No Justice

by Robbie Tolan

  “The district clerk will receive the indictment in this case. At that time, a cause number and a felony district court will be assigned. Prosecutors from our district attorney’s Police Integrity Division will handle this case through its disposition,” said Harris County Assistant District Attorney Donna Hawkins.

  We actually got a grand jury to treat us better than that ham sandwich. Black men don’t often get that type of treatment when they’re up against police officers. As for the City of Bellaire and their reaction, well they were still in a fantasyland about how and why my shooting had happened. We knew that I’d been shot because I was black, but the Bellaire city manager, Bernie Satterwhite, as usual, denied that race had anything to do with the bullet in my body.

  “Neither any action nor statement by the grand jury or the district attorney’s office has suggested, and the city has not learned of any evidence, indicating that the city’s policies or lack of training played any role in the incident. All Bellaire police officers, including Sgt. Cotton, are trained and certified in accordance with Texas-mandated initial and continuing training requirements. There is nothing about the indictment or any investigation which even suggests that race played any role in the stop or Sgt. Cotton’s actions when he arrived as a back-up officer.”

  You know, I honestly didn’t care what he had to say. I knew what was up, and three months after having been shot, this was one of the first positive signs that I just might get some justice. But our lawyers hit back hard in a statement in response to the city’s.

  “I think there’s a tremendous contrast between what happened in Dallas recently and what happened in Bellaire,” Geoffrey Berg said, referring to a police shooting that had recently occurred. “The chief of the Dallas Police Department came out immediately and said he was sorry for what had happened and that was for an egregious situation in which a young man was prevented from being by his mother-in-law’s bedside as she lay dying. Robbie Tolan was shot. And we still have no apology, so there is a great deal the Bellaire Police Department could do.”

  In my heart of hearts, I think the appearance on Real Sports had something to do with the indictment. It put me in the national spotlight, and it took the bandage off the rotten situation that was happening in Bellaire. If my shooting had only garnered local attention, I think they would have buried and ignored it. But now, it was getting national, even worldwide attention.

  For my mom, the indictment proved to be the spur for trying to get me justice. Her crusade became borderline obsessive, and you could tell that she felt this was her calling. She was a woman who’d already gone through so much in her life.

  Before having me, my mother had three miscarriages, and so she knew the devastating effect of personal loss and the ache that never goes away. I can’t imagine what it’s like to nurture a life inside you and then have it die through no fault of your own. Life itself became more precious to her because she didn’t take it for granted. But she was also having her faith tested. She and my father were almost coming to grips with the fact that it appeared that God didn’t have it in His plans for them to have a child.

  Then my mother became pregnant with me, and it seemed like the same cycle would happen yet again. She was pregnant with two babies, twins, and my twin had died. As for me, the doctor told her that it didn’t look good because all of my vital signs appeared weak.

  But the doctor said a curious thing, something that went beyond the medical training.

  “I’ve had success with this, and it might sound crazy,” the doctor told her, “but if you talk to your baby like he’s born, the positivity might just help him be okay.”

  So my mom tried to channel all of her positive feelings into this little baby boy who wasn’t supposed to be born. In order to not jinx it, she didn’t even tell my dad until the last minute that she was pregnant. It was just me and her.

  “Come on baby,” she would whisper to me while rubbing her pregnant belly. “It’s just you and me. I can’t wait to meet you, and I promise that I will love and protect you for all of your life.”

  And three decades later, here I am. So if you think that she was going to let a police officer try to kill her miracle baby and get away with it, you don’t know Marian Tolan very well. And I love her for it. I owe her for my life, and I’d happily give it to make sure that she stays safe in this world.

  My mom has always been the rock of the family. Why? Because she just knows how to run shit. Point blank. When people don’t know what to do in a situation, they call my mom. She’s always on it and takes care of business. My mom is the first person people call when they need to get something done or fixed, and if they’re almost done with something, she’s also the last person they call to see if they’ve done things right.

  And I needed that. I needed a fierce advocate who wouldn’t blink or crumble under pressure—someone who I thought could be vocal for me when I wanted to retreat into silence and anonymity. My mom fit the bill to the tee.

  My dad’s nature is a bit passive when it comes to overtly fighting, but don’t get me wrong, he’s a fighter, just not in the same way as my mom. However, my dad has never been one to openly express his feelings. He’d come to the hospital, ask me how I was doing, and then not say much else. My dad came from an earlier age that taught men to remain emotionless about the devastating impact of tragedy on their lives, but if you scratched just below the surface, you’d see that he was just as disgusted as everyone else. He felt the pain that comes with seeing your child hurting. I felt my dad’s presence, and I could also feel how he was trying to bear the weight of the family, and it was literally tearing him up inside.

  Me? As the victim in this saga, there were times when I wanted to fight and then other times when it was so overwhelming that I just wanted to crawl into a hole. Whether or not I felt like fighting depended on my mood for the day. But my mom? She never wavered. I never saw her tire of fighting. And the one thing she was very adamant about was not settling. There would never be any talk about settling from the lawyers.

  “These people are not going to continue to throw hush money at people and think that they can get away with it,” she told the lawyers. “That’s not an option.” My mom wanted our story to be heard, and she wanted the underbelly of police violence against black people to be shown. Unfortunately, that would be a bone of contention with us as the court cases got to the end point.

  Part of that showing the true face of Bellaire was keeping our story in the media. I was very selective about who I talked to about the shooting, mainly because it took a mental toll on me each time I had to relive it, even though I was prepared.

  Remember when I said that I was a weird little kid and that I had practiced giving interviews as a child? I would give myself these interviews after baseball games. I would pay attention to reporters on TV and see how they conducted interviews. I grew up around big baseball stars like Ken Griffey Jr. and Tony Gwynn, so I got to see them in their element, giving press conferences and clubhouse interviews, and then in their home life. I got to see how they conducted themselves both on and off the field, and so I tried to mimic that. After all, I thought that I was going to be a famous baseball player when I grew up.

  When I was shot, and I had to do press conferences and interviews, it felt like I’d been preparing for this my whole life. I wasn’t caught off guard by anything, and I didn’t suddenly turn timid when speaking to the media. I was very poised, and this was me finally in the game shooting free throws after I’d practiced all night. I wasn’t scared.

  But I knew that I even if I was poised, I still needed to think about my point of view on the shooting and how people would interpret my answers. Every time I was in the media, I tried to think about each and every question a reporter would ask me so that I was prepared. It wasn’t like they were trying to trick me, but I did know that each reporter had the power and ability to shape the narrative about me. If someone doesn’t know me or comes to the interview with thoughts about black men and
the police that contradict my own real story, then there’s a real possibility that the person will skew my story. You can’t come back from that. But by preparing so thoroughly, I was able to maintain a sense of control that, even if it was illusionary, was just enough to keep me sane. I made sure to keep any impulse responses, you know, like being the stereotype of the angry black man, out of the public eye, and my frustrations were only meted out in privacy.

  Nonetheless, I felt that I was under a microscope and constrained in a box shaped by American society. I couldn’t take ownership of the rational angry feelings I had for being wronged because I know that America won’t allow a black man to be angry around issues of race. Maybe it was the stoic face of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his nonviolent movement or something else that was burned into the psyche of our American id, but at no point did I feel like my true angry self could be the face I showed the media. It wouldn’t have helped my cause at all.

  I knew that I had to carry myself differently than some white guy in the same position, mainly because I’d watched my cousin Ken Griffey Jr. and our good friend Tony Gwynn, both of whom were my childhood heroes, act the same way. I watched their faces when a reporter would ask, “How are you feeling after that loss?” And you could see that they wanted to say, “What type of stupid ass question is that?” But they never did. They weren’t allowed to be angry black baseball players, and yet they kept their humanity as they talked about their frustrations, always with class. I knew that I had to carry myself with that same class.

  To be fair, most of the Houston media was very nice to me. I didn’t feel any type of malice from them, nor did they take advantage of the situation or take advantage of me. Their questions were fair, and most were interested in going beyond the whole “black man shot by white police officer” narrative and wanted to see the humanity in me. And for the most part, they were able to do that. We got some really great stories about black people in Bellaire from the Houston Chronicle, and it exposed the racism white residents had ignored or didn’t know about in the first place. However, I still only did the occasional interview. My mom? She had a different strategy.

  My mom believed that, in order to make sure that people didn’t forget me or just reduce me to a statistic or a social media hashtag, she had to talk to everyone. It didn’t matter if it was The New York Times or the June Bug Backyard newspaper, if she could tell my story, she’d tell my story. We bumped heads about this because I wanted to pick my interviews wisely and the lawyers weren’t sure that she should be out there talking about the case. But thank God that she did, because I didn’t have the energy or willpower to do it. On the other hand, this did expose her to a backlash from people who didn’t think I had a legitimate reason to be declared a victim of police violence.

  I remember when she appeared on one local Houston radio show very early on and she was talking about her passion for the fight, along with the broader problem of police violence against black men. My mom was new at this and still trying to find her voice, but she talked about how we needed support from the community when it came to police brutality against black people and how nine times out of ten the victims died during these confrontations, so she looked at my case as a unique opportunity to speak for those who couldn’t speak for themselves. Sounds pretty reasonable, right? Well the radio host, a guy named Michael Harris who has one of the oldest black radio shows in Houston, basically told her that she should keep quiet and just be grateful that I hadn’t died.

  His premise was that only the black mothers who’d lost their children to police violence had a real reason to complain and that, because these mothers would give their right arms to get their kids back, my mom had no right to complain. You are over here complaining about the criminal justice system, but you should really just go home and hug your son and be glad that he’s still here was the essence of his statements. I was infuriated after I heard that interview, thinking to myself, “What an idiot!”

  However, if I am to be completely honest, my mom’s dogged advocacy for me did produce a bit of a rift between us. No matter how much a person loves you, cares about you, and wants to do right by you, the pain you feel from being shot is still theoretical to them. They can sympathize and be outraged for you, but they’re not going through it physically and mentally as you are. At times, I think my mom didn’t understand that her crusade to see me get justice was also taking a toll on me, day to day, month to month, year to year.

  Yes, my goal was justice, but it also was to get back to being a normal human being, and that’s not something you should take lightly. You don’t miss being normal until your life is abnormal, just like you don’t appreciate walking until you’re disabled. To be who I was before I was shot was my strongest drive and my biggest priority. So practically, there were times when I didn’t have the strength to concentrate on the details of the case or what was happening with other black police shooting victims, because I was concentrating on how to sleep through the night without pain or on one of a hundred other things on my list of obstacles to overcome that were hidden from the public and my family. I think my mom took me not concentrating exclusively on the fight as me losing my spirit, or at least not being as determined as she was. But that wasn’t the case.

  No one wants to be a victim, but I learned a few things about being one. Being a victim is a balance between wanting your victimhood avenged, or at least somehow acknowledged by the people, group, or entity that wronged you, while at the same time, not letting yourself be consumed by that victimhood. Other people have a hard time understanding how you couldn’t be consumed by victimhood because, as they try to empathize, they think to themselves about what they’d do in your place. That was my mom’s position, and add to that the fact that she gives me unconditional love, and you have the passionate fighter I talked about earlier. And that’s great. But as much as my mom loves me, she isn’t me and this wasn’t her life. Yet she seemed consumed by telling me about what I needed to do to keep the fight going, and you can’t fault me for having rebelled from time to time, as the last thing I wanted was to have someone else control my life at a time when I felt like it was so out of control. Our relationship suffered in some ways during this period, but later, it would strengthen.

  While I tried to navigate between balancing my need for self-care and fighting a system, the one thing I learned that was completely out of my control was the criminal justice system and whether or not justice would prevail. The indictment was announced in April of 2009, and the trial occurred in May of 2010. However, the trial was rescheduled three times, which really made me feel like the criminal justice system was fucking with me. I now know that trials get rescheduled all of the time as a result of scheduling conflicts, but as a lay person who’d never dealt with lawyers or trials, it felt like I was the last thing on their mind, like they were never going to have the trial.

  I felt like the criminal justice element was a great labyrinth where not only justice is blind, but you are too. I don’t know if they make the rules and procedures intentionally complicated so that you’re reliant on lawyers and judges, but that’s how it felt. No matter how many explanations we got from Berg or the Harris County DA, it always felt like we were in the dark.

  On the other hand, the rest of my life was starting to make sense again. I spent the year prior to the criminal trial in constant rehab, at first just trying to get back to feeling like a normal human being who could walk without feeling like I was going to faint from exhaustion. I eventually got to the point where I felt like I was on the brink of being an athlete again. The hospital sent over a nurse to my Aunt Carolyn’s to check my vitals, but for the most part, getting healed and healthy was all on me.

  You often hear professional athletes talk about rehab being a lonely process, not only because they are hurt but also because they feel disconnected and isolated. This isolation comes in a number of ways.

  You’re disconnected from family and friends who tend to approach each day without having
to deal with limitations, so they have a limited understanding of what you’re going through. Even if you’re permanently disabled physically, you’re still able to create a world of normal limitations that you’re used to. If your life confines you to a wheelchair, then you know what you can and can’t do while in that wheelchair. For me, I had to sweat, cry, and struggle through the frustration of knowing that my physical wholeness was just over the horizon, but I’d first need to climb out of a hole that seemed impossible to climb out of. And yet I knew that I had to do it. Every step out of that hole was a victory against the City of Bellaire and the Bellaire Police Department.

  You’re disconnected from the things you love when you’re in rehab. It may sound funny, but I wanted to get back to normal just so I could go back to being part of that abnormally small percentage of society who has elite athletic skills. However, the bullet in my body introduced doubt into my psyche, and if you’re a baseball player who is trying to do the near impossible, which is to hit a baseball going one hundred miles per hour, just a nanosecond of physical or mental doubt could be the difference between success and failure. And that’s in the best of circumstances. Yet, I was proud of myself because I’d eventually overcome that doubt to get signed with another Minor League Baseball team, but that’s a story for later.

  Throughout this period, I was still on television every single day, as the news kept going with the story. The whole “if it bleeds it leads” ethos meant that there was constant interest in the Robbie Tolan story in the Houston area, which meant that my face was easily recognizable. I would constantly meet strangers at the supermarket, in restaurants, or anywhere, and of course I’d be the “Aren’t you the guy who was shot?” guy. It was weird; strangers wanted to take pictures with me, as though being shot by the police was enough to turn me into a Houston version of Jay-Z, only with a bullet in his back.