Crime Links Parents of Slaying Victim With Her Killer

NEW YORK —  Lawrence and Gayle Watkins sat in the courtroom day after day, hearing details of how their daughter was stabbed on a Brooklyn street with a 10-inch kitchen knife, killed for the $8 she carried in her bag.

The support of family and friends helped them through the assailants’ trials, the second of which ended in June. And some of that support came from someone unexpected--Margo Jamison, mother of one of the men convicted in the slaying.

Margo Jamison and the Watkinses found they share an abiding Christian faith and a deep sorrow for their children.

“She is one of our friends,” Lawrence Watkins says now. “One of our sisters in the faith.”

Amy Watkins, 26, moved to New York from Kansas in 1997 to pursue her master’s degree in social work.

As she walked down a street in March 1999, returning home from an internship where she worked with victims of domestic violence, two men attacked her. When she struggled, she was stabbed and left on the street, the knife sticking out of her body.

David Jamison, 28, and Felix Rodriguez, 21, were arrested in August 2000.

It was during Jamison’s arraignment that month that the two families found a way to connect. Lawrence Watkins was there with Gayle, Amy’s stepmother; Margo Jamison with her husband, James.

James Jamison, a deeply Christian man, turned to his equally devout wife and told her they had to talk to the Watkinses. They were parents grieving over their daughter, after all, just as the Jamisons were grieving over their son.

“He said, ‘Margo, we’ve got to go over and say something, let them know we’re hurting like them,’ ” Margo Jamison recalls.

They didn’t know what kind of reaction to expect.

“The fear was there,” she says. “My son’s accused of this crime. We don’t know how they’ll react.”

Lawrence Watkins didn’t see the Jamisons approach; when he looked up, they were standing before him.

“I think the first thing they said was, ‘We just want you to know we’re extremely sorry about Amy’s death,’ ” he says. “We realized that it took a lot of courage to do that and that touched us.”

As Margo Jamison recalls: “It was really a precious moment between parents.”

They didn’t see each other again until May, at David Jamison’s trial. In the intervening time, Margo Jamison suffered more pain.

An administrative worker at Coney Island Hospital, she went down to the hospital morgue one day in April to start the paperwork on an unidentified man whose body had just been delivered.

She glanced at the body and started screaming: It was her husband, James. He had died of a heart attack while riding his bicycle on his way to meet her for dinner.

“My world just started spinning; it hasn’t stopped since then,” she says.

So there she was in May when her son’s trial began, having just lost her husband and on the verge of losing her son to prison. “When I sat in that trial, I hurt, I ached,” she says.

One day she went over to speak to the Watkinses, telling them of her husband’s death. She remembers tears coming to their eyes.

“We realized that she had to be just going through a terrible time,” Lawrence Watkins says.

They connected several times through the trial, asking each other how they were doing, how they had slept.

“There’s been some unity in our faith,” he says. “My wife has even said that in some sense, because of our unity as Christians, Margo and David are part of our family.”

There was one subject, though, that never came up: the question of David’s guilt.

“Both of us realized that the feelings that we had during this ordeal were genuine in and of themselves,” Lawrence Watkins says. “We didn’t have to raise that question; the court was doing that. What we were dealing with was the feelings each of us had as parents.”

Jamison, who was accused of stabbing Watkins’ daughter, was convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. Rodriguez, described by police as the lookout, also was convicted of murder and sentenced to 15 years to life.

Margo Jamison believes her son was wrongfully convicted. The Watkinses believe he did it.

Lawrence Watkins says he doesn’t feel any anger toward the Jamison family--only toward David Jamison and, to an extent, the society around him.

“I’m not saying she was the perfect mother, but I’ve been a father and I’m old enough to know that no one is a perfect parent,” Watkins says.

“Kids make decisions and parents can’t always control those decisions and our culture plays a role in contributing to that. . . . I think the United States has a lot to answer for on the subject of violence.”

The Watkinses say they would be willing to visit David Jamison in prison if he wished. They would ask only about his welfare, Lawrence Watkins says.

Margo Jamison says that attitude helps her. “It makes it easier to know they don’t hate my son, they don’t feel the way the world wants them to feel,” she says.

As for the future, neither family has firm plans to see or talk to each other again. But they both seem to assume they will be part of each other’s lives.

“Whether we like it or not, we’re now connected to this boy for the rest of our lives,” Lawrence Watkins says. “It’s just a matter of being a human being to other human beings.”