WICHITA -- The mother of two brothers convicted of killing five people pleaded with jurors Tuesday to spare the men's lives, saying her children are pretty good and what happened two years ago was a horrible mistake. "I know other families out there are probably hating me to death. I am sorry for them, but spare my children. I love them just as much as you would love your children. I believe there is good in them. There is just something went wrong along the way," Janice Harding testified.
Harding said her job in Dodge City has kept her from attending most of her sons' trial.
"I don't know what went wrong, but I love you -- I love you both," she told her sons from the witness stand. "And I am sorry for everything that happened. If I did something wrong, I am sorry. I'd just like to say I am sorry to everybody. I don't know if this is my fault. If it was, I am just sorry. Sorry."
Defense attorneys for Reginald and Jonathan Carr asked jurors Tuesday to show their clients mercy in sentencing them, blaming the brothers' troubled childhood and dysfunctional family for their problems.
"We accept your verdict. We understand it. We respect what you have done in this case," Jay Greeno, an attorney for Reginald Carr, said Tuesday as the penalty phase of the brothers' capital murder trial began.
The Carrs were convicted Monday on charges stemming from a Wichita crime spree in December 2000 that left five people dead, four of them shot execution-style in the back of the head as they knelt side-by-side in a snow-covered soccer field.
Jurors returned capital murder verdicts in the deaths of Aaron Sander, 29, Brad Heyka, 27, Jason Befort, 26, and Heather Muller, 25. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for those four murders.
"I ask you to extend mercy to Reginald Carr that he did not extend to those four young individuals," Greeno said to jurors.
Befort's girlfriend was shot in the head but survived and was among the 97 witnesses testifying at a trial that lasted nearly two months.
The Carrs were also convicted of first-degree murder for the shooting of Ann Walenta four days before the quadruple murder. Walenta later died.
District Attorney Nola Foulston asked jurors Tuesday to sentence the brothers to death for the quadruple killings on Dec. 15, 2000. She rested her case without calling any more witnesses beside those who testified earlier in the guilt phase of the trial.
"We know from the evidence they committed these crimes because they wanted to, because they chose to," Foulston said.
She also argued the crimes were premeditated and that the brothers wanted "to leave no person behind to say what heinous, cruel things happened to them before they were executed."
Greeno told jurors Tuesday that he would present a case showing Reginald Carr, 24, was brain damaged, and the things that happened to him in childhood affected his development. The attorney plans to put family members and doctors on the stand to testify on Reginald Carr's behalf.
Defense attorney Ron Evans told jurors his client, Jonathan Carr, 22, had no serious involvement with the law before the crime spree. He said jurors need to know there is some good in Jonathan Carr.
"There is no explanation for something like this. What could be the explanation for something like this?" Evans said.
He said he would put witnesses on the stand to testify that Jonathan Carr tried to kill himself when he was 7 years old and again when he was 16 and that his brother, Reginald, went to prison.
"This was a very dysfunctional family -- they fought, they drank, they drugged in front of the kids," Evans said.
Harding testified about her troubled marriages and the boys' upbringing with a mostly absent father. She told about the mental illness in her family, and her own use of alcohol and marijuana.
She said it was difficult to testify at her sons' trial. "It is a hurting thing," she said.
Both she and her daughter, Temika Harding, testified they warned Jonathan to stay away from Reginald when he was released from prison.
Temika Harding, 28, the brothers' oldest sibling, described Tuesday how when they were children and one of them got into trouble, their mother forced them to hold each other down while the one in trouble got "a whooping." Temika Harding said that after their parents divorced, their mother was often not home and that she took care of her younger brothers herself.
Temika Harding also testified that Reginald Carr told her during one of her visits to the jail that he was the one who pulled the trigger during the quadruple killings, then quickly added she did not remember much about that conversation.
Reginald Carr was also convicted in the Dec. 7, 2000 robbery in which Andrew Schreiber was abducted and forced to withdraw cash from ATMs before his abductors left him unharmed. Jonathan Carr was found innocent of those charges.
Each brother faced the same 47 counts for the nine-day crime spree, with Reginald Carr facing an additional three counts for being a felon in possession of a firearm. He was convicted of all 50 charges against him, while his brother was convicted of 43 counts.
http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/4452166.htmHanging Carr effigies offend some in area
By Tim Potter - The Wichita Eagle - Wed, Nov. 06, 2002
A front-yard display of the Carr brothers hanged in effigy has been removed after some Wichitans found it racially offensive.
For several days, two dummies -- each with a dark face and a noose around its neck -- hung from trees in the front yard of a west Wichita house.
A sign beneath the dummies, with arrows pointing to them, said "Carr Bros," referring to the two Dodge City siblings found guilty Monday of capital murder in a Wichita killing spree. The Carrs are black and their victims were white, but prosecutors say robbery -- not race -- was the motive.
The Rev. Gill Ford, the NAACP regional director in Denver, said he heard about the display from the local NAACP branch. To many African-Americans, he said, a noose is especially repugnant, "It's going to be like the swastika to somebody who's been in a concentration camp.
"My hope is that the community of Wichita as a whole would condemn those kinds of actions," Ford said.
Michael Watley, a 35-year-old black carpet layer, said he found the display to be a very public and racially offensive symbol -- a jarring reminder of prejudice and lynchings in the nation's past.
"I know there is some prejudice here," Watley said, "but I didn't think it was to that level."
The resident who put up the display, who would not give his name, said he took the dummies and the sign down late Monday night after he was told that the display upset some people.
He said he didn't intend the display to be offensive and that he put it up as a statement of outrage over the brutality of the killings. People driving by and seeing the display gave him the thumbs-up sign, he said.
But Watley sees the Carrs and their crimes this way: "They're individuals, and it doesn't matter about skin color. What they did, they did on their own."
A Wichita radio station, KDGS-FM 93.9, received nearly 100 phone calls and more than 50 e-mails from listeners who heard about the display and found it offensive, said station program director Greg Williams.
Reach Tim Potter at 268-6684 or tpotter@wichitaeagle.com.
If I were him I'd put the hanging dummies back up there but with white faces or off white faces. Just make a larger sign saying "Carr Brothers".
I would like to see the objections then.
A mother's desperation, a community outraged. Too bad the judicial process can't be administered without the editorialism. These guys are toast.
Jason Befort pleaded for the lives of the five friends in that soccer field. May the Carrs' pleas be met with the same answer.
How 'bout a gurney & IV rack? That's what those two will likely see as their last vision on this Earth!
If killing them punishes her for helping to create these things, then it's all the more reason to do it.
If killing them punishes her for helping to create these things, then it's all the more reason to do it.
If killing them punishes her for helping to create these things, then it's all the more reason to do it.
"Wichita Massacre" murder trial "Ping List"