Son of Executed Killer Faces Trial : Crime: It was a shock for Robert Alton Harris Jr. to learn the identity of his biological father. Now, he could get 30 years in prison if convicted of robbery.

Like a lot of 17-year-olds, Robert Davis was a handful for his mother and stepfather. It’s not that he did anything terribly wrong, but he could not do much right either.

He argued with his parents, he skipped school, he ran off. This spring, he found himself in the state-run China Springs Youth Camp.

There, in April, he heard the news. In San Quentin Prison, the television reporter intoned, a murderer named Robert Alton Harris was about to be executed. From his Social Security card, the boy knew that Davis was not his true name. That belonged to his stepfather.

Robert Davis was Robert Alton Harris Jr.

The revelation hit him like a bullet. He knew vaguely that his biological father was a bad person--his mother had told him so. But it was a shock to learn that his father was a condemned murderer, nearing the end of a life of crime. And here was young Robert, himself locked up. Inside China Springs, the other teen-age inmates needled him when they found out. “Like father, like son,” he recalled them saying.

On the night of April 20, Harris went to bed knowing that his father probably would be dead by the next morning. He tossed and turned all night, he said. “I don’t really know why I couldn’t sleep,” he said in an interview here last week.

By the time he was released from China Springs, his father was three weeks in the grave. “I was never able to tell him: ‘Hey, I’m your son,’ ” the boy said.

It is a feeling that young Robert still has a hard time describing, now that he is in custody again, this time in the Washoe County Jail facing a charge of armed robbery that could send him to prison for 30 years.

Soon after his release from China Springs, police say, the boy started to act like a criminal. He is accused of robbing a cabdriver at gunpoint July 7, 2 1/2 months after the father he never knew was executed.

In court, where he is being tried as an adult although he is 17, he no longer is Robert Davis. That is his “a.k.a.” To the authorities, he is Harris.

There is a resemblance, particularly in the light blue eyes. But this Harris does not come off as hardened. From behind the glass partition in the jail, he spoke hesitantly, nervously, naively.

He explained that he hopes to somehow make $25,000 bail, enroll in school and get a job. But his trial date is Oct. 19. Under Nevada law, he faces a mandatory prison term for using a firearm. Washoe County Deputy Dist. Atty. Thomas E. Viloria said their policy is not to bargain away gun charges.

“I wouldn’t call this a run-of-the-mill case,” Viloria said. “It’s armed robbery. That’s a serious crime.”

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The prosecutor would not speculate on what prompted Harris to allegedly rob the cabdriver. Nor would young Harris’ lawyer, Kenneth Howard. The lawyer disputes that Harris committed the crime, challenging the cabdriver’s identification of Harris.

Although the lawyers would not speculate, family members do. Perhaps it is an aftershock of the murders his father committed on July 5, 1978, and of his father’s execution April 21.

“I know how hard it was for me to cope--and I had 14 years to prepare,” said the elder Harris’ sister, Barbara.

“He was made out to be like a criminal,” she said. “He maybe felt that if he was going to be treated like a criminal, he might as well act like one.”

Young Harris’ mother and stepfather have not visited him at the jail, and have not discussed the matter publicly. But the Harris family is doing what it can to help. Barbara Harris contends that authorities are prosecuting him as an adult because of his name.

“Even a blind man can read the writing on this wall,” she said. “It’s very obvious what’s going on here. It’s not fair to judge him for what his father did.”

In the middle 1970s, when Robert Harris Sr. was in prison for manslaughter, his wife, Cheryl, divorced him, remarried and moved away. The ex-wife became more determined to cut all ties after Harris Sr. murdered Michael Baker and John Mayeski, both 16, and stole Mayeski’s car for use in a bank robbery.

In the years leading up to his execution, the elder Harris asked that his friends and lawyers not find the boy, his only known offspring.

“He didn’t think it was fair to inflict himself and his problems on his son’s life,” said writer Michael Kroll, a friend of Harris’ who offered to find the boy. “He was concerned for the stigma he might place on him.”

Last week at the Washoe County Jail, young Harris recalled that his mother used to tell him that his biological father was in prison, that he had been mean to her, that if he ever contacted the boy, Robert should not talk to him.

But young Harris said his mother never told him who his father was or what he had done. Growing up in Reno, the boy said, he had no idea that his father was so infamous. In the weeks before the execution, he said, he thought of trying to reach his father but did not know how to do it.

Soon after his release, his fighting began again with his parents. Once more, he ran off. This time, police say, he took a .357 magnum. On July 7, he and a friend, Michael Shibles, 23, hailed a cab in Reno, and rode to a trailer park on the outskirts of town, police say. As Shibles stepped out, Harris pulled the gun.

“The gentleman said very calmly: ‘Hand me all the money you’ve got, or I’ll blow your . . . head off,” cabdriver David Shaw testified last week at Harris’ preliminary hearing.

That evening, police found Harris at a 7-Eleven convenience store a half-mile from the robbery scene and arrested him.

Barbara Harris says the family wants to help. They know they could not save the father, but perhaps they can help the son.