BOY’S MOTHER LOVE.

Shannon News, 7 April 1925, Page 1

BOY’S MOTHER LOVE.

INSISTS “I BJLLIjEJD fILLM. '

SAN FRANCISCO, March 17. Los Angeles, the metropolis of Southern California, which is constantly figuring in first-page news for its sensations, has once more thrust itself into the effulgence of the national limelight by a strange tragedy, mother love having cast Harold (“Sonny”) Willis, a boy of but fifteen years in a queer role. “Sonny” has set out to convict himself of murder, and the authorities refuse to assist him. The public prosecutors, in fact, opposed him in his strange undertaking. But the lad was fighting to save his mother from a life in prison. The youthful defendant made up his mind when charged in the Juvenile Court for murder to plead guily and demand punishment for the killing of Dr. Benjamin H. Baldwin last April. “Sonny” got himself accused of murder, but it was only after county prosecutors and juvenile judges refused to take his "confession” seriously that his mother’s attorney, Samuel S. Hahn filed the complaint. Mrs Margaret B. Willis, the lad's mother, who was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Dr. Baldwin, also now opposes “Sonny’s” strange legal fight against himself. The boy visited his mother in the County Gaol, and she chided him for “telling.” “Why-did you tell?” she sobbed. “You have your whole life before you—tell them it’s not true.” But Mrs. Willis had been subpoanaed as a chief witness to support “Sonny’s” case against himself, and she was forced into the curious predicament iof being compelled to testify again her own son. In her trial she took the responsibility for the killing, pleading self-defence.

“I killed Dr. Baldwin. Why should my mother be made to sacrifice her life for me?” argues <r Sonny.” “Sonny,” said the shooting took place on an afternoon when he returned from school. He found his mother in a struggle with Dr. Baldwin, and to save her he shot him, he said. But the authorities doubt the boy’s story. “He’s a lying little gentleman —give him credit,” one veteran prosecutor said. “He wants to save j his mother. That’s quite natural.”