Bonnita F. Spikes says Maryland's death-row inmates are her friends.

She knows Vernon L. Evans Jr. considers himself a religious man.

She knows Jody L. Miles has lived all over the place and loves country music.

She knows John Booth-El peppers his letters with legal jargon, sending her running for a dictionary.

And after a year of visits, letters and phone calls, the men know her, too; they know about her anti-death penalty activism, her former career as a union organizer, her four children and nine grandchildren.

But in all her visits and letters to the men over so many months, there's something she never told them.

* * *

Bonnita Ard met Michael Spikes in 1969, the summer she was almost 16. She was about to be a high school junior and he was a college student, working three jobs to put himself through school.

Her first impression of Michael was that he was annoying. She was walking to a cookout at a friend's house and he was trailing behind, trying to talk to her. She brushed him off, telling him that she wasn't supposed to talk to strangers.

"Well, if I tell you my name, we won't be strangers," he said.

She didn't want to like Michael Spikes, but she couldn't help it. He was so smart, he came from a big family, just like she did, and he loved to talk about sports with her. They used to ride around on his red Huffy 10-speed, with Bonnita on the handlebars and the bike's basket filled with Polish sausages from the Tastee-Freez.

Even though she was in Chicago and he was only a few minutes away in Evanston, she wrote to him every night, "like he was in China or somewhere."

She walked down the aisle the summer after she graduated from high school, in her $25 consignment store dress that made her feel like Cinderella. She was more nervous than she'd ever been, but when Michael lifted her veil, "I just knew," she said.

Michael urged her to go to college, but that wasn't where her heart was. She wanted to start having babies right away.

The Spikes family grew to three with the birth of David, and then to four with Virgil, three years later. Bonnita Spikes trained as a nurse and Michael Spikes got a job with the U.S. Postal Service.

They moved to California in the late 1970s. Michael kept getting promoted and they were doing well financially. The schools were good, which was fortunate because they had two more sons. The third child was James. The fourth — because Spikes warned her husband that she wasn't having any more and if he wanted a namesake he'd better claim him now — was Michael.

They were healthy; she exercised and turned into a vegetarian, though her husband told her that he wouldn't give up meat because he wasn't a rabbit. They were happy.

"We grew together," she said.

One day, Michael came home and told Bonnita that he had been promoted again, and that taking the job meant moving to New York City.

New York was too loud, too pushy for Spikes. The schools in Rosedale, Queens weren't so hot and other kids kept picking on her sons. The weather couldn't compare to California.

But there were good things. In addition to nursing, Spikes worked as a union organizer, first for the Service Employees International Union, and then for the Teamsters. She loved that the Teamsters had the power to shut down the whole city.

She volunteered for the NAACP and reveled in the culture of Harlem. She and Michael took advantage of New York's arts scene.

"Some nights we'd get home about 7, 8 o'clock and we'd look at each other and say, 'we ain't going nowhere tonight, right?'" she said. "And then we'd look at the what's-to-do-in-New York section, 8 o'clock, Sweetwater's [got] The Temptations, and we'd go, 'yeah, let's go,' hop on the train and go down."

Often, Mike, their youngest, would come along. David and Virgil were grown and out of the house. James was a teenager who was always out with girls, and he needed Mom and Dad only for the allowance money.

But Mike was still a kid, and he'd always been clingy.

"If I said we're going to a Broadway play maybe, Mike would say, 'oh, I wouldn't mind doing that,'" Spikes said. "My other sons, kicking and screaming. They did it, but they didn't want to go."

On March 10, 1994, Spikes got home at 3:30 p.m., her usual time, and waited for her husband. Around 4 p.m., the phone rang, and she answered it in the dining room.

Was this Mrs. Michael Spikes? the voice asked. They were sending an officer to her house, the voice said.

Spikes thought that maybe Michael had racked up one too many parking tickets and had been arrested. Maybe she had to bail him out.

"Then when the officer came and said, 'Oh, ma'am, you're going to have to come with me,' and I thought — I know he must have said to me, 'Your husband's been killed,' but for the life of me, while we're driving down there I'm saying, 'Oh my goodness, there was a car accident, he got hurt, they're taking me to a hospital,' which they were, they were taking me to a hospital," she said.

Spikes wondered which floor Michael was on and if he was in surgery for a broken arm or leg. The officer directed her and 15-year-old James to the basement. He stood them in front of a curtained window.

When the curtain opened and she saw Michael covered with a sheet, she fainted.

* * *

Every day after work, Michael Spikes stopped by a bodega and bought a Snapple lemonade or fruit punch.

That afternoon, as he was waiting to pay, two young men came in and aimed a gun at the cashier. The detectives told Bonnita Spikes later that someone in the back of the store said, "Man, you don't have to do this." One of the robbers wheeled around and fired, killing Michael and an older woman whose name Spikes does not know.

The police told her that Michael was hit once in the chest. He died in that store, instantly. The killers have never been found.

* * *

When Bonnita Spikes came to, James was standing over her, crying.

"Mom, what are we going to do?" he said.

After Michael's death, the son who shared his name turned from sensitive to full-on depressed. Spikes put him into therapy, but it wasn't enough.

One day, she came home and called for Mike, but he didn't answer. The bathroom door was shut, and when she pushed it open, he was lying on the floor.

At the hospital, they pumped out the pills Mike had taken. He spent some time in a state hospital and when he got out, Spikes moved the family to Georgia. It was gentler there, a better place for them all to heal, she thought.

Then she came home and found Mike in the bathroom again. He went back to the hospital, and Spikes fought to place him in a good program.

But some days, Spikes would visit Mike and he would be completely silent. Some days, he would refuse to see her. He gained a lot of weight because all he did most days was eat.

"One day he just told me, 'I hurt too bad to live. I don't want to live. I miss my father, I love my father, I want to be with my father.' He just told me," she said.

"I leaned to him and said, 'I know what you mean; I feel that bad too. The moment I got up from fainting, I didn't want to breathe anymore. So I can't say I don't know what you're talking about 'cause I do.' I said, 'But you got sick and I had to get over it. I had no room for it.' I said, 'You got to get well, 'cause you don't have room for it.'"

Mike was at that hospital three years. When he finally got out, he decided to go to college.

And then one day, he ended up in the bathroom again.

Mike tried to kill himself three separate times after his father died. He's 24 now and hasn't tried in years, Bonnita says, but once in a while he decides he's well enough to go off his medication, and then he slips into depression again.

Spikes feels he's finally well enough to take a little teasing, though. She said to him, "'I'm mad at you.' He said 'Why?' I said, 'Because you deprived me of my nervous breakdown. That was my nervous breakdown I was supposed to have; you took it from me,' and he laughed; he said, 'I am so sorry.'

"And I said, 'but I don't want it now, never mind.'"

* * *

While Mike dealt with his father's death by retreating inside himself, his mother coped by taking on causes. For a while, she worked for a hospice. Then, she pushed for better mental health care coverage.

"I was trying to do something that would really leave an impact on someone's life because I wanted two things: for my husband to be proud of me, and for his death and Michael's depression to have not been in vain," she said.

In 1999, when a friend told her that Washington, D.C., was the best place for activists, she moved. She continued her union work, getting hired by UPS and trying to organize a union there. She organized in the Montgomery County school system. She worked for the SEIU in Baltimore; the union would send her to visit units that wanted to leave the SEIU and persuade them to stay.

Eventually, Spikes got fed up with union work and decided to try the nonprofit world.

Both she and her husband had always opposed the death penalty, and her views didn't change after his murder. She said she likes to think that if someone was arrested for killing Michael, she would want him to stay in jail forever — but not to be executed.

So she worked for Equal Justice USA, a project of the Hyattsville-based Quixote Center that is focused on moratorium legislation. Through Equal Justice, she met Jane Henderson, head of Maryland Citizens Against State Executions. Henderson tried to show Spikes that she would have a special place in the anti-death penalty movement, but Spikes said she never understood what it mattered that her husband had been killed.

"Mike's murder's here, your murder's here," she said; "what would that do for you?"

The turning point came after Wesley E. Baker's June 2005 arguments before the Court of Appeals. Baker was asking that his sentence be overturned on the grounds that Maryland's death penalty system is racially biased.

The family of Jane Frances Tyson, whom Baker shot to death in front of her grandchildren during a robbery in 1991, was at the courthouse, and afterward, one of the men got into an argument with Henderson. Neither Henderson nor Spikes knows his name, but they remember that he was angry.

Spikes approached the man.

"His reaction when he found out she lost her husband to murder — his approach completely changed," Henderson said. "I think he even said something like, 'you're allowed to have an opinion because you understand.'"

"I had an 'aha' moment," Spikes said. "This helps. This helps people because they don't want to hear the person who hasn't been through it. They will listen to the person who's been there."

* * *

Spikes works on the death penalty issue full time now. She has a grant from the Open Society Institute-Baltimore to cultivate opposition to capital punishment among the families of murder victims and the families of murderers.

But what really energizes Spikes are her death-row visits.

After rapist-murderer Steven Oken was executed in 2004, Spikes met with his mother, Davida, and asked what the anti-death penalty movement should do for the inmates awaiting execution. Go see the men who don't have families, Oken said.

The first man Spikes visited was Jody Miles, convicted of the 1997 robbery-murder of Edward Joseph Atkinson. Spikes and Miles had been writing letters, but she still wasn't sure what she would talk about when they were face-to-face.

She said that when she finally got into the narrow visiting room with the Plexiglass barrier and the speaker to talk through, it was easy. Mostly, she talked about her grandkids, but she also discovered that they liked the same television shows and the same music.

One thing she didn't bring up — in fact, she never mentioned it to any of the death-row inmates she met — was her husband's murder. She said she never really thought it was important because it had nothing to do with why she opposes capital punishment. The men all knew she was a widow, but she left it at that.

"I think some of them were under the impression that he had cancer, that he got hit by — they didn't think he got murdered," Spikes said.

Besides Miles, Spikes visits three other death-row inmates: Vernon Evans, who shot motel workers David Scott Piechowicz and Susan Kennedy in a 1983 murder-for-hire; John Booth-El, who stabbed his elderly neighbors Irvin and Rose Bronstein to death during a robbery in 1984; and Heath W. Burch, who killed his own elderly neighbors, Cleo and Robert Davis, in 1995.

She said they were all "gruff" with her at first, but she counts them as friends now. She calls the younger ones, Miles and Burch, "cute" for thinking she's romantically interested in them and says that Burch is a "sweetie." A couple of weeks ago, Burch asked her to buy a plum and eat it for him; he said all he ever gets are apples and oranges.

She says she asks the men what they were like when they were on the outside, what their kids and grandkids are like.

She talks about how, when Evans was about to be executed in February, she rushed to be with him, but he chided her for walking too much on an ankle that had just been operated on. She was with him when she got the call from his attorneys, telling her the Court of Appeals had stayed his execution. She held the phone up to the speaker in the Plexiglass and Evans said, "Praise God."

Recently, Bonnita Spikes went on WYPR's Marc Steiner Show to talk about her husband and her opposition to the death penalty. Death row was listening. The inmates told her, "this really means something extra special that your husband got murdered and you did this," she said.

But why would Spikes want to talk television shows with men who took away someone's mother, father, husband, child, just like Michael's anonymous killers did to her? With men who, by pulling a trigger, might have driven a victim's son so deep into depression that he didn't want to live? Not wanting them to die is one thing, but isn't it another to chat with them on the phone before bed?

"I do good things for people who I think are victims of circumstance," she said.

She thinks they have stories that deserve to be told before they die, and she wants to help them tell those stories. She believes they are damaged men who deserve compassion.

"I believe," she said, "in redemption."

source - The Daily