I hadn’t thought about Tookie Williams since middle school in the 1970s. Word was he had twenty-two-inch arms, a fifty-inch chest, a Fu Manchu, and wore suspenders, no shirt. He was co-founder of the Los Angeles street gang, the West Side Crips, in those days expanding from South Central Los Angeles to the Pomona Valley, where I lived.

In my white, middle-class neighborhood, we valley kids didn’t know any Crips, but some of our African-American classmates—about fifty students out of five hundred—did. A handful were admirers, even aspiring gangsters, and talked about Williams in big ways. He’d survived dozens of shootings. He couldn’t be killed. He’d once gone home-to-home on a rival street, torn off front doors and beat up every adult male.

The truth is he did get shot, most notably in a drive-by while he was standing in his front yard—not dozens of times, but at least once, and in both legs (he recovered after a year of rehabilitation). His reputation was established.

A police reporter named Ruby said Stanley “Tookie” Williams would be put to death at 12:01 a.m. on December 13

Now it was 2005 and I was city editor for the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, having inched west from Claremont to West Covina. A police reporter named Ruby said Stanley “Tookie” Williams would be put to death at 12:01 a.m. on December 13 for four murders.

A jury of ten whites, one Latino, and one Filipino-American had found him guilty of shooting 7-Eleven store clerk Albert Lewis Owens, a father of two, while robbing the Whittier market in 1979, and killing seniors Yen-I Yang and his wife Tsai-Shai Yang, and their middle-aged daughter Ye-Chen Lin, during a motel heist in South Central. The robberies took in a total of about $200.

A coroner’s report stated that Owens was shot at point-blank range. The others met their ends at five feet or fewer. For thirty-six years, Williams denied committing the crimes, but there wasn’t time to pursue that.

“Not one Black juror?” I asked Ruby. It was an obvious question, and could have been my mother or father speaking—Midwesterners who commerced in decency, if not enlightenment. My mother talked about the stupidity of racism almost as much as she did its immorality. She was offended by illogic, and I’m the same way.

“Where’s he being executed?”

“San Quentin,” Ruby said.

~

Seventeen members of the press would be allowed in the death chamber. To gain access, I wrote to the Department of Corrections (the standard procedure), received the official OK about a month later, and assigned Ruby the story. She was dependable, no-nonsense, profane. She didn’t walk; she stomped. Her family had immigrated to the States from the Philippines and the authoritarianism of President Ferdinand Marcos. She’d been an honors student at USC. She could have been an attorney or a literature professor (she quoted reams of classic prose and poetry), but she chose journalism, which she held in high regard.

In the days leading to the execution, thousands of protesters gathered outside San Quentin. Joan Baez sang, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Supporters of capital punishment held rallies as well, in what increasingly looked like a Marin County mosh pit. A second Trib reporter, Mazza, covered the protests and rallies, including those at Point San Quentin Village adjacent to the facility, in near-freezing weather.

Among the dissenters at the village was Mike Farrell, famous as B.J. Honeycutt in the TV hit M*A*S*H, who said, “What I know is that the prosecutor trying the case excused Blacks from the jury pool, a practice in some jurisdictions that has since been held unconstitutional by higher courts. I know that the prosecutor used highly charged terms with clear racial implications in securing a conviction. I know Stanley was forced to sit before the jury in chains and shackles, a tactic intended to inspire fear and loathing in them. And I know that in examining the case later, a federal appeals court judge said the conviction was based on ‘circumstantial evidence and the testimony of witnesses whose credibility was highly suspect.’”

Religious leaders, rappers such as Snoop Dogg, and Hollywood actors led the charge against what they called an injustice. Many had seen the movie “Redemption,” a story about Williams’s life, starring Jamie Foxx in the lead role.

John Monaghan, a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney, denounced Williams for not copping to the crimes:

“What kind of message does that send to young children, when somebody like Mr. Williams, who supposedly has their attention, tells them, ‘Don’t snitch, don’t talk to police, don’t tell people who was involved in a crime?’”

After a chaotic decade in San Quentin, holding the title CDC# C29300, Williams became a peacemaker, warning kids about the bruising blowback of gang life. He published a memoir, Blue Rage, Black Redemption. “I’m learning to master self while rising from the ashes of madness,” he wrote.

It was one of the lines that caught my eye when I read the memoir, which was met with modest sales but praise from Los Angeles Poet Laureate Luis Rodriguez and other literary figures. Williams had, among other attributes, an extraordinary vocabulary, expanded by reading dictionaries and keeping word lists.

His voice was an easy alto. He walked with a cane. 
Can you be two people in one lifetime?

He also penned children’s books, including Gangs and Wanting to Belong, Gangs and Self Esteem, and Gangs and Drugs. More than fifty thousand copies were sold to schools and libraries, according to Barbara Becnel, a friend who’d written the epilogue to Williams’s memoir. Between 2001 and 2005, he was nominated annually for the Nobel Peace Prize and a Nobel Prize in Literature.

At 51, the man who had appeared on the 1970s Gong Show as a bodybuilder (and danced with bikini-clad women) was now gray, bespectacled. His voice was an easy alto. He walked with a cane. Can you be two people in one lifetime? A “yes” answer would prompt follow-up questions. Was Williams genuinely a different man than the young, violent version? If so, would that mean the state was about to put a peaceful man, a good man, to death?

Like most editors, I aimed to stay emotionally detached, but I was committed to justice—when fatigue didn’t do a number on my sense of duty. In this instance, the “two-people” notion was at the core of that principle.

Wayne Owens, brother of Albert Lewis Owens, tried in vain to broker a deal whereby Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger would grant a stay and Williams would agree to never seek release. Williams didn’t deserve to be free and didn’t deserve to die, Owens believed.

“It’s going to be a political opinion and have nothing to do with justice either way,” he said. “It will be a sad day either way. And because it’s politics, I have no confidence in it because our government has gone from a democracy to a political society and politics is to governance what puppetry is to dance.”

Schwarzenegger denied the stay on December 8. Four days later, hours before the gallows, the United States Supreme Court declined to review the case. The old gas chamber had been converted into a surgical room. Williams would die by lethal injection.

~

In the 1800s, Stanley Williams likely would have been hanged, which many at the time considered more civilized than the burnings and pillories of the past. In the late part of that century, New York and other states, seeking a more humane instrument of capital punishment, opted for electrocution, which to this day is used in southern states. US Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, who served on the court from 1956 until 1990, once gave this description of death by electric chair: “…the prisoner’s eyeballs sometimes pop out and rest on [his] cheeks. The prisoner often defecates, urinates, and vomits blood. The body turns bright red as its temperature rises, and the prisoner’s flesh swells and his skin stretches to the point of breaking. Sometimes the prisoner catches fire…Witnesses hear a loud and sustained sound like bacon frying, and the sickly sweet smell of burning flesh permeates the chamber.”

In the 1900s, most states moved to gas chambers and firing squads. In the 1980s, Oklahoma became the first to use lethal injection. By 2005, every state where capital punishment was legal used the method, at least in some cases.

According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the first state execution took place in 1893 at San Quentin. Folsom followed with a hanging in 1895. In all, California hanged three hundred and seven individuals, gassed a hundred and ninety-four, and lethally injected ten. Four females are part of the sum.

The first woman executed, in 1941, was Evelita Juanita Spinelli, a gangster. She ran her larceny operation out of San Francisco, taking in homeless men and training them to rob for ten dollars a week. During a robbery, two such men, Albert Ives and Robert Sherrod, killed a man when he reached into his pocket to turn up his hearing aid. Sherrod pulled the trigger.

Richard Ramirez, dubbed the Night Stalker, terrorized the Southland in the summer of 1985. He was sentenced to death in 1989 for thirteen murders, five attempted murders, eleven sexual assaults, and fourteen burglaries. Upon his convictions, he said, “Big deal…See you in Disneyland.” His appeals kept him alive for almost a quarter century and no execution took place. He died of B-cell lymphoma in 2013.

Charles Manson committed his grisly murder spree in 1969 and was convicted in 1970. In 1972, the California Supreme Court found the death penalty constituted cruel and unusual punishment under the state constitution. One hundred and seven condemned inmates—most notably Manson—were resentenced to life with the possibility of parole.

After years of back-and-forth legal rulings, the California State Legislature re-enacted the death penalty statute in 1977, and state voters approved Proposition 7 in 1978, reaffirming the action.

~

Hours before the execution, the copy crew at the Trib was tense. Sportswriters were loose and loud. Things got heated at the city desk. The executive editor, a chronic stock watcher who trotted Army-style to the restroom every two hours, constantly popped his head out of his office, like a man hearing noises in the hedges.

Mazza worked the perimeter of the prison, which stood neatly corporate on San Francisco Bay. This was where the condemned faced their capital accounting (including twenty-eight innocents, according to the National Academy of Sciences). In the US, about seventy percent of those on Death Row were, and are, people of color.

“Ruby was inside the tomb, about to dive below the surface, into the scuffling dark”

“I warn Black men and Black women everywhere: beware of these tombs for the living called prison,” Williams wrote.

Ruby was inside the tomb, about to dive below the surface, into the scuffling dark, among predators and prey, survivalists, mounds and depressions, shipwrecks and jewels, with the shape of herself at the axis.

By all accounts, Williams—who victims’ rights groups called a monster and Jesse Jackson compared to Jesus—was composed when they wheeled him out on a gurney and opened the curtain.

“I can’t be rattled,” he’d written. “If the system wanted to exterminate me, I thought, so what, feel free to do so. Perhaps I’d fare better in death than in life.”

I figured he’d been imprisoned for so long he didn’t care about the system as much as the system cared about him.

His left arm was so immense that during prepping they spent twelve minutes searching for a vein. Prone, with a last meal of oatmeal and milk in his system, at one point he raised his head. One reporter quoted him as saying, “Still can’t find it?”

Death by lethal injection involves, first, sedation, then paralysis and cardiac arrest. Of all forms of capital punishment, it’s the quietest, at least outwardly. Inwardly, only the dead know, though a 2020 NPR study of hundreds of autopsy reports found that pulmonary edema—lungs filling up with fluid—occurred in eighty-four percent of those who died by lethal injection. Pulmonary edema can “make you feel like you’re drowning or suffocating,” said NPR reporter Noah Caldwell, adding some of the inmates in the study were reported to have gasped for air or choked during their executions.

Williams’s chest heaved several times before he died at 12:35 a.m., twelve days before Christmas morning.

~

The first-day stories on our website and in our newspapers were delivered with the efficiency of a UPS package, timely, and with the five Ws (who, what, when, why, where), as well as descriptions of the scene.

Ruby’s second-day column would be more personal. What was Williams’s demeanor? How, precisely, did it go down? What stood out about the executioners? How did the people in the room act? What did the writer feel?

What went unsaid but must have been on everyone’s mind: How do you capture the verdict reached and the reach of the verdict? The former would be a matter of stamina, I felt. Would reporters give their best performances on deadline? Would frazzled editors catch errors, big and small?

And what of the reach of the verdict? That would play out over time. Every execution in California intensified the debate over the death penalty, and in particular, the relevance of the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution (cruel and unusual punishment). Every time a person of color was executed, it revived claims—in turn met with denials—of bias in the judicial system. In fifty years, how would historians view Tookie Williams and the circumstances of his death?

After five or six rewrites, Ruby’s final draft came in at 10:30 p.m., twenty-two hours after the event.

As a reporter for 15 years, I have covered the maimed and the dead. But I’d never witnessed an execution.

It’s a story most reporters dream about covering, and also dread.

Inside the pressure cooker that was the San Quentin State Prison execution chamber, I told myself this was part of my job…

That night, copy editors rimmed, slotted—“rimmed” came from the horseshoe-shaped copy desks of yesteryear, “slotted” meant another edit tailored for the slot of space the story had been slated—and sent the piece to a page designer for layout and proofs, then off to press, headlined, Tookie Williams’s violent life ends quietly. It was online by 1 a.m and would hit the streets of West Covina, Duarte, Baldwin Park, Irwindale, and other cities at 6 a.m.

For the Trib staff, the project that involved a week of planning, pondering all possible outcomes, and poring over every word of copy, was a wrap, as editors say. Driving home through La Habra Heights’s Powder Canyon, I thought we’d done the story justice. Fair, accurate, in-depth. Regular updates online. A dependable archive for future generations. Justice as it applied to Williams? Everyone, it seemed, had a different view.

Williams’s supporters, mere feet away from him when he died, declared, “The state has murdered an innocent man.” Barbara Becnel, Williams’s ally, continues to make it her mission to end the death penalty. Years later, she tweeted to Schwarzenegger “… as California governor, you denied clemency to execute a reformed black male gang leader, an author of nine award-winning anti-gang children’s books, you did not display a public servant’s heart. You valued cold-hearted politics.”

Per his wishes, Williams’s ashes were scattered in a lake in Thokoza Park, South Africa, after a service in Bethel AME Church in Los Angeles.

His last words were played at the service: The war within me is over. I battled my demons and I was triumphant. Teach them how to avoid our destructive footsteps. Teach them to strive for higher education. Teach them to promote peace and teach them to focus on rebuilding the neighborhoods that you, others, and I helped to destroy.

Heading home, following the road through the canyon, I recalled a detail toward the end of Ruby’s column.

Lora Owens was among those seated in metal chairs facing the green execution chamber. Williams shot and killed her stepson, Whittier 7-Eleven clerk Albert Lewis Owens, during a 1979 robbery that netted $120. Williams also fatally shot Yen-I Yang, Tsai-Shai Yang and Ye-Chen Lin during the robbery of a Los Angeles motel. But we were told that their relatives wouldn’t be there to witness the execution…

That led, a few inches down, to the final two paragraphs.

When it was over, Lora Owens sighed deeply.

And a friend put her arm around her.

Ahead, Angel Stadium’s “Big A” came into view, ten minutes from my Orange County home. I replayed a call I’d had with Ruby after the execution, as she emerged from the prison.

I was curious—How would she approach the column?

She described those thirty-five minutes—the mood, the protocol, the grim smell, a blonde woman holding her hand to her mouth. The chamber was seven and a half feet in diameter. Gold badges were pinned on witnesses. Williams, dressed in a light blue shirt and dark pants, wore his eyeglasses.

By then our grand ambitions had given way to exhaustion, though, and there wasn’t much to do but type away and see what resulted. But before we hung up, she offered one more stone from the floor of reality, a story fifty thousand readers wouldn’t see, a story only she knew.

“I didn’t feel anything,” she said.

Like a hostage negotiator, I’d leaned on her with all I had. I pressed her for an explanation, she pushed back, our talks got heated and, finally, I chose to respect her privacy, as well as her choice to end with Lora Owens.

I never knew Ruby’s stance on the death penalty. I knew how she felt about almost everything else—her frustrations with watch commanders, her impatience with clock watchers, her rage at Marcos and what he’d done to her homeland, her worries about student loans, her reverence for the First Amendment.

At her core, she was a reporter, insisting on something approximating the truth, even if getting there meant abusing cops, public relations types, soft editors (never mind that she was five-feet-one at best), a reporter who quoted Euripides, who couldn’t get over her grandparents’s deaths at sea, and who sewed clothes for her collection of Barbie dolls.

Can you be several people in one lifetime? Can one remain in all?

That’s what I was thinking five minutes from my home. Tookie had been a crowd on the margin, cruel then calm. Who do we judge? Ruby was a moving crowd that couldn’t afford to stop, retract, and feel in the moment.

A commitment to a cause—chronicling, for instance, a state execution in a thorough, exact way, free from government’s huge hand—moved her south from San Francisco Bay to the San Gabriel Valley and her next story.

Brady Rhoades’s non-fiction has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, bioStories, Black EOE Journal, Orange County Register, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, and U.S. Veterans Magazine. His fiction has appeared in The Antioch Review, Baltimore Review, Best New Poets 2008 and other publications. He lives with his wife and dog in Fullerton, California.