Mother of Murder Victim Finds Her Story Matters Less

icky Coward wanted to tell lawmakers about her son’s murder as they weighed the fate of Connecticut’s death penalty. They listened to a white guy from Cheshire instead.

A guy named William Petit.

Coward and Petit (pictured above) both lost family members to murders in 2007, their lives forever changed by tragedy.

They both traveled to the state Capitol this spring to add their voices to a debate over whether to repeal Connecticut’s ultimate sanction. The legislature had voted to do so two years ago, only to have its measure vetoed by a Republican governor. With a new anti-death penalty governor in office ready to sign an abolition bill, the stage was set for repeal.

Until Petit, who survived the horrific attack on his family, spoke face to face with legislators. They listened to him. (Petit didn’t testify at a committee hearing on the bill this session as he had in 2009; but he did manage to get the personal appointments to lobby legislators, just as he had managed to get a sit-down with the governor in 2009 to press the case for a veto.) Petit convinced two lawmakers to change their minds and keep the death penalty in place, and the abolition bill died as a result. He inspired Edith Prague, the key senator to change her position, to offer this reasoning: ““They should bypass the trial and take that second animal and hang him by his penis from a tree out in the middle of Main Street.”

Earlier in the session, along with other parents of murder victims, Coward went up to the Capitol at 9 a.m. on March 7. She waited until 1 a.m. for a turn to address the Judiciary Committee, which was considering the abolition bill.

She returned last week for a last-ditch lobbying effort by the group. She spent hours stopping by legislators’ offices. Despite their efforts, the abolition bill died in committee for this session.

Coward did get to see one state representative, who told her she had a “powerful” story but remained noncommittal. Staffers for all the other legislators, including Prague, told Coward their bosses were too busy. (Prague didn’t return a call seeking comment for this story.)

Watching legislators wrestle with the question of how to value life, Coward concluded that the lives of not just killers, but the killed, don’t always receive equal consideration when Connecticut’s politicians make laws.

She left with no illusions about why legislators showed little interest in her story but heard and acted on Petit’s.

“Something that I guess the world will never get used to or get over—and that’s the color of your skin,” Coward, who’s 49, said in an interview this week at her home on Sherman Avenue in New Haven’s West River neighborhood.

“It doesn’t take away my sympathy for the Petit family, because I can identify. [But] why do you feel so much more for him? Because he lost three people? Because he lives in Cheshire? Because he’s a doctor?”

“He’s just as important as anybody in the world,” she said of her son Tyler Coward, who was gunned down near the Edgewood Park sundial at the age of 18. “A life is a life. That’s something that’s precious. You can’t get it back. If people would stop looking at: Where you live. What’s your title? Are you well known? Are you not? Are you important? Are you not? Have you been in People’s Magazine? On Oprah? It doesn’t matter.”

To read what happened when Coward changed her mind on the death penalty, click here.