There are no photos of the criminals posted in the article, but I found one from last April.
Posted on 12/15/2006 6:40:33 AM PST by SkyPilot
Man gets life in woman's torture killing
By THERESA CONROY
conroyt@phillynews.com 215-568-8278
After just a few short hours of deliberation, a Common Pleas jury yesterday convicted Derrell Savage of first-degree murder for his role in the ambush attack - by stabbing, beating, burning, suffocating, choking and drowning - of 15-year-old Christine Ham.
Savage, 21, will be sentenced Feb. 14 to life in prison without parole.
"It doesn't really feel like a relief," Ham's mother, Joan Ignudo, said after the verdict was announced. "It's not going to bring her back."
Savage was the second of four accused killers to be convicted in the grisly case, which bore striking resemblances to the 2003 Fishtown slaying of Jason Sweeney. Lookout John Garrett admitted his role in juvenile court and was found delinquent of conspiracy to commit murder. He was sentenced to remain in detention until he is 21.
As Savage's jury began deliberating his fate, one of his alleged accomplices, Felicia Dawson, maneuvered her hulking frame behind a defense table to meet her own jury.
Alternately scornful, defiant and bored, Dawson, 21, listened as prosecutor Mark Gilson detailed - in his trademark style of no stone unturned, no tear unshed - Ham's agonizing death in a riverside park in Southwest Philadelphia.
"When it got dark, those four killers took that innocent girl into the park and they ripped her apart," Gilson told jurors during his opening remarks.
Attorney Joe Canuso, who is representing Dawson, reserved his opening until later in the trial.
Dawson's trial began just moments after Savage's case was handed to the jury in a courtroom next door. The trial for the fourth defendant, Demarcus Hamms, is to begin when Dawson's ends.
Gilson is prosecuting all the defendants in the April 2005 slaying in Bartram Gardens Park.
"She wanted to live, but they held her down," Gilson told jurors yesterday. "They outnumbered her. She was stabbed in the throat, in the chest, in the stomach and in the back."
She was stabbed 16 times. She was beaten. Then, Gilson said, her attackers shoved her in a trash can and tried to light her hair on fire. When that failed, they threw her in the river and left her there to drown.
While testifying in his own defense, Savage, who denied involvement in the murder, said part of his job had been to stay by the riverbank and watch Ham, his girlfriend, die. As she was struggling in the water, he said, she told Savage she loved him.
Ham's mother sat - slumped and sobbing - in the second row during Gilson's speech to Dawson's jury.
She was listening to the awful details of her daughter's death for the third time.
And after this one is over, she'll have to hear it yet again.
"It's hard," she said of the task. "It's very hard."
There are no photos of the criminals posted in the article, but I found one from last April.
Infuriating. Tall tree, short rope, then end.
I'm shaking my head now.
Anyway, the guy has the appropriate last name.
You know it.
So... a 15-year-old is a "woman"...but a 19-year-old who throws her newborn baby into a dumpster gets referred to as "girl" or "teen"...?
These creeps will live for decades doing God knows what to the weaker prisoners.
I hadn't noticed that before, but based on this week's news reports, you are precisely correct.
Nomen est omen.
15-year-old girls are women in Philadelphia?
No justice - no peace.
Cordially,
I usually would want a death penalty in a case like this, but these people don't deserve a sedative on a gurney then a nice long sleep.
SuperMax is the modern version of the old French punishment called the "oubliette", a solitary dungeon where people were put away to be forgotten. This is justice, in this case.
Artist/Band: Daniels Charlie
Lyrics for Song: Simple Man
I ain't nothing but a simple man
Call me a redneck, I reckon that I am
But there's things goin' on that make me mad down to the core
I have to work like a dog to make ends meet
There's crooked politicians and crime in the street
And I'm madder than hell and I ain't gonna take it no more
We tell our kids to just say no
And then some panty waist judge lets a drug dealer go
And he slaps him on the wrist and he turns him back out on the town
Well, if I had my way with people sellin' dope
I'd take a big tall tree and a short piece of rope
And hang 'em up high and let 'em swing till the sun goes down
Chorus:
Well you know what's wrong with the world today
People done gone and put their Bibles away
There livin' by law of the jungle not the law of the land
Well the good book says it, so I know it's the truth
An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth
You'd better watch where you go
And remember where you've been
That's the way I see it I'm a simple man
Now, I'm the kind of man that wouldn't harm a mouse
But if I catch somebody breakin' in my house
I've got a twelve gauge shotgun waitin' on the other side
So don't go pushin' me against my will
I don't want to have to fight you but I durn sure will
So if you don't want trouble that you'd better just pass me on by
As far as I'm concerned there ain't no excuse
For the raping and the killing and the child abuse
And I've got a way to put and end to all that mess
You just take those rascals out in the swamp
Put them on their knees and tie 'em to a stump
And let the rattlers and the bugs and the alligators do the rest
Chorus
Paging Judge Parker.
Why did they kill her?
I don't know.
Evil does not need a reason.
She was no woman, she was a 15 year old girl.
"She was stabbed 16 times. She was beaten. Then, Gilson said, her attackers shoved her in a trash can and tried to light her hair on fire. When that failed, they threw her in the river and left her there to drown."
Life in prison. Not bad enough. Hopefully it will be DEATH in prison.
I don't know, I would go mad knowing that I had to spend the rest of my life in a hell hole like that. But then again, the worst thing I've ever done is get a speeding ticket once for 8 over. Perhaps people like this don't have such a bad time in prison, I don't know.
In police statements, the defendants offered two different motives for the crime: revenge because they believed Ham set the young men up for a beating in Chester, and revenge sought by Dawson because Ham once performed oral sex on Hamms, who is Dawson's boyfriend.
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