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Family members, elected officials and friends are opposing the release of two men who were convicted of the 1980 killing of 16-year-old New York honors student Paula Bohovesky.
Both LaBarbera and McCain were convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life for the murder.
Last month, a parole board voted to release LaBarbera in July. McCain had an interview with the Board of Parole the week of June 10. The Board has two weeks to make a decision about his release.
LaBarbera and McCain have spent the last 38 years in prison. The two men were denied parole seven times since they first became eligible for parole in 2005,FOX Newsreports.
“The parole board has lost its way,” Rockland County Executive Ed Day tells PEOPLE. “People are angry and they feel pain and betrayed.”
“They hunted her down and they caved her head in with a piece of concrete,” he says. “She was raped. It doesn’t get much more brutal than this. And we are releasing these people into the community. Put yourself in the last five minutes of her life and how helpless and scared she was. Think about Paula’s last moments in life and do the right thing.”
Robert McCain.New York State Department of Corrections
Day says both men have never expressed remorse for the killings.
“No genuine remorse, no public accountability has been done,” he says. “What gives them the right to breathe free air? How can you grant them freedom?”
“Neither one of them has taken responsibility and neither one of them has shown remorse,” Paula’s mother, Lois Bohovesky, toldFox News.
Over 1,200 people attended a vigil and march Saturday in the hopes that Governor Andrew Cuomo would step in. And last week, Bohovesky’s niece Abigail Bohovesky, released a video calledSay Somethingurging the Governor to intervene.
“We are asking him to ask the parole board to revisit this decision,” says Day. “It is wrong and must be overturned.”
Cuomo, whose office did not return a call for comment, can’t overrule parole decisions, theRockland/Westchester Journal Newsreports.
Richard LaBarbera.New York State Department of Corrections
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Day says friends, family and the community don’t plan to give up.
“We are going to keep putting pressure on the Governor,” he says. “The parole board needs to be totally revamped. This is not justice. They are supposed to be a purveyor of justice and this has become a perversion of justice.”
“She loved art, and was a good kid, just a sweetheart,” he says about Bohovesky.
source: people.com
