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Timothy Adams and his mother, Wilma Adams. "We all need to learn to forgive," she says, in urging mercy for him.

In a session fraught with emotion and tears, family and friends of killer Timothy Wayne Adams on Tuesday publicly called on the state's pardons board to spare the life of the one-time security guard who is to be executed later this month for the murder of his 19-month-old son.

The public plea came one day after the Texas Defender Service formally asked the board to recommend that Gov. Rick Perry commute the 42-year-old man's sentence to life in prison. During Perry's tenure, the board only twice has recommended commutation, and the governor on both occasions allowed the executions to proceed.

Defender Service lawyer Katherine Black said Adams has exhausted his court appeals.

"My grandson meant the world to me," said the killer's father, career Houston firefighter Columbus Adams. "The family and I have been suffering tremendously from that day to this day. In dealing with my son, I told him I would be with him to the end. He has been remorseful from day one."

Both the elder Adams and his wife, Wilma, said they have forgiven their son.

"I would ask the governor and the board to, just for a moment, try to put themselves in my place and see how they would feel," Wilma Adams said. "We all make terrible mistakes, but God is a forgiving God and we all need to learn to forgive. Taking Timothy's life is not going to bring back my grandson."

The condemned man's parents said they visit him as often as once a week, and as relatives, church colleagues and friends gathered at the Adams' northeast Houston home, a death row photo of the killer stood in a place of honor on a living room table.

Adams is set to die Feb. 22 for the Feb. 20, 2002 murder of Timothy Adams Jr., whom he shot during a standoff with police at his home. The police siege grew out of a dispute between Adams and his wife, Emma, who was in the process of moving out of the couple's residence. During the episode, Adams also threatened to commit suicide.

Note to his wife"Look what you and your selfish pride did," Adams wrote his wife in a note found at the scene. "... You wish you had not called me those names now. You wished you had washed my clothes and fixed me something to eat now. You will never forget this, will you, Bitch!"

Adams' ex-wife, the dead child's mother, was not among those asking that his life be spared.

In the clemency petition, Black contends that Adams was a decent, hard-working Christian man who, suffering from an undiagnosed anxiety condition, snapped in a moment of intense stress. Jurors, she argued, were not allowed to hear testimony from family members who would have vouched for his good character.

'He just popped'The petition asserts that two jurors said they would have opposed assessing the death penalty had they heard more about Adams' background.

Adams pleaded guilty to the murder.

Twice in recent weeks, Adams agreed to death row interviews, but failed to appear.

His brother, Chadrick Adams, a licensed counselor, likened his brother's emotional state to a "shaken bottle of soda water."

"He was always shaken and it never showed," he said. "The day of the incident, he just popped."

The killer's family members and other supporters argued Adams could be a positive influence on other inmates, if spared.

"People don't know the magnitude of things that build up with you," said Willie Beck, a deacon at the Adams family's church. "To take his life, I don't think that would serve justice.

"There's no pain like the pain this family has already been through. This will just put the family through more pain. Timothy will have gone on to his rest, but his family will still be suffering, still be crushed."