Sentencing Ends Widow’s Ordeal : Justice: The bullet that killed Raymond Shield 20 months ago ended a marriage of 39 years. The killer’s death sentence brought an uneasy resolution for Jeneane Shield.

For Jeneane Shield, the gunshot that killed her husband in the summer of 1990 was the start of a 20-month ordeal that ended last Monday in the hushed quiet of a Pomona courtroom.

Surrounded by her children and grandchildren, Shield, a witness to her husband’s slaying, sat solemnly while a Superior Court judge handed out a death sentence to Paul Sodoa Watkins, 23, of Moreno Valley, her husband’s murderer.

Watkins, the triggerman, and Lucien Martin, 20, of Gardena were convicted in March of murdering West Covina community activist Raymond G. Shield during a two-county armed-robbery spree.

Although the one-week trial itself was not particularly complex, the start was delayed for nine months. During part of that time, Watkins and Martin fired their attorneys and tried to represent themselves.

They also were uncooperative and disruptive while in jail, refusing to appear in lineups. Watkins twice engaged in jailhouse fights and was convicted of assault while awaiting trial.

Martin was finally sentenced April 20 to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Watkin’s sentencing brought an end to the delays, to the trial and to Shield’s ordeal, she said.

But it is an uneasy end, said the elementary school principal with the warm smile and soft words characteristic of teachers of small children.

“Even sitting in court (Monday), I almost still couldn’t believe this is real and happening to our family,” she said. “I’m afraid we lived a very peaceful life up to that point (of my husband’s death).”

Shield, 59, who refused interviews during the trial, spoke last week for the first time about how she coped when her storybook marriage of 39 years ended in violence at a stranger’s hand.

“I lost my husband, my lover and, I really feel, my mentor,” she said.

Her marriage was a portrait of a loving couple involved in music, fulfilling careers, community activism, economic prosperity and a commitment to family--a commitment almost as innocent and untouched by violence as an “Ozzie and Harriet” television episode from the 1950s.

Her husband’s violent death “was like a nightmare,” she said. “I just kept thinking I was going to wake up from it.”

Shield met her husband while in college in San Diego. Raymond Garrett Shield was an engineering student who shared her love of classical music. He wooed his college sweetheart with piano recitals of Chopin nocturnes and impromptus.

That love of music continued in their marriage. After moving to the small-town, orange-grove dominated streets of West Covina in 1956, the Shields became volunteers at the Music Center in Los Angeles and, later, with the San Gabriel Valley Symphony Assn.

Their four children were each given music lessons.

Toy guns were banned from the house. “We were both very nonviolent kind of people,” she said. “We taught our children that the way you solve problems is not with violence but to talk . . . maybe that’s sort of naive.”

Their life centered around the family: PTA, picnics and music, Shield said.

Her husband took pride in designing their home on Crescent View Drive to accommodate his active brood and in building the stereo equipment inside it.

And he willingly baby-sat while his wife completed her college degree and pursued her own career as an elementary school teacher.

Shield’s husband also taught computer classes at Rio Hondo College and served on a city advisory committee charged with researching the feasibility of a city-owned cultural center in West Covina.

With their children grown and grandchildren to coddle, the Shields were looking forward to retirement and to more time in their vacation home on the Hawaiian island of Maui.

But those plans ended brutally at 5 a.m. July 17, 1990, when Watkins fired a slug from a 9-mm semiautomatic handgun and killed the 61-year-old engineering consultant.

During the trial in March, Watkins testified that he and Martin armed themselves with the gun, stole a pickup truck at 3 a.m. from two men in the parking lot of a Riverside County convenience mart and cruised the San Gabriel Valley freeways looking for more victims.

Shield was spotted by the pair at 5 a.m. He had dropped off his wife, daughter and two 8-year-old grandchildren at the West Covina Holiday Inn, where they planned to catch an airport shuttle bus for the start of another family vacation on Maui.

Watkins said he and Martin were nervous by the time they reached the hotel and parked. They raised the stolen truck’s hood so as not to raise suspicions about why they had stopped. Shield came over and offered to help and was shot accidentally when the gun went off as Watkins rushed to leave, the defendant testified.

“I didn’t try to shoot the dude. I didn’t try to rob the dude,” he insisted. “It was not supposed to be like this. Everything was all messed up.”

Jurors rejected his version of the events. They also rejected Watkins’ plea for leniency when his life story was presented during the trial’s penalty phase.

“Your conduct has brought great tragedy, most obviously to the Shield family, but you have also dragged some other people through that tragedy,” Judge Robert Martinez said in sentencing Watkins to die in the gas chamber at San Quentin State Prison. “I hope you find peace when you meet your maker. I hope all of us here find peace when we meet that maker.”

Violence dominated Watkins’ life, witnesses testified. As a small child, he watched his father beat his mother. As a 15-year-old, Watkin’s sister was wounded in a gang-related drive-by shooting in which five people died.

Relatives testified that after the incidents, Watkins became moody and silent. His life became a series of juvenile arrests, armed robberies and stints in state prison.

Jeneane Shield, although sympathetic to people such as Watkins who face difficulties, nonetheless said people can choose to rise above their negative experiences.

For herself, her husband’s murder has given a new urgency to her work as principal at Manzanita Elementary School in the Covina Valley Unified School District.

“To be involved in education is to try to prevent what happened to him,” she said. “There’s no hope for Watkins and Martin. But if I saw a little 6-year-old heading in the wrong direction, I could do something to show him a better way of life.”