”

Relatives of the two boys said repeatedly that it has been emotionally wrenching to hear of Harris’ continuous appeals because the lengthy delay has blocked their ability to end their grief.

Steve Baker said he wants to see “the end to this entire ordeal.” The pain is just as vivid as when his son died and “maybe more so now, because of the frustration being built into the lack of punishment.”

“If this (the appeal rejected Tuesday) is the last major one, it’ll be a relief,” said John Mayeski’s sister, Kathryn Clark, 45, a nursing assistant in Maryland. “And, when the day of execution comes, that will be another relief. Then I’ll see some justice done, and my brother might be able to rest in peace.”

Until then, Kathryn Sanders said, the “pain is just as new and fresh as when it just happened.”

“All I have to see is a name like Harris or a kid named John or a couple kids riding on a scooter and your mind goes right back to the whole thing all over again,” she said. “I think, gee, that could have been my John.”