P.S. Don’t kid yourself folks, it is the lefts policies that have made life in big city America, dangerous and intolerable. Afterall, what have all of their social programs accomplished? Bring down the crime rate? NO. Lily was the victim of a devious and faulty life denying philosophy and agenda by some very evil people.

Tom’s right in his comments and I’m sure some on the left would agree with him but don’t have what it takes to go against their friends. Wasn’t it Mark Leno that thought possessing a little bit of child porn was no big deal? People like this are the leaders of our state?

As long as we have justices who worry about the little bit of pain a condemned prison goes through more than the barbaric act that put them on the gurney in the first place we won’t be safe here. It’s a ridiculous set of procedures that have been set up to make it almost impossible to execute a prisoner in this sate.

This is supposed to show how caring a people we are while on the other hand we eventually throw to the side the memories of people like Lily Burk.

Here’s what the “social safety net” should really be. Lock up forever or just exterminate the perpetual criminals of society.
All the Money and good intentions cannot keep us safe from these scum. No doubt, in-time, it will be revealed Samuel skated on lots of felony charges , that were plead-down, that kept him from being snared by the CA three-strikes law earlier. Now he gets Four strikes at once and the victim is DEAD. And even if this piece of human refuse gets death row, society wouldn’t exterminate him for at least another quarter century. Right about the time Lily Burk would have been beginning menopause. That is if she were still alive…

Sorry Lily.
But the progressives, the ACLU, the homeless advocates and rest of the let-the-repressed-criminals-go-free crowd deemed last Friday that you and your parents had take one for the team.

Oh well.

PS – he got his revenge. Not much later, he was a cop, and they came to his town.

In going to her daughter’s apartment, with the police there and the crowd waiting for the parents to arive to view them, she realized that she played, as in a movie, the role of “Mother of the murdered daughter.” She mentioned that she felt the obligation to spare the policeman the difficult duty of having to say the words, so she asked simply for a “yes” answer that she knew was coming.

Her poem “Nighttime Prayer,” asking about her daughter’s suffering in her final moments and how long it lasted, is so sad and equally painful.

She discusses her reaction to the trial and the victim impact statements at sentencing. She read one of her poems to the murderer in her statement.

There is also her reaction to wanting the man to die even though she didn’t support the death penalty. If there wasn’t a justice system, she would have sought him out and killed him herself…out of love for her child and family. That was interesting. The murderer was sentenced to life in prison without parole. She couldn’t feel free of her rage until he was incarcerated, plus she didn’t have to deal with the guilt of the death penalty.

The poem “Forgiveness” is about the minister being obligated to ask her to forgive. The church helped her to move forward.

She has another poem for when the verdit “Guilty” was announced and what she felt. She also shares her emotions when the mother of the murderer came meekly to her to say that she was sorry. At first she despised that mother for bearing the child who would kill her daughter, and then she realized that they were the truest sisters and mothers with children they lost.

She had to write about her daughter’s death, because that story stood in the way of other writing. She wanted to pull the readers on board for a ride with her, where they couldn’t step off, until the book was over.

Celeste, I don’t have a command of adjectives and emotions that you do and I can’t do this topic justice with my business vocabulary, but this was a moving interview and worth the 47 minutes to hear it.

As with most things in life, one can’t begin to understand how someone else feels without having experienced something similar. She brought us as close as she could with her writings.