Woman Tries to Make a Difference on Streets Where Sister Was Slain : Oakland: Deborah Williams was killed as crowd cheered. Survivors want to rescue drug addicts.

By MICHELLE LOCKE

Jan. 2, 1994 12 AM PT

ASSOCIATED PRESS

OAKLAND — The day Teresa Williams heard a crack addict had been chased down and stabbed as a crowd of toughs cheered, she thought how easily it could have been her troubled sister dying in the street.

Then she found out it was.

On that day last August, Williams declared her own private war on drugs, vowing to return to the bleak neighborhood where her sister was murdered and open a center for drug-addicted women.

“I’ve just had enough,” she said.

Teresa also wants to organize a free clinic that offers classes in budgeting, good health habits, family counseling and motivation.

She wants churches to ask parishioners to “adopt” one woman, spending an hour a month with her to reinforce the message that the community cares.

It would be a fitting memorial for Deborah Leeann Williams. But it also would be a crowning irony of a life that started with so much promise and ended in so much ignominy--such a center might have saved its namesake.

Child of a politically active family, a trombone player so talented that the school gave her an instrument, Deborah was the first graduate of the East Oakland Community Learning Center, a Black Panther elementary school.

On graduation day 1974, tall and proud in a long, white dress, she declared, “One of the most important things I have learned . . . is what freedom means.”

The moment is captured on the front page of a yellowing, much-thumbed copy of the Black Panther newspaper, a remnant of the past--carefully wrapped in plastic--that Deborah Williams hung onto for nearly two decades.

“When she was homeless and on the street, she carried that newspaper with her,” Teresa Williams said.

It was the pinnacle of her life; the downward slope started in junior high.

“She started hanging out with the wrong crowd, being cool,” she said.

Once, she remembers Deborah “came in the house and she was begging for money . . . she said she needed money for cigarettes.” Teresa would watch her sister leave, penniless and hysterical.

“As an adult, I look back and it looks like it was more than cigarettes she was begging for. . . . I think that’s probably when she started on the streets.”

Then came a succession of abusive boyfriends and three children, one permanently hospitalized.

“When she started having babies . . . she’d use the kids to try to get money. (She’d say) ‘Can I borrow $20 to get the kids some diapers?’ And you knew if you gave her $20 she wouldn’t spend it on diapers.”

Sometimes Deborah Williams would enroll in a recovery program. Sometimes, she would enroll in college classes.

But then would come the inevitable relapse.

A year and a half ago, Teresa and her mother, Mary Williams, tried to get custody of Deborah’s children and put her in a recovery program.

“Deborah finally broke down, she (said), ‘I have a drug problem, I’m out of control, but I want to keep my kids. I’ll get in a rehab program, I’ll do whatever it takes,’ ” Teresa Williams said.

But there was no program.

On Aug. 11, Deborah Williams’ lopsided battle against drugs ended when she was chased out of her apartment building by a knife-wielding neighbor who told police she was angry at Williams for smoking crack in the hall.

At a street corner, Williams was surrounded by a crowd of youths, many of them suspected drug dealers, who tripped her, stomped her and egged on her attacker with cries of, “Kill her! Kill her!” witnesses said.

Stacey Camille Lee, the 19-year-old woman charged with murdering Williams, has said the killing would not have happened without the crowd’s interference.

“My client would never have been able to catch her,” defense lawyer Deborah Levy said of her nearly 200-pound client. “Who murdered this woman? I don’t think Stacey did; I think the crowd did.”

“That’s such a cop-out,” countered prosecutor Therese Drabec.

The trial is expected sometime next spring.

When Deborah Williams died, she was using the alias of Dione Wells, the name carried in news reports. “I looked for my sister’s name. I said, ‘Thank God, it’s not Deborah,’ ” Teresa Williams said.

Two weeks later, the family got the bad news in a midnight call from Deborah’s boyfriend.

Tears are not far away as Teresa Williams recalls how her sister died alone in a county hospital, but she blinks them aside.

“I don’t have time for that right now. I’m too busy trying to start something and do something positive,” she said in a recent interview at the modest Oakland home where she is bringing up her 8-year-old daughter. She and her mother share custody of two of her sister’s children.

Teresa Williams’ life has not been simple either. Like her sister, she became pregnant as a young woman, and her first three efforts to go to college ended dismally. But she always knew she wanted something more.

Now a graduate student in geophysics at UC Berkeley, she credits friends and faculty there with supporting her efforts to open the Deborah Leeann Williams center.

“Let’s try to listen to these people (drug addicts),” she said. “Let’s ask them what they need.” She wants to put addicts’ welfare money into special accounts that will pay bills automatically; she wants to encourage people in the neighborhood to report criminal activity to police.

And most of all, she wants to find a way to reach the women who, like her sister, “stop dreaming of something better.”