Daughter of Victim Talks of Williams

Rebecca Owens spoke Sunday about pain, but not about punishment, about responsibility, but not about revenge.

She was 8 years old when her father was murdered -- shot twice in the back at close range. She is 35 today and will not say whether Stanley Tookie Williams should be executed next month for the 1979 murders of Albert Owens and three others in Southern California.

“I have not asked anyone to be killed,” Owens told a gathering here of 1,200 high school students during what she described as her first public appearance. “I did not make that decision. A jury of 12 people based on the evidence decided the crime was so heinous that it deserved death.”

She would not say whether she agreed with the jury that declared the co-founder of the Crips street gang guilty and sentenced him to die. She also insisted that she was not “advocating his death.”

“I’m not here to say that,” Owens responded to a student question during the Junior State of America convention here. “I’m not doing this out of vengeance. I’m here for me, for hope. I want my dad’s death to mean something. Hopefully, it will mean that some of you guys will walk out of here thinking, not just blindly following.”

Junior State of America is a 71-year-old organization designed to inspire high school students to be active in politics.

On Saturday, Williams himself addressed the group from San Quentin State Prison’s death row as part of a panel discussion that included rapper Snoop Dogg. The singer is working to help persuade Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to grant Williams clemency.

Williams has denied that he committed the murders. He insists that he underwent a transformation after a decade in prison.

Along with Barbara Becnel, he has co-written books for children advocating an end to violence and an avoidance of gang life. He has been nominated for the Nobel Prize for his anti-gang efforts.

Owens seems angry that Williams has not taken responsibility for the murders and has not apologized to the families of the victims. But with time, she said, she has forgiven the man who murdered her father in the convenience store where he worked.

She appeared Sunday to give the students the victim’s side of the death penalty debate, alongside Debra Saunders, a San Francisco Chronicle columnist.

Saunders said Williams would “do more good dead” than alive and speaking out against violence. “It would prove you pay a penalty for murdering someone,” she said.

But Owens was as cryptic and mysterious as Saunders was adamant.

She said she would not “talk about how I feel about the death penalty, out of respect to the state of California.”

Owens, a widow and mother of four, is a cosmetology student. She did not reveal her married name or where she lives. She does not allow her picture to be taken.

“I have children, and they know about my dad, but it’s not a part of our everyday life,” she told reporters after the event. “We have our own life.”

Owens only flew to Northern California, she said, to help the student leaders learn to get all the facts and think for themselves before they make decisions in life.

It is the same message that she has for Schwarzenegger: “Look into the whole story. Make an informed decision. What bad can come from having all the facts?”

Owens was 4 years old when her father left her family. She learned of his death through a phone call from a relative, she said, and “I remember crying all day.”

Her mother had remarried, she said, and her stepfather would not allow her to attend her father’s funeral.

And she spent most of her life believing that the man who murdered her father had been convicted and executed; family members insisted that was the case.

Then four years ago, she said, she learned that Williams was alive and had been nominated for a Nobel Prize, and “it literally hit me like a ton of bricks.”

“It literally almost destroyed my life because of my own anger,” she said. “I was just flabbergasted. How could the man who co-founded the Crips be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. What in the world?”

Although she has been invited to watch the Dec. 13 execution, if it goes forward, she plans to be at home instead.

“I don’t need to go and watch another man die,” she said.