Death for a teenager? What do you think?
Jury to Decide on Life or Death for Sniper
Fri December 19, 2003 03:47 PM ET
By Christina Ling
CHESAPEAKE, Va. (Reuters) - Emotional relatives of shooting victims brought jurors to tears on Friday as they described lives shattered by their loss during a death penalty hearing for convicted teenage sniper Lee Malvo.
"The day I lost my mom, I lost my brother too. He can't handle it," said Katrina Hannum, daughter of shooting victim Linda Franklin.
Her voice breaking and her eyes full of tears, Hannum testified that she cried every morning and evening for her mother and feared the nightmares she has when she goes to sleep.
"Every night I have to watch this man shoot my mother in the head," Hannum said. "My mother was our gold thread. She held my family together each and every day. ... She made my family a family, and it's all gone now."
The jury on Thursday found Malvo, 18, guilty of killing Franklin, a 47-year-old FBI analyst, outside a Virginia hardware store during a shooting spree that killed 10 people in and around Washington, D.C., last year.
Franklin's husband, William Franklin, was standing next to her when she was gunned down and the prosecution played for the court a recording of the panicked 911 call he made immediately afterward.
Franklin's voice was so high-pitched that the operator addressed him as "ma'am" several times and struggled to understand him through his sobs and ragged breathing.
The eight women and four men who make up the jury and who must decide whether to sentence Malvo to death or life in prison also heard from Myrtha Cinada, a Haitian immigrant whose father Pascal Charlot, 72, was shot to death in the street.
"I would like to say, Malvo, that you're evil because you took my father's life. That's insane of you to do," Cinada said, crying and describing how Charlot never got to meet his great-grandchild, born two weeks before his murder.
MALVO'S FATHER
Malvo's accomplice, 42-year-old John Muhammad, was convicted last month of killing Dean Meyers, a Maryland man shot at a Virginia gas station during the same October 2002 killing spree. A jury recommended he get the death penalty.
Meyers' oldest brother, Larry, testified about Dean's love for children, while the wife of Conrad Johnson, a Maryland bus driver shot as he started his early morning shift, told how he would write love notes on the mirror with her lipstick.
Malvo's parents in Jamaica said on Friday he had been treated unfairly.
"I would like them to spare his life. He was such an obedient and manageable boy and I am very sad about this," Malvo's father, Leslie Malvo, told the Jamaica Gleaner newspaper. "If it wasn't for Muhammad, this never would have happened. My son was very young. He would not do such a thing on his own."
Malvo is being tried as an adult, although he was 17 at the time he and Muhammad crisscrossed the Washington area, shooting random human targets through a hole in the trunk of their car.
The attacks prompted people across the region to take cover while refueling their vehicles at gas stations and to weave across parking lots at a run.
Malvo's lawyers argued that Malvo, whose divorced mother moved frequently, sent him to 10 different schools and often left him with relatives while she traveled for work, found a stable father figure in Muhammad who was able to brainwash him into committing the killings.
Without directly comparing her upbringing to Malvo's, Franklin's daughter told the jury that she herself had graduated from her "ninth school" because her mother, also divorced before she met William Franklin, had moved her and her brother frequently because of her work.
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