by Scott Pratt
Officer Milhorn stood by the door while the rest of us went to work. College athletes, like most college students, live like gypsies. They travel light and can be ready to move at a moment’s notice. Kevin had the basics: a small television, a laptop, and his clothing. His parents put the television and some of his clothing in their car, and Kevin put the rest of his clothes, his toiletries, a guitar, and some photographs in his car. We were loaded up and out of there in thirty minutes. Nobody bothered to say goodbye to Officer Milhorn.
Less than two minutes after we got into the car and drove away, Jack said, “You’re a complete lunatic, you know that?”
“What? I’m not going to let some snot-nosed rookie cop boss me around. They intimidate people all the time, Jack, because they have a badge and a gun. They think they can tell people what to do and they have to do it automatically. It doesn’t work that way. I was telling him the truth. There is no law that says you have to do something just because a cop tells you to. If a cop gives you a lawful, reasonable order, then you have to comply. If they’re just bullying you, you can tell them to piss up a rope.”
“He almost tasered you, Dad.”
“Would have been a terrible mistake for him, and to his credit, he finally realized it.”
“I’ll be glad when I have your confidence,” Jack said.
“Thanks. Me, too.”
“But I’ll never be as crazy as you are. Never.”
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 9
Investigator Bo Riddle had called the watch commander early in the afternoon to see if he’d heard anything about where Kevin Davidson had gone after he was released from jail. Riddle knew he’d been banished from his home by the university and kicked out of school. He wanted to know where Davidson was going, because he and his friends had plans, the kind of plans he didn’t wish to discuss with the watch commander.
The watch commander had told Riddle he’d assigned a rookie named David Milhorn to “supervise” the removal of Kevin Davidson’s belongings from the home and to confiscate his keys. The watch commander also said Milhorn reported that Davidson had showed up along with his parents and his lawyer, gathered his belongings, surrendered his keys, and left.
Riddle asked for Milhorn’s cell number and the watch commander gave it to him. He dialed it immediately.
“David Milhorn,” a voice said.
“Officer Milhorn, this is Investigator Bo Riddle. I’m lead on the ETSU rape case, and I understand you were at Kevin Davidson’s house today when he came and picked up his things.”
“That’s right,” Milhorn said.
“So everything went smoothly?”
“Yeah, it was fine, except for the lawyer. I almost tased him.”
“Tased him? Why?”
“Because he was a belligerent bastard. I told him he couldn’t come in the house and he just barged right past me. I didn’t take it well.”
“His lawyer’s a jackass. All defense lawyers are jackasses,” Riddle said. “How did it turn out?”
“It was tense for a minute, but I eventually let him come inside. They gathered up the kid’s things and left.”
“Who’s they?” Riddle said.
“The kid, his parents and the lawyer and the lawyer’s son.”
“Did you hear any of them say anything about where the kid was going?”
“I got the impression he was going to stay with his lawyer.”
“Seriously? The kid has an old Honda registered in his name. Was he driving it?”
“Yeah.”
“When they left, did you notice if the kid followed the parents or the lawyer?”
“I noticed. The parents went west, and the lawyer’s son, who was driving a Jeep, went east. The lawyer was riding with his son. The kid followed the Jeep.”
“Thanks,” Riddle said. “Just trying to stay on top of things for my investigation. Appreciate your help.”
Riddle disconnected the phone, wondering exactly what was going on. The kid had no girlfriend that Riddle knew of. He had no family in the area. Riddle wondered if Dillard really had decided to take him in until the trial.
Part of him hoped exactly that. Dillard was already a marked man simply by virtue of representing a nigger who had raped a white woman. If he was housing him and protecting him as well, bad things were in store for Joe Dillard.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 9
The introduction to Rio had gone well; the dog sniffed him over, licked his hand, and wandered away.
“Okay,” I said. “You’ve passed inspection. You’re in. He’ll still bark at you when you come to the front door. Just unlock it and talk to him. He’ll calm down and let you in. We’ll play a little game tonight with him that will really make him like you.”
I invited Jack and Charlie over for supper. Caroline had put a pot roast in the slow cooker, and Caroline, Kevin, Jack, Charlie and I all sat down for supper. I wanted to make Kevin feel as comfortable as possible. We ate and made small talk, and after we were finished eating, I helped Caroline and Charlie clean up while Jack helped Kevin get settled into Jack’s old room, showed him which television remote operated which function, and familiarized him with the bathroom and the inside of the house. Afterward, I took him outside and introduced him to Sadie, Charlie’s horse, and showed him around the barn and the property. I showed him the trail where I still jogged almost every morning at 5:30 or 6:00 a.m., and I showed him the boundaries of the ten acres we owned. We stood looking down onto the lake, which the Tennessee Valley Authority had drawn down more than ten feet since Labor Day. The government agency constantly manipulated the water levels by using a system of dams.
“It’s beautiful up here,” Kevin said.
“Yeah. I love it. We’ve been here a long time.”
“Can I ask you a question, Mr. Dillard?” Kevin said.
“Sure. Fire away.”
“Why are you doing this? Why are you taking me in, giving me a job? You could be putting yourself at risk.”
“I’m not afraid for me,” I said. “I’m afraid for you. I’ll just be honest with you, Kevin. You’re the only player who’s going to be out on bond before the trial. The others can’t afford it. They’ll sit in jail until the trial. I think they’ll be safe there, because the sheriff runs a tight ship at the jail. But since you’re out, you’ll be the target. I think some white supremacist looking to make a name for himself could try to kill you, and I want to do everything in my power to make certain that doesn’t happen.”
“But why do you care?” he said.
“Because I’m a human being. Because I’m a lawyer. Because I look at this case and it stinks to high heaven. They don’t have any reliable evidence against you, but they indicted you anyway. The DNA tests came back negative. The photo lineup Bo Riddle showed the girl was coached, unconstitutional, and will never see the inside of a courtroom. We have video of everything that happened from the time the girl arrived at the party until the time she left. It proves no rape took place, but Mike Armstrong wouldn’t even look at it.”
“So you think this is purely a racial thing?” Kevin said.
“That’s part of it, especially with Riddle, but there’s something else going on I haven’t been able to figure out. I’ll let you know as soon as I do.”
Kevin turned to face me and stuck out his hand.
“Thank you, Mr. Dillard. I mean it. Right now, I feel like my entire world has been blown apart, but there’s something about you that makes me think it’s going to turn out all right.”
“I hope so, Kevin,” I said. “I really do.”
We went back inside when it grew dark.
“Let’s play that game I was talking about,” I said.
I walked into the den and picked up a tennis ball that I kept on a shelf near the door. Rio immediately started whining, his tail banging into a coffee table.
“Sit,” I said, and the dog sat.
“Stay.”
I handed the ball to Kevin.
“Walk out onto t
he deck, close the door, and throw the ball in any direction you want,” I said. “Don’t throw it too hard toward the lake or it might roll over the bluff. After you throw it, open the door and let Rio out.”
Rio whined while Kevin went out, but he stayed where he was. I watched Kevin throw the ball with his left hand. He came back to the door and opened it. Rio looked at me.
“Go get it,” I said, and he shot through the door like a rocket.
“Less than five minutes, guaranteed,” I said.
About four minutes later, the dog was back with the ball in his mouth. He dropped it at Kevin’s feet.
“That means do it again,” I said, so Kevin repeated the whole process. He even gave Rio the “sit” and “stay” commands. I watched while they played the game for a half-hour or so.
“Okay,” I said after Kevin had thrown the ball and Rio had retrieved it seven or eight times, “that’s enough for tonight. Kevin, you’ve made a lifelong friend.”
We spent the rest of the evening watching the National League Division Series on television. The game ran pretty late. Jack and Charlie left around 10:00 p.m., and Caroline went to bed thirty minutes before. The ballgame was a blowout, and at some point I turned to Kevin and said, “Kevin, I played ball in high school with black guys and I served with black guys in the Army. I sweated and trained with them, drank beer with them, shared food with them, even fought in combat alongside them. I’ve represented dozens of black men and women over my career. But you know what? I never thought to ask one of them what it’s like to be black in the United States of America. So I’m going to ask you. What’s it like?”
He paused, considering his answer. That was something I’d noticed about Kevin. He was thoughtful in his approach to questions like the one I had just posed. He didn’t just blurt out the first thing that came to his mind.
“It’s hard for me to speak for so many,” he began, “because my life has been different than the lives of a lot of young blacks in this country. My father was always around. He was a steady influence, a good man. My mother was the same. Hard-working, conscientious, intelligent and loving. I always had clothes to wear and there was always food on the table. We ate as a family every evening, even if I was practicing and didn’t get home until late. Everyone would wait until we could all eat together. I wasn’t running the streets like so many others. I was in a safe, loving environment at home and at school, I worked hard in the classroom and in sports.
“But there have been things that happened—a lot of things—that made me uncomfortable, made me ashamed, made me angry. I’ll give you a couple of examples. I was stopped by the police three times my freshman year at Collierville, and all I was doing was walking to class. We had to walk outside from one building to another, and I would get stopped and questioned while my white classmates walked right past me. Why did they stop me and harass me? Because I was wearing red sweatbands. The school colors were red and white. A lot of white guys, especially athletes, wore red sweatbands, but on me, it was taken by the white cops as flashing gang colors. I finally just quit wearing them. After I got my license, I was stopped a half-a-dozen times by the Collierville police, for no other reason than I was a young black man driving around in a nice, predominantly white, neighborhood.
“My parents tried to prepare me, they warned me about some of the things I’d come up against, but it’s still hard to take when you’re walking down the street and a white woman that’s walking towards you crosses the street and clutches her purse. I remember playing spin the bottle at a party with a bunch of white kids from my neighborhood when I was in the sixth grade. I spun the bottle and it pointed at this girl named Susan Dell. I leaned over to kiss her and she got up and ran out of the room. A friend invited me over to swim in his pool when I was sixteen. When his father came home, it was immediately apparent that he was uncomfortable with me being in the pool. He asked my friend to ask me to leave. I know as I got older my mother was afraid every time I left the house because so many young black men were being shot by white police officers, people who were supposed to serve and protect us. You learn to cope with it, but you never really feel free. And you know why? It’s because you aren’t, not in the true sense of the word. Not in the white sense of the word.”
I didn’t know what to say. Everything he’d said had a ring of truth to it, and what was worse, here was a kid who had tried his entire life to do everything right, to walk that fine line, to advance and excel in a society where the deck was stacked against him, and now he’d fallen victim to the very things he’d just talked about. It was a perfect storm, and it would certainly devour this young man if I couldn’t do something to calm the winds. I decided right then and there I had to do something, and soon. I couldn’t let this case run its course through the normal channels. The risk was too great that we could wind up with a jury full of closet racists and that Kevin would go to the penitentiary for the rest of his life.
My biggest problem was that there was no real legal mechanism for walking into Criminal Court and asking a judge to dismiss an indictment based on a lack of evidence. Defense lawyers could challenge indictments on mistakes in the form of the indictment or mistakes in the charges, but even if we managed to get the case tossed on technical defects in the indictment—and there weren’t any in Kevin’s case—Mike Armstrong would just go back to the grand jury, present his case again, get proper indictments against the players, and we’d start back at square one. What I needed to do was to attack what little evidence they had piece by piece, try to get it all excluded by filing motions in limine, get the judge on our side, and then gut Armstrong at trial. A motion in limine is a motion filed before the trial, asking the court for an order limiting or preventing the use of certain evidence during the trial.
I decided to get everyone together first thing in the morning and organize the attack. I also decided to do something I normally wouldn’t have done, which was to tell the lawyers representing the other two players what I was planning to do. They were both excellent lawyers, and I thought they might be able to offer some help.
“I’m going to hit the hay,” I said to Kevin. “I usually get up early and go for a run along a trail that runs through the woods at the top of the bluff above the lake. You’re welcome to join me, or you can sleep in.”
“What time do you get up?”
“Usually around five,” I said. “I hit the trail around six.”
“I’ll get up and go with you,” he said. “Might as well get up and move around. I’ll get depressed if I just sit around and worry.”
“Good. I’ll see you in the morning.”
I went back into the bedroom, kissed Caroline on the forehead, and went to sleep.
They came around three-thirty in the morning, the miserable cowards. It started when I was awakened by a low, steady growl coming from Rio. He was standing beneath the bedroom window, and I rolled out of bed and tried to calm him. What he was doing was extremely unusual. Rio knew the difference between a deer walking through the yard and a threat. Something, or someone, was outside that wasn’t supposed to be there. I opened the blinds and looked out the window but couldn’t see anything. It was pitch black outside, which was another sign that something was wrong. We had a security light at the corner of the house by the driveway. It had either quit working or someone had disabled it.
I moved quickly to the closet and threw on a dark hoodie, a pair of sweats and my running shoes. Then I grabbed a Remington Model 1100 Tactical shotgun and started sliding twelve-gauge, double-ought buckshot rounds into the magazine. It held eight.
I stepped back into the bedroom and Caroline was sitting up.
“What’s going on?” she said.
“I don’t know, but something isn’t right. The hair on Rio’s back is standing straight up.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Go out there and see what’s going on.”
“Why don’t you call the police?”
“Go ahead,” I said,
and she reached over for her phone.
“Stay in here. Keep Rio with you. If I’m not back in five minutes, pick up a weapon and don’t be afraid to use it.”
Caroline had occasionally enjoyed going along with Jack and I on our shooting jaunts and could handle a variety of weapons. She wasn’t a dead-eye, but if a person got close enough, she could put a bullet in them. And I had no doubt she’d do it, too, to protect her home, herself, her dogs, and Kevin Davidson.
I slipped out of the bedroom and closed the door. I decided to go out the back, down the steps off the deck and circle around the house. I moved quickly, the shotgun at my shoulder. Just as I came around the corner of the house, I heard the rat tat tat of an assault rifle coming from the road at the top of the driveway. It had the distinctive sound of the Kalashnikov AK-47. The windows in the garage began to break. I huddled against the side of the house. There was no way I could go up against an assault rifle with a shotgun from that distance, and I had no idea how many people with weapons were out there. The firing continued as the shooter began to shred Kevin’s car, which was parked just to the side of the driveway on an asphalt pull-off. Finally, the shooting stopped, and the next thing I heard was a loud whoosh as flames lit up the night sky. Next came the sound of a diesel engine, most likely a large pick-up, and a male voice that yelled: “Nigger lover!”
I began to run toward the sound of the truck, firing the shotgun as I went. I squeezed off five rounds as the truck roared off into the darkness. I stopped running and moved the rest of the way up the driveway toward the fire. It was just a few feet off the road, and it only took a few seconds for me to realize what they’d done. I stood there staring, with a feeling of surreal bewilderment coming over me.
I’d read about it in books. I’d seen it in the movies.
But never, not once in my life, had I envisioned someone burning a cross in my front yard.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 10
After I made sure they were gone by doing a sweep around the house and letting Rio out to do his own grid search, I dragged a water hose up and doused the flames. The cross was only about four feet high, made from a four-by-four post and a two-by-four crosspiece that had been nailed together. It was a hasty and sloppy job as far as intimidation tactics go, but I guess it served its purpose. I was certainly on notice that the racists knew where I lived and were willing to show up at my house. I didn’t know whether they were aware that Kevin Davidson was sleeping in Jack’s room. They hadn’t tried to get to him, but the thought nagged at me that someone knew, and I wondered who that person was and how he found out. It had to be a man. Women didn’t typically do cross-burnings.