17-Year Wait for Justice Leaves Family Anguished and Broken

Md. Plans to Execute Triple Murderer This Week

Her father unloads the plastic bag of photos on a kitchen table and begins picking out some of his favorites. Dawn in her Troop 1004 Brownie uniform. Dawn in a Shirley Temple dance pose. He searches her face, wondering what might have been.

Her mother retrieves the hatbox she keeps on the high shelf of a back closet and carefully sorts through its contents. A baby's christening gown, a schoolgirl's favorite pair of beribboned socks. The shoes, white satin, that Dawn wore when she walked down the aisle. "This is what I've got left of my daughter," she said.

The mementos can bring comfort, and they can bring pain. Dawn Marie Garvin's parents want to remember the entwined memories, the occasions and accomplishments that made a young woman singularly special. But for almost 17 years -- in courtrooms, hearing rooms and demonstrations -- their focus has been elsewhere. Less on the happiness of her days than on the protracted aftermath of her death.

It was November 1987 when the 20-year-old college student and newlywed was murdered in the bedroom of her Baltimore County apartment. It was January 1991 when the perpetrator was tried, convicted and condemned. It was March 2002 when he was first scheduled to die, then March 2003. And now, sometime this week.

Garvin's parents, her brother, the high school sweetheart who so briefly was her husband, all were cautioned that the appeals to which Steven Oken was constitutionally entitled could last a decade. Yet hearing that is not the same as enduring it, especially as the decade comes and goes and one execution warrant is signed and stayed, and then another, and then yet another defense motion or petition is taken to the Supreme Court, regardless of past refusals to intervene.

"It's time to end this," said Garvin's mother, Betty Romano, meaning not just the waiting but the hurt, physical and emotional, exacted on her family.

"It's a tragedy," said Garvin's father, Fred Romano, who even now cries over the most innocuous reminiscences. "It's a tragedy, nothing less, what's happened to all of us."

Soon, the waiting could be over. Barring an at-the-wire intervention by the governor or a judge -- a federal court hearing this afternoon may give the defense another chance -- Maryland will carry out Oken's long-anticipated execution by midnight Friday. It would be the state's first sanctioned killing since 1998 and only its fourth since 1961.

Officials plan to escort Oken the last 40 feet of his life, direct him onto a padded stainless steel table, strap down his limbs and inject into his veins a lethal sequence of chemicals. Because he is a triple murderer -- he sexually assaulted and fatally shot two women in Maryland and a third in Maine -- Garvin's family will join other families witnessing the execution.

"There's a fine line between justice and vengeance," her husband said he believes, speaking carefully after years of public silence. Dawn "was the best, period," Keith Garvin explained. In difficult times, he still feels her presence.

For him, for the Romanos, Oken's execution will be justice.

Yet each acknowledges it has come at its own awful cost. Damaged health, damaged hearts. Nightmares and a marriage destroyed.

"A feeling of darkness," said Fred Romano, "that overshadows everything."

Never Wavering

Opponents consider the death penalty a horrible charade for grieving families, playing on their devastation and pain while offering a phantom hope of closure for their loved ones' loss.