On the day his mother walked out of jail, more than 13 years after she was convicted of killing her daughter, Ed Girard was asked about his father.
"If you can call him a father," the 22-year-old said, audibly scoffing at the mention of a man who was convicted of molesting Crystallynn Girard repeatedly, more than three years before someone strangled her and left the 13-year-old girl's body naked on a mattress.
When his half-sister's body was found on Valentine's Day, 1993, Ed Girard, then 8 years old, lost the closest thing he had ever had to a true parent. With his father in prison and their mother, Lynn DeJac, wont to partying all night in the Seneca-Babcock neighborhood of Buffalo where they lived, Ed and Crystallynn depended on each other.
After a jury convicted Lynn DeJac of second-degree murder and Erie County Judge Michael D'Amico sentenced the South Buffalo woman to 25 years to life in state prison, Ed was left an orphan whose biological parents were very much alive.
It would have been predictable, almost understandable, if the boy slipped into the low life that consumed his parents and, indirectly, his sister.
On Nov. 28, Judge D'Amico decided that tests linking newly tested blood found in the room where Crystallynn died to Dennis P. Donahue -- one of the several men in his mother's life at the time of the murder -- made it probable that a jury would have ruled differently had the information been available at the time. The judge dismissed the guilty verdict and ordered a new trial.
A few hours later, State Supreme Court Justice John Michalski ordered DeJac released on her own recognizance pending a new trial.
It should have been a day of celebration for Ed Girard, reunited with his mother after almost 14 years apart. But while he had arranged to be in court for the Nov. 20 hearing at which his mother's attorney, Andrew LoTempio, argued for her release, he couldn't stay for the announcement.
That's because he's a sergeant in the U.S. Army, stationed at Fort Bragg, N.C. Somehow, a boy boxed in by an unimaginable set of circumstances -- his sister murdered, his mother convicted of killing her and his father in prison for raping the girl -- managed to escape.
He credited Chuck Peters, a neighborhood handyman who fathered DeJac's twin sons and married her after she went to prison, with keeping the contorted family together, serving as the father the boy never had.
"He worked to get us out of foster homes," said Ed Girard, who in turn provided the twins, now 13, with the sort of male role model he had never had. "He kept us together."
The DeJac saga played out in Seneca-Babcock, a gray collection of duplex houses, boarded storefronts and vacant lots cut off from the rest of the city by rail lines and a highway. Most people you talk to in the neighborhood have lived there all their lives, even though the nearby factories that employed their fathers and grandfathers have been long since shuttered or demolished.
Where once there were stores, restaurants and a bowling alley to serve the people who lived and worked there, all that remains is a couple of neighborhood taverns and a corner market offering beer, smokes and a few shelves of canned and packaged foods.
In other words, it could be any number of neighborhoods in Niagara Falls.
Driving through Seneca-Babcock recalled a scene on Falls Street last summer.
Between 19th and 24th streets, a tiny boy stood on the curb, one step from wandering into traffic on a sunny afternoon. He couldn't have been more than 2 years old. I slowed down, both to make sure that he didn't run in front of me and to see if there was an adult anywhere nearby, anyone paying attention to this baby.
There wasn't. I don't know that I've ever seen anyone look so completely alone.
I watched him in my rear-view mirror, deciding whether to stop and go back -- and if I did, whether to try to walk around the neighborhood trying to find the boy's parents, or just take him to the police station. It's not as if anyone were watching him who might think they were seeing an abduction.
Before I could make up my mind, though, the boy turned from the brink of disaster and toddled away from the street, toward the empty porch of a house where I assume he lived.
I kept thinking about that little boy while working on the DeJac story over the last few weeks, reading about the squalid flat where Crystallynn and Ed grew up, how their mother left them alone while the spurned and enraged Donahue stalked her and another man through the neighborhood. LoTempio believes the jury in DeJac's 1994 trial based their conviction more on their feelings about her as a mother and person than on the feeble evidence suggesting that she was a murderer.
The foundation of the prosecution's case -- a third-hand confession as supposedly told to a professional check-kiter -- would have been far less convincing had it revolved around the den mother of a Cub Scout pack.
Lousy parenting, however, is very different from murder. While the jury and judge seemingly had trouble with that distinction in 1994, the latter knows reasonable doubt when he sees it. Donahue's arrest earlier this year for the strangulation murder of another Buffalo woman, Joan Giambra, later in 1993 led LoTempio to ask police to dig out the crime-scene evidence from the DeJac case.
New DNA tests not available at the time of her trial showed a high probability that Donahue's skin cells were found in three places in Crystallynn's bedroom. In his ruling, D'Amico said it was impossible to ignore the potential impact of the evidence on the case, including LoTempio's cross-examination of Donahue, who testified for the prosecution after being granted immunity.
Despite conceding that the DNA likely belongs to Donahue and that DeJac would not return to prison even if convicted at a new trial, Erie County District Attorney Frank Clark said prosecutors plan to put the case before another jury.
Clark contrasted the case with last spring's exoneration of Anthony Capozzi, who had served more than 20 years in prison after being convicted of two rapes that new DNA tests showed were committed by Altemio Sanchez, who later confessed to three murders and at least a dozen rapes dating back to 1981.
While the presence of Donahue's skin cells in Crystallynn's room and body shows that he could have killed her -- and at the very least, did something horrible -- it does not prove DeJac's innocence, Clark said before and after D'Amico's decision.
During the Nov. 20 hearing, LoTempio guaranteed an acquittal.
"What they're suggesting is that there's some excuse for a 40-year-old man's DNA being mixed with her blood on the wall, on a bed sheet and in the naked body of a 13-year-old girl," LoTempio said.
The futility of trying to downplay the new evidence implicating Donahue showed through during the Nov. 20 hearing. Assistant District Attorney J. Michael Marion tried to slough off Donahue chasing DeJac and a new suitor, Michael Nichter, to her home, through several taverns and finally to outside Nichter's home, where Donahue put a knife to his rival's throat.
"She deliberately hugged a man in front of Donahue," Marion said incredulously. "I wonder how many men have not had a jealous response, an angry response, in a situation like that." And this:
"Yes, he had a little knife that he held up to the man's neck," Marion said, his voice verging on a chuckle. "Mr. Donahue was concerned that Mr. Nichter was taking advantage of Ms. DeJac."
What a guy.
"They're talking about Donahue being a nice guy -- he's across the street," Ed Girard said after the hearing, gesturing toward the Erie County jail, where Donahue, who police also suspect in a similar 1975 killing, has been held since being charged with Joan Giambra's murder.
Clark said his office will reinvestigate the case before proceeding, leaving open the possibility that DeJac will never face another jury.
DeJac is living in a new neighborhood, rebuilding her life with Peters and their teen sons a few miles from where it all came apart.
Meanwhile, Sgt. Ed Girard is in North Carolina with his own wife and child, providing his family with an existence he never knew.
"I'm glad the truth finally came out," he said. "I just wish I could have been there."
The number of places in Niagara Falls where you can go to see live music has dwindled over the past few years, particularly if you're not on the property of the Seneca Niagara Casino.
Part of that stems from the steady decrease in the number of nightspots in the city, a consequence of a decreasing population, a stagnated economy and ever-increasing taxes and regulations, most dramatically demonstrated by the statewide smoking ban.
Another factor has been stringent enforcement by The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, which keeps tabs on live venues to make sure owners are paying the required fees if bands perform music written by others.
Such cover bands have long dominated the area scene, attracting audiences who care more about hearing their favorite songs than about who is playing them.
Anyone who wants to hear anything original has much more limited options. There's the sporadically open Dome Theater on Main Street, which hosted a number of national acts in its various incarnations, but not since August, according to its Web site. And that's about it.
If you want to take in a local act that plays its own compositions, the only option is to head to Buffalo, where Mohawk Place and Nietzsche's serve up an eclectic mix of pop, punk, folk and rock, while The Sportsmen's Tavern offers a more countrified flavor.
In an effort to stake out a niche in Niagara Falls, Club Joey on Pine Avenue plans to start staging regular indie-rock shows, starting with a Dec. 7 double bill featuring Spouse, a New England-based eight-member ensemble touring in support of its CD "Relocation Tactics," along with a Niagara Falls band, The Failyears.
Samples of both bands can be found online through a Google search.
There's no cover charge. Club Joey owner John Diletti said he hopes to put on live shows at least once a month, more frequently if it catches on.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Dec. 4 2007 |