I really never thought too much about crime or how I felt about the death penalty. I never thought that it would even affect me, especially not so personally. I was raised in a conservative family of eight children. Both of my parents were teachers and I believed us to be an upstanding family in the community.
Vickie Robison-Barnett
You can imagine the shock when I turned on the television one hot August day in 1982 to see my younger brother on the evening news. He had been arrested.....for murder! I fell to my knees and thought surely this must be a mistake. Not my brother, not my "nice" brother Larry.
We knew Larry had problems and he had been diagnosed several years earlier with a mental illness called schizophrenia. He had been hospitalized for his condition on numerous occasions. But he had never shown any signs of violence, certainly none that would indicate he was capable of murder.
Larry needed help that was denied by the medical community who knew that his condition was volatile. They insisted that he must first be violent before they could assist with intense medical treatment. Of course when he satisfied their criteria for getting help, there was no help forthcoming. Instead, it was decided that he needed to die for a manifestation of his illness. Surely this is one of the most profound cases of preventable murder there ever was. Had Larry received the medical help that he needed, this tragedy might never have happened. Six precious lives could have been spared.
My life since that day has been a long journey of sadness and despair trying to balance deep feelings of sorrow for the families of the five victims that Larry killed while still loving Larry himself. We watched Larry evolve over the seventeen years he lived on death row. Larry asked for forgiveness every way that he knew how and was truly sorry for the pain his actions had inflicted on many lives. He tried to live the rest of his life as an example of love.
Ultimately Larry was executed on January 21, 2000. Larry felt that he deserved death for his actions even though he could never explain how or why he did what he did. He was ready to go and we as his family have had to accept his death just as we had to accept the fact that he really did murder five innocent people.
I started a website for Larry http://www.larryrobison.org a few months before his execution date to try to prevent his execution. Through the internet I met Lynne Marien, whose son Jim was murdered. I was struck by her story and I felt that her story about her son's untimely death needed a home. So I gave it a home at Larry's website. Lynne and I share a belief that we need to be more concerned about how to prevent murders BEFORE they happen, rather than simply killing the problem after it is too late to save the victims. We as a nation need to be pro-active in finding positive ways to prevent violent crime and murder before it is too late and many lives are destroyed. One way to be pro-active is to support the 'From Tears To Hope' project by doing whatever you can to make this world a better place to live. We would all probably be very amazed at the impact some small positive thing that we do might have on someone's life. You never know how some small act of kindness, understanding or help might someday prevent a murder. That is the 'hope'.
Larry Robison
Memorial To Larry's Victims
