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Friday, October 30, 2009
Hurting Mother Clings to Son's Cause
By Joline Gutierrez Krueger
Journal Staff Writer
It was the unimaginable phone call, and not the one about a son or daughter being killed in some horrific, nightmarish incident.
In some ways, it was almost worse because it was harder to blame someone else for the awful news unfolding on the other end of the line.
For Linda McCallister, the call came around 4 a.m., three days before Christmas 1993:
Eric Smith, her big bear of a red-headed middle son — and, her other two children would tell you, her favorite — had been arrested hours before on an open count of murder.
"Even in my wildest dreams, I would have never thought this could happen," she said.
Smith, then 22, along with wife Darcy Smith, 18, and longtime friend Mark Apodaca, 20, had been identified by a Crime Stoppers tip for what had until then been the unsolved Nov. 23, 1992, homicide of high school senior Adam Price, whose bullet-riddled body was found off a highway near Bernardo in Socorro County.
The three had spotted Price, 17, in the University of New Mexico area and, depending on which version of the story you believe, forced him or encouraged him to get into their car for a ride that would end with 10 rounds from three weapons fired into Price's body.
"They say they were looking for someone to scare that night," State Police Agent Michael Davies had told reporters then about the randomness of killing a boy the three had not known before that night.
McAllister, who had raised her children mostly on her own, could not help her son with bail money or expensive lawyers. They had to rely on whatever justice doled out.
But even then, McAllister said, she felt sure that her son could never have committed such a despicable act. He might have been there that night, might have inexplicably kept quiet about the murder for 13 months, but she was convinced Apodaca was the shooter, that he would go down for the murder and her son would be cleared.
She was sure that justice as she saw it would prevail.
But she was wrong.
On Dec. 15, 1994, a Socorro County jury found Smith guilty of all charges, including first-degree murder. He was sentenced to 62 years in prison, the maximum allowed. It was later reduced by 10 years because of a sentencing error.
"I have lost my son," she wrote in a letter to a reporter then. "I am forced into the realization that my son may never know freedom in my lifetime."
But if it sounds as if McAllister had accepted the notion that her son was a killer and the courts irrefutable, you would be wrong.
"I believe Eric was convicted on the jurists' gut feelings and not on the facts of the case," she said.
But 15 years later, her son is still in prison. All the usual legal efforts have been exhausted, from his direct appeal in 1997 to a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2001.
So McAllister has brought her son's case to the court of public opinion.
But let's be clear: Her efforts are in no way meant to detract from the loss the Price family suffers, she said.
The Price family, meanwhile, offered this perspective:
"As parents, we feel deep sympathy for Mr. Smith's mother and the devastation of his sentence," the family wrote in a statement. "However, the aftermath of our son's murder and torture is something our family lives with every day. We will never know the full circumstances of the night that Adam was kidnapped at gunpoint on our street by Eric and Darcy Smith and Mark Apodaca. We do know that after Adam's murder we spent five years in trials and hearings for the three killers.
"Eric and Darcy Smith were separately represented, by very capable lawyers. Each of them had separate trials, with different juries, and both were convicted of first degree murder; we have no reason to believe that the verdicts should be revisited."
Still, McAllister calls into question about 45 key points on how her son's case was botched. While some were incorporated into her son's appeals, most have no legal basis.
There are curiosities, like why Apodaca was allowed to take a plea deal that earned him substantially less time in prison, even though that deal was contingent on his passing a polygraph test, which, according to testimony, he didn't.
Or why the prosecution was allowed to introduce into evidence a handgun that wasn't used in the killing; why Smith's attorney didn't object to hearsay testimony offered by a friend of the trio; why a second polygraph expert McAllister paid for was never called to the stand; why casings at the crime scene were not located until months later and then never connected to the murder weapons.
None of these points might have been strong enough for an acquittal, but it's worth pondering how things could have turned out had Smith been the first of the three to be arrested.
McAllister is left with the same feeling of disbelief she had the night her phone rang. She hadn't seen this coming. Smith, she said, had been a good son, a caring man. And she had been a good mom.
"Our country is full tonight with mothers grieving for sons who are in or on their way to America's countless prisons. Many are probably blaming themselves: 'Where did I go wrong?' " she said. "They didn't go wrong, and neither did I."
UpFront is a daily front-page opinion column. You can reach Joline at 823-3603, jkrueger@abqjournal.com.
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