Va. Man Nears Execution in Test of Destroyed DNA

She broke down.

"It's going to be okay," Carter recalled him saying. She collected herself -- sitting there with another brother and a cousin, aware that Lovitt's life might soon be over.

Lovitt made it clear, she said, that he would not discuss the possibility of execution. "He just wants everyone to know he is innocent, [that] he didn't do it," she said.

For the time they had, she said, she enjoyed the sight of him -- the brother who once sent her to school in the morning and cooked for her when her mother was not around, and who became a beloved uncle to her children.

It was hard for her to imagine that he had ended up this way, she said -- in spite of a childhood that she finds hard to discuss openly. They grew up in a tiny house in a tough little neighborhood in Arlington, 12 kids in a cramped space, lorded over by Lovitt's alcoholic stepfather who sold and used drugs, according to court documents.

The stepfather, court documents state, singled out Lovitt for special abuse because he was the eldest child and the only one who was not his own. Lovitt was beaten -- sometimes in bed at night, once with a telephone cord, in a house where sexual abuse was common, court papers said.

By the time Lovitt was 5, he had taken his first alcoholic drink, according to drug treatment records, and by 8 he had smoked marijuana. He turned to speed and heroin as a teenager, then PCP and crack cocaine. He had a long string of arrests. By 35, he had spent 15 years behind bars, mostly on burglary, drug and larceny charges.

Months before the killing, Lovitt tried to correct course, landing a job at the pool hall and taking culinary classes at Stratford College. But he fell into drugs again. He applied for long-term drug treatment, writing: "I've used drugs all my life and I need all the help I can get."

Lovitt admitted to being high on crack the night of the crime and to stealing the cash-register drawer and taking it to his cousin's house, behind the pool hall. But he has insisted he had nothing to do with Dicks's killing.

The evidence against him includes a jail informant's testimony and an eyewitness who said he was "80 percent" certain the killer was Lovitt. Bloody scissors that prosecutors said were used in the crimes were found between the pool hall and the house of Lovitt's cousin.

DNA results on the scissors could not be conclusively linked to anyone except the victim.

On death row since March 2000, Lovitt has seen 19 other men leave for their executions. His visitors said he has tried to stay positive, writing poetry and greeting cards, serving as a barber to other death-row inmates and becoming well-acquainted with his legal briefs.