YORK, Pa. - Two white men convicted in the 1969 race-riot killing of a black preacher's daughter were sentenced yesterday to spend at least 4 1/2 and 9 years in prison.
York County Judge John C. Uhler handed down the sentences - 4 1/2 years to 10 years for Gregory H. Neff and 9 years to 19 years for Robert N. Messersmith - at the end of an emotional court hearing in which Messersmith leveled new accusations against former York Mayor Charlie Robertson. The former mayor was acquitted in October of charges that as a police officer he offered encouragement and bullets to the white gang members who killed Lillie Belle Allen.
Messersmith told 200 onlookers packed into the courtroom that he had not only seen Robertson hand out ammunition to four young men but that he had also watched him hand a rifle to Messersmith's best friend, Donald E. Altland, who committed suicide in April 2000, a day after detectives questioned him about Allen's death.
The statements from the handcuffed and shackled Messersmith - including his assertion that Altland fired the fatal shot and told him what he did with the deadly rifle - drew such a fiery, expletive-laden response from Allen's daughter that sheriff's deputies hauled the 44-year-old woman from the courtroom.
"What are you telling this for?" Debra Taylor screamed as other family members wailed and wept. "You are just as guilty. You killed that woman. You killed her."
Messersmith, 53, the former leader of the Newberry Street Boys gang, was accused of firing the shotgun blast that killed Allen. Witnesses testified during the month-long trial that he fired what seemed to be the first of hundreds of shots, including the one that felled Allen after she got out of the car to help her younger sister turn their car around and escape men with guns. Another witness told the jury that within weeks, he overheard Messersmith bragging that he had killed her.
Neff, 54, one-time leader of the rival Girarders gang, admitted to a grand jury last year that he had fired three shots at the white Cadillac in which Allen and her family had been riding.
While friends, family members and attorneys for the two men begged the judge for leniency - citing everything from Messersmith's hesitancy to use profane language or racial slurs to Neff's willingness to help others with their golf games - prosecutors and Allen's relatives asked for the maximum penalty of 10 to 20 years in prison. An all-white jury convicted both men in October of second-degree murder.
"I ask for your verdict to be stern - stern because it should be fair, it should be just, and it should show responsibility," said Michael Allen, who was 9 years old in July 1969 when his mother was gunned down at a railroad crossing on her way to a grocery store. Lillie Belle Allen, 27, of Aiken, S.C., was visiting relatives in York when she and her parents, younger sister and brother-in-law unknowingly strayed into a hostile white neighborhood at the height of the riots.
"I have already asked God to have mercy on the people who killed my mother," Michael Allen told the judge. "But I would expect that in their lifetime here on Earth, they be held accountable for what they did to my mother."
During a news conference after the sentencing hearing, prosecutor Thomas H. Kelley discredited Messersmith's claims as "the last gasps of someone about to go upstate," a reference to prison.
"He said, 'How can I get out of it?' This man's been doing this for 33 years," Kelley said. "What you heard today was a lot of blame foisting. I think you have to take everything he said today with a grain of salt."
Harold I. Goodman, the Allen family's attorney, said Messersmith's courtroom remarks contain at least a grain of honesty.
"Their defense had some truth to it: 'We were young, we were armed by police, we were told to kill black people, and we did,'" he said on the courthouse steps, quoting defense claims from the trial. "An entire block was deputized ... and the city of York and the Pennsylvania State Police, as entities, are responsible for her death by their action and inaction."
Attempts to reach Robertson and his attorneys yesterday were not successful.
Relatives of Lillie Belle Allen announced plans yesterday to file a civil rights lawsuit against York and to ask Pennsylvania Gov.-elect Edward Rendell to appoint a commission to investigate the York Police Department, the Pennsylvania State Police and "their failure to protect [Allen] and allow her to live a full and complete life," said Goodman, a Philadelphia-based civil rights attorney.