By Jan Skutch

Created 2007-07-08 07:47

Mark Allen MacPhail should have been home with his wife and children in the early morning hours of Aug. 19, 1989.

Instead, he had taken a private, off-duty security shift at the Greyhound Bus Station/Burger King restaurant in place of a fellow Savannah police officer.

MacPhail never made it home.

Two shots fired from a .38-caliber pistol left him dying on the asphalt parking lot off Oglethorpe Avenue and Fahm Street.

Two years later, a jury convicted Troy Anthony Davis, 22, of killing MacPhail.

MacPhail's wife, Joan, said she has lost her best friend, the father of her two children and peace of mind as appeals for Davis have drawn on.

"It's like another punch in the stomach," she said. "You have to relive that night over and over.

"That's so wrong. Why shouldn't we have peace in our lives?"

If, as scheduled, Davis is executed by lethal injection July 17, it will give the MacPhail family some measure of peace.

"My anticipation is really of more of a period that I don't have to worry about this all coming back," she said. "It's over. I don't know if there'll ever be any peace, but it's a start."

Best friends

She met MacPhail, then a U.S. Army Ranger stationed at Hunter Army Airfield, in 1983. She describes him as "one of those people you find on your doorstep."

"He was my best friend," Joan MacPhail said. "Who'd a thought we would get married?"

They did - on Oct. 29, 1986.

Mark MacPhail left the Army, worked a year doing security work, then joined the Savannah Police Department on July 7, 1986.

The job seemed right.

"I think that's where he felt most comfortable," his wife said. "I think military types need the structure of the police department.

"He did very well. He liked it. He liked the structure."

Mark MacPhail, an advanced patrol officer, shared the security job with another officer and had traded shifts the night he died.

A call from a friend alerted Joan MacPhail to a problem at the downtown site. An X-ray technician at Memorial Medical Center, as the hospital was known then, Joan MacPhail called the Greyhound station, only to be told that her husband was not working.

"By that point, I knew something bad had happened," she said.

Her persistence brought Savannah Police Maj. William Lyght to the phone. He later went to her home off Montgomery Crossroad to deliver the bad news.

Retired Savannah Police Chief David Gellatly recalled hiring Mark MacPhail.

"He'd only been in the department two or three years," Gellatly said. "He was just a squared-away perfect officer."

Gellatly recalled Mark MacPhail being a former Ranger and a veteran of the invasion of Grenada.

"I remember going to that house (with Lyght) to explain to her what happened," he said. "That had a very traumatic effect on us both." Gellatly said MacPhail was the second of three officers killed in the line of duty during his tenure as police chief from 1980 until the end of 1999.

"They were all traumatic - and something I carry with me to this very day," he said. "And I will for the rest of my life."

Gellatly described the investigation of Mark MacPhail's slaying as "very extensive, very comprehensive and very detailed ... that lasted a very long time."

He said he personally followed it on a day-to-day basis.

He, like Joan MacPhail, pledged to be in Atlanta for the July 16 clemency hearing.

Left town, lost friends

Joan MacPhail and her two children left Savannah six years ago so she could pursue a better job opportunity.

She visits Savannah but has little contact with her friends here.

"Death has a way of leaving personal partitions up and separating people," she said.

Their 19-year-old daughter, Madison, still sobs uncontrollably when news of another court appeal hits.

"How do I heal those hurts?" Joan MacPhail asked. "That man was the man she trusted. He was the love of her life."

She wonders whether Amnesty International USA officials, who are leading the Davis appeal effort, ever consider that.

"Do they understand what we underwent?" she asked.

Her son, Mark Jr., who was 7 weeks old when his father was killed, is in high school and is every bit his father's son, she said.

"He acts, he does the same things," she said. "He laughs the same way."

Joan MacPhail recalls sitting through the trial in Chatham County Superior Court and being pleasantly surprised at the jury's decision to support the death penalty.

"I could only pray the jury saw the same things we did," she said. "I just didn't think Savannah had it in them."

A transplanted New Yorker who moved to Savannah with her family at age 6, Joan MacPhail said she appreciated the jurors' principles.

"People stood by their morals," she said, "and they stood by their convictions."

She said she does not blame Davis' family for his actions.

"I feel sorry for them, actually," she said. "Really, I don't have any animosity. My heart really went out to his mom when all this happened.

"They didn't choose this. He (Davis) chose on his own."