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Random Acts of Violence

He was nobody's dream man, but I dreamed about him.
He stood in the curtains in my hotel room and then sat beside my bed whispering my name in the dark. He was a double murderer.
Watching him die gave him life, and he's clung to it ever since.

I first saw him in a courtroom a few years ago at the Wichita County Courthouse. He shouted, cursed and backpedaled on a request to waive his right to appeal his death sentence.
A carpenter with a seventh-grade education, he shot a mother and her grown son for reasons that were never clear.
He wasn't related to them and apparently had no quarrel with them.
The killer stood outside a Wichita Falls home and fired at the mother through a glass door.
Then he chased down her son who'd fled to the garage and shot at him until the 30-30 rifle ran out of ammunition.
It's not unheard of for the struggle for justice to consume an innocent man. But the man I watched die was condemned not only by a jury of his peers but also by his own family.
The killer's courtroom antics that August prompted one of his long-suffering relatives to say, "I think they need to hurry it up."
I asked a prosecutor if the man's outrageous actions in the courtroom would carry any punishment for him.
The prosecutor said no, he's going to die. What more could be done?
A defense attorney's last-ditch effort to halt the execution on the grounds the man was mentally challenged failed.
He was going to die, and, as the senior crime reporter, I was going to watch him.
I never considered trying to escape the duty.
Journalists have to look into dark corners and tell society what's there.
Back away from observing an execution, and what next?
A thick December rain started long before I reached Huntsville where the death chamber and all its attendant rituals was.
I'd spent a good 45 minutes looping around Fort Worth, feeling lost in more ways than one.
But I and the other reporters had plenty of time to wait for the tense minutes it would take the state to put him to death.
He would die an impersonal death before a group of reporters and officials.
Neither his nor the victims' friends and family members came to watch.
A prison chaplain was at his side though.
The convicted killer was strapped down on a gurney on the other side of a viewing window. His face was pointed at a microphone that seemed ready to strike.
I leaned close to the window, tensed to record every sigh, cough and last word.
He expressed no remorse in his final statement.
A concoction of deadly drugs flooded his sytem. His face went slack like a sack empitied of contents. His skin was the color of death.
Within seven minutes, a doctor pronounced him dead. I banged my head hard on the viewing window's thick glass when I looked down quickly to record time of death.
The deadline clock was ticking.
I rushed back to a hotel room to try to contact absent relatives. At times, a query for such comments elicits a few choice curse words and then a dial tone howling in my ear. But not trying could mean silencing someone who wanted to talk.
A relative of the slain mother and son told me she'd sat through the trial, and that was bad enough.
"I just didn't see where going and watching him die would help me," she said. "I had closure when they sentenced him. This wasn't closure for me."
Her voice carried a lonely remoteness that had nothing to do with the miles of telephone line stretching between us.
Within a couple of hours, I'd made the last call, written the last word and given a Wichita Falls television station a phone-in.
That's when I noticed it was pitch black outside and the rain was falling harder than ever.
Adrenaline and the recent events kept me awake two or three hours. I'd seen dead bodies before but never watched a man die.
Then it started.
He was in my hotel room, silently threading in and out of the long curtains at the windows.
I jerked awake and, against all common sense, checked the drapes. Then I went into the bathroom, flicked on the light and peered in the mirror, my mind blank and my body tensed to flight or fight.
Bone tired, I fell back into bed and a restless sleep.
Soon, he sat in a chair by the bed and watched me quietly for a long time, like a cat watching a sparrow.
Finally, he said a single syllable, his hoarse voice giving it an unfamiliar obscenity, "Trish."
I willed myself out of the nightmare, felt my way to the bathroom and clicked on the light. The comforting yellow pool of light kept me company the rest of the night.
Being a reporter has taught me random acts of kindness and "paying it forward" surface in the strangest places. It's also taught me that an enthusiastic minority are out there murdering, molesting, raping and maiming in apparently random acts of violence.
The double murderer came to my mind at 4 a.m. today when I woke up out of a sound sleep screaming so loudly I thought someone might call the cops.
I'd dreamed a man was hunched down beside my bed, getting closer and closer to my ear. He whispered over and over, "Trish."
But I could see in the semidarkness from the bathroom light that I was perfectly alone.
If I'm asked to cover an execution again, I will do so without hesitation.
It's my job.
Plus, it's a sure bet that others have done an unimagineable amount of suffering before an execution takes place. What are a few bad dreams compared to that?
And I'm already sleeping with a light on anyway.

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