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 45 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........

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