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Stanley Williams Executed For 4 California Murders

Stanley Williams was executed by the State of California for four murders

According to court documents Stanley Williams, who was a founder of the street gang the Crips in 1971, would rob two businesses in a two week period that left four people dead. In the first robbery Williams would murder Albert Lewis Owens and in the second robbery would murder 76-year old Thsai Shai Young, his 63-year old wife Yen-I Yang and their 43-year old daughter Ye Chen Lin

Stanley Williams would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death

Stanley Williams would be executed by lethal injection on December 13 2005

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When Was Stanley Williams Executed

Stanley Williams was executed on December 13 2005

Stanley Williams Case

Stanley Tookie Williams, whose self-described evolution from gang thug to antiviolence crusader won him an international following and nominations for a Nobel Peace Prize, was executed by lethal injection early today, hours after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger refused to spare his life. His death was announced at 12:35 a.m.

During the execution, the inmate’s friend Barbara Becnel and other supporters mouthed “God bless you” and “We love you” and blew kisses to Williams. Stanley Williams also seemed to mouth statements to Becnel. The entire procedure took longer than usual. The execution team took about 12 minutes to find a vein in Williams’ muscular left arm. While the personnel were probing, Williams repeatedly lifted his head off the gurney, winced visibly, and at one point appeared to say: “Still can’t find it?” After Williams was pronounced dead, Becnel and two other supporters of Williams turned toward the media in the witness room and yelled in unison, “The state of California just killed an innocent man!” Lora Owens, murder victim Albert Owens’ stepmother, appeared shaken, and was embraced by another woman.

Outside the gates of San Quentin as midnight approached, speakers urged calm. There was a moment of tension when a Stanley Williams’ friend, Fred Jackson, told the crowd, “It’s all over.” Angry shouts broke out. A woman sobbed on someone’s shoulder, and a man burned an American flag. As Jackson continued to urge calm, the crowd dispersed. Speaking outside the gates of San Quentin after the execution, Becnel, who is taking possession of Williams’ body, called Schwarzenegger a “cold-blooded murderer” and vowed to work for his defeat in the next election.

Despite persistent pleas for mercy from around the globe, the governor earlier in the day had said Stanley Williams was unworthy of clemency because he had not admitted his brutal shotgun murders of four people during two robberies 26 years ago. After the U.S. Supreme Court denied a request for a last-minute stay Monday evening, the co-founder of the infamous Crips street gang — who insisted he was innocent of the murders — became the 12th man executed by the state of California since voters reinstated capital punishment in 1978.

With its racial overtones and compelling theme — society’s dueling goals of redemption and retribution — the case provoked more controversy than any California execution in a generation, and became a magnet for attention and media worldwide. A long list of prominent supporters — as disparate as South African Bishop Desmond Tutu and rapper Snoop Dogg — rallied to Williams’ cause.

But in a strongly worded rejection of Stanley Williams’ request for clemency, Schwarzenegger said he saw no need to rehash or second-guess the many court decisions already rendered in the case, and he questioned the death row inmate’s claims of atonement. Williams, the governor said in a statement, never admitted guilt, plotted to kill law enforcement officers after his capture, and made little mention in his writings of the scourge of gang killings, which the statement called “a tragedy of our modern culture.”

As night descended Monday, about 1,000 demonstrators who gathered on a tree-lined street leading to the gates of San Quentin State Prison endured frosty temperatures to protest the execution. Joan Baez sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” as speakers urged participants to keep fighting. Small clumps of people in scarves and gloves held candles and sang hymns, while others wandered off alone, gazing into the bay. There were small, scattered protests around the state, including a candlelight vigil Monday night in Leimert Park.

A few death penalty supporters also turned out at San Quentin. Scuffles and shoving matches broke out on occasion, but no serious incidents were reported.

Behind the prison’s thick walls, Stanley Williams passed his dwindling hours quietly, visiting with friends and talking on the telephone while under constant watch by guards. An acquaintance described him sitting at a table, handcuffed, next to untouched turkey sandwiches, bidding goodbye to friends in an ordinary, everyday manner. A prison spokesman said Williams was calm and upbeat, though he ate nothing but oatmeal and milk all day, refusing the privilege of a special last meal. Williams also declined a spiritual advisor.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said he met twice with Stanley Williams, and together with Becnel delivered the news that the governor had denied clemency. Williams smiled “as if he expected it,” Jackson said. He said Williams again denied his guilt, and said that he thought “his baggage as a Crip was on trial more than for the four murders.”

In recent statements, Stanley Williams had expressed a philosophical attitude about his own death. Fred Jackson, 67, who works with Internet Project for Street Peace, Williams’ gang intervention project, said the inmate struck that tone in a phone conference with an Oakland support group Sunday. “He said he doesn’t fear death — he doesn’t fear what he does not know,” Jackson said.

At 6 p.m., Stanley Williams was strip-searched, given a set of clean clothes and placed in a holding cell steps from the death chamber under nonstop observation by a sergeant and two officers. Officials said he spent the evening watching TV and reading some of the roughly 50 letters that arrived Monday from as far as Italy and Israel — including some from schoolchildren. Many of them said they were praying for him. Nearby, the injection team began its final preparations in the prison’s converted gas chamber, ensuring that the required needles, tubes and chemicals were in place.

Stanley Williams’ son, Stanley Williams Jr., who is in High Desert State Prison serving a 16-year sentence for second-degree murder, will be notified in person of his father’s death by a chaplain and mental health specialist, prison officials said. The younger Williams is in isolation for disciplinary problems, and would not normally have access to any news source.

Five members of the murder victims’ families were at the prison, although it was not clear how many witnessed the execution. Stanley Williams, who earlier said he didn’t want to invite anyone to observe “the sick and perverted spectacle,” had five witnesses, including Becnel and members of his legal team. Officials designated a total of 39 witnesses, including 17 media representatives.

Lora Owens said she did not expect the execution to end the ache over losing her red-haired stepson, Albert, who was killed with a shotgun at the age of 26 while working at a Pico Rivera 7-Eleven late one February night in 1979. But watching the killer take his last breath, she said, might help her “let it go” just a bit.

Advocates for clemency had argued that Williams had unmatched credibility as a messenger urging youths to say no to gangs. But law enforcement officials and victims’ rights leaders portrayed Williams as a fraud whose influence on would-be gangsters was overblown.

Prosecutors said the absence of a confession, and Williams’ refusal to formally cut ties with the Crips by sharing his knowledge of gang tactics with police, disproved his claim of rehabilitation. “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?’.” said John Monaghan, a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney.

As Schwarzenegger weighed his decision, attorneys for Williams spent the weekend hunting for a court that might issue a stay. On Sunday, the state Supreme Court turned back arguments that his trial was “fundamentally unfair” in part because prosecutors had failed to disclose that a key witness, Alfred Coward, was a violent ex-felon. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and finally the U.S. Supreme Court followed suit Monday.

After the governor rejected clemency, lawyers asked Schwarzenegger for a stay on the basis of three witnesses who they said had come forward just this week with exculpatory information. But Schwarzenegger again delivered a rebuff. Just before 9:30 p.m., Williams lawyers filed another petition, citing a fourth purported witness who claimed other inmates tried to recruit him into a scheme to frame Williams. The governor denied that, too.

Born in New Orleans, Stanley Tookie Williams III was named for his father but raised by his mother. Hoping to escape poverty and crime in Louisiana, the family moved to South Los Angeles in 1959. He spent his youth as a delinquent, rebounding in and out of Central Juvenile Hall. In his writings, he admitted that he was a megalomaniac who beat, robbed and shot at the innocent. By the 1970s, Williams was viewed as one of the more menacing toughs in South Los Angeles, weighing 300 pounds with biceps measuring 22 inches. In a move he said he regretted more than any other, he helped launch the Crips — originally called the Cribs — and began terrorizing the streets.

On Feb. 27, 1979, he and three cohorts smoked cigarettes laced with PCP and, armed with a 12-gauge shotgun and a .22-caliber handgun, set out on a late-night search for a place to rob, according to court documents. They wound up at the 7-Eleven where Owens, a father of two and Army veteran, was working the overnight shift. Owens was shot twice in the back.

Less than two weeks later, Williams broke down the door at the Brookhaven Motel and killed the motel’s owners, Taiwanese immigrants Yen-I Yang, his wife, Tsai-Shai Chen Yang, and their daughter, Yu Chin Yang Lin, who was visiting. The two robberies netted $220.

In 1981, a jury in Torrance convicted Williams, landing him on death row. Initially his conduct was disruptive: “I gave this place hell,” he acknowledged in an interview. While in solitary confinement, however, he began a transformation, Williams said. At first he read voraciously — the Bible, the dictionary, philosophy, black history — and struggled to understand his past.

By 1992, Williams was a changed man, he said, deeply remorseful for the bloody rampage the Crips had perpetrated across America — and for the gang life that lured in one of his two sons. In 1994, Williams left solitary confinement and declared himself a champion of peace.

With the help of Becnel, he wrote a series of books warning youths away from violence and brokered gang truces in Los Angeles and New Jersey. Last year, his life became the subject of a TV movie, “Redemption,” starring Jamie Foxx, and his imposing appearance gradually gave way to a graying beard and spectacles. Reached by phone at her Los Angeles home as the execution was underway, Williams’ ex-wife, Bonnie Williams Taylor, said, “This is an awful time. I want to be with my family.”

Earlier in the evening, dozens of people had gathered in Leimert Park in Los Angeles to oppose the execution. But the speakers who addressed them focused more on healing crime in black communities than on Williams’ plight. “We have to understand,” said African American activist Eric Wattree, 53, speaking to a mostly black crowd early in the evening, “this is our failure taking place here.”

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Donald Beardslee Executed For 2 California Murders

Donald Beardslee was executed by the State of California for a double murder

According to court documents Donald Beardslee was on parole for murder when he would murder two women, 23 year old Patty Geddling and 19 year old Stacey Benjamin, after a drug debt gone wrong

Donald Beardslee would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death

Donald Beardslee would be executed by lethal injection on January 19 2005

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Donald Beardslee was executed on January 19 2005

Donald Beardslee Case

Last-minute court appeals rejected and clemency vigorously denied by the governor, Donald Beardslee was executed early this morning, 24 years after he confessed to the slayings of two Bay Area women. As about 300 opponents of the death penalty held a vigil outside the prison, Donald Beardslee, 61, was strapped to a gurney and injected with a fatal cocktail of drugs.

In an extraordinarily detailed statement Tuesday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said: “Nothing in his petition or the record of his case convinces me that he did not understand the gravity of his actions or that these heinous murders were wrong.” Shortly after the governor’s rejection, the U.S. Supreme Court without comment denied Beardslee’s application for a stay. The decisions cleared the way for Beardslee’s execution at 12:01 this morning, the state’s 11th execution since voters reinstated the death penalty in 1978 and the first under the Schwarzenegger administration.

Beardslee refused a special final meal and had regular prison fare of chili macaroni, salad and cake. Among those gathered to witness the execution on San Quentin’s death row were four family members of Patty Geddling, 23, and Stacey Benjamin, 19, whom Beardslee admitted killing and dumping in secluded spots after a dispute over a $185 drug deal in Redwood City, Calif.

At a state clemency hearing in Sacramento on Friday, defense attorneys asked Schwarzenegger for mercy in the case, saying that Beardslee suffered from previously undetected brain damage that caused him to commit the two 1981 murders as well as the fatal stabbing of a Missouri woman in 1969 for which he served seven years in prison. Hoping that Schwarzenegger would take a cue from the late Ronald Reagan, the last California governor to grant clemency to a condemned man, the attorneys asked that Beardslee be allowed to undergo a sophisticated magnetic resonance imaging brain scan not used during his trial. In a 1967 case, Reagan commuted the death sentence of a brain-damaged convicted killer because the latest scientific test, the 16-channel encephalograph, had not been available at the time of trial. But Schwarzenegger rejected the brain damage theory, noting that Beardslee functions at a very high level, earning “A’s, Bs and Cs when he attended the College of San Mateo while he was on parole for the Missouri murder.” After spending the weekend reviewing the case and the sealed recommendation of the state Board of Prison Terms, Schwarzenegger denied clemency for Beardslee, just as he did last year in the only other death case he has faced since taking office.

Last February, Schwarzenegger ignored appeals from a prominent chorus of American and international voices — including some in the movie business — and rejected clemency for escaped convict Kevin Cooper. Cooper was sentenced to death for the 1983 hacking deaths of three Chino Hills family members and a neighborhood friend during his flight from prison. Cooper was later spared from execution by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which sent the case back to lower courts to consider new DNA tests.

Because of the relative leniency he has demonstrated in parole cases — particularly compared with his Democratic predecessor Gray Davis — Schwarzenegger’s early dealings in capital cases are being watched closely by the state’s prosecutors and defense lawyers. In interviews, Schwarzenegger said he believes in the death penalty as “a necessary and effective deterrent to capital crimes.” However, Legal Affairs Secretary Peter Siggins said in a February interview that the governor has indicated he would grant clemency if the right case came along. “He’s certainly indicated that in the right case he’d be willing to entertain” clemency, said Siggins, who added: “I can tell you the governor is a supporter of the death penalty and believes it’s an appropriate form of punishment.” Since taking office in November 2003, Schwarzenegger has granted three pardons and issued the first commutation of a prison term by a California governor since Jerry Brown.

California leads the nation with 640 inmates on death row, but ranks 18th in executions performed since 1976. Texas ranks first in executions with 337, and second in inmates on death row, with 455 sentenced to death. Because of the complicated appeals process, condemned California prisoners wait an average of more than 20 years between the date of sentencing and execution. In fact, most inmates on the state’s death row die of natural causes. Next in line for execution after Beardslee is Blufford Hayes Jr., whose 1980 death sentence is under appeal.

In the nearly quarter-century that he waited in San Mateo County Jail and on San Quentin’s death row, Donald Beardslee is reported to have become a model prisoner. According to testimony read at Friday’s clemency hearing, he even assisted corrections officials on prison security. Former San Quentin Warden Daniel Vasquez described Beardslee as a rare inmate with no discipline record. “Killing him would be a shame,” Vasquez said. But Schwarzenegger was not swayed by the good behavior argument. “I expect no less,” he said.

The last-minute call for mercy was also countered by emotional testimony from the families of the two Bay Area women, including Geddling’s grown children. “I don’t know what problem [Beardslee] has with women. He seems to like to kill them,” said Tom Amundson, Benjamin’s older stepbrother.

In 1969, when he was 26, Donald Beardslee killed a 52-year-old woman he met in a St. Louis bar, stabbing her in the throat with a knife and leaving her in a bathtub to bleed to death. After serving seven years of an 18-year sentence in that killing, the former Air Force mechanic moved to California to be near his mother. While on parole, Beardslee got a job as a machinist for Hewlett-Packard, where he got consistently good job evaluations.

In 1981, Donald Beardslee picked up a hitchhiker, Rickie Soria, a drug addict and prostitute. Moving in with Beardslee, Soria introduced him to her friends. One of them, 19-year-old Bill Forrester, claimed that he had been ripped off in a $185 drug deal involving Geddling and Benjamin. Frank Rutherford, a drug dealer portrayed as the group’s ringleader, devised a scheme to entice Geddling and Benjamin to Beardslee’s apartment on April 24, 1981. The day before, Beardslee sent Soria to buy duct tape to tie the women’s hands when they arrived.

After Rutherford accidentally wounded Geddling, Beardslee, Soria and Forrester drove her to a remote site in San Mateo County, where Beardslee shot the young mother twice in the head with a sawed-off shotgun. The next day, Beardslee, Soria and Rutherford, who had remained with Benjamin, used cocaine as they drove the Pacifica native 100 miles to a secluded area in Lake County, north of San Francisco. After the two men failed to strangle Benjamin with a wire garrote, Beardslee slit her throat with Rutherford’s knife. Before leaving the body, the two men pulled down Benjamin’s pants to make it appear that she had been raped. Police tracked down Beardslee using a phone number found at one of the crime scenes. As he had in St. Louis, Beardslee quickly confessed to the crimes and was the lead witness in the trials. Rutherford, who died in prison two years ago, and Soria were given long prison terms, and Forrester was acquitted.

Tried last, Beardslee was convicted and, after extensive jury deliberations, sentenced to die in San Quentin’s gas chamber. The method of execution in California was later changed to death by lethal injection.

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Clarence Allen Executed For 3 California Murders

Clarence Allen was executed by the State of California for three murders

According to court documents Clarence Allen found out that his son’s girlfriend informed on him for a robbery so he would arrange for someone to murder seventeen year old Mary Sue Kitts

While in prison on the murder conviction of Mary Sue Kitts Clarence Allen would arrange with another inmate to murder three people who testified against him: Bryon Schletewitz, 27; Douglas White, 18; and Josephine Rocha, 17. For the triple murder Allen would be sentenced to death

Clarence Allen would be executed by lethal injection on January 17 2006

This was the last execution in California

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Clarence Allen was executed on January 17 2006

Who Was The Last Person Executed In California

Clarence Allen was the last person executed in California

Clarence Allen Case

California prison officials executed 76-year-old murderer Clarence Ray Allen at the state prison here early today after his final appeal was turned down by the U.S. Supreme Court. His death by lethal injection was announced at 12:38 a.m. by Elaine Jennings of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Allen was wheeled into the death chamber at 12:04 a.m. By 12:35 a.m., Jennings said, the three drugs used in the process had been administered, however a second dose of potassium chloride — which stops the heart — was required.

Allen, who turned 76 Monday, was by far the oldest of the 13 convicts executed in the state since California restored the death penalty in 1977 and the second oldest in the nation. That status, however, may not endure. California has the nation’s largest death row — 646 inmates — but executes a relatively small number. As a result, the ranks of the condemned grow steadily more elderly, and now include five older than 70, 34 in their 60s and 155 between 50 and 59.

Lawyers for Clarence Allen argued that his lengthy time on death row, age and ill health should have barred his execution; he recently had a heart attack, suffered from diabetes, was legally blind and used a wheelchair. But Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and a series of courts rejected those pleas over the last several days.

On Sunday night, Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals noted that Allen was already 50 years old and incarcerated at Folsom State Prison for another killing when he orchestrated the triple murder for which he was handed the death penalty in 1982. Evidence at that trial showed he had paid another inmate $25,000 to kill three potential witnesses against him. “His age and experience only sharpened his ability to coldly calculate the execution of the crime,” wrote Wardlaw, an appointee of President Clinton. “Nothing about his current ailments reduces his culpability.”

The execution was the second in a month’s time, which is rare for California. Last month, the state executed Stanley Tookie Williams, 51, the former leader of the Crips gang. Later this week, a Ventura County Superior Court judge is expected to set an execution date for 46-year-old Michael Morales stemming from a 1983 murder in San Joaquin County. State officials also have said it is possible that execution dates could be scheduled later this year for two other longtime condemned inmates, Stevie Lamar Fields, 49, and Mitchell Sims, 45.

Clarence Allen’s last significant court challenge failed Monday afternoon when the Supreme Court denied his request for a stay of execution. As it often does in death cases, the court acted without a written opinion. Justice Stephen G. Breyer issued the only dissent, a brief statement noting Allen’s age, ill health and the fact that he “has been on death row for 23 years.” “I believe that in the circumstances, he raises a significant question as to whether his execution would constitute ‘cruel and unusual punishment,’.” Breyer wrote.

Since California reinstated the death penalty, the inmates who have been executed have had an average stay on death row of nearly 16 years, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The cases take a long time for several reasons, but chief among them is that the state takes considerable care in reviewing death sentences. The state Supreme Court automatically reviews each capital case. Although the court upholds the overwhelming majority, it does not begin the process until an appellate lawyer has been found to represent the inmate. Finding lawyers able and willing to handle the cases has proved difficult, Chief Justice Ronald M. George has said.

Currently, more than 100 inmates have no lawyer for their appeal, and the waiting list to get an appellate lawyer is several years long, said UC Berkeley law professor Elisabeth Semel, who runs the school’s death penalty clinic.

Clarence Allen’s case did not draw as much media attention as that of Williams, who was executed in December after a massive campaign urging the governor to grant clemency. Nonetheless, Death Penalty Focus, a San Francisco-based group that opposes capital punishment, held a 25-mile “Walk for Abolition” on Monday, starting at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, proceeding across the Golden Bridge and culminating at San Quentin. The group said there also would be a rally against the death penalty in Los Angeles and vigils outside the state Capitol and in several other cities around the state. Shortly before the scheduled execution, the number of protesters outside the prison grew to about 300.

Allen maintained his innocence, despite what Judge Wardlaw, in an earlier decision on the case, had called “overwhelming” evidence of his guilt. The case involved the murders of Bryon Schletewitz, 27; Douglas White, 18; and Josephine Rocha, 17. Prosecutors told a jury in Fresno that Allen had organized the murders and paid a fellow inmate, Billy Ray Hamilton, to carry them out.

At the time, Clarence Allen was in prison, convicted of the 1974 murder of Mary Sue Kitts. California did not have a death penalty statute at that time. Kitts, a girlfriend of Allen’s son, Kenneth, was found strangled after telling the owners of a Fresno market that Allen’s gang had burglarized their business. Schletewitz was the son of the store owners and had testified against Allen in the Kitts case. According to prosecutors, Allen, who was seeking a retrial in the Kitts case, paid Hamilton to kill Schletewitz and other potential witnesses. According to testimony, Hamilton went to the store, Fran’s Market, with a sawed-off shotgun, ordered Schletewitz and three other store employees to lie on the floor and then shot all four. One employee, Joe Rios, was shot in the face but survived and testified at the trial.

Hamilton was arrested during a liquor store robbery a week after the murders. When he was captured, police found that he had the names and addresses of seven others Allen wanted killed. Hamilton also was sentenced to death and is still on death row. Kenneth Allen, who provided the shotgun to Hamilton, was given a life term for his role in the crime, as was his girlfriend Connie Barbo. After the Supreme Court turned Allen down, Deputy Atty. Gen. Ward Campbell, who prosecuted him, noted that “every court has now rejected all of Allen’s claims.”

“Allen deserves capital punishment because he was already serving a life sentence for murder when he masterminded the murders of three innocent young people and conspired to attack the heart of our criminal justice system,” Campbell said.

Anti-death-penalty activists Monday distributed excerpts from an interview that Michael Kroll, a founding director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C., had done with Allen, in which he asked if the condemned man was willing to express remorse for the killings. According to Kroll, Allen responded that he was “terribly sorry for all that happened. But I can never express remorse for this crime because I didn’t do it.” “I hope to meet the victims in the afterlife and explain to them I never plotted to harm them, and I never wanted them to be harmed,” he added.

Although Kroll repeated Allen’s claims of innocence, other protesters expressed opposition to all executions. Lyle Grosjean, 72, a retired Episcopal priest who was one of the marchers Monday, said he had participated in virtually identical marches from the Legion of Honor to San Quentin for every execution in California in the last 46 years, starting with the 1960 gassing of Caryl Chessman, the rapist who gained fame through his death row writings. “We do it every time. We believe that there is a need to have a witness against the death penalty on the eve of every execution regardless of the person or the crime or the victims,” Grosjean said in a telephone interview as he marched Monday. “We believe murder is wrong and [the] execution of murderers is just as wrong.”

Outside the prison, a San Quentin spokesman, Lt. Vernell Crittendon, told reporters that Clarence Allen had been “surprisingly upbeat.” “He is at peace with this process that’s about to unfold in the next few hours,” Crittendon said Monday night.

Crittendon said he has been present at all of the executions in the state since 1978, and for a few in other states, including Arizona and Maryland, and that Allen’s “jovial” demeanor was far from the norm. In the last few days, Allen was visited by friends, family and supporters, and “he has insisted that they don’t engage in sobbing or crying,” Crittendon said.

Clarence Allen had a last meal of buffalo steak, a bucket of KFC white-meat-only chicken, sugar-free pecan pie, sugar-free black walnut ice cream and whole milk. At 6 p.m., Allen was moved to the death-watch cell and met with a Native American spiritual advisor. Crittendon said Allen would be allowed to carry several Native American religious artifacts with him at the time of his death, including a headband and a neck piece known as a “stairway to heaven.”

Clarence Allen, whose mother is part Choctaw and father is part Cherokee, “professed to be a Native American since about 1988,” Crittendon said. Kroll said Allen had told him that when the time came, “the last words I’ll speak is an old Indian saying, hok-ah-ei — it’s a good day to die.”Cla

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