Sorry Mr. Gray, but sometimes you need to reap what you sow.
If you were living, and in the Richmond area back in Jan. 1,
2006, I’m sure you remember the story about the Harvey family and how they were
murdered. It wasn’t just a run of the
mill home break in, it was the deliberate and horrific murder of Bryan Harvey,
Kathryn Harvey, and their two daughters, Stella 9 and Ruby 4.
It’s not just that they killed this family, it’s as much the
manner in which they went about their evil work: they were tied up, they were beaten, they
were hit on the head with a hammer. Gray
and his accomplice Ray Dandridge then went on a romp and killed another
accomplice, Ashley Baskerville, and her mother Mary Tucker, 47; and stepfather,
Percyell Tucker, 55.
And so, now, a week away from his date with some lethal
injection drugs, we are asked not to impose that punishment. Really?
Some crimes by their very nature merit the ultimate
punishment. I suppose, for some people,
the 11 years that have passed since that horrid act will have softened them to
the execution of this monster. But, some
say, he is now remorseful. He had a
tough child hood. There are probably a
hundred dozen reasons why someone might think Mr. Gray deserves a break.
But he never gave the Harvey family a break. He never gave the Baskerville’s a break. How would you feel if that happened to
someone in your family?
There are few cases that merit the death penalty more than
this case. The brutal murder of two very
small children. It’s hard for me to
think that anyone could forgive someone of those kinds of actions.
As a reporter back in the day, I sat through two capital
murder trials while covering Chesterfield County. Both cases came back as death sentence
cases. One was similar to the Harvey
Murder in terms of depravity.
Charity Powers was 10 years old when Everett Lee Mueller
abducted, raped and murdered her.
Mueller’s actions were in a class about equal to Gray’s, except that it
was only one little girl. At that point,
Gray’s case diverges from horror into something far worse.
When we swirl around the kinds of human beings there are in
this world, we know about good and bad and the many varieties in between. We
have friends, we have acquaintances, and we have enemies—point blank everyone
does.
But people like Gray and Dandridge fall into a different
group totally. Like the old “world” maps
show as they reach the borders of known areas, “here there be monsters.” In Chester, where Charity Powers was so
brutally slain, the Chesterfield Police Department said there were about 20
people in the area who they felt could have been responsible for such a
reprehensible crime. Does that scare
anyone? It ought to. CCPD already were pretty sure who it was, but
it took them four or five months to finally get enough proof to arrest him.
Gray and Dandridge are living proof that monsters
exist. Yes, it’s been a long time for
Gray to work his way through all of the legal niceties involved in a capital
murder case. And, I am sure, that he is
sorry for his actions now. But has that
length of time dulled our senses to what really took place 11 years ago?
Not mine.
I can only imagine the horror and fear they instilled in the
Harvey family. The courts acted properly,
the jury did their work properly, and the result will take place next week
properly. It sorrows me that a man is
being put to his death, but in the scheme of murders few reach the level of
depravity that the Harvey family’s murder did.
Goodbye, Ricky Gray, you have reaped what you have sown.
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