Psychologically, however, the move from Sondra’s to Ellsworth’s was jarring, going from a home of chaos, violence, and unpredictability into a hypercontrolled environment.
Impressions of Ellsworth as a caretaker varied. “A wonderful little old lady” and a “fine law-abiding citizen,” or “Wicked Picket” and “Shotgun Annie,” based upon her reported habit of collecting rent at the barrel of a gun.
Ellsworth was described by relatives as “firm and rigid,” “not an affectionate person, [she] did not give the children the care and attention they needed.” Another stated that “Annie’s house was not a loving, cheerful place.” The home was further described as “grim, so much like a prison and I was so lonely that I could hardly wait to get to school.” Lights could not be turned on at night without permission, nor could the bathroom be used, with the children told to go in a pot.
Ellsworth was said to have a temper, using physical beatings and threats of violence to impose discipline. Recalls a family member, “Annie was more than strict with Tiequon, Demontray, and Edrina. She switched them with branches from the backyard trees for making noise in the house or letting the dog out.”
Tiequon’s uncle Roosevelt also spent time at Ellsworth’s home and frequently disciplined Tiequon with “physical whippings or beatings.” Family members also recalled that Ellsworth told Tiequon and his siblings “that no one in the family loved or cared about them or wanted them and that she was the only one who would take them.”
During this time, Tiequon’s friends described him as “depressed” and “empty,” “as if he were only tolerating life.” A second-grade teacher recalled him as “very quiet,” “a listless learner.” A relative stated that “as Tiequon grew older he seemed to care little about whether or not he survived. His friends and other neighborhood kids felt that he lived a sad and isolated existence.”
* * *
Throughout his childhood, school was always a struggle for Tiequon. He entered the Western Avenue School in October 1970, when he was two months shy of five. School was already three weeks under way, and Tiequon was the youngest child in the class.
An educational psychologist with the Los Angeles Unified School District said that Tiequon “seems to have entered school before he was mature enough to learn. Immaturity seems to have hindered academic growth.” His kindergarten teacher likewise commented that he had “difficulty adjusting to school.” This was exacerbated by chronic absenteeism. Tiequon was present for twenty-nine days, absent for seventy-three for his first semester in kindergarten.
Despite such “difficulties,” Tiequon was promoted to the first grade, where the problems continued. His first-grade teacher described him as “extremely immature—unable to do first grade work.” She referred him for “EMR [educationally mentally retarded] testing.” The teachers’ “custom and practice is to consider a student to be extremely immature if he is easily upset and quick to cry.” The high rate of absenteeism continued, with the first-grade teacher calling it “indicative of a highly unstable life.”
Again, despite the problems, Tiequon was advanced to the second grade. While his life became more stable and his attendance improved dramatically while he lived with Ellsworth, his academic struggles continued. In the second grade, his teacher, referring to his standardized test scores, stated that they were “extraordinarily low and indicated he lagged far behind grade level.” By the end of second grade he was considered a “very slow learner—nonreader, no number concepts.” At this point it was recommended that Tiequon repeat the second grade, with his teacher stating: “In my entire teaching career, I have recommended that a student be retained to repeat the same grade level only two times. Tiequon was one of those two students.”
The EMR was viewed by his teacher as a last resort, as it was “terribly stigmatizing for a student at such a young age. It can cause a child to be teased by his peers and, even if not teased, to lose confidence and self-esteem because he knows something is ‘wrong’ with him.”
When he was given the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), an IQ test measuring the child’s capacity, his WISC was 95, and his full-scale IQ 94. Both put him in the average range of general intelligence. This suggested that there was nothing “internally wrong with Tiequon’s brain” that was “causing his disabilities, but that a poor, chaotic or abusive home environment, lack of encouragement or help from home, or social problems were most likely the cause.” He was found by an examining doctor for his EMR referral to have a “short attention span” and “lack of self control.”
Moved on to the third grade after a second year of second, he tried hard, his teacher said, but “was slow to grasp new concepts.” In the fourth grade his teacher expressed surprise that he “was not in a special education class,” as he was “unable to read a complete sentence.”
In the fifth grade he would shift between two schools, as his mother took him back for several months, before losing him to emergency foster care. Ellsworth was subsequently granted legal custody.
When he was eleven he ran away to his grandmother Audrey Martin’s house. This house had neither Sondra’s abuse, nor Ellsworth’s restrictions. It was a “freewheeling,” “hell-raising” place with parties, and strangers constantly crashing out. The social worker for Tiequon’s brother, Demontray, classified the house as “unsuitable for placement.”
He attended the Elysian Heights Elementary School for one month of sixth grade before returning to Ellsworth for the rest of his final year at the 74th Street School. Throughout this time he remained “academically below grade level in all areas.”
* * *
Friends described Tiequon as “always in motion when we were in grade school, doing gymnastics on the way to school.” A teacher said, “Tiequon played unusually hard and exerted himself vigorously physically on the playground.”
Another elementary school teacher: “At the time I had Tiequon as a student, I noted that he was very aggressive on the playground. . . . He was easily offended. At the 74th Street School, disputes, disagreements, or name-calling were settled physically on the playground. It was important in that neighborhood for a kid to stick up for himself and fight. Otherwise, he might be constantly picked on and subjected to harassment. This was just the way disputes were settled.”
When Tiequon reached junior high, he attended Horace Mann. Reports on his behavior conflicted.
The principal referred to Tiequon as a “very sweet, very quiet child,” who “was reserved and withdrawn. He was the kind of kid you wanted to reach out to. He was not hostile.”
At the same time, however, he was referred to the “Opportunity Classroom,” for disruptive behavior. The Opportunity Classroom teacher recalled: “Shortly after I met him, I told my husband that I wished we could have him in our house for a while. Tiequon was emotionally needy and appeared to be someone lacking in affection. But he was also introverted and withdrawn.” She remembered him leaning with his back against a wall, acting “guarded and watchful,” carrying himself in a way that said “don’t come near me.”
At the time, Horace Mann Junior High had a notoriously poor reputation, described as a “violent snakepit,” “downright dangerous,” and a “battleground.” A onetime student recalled, “Guns and knives were commonplace in the school. The campus security had no ability to maintain the peace.” “It was a place to earn combat stars and stripes, rather than to do serious studying.” Another reported, “The junior high school Tiequon and I went to, Horace Mann, was more a war zone or a gladiator school than a place to learn academics . . . at age twelve, my childhood was over.”
In Tiequon’s words, “When you walk up you’re checking everyone and everywhere. When you’d be waiting for classes you’d keep moving and observing. It could cost you your life if you don’t observe. The school was open ground.” Tiequon said such conditions applied to the classroom as well. “You’d never let yourself be absorbed in what was going on in the class, you’d never let down your guard. Y
ou can’t live like that. There are people just lying in wait for you to be slipping like that.”
A peer from Horace Mann said that Tiequon was “challenged more often than others by kids in the neighborhood, in part because of his green eyes, light skin, and reddish hair. While being light-skinned might have been a positive thing in Caucasian neighborhoods, it was not an advantage in our neighborhood. That, plus having no parents who could or wanted to have him live with them, caused him to come up hard and he had to learn to protect himself early.”
Donald Bakeer, a teacher at Horace Mann, commented that most of the male students “were afraid, had no one to turn to, and diverted energy away from school and learning into protecting themselves.”
Previously, the Los Angeles Times reported, teachers at Horace Mann singled out the school as a security risk, threatening to strike because of “the severity and frequency of the violence,” and said action needed to be taken to “protect them and their students.”
Given this environment, only the least qualified and inexperienced teachers were willing to test their luck at Horace Mann. Thus teachers without skills held the children to very low standards, which in turn produced very poor work. Bakeer stressed that “Tiequon’s teachers had very low expectations of him and therefore, Tiequon had low expectations of himself.”
Further, a law required that half the teachers be white, in a school that was 90 percent black. The teachers, not from South Central, were often scared, and simply wanted to get through the day and move on to a different school as soon as possible. They therefore “tolerated behavior from the students that they would not have tolerated from their own children.”
As a classmate of Tiequon’s noted: “The majority of teachers at Mann were white, and many had given up on trying to teach us anything. Drugs and alcohol were widely available. Marijuana and PCP (usually known as ‘sherm’) were easy to get on campus.”
In an attempt to buffer this environment, some at Horace Mann reached out to the students. Homeroom teacher Donald Bakeer, because of Tiequon’s skills, made him captain of the basketball team.
Bakeer said that the gap between Tiequon’s talent level and the next-best player was massive. This caused problems. Tiequon hogged the ball, refused to pass to lesser players or involve them in the games, and ran the show on the court, ignoring Bakeer’s coaching. Bakeer eventually felt forced to remove Tiequon as captain.
Bakeer later reflected that this was very damaging to Tiequon, “and hurt him deeply.” “The basketball team and our relationship were very important to Tiequon. Shortly after losing the position as captain he stopped coming to school. I then heard from other students that Tiequon was drafted into the Crips.”
The assistant dean at Horace Mann focused on the lack of an appropriate father figure for Tiequon, stating that “a biological father or other adult male who could set expectations and a standard of conduct for his children was especially important for the boys in the community.”
Tiequon’s alienist would later conclude, “Tiequon began to find the nurturance, acceptance, and sense of belonging he needed from his peers. His community was full of similarly neglected, abused, and brutalized youths who came together to fill the vacuum left by the disintegration of their families and schools.”
While accounts vary, a change was noted in Tiequon sometime between the sixth and eighth grades. Some in the neighborhood recalled that by age eleven he had already established a reputation as a tough kid who had the backing of an older group. Other sources indicate that the change occurred later, around thirteen years old. Undisputed is the fact that by age fourteen Tiequon was wearing gang clothing and colors and immersed in the gang lifestyle. He quit attending school in the ninth grade.
28
SO DRIVE
BACK IN JUDGE Boren’s courtroom, the prosecutor concluded his opening statement, and the first witnesses were called.
My family heard the evidence: the palm print, the ballistics, the eyewitness testimony of Webb and Driver, the neighbors from across the street. Then came the autopsy photos and Norris told us we might want to leave the courtroom. We did.
My brother Neal testified to having fought with the shooter, whom he saw from behind, holding a rifle. Neal described him as a black male, twenty to thirty-five years old, five feet, eleven inches tall, well built, with a dark complexion. According to Neal the man had some kind of blue object on his head, perhaps headphones, and wore dark blue pants.
Ivan testified regarding his quick glance at a black man holding a long gun. Ivan described the man as about five feet ten, twenty-five to thirty-five years old, with a dark complexion and short hair. Ivan also testified that the intruder had earphones on, wore a dress shirt with buttons, and also wore dark blue jeans.
Later in the case the defense would make hay of the survivors’ descriptions.
* * *
Ida Moore and Delisa Brown testify to the van ride to our house, then the escape.
A minute or two after CW returns to the van, Cox comes running and jumps in. He holds a rifle.
As he pulls the sliding door shut, he says, “I just blew the bitch’s head off, so drive.”
All three men sit in the back. They tell Moore to floor it. She speeds toward Main, where she makes a right.
CW directs her to Vermont and Gage.
Other than directions, there is no conversation. Eventually CW tells her to stop at Jack’s Vermont Club.
CW exits the van and enters the club.
He comes back out, tells Cox and Burns to come in. CW still holds the pistol, Cox the rifle.
Moore is told to ditch the van.
At 9 a.m., Brown listens to news of the killings on the radio and calls CW for instructions. He tells her to drive his Fiat to the Vermont Club.
Brown parks at the gas station next door. CW hands the rifle over a fence to Cox, who puts it in the Fiat’s trunk. Cox drives the car, with Brown in the passenger seat, to Tenth Avenue. He takes a dark jacket from the backseat, retrieves the rifle from the trunk, and wraps it in the jacket. He disappears into an apartment complex, then returns empty-handed.
Cox then drives to his home and Brown goes with him. She watches him comb his hair and put on a shirt. He drives Brown to Moore’s house, drops her off, and drives away.
Later on that same day, CW gives Brown twenty dollars. He wears new clothes and new jewelry.
CW tells Moore not to drive the van, that he will paint it for her. He warns Moore and Brown to keep quiet or he will kill them.
* * *
James Kennedy testified that on the morning of August 31, 1984, Tiequon Cox showed up at the apartment complex on Tenth Avenue in Hyde Park and handed him an M-1 carbine rifle wrapped in a black jacket.
First Cox told Kennedy to get rid of the gun, then he told him to destroy it.
Cox also told Kennedy to have his sister, Shanta, whom Cox was dating, wash the black jacket because it had gunpowder on it.
* * *
Perry Kendrix testified that in the early afternoon of August 31, 1984, he worked for Figueroa Automobile, and that Cox came to the dealer and bought a 1975 yellow Cadillac for $3,000 in cash. Kendrix saw Cox pull mostly $20 bills and some $100 bills from his pocket.
* * *
District Attorney Norris’s closing argument highlighted the slaughter inside the house, as he called for the jury to remember the victims in their final hour, remember them as they were in life.
The two boys, Damon and Damani, are lying just as they were sleeping before they were executed in bed.
Obviously, Damani had fallen off [the bed] in the night, and was sleeping there in exactly the same place that he was sleeping when he was executed.
Damon was lying just like you see the head there, just as if he were a sleeping young boy of eight. . . .
And Dietra, likewise with the photo of Dietra, when you examine that—
At this point the district attorney is interrupted.
“Liar!” a woman yells.<
br />
It is Sondra Holt, Tiequon Cox’s mother.
After the outburst, a bailiff tells Holt that she must leave.
As she is escorted from the courtroom, Cox glowers at the bailiff.
“They better not touch her,” he says.
* * *
It is August 30, 1970. Tiequon Cox is four years old. His mother’s pimp-boyfriend enters the house, catching Cox’s mother in bed with a neighbor.
Tiequon and his two younger siblings are inside the house. From their room they hear a beating—whacks, thuds, their mother’s screams.
Slamming the bedroom door, the boyfriend walks out of the house. A friend of the neighbor confronts the boyfriend and shoots him in the neck. He bleeds to death on the front doorstep.
* * *
Several months later, on December 15, 1970, Tiequon, just turned five, is outside playing. He visits a neighbor’s house. What look like little red candies are scattered across a coffee table. The boy grabs a handful and eats them.
When Tiequon returns home, his mother, noticing that he looks sickly, forces him to vomit. The little candies were “red devils,” a barbiturate. His mother runs next door and attacks the woman who left the pills within her child’s reach, then returns home. Neighbors call the police.
There is banging on the door. His mother tells Tiequon not to open the door, but he does so anyway. His mother stands in the kitchen holding a knife. Tiequon crouches by her side. His little sister Edrina sits in a nearby high chair. An officer draws his revolver and orders his mother to drop the knife. His mother yells at the officers, calling them “motherfucking pigs,” telling them they will have to kill her before she will surrender.
She finally drops the knife, but as they attempt to place her in handcuffs, she swings wildly, clawing and scratching, as they put her in a choke hold. When the police struggle to subdue his mother, Edrina is knocked from her high chair. Tiequon screams and tries to fight the officers as they wrestle his mother to the floor. A neighbor comes to pick up the children. His mother is taken to jail.
The Valley of the Shadow of Death Page 20