For Relatives of Harris’ Victims, More Frustration

Steve Baker, the father of one of the two San Diego boys killed by Robert Alton Harris, traveled to San Quentin prison early Monday hoping that within hours he would watch his son’s murderer die.

But Baker, a San Diego police officer, said aboard his airplane flight from San Diego to San Francisco that it would “surprise the hell out of me” if Harris’ execution actually went ahead as scheduled, at 3 a.m. today.

“I’m not convinced this is going to go,” Baker said.

Monday afternoon, the U.S. Supreme Court proved him right. The court declined to overturn last Friday’s stay of the execution by a federal appeals court judge.

Baker flew home to San Diego within hours of the announcement of the Supreme Court action. And for him, as well as for other relatives of his son and John Mayeski, Harris’ other victim, Monday’s development marked another example of incomprehensible legal delay.

The decision was particularly puzzling because the high court had turned down Harris’ appeals four times before, said John Mayeski’s sister, Kathryn Clark, 45, a nursing assistant from Port De Posit, Md. “I can’t understand the Supreme Court,” she said. “They’ve denied him all the way up the ladder.”

She added, “This is torturing my mother,” referring to Kathryn Mayeski Sanders, 68, a retired electronics technician who lives near San Diego and is fighting cancer.

“I’m in the medical field and I know this stress aggravates cancer,” Clark said. “The more this continues, they may be saving Harris’ life, but they are killing my mother, in so many words.”

For her part, Sanders said, “There’s something wrong somewhere with the system and I can’t put my finger on it. . . . I was hopeful. I thought we had a chance. But we didn’t.”