Betty Romano, mother of Dawn Marie Garvin, has pulled out two of her slain daughter’s stuffed animals to bring along if the state carries out the death penalty against the killer. She has affixed handmade signs to the windows of her Buick announcing the scheduled execution.
Garvin’s father, Fred J. Romano, and brother, Fred A. Romano, are making plans to stand outside Maryland’s death row, amid death penalty protesters, on execution night.
The Romanos know that Steven Oken – who nearly 17 years ago raped and murdered Garvin and two other women – has a motion before the state’s highest court today asking the judges to delay his court-ordered death by lethal injection. And they know that twice before the court has granted similar requests.
But, Betty Romano, 57, said yesterday, “This is the closest we’ve ever come.”
Less than a week before the first day that Oken’s death sentence could be carried out, the Romanos hope that they might finally see what they call justice for Garvin.
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When a Baltimore County prosecutor called Betty Romano yesterday at her Aberdeen apartment with a daily update, she told him, “If this falls through, I will be a disaster.” The signs in her car windows urge people to “join us at the execution for Steven H. Oken. … Free Admission.”
Deputy State’s Attorney Stephen Bailey said that for the Romanos the years of delays have been “a hellish emotional roller coaster.”
In the early morning hours of Nov. 2, 1987, Fred J. Romano found his only daughter dead in her White Marsh apartment, nude, her face covered by a pillow, in a pool of blood on her bed. She had been raped and sexually assaulted with a condiment bottle before Oken, a man she’d never met, shot her in the head. A stuffed bear – one her mother plans to hold if she witnesses Oken’s execution – was tucked under her arm.
Garvin, 20, an accountant and college student, had been married about four months to her high school sweetheart, naval officer Keith Garvin. He had returned to base in Virginia the day she was murdered.
Fred J. Romano, 60, said the memory of that scene and the loss he feels stoke bitterness and hatred. But he said he tries to contain those feelings and approach capital punishment in a matter-of-fact way:
“The death penalty was rendered after a trial, and the state is obligated to carry out that sentence,” he said yesterday at his son’s townhouse in the Belcamp area of Harford County.
“My dad is much more rational than me,” said Fred A. Romano, 34. The younger Romano makes no attempt to couch his feelings about Oken:
“There is one person on this Earth that I could kill in cold blood,” he said. “And that person is Steven Oken.”
About three years ago, Fred A. Romano said, he came to believe that the voices of family members of murder victims were being drowned out by outspoken death penalty opponents.
He created a Web site, called Maryland Coalition for State Executions, mc4se.org, and began posting information about death penalty cases in Maryland. Last year, his wife, Vicki Romano, developed a national companion, prodeathpenalty.org.
Recently, he added a clock that counts the days, hours, minutes and seconds until the death warrant for Oken goes into effect.
Garvin’s death and the shocking way that she died have taken a heavy toll on the family.
Her parents separated about three years ago, something that Betty Romano attributes, at least in part, to the murder and its aftereffects. She created a support group called Families of Murdered Loved Ones, but she eventually dissolved the group because “every minute of every day, I was reliving the pain.”
Fred A. Romano said it pains him to know that his children – two little girls and a teenage stepson – never got to meet “Aunt Dawn.”
“Oken cheated them, too,” he said.
He contemplated what he would write on the signs he plans to hold outside the prison hospital in Baltimore the night of Oken’s execution, if it happens. He thinks they will say, “Judgment Day has come.”
Sun staff writer Laurie Willis contributed to this article.
<!– ART CREDIT
ART CREDIT–> <!– CUTLINE TEXTNewlywed Dawn Marie Garvin was raped and killed in 1987.
CUTLINE TEXT–> <!– ART CREDITLLOYD FOX : SUN STAFF
ART CREDIT–> <!– CUTLINE TEXTFred A. Romano (left) and his father, Fred J. Romano, plan to stand outside Maryland's death row on the night of the execution. The younger man has created a pro-death penalty Web site.
CUTLINE TEXT–> <!– ART CREDITLLOYD FOX : SUN STAFF
ART CREDIT–> <!– CUTLINE TEXT"If this falls through, I will be a disaster," said Betty Romano, mother of Dawn Marie Garvin.
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