Kurzan’s pro bono legal team is also asking Riverside County Dist. In an election season where one of the few issues that seems to have any traction against Newsom or Democrats is crime, pardoning murderers probably isn’t high on the governor’s to-do list. I asked the governor’s office about Kruzan, but it won’t comment on the clemency process. “I think without the pardon, human spirit is going to forever be in pain, because mine was.”Ĭalifornia Sex trafficked and imprisoned, California woman wins freedom after long fightĪfter nearly a decade in prison for crimes related to being sex trafficked as a minor, Keiana Aldrich was released Thursday night And human beings hurt people and we make mistakes and it’s terrible, but the beauty about being human is that we are able to overcome it and transform our lives and allow our true human spirit to thrive,” said Ralston. “The message is that your mom is a monster. She thinks Summer deserves the freedom of a pardon as much as her mom - so we don’t pass the trauma of our callousness on to another generation. Ralston said she was surprised by how much the clemency meant to her family as well, relieving them of a weight too. It didn’t change my life, it doesn’t exonerate me from what I’ve done, it doesn’t expunge my record, but it did something for my soul, and I think Sara needs that too.”
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“And I think that was the last piece that I needed to really free me in my heart and in my soul. “I was able to help so many people, but I could not help myself in getting past the burden for the crime that I had committed, and the family that I feel like I broke apart, until the day the governor called,” she told me recently. Until that moment, she didn’t fully understand what it would mean to her, she said. He was calling to let her know he had signed her pardon. In January, sitting in her office at Cal State Fullerton where she is director of a program for formerly incarcerated people, she received a call she thought was a prank.
Like Kruzan, she was convicted of murder and served more than two decades. It is grief and torment that Romarilyn Ralston understands. “Definitely I don’t trust a lot of people.” “I feel like I have just kind of built my life on this quick sand, repeating patterns, repeating trauma,” she told me. It’s the psychic burden that weighs on her, a different kind of prison, a poison to her ambition and well-being. This month, her memoir, “ I Cried to Dream Again,” was released, detailing with scorching honesty what she has been through.īut nothing she does seems enough to overcome that night in the hotel room, she said. She’s pushed ahead anyway, becoming a national advocate for reforming laws that let kids be treated like adults, and that ignore the abuse of trafficking when it comes to sentencing. It shows up in the obvious ways, like when she tries to get an apartment or a job and the background check turns into a giant roadblock. But what happened next may be worse - because it’s on us.Ĭalifornia After sexual assault: A guide to the exams, your rights and your choices She was so scared and shocked after she fired the gun that she fled barefoot, leaving her purse behind. But everything went wrong, and Kruzan ended up shooting and killing Howard in the honeymoon suite of a cheap motel, where Howard had been about to sexually assault her with a painful massage tool that he had used on her many times before. Thinking she’d found true love with a man named Johnny, and fearful of his ex-con uncle, she agreed to help them rob Howard. Over the next years, he hurt her, sold her, and left her feeling like she was unable to inhabit her own body and unable to escape it. Better than going home and being punched in the face by her mom, anyway.īy the time Kruzan was 13, George Gilbert “G.G.” Howard, the 31-year-old man in the Mustang, was her abusive pimp, forcing her to have sex with 11 men on her first night on the streets in Hollywood and Orange County. She’d never seen a car like that, and the thought of the cool treat on the hot day was irresistible. Kruzan was 11, poor and abused, walking home in the speck of a place known as Rubidoux, in Riverside County, when a man pulled up beside her in a red Mustang and offered to buy her that ice cream. Why she hasn’t received that pardon is a mystery to me. Gavin Newsom so Summer can grow up knowing that we, the people of California, forgive her mother’s crimes and acknowledge the indifference and racism on our part that allowed Kruzan to be treated like a throwaway Black girl. Sara Kruzan makes sure her daughter Summer Reign-Justice never wants for ice cream, because it was a triple dip of mint chip and rocky road that led Kruzan to murder and prison.īut she also wants to make sure Summer has something more substantial to protect her future: a pardon for Kruzan from Gov.
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