Woman gets life for role in girl's death

Cindy Lang has followed the final steps her daughter took as her killers escorted the teenager to a set of concrete steps in North Braddock.

"That's a long walk," Lang said Thursday of the half-mile trek from the home of one of the suspects to the spot where a bus driver found the nude and battered body of her daughter, Dana Pliakas. "They had time to change their minds. Instead they tortured, humiliated and murdered my Dana."

Lang, of Murrysville, Westmoreland County, told Allegheny County Judge Robert E. Colville yesterday that the woman convicted of beating Pliakas, 17, and the man accused of shooting the Franklin Regional High School junior deserve to die for the March 2003 killing.

Prosecutors, however, did not seek the death penalty against Brittany Williams, 20, of Penn Hills, so Colville sentenced her to life in prison without parole for her first-degree murder conviction.

Accused shooter Rodney Burton, 23, of North Braddock, does face the death penalty for the killing when he stands trial in February.

"They are pure evil. I hate them," Lang said yesterday as she tried to hold back tears. "Send this she-devil far, far away."

Williams apologized in a faint voice, turning toward Lang and saying, "I'm sorry," before Colville announced he would add two consecutive terms of 20 to 40 months to the end of her sentence for kidnapping and conspiracy charges. She was then led from court crying.

According to testimony during her trial in June, Williams beat her former friend Pliakas with her fists, a leather belt and a plastic detergent jug inside Burton's home, where they all had been drinking rum and smoking marijuana during a party.

Williams and her boyfriend, Burton, grew angry when Pliakas told Williams about overhearing a phone call between Burton and his ex-girlfriend.

Although Williams blamed Burton for the killing, witnesses said Williams ordered the girl's death.

The pair told Pliakas they would take her to get a jitney home. Instead they walked her to steps below Electric Avenue, where prosecutors said they stripped the victim and shot her in the head.

The thought of those final hours in the house and on the steps "makes me physically sick," said her aunt, Robin Hanna, whom Pliakas tried to call during the torture.

Danielle Hanna, 14, said she's haunted by the "pain and terror" her cousin went through.

"I feel sometimes like a 2-year-old who lost her favorite toy," Danielle Hanna said, reading from a letter to Colville. "I keep thinking, I just want her back right now."