Harris Murders Leave Mark on Mira Mesa : Families Seek Healing From Harris’Death : * Punishment: Relatives of young shooting victims John Mayeski and Michael Baker apprehensively await a fitting end to their long and very painful ordeal.

Twice a week, at least, Marilyn Clark visits the cemetery where her brother, John Mayeski, rests. It’s been nearly 14 years since Robert Alton Harris killed him. And still she keeps coming by.

The cemetery in Sorrento Valley is on her way home from work, Clark said. And it’s so soothing to talk to her brother, especially when things get hectic--as they have been these past few days, when Harris was due to be executed Tuesday. There was the clemency hearing last week; now, suddenly, there is a deluge of calls from snoopy news crews.

Graveside, it all seems far away. There’s a quiet peace in updating John about family events, Clark said. Or asking whether he’s still playing penny-ante poker, a family ritual. Of course, there’s no answer but the wind, she said. But just being there soothes the pain, the powerful grief that tears at her soul despite the passing of the years, she said.

“Especially with the days being as they are, closer and closer to the execution, I know mentally it’s for me . . . it’s like talking to John,” Clark said. “It helps me in the long run. It gives me moral support to keep on going.

“No other family needs to feel this. They don’t need to feel what we went through. It’s a shock, terror and anger in the heart, where it has never healed.”

Those feelings are still so raw, Clark said, because Harris has not yet been punished--all these years after he killed John Mayeski and John’s best friend, Michael Baker. If Harris actually meets his death in the San Quentin gas chamber, that act will finally deliver justice, Clark said.

The time itself is drawing near. Determined to honor the two boys, yet fearful of profaning their memory by lusting for the death of the murderer, the families have placed a premium on endurance, waiting for the moment that Harris meets his death--believing fervently that the end of Harris’ life will mark the beginning of their healing.

At long last, the end seemed tantalizingly close. But then came another delay Saturday night, at the hands of U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel--a 10-day stay of execution.

Four of the dozens of Baker and Mayeski relatives had been selected by San Quentin authorities to witness the execution--Clark and three of Michael Baker’s relatives, his mother Sharron Mankins, father Steve Baker and a sister, Linda Herring.

“It’s a big, big, big emotional roller coaster,” Clark said. “You’re up. Then you’re down. It’s time to end this. But you can’t say it’s going to happen. So we have to be prepared for anything.”

Four times before, Harris has survived execution dates. In April, 1990, he was spared with just days to go when a federal judge called off the execution, saying the courts need time to study a defense claim that Harris was brain-damaged and could not control his murderous impulses.

Memories from two years ago are still vivid.

“We heard about it on the radio,” Mankins said. “It was like a punch to the stomach. I was numb. I was angry, frustrated and so disappointed.”

Baker, a San Diego police officer, said he was at San Quentin when he learned of the postponement. He made a quick statement to reporters. Then, en route to the San Francisco airport, he fought traffic for an hour. “You can imagine how that improved my mood,” he said.

With an hour to kill before departure, Baker headed for an airport bar. Just as he walked in, a TV set inside was broadcasting his picture and his voice.

“I look up and see myself wearing the same clothes I have on,” Baker said. “Now I can’t see my own face, my expression. But I guess I looked angry as hell because that bar just cleared out. I had the place to myself. They were leaving drinks on the table.”

With the keen disappointment of two years ago in mind, the families are ready for anything, Herring said.

“We’re going to try our best to not get our hopes up,” she said. “Because, when you do, and it doesn’t happen, it feels like you just get your insides squashed.

“This is the furthest we’ve ever gotten in the process,” Herring said. “Still, they could put (Harris) in that chair and strap him in and stop it right there. How’d you like to be in that position if you were us? How would you like to deal with that?”

The difference this time around, Baker said, is that the courts, which for years had entertained Harris’ novel appeals, have made it clear in recent weeks that they are weary of hearing from his defense lawyers.

There’s reason for optimism, though Harris’ defense lawyers filed last-ditch appeals Friday with both state and federal courts, he said.

“I want to think this is going to go this time,” said Baker, who was on patrol July 5, 1978, and helped capture Harris, not knowing that Harris had killed his son hours before. “The closer it gets, the more I think it will. That’s not to say I’m not setting myself up for a fall.

“It’s nearly 14 years,” Baker said. “Anything’s possible. Because this has gone beyond the ridiculous and into the realm of the bizarre.”

For years, Baker has been the most outspoken of the survivors. This fifth go-around, however, a number of relatives from both families opted to take a high-profile stance in urging that the execution go forward, dramatically reversing years of public silence to vent their lingering grief.

“It’s very simple,” Mankins said. “We are eager to get our word out because we are frustrated, frustrated enough to talk about it. Enough is enough.”

Mankins, who politely declined to speak to reporters for 13 years, has been interviewed the past month by virtually every major California newspaper and TV station. Last week alone, she and her husband of 17 years, Sam Mankins, were interviewed by the Washington Post and by CNN, among others.

Clark, who had given one interview in previous years, to a friend with a San Diego business newspaper, said she had so many phone calls one day last week from reporters on her answering machine that she didn’t know what to do.

Even Andrew Mayeski, 27, John Mayeski’s younger brother, who has studiously avoided the press, has consented to interviews.

“You see this stuff about Harris every day on the news,” Andrew Mayeski said. “It’s hard to avoid. When I socialize, people who know me or who learn my last name talk to me all the time about it. It’s a heavy issue, all the damn time. It’s time to get it over with.”

Baker, meanwhile, has fielded calls from reporters in France and Mexico. “I’ve talked about this so much,” he said. “But you can only say so much. There are no new questions, really.”

Execution day is yet to come. But already the relentless--and intensifying--attention has become a grind.

“We’re all feeling the toll,” Mankins said. “We’re not sleeping well. We’re losing weight.”

Besides the press, there have been other pressures. The four relatives due to witness the execution were interviewed by prison authorities, to make sure they were psychologically stable enough to watch the execution process, since cyanide gas usually takes 10 to 12 minutes to kill. All four apparently passed.

The fear of becoming the target of anti-death-penalty protesters has been a nagging worry. “We see all the protesters on the TV news,” Mankins said. “I wonder what it’s going to be like at San Quentin.”

Every night in recent weeks, it seems, there’s a new protest group featured on TV, Herring said. Or a special on the death penalty and the significance of the Harris case. It’s as if there’s no getting away from the story of Robert Alton Harris, Baker said.

“There was a program on, one of the TV tabloids, they did a re-enactment (of the killings),” Baker said.

“I watched that one time,” he said. “And I didn’t want to see it anymore. It was a lousy re-enactment. But it had just enough truthfulness in it that I didn’t want to watch it.”

In a perverse way, Herring said, it all has strengthened her resolve. A few wearying weeks have to be measured against all the years that have passed since the killings, she said.

“I’ve been suffering for 13 1/2,” she said. “This guy Harris has become a celebrity. I’ve seen him on TV endlessly. I’ve seen his lawyers on TV endlessly.”

Herring said she assuredly wants to take in the grim details of the execution. “I’ve been suffering for 13 1/2 years,” she said. “Harris has been sentenced. He ought to pay. It’s time. He should suffer.”

She added, “I owe this to Mike. I want to see it for myself, watch Harris die. Once he’s gone, I can get on with my own life. Knowing that Mike can rest in peace, the family can get on with their own lives.”

Clark, unlike Herring, said she does not wish for Harris to suffer. “I just want him to go peacefully, quietly and to have everything done with.”

But she, too, feels a strong duty to family. Her parents both died without seeing the execution, her mother last year and her father in 1982. The family took a vote and decided she should be the witness. “Nobody else wanted to see it,” she said.

“Deep down inside, I think I’m doing this mainly for my mother and father,” Clark said. “For them, and to stand up for the Mayeski name. And for something personal inside me.”

It’s that something personal that keeps her going back to the cemetery regularly, Clark said.

“It’s a constant upbringing of memories, of feelings of loss, of what we could have had,” Clark said. “John could have had a family. His children could have been playing with mine right now. The things we’ve lost over years, that’s what hurts. It’s a constant reminder.

“He was only 16 when he was killed,” she said. “You don’t realize how much a man he was until after you looked in the casket and he was lying there, how he had matured over the years, how handsome he was.

“When I first looked at him lying there, I couldn’t believe the size of his arms,” Clark said. “He was a full-grown man. I had joked with him all the time, I’d say, ‘You’re not a man yet.’ And he would say, ‘Well, I’m getting there.’ He never got there. And now, when I go talk to him there at the cemetery, I tell him it may finally be getting to be time for justice.

“And that feels so sweet.”