A mother’s words to her son’s killer — ‘I forgive you’
After her only son, Tyler, was shot and killed in New Haven’s Edgewood Park in 2007, Vickye Coward became intimately acquainted with Connecticut’s court system. She was a constant presence at the trials and hearings of the man accused of his murder.
She also grew accustomed to the fleet of news vans parked around the stately buildings.
Her son’s death wasn’t the only tragedy in the state that year. The journalists in the vans were jockeying for position to cover the trial of two men accused — and later found guilty of — the Cheshire home invasion that ended in the deaths of three, Jennifer HawkePetit and daughters, Michaela, 11, and Hayley, 17. We learned the grisly details through painstaking reporting from the courtroom.
The husband and father, Dr. William Petit, was beaten, but he survived. He later founded a charity that supports women’s education, served as a state representative for the 22nd district (he recently announced he won’t seek a return to the capitol), and he became an outspoken and respected proponent of the death penalty, which he suggested should be available as punishment for the kind of heinous crime such as the one that destroyed his family. At one point, he was quoted saying, “Vengeance belongs to the Lord. This is about justice. We need to have some rules in a civilized society.”
It isn’t meaningful to compare scars, and Coward’s heart went out to Dr. Petit as a fellow survivor, but in her grief, on one of her walks past the members of the media at the courthouse Coward knocked on the door of a news vans.
My son, Tyler, was murdered, too, she told the crew inside. He’s important, too, and if you want to talk about him, I’ll give you a free report.
She thought she could tell them of his potential, and how they’d accompanied one another — him on drums, her on piano — at church, and how he was supposed to start a new job just days before he was killed.
The crew declined. They’d been sent to cover the Cheshire home invasion trial, which made international news. What they didn’t say — but what Coward knew was unspoken — was that her son was one more Black man shot dead in the city. Where’s the news?
“Because my son was of another color, my son didn’t have a title in front of behind his name, he wouldn’t be considered important enough to spread the word,” Coward said. “Maybe they thought he was dealing. Maybe they thought he was using drugs” — except an autopsy found nothing in his system.
But even if he had been using drugs, six bullets in a public park was unacceptable.
Last week, advocates and activists gathered on Zoom to mark the 10th anniversary of Connecticut’s appeal of the death penalty. Hosted by New York-based Equal Justice USA, the webinar included Coward; Jamila Hodge, Equal Justice executive director, and Michael P. Lawlor, former state representative and former undersecretary for criminal justice policy, among other participants. Most of the panel members talked about the exorbitant cost and the awful racism inherent to the death penalty.
Coward brought receipts. She talked about the need for mental health counseling in the wake of a violent death, and how so many in families like hers simply cannot afford to seek help. After her son’s murder, she said a local news reporter visited her, and started the interview by warning her that everything she said would be double-checked. If her son was dealing drugs, the reporter said, they would find out and include that in the story.
Imagine telling a grieving mother that. Coward thought about sharing the autopsy that came later, but she figured it wouldn’t make much of a difference.
Anyone in Connecticut in 2007 knew about the Petit home invasion and murders, and it was difficult to push for abolition of the death penalty in the wake of Dr. Petit’s grief. In fact, in the webinar Lawlor noted that the Cheshire crimes pushed the state to pass more draconian rules, and made abolishing the death penalty politically impossible.
But while Petit lobbied to keep capital punishment in place, people such as Coward diligently lobbied against it. She went to Hartford multiple times, and stood in line to give testimony in front of legislators. She wrote a short book about losing her son, and talked about being a preacher’s kid, and about how one tear slid down her father’s cheek when she had to tell him his grandson had been shot and killed, and the pain that informs the words, “He didn’t make it.” She wrote about the park where he was killed, and how people come to pose there for graduation/prom/wedding pictures.
She told anyone who would listen that she missed her son, but that killing his killer didn’t seem like a good answer. At a 2010 sentencing hearing, Vickye Coward told her son’s killer, “I forgive you. My son, I didn’t raise him to hate any one, and I don’t hate you.”
Tyler Coward’s killer pleaded guilty to manslaughter, and was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Coward has stayed in touch with him.
Susan Campbell is the author of “Frog Hollow: Stories from an American Neighborhood,” “Tempest-Tossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker” and “Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism and the American Girl.” She is Distinguished Lecturer at the University of New Haven, where she teaches journalism.