Faith, Interrupted - In these
Faith, Interrupted - In these Oprahfied times, I found the Clara "Mercedes Killer" Harris verdict reassuring.
His 17 year old daughter spoke:
Lindsey Harris -- who lives with her mother and stepfather in Ohio -- told jurors she had a "great" relationship with her father.
"I talked to him on the phone every other day," she said. "We were the same person. We finished each other's sentences."
The teen testified that they shared interests, including music, athletics and dentistry.
"I planned to come to college down here and spend the rest of my life down here," she said. "Everything was planned. It was just perfect. And then it was ruined."
She told jurors of the harrowing minutes when, as a passenger in her stepmother's car, she recognized that her father would die.
"I saw his eyes," she said of the incident in the parking lot of the Nassau Bay Hilton. "I felt so bad that I couldn't help him. He couldn't get away. He was so scared and I couldn't do anything.
"It was terrifying. She was killing him. I would never see him again. I never got to say goodbye. I only got to spend 16 1/2 years with him. I had plans. It just wasn't fair."
Once she returned to the family's Friendswood home, she testified, she found her father's clothing in a garbage can -- placed there by a nanny on the instructions of Clara Harris.
The daughter said she brought the clothes upstairs and put them on her bed, then got her father's possessions from his bathroom and closet and brought them to her room.
"I felt like he was there with me," she said.
Justice served, right?
Maybe not. Attorney Dan Abrams on the Today show, reports that under Texas law, the jury can give any sentence from life without parole to probation - and while he figured probation was unlikely, he didn't figure it was impossible, given the jury's emotional state; jurors were reportedly crying as they delivered the verdict.
I wonder if probation would be on the table if the husband had did the driving?
Posted by Mitch at
February 14, 2003 07:56 AM
