No Justice

by Robbie Tolan

  I saw the door open, and my dad walked out first, followed by my mom. Both were in their pajamas.

  “What’s going on?” Dad asked as he stepped out onto the porch. I could see that he was doing a quick survey of the scene and hadn’t expected to see the police. When he saw that Officer Edwards had turned his flashlight and gun toward him, he also instinctively raised his hands to show that he wasn’t a threat.

  “I heard Robbie yelling, ‘No, the car is mine,’” my dad recalled about that night. “And I thought he was out there talking to Anthony, his cousin, because they were out there together. So I went outside to stop them from arguing, and that’s when I saw this officer with a flashlight, and Robbie was saying that the officer said that they’d stolen the car.”

  “Listen to this bullshit!” I yelled at my father, livid that it had come to this.

  “Robbie, shut up and get on the ground!” my father said, turning back to Officer Edwards, who still had his gun pointed at us. I did what my father said and got on the ground. “What’s the problem, Officer?” my dad asked both Anthony and me.

  “We have a report of a stolen car.”

  “No sir. No sir. That’s my car,” Dad explained calmly. “That’s our car. This is my son. That’s my nephew. This is our house.”

  “Get against the wall!” roared Officer Edwards, becoming more belligerent as he rushed toward my dad.

  It was as though the officer couldn’t believe that he could possibly be wrong, and the more people who questioned him, the angrier he got. But the fact is that he was wrong.

  Turns out that while following us, Officer Edwards had incorrectly entered the license plate number. Instead of entering plate number 595BGK, he entered 596BGK, and that wrong plate would unfortunately match a stolen vehicle of the same color and make, but crucially, one model year off. This match caused the squad car’s computer to send an automatic message to other police units, informing them that Edwards had found a stolen vehicle.

  Getting the license plate wrong was not uncommon, we later found out when we asked a relative who is a cop. Sometimes the cop punching in the license plate is trying to drive and work his dashboard at the same time, and mistakes happen. Because it’s so common to get a false hit, most police departments follow a procedure to have their officers double-check the license plate when the car is parked. However, despite parking his police car directly in front of our car, with our license plate clearly in view, as his dash camera would show during future court proceedings, Officer Edwards did not re-check the plate. Instead, he got out of his car, gun at the ready, already convinced that the two black guys in the nearly all-white neighborhood were guilty.

  “He should have verified that license plate, which he did not,” my dad later said.

  “Spread your arms and get up against the truck!” Officer Edwards yelled at my dad. My father immediately complied. While I was lying flat on the ground, I watched as Officer Edwards pushed my dad against our Chevy Suburban, with his gun right at my father’s head. He kicked at my dad’s feet in order to make him spread eagle.

  “He never even really identified himself,” my dad remembered. “Since he was a law officer, he could have asked me for ID, or the registration of the car, and this could all be resolved. But he never did that. To me, he was just in a hurry to do something that would make a name in his police department.

  “You would think that any reasonable good police officer would have said, ‘Sir, let me explain what’s going on. We got a report of a stolen car and it fits this description. But he didn’t do that. I think he was more interested in making a bust, as I think that’s how they get promoted in their department.”

  “What the fuck is going on?” I thought, sweat now dripping down my face and into my eyes. I could hear my mother plead for the officer to listen to us, to think about what he was doing.

  Officer Edwards was having none of it. And when his backup arrived, Sergeant Jeffrey Cotton, things went from bad to worse.

  Sgt. Cotton is one of those cops who, if you’re black, you dread meeting at a traffic stop. Why? Because at first glance, Cotton represented the white American ideal of a cop. He had a blond close-cropped military haircut and a powerful body-builder physique. He was a police officer who seemed to be looking for action wherever he could find it. And he soon found it.

  Anthony was trying to keep the phone on his ear so our cousin could hear what was going on, and at the same time, my mother was trying to make sure nothing happened to us. She grabbed Anthony’s phone, while trying to figure out why this was happening. Because of the commotion, no one had seen or heard Sgt. Cotton drive up, and without identifying himself, he came from behind our SUV and immediately escalated the situation.

  “Get up against the wall!” Sgt. Cotton yelled at my mother.

  Startled, she couldn’t believe that he was talking to her. Where did he come from?

  “Are you kidding me? We’ve lived here fifteen years. We’ve never had anything like this happen before,” my mom said, turning to Cotton.

  Sgt. Cotton didn’t care. He grabbed my mother, a fifty-five-year-old woman, and threw her like a rag doll against the garage door. You should understand that my mother is not a big woman at all. She’s a tiny petite woman, who even in the most warped fantasies couldn’t threaten or harm anyone. So when Cotton grabbed her and flung her to the garage door, it was like he’d lifted her body off the ground.

  That’s when I snapped. There was something about seeing my mother being abused that instinctively made me want to protect her—protect her in the same way that she wanted to protect me.

  “Get your fucking hands off my mother!” I shouted as I slowly rose from the ground, my hands and arms still spread wide. I never did stand up, because as I rose to one knee, Sgt. Cotton turned, aimed his .45 down at me, and fired at my chest.

  Boom.

  My mother said that she was so close to the gun that she could see the fire from the gun as the bullet headed toward me at over eight hundred feet per second. Cotton fired three times, and one of the bullets hit my chest, right under my right nipple.

  I couldn’t believe it, even as I flew back into our front door from the impact. Had he shot me? Maybe it was a beanbag? Maybe it was a rubber bullet? Maybe it was something else, but it couldn’t be a bullet, right? It couldn’t have been real. I slumped against the front door and slowly slid down to the ground.

  “Oh my God, I can see smoke coming from his chest!” my mother screamed, as she saw the damage the bullet had done to my body.

  “That’s just smoke from the fibers of his clothes,” Sgt. Cotton said, as casually as one would say that he likes ketchup with his fries. He appeared to be unbothered as I sat there dying, although he would say something very different during the trials.

  I tried to get up, but it felt like I had the weight of a ten-story building on my chest, with over two thousand pounds of brute force compressing my chest. I wanted to cry out, to say something, but I couldn’t. I reached under my t-shirt and then looked at my hand. My hand was smeared with blood.

  Gasping for air, thoughts rapidly rolled through my brain. What I didn’t know is that the bullet had ripped through my right lung and had damn near liquefied my liver. In the distance, I could hear my mother scream, and then her desperate prayers.

  “Please Lord, keep your healing hands on my son!” my panicked mother shouted over and over as I struggled to maintain consciousness. I thought I was going to die, and if you think that you don’t need the help of prayer in your efforts to stay alive, you’re a damn fool.

  I tried to say the Lord’s Prayer, but the only thing I could do was say, “Our Father… Our Father…” because I could feel my breath leaving me, but none coming back into my body.

  When you think that you’re going to die, you don’t have some sort of peaceful wave wash over you. That’s Hollywood bullshit. In reality, thoughts of impending death are one of the ugliest, most brutal experiences you can have. All of the horror fi
lms in the world can’t prepare you for being that scared. And as my body slid down to the ground, forever violated by Cotton’s bullet, I could feel a combination of panic and helplessness overcome me, as I was suddenly in the hands of strangers to keep me alive, specifically and initially, the Bellaire Police Department and the city’s emergency medical technicians (EMTs) in their ambulances. The people who tried to kill me, or people connected to the people who tried to kill me, were the ones tasked with keeping me alive. As my cousin Anthony would later joke, “Where they do that at?”

  The EMTs and more Bellaire cops arrived, and as I struggled to maintain consciousness, I saw various officers putting my family—my family who’d just minutes before been minding their own business—into handcuffs like common criminals. Anthony, my mother Marian, and my father Bobby were all shackled like they’d done something wrong, and they were put in the back of separate police cars. My father, in the back of his own police car, heard as the truth was coming over the radio.

  “While I’m in the police car,” my dad recalled, “I can hear the police dispatcher say that the car wasn’t stolen, so I’m pounding on the glass trying to get their attention. One lady officer on the outside turned to me with a look on her face that said, ‘Just shut up.’ If I could have kicked that window out, I would have.”

  In the back of another police car, my mother, in a panic after having seen her baby shot at point-blank range and not knowing if I was going to live, continued to pray.

  “Please Lord, keep your healing hands on my son!”

  “Keep quiet,” a Bellaire officer ordered, as she glared at my mother.

  The EMTs rushed to strap me onto a gurney and put me into an ambulance, but I remember one of them looking me directly in the face and asking, “What happened to you?” Before I could answer, Sgt. Cotton responded, “Don’t worry about what happened to him.”

  As the EMTs lifted me into the ambulance, I could see Sgt. Cotton huddled with other officers, some who had not been at the scene when I was shot, and I specifically recall him saying, “Okay, people are going to start showing up. We’ve gotta get our stories straight.”

  That’s when I knew that it was going to be me against the Bellaire Police Department and the City of Bellaire.

  As the ambulance took me to the hospital, I remember telling the EMTs, “No, no, no, I need my parents. Someone get my parents.” And yet, no one did anything. Instead, they were cutting my shirt off and putting monitors on my chest. They were doing stuff, but I was panicking because I knew that I was dying and I just wanted my parents to be there with me. But they kept pushing me back down on the gurney, and that’s when I thought that I’d never see my parents again.

  The ride to the hospital was one of the worst in my life. I felt every bump, every jolt, as my breathing became more labored. Strangely, though, as the ambulance arrived at Ben Taub General Hospital, I felt calm come over me. True, the burning sensation of the bullet traveling through my body, as a violent foreign interloper into my being, hadn’t dulled. But mentally, I put my life into the hands of the people at the hospital who rushed toward me. The further away I was from the Bellaire police, the more I felt as though the people surrounding me wanted me to live. I was tapping into a faith that these humans were righteous and ready to do good.

  Just like in the movies, as the gurney whipped through the hospital hallway toward the operating room, I stared up at the faces of multiple nurses, each asking questions, clipboard in hand.

  “You’re going to be just fine. What’s your name? What’s your Social Security number? Do you take any medicines?”

  “Robbie Tolan. My Social Security is.…”

  I shook my head as each question came, barely understanding them. I just wanted the pain to end. They took my new shoes off, cut my pants off, and hooked me up to an IV. I was still terrified; nothing like this had ever happened to me before. Finally, as we arrived at the operating room and they lifted me onto the table, it dawned on me that I might not fucking come out of this. I could actually die from driving my own car and walking to my own house in my own neighborhood. And no one but my family would care.

  I was scared to death and I wanted my mom. There I was, a grown man, needing my mom in the same way I needed her when I was a kid and fell off my bike. It’s something primal, and I heard that it happens all the time in war, when even the most grizzled veteran calls out for his mother when shot. Your brain, I think, searches for comfort and safety in times of imminent danger, and the essence of that comfort and safety tends to come from your mom. I knew that I might be dying, and I felt like having her with me would make it better. But she wasn’t there, and as a result, I felt intensely alone.

  It was then that the anesthesiologist slid a clear mask over my face, tightening the bands around my head.

  “Breathe deeply, Robbie, and count down from one hundred for me.”

  “One hundred. Ninety-nine. Ninety-eight. Ninety-seven.…”

  All of the sudden, the pain from the gunshot and the world around me faded into the distant reaches of my consciousness as the anesthesia gradually did its work. I was still scared, but I was also at peace. And peace was all that I wanted at that point. Peace.

  CHAPTER 2

  MY NEW REALITY

  Sean Bell, 23, New York, New York—November 25, 2006

  Sean Bell, a twenty-three-year-old African American man, was shot over fifty times by five New York uniformed and plainclothes police after leaving his bachelor party at Club Kalua, a strip club. The police had targeted the strip club for prostitution and was intending to raid it when they encountered Bell and his three friends leaving the club. According to the police, Bell attempted to strike an officer with his car when officers opened fire on the car, killing Bell and severely wounding two others. Three of the five NYPD officers were charged with first-and second-degree manslaughter, second-degree reckless endangerment, and first-and second-degree assault. They were subsequently acquitted on all charges.

  Wake up, Robbie. Wake up, baby.”

  As I struggled to release myself from the grips of the drugs after surgery, my ears heard the soft pleadings of my mother, but still, I kept my eyes closed. I wanted a few moments of listening to her loving words before I had to deal with the harsh realities of my near-death experience. I took comfort in the fact that I could feel her squeeze my hand as she spoke.

  When I finally opened my eyes, my first thought was that I had to be dead. There was a bright light shining in my eyes, and I thought to myself, “Wait, is this the bright light everyone talks about when you die?”

  No, I wasn’t dead. And yes, it’s kind of funny now when I look back on it, but after turning my eyes away from the lamp above me, I saw that I was surrounded not only by my mother and father, but seemingly every aunt and uncle I had on this planet. They spilled out of my small hospital room and into the hallway, and I was so relieved because I never thought I’d see them again.

  “What happened?” I asked finally, as my eyes darted around the hospital room, trying to make sense of where I was. My mother, who was in tears, came over and gave me a kiss and sang praise to God, while my father had that stoic look of a dad coming to the awful realization that he hadn’t been able to keep his child safe and now was helpless to do anything except watch his son deal with the pain.

  I knew that I’d been shot, but everything else had become hazy from the moment I’d entered the hospital. How long had I been knocked out? What day was it? Was I going to live or die? Did they get the bullet? Would I play baseball again? Nothing seemed to be normal. I still had trouble breathing, with the pain of the bullet that ripped through my right lung never leaving me despite the drugs.

  As the hospital monitors buzzed and beeped, the anesthesia made my eyes feel heavy, but I was afraid to close them. I might not wake up.

  “Do you remember anything?” my mother asked, the concern lining her face. I hesitated, and I’m not sure if she was relieved or petrified. I could remember certain de
tails, but not everything.

  My family then frantically tried to explain what happened from their different points of view, trying to fill in my blanks. What they didn’t know was that it was too much for my brain to handle.

  “You were in surgery for about four hours,” one voice said.

  “I think that Cotton shot at you three times because there are two other bullets in the house,” another voice said.

  “They wouldn’t let Tammy and Chasen into the house after we were taken away in the police cars, talking about that it was a crime scene. When we asked them what crime was committed, they just walked away,” said yet another.

  “Anthony was made to give statements to the police like he’d committed a crime.”

  “Do you remember that after you were shot, Cotton started going through your pockets? He kept saying, ‘What were you reaching for?’”

  All of their voices quickly turned into one massive mumble, resembling the indistinct voices of Charlie Brown’s parents. As I lay in the hospital bed, with the antiseptic white walls closing in on me, I felt like I was alone, even though I was surrounded by people who loved me. I felt like they were trying to give me key pieces to a puzzle, but no matter how many pieces they put in my lap, I still didn’t have the picture on the box to make sense of it all. Plus, to be honest, I didn’t want to talk about it. This was an extraordinarily traumatic event, and I’d moved from thinking that I was going to die to enjoying the fact that I was still alive.

  The one thing I did note, though, was how my dad said the police treated him after releasing him. Remember, he’d been in his pajamas when he’d gotten to the hospital, so he needed to go back to our house and change. But when he got there, the police had yellow taped the front door and said that he couldn’t enter because he’d be contaminating a crime scene.