DETROIT — In the weeks before Rachel Timmerman’s murder in 1997, she warned police and prosecutors that Marvin Gabrion would kill her to stop the 19-year-old from testifying that she’d been raped by Gabrion.

Her mother and others in the Newaygo County community echoed the same concerns during the 1997 case. And their warnings proved prophetic.

Gabrion abducted Timmerman before she could take the stand and killed her on federal land. Timmerman’s 11-month-old daughter, Shannon, was never found.

On Monday, two days before Christmas, Timmerman's mother, Velda Robinson, felt again like her voice wasn't heard and like justice was upended when she received a text message from her niece informing her that Gabrion would no longer get the death penalty.

His sentence had been commuted by outgoing President Joe Biden to life in prison without parole, unbeknownst to Timmerman's 67-year-old mother, who had waited through 22 years of appeals for Gabrion's death sentence to be carried out.

Biden's decision, Robinson said, made her feel that she was a “lesser person,” undeserving of the sentence a 2002 federal jury found was necessary to secure justice in her daughter's death.

“Those that don’t believe in the death penalty I believe, honestly, that they have never been traumatized by somebody so vile, that they couldn’t comprehend where I’m coming from,” Velda Robinson told The Detroit News. “They really shouldn’t judge me for wanting it.”

Velda Robinson, mother of Rachel Timmerman and maternal grandmother of Shannon, is pictured here on June 8, 2006 in her home in Howard City, Mich. in rural Montcalm County. Marvin Gabrion was sentenced to death in 2002 for killing Rachel Timmerman on federal property in the Manistee National Forest to prevent her from testifying that he raped her. In 2006, Robinson said she would prefer to spare Gabrion's life if he would tell police where to find her granddaughter Shannon's remains.

Gabrion would have been the second person put to death from Michigan since the state became one of the first in the western world to ban the death penalty 172 years ago.

But Biden, who issued a moratorium on federal capital punishment in 2021, had pledge to end federal executions and, on Sunday, he commuted the sentence of 37 of 40 federal death row inmates. Those still facing execution are the 2013 Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; Robert Bowers, who was convicted for the 2018 mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburg; and Dylan Roof, who was convicted in the 2015 Mother Emmanuel Church mass shooting in Charleston.

The president, the White House said in a Monday statement, “believes that America must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level, except in cases of terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder — which is why today’s actions apply to all but those cases.”

Velda Robinson, 67, decried President Joe Biden's decision to spare her daughter's killer from facing the death penalty. Marvin Gabrion, 71, will instead spend the rest of his life in prison after Biden commuted the death penalty portion of his sentence.

Tim Timmerman, Rachel Timmerman’s father, told WOOD-TV on Monday that he was contacted by the U.S. Attorney’s office on Sunday with news of the commutation. Timmerman told the Grand Rapids television station that he didn’t disagree with Biden’s decision but said the timing around the Christmas holiday was “despicable.”

“I think President Biden offered a Christmas gift to the perpetrators of murder, but he offered only pain to the victims, the families of the victims,” Tim Timmerman said.

Gabrion, who is now 71, was convicted of killing Rachel Timmerman on federal property in the Manistee National Forest, where her body was found in Oxford Lake.

Marvin Gabrion II is shown during his preliminary hearing in White Cloud District Court, Dec. 4, 1997, in White Cloud, Mich.

Her mouth and eyes were covered with tape. Chains were wrapped around her body and padlocked. Federal prosecutors believe she was alive when she was put in the water, according to appeal records.

Prosecutors believed Gabrion is also responsible for the deaths of three men who have been missing since about the time of Rachel Timmerman’s murder: Robert Allen, a mentally disabled man from Kent County whose identity Gabrion is alleged to have stolen; Wayne Davis, who allegedly witnessed the sexual assault of Rachel Timmerman; and John Weeks, who allegedly lured Rachel Timmerman and her daughter to Gabrion before Timmerman's murder.

The U.S. Justice Department at that time told prosecutors to ask jurors for the death sentence, and the jury of Gabrion's peers handed down the judgment in 2002. He’s been appealing ever since, with his latest being denied in August 2022 by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The 71-year-old is being held at a federal medical center in Springfield, Mo., according to federal Bureau of Prison records.

Robinson, who lives in rural west Michigan, said she’s suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and remained fearful since her daughter’s murder — setting up a gate around her yard and installing cameras in the event that Gabrion somehow orchestrates some sort of retribution from prison.

She said she also fears for the precedent the decision sets, that someone would be able to brutally rape her daughter and murder up to five people only to be spared the death penalty by a president on his way out the door.

"People need to know that when you do something so heinous, you ain’t going to get away with it," Robinson said.

"How does Biden justify whose crime is worse than the others?” she added. "(The jury) made this decision and he just slapped the whole judicial system down."

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