FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. _ After a newly freed prisoner brutally stabbed a pregnant teenager in 1993, doctors rushed to save her unborn son.
The boy lived but suffered brain damage and never walked or talked. He spent his days confined to his bed in his grandmother's home, using tubes to help him breathe and eat.
Julius Dyke died on Sunday. He was 23.
"He went to be with his mom," said his grandmother, Margaret Dyke, choking back tears. "I loved him unconditionally. If I had to do it all over again, I would do it. Julius was an angel. I've never seen a fighter like Julius."
The family's nightmare began Jan. 26, 1993, when 18-year-old Lisashante "Lisa" Dyke was baby-sitting for a friend in Wilton Manors.
She was in the kitchen, making toast and watching the woman's 9-month-old son when Ronnie Keith Williams came to the apartment. He was apparently looking for his girlfriend, the woman's sister, who had broken up with him the night before, police said. And Lisa Dyke was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Prosecutors and police say Williams stabbed Dyke repeatedly in her chest and back with a 15-inch knife and bit her on her back, breasts and buttocks. They say Dyke identified Williams to a 911 operator and again on her hospital deathbed by pointing him out in a photo lineup.
In the hospital, when Margaret Dyke asked her daughter what happened, Lisa Dyke, unable to speak because of the tubes in her throat, wrote, "I played dead until he left, called police."
Julius was born by cesarean section two days after the stabbing. He suffered brain damage because of his mother's wounds and weighed 4 pounds, 11 ounces.
"He was born (about one month) premature because for her to get any better the baby had to be taken out," doctors said at the time. "Everybody was trying to keep her alive."
Lisa Dyke was a church-going Stranahan High graduate who worked part time at Subway at the time of her murder. She was engaged to Julius' father, also 18 at the time.
When Margaret Dyke told the girl to get better so she could be with her baby, Lisa Dyke scribbled, "No. I leave him to you."
Lisa Dyke died 18 days after Julius was born. Williams is now on death row.
Margaret Dyke was working as a lounge singer at the time of the murder and gave it up to care for Julius full time.
She said Julius's birth helped her cope with her only daughter's murder. Now it gives her comfort to visualize her daughter getting her son back. "She is in a joy state right now," cried Dyke. "I can see her holding him."
At the time of Lisa Dykes' death, Williams was fresh out of prison for the 1984 murder of 21-year-old Gaynell Jeffrey of Fort Lauderdale, who was stabbed to death at her home and then dumped in an abandoned field.
As prosecutors readied their murder case, they added a charge from another, unrelated crime _ indecent assault on a child.
For the two cases combined, he was sentenced to 17 years but served only seven because of prison crowding.
A jury convicted him in 1996 of Dyke's murder and voted 11-1 to recommend death. But that conviction was overturned because a juror had an emotional collapse.
Williams had a second trial in 2003 that ended in a mistrial because of a prosecutor's error.
In 2004, a new Broward jury found Williams guilty of first-degree murder, rejecting his defense that he was too drunk on vodka and high on cocaine to have planned the attack. The same jury recommended he receive the death penalty.
Executions in Florida have been on hold since January, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state's death penalty sentencing law was unconstitutional because it gave too much power to judges, instead of juries.
On Monday, State Attorney's Office spokesman Ron Ishoy said the case is still on appeal. Williams, now 54, is at the Union Correctional Institution in Raiford, state records show.
"This guy really destroyed my family," said Margaret Dyke on Monday. "He came out of nowhere. My whole life turned upside down. I watched my grandbaby suffer for 23 years.
"What a tragedy. And here I am living it all over again," she said. "Parents are not supposed to bury kids."
