Is Closure Possible?

Brooks Douglass knows what it must have been like for the Oklahoma families to watch the death of Timothy McVeigh. He also knows why it was important that they see with their own eyes.

"It's going to hurt," he says. "And it'll hurt for a while. But I think ultimately they will be better off."

Douglass is an Oklahoma state senator who wrote what’s known as the state's "right to view" law. It allows family members of the person who was murdered can witness the execution, if they want to.

Douglass knows first hand about being a victim, and closure. Late one Monday afternoon in 1979, Douglass, then 17, was home with his parents and sister, getting ready for supper. There was a knock on the door; Douglass opened it to find two men, drifters named Steven Hatch and glen Ake, armed with guns and knives.

"Then they brought all of us to the living room, tied us hands and feet behind our back. All except for my sister. They tore the phones out. They sat down and ate the dinner my mom had been preparing. Then they took turns raping my twelve-year-old sister Leslie," says Douglass.

"I can still remember lying face down on the floor with my hands and feet tied behind my back and I can still smell and taste the carpet and then hearing myself say 'Please don’t kill us.' And if you’ve never had that happen to you can't understand what it’s like," he says.

Hatch and Ake ransacked the house, started their car, and then, before they left, shot each member of the family in the back.

Douglass and his sister survived. Their parents did not. Five weeks later the two men were caught. Then came 17 years of appeals, sentencing hearings, and re-sentencing hearings. Ake received life in prison; Hatch got the death penalty. Douglass, now a state senator, had helped to passed the 'right to view' law, and he was able to watch the execution.

Douglass says that witnessing that execution allowed him to close an agonizing chapter of his life. "For 17 years I had been living my life by someone else’s schedule and someone else's terms," he says. "A lot of people hate the word closure and all that. I like the word. I think its possible. I think you can have it."

But it doesn't come easy, and it doesn't come to everyone. Leslie Frizell, Douglass’ younger sister, says that she doesn't feel closure, even though she also watched Hatch’s execution.

"They just laid him down on the table, you know like I've laid down umpteen times for surgery, and then the IV started and then he went to sleep. And I just sat there and I was like 'That's it?'" she says.

She worries that the families that witnessed the McVeigh execution suffer the same painful disappointment. "If people think they are going to walk in there and have some sort great kind of closure by seeing somebody put to sleep, they may want to rethink it," she says.

"They still don’t have that child or that dad or that loved one or that brother," she says.

ut maybe this disagreement is just the point: Everyone heals differently. For Douglass, Frizell, and the families of Oklahoma City, peace comes on it's own terms, and in it’s own time.

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