Jill Porter: For victim's kin, killer adds Internet to injury
JORGE FIGUEROA knew that it would be a long wait. He knew that the man sentenced to death for killing his wife and two others was entitled to interminable appeals.
JORGE FIGUEROA knew that it would be a long wait.
He knew that the man sentenced to death for killing his wife and two others was entitled to interminable appeals.
It's been 27 years since Figueroa discovered the murders at Smokin' Joe's Corner, a City Avenue restaurant partly owned by heavyweight boxing champion Joe Frazier.
Figueroa was braced for the years of waiting while Ralph Trent Stokes pursued one legal remedy after another.
The appeals are still ongoing, more than a quarter century later.
And that is hard enough.
But Figueroa was not prepared to see Stokes defy the confines of death row with an e-mail account, a MySpace page and personalized Web pages sponsored by death penalty opponents.
"Can you believe it?" Figueroa says, fingers tautly clasped over his mouth, as he glares at a computer screen festooned with photos and information about his wife's killer:
Stokes' poetry. His music tastes. Internet posts from supporters, whose messages are decorated with hearts and teddy bears.
And his claim that he was railroaded by "racist police," represented by a "pitifully inept attorney" and convicted "in spite of the absence of evidence."
"The trial was a farce," Stokes wrote on a Web site.
"Can you imagine the nerve?!" Figueroa exclaims, slumping back in his chair, exhaling sharply in frustration.
Figueroa was mollified, at least, to learn that Stokes has no direct access to a computer, and communicates through friends who post the information for him.
Still, Figueroa said: "It's obscene."
The gory scene never leaves Figueroa, now 65: on the afternoon of March 11, 1982, he arrived at the restaurant to pick up his wife, Mary, who co-managed the place with him.
He found a silent, macabre scene: a mailman dead, his face obliterated by gunfire; his wife and another employee dead in a walk-in refrigerator.
Figueroa said that two employees who survived told him that Stokes, a former short-order cook, had tried to rob the place and killed Mary when she recognized his voice.
Another employee was killed along with the mailman, who happened upon the scene. Stokes and his accomplice fled, leaving the witnesses, when the gun reportedly jammed.
The accomplice pleaded guilty and testified against Stokes.
The testimony at trial was compelling enough for the jury to return a death sentence against Stokes in less than an hour.
Figueroa was relieved at the conviction, but remained in a state of emotional collapse, bitter and empty, for years.
With the help of his three children, four grandchildren, and his second wife - he remarried 10 years ago - Figueroa recovered as much as possible.
But he was thrown for a loop when he learned that Stokes was seeking public support on the Internet.
Stokes seeks recruits to his "campaign for justice," and solicits donations on a Web site authored by a supporter.
"He must think he's a great hero," an incensed Figueroa said.
Survivors of victims across the country have endured the same sense of outraged violation, and have tried to stop prisoners from having computer access, even by proxy.
But courts have ruled in favor of prisoners' free-speech rights.
William DiMascio, executive director of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, said that he sympathizes with Figueroa, but recognizes that prisoners - even on death row - "ought not to be thought of as nonpersons."
"They're individuals, they're human beings and they do have some rights."
The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections recently implemented a policy preventing inmates from soliciting pen pals online, because of scams in which individuals were defrauded.
Otherwise, said spokeswoman Susan McNaughton, the state can't stop third parties from posting on behalf of prisoners on the Web.
Clearly, this is one of those issues in which sensibilities clash with legalities.
Because there's something grossly indecent about a killer using the Internet to solicit sympathy and support.
One civil-rights advocate suggested that people who find the sites offensive simply not look at them.
Jorge Figueroa has done just that.
But Stokes' Web postings still insult him and his family.
"It's like rubbing salt in the wound," Figueroa said.
"I do not understand how this can happen." *
E-mail porterj@phillynews.com or call 215-854-5850. For recent columns: