Shadows in the Rain

Seeing them for the first time, one might assume they are store clerks or office workers taking an early lunch. There is nothing unusual about their appearance, either in clothing or gesture, that would connect them with San Quentin’s death row.

One expects, perhaps unfairly so, the mothers of condemned men to somehow reflect the brutality of the crimes their sons have been convicted of committing.

But neither Melanie Bostic nor Doris Harris bears any physical traits that would associate them with murder. Bostic is a handsome woman of 58 who glows with vitality. Harris, 65, is a soft-spoken, almost whispery, woman with cultured good manners.

But there are shadows on their lives.

Bostic is the mother of Robert Bloom Jr., convicted of the 1982 Sun Valley murders of his father, stepmother and 8-year-old stepsister.

Harris is the mother of Lanell Craig Harris, sentenced to die six years ago for killing a Van Nuys father of six while attempting to rob a group of men playing cards.

Both women bear in different ways the anguish of knowing that their sons have dates with death. And they are similarly burdened by the beliefs of others, both spoken and unspoken, that they are somehow responsible.

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I was brought together with them by a militant, anti-death sentence activist who has good reason to be so. Janice Gay, a grandmother of 11 children, is married to death row inmate Kenneth Gay, one of two men convicted of killing a Los Angeles police officer in 1983.

I met with the three women in the cafeteria of the Van Nuys courthouse on a day dark with rain. We weren’t there to debate the guilt or innocence of the men they believe with all their hearts should not be on death row. We were there to talk about feelings.

Gay, a 56-year-old home care worker, contacted me because I have written of my opposition to capital punishment. Talking to reporters is a part of the reaching out she does as founder and head of an organization called Wives, Families & Friends, bringing comfort to those with loved ones on death row and fighting to end capital punishment in California.

I was drawn to Bostic and Harris, not because of militancy, but because I was trying to imagine what it would be like to have a son on death row.

“I can describe it in one word,” Bostic says, staring at me through eyes that narrow with intensity. “Pain.”

“Every night at 10, my son kneels in his prison cell and prays,” says Harris, a hospital office worker. “And every night at 10 I close my eyes wherever I am and pray with him that he will not die in San Quentin.”

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In a society reluctant to forgive, we condemn the mothers along with their sons. The sins of the young are borne, however unfairly, by their progenitors. Few stop to consider parental feelings and many, in fact, are quick to heap invective on them.

“We feel hated,” Gay says, isolating their single most overriding emotion.

The hatred stems as much from their cause as from their relationship with condemned killers. They are visibly and militantly in the forefront of opposing capital punishment. Sometimes it costs them.

On a march protesting the death penalty, Bostic was approached by a man who grabbed at the Star of David around her neck and snarled, “How did Hitler miss you!” It was during the time San Quentin was still using gas to execute its condemned prisoners. The horror of the comment was not lost on Bostic. “But,” she says, “I’ll keep right on marching.”

She empties a plastic bag of badges on the table. They say, “Light the Torch of Conscience” and “Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong?”

“My son is mentally ill,” she says. “I found him holding his breath one day after he was convicted. He said it was because he was practicing to die.”

Harris’ son was a normal child, raised in a family of eight children. “We made them all do their homework before they could play,” she says. “Lanell was on the football team. At Thanksgiving he’d help me cook and take food to the homeless people in the park.”

He rode his bike as a child and played with other kids. He laughed a lot. But when does laughter stop and a murderous attitude begin? Who draws the line between insanity and irresponsibility?

Bostic, Harris and Gay write, march and speak on behalf of ending capital punishment. Their cause is political. But the ache in their heart is real.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.