At 17, She Gave Up Her Son. Sixty Years Later, She Found Him on Death Row.

Sandra never knew what happened to the child she had at 17.

Growing up in a respected, church-going, middle-class family in the South, her parents were dismayed when she told them she was pregnant. This was the early 1960s. “To get pregnant out of wedlock and while you were still that young was a stigma,” Sandra said. A baby also threatened her future ambitions: She was an outstanding student, a top basketball player, and lead clarinetist in her school band. Her parents were firm; the child should be given up for adoption. “I wasn’t going to fight it,” she said.

The family kept the baby a secret, sending Sandra to New York City to give birth. She stayed at a home for unwed mothers and on January 3, 1963, delivered a boy at the municipal hospital in Queens. He weighed 7 pounds, 13 ounces, according to the birth records, an “alert” and “responsive” baby with “curly black hair, dark brown eyes, and a medium complexion.” She named him Barry. Then he was gone.

For the next several years, Sandra didn’t dwell on the child she gave up. “Or maybe I purposely put it out of my mind so that I could move on,” she said. She graduated high school, went to college and got married, choosing her career over raising children. At a time when few women were working on Wall Street, let alone Black women, she found success in international banking. “I was good at it,” she said. And it gave her a chance to travel the world.

Nevertheless, as she approached her 30th birthday in 1975, Sandra found herself yearning to know what had happened to her child. The adoption remained a closely guarded secret even within her own family. (She agreed to be interviewed on the condition that she would not be identified by her real name.) But she did tell her husband. “And he asked me, would I like to find him?”

Sandra called the group home and the hospital in Queens. But New York’s stringent adoption record laws blocked her at every turn. It was not until decades later, in 2019, that the state would amend its adoption regulations, giving adoptees a right to obtain a copy of their birth certificate upon turning 18. By then, Sandra had long left the city and moved back south.

On October 26, 2022, she heard a knock at her front door. As she recalls, she was in the process of booking a vacation — her first big trip since losing her husband of 50 years. “I had just started to get myself together,” she said. But her world was about to turn upside down again.

The visitor was an investigator from the Capital Collateral Regional Counsel’s Office in Florida. She carried a copy of her son’s birth certificate, along with a handful of other records. She told Sandra that her son wished to be in touch with her. Was she open to that?

Elated, Sandra said yes. It was only when they sat down at her breakfast nook that the woman told her that her son was in prison. His name was Richard Barry Randolph, and he was on Florida’s death row.

Three years later, Sandra still struggles to find words to describe that moment. Her excitement turned to shock, then disbelief, then horror. Before leaving her house, the investigator warned that if Sandra planned to read news coverage of the crime, she should keep in mind that it did not reflect the whole story. Her son was no longer the same person he’d been. Sandra went online soon afterward. “That’s when I lost it,” she said.

The news stories said that he raped and murdered a 62-year-old woman at a Florida convenience store in 1988. The more she read about his case, she confessed, “I wasn’t sure I wanted to know him.”

“I’ve never had anyone in my family do anything like this. Never had anyone in my family incarcerated — definitely not on death row,” she said. The violence of his crime made her want to disavow him. “For me to say, ‘That’s my child’ was like, ‘Oh no.’ And that’s just the way I felt at the time. I’ve since changed my mind.”

A few weeks later, Sandra got a letter from her son in the mail. It was handwritten and read like he had carefully planned what to say. He wanted her to know that he wasn’t angry at her for giving him up — but he did want to know why. His childhood had been painful. Case records described his adoptive parents as ill-equipped to raise him; his mother drank heavily and his father was physically abusive. But he wanted to make clear that he didn’t blame Sandra. “He said that he didn’t hold it against me,” she said.

“The idea of giving him up for adoption was so that he would get a better home,” Sandra said. Instead, he’d been traumatized. According to the lawyers, her son had developed a serious problem with crack cocaine, which helped pave the way to his crime. But the explanation felt inadequate. Plenty of people struggled with addiction without committing such violence, she thought. “I don’t know what caused him to do that,” she said. Yet she found herself thinking, “What can I do to help you?”

In October 2025, a few days before her 80th birthday, Sandra answered a call from her son. By then, they had been talking for nearly three years. “They just signed the warrant,” he said — and she knew from their previous conversations what this meant. Florida’s governor had set an execution date. He was scheduled to die by lethal injection on November 20.

“‘I want you to stay strong,’” Sandra recalled him saying. “And then he apologized for it being my birthday week.”

Today, Richard Randolph is 63 years old and has been on death row for nearly 37 years. He converted to Islam decades ago and took the name Malik Abdul-Sajjad. Barring last-minute intervention, he will die by lethal injection on Thursday night at Florida State Prison in Raiford — the 17th person killed in the state’s execution chamber this year.

Florida has led a resurgence of executions across the country in 2025. Since May, it has averaged about two executions per month, far outpacing any state in the country. Although Florida has always been a leading death penalty state — it has the second largest death row in the U.S. — the current execution spree is unprecedented. “We had one last week and then this week and then there’s another one in December,” said capital defense attorney Maria DeLiberato, former executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, in a phone call on Monday. On Tuesday night, Florida announced yet another execution date for December. If all the executions go through, the state will end the year having killed 19 people — more than the previous 10 years combined.

The execution spree is the handiwork of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has presided over a systemic dismantling of the legal framework that once governed Florida’s death penalty. He has transformed the state Supreme Court, handpicking judges willing to discard long-standing precedents, including critical guardrails to prevent wrongful executions. Meanwhile, DeSantis’s position gives him more power than most to carry out death sentences. While other states require courts to schedule execution dates at the request of a state attorney general or local district attorney, in Florida the governor can do it himself. “He just picks somebody,” DeLiberato says, “and then 30 days later they’re dead.”

The executions have been driven by politics. DeSantis reactivated Florida’s death chamber in 2023 — just a few months before announcing his run for president. It was part of a broader death penalty push triggered in part by the long-awaited conviction of Nikolas Cruz, who slaughtered 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. Prosecutors had refused to allow Cruz to plead guilty to avoid the death penalty, insisting on a costly, protracted capital trial, only for jurors to reject a death sentence, opting instead for life without parole.

Today, Florida only requires eight jurors to send a defendant to die.

DeSantis seized on the backlash. Florida had only recently reformed its death penalty law to require juries to unanimously agree on a death sentence. For much of its history, a defendant could be sent to death row by a vote of just 7 to 5. But in 2016, the state Supreme Court declared the statute unconstitutional, and lawmakers reformed the law to bring Florida in line with other states, requiring all 12 jurors to agree. After learning that three jurors held out against a death sentence in Cruz’s case, conservative lawmakers accused the holdouts of “derailing the full administration of justice” — and DeSantis vowed to change the law back to the way it was before. In 2023, he signed legislation to lower the threshold. Today, Florida only requires eight jurors to send a defendant to die.

Donald Trump’s reelection has since generated what DeLiberato describes as a “perfect storm.” U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has spent the year carrying out orders to aggressively pursue the death penalty on all fronts, with her home state quick to comply. Florida is now making a name for itself as “the deadliest state in the country,” DeLiberato said. “And that’s just something they’ve decided to own.”

Florida’s capital defense lawyers have been unable to hold back the tide of DeSantis’s execution spree. For Malik’s attorney, Marie-Louise Samuels Parmer, a veteran lawyer at the Capital Collateral Regional Counsel, his death warrant came just weeks after the execution of her longtime client Victor Jones, the 13th man put to death this year. Notice of the warrant arrived at 4:59 p.m. on October 21. The Florida Supreme Court set an expedited scheduling order to fast-track any final litigation. Whereas other states provide months or even years from a death warrant to execution, Florida gives 30 days.

Samuels Parmer was comparatively new to Malik’s case when her client learned the identity of his biological parents in 2022. She hoped the discovery might give him a shot at getting back into court based on new evidence. The adoption records unlocked a story that his jury never heard. Although the sole witness at his sentencing trial testified that Malik had been adopted, the witness erroneously said his birth parents were college students — “and that’s as far as we know about his early life.” To Samuels Parmer, it was clear that her client’s traumatic childhood set him on a tragic path. She firmly believed that if he’d been raised in a family more like Sandra’s, “he never would have ended up on death row,” she said.

There was a lot that Malik’s trial attorney could have learned about his client’s upbringing if he’d had the time or motivation to investigate it. If Malik’s case were to be tried today, it would likely take at least two years to go to trial — and his defense team would include at least two lawyers and a mitigation specialist, who would investigate his early life for any signs of trauma, neglect, abuse, or mental illness. But that’s not how things worked in 1989. Malik was tried five months after the murder and represented by a court-appointed attorney who insisted on working alone. At a post-conviction hearing years later, the lawyer conceded that he presented “not much of a defense at all.”

Yet the jury was split on his punishment, voting 8 to 4 in favor of the death penalty. The jury was majority white, with only four Black jurors, although it is unclear from the available record whether this included alternates. In their challenges to Malik’s death sentence, his attorneys have pointed to the divided vote as proof that his life could have been spared if not for his defense attorney’s failures. But Florida courts have disagreed.

As Malik’s execution nears, there is no remaining venue to ask for mercy. Any decision to spare his life would have to come from DeSantis: the same man who set his execution date in the first place. While other states give the condemned a chance to file a clemency petition close to their execution date — with some clemency hearings open to the public — this is not the case in Florida. In fact, many of the people now facing execution had their clemency review years, even decades, ago.

“Mr. Randolph is not the same person who was sentenced to death in 1989.”

Malik’s clemency application was submitted in 2014. Since then, his attorneys argue, the case for mercy has only become stronger. “Mr. Randolph is not the same person who was sentenced to death in 1989,” Samuels Parmer wrote in a legal filing last month. He is a “model inmate,” with no rule infractions over more than 14 years. He is also a mentor among the younger men on death row. And he has family who supports him, including his newfound relatives. In addition to his birth mother, he recently connected with a younger brother on his biological father’s side. That brother was willing to travel from California to meet Malik this week. But the prison denied his visit.

Florida’s execution assembly line has left little opportunity for the public to learn about the individuals being killed in its death chamber. But the cases are emblematic of the death penalty as a whole. While Malik’s story is unique in some ways, the problems in his case are all-too familiar, hallmarks of a “modern” death penalty that remains stuck in the past.

Richard Barry Randolph in an undated photo. Courtesy of the legal team of Malik Abdul-Sajjad

The city of Palatka sits on the St. Johns River, some 60 miles south of Jacksonville, a “rural band of the state that is reminiscent of the South of the 1950s,” as one news article put it in 1994. Once known for its paper mill, a 55-acre facility that provided critical jobs while filling the river and air with pollutants, the population in 1988 was roughly 11,000 people, about half of them Black. A 20-foot Confederate monument stood on the lawn of the county courthouse, with an inscription on its base: “The principles for which they fought will live eternally.”

In August of that year, 62-year-old Minnie Ruth McCollum arrived at the Handy Way convenience store in East Palatka, across the river from downtown. She usually arrived at 5:30 a.m. to open the store at 6, going out to prepare the gas pumps before customers started to arrive. But when employees got to the store just past 7 that morning, they found the doors locked. Police would force their way in to find McCollum in a pool of blood and undressed from the waist down. She was alive but had been badly beaten and was unable to speak beyond a moan. She died at the hospital several days later.

A suspect was identified almost immediately: 26-year-old Richard Randolph, known as Barry. He once worked at the store, and was seen by three witnesses leaving that morning. His girlfriend, who later testified for the state, said he had shown up at her house later that morning driving McCollum’s car.

According to the case records, Malik gave two statements confessing to police that same day. The interviews were not recorded. Instead, officers took notes on what he said. Investigators said he rode there on a bike that morning with a plastic water pistol and a plan to rob the store. He waited until he thought McCollum was at the gas pumps to dash inside but ran into her unexpectedly. He savagely beat her, then sexually assaulted her, giving a nonsensical explanation for the latter: No one would believe he was capable of such a thing. “I’m not sure what to say. I’m ashamed,” he reportedly told police.

McCollum’s murder took place amid a contentious election season in Palatka, the seat of Putnam County. The local sheriff, who had been in office since the 1950s, was running for reelection while mired in a sexual harassment scandal. According to media stories at the time, he gave a press conference after McCollum’s murder that would raise the ire of the NAACP. He said he had been asked whether the murder in Palakta might be linked to a convenience store robbery elsewhere in the county. Claiming to quote a Black man, the sheriff answered, “It don’t make no difference; those Puerto Ricans and n-ggers is all alike anyhow.”

As the trial approached in February 1989, newly elected Florida State Attorney John Tanner announced that he would “personally prosecute” Malik, calling the murder “a case of significant impact on the county.” Tanner, a former defense lawyer and bombastic born-again Christian, had been elected the previous fall on a vow to go after drug dealers and pornography, while pledging that his office “will not be used for political purposes.” But he immediately came under fire for his unlikely relationship with Ted Bundy, whom Tanner had visited on death row dozens of times as part of a prison ministry program. As Bundy’s January 1989 execution approached, Tanner was accused of trying to delay the execution, leading to rumors of a recall. Some questioned his commitment to the death penalty itself.

Malik’s case became a shield against the political attacks. “We’re putting the thugs on notice, if they harm or rape a convenience store clerk or any other citizen, we’re going to seek the maximum punishment,” Tanner announced at the trial. “If they kill their victims, we’re going to put them in the electric chair.”

Malik’s case became a shield against the political attacks.

Like many death penalty defendants in that era, Malik was represented by a lawyer who would become notorious in his own right: assistant public defender Howard Pearl. Pearl presented no witnesses during the guilt phase of the trial; when it came time for his closing statement, he repeatedly conceded his client’s guilt, prefacing his remarks by expressing admiration for Tanner. “We’ve been friends for years,” he said, “and he has certainly acted in this case in a gentlemanly and professional manner.”

Post-conviction attorneys would later find evidence that Pearl enjoyed an uncomfortably cozy relationship with law enforcement agencies. At the time of the trial, Pearl had been designated as a “special sheriff’s deputy” in a nearby county — a position he’d held since 1970. Although Pearl explained that the sole purpose was to be allowed to carry a concealed weapon, he did not disclose his position to his clients.

Pearl said that he deliberately chose to work alone, rejecting any need for a second lawyer, which is standard in today’s capital case.

But most devastating for Pearl’s clients was his approach to defending them in the courtrooms where they went on trial for their lives. At a 1997 post-conviction hearing in Malik’s case, Pearl said that he deliberately chose to work alone, rejecting any need for a second lawyer, which is standard in today’s capital cases. “I was sole counsel,” he said. “No one ever sat with me. I did not permit it.”

Pearl did not investigate Malik’s case for mitigating evidence. Instead he followed his usual modus operandi: Rather than put witnesses on the stand who might do a poor job on cross-examination, he relied on a psychologist to interview his client, get names of people who might be important, and incorporate any information they might provide into his own testimony. “He selects those things which he feels are relevant to the testimony he wants to give,” Pearl explained.

Such an approach is shockingly inadequate compared to the mitigation investigations in most modern death penalty trials. Asked at the post-conviction hearing if he considered sending an investigator to learn more about his client’s life with his adoptive family in New York, Pearl said no. “I have never done that. And I would not. If I thought it was that important, I would have gone myself.”

Yet his assessment of what counted as important evidence in the case was dismissive. There were questions surrounding the sexual assault — a major factor in the case, especially in a prosecution of a Black man charged with killing at white woman. But Pearl didn’t seem to agree. Given the violence of the rest of the crime, “whether or not he raped her was not really all that important.”

As Sandra got to know her son over the past few years, she realized there were times when they lived within a few short miles of one another in New York City. “He could have seen me and I could have seen him and not known,” she said.

Malik’s adoptive father worked as a cab driver in the city, while his mother worked at an insurance company. Although they’d been thrilled to bring a baby home, it was an unhappy household. “There was chaos, there was confusion, there was abuse,” one expert witness testified at Malik’s 1997 post-conviction hearing. Case records show that Malik struggled emotionally from the start, having trouble sleeping, throwing “temper tantrums,” and biting his fingers and hands.

The trauma that stems from adoption was not as well understood as it is today. According to Malik’s adoptive father, who testified at the hearing, he and his wife told Malik that he was adopted at the direction of a book recommended by the adoption agency. But the revelation was devastating — and his parents struggled to handle the fallout. They divorced when Malik was 10. After living with his mother for a time, he moved in with his father, who is described in case records as demanding and brutal in his discipline: “tying him and beating him with his hands, a broomstick, and a belt.”

A bright spot in Malik’s life was his brother, Jermaine, who was born after his father remarried. Despite their age difference, the two formed a tight bond. Jermaine remembers looking up to his brother; in a phone call, he said Malik instilled in him a love of music, which inspired him to become a DJ for awhile. And while Jermaine remembers Malik starting to get in trouble as he got older, he also tried to set a good example. “He always did that away from me,” he said. “Always taught me the right and wrong things to do.”

Malik eventually left New York for North Carolina, where he met the girlfriend who would later testify against him at trial. As she would tell the jury, he was “a nice young man” when they met. But things changed when they moved to Florida, where he “started hanging out with the wrong crew,” she said. “I don’t know what happened to him.” He became quick to anger, “wanting to fight.”

Addiction was a big part of the problem. Although his trial expert testified that Malik struggled with crack cocaine, post-conviction attorneys unearthed further evidence showing that he had been on the drug the morning of the murder. His adoptive father, who also moved his family to Florida upon retiring in 1985, recalled finding Malik asleep in his car one morning and knowing something was wrong. He testified that he would have been willing to take the stand at the trial “in a heartbeat.” But Malik’s lawyer never contacted him.

Jermaine concedes that their father was harsh with Malik. But he also remembers him being devastated by the death sentence. Jermaine was 12 years old when he attended the sentencing in 1989 with his father and uncle, a New York police officer. “We drove up to Palatka and heard the verdict,” he said. “And that was the first time I ever seen my dad cry.”

Jermaine has visited and kept in touch with Malik over his years on death row. They talk about their families and follow sports. After the New York Knicks were eliminated from the NBA playoffs last year, he recalled, laughing, “I got an email with nothing but sad emojis on it.”

Florida does not allow family of the condemned to witness the execution.

Jermaine’s last visits with his brother have taken place behind glass. He could not attend the execution if he wanted to: Florida does not allow family of the condemned to witness. In the hours leading up to the execution, he’ll be at the country club in Lakeland, Florida, where he works as a chef — the same place he was where he heard about the warrant.

Meanwhile, Malik will never have a chance to meet his other brother, the son of his biological father, Hayves Streeter Sr. As with Sandra, Malik’s lawyers tracked down Streeter in California, but he fell out of touch. His son, Hayves Streeter Jr., was at work in San Diego last month, preparing for an all-hands meeting with his staff, when he got a phone call from a member of Malik’s legal team, asking about his father. And that’s how he learned he had a brother on death row.

“Whatever I was doing,” he said, “I was stuck in that spot.” His father, a nuclear engineer who married three times, had never said anything about having another son. It was not until he was in the throes of an aggressive form of dementia that he made a comment that struck Hayves as bizarre. “He made mention that, ‘Hey, you might have a brother,’” he said. “I kind of laughed it off.” His father said that the man was in jail, which made Hayves worry that he might be getting scammed for money. But then, he said, his father was saying a lot of things that didn’t make sense at the time.

“We’ve got to get years of information to each other in this short amount of time.”

On the phone with the legal team, Hayves realized what his father was saying had been real. In the weeks that followed, he received phone calls from Malik. They asked each other questions and shared whatever they could. He tried to get permission to visit Malik before his execution but was denied. In one of their last phone calls, they were allowed to talk longer than usual — 20 minutes — and covered as much ground as possible. “We’ve got to get years of information to each other in this short amount of time,” he said. “So we’re just shooting questions off left and right, trying to make the most of it, because neither one of us knew when the guard was gonna say, ‘All right, it’s time.’”

Sandra once hoped to meet her son in person too. As his execution approached, she was still grappling with the question of why his life turned out the way it did. It is especially painful when she looks at her nieces and nephews. “They’re successful, happy, married with their own families,” she said. She doesn’t expect to find an answer. But it will be harder once the state takes her son’s life.

Malik’s lawyers arranged for Sandra to visit him before his execution. She planned to fly out this week. But she canceled the visit days before, saying she was having health issues. In our phone call, she said she did not want to see him on the day he was scheduled to die — and he did not want her to see him like that either. Last night, on the eve of the execution, Sandra was at home instead.

“I don’t want to think about it,” she said. “But I know I’m going to have to.” She knows it will affect her, but she’s afraid to find out how. “I really don’t want to think about it.”

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