Cooey Isn't The Victim

There's been plenty of writing and reporting over the past few weeks on the scheduled execution of Richard Wade Cooey that refers to his kidnap, rape and murders of "...two University of Akron coeds."

Enough. The real victims have names.

Wendy Offredo and Dawn McCreery were simply wrapping up a night's work at the Brown Derby restaurant and were looking forward to a night of fun before turning in. It was simple until Cooey, buddy Clint Dickens and a friend thought it would be a hoot to drop chunks of concrete from a highway overpass onto the vehicles below.

Vehicles driven by people just like Wendy and Dawn. It was Wendy and Dawn in that car when the man-made rock crashed into their car. Cooey and company flocked to the scene like vultures, but at first they were the doves of peace -- offering to help, even driving the girls to use the phone to call their parents. Wendy and Dawn were found later, when it was too late for any help.


Cooey, 19, got a death sentence handed down by three judges; Dickens got life in prison thanks to the calendar and being under 18 at the time.

Wendy and Dawn had full lives ahead of them, both attending University, both working hard to make their way through the world. They were so typical of young women then and today: opportunities they had the power to make for themselves. Wendy and Dawn are your daughters, your sisters, your friends, your girlfriends, your mothers.

But they've been somehow lost in this equation as the attention of the legal system and the media following behind focuses on one of the men who victimized and are not victims. We must remember them, we should mourn their loss, we shouldn't forget their faces forever frozen in memory, we shouldn't describe them as just the "coeds."

What he took away from Dawn McCreery and Wendy Offredo and their families is the reason Richard Cooey is where he is. He's not in this situation because the law was stacked against him; judge after judge has heard the case, to the point where it is a new generation of judges and appeals panels that listen to the petitions of an even newer generation of public defenders who represent him. It is a new generation of prosecutors who represent Dawn and Wendy, and the families that have waited for what the justice system promised them more than two decades ago. It is a new generation of reporters who write the stories who need to remember behind the tale of a killer is the stolen hope and promise of two young women who deserve to be remembered for who they were, not what Richard Cooey turned them into.


On Tuesday morning, barring again any last-minute rulings from appeals courts that have already ruled on fitness to take a needle, or turned aside arguments prison food made him too fat to kill, or the medicines he got behind bars makes injection cruel, Richard Cooey will lead the story but it is Wendy and Dawn who should be on our minds.