Son: Execution duty changed father

By Kevin Woster, Journal Staff Writer | Monday, August 28, 2006

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SIOUX FALLS — Arnold Veglahn was simply doing his duty as night captain at the state penitentiary 59 years ago when he walked George Sitts to the electric chair for South Dakota’s last execution.

But Veglahn, a former sheriff and city police chief who worked for 30 years in South Dakota law enforcement, was never quite the same after that experience, his son, Don, said Sunday.

“It was devastating on him; it really was,” 72-year-old Don Veglahn said Sunday as he stood across from the South Dakota State Penitentiary and recalled his father’s role in the 1947 execution of convicted murderer George Sitts.

“He had been very proud to be in law enforcement. And after that, I never sensed that again, that he was proud of it. He was never really the same again. He was more somber.”

Don Veglahn, a retired Methodist minister, predicts that if the execution of confessed murderer Elijah Page proceeds as expected this week, it could have the same kind of sobering effect on people who take part in and witness Page’s death.

“For them, it’ll be an existential experience that will never leave them,” Veglahn said. “To the rest of us, it’ll be academic: Are you for or against the death penalty? Is it right or wrong?”

For the record, Veglahn is opposed to state-sanctioned executions. He sees them as legal-system failures that offer lots of official retribution, little deterrence and no mercy.

Also for the record, he wants those who might label him a “pacifist pastor” to understand that they are only half right. He’s a pastor, retired. But he’s also a former gunner in a B-26 bomber who flew 20 combat missions during the Korean War.

But the chaotic carnage of war, with its own set of life-altering experiences, is still a form of national self-defense, and state-sanctioned executions are something else, Veglahn said. That’s true even in this case, where the 24-year-old Page — sentenced to death row five years ago for his part in the March 2000 torture and murder of 19-year-old Chester Allan Poage of Spearfish — has stopped his appeals voluntarily and asked to die.

“It’s really sort of a state-assisted suicide,” Veglahn said.

Page’s personal death wish spoke loudly to some of the people who came Sunday to visit inmates at the prison, including a young woman who sat smoking a cigarette as she watched a toddler in a parking area across the street. The woman, who declined to give her name, said she hadn’t heard much about Page’s execution and didn’t know what he had done.

“If he wants to die,” she said, then paused and shrugged. “He’s going to die in prison anyway.”

A block or so southwest of the prison, several members of the Crossroads Community Church were just leaving Sunday service. They also knew little about the impending execution or any details about what Page had done. But Pastor Nick Constant said there was plenty of biblical justification for capital punishment.

“All of us are responsible for our wrongs,” he said, as listeners nodded.

In a garden plot on city land three blocks away a few minutes later, Rick and Tami Jo Huffman took a few minutes away from their vegetables to discuss the Page execution.

“I’m for the death penalty, especially since he wants to (die),” Tami Jo Huffman said.

Rick Huffman said he continued to support capital punishment, applied wisely for the most heinous of crimes. But he doubts the punishment has much effect on crime.

“I used to think it was a way to deter crime. But it hasn’t turned out to be that way at all.”

Veglahn said he understands the other side of the capital-punishment debate and respects those who differ with him. He acknowledges the Old Testament support for the pro-death-penalty views of some ministers but believes the New Testament holds the overriding truth.

“It’s one of those two-sided arguments. But the New Testament talks about grace and forgiveness,” he said. “I won’t let the other side take the moral high ground on this. I just don’t see two wrongs making a right.”

Contact Kevin Woster at 394-8413 or kevin.woster@rapidcityjournal.com