Stanley "Tookie" Williams and his Forgotten Victims

Snoop Dogg, Farrakhan rally supporters as Crips co-founder faces execution December 13th for murder of four in 1979.


Louis Farrakhan with Williams at San Quentin

Alvin Owen, Thsai-Shai Yang, Yen-I Yang, and Yee Chen Lin.

These are the names of the people Tookie Williams killed in 1979 then mocked as they lay dying. The co-founder of the most bloody gang empire in American history, the Crips, now faces execution on December 13th.

From Michelle Malkin:
Williams was convicted of murdering four innocent bystanders with a sawed-off shotgun in 1979. There was nothing peaceful or compassionate about the way Alvin Owen, Thsai-Shai Yang, Yen-I Yang and Yee Chen Lin died. Owen was a white teen-age clerk at a 7-11 convenience store, shot twice in the back of the head -- execution-style -- as he lay unarmed on the floor during a hold-up. A witness testified that Williams mocked the gurgling sounds Owen made as he lay dying. "You should have heard the way he sounded when I shot him," the witness quoted Williams.

The Yangs were Taiwanese immigrants who, along with their daughter Yee Chen Lin, were gunned down during a motel robbery two weeks after Owen died. Half of the daughter's face was blown off by the shotgun blasts, former L.A. County Deputy District Attorney Robert Martin told me in an interview this week. Williams called them "Buddhaheads," Martin recounted, and robbed them of petty cash.

I would post his victims' photos, but none exist on-line that I can find. Very little biographical information is available either.

However, search for "Tookie Williams" on Google and you'll get hundreds of sites (mostly Leftist) celebrating this unrepentant murderer [he has never expressed remorse for the killings or apologized to the victims' families] and his efforts to educate young people on gang violence.

Typical treatment from Talk Left:
Stanley (Tookie) Williams was the leader of the Crips in south central LA. He's been on death row for 23 years. While in jail, he became an anti-gang activist, wrote children's books and was nominated by a member of the Swiss Parliament for the Nobel Prize. In 1999, he was visited by Winnie Mandela.

Most sites you find while searching fail even to mention 17-year-old Owen, the Yangs, or their 12-year-old daughter, Chen Lin - all shot and killed by Williams. No celebrities pleading their cases.

Jamie Foxx starred in a film released in 2003 about the gang leader's life entitled Redemption. This biopic screened at Sundance to favorable reviews and Winnie Mandela even makes an appearance in it. Now, Snoop Dog plans to release a new song on Williams' behalf.


Still a Crip: Snoop Dogg at rally to save Williams

Fair enough. Snoop Dogg was once an active Crip gang member. He claims that Tookie helped him understand the cycle of violence that gangs promote and sustain. Has Snoop Dog renounced gang violence and his association with the Crips? Judge for yourself as Snoop explains in the 2003 hit song "P.I.M.P" with onetime drug courier, 50 Cent:

Yea bitch I got my now & later gators on
I'm bout to show you how my pimp hand is way strong
You dead wrong if you think that pimpin gonna die
12 piece with a 100 whores by my side
I'm down with that nigga 50 like I'm down with blue
F*ck cuz naw nigga motherf*ck you

I dont know what you heard about me
But a bitch cant get a blood up out of me
I drive a Cadillac wear a perm cuz I'm a G
And I'm a motherf*ckin C.R.I.P

(A partial list of songs by Snoop Dogg where he specifically glorifies the Crips within his lyrics can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

It appears Tookie's lessons have fallen on deaf ears. Snoop's "change of heart" is betrayed by his own words. A truly changed Snoop Dogg might have convinced many observers to reconsider this prisoner's fate.

Ironically, the one who may be betrayed ultimately by Snoop's insincere pleadings and glorification of Crip culture is Williams himself.

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"The usual moral distinctions between good and bad are simply drowned in a maudlin emotion in which we feel more sympathy for the murderer than the murdered, the adulterer than the betrayed, and where we have actually come to believe that the true guilty party - the one who caused it all is somehow the victim and not the perpetrator of the crime." --Robert Fitch