Judge Cynthia Gray Hathaway was removed from the bench for six months by the Michigan Supreme Court a decade earlier for, among other things, adjourning trials to sneak away on vacation.
After his adjournment by Hathaway, Gibson did not show for his new court date.
I got a call from a high-ranking prosecutor.
“Dude, come meet me. You’re not going to believe what I found.”
We met at a coffee shop in midtown. He was wearing suspenders and a sour face. I took a seat and he tossed a manila folder at my elbows.
“Take a look,” he said.
The day after Huff was killed, and under fire from the police for her leniency toward Gibson, Judge Hathaway went into the case file and made changes, according to notations made in the court’s computerized docket system.
“Holy shit,” I said.
“She fucking killed that cop,” he said. “She had to know Gibson was going to run. That’s all he ever did.”
“What did she change?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Go to her courtroom. Ask for the case file. It’s public record.”
We shook hands.
* * *
I went to the judge’s courtroom. Not only would she not come out from behind the oak doors, she refused to let me see the original paper file, despite the fact that it is a public record. Her clerk said the judge could not comment on the case because she might preside in the trial against Gibson.
I went back to the office and wrote it up with my colleague who covered courts for the News. Inexplicably, our report sat for days. And when it did appear in the paper the next week, it was watered down to the point of being a half story. Explanations were made on the judge’s behalf, but not by the judge herself. Instead, we took the word of her supervisor that everything was on the up and up.
Editorial decisions like this are made all the time in the news business. But the changes in the copy were never checked with me, as is the custom. When I went to the editors for an explanation, I was told “there were questions” with the original copy.
I’ve been in the business long enough to translate what that meant: we don’t want to piss off a judge unless we’re absolutely sure.
As right as the editors may have been, I was done. Maybe we couldn’t clean up Detroit, but here we had a lazy judge running for reelection and we could have at least done something about that. How long were we going to slog through this river of shit pretending?
I called my buddy the janitor and had him bring a trash can on wheels up to the newsroom. When he did, I swept the entire contents of my desktop into the garbage and walked out.
On my way to the stairs, I looked up at the bank of television sets where I had seen the story of Kilpatrick and the dead stripper on my first day of work nearly two years earlier.
The screens had gone dark.
Outside, I stopped and lit a cigarette and leaned against the building. I thought about what I had just done. I had turned my back on the newspaper business and I was sad. I love being a newsman and I believe in the words carved in the sandstone parapet of the News building: TROUBLER OF THE PUBLIC CONSCIENCE.
But that ideal had become as ossified as the statue of Benjamin Franklin up there. From New York to Los Angeles, American newspapers were yellow and stale before they even came off the press. Dog-beaten by a dwindling readership, financial losses and partisan attacks, editors had stripped them of their personality in an attempt to offend no one. And so there was no more reason to read them. Safety before Truth. Grammar over Guts. Winners before Losers. My eyes traveled down from Franklin to the iron sconces above the entrance.
Pigeons had taken residence inside.
AIN’T THERE NO LOVE NO MORE?
A FEW DAYS later I got a call from Lyvonne Cargill, Je’Rean’s mother. She told me that Je’Rean’s best friend, a kid named Chaise Sherrors, had been murdered the night before—an innocent bystander who took a bullet in the head as he was on a porch clipping someone’s hair.
“It just goes on,” she said. “The silent suffering.”
Chaise’s mother wanted to talk to someone—anyone—who might think her child was worth something. The job fell to me since I knew there would be no other takers in a city anesthetized to violence.
Chaise lived on the other side of the Chrysler complex. He too was about to graduate from Southeastern High. A good kid who showed neighborhood children how to work electric clippers, his dream was to open a barbershop. The morning after he was shot, Chaise’s clippers were mysteriously deposited on his front porch, wiped clean and free of hair. There was no note.
If such a thing could be true, Chaise’s neighborhood was worse than Je’Rean’s. Walk a mile along Mack Avenue in each direction from Alter Road to Gratiot Avenue. You will count thirty-four churches, a dozen liquor stores, six beauty salons and barbershops, a funeral parlor, a sprawling Chrysler engine and assembly complex working at less than half capacity, and three dollar stores—but no grocery stores. In fact, there are no chain grocery stores in all of Detroit.
The house next door to Chaise’s was rubble smelling of burnt pine, pissed all over with spray paint by admirers of the East Warren Crips. The house on the other side was in much the same state. So was the house across the street. In this shit, a one-year-old played next door, barefoot.
Chaise’s mother, Britta McNeal, sat on the porch staring blankly into the distance, smoking no-brand cigarettes. She thanked me for coming and showed me her home, which was clean and well kept. Then she introduced me to her fourteen-year-old son, De’Erion, whose remains sat in an urn on the mantel. He was shot in the head and killed the year before, his case unsolved.
She had already cleared a space on the other end of the mantel for Chaise’s urn.
“That’s a hell of a pair of bookends,” I offered.
“You know? I was thinking that,” she said with tears.
The daughter of an autoworker and a home nurse, McNeal grew up in the promise of the black middle class that Detroit once offered. But McNeal messed up, she admits as much. She got pregnant at fifteen. She later went to nursing school but got sidetracked by her own health problems. School wasn’t a priority. Besides, there was always a job in America when you needed one.
Until there wasn’t. Like so many across the country, she’s being evicted with no job and no place to go.
“I want to get out of here, but I can’t,” she said. “I got no money. I’m stuck. Not all of us are blessed.”
She looked at her barefoot grandson playing in the wreckage of the dwelling next door and wondered if he would make it to manhood.
“I keep calling about these falling-down houses, but the city never comes,” she said.
McNeal wondered how she was going to pay the $3,000 for her son’s funeral. Desperation, she said, feels like someone’s reaching down your throat and ripping out your guts.
* * *
It would be easy to lay the blame on McNeal for the circumstances in which she raised her sons. But is she responsible for police officers with broken computers in their squad cars, firefighters with holes in their boots, ambulances that arrive late, a city that can’t keep its lights on and leaves its vacant buildings to the arsonist’s match, a state government that allows corpses to stack up in the morgue, multinational corporations that move away and leave poisoned fields behind, judges who let violent criminals walk the streets, school stewards who steal the children’s milk money, elected officials who loot the city, automobile executives who couldn’t manage a grocery store, or Wall Street grifters who destroyed the economy and left the nation’s children with a burden of debt while they partied it up in Southampton?
Can she be blamed for that?
* * *
“I know society looks at a person like me and wants me to go away,” she said. “‘Go ahead, wal
k in the Detroit River and disappear.’ But I can’t. I’m alive. I need help. But when you call for help, it seems like no one’s there.
“It feels like there ain’t no love no more.”
* * *
I left McNeal’s porch and started my car. The radio was tuned to NPR and A Prairie Home Companion came warbling out of my speakers. I stared through the windshield at the little boy in the diaper playing amid the ruins, reached over and switched it off.
PANTS ON FIRE
THE MAN WHO paid the bum twenty bucks to burn down the house that killed firefighter Walt Harris was brought into the courtroom by his elbow.
Mario Willis wore a suit with wide stripes and a jacket hem that hung low on his hips. He sported tasseled loafers and gold-framed glasses and steel handcuffs.
“Who is that, Papa?” my three-year-old daughter squealed.
“He is a man who did bad,” I told her. “He’s going to jail.”
I wasn’t a reporter anymore. I was just a stay-at-home dad again, bringing my daughter on a field trip to study the gears of the municipal machinery. I wanted her to see how it was supposed to work, how society looked when it functioned properly. I wanted her to see the good side of things. If the morning’s proceedings could be considered good.
And truth be told, I had a pony in this race. I had something to do with this man’s punishment. I wanted to feel like I had done at least something for the betterment of Detroit. I wanted to feel . . . happy, I guess.
“What did that bad man do?” my girl asked in her tiny alto.
Even Willis turned around to see where the little voice was coming from.
The bailiff walked over.
“There are no children allowed in the courtroom,” she said.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know. She is a citizen,” I said hopefully.
The bailiff hesitated, looked around at all the uniformed people who had packed the gallery, and sensing the sadness in the room, she relented. “That’s okay, hon. Just try to keep her quiet.”
I told my daughter to whisper.
The firehouse mates of Harris sat in the jury box, scowling and whiskered. They looked like one of those old silver daguerreotypes from the Wild West: dark-eyed, mustachioed and the hair miscombed. One of the men looked as though he were preparing to leap out of the box and puncture Willis’s throat with a knife.
Willis did not look up at them.
My daughter noticed the dour men in the jurors’ box as well.
“Who are they, Papa?”
“Those are firemen.”
“Why are they here?”
“They want to see what happens to the bad man.”
“What did the bad man do, Papa?” she asked again.
“He killed their friend,” I said. “He was my friend too.”
“Oh dear,” she whispered. “How did your friend die, Papa?”
“By fire.”
“Why was he making a fire?”
“He wasn’t. The bad man made a fire to burn a house so he could get some money.”
“Was it an accident, Pops?”
“No, sweets.”
“The bad man, he’s still nice. Right, Pops?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart,” I said, kissing her neck. “That’s why we’re here. All of us together will decide how nice he is.”
“Is your friend in heaven with God?”
“He has to be,” I said.
Judge Michael Callahan, a small stone-faced Irishman, entered the courtroom. The people stood.
“Who’s he, Papa?”
“He’s the judge, sweets. He will decide how long the man will go to jail for killing another man.”
“Killing is not right, is it, Pops?”
“No, it is not. God says it is the worst thing a human being can do.”
“Yes, Pops. It’s very bad.”
“And those are lawyers,” I pointed out to my daughter. “They will argue how long the man should go to jail.”
My daughter quickly grew bored with the lawyers and their arguments and protestations and sentencing guidelines. She ducked beneath the pews to play with her toys on the carpet. I did not stop her.
Willis’s mother and then his minister spoke on his behalf—calling his conviction both devastating and unjustified. They spoke about his faith and his work with young toughs. They spoke of the Spirit Award bestowed upon him by the mayor of the city, who was currently residing in the state penitentiary. Their son was a pillar of Detroit, they sobbed. Their son was an honest citizen.
Then came the sickening part. Willis himself. With a straight face, he maintained his innocence despite the fact that the handyman he hired to set the blaze placed him at the scene of the fire. The handyman testified he was paid to burn it down once before. Willis’s cell phone records placed him at the scene of the fire. Willis’s wife testified that he was sleeping with her that night even though phone records show that Willis called her on his cell phone. His wife testified he must have called her from the next pillow over.
His monologue was so weak, so insulting, so slippery, that some of the jurors who had convicted him at trial and had come for his sentencing hissed like snakes.
“Your Honor,” said Willis, standing with an oily but straight face. “I was taught to own up and be a responsible man to all actions. And it’s just . . . it’s not in me, Your Honor, to own up to anything that I didn’t have a part of. I maintain my innocence in this matter.”
Most insulting, he turned to the widow of Walt Harris, addressing her directly.
“I apologize to you, Ms. Harris. I hate the loss. You know, I don’t like what’s happening. I mean because you and your family had the biggest loss ever. I hate that you have been put in this situation, but I did not set this man to do this and I did not have any type of financial gain or any financial wherewithal with this situation. And that’s from me to you.”
He turned to the ash-faced Callahan. “I just once again, just thank you. I ask you to have mercy upon me and I’m very humbled by the situation.”
The widow sobbed at the audacity of the pimp-suited businessman who had cheated her of a beautiful life. Willis the arsonist who burned down a corner of the city for his own profit. Willis the man of God who asked for mercy but could not admit to a widow’s face that his greed had cost her husband’s life.
He was everything wrong. He took no responsibility for the lives he ruined. He blamed others. He hid behind slogans and excuses. He was Kwame Kilpatrick. He was General Motors. He was Wall Street. He was modern America. He was a cheater.
My daughter, hearing the widow whimper, crawled up on my lap.
The judge’s porcelain complexion had gone scarlet as he imposed his sentence:
“In the City of Detroit we have been plagued by arson as a means of entertainment that was known in the city as Devil’s Night, a situation in which the firefighters were called on in many instances to battle hundreds of fires,” he growled.
“They have also been forced to battle fires in schemes for profit, fires set in order to generate insurance proceeds from those who do not deserve them. The defendant went to great lengths to avoid detection and responsibility in his arson-for-profit scheme, including orchestrating perjury by his wife for use in his alibi defense.”
My daughter, who was standing on the pew, whispered in my ear.
“Why is the judge yelling, Papa?”
“The judge is angry because the man is lying,” I said.
“He’s a liar, Pops?”
“Yes, he’s a liar.”
“Pants on fire?”
“Yes, Boo Boo. Pants on fire.”
Judge Callahan sentenced Willis to forty-two years in prison.
* * *
People often ask, w
here is the hope in Detroit? It was right here. I had just watched it. Society had functioned properly in this case because we all wanted it to. The firefighters, the cops, the judge, the jury, the reporter. We the people who wish to raise our children in peace and health. We the people who would like to bequeath something decent to the people who will follow us. To borrow from George Orwell: People like the cops and the firefighters are willing to commit violence and risk their lives on the behalf of others so others may sleep peacefully at night. People who believed in order and fairness. People clever enough to get away with the lie but who defeat the urge for the greater benefit.
A dirty man had killed our friend. And we got him behind bars. We got justice without harming the law. It felt righteous. In the end, if we are going to fix it, we are going to have to stand up and say “enough” and then get on with the difficult work of cleaning it up.
On my way to the elevator, a group of firefighters including Nevin stopped me.
“Hey, Charlie,” he said. “Thank you.”
It was only the second time in my journalism career that I remembered someone with an official capacity saying that to me. Thank you. The other time was at Ground Zero when the final piece of debris had been removed from the hole. It was a group of iron workers who until that point acted as though they hated my interloping guts.
“LeDuff. I appreciate you writing our names down,” shouted one of them, walking across the bar and handing me a glass of bourbon. “Thank you.” I was happy he knew my name. That was enough.
It was the same now.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
The elevator doors opened.
“Can I push the button, Pops?” my daughter asked.
A woman wearing a blouse tighter than a prophylactic and saucer-sized sunglasses stood in our way.
“Excuse us, please,” I said.
She looked like Monica Conyers, the city councilwoman-for-sale who would be sentenced to prison in a few weeks. She said nothing and turned from the doors.
I said nothing and stepped into the elevator.
Detroit: An American Autopsy Page 22