Sunday, Feb. 22, 1998 | 11 a.m.
She is a girl who went with dignity to identify her mother's body at the morgue. In court she minded her manners, even when photos of her mother's nude torso, dotted with stab wounds, were mounted on an easel for strangers.
The seventh-grader has thought long and hard about whether the man who did this should die himself - especially since he is Lawrence Singleton, a man better known for raping a California girl and chopping off her arms with an ax.
The jurors who found Singleton guilty of murdering Akiena's mother, Roxanne Hayes, will begin deciding Monday whether he should be executed. But Akiena already has decided for herself.
Singleton should not go to the electric chair for stabbing her mom to death, she says. He should go to prison for life. And this is why:
If this man asks for forgiveness before he's executed, God must grant it.
"Then he will go to heaven and have a better life. He shouldn't get that," Akiena said quietly, her chin down, as she sat on a courthouse bench last week.
Singleton already has had a chance of forgiveness. A decade ago, he was paroled in California after serving eight years for raping and mutilating a teen-age hitchhiker. Police predicted he would try to kill again.
Last February, he was arrested in Tampa after a house painter saw him struggling with Ms. Hayes. By the time police arrived, she was dead. Singleton told his jury she attacked him with a knife and he was trying to grab it when the blade plunged seven times into her body.
Akiena sat in the courtroom Friday with her two younger brothers and Clifford Tyson, who had been Ms. Hayes' live-in boyfriend for 10 years.
All four were dressed in black. They sat quietly in the second row listening to lawyers' closing arguments, and then the verdict convicting Singleton of first-degree murder. They heard enough to know the woman described in court wasn't the woman they knew at home.
Yes, she was a prostitute who went home with strange men. Yes, she sometimes used cocaine and spent her days on the street. And yes, she charged Singleton $20, performed oral sex on him and then died naked on his floor.
But her life with her family was far from the ugly and dangerous one that killed her.
"She believed in people. She valued human life," said Tyson, the father of her two young boys. "She had a crazy laugh. She'd crawl into dumpsters to save stray kittens. She'd lend money to anyone. Her kids were her joy."
A police vice officer who often arrested Ms. Hayes for prostitution described her as a kind and funny woman, never violent, who would wave when she caught their surveillance and sometimes cry when hauled off to jail.
And always, always, she talked about her children, Hillsborough County Sheriff's Cpl. Art Picard said.
"Her kids were her whole world," said Mary Jo Ciccarello, a social worker who met Ms. Hayes when she was put on court-ordered probation and remained friends with her until her death.
Four-year-old Malachi remembers playing this game with his mom:
"I love you," she'd say, holding him on her lap and poking him gently in the chest.
"No, I love you," he'd respond, punctuating the "you" with a poke to her chest.
"No, I love you," she'd say and poke, back and forth, until the game dissolved into tickles and laughter.
Eight-year-old Clifton remembers a playful mom who liked to laugh, a mom who took them to the park, to the state fair, to the YMCA.
He wants to be a professional golfer and recalls his mother's encouragement: "You can be whatever you put your mind to."
Clifton believes Singleton should die.
"He has no business killing kids' moms," Clifton said, his dark eyes shining.
Tyson believes Roxanne would have forgiven her killer, for everything except taking her from her children.
Akiena spoke quietly and looked away when talking about her mom.
She went along to the morgue one year ago to identify her mother's body. "Is that her?" she remembered asking. Then she squinched up her eyes and looked into the distance. The tears came later.
"She's the strong one," Tyson explained.
Akiena knew her mother was a prostitute. But she sees no need to defend her.
As she begins her teen-age years without her, she wants to remember her, "Loving everybody like she did. Helping people in need. Caring, always."
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