Prison Bars Can’t Keep Out Mother’s Love : Reunions: Women trek to San Quentin to assure their sons: I love you no matter what.

The lucky ones got two hugs and two kisses for each day of their visit here. The lucky ones got to hold hands with their sons, share lunch from a vending machine, have a guard snap a Polaroid picture to take home--woman and child in Death Row visiting room, Mother’s Day weekend, 1994.

On Saturday, the lucky ones got to telegraph again the message they can so rarely say in person: I love you anyway. You were convicted of raping and setting a woman on fire, but I love you anyway. You beat four gay men to death with a pipe, but I love you anyway. You shot and killed a liquor store owner after robbing him of $80,000, but still I am here.

“I brought him into this world; I will always be there for him,” says Catalina Weaver of her son LaTwon, who is on Death Row for the murder of a jewelry store owner in a 1992 robbery. “I will always find a way to visit him. I could never give up.”

Eighteen Southern California women with hearts as full as their wallets are empty traveled Friday from Los Angeles to San Quentin to see the men whose absence shapes their lives, these sons and husbands, nephews and boyfriends spending anywhere from a couple of months to the rest of their days in the oldest state prison in California.

Their Mother’s Day is not about perfect families; it is, however, about close-to-perfect love, the kind that makes Irene Mepsham of Los Angeles spend a silent weekend on the road simply to see her son Leo’s face.

Mepsham cannot hear and no interpreter accompanied her. Instead, she carried a black ballpoint pen and a small white pad for her very cursory communication at places such as Carl’s Jr.: “Charbroiled chicken sandwich and a 7Up.”

For company, a new Reader’s Digest. For support, an aluminum cane. Inspiration? A black and white high school picture circa 1961: Leo in coat and tie--young, handsome, innocent.

“A lot of these people on this bus haven’t seen their sons or husbands for some years,” says Samuel Theus, president of the HELP Public Service Foundation, which along with the Los Angeles Police Department, arranged the unusual--and free--Mother’s Day bus trip. “A lot of these mothers don’t let go of their children regardless of what they’ve done.”

This isn’t the sort of pilgrimage that Anna Jarvis of Philadelphia probably envisioned in 1907, when she started the holiday by asking her church to hold a service in memory of all mothers on the anniversary of her own mother’s death.

A Mother’s Day journey to a far-off prison is not the sort of gift that Theodore M. Kaufman thinks of first, he of the Father’s Day/Mother’s Day Council Inc., when he says: “The median mother gets 2.5 gifts. Some get five and 10, some only one.”

And some spend eight hours in a vibrating bus under rain and hail, past vast, empty fields, through the belly of California to see the men they love--the lucky ones granted physical contact, the others just speaking through windows.

Odell Farris, regal in bright-colored African garb, is HELP foundation leader and unofficial hostess. As the bus splashes rapidly north, Farris says: “Would anyone like some chips? We still have some M & M’s left. Something to read?”

First stop Buttonwillow. Next stop Los Banos. Final destination, a dreary motel whose chief comfort is its cleanliness. It is 9 p.m. Friday. They grab their bags in the soft steady rain and head for rooms they will share with strangers.

“Does anyone need an iron?” Chris Escobedo asks of no one in particular. “I brought an iron and starch and a curling iron.”

The closet-sized lobby is scented with curry. For a quarter, the beds have magic fingers. U.S. 101 runs right by the pillows of these 18 women, two men and a child; at least it sounds that way at midnight, with sleep far in the distance.

By 2 a.m. it is even closer, as an out of control car slams into the motel, skids along a side street and comes to rest underneath a Ford. A fight breaks out. Three police cars, a fire engine, a tow truck and paramedics extricate the driver and his wayward compact. The motel balcony is ringed with spectators.

“I was just getting into a good sleep, when ‘Pow!’ I thought it was an earthquake,” says one sleepy-eyed mother as she waits in the rain for the bus to San Quentin.

It is 7:30 a.m. She has not seen her son for a year. Their reunion is still an hour away. She does not give her name, this persevering parent. No pictures, either, thank you very much.

If she did, well then, the talk would start again, the memories would roll, and where would she be? Back on that dreadful night 11 years ago. Hearing another woman say she will not rest until a young man dies and evens the score. A son for a son.

“I do think about her child that died,” says the woman who visits the child that lived. “I think about it all the time. We still grieve. We still hurt. It’s like I’m doing time. . . . I feel bad for their family. My son did it. We’re suffering. I didn’t raise my son to do this. It was the drugs.”

What if she just stayed home, this woman who can ill-afford to visit Death Row. Her eyes narrow, and each word is spoken just so: “You don’t stop loving people because something goes wrong. That makes you less than human.”

Deputy Chief Mark Kroeker of the LAPD is a firm believer in the power of “influential eyeball-to-eyeball visits” by mothers and sisters, children and wives. These men will be back on the streets some day, quite possibly even those who are condemned. Connect them to the real world, Kroeker says, and maybe they will stay out of trouble.

“There’s nothing better than the family,” says Kroeker, who linked Theus up with Tom Nix, president of a check-cashing business, the man who is bankrolling the $6,000 trip, which ends with more visits today.

A visit next month is planned for Pelican Bay, but funding is still in question.

There are those who might argue with Kroeker, but Geneva McClintock is not one of them. Her son, she says, has a heart of gold, this man who is in prison for aiding and abetting a drive-by murder 11 years ago.

“It’s been so long, so long to see him,” says the mother. “He’s been going to school. He’s been working. Every year the parole board says one more year. It’s just dreadful.”

McClintock passes the time on the tedious trip to San Quentin composing a speech in a spiral binder. She thanks just about anyone she can think of for bringing her north to see her boy.

“Ladies and gentleman,” McClintock begins, in script that wavers from the bus’s motion. “Our loved ones need to know we love them. We want them to know they are very special, and when they do come home we want them to know they are coming to a world of love.”

She never gets to read these words; instead she starts her Saturday sort of speechless. At 9:05 she is inside the San Quentin gates, the arms of her son, Thomas Bailey, around her.

Bailey can find the words as he wipes the tears from his mother’s eyes. “I’m so elated. Some days are bad in here. Some are better. But this day, this day is the best.”

She touches his face: “My special love.”

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Times photographer Al Seib contributed to this story.