Katrina Brown's Killer Sentenced to Death

Richard Winton reported at LATimes.com that James Heard, 58, of Compton, has been sentenced to death in another case that illustrates all too vividly the danger of exposing your kids to your new honey.

James Heard, 58, killed sixth-grade honors student Katrina Brown in December 1990 while her mother was at work. Heard later said he could not remember the slaying because he had been drinking alcohol and smoking crack for more than a day.

You know, when I was a teen, I used to worry that I wouldn’t be able to get dates unless I had a good job, a nice ride, and was living a fairly decent life. How naïve I was.

But investigators tied him to the crime after recovering a part of his tongue that Katrina had bit off.

Good for her. He had sexually assaulted her, and she fought back in a way that produced evidence. Unfortunately, it enraged him.

It is his second death penalty sentence; the California Supreme Court overturned the first in 2003 because of a "seriously deficient examination of a prospective juror during the jury selection process."

During Heard's trial, Deputy Dist. Atty. Danette Meyers told jurors that Katrina had marked her killer by biting off part of his tongue, and that he stomped on her and poured rubbing alcohol down her throat to get her to regurgitate before he strangled her to death.

The story does not quote the mother or the guy who impregnated her in the first place.

Meyers, an experienced death penalty trial lawyer, has called the case “most brutal crime I have seen perpetrated in my lifetime."

"This is one guy I hope to see executed in my lifetime," she said. "I'm hoping they expedite this."

It's California. He'll die of old age on Death Row. He’ll probably get letters from women who want to marry him.

A woman usually finds herself unmarried with minor children for one of the following reasons:
1) She intentionally got pregnant without wanting a husband to father the child.
2) She's a widow because her good husband was killed by a bad person, fire, or in an accident.
3) She drove away a good husband.
4) She got knocked up by the wrong man (one night stand, boyfriend, shack up, bad husband, guy involved in shady dangerous stuff who ended up dead or in jail).

A lot of these women fall into the last category, which means they may be really bad at picking men. But even the women in the other categories are more likely to attract pedophiles and other child abusers.

And guys – you lose a lot of control over your children and ability to protect them if you're not married to and living with their mother. Be very careful where you stick it.