Susan Smith’s Ex-Husband Weeps on Witness Stand

David Smith held pictures of his murdered babies in trembling hands Tuesday and testified about his loss with an anguish so raw that it moved jurors to tears and brought the death-sentence trial of his former wife to a stunned halt.

As he sat weeping in the witness box after jurors were excused for lunch, Susan Smith brushed past him, inches away. “I’m so sorry, David,” she blurted.

During two wrenching hours on the stand, David Smith was not asked to tell the jury what punishment he thinks his ex-wife deserves for sending her car into John D. Long Lake on Oct. 25 with their two sons strapped in their child-safety seats. He has said in the past that he thinks Susan Smith, who was found guilty Saturday of first-degree murder, should be executed.

At one point, Circuit Judge William Howard called a brief recess and gently pushed a box of tissues toward the witness as he choked back sobs. At the defense table, Susan Smith lay her head down and cried loudly. The three women on the jury--a doctor, a clerk in a dry-cleaning store and the police chief’s wife--all dabbed at tears.

Wearing a dark tie emblazoned with a tiny Mickey Mouse emblem, David Smith told the hushed courtroom about the last time he saw his children alive, two days before they disappeared, on a beautiful fall Sunday they spent feeding ducks at a park.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do without my kids,” the 24-year-old grocery worker wept. “Everything I had planned--teaching them to play ball, taking them fishing, teaching them to ride a bike, watching them go to school the first day, watching them grow up . . .

“All that’s been ripped from me.”

He recounted his troubled marriage with Susan Smith--his jealousy over her romantic liaisons before the divorce, his frustration at her lack of desire for him, his shame at having twice treated her roughly during arguments, his flowers-and-champagne attempt at reconciliation.

He also acknowledged accepting $20,000 to write a book about his life with Susan Smith, but said all royalties--an expected $200,000 to $300,000--would go to children’s charities.

Apparently alluding to Susan Smith’s sexual molestation by her stepfather, her father’s suicide and her own teen-age suicide attempts, he said he wanted to write the book “because so many people were portraying Susan to be the victim of what happened and that’s not true. Michael and Alex were victims.”