Turn Out the Lights On Tookie

Fire of Liberty

As I was watching The Jaime Foxx Show yesterday on BET, I came across an advertisement for a special in which a collection of Hollywood stars will speak out for "their brother Tookie Williams and his fight against crime and gangs." Now I'm all for standing up for someone who has been railroaded or wrongly convicted but Tookie Williams is not an innocent man. Yeah, he might get various accolades from the press and his Hollywood friends - who seem to be in this because of their opposition to the death penalty - because of his denunciation of gang violence, the publication of kid's books and his nomination for the Nobel Piece Prize but the simple fact is that the co-founder of the L.A. Crips street gang is a vicious murderer. Though I've read several accounts of Tookie's crimes, I think this piece by Jack Dunphy over at National Review Online provides a detailed description of the heinous acts committed by Hollywood's current cause celebrity. Here's just a sample of Tookie's blood deed:

On February 28, 1979, Stanley "Tookie" Williams and three other men drove in two cars to a 7-Eleven store in the city of Whittier, California, a suburb southeast of downtown Los Angeles. The lone clerk on duty at the time was 26-year-old Albert Owens, who was sweeping the store's parking lot when the men arrived. Owens apparently believed the men to be legitimate customers, for he put down his broom and dust pan and followed them into the store. Williams, armed with a sawed-off shotgun, forced Owens into a back storeroom. After ordering Owens to lie on the floor, Williams fired a shotgun blast into the store's security monitor. Then, though Owens had offered no resistance at all, Williams fired two blasts into the prostrate man's back, killing him. When an accomplice asked Williams why he had shot Owens, Williams explained that he didn't want to leave any witnesses. The accomplice would also later testify that Williams told him he killed Owens "because he was white and he was killing all white people."

Williams and his three accomplices netted about $120 in cash for their efforts that night.

Less than two weeks later, at about five in the morning on March 11, Williams went to the Brookhaven Motel at 10411 South Vermont Avenue, less than a ten-minute drive due east from Los Angeles International Airport. After breaking into the motel's office, Williams shot and killed 76-year-old Yen-I Yang and his 63-year-old wife, Tsai-Shai Yang. Next he killed their daughter, 43-year-old Yee-Chen Lin. As in the Owens killing, the murder weapon was a 12-gauge shotgun. The take in this crime was about $100.

Williams was identified as a suspect in the killings and arrested. In March 1981 a jury convicted him of all four murders and also found true the "special circumstances" that under California law exposed him to the death penalty, to wit, multiple murders and murder committed during the act of robbery. The jury recommended the death penalty, and on April 15, 1981, the trial judge did in fact sentence Williams to death.

What I find hard to believe is that even after reading these facts not to mention this fact sheet of Tookie's crimes that have been compiled by L.A. County district attorney Steve Cooly, the "Save Tookie" campaign is still running with all cylinders and is begging Governor Schwarzenegger to give him clemency and prevent his December 13, 2005 execution. These celebrities might find it fashionable to raise Tookie up on their shoulders but they seem to forget that he did kill four people thus forever robbing them from their grieving families. I can assure you that had Tookie rolled up in Beverly Hills or some other ritzy neighborhood and killed some family member of theirs, they would probably be clamoring for Williams execution much like the family members of Tookie's victims. Since we are a nation of laws that are grounded on principles of rights and wrongs, Tookie Williams must lose his life for the gruesome killing these four people who weren't doing anything but trying to earn their own way of life in America. If you are willing to gun down four people for $220 then you should be prepared to pay for your crime, which in Tookie's case will be death by lethal injection. (Its a shame his death will be more humane that what he doled out on his victims.)