Unit 1012 sends our utmost condolences and heartfelt
sympathy to Cindy McNamara, the mother of Shannon McNamara, who was killed by
Anthony Mertz on June 12, 2001. We do not only remember her on the date she
died but we will remember her birthday on June 21 every year.
We, the comrades of Unit 1012, will pray that Governor
Pat Quinn will step down from November 4, 2014. We support you Cindy!
INTERNET
SOURCE: http://www.suntimes.com/4387475-417/gov.-quinn-totally-dismissed-me-murder-victims-mother-says#.U5hLjSiz6uI
Gov. Quinn
‘totally dismissed me,’ murder victim’s mother says
BY DAVE MCKINNEY Sun-Times Springfield
bureau chiefdmckinney@suntimes.com March 18, 2011 9:28PM
Updated: September 24, 2012 6:25AM
 |
|
Cindy McNamara is
upset at Governor Pat Quinn for abolishing the death penalty in Illinois.
McNamara's daughter, Eastern Illinois University student Shannon McNamara, was
killed by Anthony Mertz in 2001. Mertz, currently on Death Row, is now spared
by the death penalty ban. She holds a photo of her daughter on Friday, March
18, 2011. | Richard A. Chapman~Sun-Times
|
SPRINGFIELD — Cindy McNamara called
Gov. Quinn’s office five times since January, desperately seeking to talk to
him before he decided whether to end the death penalty and clear Death Row.
The best the Rolling Meadows woman got
was a call from an aide.
And now, this mother whose only
daughter, Shannon, was murdered by the first killer put on Death Row since
George Ryan left office, has nothing but harsh words for Illinois’ current
governor, whom she angrily derides as “a weasel.”
“He totally dismissed me and the other
families like we didn’t count. Our say was not worth the time and the respect
that he could give us to sit down and talk to us,” she said. “He’s the
governor. He’s the head of the state. I’m just a little person. But I still pay
my taxes, and he just took Shannon’s death like it was a stub on the toe.”
Earlier this month, citing a litany of
errors that put 20 men on Death Row by mistake, Quinn signed historic
legislation ending executions in Illinois and commuted the death sentences of
15 condemned killers, including Shannon McNamara’s murderer, Anthony Mertz.
Mertz was convicted of the June 2001
murder of Shannon McNamara, a 21-year-old Eastern Illinois University student a
semester away from graduating and former high school track athlete.
A jury determined Mertz, an ex-Marine
and apparent admirer of Adolf Hitler and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh,
broke in to her apartment while she was asleep and attacked her, raping,
beating, strangling and stabbing the young woman. Mertz positioned his
mutilated victim in such a way so her roommate would discover the body when she
returned to the apartment.
With his action on the death penalty,
Quinn justified reducing the sentences of Mertz and other condemned killers to
life in prison without parole, saying that once he’d decided to abolish the
death penalty, it should be done for all.
Quinn told reporters that he talked to
advocates on either end of the death penalty spectrum while weighing the issue,
but the governor specifically acknowledged he did not speak to any family
members whose loved ones were killed by the 15 on death row.
“I think I listened to many, many
people on both sides of this issue. I think it is probably impossible for me to
talk to everyone,” Quinn said.
After Quinn made that statement a week
and a half ago, his office Friday clarified the governor’s assertion that he
had not met with any family members who had loved ones murdered by someone on
Death Row.
In a late February meeting with
anti-abolitionists, the governor met with prosecutors, the family of slain
Chicago cop Thomas Wortham, and Roger Schnorr, whose sister, Donna, was raped
and murdered by death row inmate Brian Dugan, Quinn spokeswoman Annie Thompson
said.
Dugan was sentenced to life in prison
for killing Donna Schnorr, but Dugan’s actual death sentence came in 2009 for
the 1983 murder of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico, of Naperville.
Before Quinn’s action on March 9,
Cindy McNamara left with her husband on a trip to Cancun to celebrate their 35th
wedding anniversary. She thought she still stood a chance to speak with Quinn
when she returned based on his aide’s assurances.
But two days into their Mexican
getaway, a friend got an international call through to McNamara and informed
her of Quinn’s decision.
“She said, ‘Cindy, he signed it.’ I
said, ‘You know what, Sharon? I pretty much thought he would.’ But I was
praying and hoping it wouldn’t go further than that, that he’d give us, the
victims’ families, a chance before he commuted all those guys. Then the next
sentence I heard was, ‘He commuted the death sentences,’ and my heart just
dropped.”
The news that Mertz wouldn’t be put to
death, McNamara said, was “pretty close” to as jolting as first getting word
her daughter was dead.
“Is he a coward? Did he not want to
face us?” she said of the governor, who as a candidate last fall expressed
support for the death penalty though he vowed to keep the moratorium on
executions in place.
The early-March phone call McNamara
wound up getting from the Quinn aide — a woman whose name she now can’t
remember but who confided that she too had a daughter named Shannon — came
after McNamara sought help from state Sen. Matt Murphy (R-Palatine) in reaching
the governor.
McNamara said she turned to Murphy,
her state senator, after five previous phone messages to Quinn’s office were
left unanswered since she wrote a letter to the governor in early January. (The
governor’s office released a copy of that letter to the Chicago Sun-Times along
with correspondence from others two weeks before the governor’s decision.)
“There are 15 murderers on Death Row.
If you’re gonna do this, calling on the families of their victims isn’t that
onerous of a task,” Murphy said. “She deserved a call back at a minimum from
the chief of staff and preferably the governor himself to hear her out.
Unfortunately, she didn’t get that.”
One thing McNamara said she remembers
about the discussion with the Quinn aide was telling her the dates she and her
husband would be gone and that she still hoped for an audience when they
returned to the northwest suburbs this past week.
“It’s so strange that it was a
Wednesday when we left, and on that day he signed it,” she said. “I think he
felt like, ‘All right, that’s one person off my back for a week.’”
But McNamara’s strong feelings for the
death penalty reached the governor’s office and Quinn himself, Thompson said.
“The governor did read Cindy
McNamara’s letter, and she spoke at length with a top legislative aide in the
governor’s office,”
the Quinn spokeswoman said. “During his deliberation on
this historic legislation, Gov. Quinn carefully considered such letters,
conversations and all those who reached out to his office as he made a decision
that was ultimately based on a system that is flawed and that we cannot rely on
when lives are at stake.”
With time to soak in the new reality
involving Shannon’s killer, Cindy McNamara said she now has a whole new set of
fears despite Quinn’s promise to keep the prison door shut forever on Mertz and
others on Death Row.
“I’m afraid he’s gonna get
out. People say, ‘He’ll never get out. He’s not available for parole.’ But I
just don’t trust the system anymore,” she said.
“Shannon is in a good place.
I don’t have to worry about her anymore. But it’s all the other young women. If
that maniac, psychopath is let out, he’ll commit murder again. I know he will.
Just look at his mugshot. He has that creepy smile, that smirk. And that’s
exactly what he had when he was looking at young women coming into the court,” she said.
McNamara said her enmity for Quinn now
runs so deeply that if he seeks another term in 2014, she said she’d
“absolutely” appear in an opponent’s campaign commercial, if asked, to explain
to voters what the governor did to her family and how he went back on his
pledge as a candidate to support the death penalty.
“I just want the people of
Illinois to know what he really stands for,” she said. “He
just blatantly lied to us.”
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