THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 9, 1994 TAG: 9410090044
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MATTHEW BOWERS AND DENISE WATSON, STAFF WRITERS
LENGTH: Long : 254 lines
``You have blood on your hands!''
At an outdoor memorial service for Dr. David Gunn in March 1994, Gunn's son could hear the angry shouts of the three abortion protesters who were separated by a police line from where 100 mourners gathered.
Yellow carnations marked the spot behind a Pensacola, Fla., clinic where the doctor had been shot down a year before.
Activist David J. Crane, who spends most of his time protesting outside the Hillcrest Clinic in Norfolk, was among the trio whose shouts pierced the air that March day as unsympathetically as the bullets that felled Gunn.
But this was more than just another protest for Norfolk's most vocal abortion foe. This was the day Crane and the national spotlight would find each other. A day that moved him into the company of Paul J. Hill, who would later kill another Florida doctor.
David Crane. A Norfolk father of six. High school soccer standout. Successful construction company president.
Full-time activist.
The anti-abortion movement has grown increasingly violent in recent years. Since 1977 there have been 66 attempted arsons, 88 arsons, 38 clinic bombings - including one at Hillcrest in 1984 - and two attempted murders, according to National Abortion Federation statistics. Three people have been shot and killed in the past 19 months.
More violence is feared as tough new federal laws limit clinic protests, and courts continue to uphold women's rights to abortions. Last week, Hill, a former minister, was convicted of fatally shooting a doctor and his escort in July of this year, four months after demonstrating with Crane.
Crane, 36, says he isn't violent and never will be. But more and more, Crane aligns himself with those who are.
He signed Hill's petition supporting the use of force to protect unborn children. In Mississippi, Crane formed a national anti-abortion group - aimed at harassing doctors out of the abortion business - with other petition-signers. He refuses to flatly condemn those who have killed abortion doctors.
``You would still have to prove it was necessary force, but if you could, then it would be justifiable,'' Crane said.
Crane and his fellow activists are ``very dangerous,'' said Katherine Spillar, national coordinator for The Feminist Majority Foundation, which sponsors abortion-clinic ``defense training.''
``I would say they are among the most extreme of anti-abortion activists nationwide,'' she said.
But Crane's friends and fellow activists disagree, calling him nonviolent, polite, witty, calm, the ``John the Baptist of Hampton Roads.''
Crane pays no attention to names. ``Choose life!'' he calls across the parking lot of the Hillcrest Clinic on East Little Creek Road six mornings a week. Doctors watch him picket their homes, and their neighbors receive fliers comparing the doctors to Hitler.
Federal marshals - sent to protect Hillcrest after the multiple Florida shootings - watch Crane. Clinic employees watch Crane. The FBI watches Crane.
Everyone watches. And waits. And wonders how things ever got this far. And how much further they will go.
Summer 1988. Crane doesn't remember when he decided abortion was wrong.
It wasn't talked about much in the Tabernacle Church of Norfolk, the conservative, nondenominational Christian church he has attended since he was a child. It wasn't debated heavily as he made his way through the Norfolk Christian Schools. It wasn't a front-and-center issue when he met and married his wife, Pamela J. Cosby, in 1981, and received his business-management degree at Old Dominion University in 1983.
But by summer 1988, his frustration was high. What could he do to stop it? What could anyone do? The law was the law, and had been for 15 years. He had his father's construction business - Metro Construction - to run, and a wife and, so far, three kids to support.
But something changed that summer. His business partner returned from the bank one day carrying fliers. People picketing the Hillcrest Clinic, housed since 1973 in the same building as the bank, were handing them out.
The two-page flier was full of color photos of aborted fetuses. Fetuses with tiny hands and feet. Fetuses with faces. Crane saw children - innocent children covered with blood, defenseless children, children no one intervened to save.
The pictures disturbed both men. Crane's partner tacked them to a wall of their office trailer at a construction site at Oceana Naval Air Station. Day after day, Crane couldn't avoid the images.
For the first time, the two men began to talk about abortion. And about fighting it.
Crane knew about the pickets at Hillcrest. He had followed the news, in the secular and the Christian media, about the first Operation Rescue ``event'' in Atlanta that July, where hundreds were arrested for blockading abortion clinics.
He saw women changing their minds, unborn children being saved.
Crane's religious faith - and those pictures - nagged at him to get involved in the blockades. It might stop only one abortion. It might not stop any. But at least he would be doing something.
Searching for abortion protesters, Crane called area churches. Someone at the Rock Church in Virginia Beach directed him to J. Donald Varela, founder of a local Operation Rescue group in Chesapeake.
In October, a nervous but excited Crane - husband, father of three, president of a construction company - was in a van with eight others, heading toward Atlanta some 600 miles away to participate in the next round of blockades.
Atlanta, October 1988. Hundreds spilled into the parking lot across from the abortion clinic. ``STOP ABORTION!'' ``SAVE THE BABIES!'' screamed a wave of posters that bobbed up and down, up and down, as a line of protesters hoisted them high above their heads. Past a kneeling sea they walked - some silent as they clutched Bibles to their chests in prayer, many whispering their words to God through tight lips.
The loud whir of helicopters, the hum of police cars, muffled their fervent pleas.
Crane can't remember the name of the clinic now. The Feminist Women's Health Center, the Midtown Hospital, the Atlanta Surgi-Center - all of Atlanta's seven clinics were under siege that summer and early fall. Protesters calling themselves ``Baby John Doe'' and ``Baby Jane Doe'' crowded the jails.
A decade earlier, Crane had discussed community activism, freedom of speech and civil disobedience in James H. Hinshaw's senior government class at Norfolk Christian High. Hinshaw later would say: ``He did hear from me that you can make a difference. That they should follow their beliefs, but within the law. . . . I did talk about civil disobedience, that you have to be willing to pay the price.''
Crane was about to pay it.
A line of people sat cross-legged, blocking the clinic doors. Crane joined them on the front lines.
Officers told him to move. Crane didn't budge.
Grabbing his hands, the officers slapped a plastic band around Crane's wrists, pulling the band until he could barely wriggle his hands. Half-carrying, half-dragging, the cops struggled to move Crane. He made his body go limp, as he had learned to do - to get up willingly would be to allow the clinic to open that much sooner. Besides, any further delay would give other protesters more time to dissuade patients waiting to get in.
The crowds, the prayers, the singing, the arrest, their rescue of unborn babies, what a story he would have for his wife.
Pamela had stayed in Norfolk, quietly supporting her husband from home. It would be something she would do for years and many arrests to come.
``Navy spouses go off for six months or more and no one criticizes them for doing what they believe in,'' Pamela says now.
Norfolk, May 1989. Suzette Caton, director of communications at Hillcrest Clinic, usually gets to work a few minutes early. On May 25, 1989, she was one of two people there when she noticed a young woman standing by the door.
Just a few more minutes, Caton told the woman, realizing too late it wasn't a client but a protester who usually paced in front of the building.
The rest was a blur. Caton tried to close the door as a rush of people shoved their way in. Crane was the first one. ``You're trespassing! You can't do this!'' Caton screamed as Crane pushed through, knocking Caton into a desk and onto the floor.
Six protesters charged into the waiting room, quickly chaining themselves together with bicycle locks in hopes of preventing women from keeping their clinic appointments. Caton struggled to her feet as the police were called. Minutes later, police arrived and tried to break the locks. Finally, electric saws chewed through the metal, while clinic workers closed the waiting room and diverted clients into other rooms.
The protesters were arrested for trespassing, and Crane was charged with misdemeanor assault.
``I was so shocked,'' said Caton, whose injuries required months of physical therapy. ``I had naively thought they wouldn't hurt anyone. They call themselves pro-life, but here they were knocking me down. . . . I've learned to develop a healthy fear of them.''
On June 9 that year, Caton sued the protesters in Norfolk Circuit Court for assault and emotional distress. After a two-day trial in December, the jury awarded Caton $7,500 plus court costs. To this day, Caton hasn't received a dime.
Three of the defendants left the area. Crane asked the court to prevent certain personal items from being seized - a microwave oven, a 13-inch black-and-white television set, a corner cabinet, a couch, two chairs and a Pontiac 6000 he valued at $2,000.
He also owns a $120,000 home in Suburban Acres overlooking the North Branch of the Lafayette River and was president of a construction company at the time, but he didn't pay on his share of the debt.
In September 1990, Crane was back at Hillcrest despite a judge's order to stay away from the clinic. He spent 45 days in jail.
In the next three years, local doctors who performed abortions began to see Crane everywhere - cruising by their homes, walking up behind them in the parking lots of food stores, whispering: ``Stop killing babies.''
By 1994, Crane had been a full-time abortion protester for two years, letting his construction company go inactive. He, his wife and their six children live off family savings and contributions, some in the form of regular monthly pledges, from hundreds of people who consider him a missionary for the cause, he says. No records are available to verify the sources of his income.
He heads two organizations: Life Ministries, focusing on sidewalk counseling of pregnant women and prayer vigils, and Citizens for Justice, a more confrontational group focusing on picketing of doctors and ``peaceful'' sit-ins.
His signing of Hill's controversial petition is a statement of philosophy, Crane says, not intent. It's consistent to apply the same standards for protection to the unborn as to the born - anything else would be hypocritical, he says.
A fellow activist gives Crane credit for changing his mind about using violence in the fight against abortion.
C. Roy McMillan, executive director of the Christian Action Group in Jackson, Miss., also signed Hill's petition.
``David convinced me that it's not a sin to shoot an abortionist,'' McMillan said. ``We don't advocate it. We don't criticize it.''
Would Crane shoot one?
``No, I don't think so,'' McMillan said.
After Hill's arrest, Crane joined other activists to form a group in Mississippi, the American Coalition of Life Activists, to try to harass its lone abortion doctor out of the state. They call their program ``No Place to Hide.''
And as Crane continues to push his controversial agenda, he finds himself in the same dilemma.
Norfolk, August 1994. David Crane peered out of an upstairs bedroom window, spying two men in dark suits outside his front door.
The FBI. They had to be the FBI.
He had read that the feds were investigating a possible national conspiracy to kill abortion doctors, and he knew he was one of the suspects.
Just days before, fellow activist Hill had gunned down a doctor and his protective escort outside another Pensacola clinic. Crane had signed Hill's petition a year earlier, and had joined him in March to demonstrate at a memorial for the earlier abortion shooting.
His associations were gaining Crane unwanted attention that morning in early August. It wasn't yet 8 a.m., his pregnant wife and children were away visiting friends, and he'd just gotten out of bed. Half awake, he had a quick decision to make: Should he talk to the agents?
He had expected the FBI to contact him eventually. But a national murder conspiracy was a large and scary leap from his history of sit-ins and misdemeanor trespassing charges at clinics.
Crane may be a fervent enemy of abortion, but he's also a husband and father. He was worried about his family. What these agents were investigating is serious stuff, with long prison sentences in the offing. The men on his doorstep frightened him, and he wasn't sure what to do.
He stalled a little, unhurriedly pulling on his pants and shirt and even taking time to comb his hair. It worked. The impatient agents left before he got downstairs, less than two minutes after ringing his doorbell.
In the next few weeks, the investigators' messages piled up on Crane's answering machine. Friends, family, several lawyer pals, even a retired FBI agent, all told him the same thing: ``No matter how innocent you are, it's never in your best interest to talk to them.''
So he called the FBI back. He told them that, while he's not involved in any shootings or conspiracies, he still won't answer their questions.
September 1994. The climbing fort, the swing set, the trees, were full of Crane children on a sunny afternoon in their yard. Schooled at home by their mother, they were taking a break while waiting for a favorite movie on TV.
David Crane was taking a break, too. After spending most mornings on the sidewalk at Hillcrest, he returns in the afternoons to work the phones in his home office, scheduling the daily pickets, soliciting support from churches, organizing, planning. He and his wife used to man a pregnancy hot line in their home, counseling young women; they still get occasional calls.
Crane still hadn't answered any questions from the FBI. He pledged to answer only to his conscience and to his family. For him and his wife, children are a blessing, ``assets'' granted by God.
And while others fear Crane and his methods, his family views his mission as simple as the child's prayer his 4-year-old son whispers each night:
``Help Daddy save the babies.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
PAUL AIKEN/Staff
David Crane hands out a flier outside Hillcrest Clinic on East
Little Creek Road in Norfolk last month. In May 1989, Crane was
charged with misdemeanor assault after he and other protesters
stormed the clinic.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE BIOGRAPHY ANTI-ABORTION MOVEMENT by CNB