THE BONIN EXECUTION : Outside, Many Argue but Few Listen

SAN QUENTIN —  Erwin Baumgartner was looking for a fight.

He was fired up, man, a full head of steam under the hood of his Oakland Raiders sweatshirt, and he was fixing to bait somebody, anybody, on this death penalty thing.

He didn’t want to “dee-bate” you, no sir, none of that point-counterpoint crapola for him. He was spoiling for a verbal rumble, brother, so just put down that thermos of herbal tea and answer the question without any more stalling.

Are you pro or are you anti the death penalty?

Anti? Anti? What, do you love murderers?

In the hours before William G. Bonin was executed Friday morning, it was a surly, combustible crowd that gathered for a rally outside the east gate of San Quentin Prison, a crowd that seemed evenly drawn from college debate societies and monster truck pulls.

Yes, Baumgartner was gleefully rude and intensely pro-death penalty, but many in the opposite camp were equally loud and boorish, and neither side could walk away from the night’s proceedings feeling that good taste had carried the day.

There was a formal protest of the execution, organized by anti-death penalty forces, but each speaker spawned so many arguments and mini-arguments in the crowd that he or she could barely be heard.

As family members of Bonin’s victims dined on roast beef and shrimp salad at the warden’s house, which sits on a bluff overlooking the prison grounds, they couldn’t help but notice the baying throng below--countless strangers using the families’ pain as a political flash point.

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Some victims’ families avoided the prison altogether because they didn’t trust themselves among the protesters. Others chose to physically confront the protesters, and their emotions ran so high that violence was the ironic result. When the announcement came that the lethal injection had indeed been administered, a fistfight broke out between the family of one young victim and a group of nearby protesters. Several people had to pull apart the combatants.

For a man named Bill, who refused to give his last name, the scuffle was senseless.

“We’re gonna stand out here and fight over some guy who’s dead?” he hollered, incredulous.

For Bill, the issue had been happily decided by a lethal IV, and now it was time to go home and watch himself on TV.

He mocked a few people, then exhaled a cartoon balloon of cigarette smoke before stalking away. It was hard for an observer not to think: Rude Man Walking.

Like the current hit film “Dead Man Walking”--in which Sean Penn plays a convicted killer on death row--the scene was a graphic depiction of how the death penalty issue reaches people.

In fact, it was seeing “Dead Man Walking” that compelled a couple of guys named Bob and Charley to visit San Quentin, straight from the 7 p.m. showing, the popcorn still stuck between their teeth. Emerging from the theater, filled with arguments for and against, the two young men decided to head over to San Quentin’s east gate and blend in by lending their voices to the din.

Mike Leitao was pro-death penalty when he arrived at the rally, ambivalent when he left.

After driving here from Orange County with his longtime friend, David McVicker, whom Bonin abducted and raped 21 years ago, Leitao had come to the conclusion that justice was being served Friday morning.

But then, while roaming outside the prison amid all the rancor, Leitao came upon a woman sobbing. Instinctively, he embraced her.

When the woman stopped crying, Leitao learned who she was: Charlene Mason, widow of David Edwin Mason, the last person executed in California.

Few people at the rally were more opposed to the death penalty than she, and yet Leitao didn’t find her to be a monster at all. In fact, he found her touchingly, hauntingly human. And after a long, tearful conversation, she discovered the same was true of him.

Separating, they exchanged addresses and vowed to write.

Brad and Lyn Sheridan’s rally experience wasn’t nearly so intense. They were that rare exception in the crowd--disinterested observers.

The Sheridans decided late Friday to fly north from Los Angeles, thinking it might be fun to capture a few mental “Pictures at an Exhibition” outside the execution.

For them, the protest was purely spectacle. Until it became personal.

“Hey, look at that sign,” Brad said to Lyn.

He pointed at a placard that read, “12:01--One Less Scumbag!”

Brad liked that. He laughed. He asked the man what was printed on the other side. Smiling, the man flipped the sign around. “The system is broken,” it read, “and only scumbag lawyers benefit.”

Brad, a lawyer, was not amused.

Hilary Sanderson of San Diego, who was staying with a friend up the street, couldn’t believe so many people would come out to demonstrate for or against the death penalty. Dressed to the nines, cosseting a glass of red wine, she wandered leisurely through the crowd, slowly reading each sign slowly, lazily examining each banner, as though browsing in a bookstore.

About the death penalty, she would only say with a wave of her leather-gloved hand: “I have mixed feelings.”

The scene turned progressively uglier as Bonin’s final moments drew near. Grieving families of recent murder victims took turns at the microphone to call for an end to the death penalty, declaring that executions did nothing to ease their pain.

But they were jeered and heckled by the pro-death penalty people.

By consensus, Baumgartner was the loudest heckler of the night. A local glazier who hollered himself hoarse for five hours straight, he was sickened by the anti-death penalty faction, and he never hesitated to jam his clenched fists into his pockets and let them know it.

“Not in my name!” a speaker declared, objecting that his tax dollars were paying for Bonin’s execution.

“Then do it in mine!” said Baumgartner, who at some point in the evening decided to fashion a fake noose around his neck.

Baumgartner was especially voluble when the actor Mike Farrell took the podium.

“It’s the voices of fear,” Farrell said, “insisting that the fortunes of this state be spent putting this man to death.”

“Not fear!” Baumgartner yelled, his scalp turning red under his buzz-cut hair. “Sensibility!”

“Compassion!” a plaintive voice cried out.

“Victims!” Baumgartner shouted.

“Solutions!” another voice cried.

If Baumgartner responded, his voice was drowned out by a New Year’s Eve noisemaker, because Bonin had been declared legally dead, and among at least half the crowd a rowdy celebration had begun.

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VOICES

“I’m glad it’s over with. And for those who went up there . . . thinking that if they saw him die they could put it behind them, I hope it’s so.”

Lavada Gifford, mother of 14-year-old Sean King, whom Bonin confessed to killing

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“He became my guardian angel. I got to love him more than anyone I had loved before.”

Ben Aronoff, former San Quentin guard who befriended Bonin, as he has other death row inmates

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“Good riddance. . . . Maybe some of the victim’s relatives will find peace. I got my memories of my son.”

Anna McCabe, whose son James was 12 when he died at Bonin’s hands

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“The guy had a miserable childhood. He was mistreated terribly at a very early age. You take a dog and treat it like that [and] it’ll turn into a snarling beast. Unfortunately, that’s what he became.”

Bryan Uhlenbrock of Oakland, who protested the execution just outside the prison gates

“I can’t even put him in the category of an animal. An animal kills for food. I can’t feel any empathy for the guy.”

Former Orange County sheriff’s investigator Bernie Esposito, who worked on the Bonin case and witnessed his execution

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“This Bonin, 14 years he’s been on death row. . . . I wish he’d been gone a long time ago, so people can get on with their lives.”

Elza Rodgers, whose 14-year-old grandson, Glen Norman Barker, was a Bonin victim

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“What he taught us was, do the best you can with what life hands you.”

Alexis Skriloff, who is writing a book on Bonin and stayed with him during his final hours

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“I haven’t really thought much about this man in all these years. . . . This brings all the bad memories back. I’m glad he got what was coming to him but I don’t really feel a sense of closure.”

Patricia Kendrick, mother of 19-year-old Bonin victim Darin Lee Kendrick

Compiled by Times staff writer Rebecca Trounson