‘My Son’s Killers Deserve to Die,’ Mother Says After Verdict

As the clerk read the jury’s recommended sentence Thursday for the murderers of Deborah Bush’s 14-year-old son and his two friends, it seemed an eternity until the pronouncement: death for the infamous Pasadena Halloween killers.

Bush had waited three painful years for those words, attending the trial day after day.

“I have justice in the verdict, but I don’t have my son--that pain is there every day,” she said, her face torn with anguish. “My son’s killers deserve to die.”

Just hearing the clerk read her son’s name Thursday was like having a razor drawn across a raw wound. Bush began to silently weep. The sentence recommendation could not have come on a more painful day: the third anniversary of her son’s murder as he walked home from a party.

“At 10:35 tonight, I have to relive that nightmare,” said Bush, a longtime crime scene investigator for the Pasadena Police Department.

She last saw her son, Stephen Coats, and his two friends shortly before they were slain in Pasadena, when they declined her offer of a ride home. And she was the first to find them dead, their Halloween candy covered with their blood.

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Stephen and his friends--Reggie Crawford, also 14, and Edgar Evans, 13--were headed home after attending a cousin’s birthday party when they were killed.

They turned down Bush’s offer of a ride, saying they would beat her in a race back to their home. Her final words to her son were a caution: no candy until Mom checks the trick-or-treat bags.

When Bush saw the boys again, they were lying in blood, their killers having fled, mistakenly believing they had shot members of a rival gang.

“Now it comes full circle, now they die,” she said after the jury recommended the death penalty.

“My son died within 30 seconds, before he hit the pavement,” but his assailants will have time to file motions, live in jail, talk with loved ones and carefully craft their goodbyes. Bush envies that. Her son’s killers will have more time than their young victims ever did.

Nearly every morning of the murder trial for the past year, she drove from the San Gabriel Valley to court in downtown Los Angeles. She held hands with her daughter in December when a jury convicted Lorenzo Newborn, 26, Herbert McClain, 28, and Karl Holmes, 21.

But later, when Bush expected the proceedings to be ending, the jury deadlocked on whether to recommend sentences of life in prison without parole or death. That meant she had to keep driving downtown to watch a second jury be chosen and the retrial of the penalty phase take place.

Once more, she had to hear how her son and his friends were walking home, how the three gang members hid in the bushes, how her son and two friends died painful deaths on the Pasadena pavement, just steps away from her home.

“I ate, drank and slept this case every day for three years,” Bush said before the sentencing recommendation was announced. “I’ll be glad to get this part behind me.”

She was the only family member of the victims to attend virtually the entire trial.

“I missed one day,” she said. “I was sick--sick of this whole thing.”

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During the course of the trial, she could feel herself change, Bush said. Emotions that had been numbed since the moment she ran to the crime scene and saw her son with a bullet in his head have begun to surface. Feelings of aching loss that she had not allowed herself to explore have come bubbling forth, often in streaks of tears.

“Now that I’ve taken the shield off, I feel some of the pain,” Bush said. “Steven would be 18 on his birthday in December, he’d be a senior in high school, he’d be graduating.”

The mother of three other children--one of whom was with his brother that Halloween night--and the grandmother of one, Bush said she had no choice but to do her best to help herself and her other children deal with Stephen’s death.

She had to listen to her surviving son describe his last moments with his brother after the gunfire had struck.

Just before his brother died, the younger boy testified, Stephen pushed him out of the volley of gunfire. “I heard him say, ‘I’m hit,’ ” he said.

Others testified, as Bush listened, that the younger boy went into shock, screaming for someone to come help Stephen as he stood over his brother’s body.

Hearing that again, Bush said, was still more motivation to work toward healing.

“For this whole town, the question is, now what do you do?” she said.

“What do you do on Halloween 1997, when there is no trial, no reminders. I don’t know if it will ever be completely over.”