4/11/2021 The Long Shadow of Virginia's Death Penalty
Liliana Segura
April 11 2021, 8:20 a.m.
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, seated center, signs a bill abolishing the death penalty, surrounded by
legislators and activists at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Va., on March 24, 2021. Photo:
Steve Helber/AP
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On a rainy Wednesday afternoon in late March, a stream of cars pulled
up to a checkpoint at the Greensville Correctional Center, just outside
the rural town of Jarratt, Virginia. An employee with the Virginia
Department of Corrections inspected driver’s licenses and took
temperatures, then waved each vehicle up a narrow road toward the
parking lot, where reporters waited for the governor to arrive.
The media had visited this parking lot many times before. Since 1991, the
year Virginia’s death chamber was moved to Greensville from the old
state penitentiary in Richmond, more than 100 people had been executed
inside the prison. There was Roger Coleman, whose vociferous claims of
innocence before his 1992 execution were debunked years later by DNA.
There was John Allen Muhammad, known as one of the Beltway snipers,
who terrorized the D.C. area before being executed in 2009. And there
was Teresa Lewis, killed the following year for a double murder for hire
— and the sole woman to die in Virginia’s death chamber in nearly a
century.
Now reporters gathered in the same parking lot for a very different event.
In a milestone that seemed to catch lawmakers themselves by surprise,
Virginia had become the first Southern state to abolish the death penalty.
The signing ceremony put racial justice front and center, casting the
death penalty as a historical relic rooted in slavery and lynching.
Introducing Gov. Ralph Northam, his chief legal counsel, Rita Davis,
greeted the attendees with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. “The arc
of the moral universe is long,” she said. “But today, in the
Commonwealth of Virginia, it bends sharply towards justice.”
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Among those gathered inside the tent was Dale Brumfield, a local author
and field organizer for Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
His most recent book, “Railroaded,” profiles the first 100 people killed in
Virginia’s electric chair, 87 of whom were Black. One was a teenage girl,
executed in 1912 on her 17th birthday. In a story for Richmond’s alt-
weekly, Brumfield linked these killings, little more than legal lynchings,
to the first executions in the so-called modern death penalty era. On the
night that Linwood Briley was executed in 1984, for example, a white
mob reveled outside, “shouting racial epithets and waving homemade
signs declaring such racist invectives as ‘kill the negro,’ ‘fry Briley fry,’
and far worse,” he wrote.
Brumfield echoed what others have said about the abolition law: “It
happened way sooner than I ever thought it would,” he said. Although
there were several contributing factors — the Democratic takeover of the
legislature key among them — everyone agreed that one event had fueled
the urgency around abolition: the killing of George Floyd in May 2020.
The unprecedented wave of protests not only led to the topplingof 26
Confederate monuments in Virginia between May and September, but
also “turbocharged criminal justice reform in Virginia across the board,”
said VADP Executive Director Michael Stone.
Northam had called a special session to be held in August, which was
intended to tackle budget challenges due to Covid-19. Instead, criminal
justice reform dominated the session. Lawmakers brought a slew of bills
aimed at police accountability, sentencing reform, and racial justice.
Politicians who had theoretically supported but never acted on abolition
legislation decided they were ready to pass a bill during the regular
session. “The whole Black Lives Matter movement suddenly made it a
priority,” Stone said.
It didn’t hurt that the governor himself had something to prove when it
came to his commitment to racial justice. Northam faced calls to resign
in 2019 after a photo emerged from an old yearbook that appeared to
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show him in blackface. Compounding his disastrous response to the
controversy — first apologizing, then denying it was him in the photo —
Northam then held a press conference in which he admitted to having
worn shoe polish on his cheeks to imitate Michael Jackson and almost
did the moonwalk on stage.
Now the governor was invoking the racist history of capital punishment.
Of the 377 people executed for murder in Virginia between 1900 and
1999, 296 were Black. “The racism and discrimination of our past still
echoes in our systems today,” Northam said. He cited the case of Earl
Washington Jr., a Black man sentenced to death in 1984 for a crime he
did not commit. After giving a coerced confession, Washington came
within days of execution only to be exonerated in 2000. “Can we really,
truly be sure that there aren’t others?” the governor asked.
Northam introduced Scott
Surovell, the bill’s lead
sponsor in the state Senate.
“T'll be damned. I Surovell had toured
th i n k we d id Greensville in the early
th is.” 1990s as a governor’s fellow
straight out of college. He
remembered seeing the
electric chair “sitting right
there in the middle of the room. And I can’t tell you the impact it has on
you ... to see that device, to have to think about how many people sat in
it.” He recalled a sense of revulsion and shame. “I never thought I’d be
back here today doing this, I can tell you that.”
As the bill’s sponsors spoke, Kenneth Plum sat a few feet away in the
audience. The longest serving member of Virginia’s House of Delegates,
Plum was first elected in 1977, the year after the U.S. Supreme Court’s
ruling in Gregg v. Georgia ushered in the “modern” death penalty era in
the United States. Over the next three decades, Plum tried to push back
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against the death penalty but was stymied by politics. “So much of the
discussion about it was whether or not you could get reelected if you
voted to get rid of it,” Plum recalled in a phone call after the signing.
“And when I look back on this, it’s disappointing to realize that that was
the driving force for keeping it in place for a lot of people.”
Plum had driven four hours for the signing ceremony. “I haven't been to
another bill signing since the pandemic,” he said. Virginia was on a roll
passing progressive legislation, but this one was especially meaningful.
“Tt was kind of like, ‘I'll be damned. I think we did this.”
Dale Brumfield, field director for Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, left, and
Jack Payden-Travers stand at the Greensville Correctional Center on July 6, 2017, in Jarratt,
Va. Photo: Steve Helber/AP
Careers Built on Capital
Punishment
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The end of the death penalty in Virginia is part of a larger and
now familiar story nationwide. Like almost every other jurisdiction in the
country, Virginia had already seen a sharp decline in new death
sentences and executions. Thanks in large part to a network of regional
capital defender offices that vastly improved the lawyering done in death
penalty cases, there had not been a new death sentence since 2011.
Still, it is hard to overstate the significance of Virginia’s abolition law.
Counting executions in the colonial era, the commonwealth carried out
more executions than any state in the U.S. — and was second only to
Texas in the number of people put to death in the modern era. This was
largely due to an appellate process designed to swiftly send defendants to
the execution chamber. Virginia had the dubious distinction of killing the
condemned faster than any jurisdiction in the nation.
Virginia was also a case
study in the death penalty as
a bipartisan project. Of the
113 killings carried out since Vi rgi nla had the
the state resumed executions d u bious
in 1982, 47 were overseen by d isti nction of
Democratic governors. The Te
last three executions were ki I I I ng the
approved by former con d emn ed fa ste r
Democratic Gov. Terry tha na ny
McAuliffe, who most
jurisdiction in the
recently denied clemency .
to William Morva, a man nation 7
with severe mental illness. In
the years since Morva’s
execution, the daughter of
one of his victims had become a vocal critic of capital punishment.
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As in other states, Virginia’s modern death penalty law was once
supposed to be reserved for a narrow class of murders. After lawmakers
revised the statute in the wake of the landmark 1972 Supreme Court
ruling in Furman v. Georgia, which declared the death penalty unfairly
and thus unconstitutionally applied across the country, lawmakers
immediately started adding crimes to the list of offenses that made a
defendant eligible for death. Between the late 1970s and the end of the
1990s, lawmakers voted to expand the death penalty over a dozen times,
to include offenses ranging from the murder of a police officer to the
murder of a child under 14 years old by a person over the age of 21.
Few politicians were as aggressive in pushing these laws as the elected
prosecutors who made up the Virginia Association of Commonwealth’s
Attorneys. For years, the group “routinely opposed any kind of death
penalty reform legislation,” recalled Stone. But over the past decade,
Virginia voters began electing commonwealth attorneys who ran on
promises of criminal justice reform. As Stone recalled, “we ended up
getting the support of 12 commonwealth attorneys in support of
abolition,” including those representing counties that once routinely sent
defendants to death row. With their members divided on the matter,
VACA stayed silent on the abolition bill.
Among the new crop of commonwealth attorneys was Amy Ashworth,
who replaced famed Prince William County prosecutor Paul Ebert after
he retired in 2018. During Ebert’s five decades in office, he won 13 death
sentences, making the county one of the country’s top death penalty
jurisdictions. In a sign of the times, Ebert failed to win a death sentence
in his final murder trial, later musing to the Washington Post that the
county had changed. “The demographics of Prince William were
relatively conservative all those years and much more pro-death,” Ebert
said. “And I always knew someone on the jury. Now, I seldom know
someone on the jury.”
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Like numerous prosecutors of his generation who built careers on capital
punishment, Ebert reveled in his tough-on-crime reputation. He also
exemplifies the lack of accountability for prosecutors who abused the
power they wielded against defendants. Ebert presided over one of
Virginia’s most egregious death penalty cases in recent memory: that of
Justin Wolfe, who was just 19 years old when he was arrested for a
murder he swore he did not commit. Wolfe spent more than a decade on
death row insisting on his innocence before ultimately taking a plea deal.
For Wolfe and countless others whose lives were shaped by Virginia’s
death penalty system, abolition does not bring their ordeal to a close.
DITES NON
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ALA PEI “TH
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Terri Steinberg, left, whose son is on death row, speaks with Delia Perez Meyer, whose brother is
on death row, during the 20th annual Starvin’ for Justice fast and vigil against the death
penalty in Washington, D.C., on June 29, 2013. Photo: Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images
A Bittersweet Victory
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Wolfe’s mother, Terri Steinberg, was at home in Fairfax the day the bill
was signed. A dedicated activist who traveled the country with an
abolitionist group called the Journey of Hope, she’d hoped to be at the
signing ceremony but was unable to make the trip. Although Steinberg
was overjoyed at the news that the legislation had passed, the victory was
bittersweet. The same week Northam signed the bill into law, her son
turned 40 years old behind bars.
Steinberg has told her story countless times. Her oldest son, Justin,
started selling marijuana while in high school. In 2001, a former
classmate named Owen Barber killed another drug dealer named Daniel
Petrole, the son of a former Secret Service agent, then claimed he carried
out the murder at Wolfe’s command. After a three-week trial that leaned
heavily on Barber’s self-serving testimony, Wolfe was sentenced to die.
After years of denying that Wolfe had ordered Barber to kill anyone,
Wolfe and his lawyers discovered a police report that Ebert had hidden
from the defense at trial. It showed how a Prince William County
detective had coerced Barber into blaming Wolfe for the murder by
threatening him with the death penalty. In an evidentiary hearing in
2010, Barber testified that “they said they wanted the truth, but at the
same time, they said that this is what you have got to say or you are
getting the chair.”
Such violations are not
uncommon in death penalty
cases — nor do they
“They said they necessarily lead to new
wanted the truth 7 trials. But the police report
but at the same was not the only evidence
. . that Ebert had failed to
time, they said disclose. In fact, at the same
that this Is what hearing, Ebert defended his
misconduct by essentially
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you have got to explaining that his office did
not have an “open file” policy
say or you are for a reason: He did not want
getti ng the defense attorneys to have
ch a i i. 7 evidence that might
exculpate their client. In his
experience, he testified,
“when you have information
that is given to certain counsel and certain defendants, they are able to
fabricate a defense around what is provided.”
In 2011, U.S. District Judge Raymond Jackson found Ebert’s conduct
“not only unconstitutional in regards to due process, but abhorrent to the
judicial process,” vacating Wolfe’s conviction. Although the 4th Circuit
Court of Appeals upheld Jackson’s order in 2012 — lambasting Ebert’s
“flabbergasting explanation” for withholding exculpatory evidence — the
commonwealth refused to give up. A few days after the ruling, Ebert
visited Barber in prison, accused him of violating his plea deal, and told
him that a revocation of the agreement would leave him eligible for the
death penalty himself. “In effect, they applied the same pressure that had
been applied before Wolfe’s trial,” wrote Slate’s legal correspondent
Dahlia Lithwick, who followed the case for years.
Things only got worse from there. After Jackson decried Ebert’s attempts
to pressure Barber — and ordered Wolfe’s release in December 2012 —
Ebert appealed again. This time, the 4th Circuit found that the judge was
wrong. While Wolfe remained in jail, prosecutors revamped their case,
casting him as a kingpin in a “continuing criminal enterprise” and
bringing new charges against him — a number of which carried the death
penalty. Steinberg went from shopping for new clothes in anticipation of
her son’s homecoming to facing a brand-new death penalty trial.
By then, Steinberg was watching her son increasingly struggle. The
trauma of death row and multiple execution dates had been hard
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enough. Now he was
languishing in isolation at
the Prince William County
jail with no end in sight. “ He watched so
“When the case was vacated, ma ny of h IS
it went back to Virginia to be friends on death
retried within 120 days,”
Steinberg said. “And before row go th roug h
you know it, it was four the mental brea k
years ~ He had gotten to ca used by sol itary
the point where he ha .
started to feel the effects of a nd was sta rt ng
solitary confinement. He to feel some of
watched so many of his that h i mself. "
friends on death row go
through the mental break
caused by solitary and was
starting to feel some of that himself.”
In March 2016, Steinberg sat down to write an email to friends and
fellow activists. The subject was “Justin.” She thanked them for their
support over the previous 15 years and told them she wanted them to
hear what she was going to share from her rather than through the press
or social media. Prosecutors in Wolfe’s case had offered him a plea, and
he had decided to take it. Rather than face the threat of a new death
sentence — or another decade of appeals — he agreed to plead guilty to
first-degree murder and was resentenced to 41 years in prison.
“I was devastated,” Steinberg recalls. She did not read her son’s
handwritten, four-page statement until it was published by the
Washington Post, which called it a “stunning reversal” that “essentially
validated the prosecution’s consistent version of events.” In fact,
Steinberg said, although the letter was supposed to be in her son’s words,
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he told her he’d been made to rewrite it numerous times to satisfy
prosecutors.
“Justin took this plea under such duress,” Steinberg said. A new legal
team has since challenged Wolfe’s plea deal, arguing that he was coerced
by vindictive prosecutors. In 2019, the U.S. Supreme
Court orderedVirginia to grant a hearing on the matter, but it has yet to
be resolved.
On the day the final vote came down to end capital punishment in
Virginia, Steinberg was at work, unable to follow the vote. It was only
when an activist friend called her and said “It’s done” that she started to
cry. “There was just tears of relief, joy, sadness.” She sent a message to
her son right away. “He called me within a half an hour,” she said. “And
we celebrated on the phone.”
At the prison where he is currently incarcerated, Wolfe works in the area
that receives new transfers. Steinberg says her son hopes he'll have a
chance to see the two remaining men on death row once they are
reclassified and moved. One of them has an innocence claim that she
hopes will lead to his conviction being overturned. “But,” Steinberg said,
“the system doesn’t always work the way it’s supposed to.”
You’re Saving All of Us
In all, 18 people were executed in Virginia while Wolfe was on death row.
Among them were friends who had tried to help him adjust to his
surroundings. When Wolfe first arrived at Sussex State Prison at age 21,
Steinberg recalled, “someone had put together a brown paper bag full of
candy bars, soap, magazines — things that he would need when he first
got there, because he had nothing.” The welcome package had been
arranged in part by Dennis Orbe, who would be executed in 2004. On the
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night he was killed, Steinberg drove Orbe’s spiritual adviser to
Greensville and back.
Just as her son had forged unlikely friendships with his neighbors,
Steinberg found community among the activists and loved ones who
fought for the condemned. She spent hours on the road with the
grandmother of Ricky Gray, who was 80 years old and had diabetes but
was nonetheless determined to see her grandson before she died; Gray
was executed in 2017. Before Virginia executed John Allen Muhammad
in 2009, she got a letter thanking her for raising a son as compassionate
as Wolfe, along with her work against the death penalty. “I know you got
into this to save your son, but ultimately, you’re saving all of us,”
Muhammad wrote.
One of the last people to be executed before Wolfe left death row was
Teresa Lewis. As the only woman under a death sentence in Virginia,
she was held inside one of the isolation wings at the Fluvanna Women’s
Correctional Center, almost two hours away from Greensville. Shortly
after Lewis was executed in September 2010, Steinberg was on a panel
with Lewis’s defense attorney, James Rocap. “He was so broken by it all,”
she recalled. “I really thought they would be able to save her.”
Rocap is a lawyer handling civil cases at a firm in Washington, D.C. Ina
phone call following the signing ceremony, he recalled the many
problems with Lewis’s case. Lewis was convicted in 2002 for paying two
men to kill her husband, Julian, and his 25-year-old son, Charles.
Although she quickly confessed to having arranged the murders in order
to collect insurance money — and was portrayed as the mastermind
behind the crime — questions emerged about the commonwealth’s
theory. Lewis was evaluated by an expert who said her intellectual
functioning placed her among the “lowest 3% of our society.” In 2004,
one of the gunmen, Matthew Shallenberger, who later died by suicide,
admitted to an investigator that the plan had been “entirely my idea” and
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that he had manipulated Lewis, who was in love with him, “eager to
please me,” and “not very smart.”
“She was basically duped,” Rocap said. “Was she a member of the
conspiracy? Yes, she was a member of the conspiracy. ... Was she
responsible in the same way that someone who intentionally, and
purposely, and so on, commits a horrific crime like this? No, she wasn’t.”
Lewis’s execution attracted attention well beyond Virginia. Novelist John
Grisham wrote an op-ed calling for clemency. Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad invoked the case in a speech in New York,
accusing Americans of hypocrisy for raising cries against the death
sentence of an Iranian woman found guilty of adultery while appearing
to ignore the case of Lewis. Although they did not receive as much
publicity, the most sincere and heartfelt appeals came from the women
who had gotten to know Lewis behind bars.
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Death penalty protester and former Fluvanna prison chaplain Rev. Lynn Litchfield reads a passage
from the Bible outside the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Va., on Sept. 23,
2018. Photo: Steve Helber/AP
In solitary confinement at Fluvanna, Lewis encountered other women
who had been sent to the segregation unit. “They would be next door to
her, and she would be able to talk to them through the walls,” Rocap
said. In a clemency petition he sent to then Gov. Bob McDonnell in
advance of Lewis’s scheduled execution, Rocap included numerous
letters describing how Lewis had become a counselor and religious
mentor to the women she met.
A library worker who brought books to the segregation building recalled
giving Lewis a red hymnal that had been donated. “I heard stories from
other inmates about how she would calm the cell block at night — one
needs to understand the hysteria and craziness that goes on there at
night — by talking to any inmate who was hysterical and then singing her
hymns of comfort and joy,” she wrote. “It was the only way they survived
their time in that horribly punishing environment.” Another woman
recalled how she’d gotten through a particularly upsetting moment by
singing “Angel” by Sarah McLachlan with her. For Lewis to be executed,
she wrote, “a lot of women in the future will not have the blessed
opportunity to be encouraged by her.”
McDonnell rejected Lewis’s
petition. To Rocap, the
decision to kill a woman who
was not only remorseful but The decision to
also clearly doing more good ki ll a woman who
than harm was emblematic was not on ly
of the death penalty’s cruelty
and irrationality. In a remorsefu | but
testimonial he wrote after a Iso clea rly doi hg
she was killed, Rocap more good tha n
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recalled the last day of his h arm was
client’s life, how she visited i
with her son and spoke on emblematic of the
the phone with her daughter, death pena Ity Ss
later “consoling and cruelty a nd
encouraging those of us who irrationa | ity
had come to try to console
and encourage her. She did
not need it; we did.”
In her final moments, Lewis asked Rocap to pray with her and her
spiritual adviser, prison chaplain Julie Perry. Separated by bars in a cell
adjacent to the hallway that led to the execution chamber, “the three of
us joined hands through the meal tray slot, awkwardly at first,” Rocap
wrote. “Her left hand was cradled in both of mine.” At 8:45 p.m., prison
guards came and tapped his shoulder, saying, “It’s time.”
A Washington Post reporter would later describe Rocap and Perry
looking “crushed and exhausted” as they entered the witness area. Lewis
was brought inside the execution chamber, “ushered by guards in blue
uniforms who held her elbows.” The curtains closed while officials
inserted the intravenous lines then reopened to show Lewis lying on the
gurney, her arms outstretched. She asked if the daughter of her slain
husband was present, then apologized. “I just want Kathy to know that I
love you and I’m very sorry,” she said.
Rocap was struck by his client’s courage and faith before her death. But
he describes the execution as an act of madness. “I just can’t imagine
how anybody could be there and watch what happened, no matter who
the person was, and come away thinking, ‘Yeah, that was good. ... That is
what we should be doing,” he said. Afterward, he remembers telling
people that more Americans should witness executions to see what was
being done in their names.
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Rocap was not directly involved in the abolition legislation. When it
passed, he remembers saying to himself, “Why didn’t they do this 15
years ago, before Teresa’s case?” Although the case does not haunt him
as frequently as it used to, memories of the execution return at
unexpected times. He recalls some years back watching an episode of
“The Good Wife” that began with a scene involving an execution
chamber. “It wasn’t in Virginia, but it looked identical to the death
chamber in Virginia,” he said. “I was watching it with my wife, and I
literally had to get up and walk out of the room.”
Former executioner Jerry Givens attends a high school basketball game where some of the boys he
mentors are playing on Jan. 15, 2013, in Richmond, Va. Photo: Michael S. Williamson/The
Washington Post via Getty Images
The Executioner’s Trauma
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Of all those impacted by the executions in Virginia, perhaps no one
carried more complex trauma than the people who carried them out.
Jerry Givens executed 62 of the 113 people killed in the death chamber
only to become a vocal death penalty abolitionist. Givens had kept his
work a secret from his own family, hoping to protect them from the
horror of what he was tasked with doing. He later told his story to
audiences across the country. Some of his final speeches were delivered
in Terre Haute, Indiana, home of the federal execution chamber, where
he warned of the impact Donald Trump’s planned execution spree would
have on prison employees. “People think you can do something like that
and then go home and forget about it,” he said in the fall of 2019. “No.
It’s something that is stuck with you.”
Givens did not live to see his home state abolish the death penalty:
He died in April 2020 of Covid-19. But his influence was clear during the
debate among lawmakers. Speaking on the floor of the state Senate in
early February, Sen. Jennifer McClellan recalled hearing him testify in
opposition to expanding the death penalty over the years. “I have heard
the words of Jerry Givens over and over and over again in my mind,” she
said. She remembered how haunted he had been by the case of Earl
Washington, the man who falsely confessed and was later exonerated.
“He realized the toll it would have taken on him had he executed an
innocent man.”
Givens’s family was elated at the news that Virginia had finally abolished
the death penalty. “I can recall the moment we found out the law was
passed,” Valerie Travers, Givens’s niece, said in a phone call after the
signing ceremony. “I think he would have been very happy to see that his
work has finally paid off.” It was especially meaningful for Givens’s
widow, Sadie. “I was rejoicing for him because I know what he put into
it,” she said. For years, she had seen him “thinking, meditating, praying”
over the issue. “I know deep within my soul that he visualized this
happening. ... He would always say ‘Things are gonna happen. This is
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gonna happen. ... If there’s such thing as looking down, he’s rejoicing
because he said it would.”
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