The family of a wrongly convicted Black teen who was the youngest person to ever be executed in Pennsylvania is suing Delaware County, per PEOPLE.
On Monday (May 20), lawyers representing the family of Alexander McClay Williams, who was 16 years old at the time of his 1931 execution, announced a lawsuit against Delaware County, where he was prosecuted.
"They murdered him,” Susie Williams Carter, Williams' only surviving sibling, said at a press conference. “They need to pay for killing my brother.”
The lawsuit comes decades after Williams was convicted of murdering Vida Robare, a 34-year-old white woman who worked at the teen's school, the Glen Mills School for Boys. Robare was found dead with multiple stab wounds in her cottage on the school premises by her ex-husband, Fred Robare, who also worked there.
According to reports, there were no witnesses to Robare's murder. Williams was coerced into confessing despite there being no evidence to tie him to the crime. The teen was tried and sentenced to death by electric chair by an all-White jury.
Williams' family spent decades seeking justice for the teen. In 2022, Williams was posthumously exonerated by Governor Tom Wolf.
The lawsuit also names the estates of a prosecutor and two detectives who were on the case as defendants and is seeking unspecified damages.
“This tragedy haunted the family, haunted the parents, haunted Susie, haunted [trial lawyer] William Ridley and his family,” lawyer Joseph Marrone said in a statement. “There was nothing to connect him to the murder. He was a convenient Black boy at the hands of these detectives and this prosecutor."
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