One Killing For Another: Death Penalty As Deterrent

Yesterday, 12 hours before Robert Alton Harris was scheduled to be executed in California, someone a little less famous wanted to remind you what this was all about.

Laura Mankins was at her San Diego home when I called, the same family home where she first learned the terrible news.

In 1978, Mankins was 13. She had just returned from soccer practice and was walking up to the house when she was told her stepbrother was dead.

Michael Baker was 16. He had tried to run away from his killer, but was hunted down in some bushes and, as he screamed, was shot in the back and stomach.

Laura Mankins now is 26, finishing college. As she tells of the years since that July 5, 1978, she keeps talking about the tears.

You read stories about families of murder victims, or you watch TV shows about them, and the tears are always mentioned. In those stories the tears end at the next commercial.

Mankins wants to tell you it's much, much different when it happens to your family. The tears keep flowing and flowing and flowing.

There were six kids in her family, three each from their parents' previous marriages. Her stepbrother was a nice kid, she said, as it's always said about murder victims.

She gave some details to make Michael seem more real. He was shy and trying to figure out how to meet girls. He had never gone on a date. He liked to skateboard. He was proud of his motor-cross abilities. He loved the board game "Stratego."

These days, Laura Mankins cannot bear to look at that game. She was the one who finally cleaned out Michael's room two weeks after he was murdered. She put away the board game. No one in the family had wanted to go in there.

For others in the family it might be something else that brings back the pain.

Sharron Mankins was Michael's mom. Years and years after the murder, Laura remembered, the family would be having breakfast and the mother would look at a bowl of cereal and start crying. She would go into her bedroom, where the children couldn't witness her never-ending pain.

This week, there have been full-page ads asking for clemency for Harris. Laura Mankins wants you to remember just why Harris deserves the gas chamber.

Besides her stepbrother, Harris killed another boy, John Mayeski, also 16, who was shot in the head and back. That July 5, the two boys were in Mayeski's car, going fishing, when they had the bad luck of stopping at a Jack-in-the-Box, where they were kidnapped.

Harris needed a car to pull a bank robbery. He pointed a stolen 9mm Luger at the boys and forced them to drive to an out-of-the-way spot. Harris was used to murder. He was on parole for a previous slaying.

He laughed and giggled after shooting the boys, according to Harris' brother, Daniel, who was a witness.

Daniel told the San Diego Union-Tribune that his brother later ate the hamburgers the two boys had bought. Daniel said his brother offered him a fruit turnover the boys had also purchased. ". . . I just lost it. I went to the bathroom and started getting sick," Daniel remembered.

News stories have recounted Harris' terrible childhood, how his parents were alcoholics and how Harris' father had molested his own daughters.

Laura Mankins feels no pity for Robert Harris. "His brothers, his sisters said they had all been traumatized as children," she said. "But they didn't go around killing people."

Laura Mankins wants to tell you she thinks the death penalty could be a deterrent, especially if justice doesn't take 14 years to be carried out.

She said she also knows that until it happens to your family, it is easy to sympathize, but very hard to understand the many, many tears.

Laura Mankins talked about that July 5 as if it were yesterday. She was returning from soccer practice. She saw Michael's bike in the garage, and thought he had been found alive and well.

Then her older brother said, "Michael is dead," and then she remembered that she walked around the house aimlessly, for hours and hours, not knowing what to say or do.

Yesterday, she was in the family home in San Diego, watching CNN and listening to the radio. Now it was Robert Alton Harris' time, time for the circle to be complete.

Erik Lacitis' column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Friday in the Scene section of The Times.