EXECUTION JOURNAL : Relatives of 2 Victims Weigh Emotional Toll

At noon on the day he watched his son’s killer die, Steve Baker came to the east lawn of the Capitol and tried to shift gears.

In 48 hours, Baker had slept just two. Before dawn on Tuesday, he had locked eyes with Robert Alton Harris, acknowledged his two-word apology and watched him die. Then, after quickly changing clothes and brushing his teeth, Baker had headed here, to attend a victims’ rights rally.

Baker had gotten the ending he’d asked for. But as he stepped off a bus and into his fifth impromptu press conference of the day, the 49-year-old San Diego police detective wasn’t sure that his hurt was anywhere near being over.

“How I feel deep down inside, I just don’t know,” he said, reflecting on the execution during the bus trip from San Quentin State Prison to the state capital. “I hope to feel vindicated and relieved. . . . Right now I can’t actually say that (I do). It’s a little too soon.”

Baker’s arrival in Sacramento brought an emotional week full circle.

One week ago today, at a clemency hearing here, Baker and other relatives of Harris’ victims had begged Gov. Pete Wilson not to spare a killer’s life. One day later, they had gotten their wish. And especially since then, as the execution was stayed four times in the final hours, the families of slain teen-agers Michael Baker and John Mayeski had been at the center of a storm.

Of all the 330 Death Row inmates, fate had put Harris at the front of the line--his pre-dawn execution was the first in California in 25 years. By calling for an execution that would alter the history of the state, the Bakers and Mayeskis had become reluctant celebrities.

In interview after interview, they tried to explain their need for what one of John Mayeski’s sisters called “finality.”

They were tired, they said, of seeing Harris’ smiling face. It hurt, they said, to realize that 14 years after the killings, some people seemed more interested in Harris’ suffering than that of his victims. It wasn’t fair, they said, when Mother Teresa of Calcutta called the governor to plead for mercy. Never once had she called a single one of them.

Sometimes they shut down, resentful of being asked again to air their grief in public. At a news conference after the clemency hearing, Linda Herring, Michael Baker’s 26-year-old sister, told one reporter that it was none of his business why she wanted to witness the execution. Unless he’d lost a brother, she said, he wouldn’t understand.

It was to promote that kind of understanding, Steve Baker said, that he forfeited sleep and went to the Capitol.

“This is my opportunity to get the word out--that the victims have been forgotten for too long. I did not want to miss this day,” he said, his face solemn.

That face, as well as Baker’s imposing 6-foot-3-inch frame and his calm, serious voice, are familiar now after hundreds of television sound bites. After witnessing a killing, he was tired, but the same person--a characteristic that he realized made some people suspicious.

“They keep asking me, ‘How do you feel?’ ” he said. “I know they think I’m putting them off. I’m really not. I just haven’t come down yet.”

At one point, a woman approached Baker and touched his arm gently.

“I don’t know whether to say, ‘Congratulations’ or just ‘I’m glad you survived it,’ ” she said.

“I’m not sure I survived it,” Baker replied with a weary smile.

Baker said Harris’ own seriousness had surprised him. Expecting defiance, the grieving father was impressed by the murderer’s dignity.

In conversations throughout the day, he put himself in Harris’ shoes, imagining that in the end, the worst part was probably the waiting.

“If you can imagine sitting, knowing, counting your days, saying ‘Gee, I’ll never see another Tuesday again,’ ” he said. “Last night was probably one of the worst nights I ever spent and probably the worst night Harris ever spent.”

“If you’re going to execute somebody, they should not be treated like Robert Harris was today,” Baker continued. By filing appeals, he said, the American Civil Liberties Union “did more of a disservice to Harris than everybody else.”

But all those thoughts did not detract from the satisfaction of knowing that, at last, Harris had been punished. There was no excuse, Baker said, for what Harris--or all the other condemned inmates--had done to their victims.

Just off the bus, Baker and his wife, Donna, lighted cigarettes and walked hand-in-hand to the rally, past a rose garden and into a mock graveyard--700 cardboard coffins, laid out on the lawn as a symbolic memorial to the victims of California’s Death Row inmates.

“That’s really an impressive showing,” Baker said.