Her Plea Counted Less

Vicky Coward wanted to tell lawmakers about her son’s murder as they weighed the fate of Connecticut’s death penalty. They listened to a white guy from Cheshire instead.

A guy named William Petit.

Coward and Petit (pictured above) both lost family members to murders in 2007, their lives forever changed by tragedy.

They both traveled to the state Capitol this spring to add their voices to a debate over whether to repeal Connecticut’s ultimate sanction. The legislature had voted to do so two years ago, only to have its measure vetoed by a Republican governor. With a new anti-death penalty governor in office ready to sign an abolition bill, the stage was set for repeal.

Until Petit, who survived the horrific attack on his family, spoke face to face with legislators. They listened to him. (Petit didn’t testify at a committee hearing on the bill this session as he had in 2009; but he did manage to get the personal appointments to lobby legislators, just as he had managed to get a sit-down with the governor in 2009 to press the case for a veto.) Petit convinced two lawmakers to change their minds and keep the death penalty in place, and the abolition bill died as a result. He inspired Edith Prague, the key senator to change her position, to offer this reasoning: ““They should bypass the trial and take that second animal and hang him by his penis from a tree out in the middle of Main Street.”

Earlier in the session, along with other parents of murder victims, Coward went up to the Capitol at 9 a.m. on March 7. She waited until 1 a.m. for a turn to address the Judiciary Committee, which was considering the abolition bill.

She returned last week for a last-ditch lobbying effort by the group. She spent hours stopping by legislators’ offices. Despite their efforts, the abolition bill died in committee for this session.

Coward did get to see one state representative, who told her she had a ​“powerful” story but remained noncommittal. Staffers for all the other legislators, including Prague, told Coward their bosses were too busy. (Prague didn’t return a call seeking comment for this story.)

Watching legislators wrestle with the question of how to value life, Coward concluded that the lives of not just killers, but the killed, don’t always receive equal consideration when Connecticut’s politicians make laws.

She left with no illusions about why legislators showed little interest in her story but heard and acted on Petit’s.

“Something that I guess the world will never get used to or get over — and that’s the color of your skin,” Coward, who’s 49, said in an interview this week at her home on Sherman Avenue in New Haven’s West River neighborhood.

“It doesn’t take away my sympathy for the Petit family, because I can identify. [But] why do you feel so much more for him? Because he lost three people? Because he lives in Cheshire? Because he’s a doctor?”

“He’s just as important as anybody in the world,” she said of her son Tyler Coward, who was gunned down near the Edgewood Park sundial at the age of 18. ​“A life is a life. That’s something that’s precious. You can’t get it back. If people would stop looking at: Where you live. What’s your title? Are you well known? Are you not? Are you important? Are you not? Have you been in People’s Magazine? On Oprah? It doesn’t matter.”

A Changed Mind

Vicky Coward (she prefers not being called Victoria — ​“that sounds so regal”) didn’t immediately wish to see Tyler’s killer’s life spared after the murder.

“In the beginning I was so mad, I did want him dead,” she recalled. ​“Then I had to think about it. You don’t want anyone killing your son. Just get him off the street so he doesn’t do that to anybody else.”

“Killing Jose [Fuentes Pillich, Tyler’s murderer] isn’t going to help me. He has a 5‑year-old son. What’s that little boy going to do? If their mind is gone, put them away and let them live out the rest of their life in jail.

“What would killing him [accomplish]? My son is still gone. It’s still there. It’s something you never, ever get over.”

Coward concluded that the money spent on prosecuting a death penalty case would be better spent helping the murder victims’ survivors. The state spends millions of dollars both to prosecute and defend (in instances of indigent defendants) death-penalty cases. More than 7 percent of the state’s public defender budget in the 2009-10 fiscal year was spent on capital cases, even though they represented just 0.06 percent of the caseload, according to this fact sheet prepared by abolition advocates.

As the case against Tyler Coward’s killer worked its way through the courts, the Petit case did, too. And it cast a shadow over Coward’s quest for justice. She noted the weekly appearance of William Petit’s face on front pages of newspapers — or daily appearance as one of the family’s murderers went on trial. One day she knocked on the windows of three TV vans parked outside the Church Street courthouse asking, to no avail, for some coverage of Pillich’s pleal, which was also taking place. (Read about that here.) Pillich received a 25-year jail sentence.

Reading about her position on capital punishment in the Independent, organizers from the Connecticut Network to Abolish the Death Penalty contacted Coward. They asked her to join more than 80 other relatives of murder victims to come forward this year during the death penalty debate and say: Yes, we lost someone dear to us to a horrific crime. Yes, we want to see justice. No, we don’t see another death as justice.

Coward spoke at a Capitol press conference in February with dozens of other pro-abolition survivors. She said she didn’t mind the following month waiting from 9 a.m. to 1 a.m. to address the Judiciary Committee. And she’s glad she got to speak to at least one legislator face to face before the abolition bill died this session.

“My voice was heard,” even if it wasn’t heard as much as someone like Petit’s, she said.

“It’s unfortunate that her story does not get that much attention in the media,” CNADP organizer Ben Jones remarked. ​“Because it happened in the inner city, the media just isn’t as interested. It happens every day.”

“I Don’t Hate You”

Outside the limelight, Coward struggled daily to cope with the aftershock of her loss.

The daughter of two parents who each held down two jobs, at Yale and the Winchester rifle plant, Coward believed in the importance of work. After high school she landed a job as a secretary at Yale, then as a patient care associate at Yale-New Haven. She battled lupus but kept working.

After Tyler died she continued working while dealing with his case and with caring for her widowed father (who at 93 continues to preach from the pulpit at St. James Unity Holiness Church on Lawrence Street). Amid all the pressure the lupus worsened, and last year she had to stop working. Since then she has struggled to keep up with mortgage payments on her two-story wood-frame house on Sherman along with her daughters, who are 20 and 21, and her husband, a laborer.

Coward offered Pillich a tear-filled forgiveness at his sentencing last December. (Read about that here.)

She plans to visit Pillich in jail soon. What will she say to him? She wants to ask him why he shot her son. (The police never determined what the pair’s ongoing dispute was about.) ​“What ticked in his head that made him so angry to want to invest the time to get the gun, walk into that park, and then shoot him six times — four [of those] times directly in the chest, turn to run, then shoot him two times more?”

“I don’t hate you,” she plans to say. ​“I wasn’t brought up to hate. I know what it feels like to get angry.”

She intends to see if she can help Pillich in any way.

And Coward plans to return to the state Capitol next year to continue telling her story as part of the quest to ban capital punishment.

“My voice,” she declared, ​“will be heard.”