Early release opposed for terminally ill prisoner convicted in 1993 courthouse killing of Newark cop – NJ.com

The 1993 killing of a Newark police detective inside an Essex County courthouse drew national attention for the shocking and brazen nature of the crime: a plot that involved smuggling a .357 Magnum into a tightly secured sanctum of justice, with the intention of fatally silencing Det. John Sczyrek before he could testify at the drug trial of the shooter’s friends.

Three decades later, attention has again been focused on the notorious crime, with a hearing scheduled for Monday — in the same courthouse — on a petition for compassionate release of convicted killer Al-Damany Kamau, who is now 53 and wheelchair-bound with multiple sclerosis and other physical and mental illnesses. His release is vehemently opposed by the local law enforcement community and the slain officer’s family.

“His sentence was two life sentences, so whether his life ends six months from now or 30 years from now, he should be in jail,” said the detective’s widow, Cheryl Sczyrek.

Kamau was spared the death penalty following testimony that he was mentally ill and had been traumatized at a young age by seeing his biological father beat his mother.

Instead, he was sentenced to consecutive life prison terms without the possibility of parole for 75 years, and he has been serving his time at South Woods State Prison in Bridgeton, and at Cooper University Hospital in Camden, where his lawyers say he is frequently taken for treatment. Kamau, whose legal name was Eddie Lee Oliver Jr. at the time of the shooting, received his second sentence for wounding Sheriff’s Officer Ralph Rizzolo Jr. during the attack.

Monday’s hearing before state Superior Court Judge Ronald Wiggler in Newark comes after the state corrections commissioner, Victoria Kuhn, certified on Nov. 4 that Kamau was “medically eligible for consideration for Compassionate Release,” the documentation states. It was based on the conclusion of two state-appointed doctors that he was suffering from a terminal illness, meaning he had no more than six months to live.

Nonetheless, the petition is vehemently opposed by the Newark Department of Public Safety, the Fraternal Order of Police union, retired former colleagues, the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office, and the slain officer’s widow and daughter.

Shannon Sczyrek, who was 2 years old at the time, echoed others when she asked where was the killer’s compassion when he shot her father in the back of the head on June 3, 1993, on the 11th floor of what’s now known as Essex County Veterans Courthouse?

“He was shot execution style, he didn’t have a chance to fight for his life,” Shannon Sczyrek told NJ Advance Media.

She said her own baby girl will have her first birthday next month without her maternal grandfather present.

“It’s been my whole life, and it’s not just the big milestones,” Sczyrek said of her father’s absence. “For me, it was every day.”

She and her mother say they’re appalled that Kamau was even eligible to petition the court under the state’s 2020 compassionate release law, N.J.S.A. 30:4-123.51e, which is also intended to unburden the corrections department, and taxpayers, of the time and expense of providing terminal inmates’ medical care.

“As far as unburdening the state, this could have been unburdened years ago, when this was a death penalty case,” Cheryl Sczyrek said.

“The loss of him never went away,” she said, emotion creeping into her voice. “I’m still…It’s hard to put into words.”

The Department of Corrections did not respond to requests for comment.

Kamau’s sister, Tonya Campbell, did not try to justify her brother’s actions during a recent phone interview from her home in North Carolina, where she hopes to administer hospice care during what she expects to be the final weeks of his life.

Anyone who believes her brother will enjoy his time outside of state custody if he is released would be mistaken, said Campbell, who relocated from Newark to North Carolina as a child with her mother, stepfather and seven siblings in 1986, though her brother later returned to Newark as an adult.

Since Campbell resumed contact with her brother in 2015, she said his health has gone from nightmarish to worse. Already confined to a wheelchair due to MS, he was uncommunicative and refused to take his medicine, said Campbell and her husband, Teddy. The first time they laid eyes on him, his face was severely swollen from assaults by other inmates taking advantage of his mental and physical condition.

“He’s a target of a lot of predators,” Campbell said.

She said her brother falls or pushes himself out of bed and cannot move from the floor, in his cell and in the hospital. His mental health had deteriorated to the point that he was ingesting his own feces.

A bitter irony of her brother’s crimes, Campbell said, is that their stepfather, Clarence Philson, was a Newark Police officer, as was his brother, Edward. She said Philson married her mother when her brother was 5 or 6, and that Philson would commute to his police job and return to the family in North Carolina on weekends.

Campbell, 51, said her stepfather retired before the shooting, but that his brother was still on the force at the time. She said she plans to attend Monday’s hearing in person, and will read a letter expressing compassion for the Sczyrek family.

“I do have great sympathy,” said Campbell. But, she added, “You can’t take back what happened. It’s unexplainable, the whole situation.”

It was Campbell who initiated the petition process resulting in the commissioner’s certification and Monday’s hearing. Because Kamau did not have a lawyer, the case was referred to the Essex County regional office of the State Public Defender, where Diane Carl and Abigail Fisch, are handling the case.

Kamau’s cousin, Michael Paul Anderson, an economic civil rights activist who divides his time between Newark and Los Angeles, said he doesn’t condone Kamau’s crime, but that allowing him to die outside of custody would be a small but positive step toward unifying a world divided by racial, economic and other injustices.

“God bless both the families,” Anderson said over the phone from California. “Letting him die in prison does nothing for anyone’s memory.”

In a joint phone interview, Carl and Fisch, like Campbell, did not refute Kamau’s guilt or dispute the heinousness of the attack nearly 29 years ago, for which the accomplice who smuggled the gun into the courthouse and a getaway driver were also convicted and sent to prison, though for shorter terms.

Kamau’s lawyers said they understood the opposition to his release based on the pain he had inflicted on the family and the law enforcement community and the crime’s affront to civil society.

“But that’s not what this matter is about,” Carl said. “The statute doesn’t address the underlying crime. The statute was enacted solely to take into consideration the fact that the person is dying and could not possibly present a danger to anyone else.

Still, that’s still not acceptable to opponents of Kamau’s release.

Newark Public Safety Director Brian O’Hara said he was sending a letter to the judge this week expressing his opposition.

“We remember John Sczyrek every day,” O’Hara said.

Detective James Stewart Jr., president of Newark’s Fraternal Order of Police union, opposes Kamau’s release as well.

“We don’t believe that he has fulfilled his debt for the heinous act that he committed in 1993,” he said.

Stewart’s heart went out to Michelle Sczyrek’s widow, and the widows of all slain police officers. And Shannon Sczyrek, now a mother herself, had to grow up without her father. Who were they supposed to petition for their loss, Stewart wondered.

“They don’t have compassionate relief,” he said.

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Steve Strunsky may be reached at sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com