by John Hersey
15
MAN, THEY’RE GOING TO SHOOT
1. A Shot Came through There
After the byplay with the starter pistol Carl and Michael went back upstairs, and Auburey and Sortor remained in A-5. Sortor testified that he closed the French doors and went over to the stove. “About two minutes later, then,” he said, “a shot came through there.” This was undoubtedly the shot fired by the private guard over the head of the man in the yellow shirt as he crouched behind a car in the parking lot, very near the French doors. “It sounded like it came in the room, you know,” Sortor testified, “so we ran upstairs. . . . Auburey jumped up and he said, ‘Somebody’s shooting,’ so we ran, we ran upstairs.”
2. Somebody Playing the Fool
Since about midnight, Roderick, Fred, and Larry, the three members of the Dramatics still at the Algiers, had been sitting out, to keep cool, Larry in his underwear and all three in stockinged feet, on the separate back porch that could be reached by a single door from room A-3. They heard a couple of shots, which they all agreed came from upstairs—presumably the first shots of the starter pistol. “We didn’t think anything of it,” Roderick told me, “just figured it was somebody playing the fool.” But the reports apparently made them a bit nervous, because they went inside, closed the door, and sprawled on the beds. The phone rang. Fred Temple answered, and it was Larry’s girl friend of about a year, Glenda Tucker, a singer in a group called the Fabulettes; she asked for Larry, and Larry began chatting with her.
3. Looking out the Window
Auburey and Sortor rushed into A-14. “And Auburey said, ‘Somebody’s shooting,’ ” Sortor testified, “and they said, ‘You just playing.’ ” The boys upstairs had evidently taken the private guard’s warning shot as another round from the blank gun, which must have remained downstairs (it was never found); and they now took Auburey’s and Sortor’s excited announcement as just more pranking.
But those two, Lee said to me, “told us that the police had surrounded the building. So we looked out the window”—the lights were on and the curtains were open, but the windows were closed, as the room had air conditioning—“and see a state trooper’s car in a back alley, and this guy told us to get back from the window. The car was over on Euclid.”
“We seen this here guy coming,” Sortor told me, not naming the man in the yellow shirt to me (none of the friends ever named him), “that’s when everybody was looking out the window, when this guy was coming out the side, and they told him to put his hands up and took him on somewhere. He came on across, you know, and we say, ‘Man, they going to shoot that guy,’ you know, so he throwed up his hands.”
“We seen an officer sneaking up side of the wall there . . .” Sortor testified. “I don’t know if it was a police officer or what, but I seen somebody sneaking, you know. Because, you know, he was all cropped down like this, you know. He had his rifle.” “It was a shotgun,” Michael testified.
“I saw a boy,” Michael said in court. “He was, well, he was down in the back in the parking lot, and he was, he was walking north towards the police car, and he had his hands up. He had an orange shirt. And let’s see; I told Carl, me and Carl was looking at him, and then I don’t know if he got in the police car or what, but anyway we came—let’s see, we came back away from the window, and then that’s when Carl said, ‘It’s getting hot in here. Why don’t you cut the air conditioner on?’ And I went back to the window and I was cutting the air conditioner on and I looked down and this is when I saw the officer down in the parking lot.”
4. To See What Was Happening
“And so at that time,” Lee testified, “I went back down to my room to see what was going on. . . . And my back door was open”—either Sortor had not closed it, as he thought, or Lee reopened it, presumably to see what was happening outside to the man in the yellow shirt—“and I heard them, they told me to get away from the door. . . . Somebody hollered in and said, ‘Get away from that door.’ So I got away from the door and run back upstairs. And before I could get upstairs—”
5. A Dropped Phone
“I was, you know, talking on the phone . . .” Larry testified. “I was, you know, like sitting on the floor and then a few minutes later I heard some shooting, you know, it sounded like shotguns or something.” He asked Glenda if she heard the shots, and Glenda said she did.
“I heard,” Roderick told me, “a policeman outside say, ‘Shoot the windows out.’ ”
Larry said to Glenda, “Wait a minute”; he wanted to get some trousers on, he told her. He dropped the headpiece of the phone and left it on the bed.
“Then,” Roderick said, “they did shoot a window out, and we thought all the windows would be shot out, so we laid on the floor.”
6. Up into the Window
“As I was cutting the air conditioner up,” Michael testified, “I looked out the window and then this officer shot up into the window . . . where I was. And after I saw—I heard a shot, so I fell on the floor. . . .”
“A shot came through the closed window,” Karen told Allen Early. “You could not open the windows. Everyone hit the floor and no one was hit. Then everyone crawled out the door.”
7. Glass Shattering
As Lee ran up to the second floor on his way back to Carl’s room, he heard several shots outside and glass shattering on the third floor. “When I got up to A-14,” he testified, “everybody was outside in the hall lying down.”
16
HOW TO ATTACK A BUILDING
1. A Little Tear Gas
“You hear a lot of times,” Auburey Pollard’s father said to me one night long after the killings, “some guy that went berserk over in this neighborhood, he’s got a shotgun. The police don’t do nothing, they stay outside, and that’s where they might shoot a little tear gas, and a lot of the time they don’t shoot tear gas, do they? Huh? They plead him out, don’t they? So then why would they want to kill three youngsters like that? It’s nuts! It’s nuts! And I’ll always say it’s nuts.”
2. Riot Plan
Granting that the third night of the Detroit uprising might not have been thought by the exhausted policemen a suitable time to plead with men they believed to be snipers to come out of a building, Mr. Pollard’s outburst made me wonder exactly what the police had been trained to do under these circumstances.
The Riot Control Plan of the Detroit Police Department has this to say, under the heading “Attacking a Building”:
“1. When rioters or snipers are barricaded in a building, chemical agents should be used (either grenade or gas gun projector) through windows or doors.” On the same page, the instructions say, “The use of tear gas is an effective and humane method of riot control,” and a diagram is provided, entitled, “Driving Barricaded Persons Into the Open with Minimum Casualty Risks,” and suggesting, “Blocking the retreat with gas first, and then gassing the room where the resisting person, or persons, are located, is the surest way to safely accomplish the objective.”
“2. Troops should be instructed to avoid ‘bunching up’ if sniper fire from buildings or rooftops is encountered.
“3. Cover, if available, should be taken and a selected small group (5 to 7 men) should be detached as an assault force. These officers shall be equipped with automatic weapons, rifles, shotguns, and gas, and shall advance under cover of a support unit. Unnecessary or indiscriminate gunfire should be avoided and consideration should be given to employment of a police rifle marksman for counter fire if the location of the sniper is definitely established. This action should be closely controlled and supervised.
“4. Should armor vehicles be available, consideration may be given to their employment as a covering force in the assault phase of the operation.
“5. Maximum emphasis should be placed on all units involved in any disorder to closely observe all rooftops and windows from which sniper or fire bomb action might emanate.”
17
EVERYBODY DOWNSTAIRS!
1. Too Much Sh
ooting
“So,” Michael testified, as to what happened after the first shot broke the window of A-14, “I fell on the floor and then I came—we all came out of the room. And they was, we could still hear shooting into the bedroom, and they was shooting into the building. And so everybody came out into the hall, and let’s see, Carl Cooper and Lee—let’s see, Carl Cooper, Lee Forsythe, and the two girls, they went downstairs; and James Sortor, Auburey Pollard, and myself, we stayed upstairs because we heard too much shooting, and we wasn’t going down there. . . . We was right there by the stairs, because just as we was getting ready to go down the stairs, Auburey, he went into . . . a linen closet in the hall, because they was doing a whole bunch of shooting downstairs and he was scared to go down there. . . . And then we—no; Sortor went in the closet with Auburey, and then I told them to come out of the closet. . . .”
“I know when I got in the closet,” Sortor testified, “then Auburey came in the closet. Then Michael . . . he came in and he said, ‘Get out of that closet, man, because, you know, they’re coming around here and if they see us in there, they think we’re doing something wrong or something.’ ”
“And then they came back out,” Michael testified, “and sat on the floor with me, we was all, us three was sitting on the floor, down on the floor.” According to the others, they were lying down. “And after a while we started hearing someone kicking in doors. We heard the doors kicked in, and then we heard a bunch of shooting. And then they was going all the way down the hallway doing that to every door. And then when they got up to the second floor, we started hollering down there and telling them that we was up on the third floor.”
“We hollered,” Sortor testified, “saying, ‘We’re up here, don’t shoot.’ ”
“And one officer,” Michael went on, “somebody hollered up there and told us to stay up there. And then when they got through searching the second floor, one of them told us to come down. . . . They said, ‘Put your hands in the air and come down.’ That’s what we did.”
——
“And so we were going to stay up there,” Sortor told me, “until they come up there and get us, you know, so when we see them coming up, we started hollering, ‘We ain’t did nothing.’ So they told us to come on down, and so they started to beating us with them rifles and stuff.”
——
“Clark stated,” according to the synopsis of what Michael told the police, “that there was a lot of shooting and glass breaking. He heard someone yell from downstairs, ‘He’s dead,’ and also heard someone yell, ‘Everyone come down.’ ”
2. One Man and Two Ladies
“When I left A-14,” Juli testified, “I went to A-7 on the second floor, Karen and I did, because I didn’t know where else to go.”
In that room, Robert Greene, the Vietnam veteran, was in bed asleep; he had slept through all the noise up to this point, he later said. Both Greene and the girls testified that they had become acquainted in the motel.
“Everybody ran so I just told Karen we would go down on the second floor. Everybody was in a scuffle. . . . A lot of people upsetting things and screaming and yelling and stuff like that. . . . We knocked on the door and he let us in and told him, you know, there was a bunch of confusion and that, and we heard the police go up to the third floor. He said, ‘Well, just sit quiet,’ you know. ‘Be calm.’ And he opened the door, and when he heard the police come down on the second floor, he hollered, ‘We are in A-7. Don’t shoot.’ ”
——
“Police came in and went to the third floor,” Karen had reported, according to Allen Early’s notes. “Could hear the police say, ‘They’re up here.’ Heard them knock down all the doors and went into the rooms and called them names and asked, ‘Where did you hide the gun?’ Heard things being pushed around or scuffling. Doesn’t remember if she heard shots. Could hear the boys pleading. . . .”
——
“I didn’t know anything about any shooting,” Greene told Prosecutor Eggleton, “until the two girls came up to my room hollering, ‘Let me in. Please let me in. They’re shooting up the place.’ . . . As soon as I got up and opened the door I heard firing upstairs and downstairs. I told them to come in, put their hands on top of their heads. I turned on all the lights, opened my door, and a couple of seconds later a police officer, he came up and poked a gun in the door and said, ‘Was anyone in here?’ I said, ‘Yes, one man and two ladies.’ He said, ‘Put your hands on top of your head and sit on the bed.’ I said, ‘We already have done it.’ ”
——
“In a few minutes,” Juli told the police “a police officer came in the room carrying a rifle or shotgun. He was six feet, hundred and ninety, white, looking wild. The policeman shot through the closet and asked if anyone was in the closet or bathroom.” In her testimony, Juli said, “He looks around, he shoots—I thought he shot in the closet—but he did shoot in the bathroom. And after he shot in the bathroom, he said, ‘Is anybody in there?’ and he immediately turned to us and said, ‘Stand up with your hands up.’ Well, we already had our hands up, and he came charging at me with his gun and hit me on the side and knocked me down. And two more ran in and did the same to Karen and Robert Greene. Well, I jumped back up and he immediately took that long end, the metal end of the gun . . . and hit me in the head. And so then they, you know, took us downstairs and put us up against the wall . . . with our faces against the wall.” Juli identified Robert Paille as the man who had struck her.
——
“One peered in the door,” Early’s notes on Karen report, “and looked into the open closet door and shot in there and then shot through the wall into the bathroom and then asked if anyone was in there. As he came in he told them to put their hands up and all three put their hands up. The 3 were sitting on the bed with their hands up when the first officer came in. He told them to stand up. After he shot, a couple more (two she thinks) came into the room. Told them to keep their hands up then got behind them and beat all three of them down. Told them to get up and get downstairs. . . . Juli had blood running down her face. . . . Made them stand up against the wall in the lobby. As they were coming down the steps she saw Carl lying in A-2 with blood all over him. . . .”
——
From David Senak’s statement to Homicide:
“Quest: Where did you go when you went into the Manor House?
“Ans: ‘I went to the second floor with another police officer (white and in uniform) and a guardsman.’ ”
3. I Saw Him
“And when we came down,” Michael testified, “I saw him . . . this one right here, Paille . . . he had a shotgun pointed at my face, and he told me, he told me and Auburey and Sortor to keep on down to the first floor. And when we got down to the first floor I saw Carl Cooper . . . right across from the stairs on the first floor. . . . He was laying down, he was on the floor and I kind of hesitated because I was going over to him, and that’s when Dismukes, he hit me in the back . . . with the barrel of the rifle. Then he told me to get against the wall. . . .” Elsewhere Michael testified that Senak “pushed me up against the wall.”
4. Already Killed One
“I started down towards my room,” Lee testified, “. . . but I didn’t make it to the first floor. . . . There was some more shooting downstairs, so I ran into A-9 . . . —coming up the stairs on the left-hand side. . . . I was alone in there, and then I lay down on the floor and I heard some more shooting. . . . And then I heard the police come in and ordered the people downstairs and as I got up, getting ready to go out towards the door, I saw him kick into A-7 and took the two girls and another fellow downstairs. . . . That was on the same floor, and I could see them shooting into the room. . . . I stayed in A-9 . . . and still I hears some more shooting. Then one of the officers come to the room I was in and asked me to come on. Before he come out he took his gun and went to shoot it but it didn’t go off, and he told me to get downstairs, and as I was leaving out the door he hit me on the back of the he
ad. Going down the stairs a trooper hit me. I got beat all the way down the stairs. When I was still upstairs this one fellow shouted to me, ‘Get your black ass down here, I already killed one of them.’ That was on the way down the stairs, because I—I was the last one down—because I had stopped and hesitated because I had seen what looked like Carl, and when I stopped, then he came over and pointed the gun at my head and said to get over in the line, he’d killed one of us already.”
18
PHONE CALLS
1. Watch Out
Glenda Tucker, Larry Reed’s girl friend, was left hanging on the telephone. According to the police synopsis of her account, “Reed said, ‘Wait a minute,’ that he wanted to put on his trousers. She did not hear any shootings from inside the building. She hung up when Reed failed to return to the phone and called back to the motel clerk. The clerk told her there was trouble in that part of the motel and she could not connect her.”
Miss Gilmore, the clerk, told the police, “After the [first phase of the] shooting stopped, a girl called, and Clara Gilmore answered the phone at the switchboard. The girl asked if anyone had been shot. She said she had been talking to her boy friend, Cleveland Reed, in room A-3. Miss Gilmore picked up the phone to A-3, and the line was open. She listened and heard someone yell, ‘Get your hands up.’ A few seconds later, someone yelled, ‘Watch out, he’s got the back of the gun,’ then she heard several shots. She then pulled the plug.”