No doubt it was the most surreal, riveting near-death scene anyone in the sparse courtroom ever had witnessed.
The same way you lock your gaze onto a freak scene, an accident or a bearded lady.
A physically fit career soldier, in his mental prime, was being banished to the farthest corner of primitive civilization for the rest of his natural days — 40, 50 or more years from now.
If you ever have wondered what you would say to the world on the last day of your normal life, before you, a young man, were sent off, manacled, to prison until you were dead, Scott Allen Ansman got an acrid taste yesterday afternoon.
As if he were eating with the wrong end of his silverware, he sputtered and spat the odious words back in still-smoking, undigestible ashes.
Nothing to lose, he must have rationalized.
Mercy, mercy, his 3 closest family members — Mom, wife and sister-in-law — cried out in tiny, pillow-soft tones.
A scant glance at the sentencing judge would have told them snow would come first.
Reading the Judge
The extraordinary easel of unrequited family suffering that was spread out in the courtroom of Judge H. Chester Horn Jr. was noteworthy for a number of siren moments:
Elevated above eye level on his bench, as is traditional, Judge Horn studied the room inscrutably for the 65 minutes of the sentencing session.
Perhaps in his late 50s, he bespeaks elegance.
His square, rather regal, ruddy face is crowned with a generous thatch of wavy gray hair, parted perfectly, a rounded portrait making it clear who is in charge.
After Mr. Ansman’s relatives pledged their unquenchable love and fealty to the killer, forever, and Mr. Ansman lashed back at his punishers, the closing act was left for Judge Horn, who was equal to his assignment.
Espousing a minimalist approach, Judge Horn immediately extinguished Mr. Ansman’s slimmest hope.
Firmly, he declared in an admirably even tone — neither compassionate nor punitive — that never, not one single time, had the defendant expressed a trace of remorse for his hideous crime.
With crashing speed, Judge Horn pronounced the expected sentence, that Mr. Ansman is not to leave prison as long as he is alive.
No swift intakes of breath were espied.
Mothers’ Day — the Wrong Way
The script was formfully fulfilled, from Martha Lou Harris, the mourning 70-year-old mother of JoAnn Crystal Harris, who lovingly traced her daughter’s steps up and down life’s inevitable ladders, to Ms. Harris’s niece, Dechelle Richardson, who lavishly thanked the prosecutor while branding her aunt’s killer an “animal,” and finally to the other mourning mother, Marilyn Ansman.
Both mothers are widows of longstanding, Ms. Ansman budging her blocky walker along inches at a time.
Both weeping moms would have preferred to have suffered the last 2 years in the anonymity of privacy.
The aperatures in their hearts, caused by what one mother’s son did to the other mother’s daughter and unborn child, never can be closed as long as they are in this world, they vowed, humbly, stoutly, separately.
Before Mr. Ansman’s final explosive, acerbic address, the only sound heard from the temporarily unshackled prisoner — closely guarded by 4 County Sheriff’s deputies — the only sounds he emitted were repeated, distracting, almost annoying, sniffles, the kind caused by a runny-nosed person without access to tissues or sleeves.
The Jury Scarcely Paused
Life in prison without possibility of parole is the worst there is for a living person, he has realized for the 699 days he has been behind bars.
He is a criminal forever, in the official lexicon of the land.
No traffic school that he can attend to expunge a speeding ticket.
Likely, even though he only is 36 years old, yesterday afternoon, a little before 3 o’clock, would be the final time in his whole life he would have the luxury of an audience of regular persons, not fellow convicts.
And he meant to desperately squeeze the orange until it stopped dripping blood.
He daubed each of his punishes with despicable splashes of the label “liar.”
His self-pitying, rusty-nails speech — “my wife will have to raise our children alone, just another welfare case” — drew down a tear-stained curtain on his double-decker crime whose denouement, many believed, never was in doubt.
A jury swiftly ruled last spring that 25 months ago tomorrow, Friday, Aug. 24, 2007, Mr. Ansman, a sergeant in the National Guard, resorted to almost unimaginable brutality in battering to death his pregnant girlfriend — evidently because she was pregnant, but not, unbeknownst to him, with his baby.
The prosecutor, Dept. Dist. Atty. Joe Markus, proved that Mr. Ansman spent weeks on a computer in search of ways to end the existence of the fetus.
Failing, Mr. Markus contended, the former Sgt. Ansman set out to do away with the mother, 29-year-old Ms. Harris, making sure this would be their final scene, repeatedly battering her with perhaps the wickedest weapon available, a baseball bat.
After slugging his 6 months pregnant girlfriend into bloody submission at the Culver City National Guard Armory, he apparently dragged her across the now-stained gymnasium floor.
Pausing, he called 9-1-1 to report the crime. After hanging up, he fastidiously began swabbing the gym floor clean of Ms. Harris’s blood, which he was doing when Culver City police arrived around 4:30 in the afternoon, just before Fiesta La Ballona would start next door.
Mr. Markus was outraged that Mr. Ansman — who was and is married, with 3 small children —chose to attend the floor instead of the dying Ms. Harris.
To the contrary, claimed Mr. Ansman, Ms. Harris, allegedly fueled by a drug intake, came after him at the Armory, and he managed to repel her with the aforementioned bat, a case of self-defense. The jury did not seem to take his assertion seriously. They required only 2 hours to convict last May after a 3-week trial.
