Tears

Shonna McNeil offered the jurors her best reason why they should spare the life of admitted murderer Rasheed Scrugs, her estranged husband and the father of her two boys, ages 5 and 6. "I think every child deserves to have a father and know who that father is," she told the eight women and four men. "The only ones who are really hurt in the end are the children. . . . I want my kids to know who their father is, that he is not a bad person and has a good heart. " For Kimmy Pawlowski, it must have seemed the final insult.

I Can Do Bad All By Myself, Tyler Perry's endearing adaptation of the melo-comedic stage play that introduced his alter ego Madea, is a double shot of Saturday-night lowdown chased by a cheery chug of Sunday-morning uplift. Starring that spitfire Taraji P. Henson (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) as a lounge singer who resists assuming guardianship of her late sister's children, the film is a variety show that successfully prompts laughs, tears, and song, culminating in heaps o' hope.

Yesterday, another crisp, bright American morning was consumed in another merciless blaze of jet fuel. This dreaded renewal of the Sept. 11 sequence - top-of-the-day trauma, followed by hours of anxious monitoring of CNN - turned the nation's biggest city into the protagonist of a modern-day Book of Job. New York, poor New York. The anguish of Sept. 11 scoured away much of its imperial haughtiness. But what was thus revealed underneath was more impressive than any skyscraper - the doughty spirit and workaday heroism of the rescue worker, the shopkeeper, the office worker.

The tears have dried, but the memory will linger on. In the middle of playing an Australian Open quarterfinal with Jim Courier last month, Pete Sampras began crying. He tried to halt the flow of tears, but he couldn't. Tears trickled down his face as he served. With a towel covering his face, he sobbed during changeovers. It was a remarkable sight, a professional athlete crying during competition. It was even more remarkable because Sampras, the world's No. 1- ranked men's tennis player, has rarely shown any emotion on court.

A homeless man was sentenced yesterday to 26 to 52 years in prison for the July 2002 rapes of two roommates in their Center City apartment. In a soft voice and with tears running down his face, 40-year-old Derrick Watley yesterday told the young women: "I would like to say to what happened to you, I'm terribly sorry. I wouldn't wish that on nobody in this world. Nobody should go through what you ladies went through. "The reason I'm shedding tears is because I know what you went through - I went through it. I know what it's like to be violated, to have your safety taken from you, to have everything that holds you together fall apart," Watley said.

The tears flowed easily, like streams down her shiny face. Marion Jones had lost, and lost badly, and the enormity of it all, of the past months under the unpleasant specter of a drug investigation, came crashing on top of her. It was a simple enough question that sparked the breakdown yesterday: "Can you sum up your Olympic experience?" "It was a rough one," Jones said, before pausing, and turning her face away from the throng of reporters. There was no stopping the tears, no saving face.

On a sublime afternoon at the Penn Relays, only raw nerves could catch up to Kim Fisher. It happened yesterday just before the girls' 1,500-meter run, when the Sun Valley High star stepped out of the Franklin Field paddock and onto the infield. With her big race only minutes away, the pressure overwhelmed Fisher, and tears started pouring from her eyes. Stacy Robinson, a friend and rival from Phoenixville High, saw Fisher sobbing and stepped over to comfort her. "I told her, 'You can't let yourself get so upset, then it's not fun anymore,' " Robinson said later.

William Patrick Joyce Jr., charged with kidnapping a restaurateur a year and a day before, yesterday brought something unusual to court: two dozen weeping relatives. Among them were parents, siblings, grandparents, a cousin who is a Roman Catholic priest, and an uncle who is a juvenile justice administrator. They helped. Burlington County Superior Court Judge Donald P. Gaydos, saying he felt for Joyce's family, sentenced the 28-year-old former limousine company employee to 18 years in prison.

Donald and his mom sat at the table in a far-off corner of the second-floor cafeteria at Hahnemann University Hospital. She sipped from a cup of dark coffee and the 17-year-old bit nervously on a straw he had used moments earlier to drink a soda. They were trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. They did not look at the nurses and technicians walking by with their lunch trays. Earlier on Thursday, the mother called me and spoke hysterically about her son's involvement with Edward I. Savitz, the jailed businessman who is charged with involuntary deviate sexual behavior, corrupting the morals of a minor and sexual abuse of children by photograph.

It was a rite of passage Theresa Hertz had shared with each of her five older sons, and now it was Thomas' turn. Time for Thomas Hertz to join his classmates for the ring Mass, an annual event at St. James Catholic High School for Boys. The ceremony held last Thursday marked the end of an era for the Hertz family and for the 53-year-old school scheduled to close in June. "I wish he could have finished here," Theresa Hertz said with tears in her eyes. "Next year he'll go to (Monsignor)