Detroit: An American Autopsy

by Charlie Leduff

  “Yeah, that was me,” I said, nervous that Woolfolk’s crew knew me by sight.

  “That was hilarious,” Little Miss Piggy said, touching my forearm. “We was all passing that story around. He don’t know how to dress. You funny.”

  “Thank you,” I said, relieved, thinking that the boss would be pleased to learn that I had expanded our ever-shrinking readership in the community—to a group of young urban residents with disposable incomes, no less.

  The star witness, the hit man who had called me threatening to kill the prosecutor, was supposed to testify.

  Except the hit man sat cowering in the holding cell behind the courtroom, invoking his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. The prosecutor was hoping the hit man would tell the judge that Alls had been ordered dead. If the judge believed it, she might allow Alls’s statements to police to be entered into evidence: that Alls saw these men beat his best friend to death with liquor bottles and a rope stanchion in the middle of a packed nightclub, all because someone groped a woman’s ass.

  But the hit man knew what Big Martha and everyone else in Detroit knew: a murder always stays murder, forever.

  “Let’s take ten minutes,” ordered Susan Moiseev, whose title, according to the lettering affixed to the bench below her, was DISTRI T JUDGE. The C had fallen off long ago.

  I wandered about the hallway and examined the photos of the district judges pinned to a corkboard behind locked glass panels. The photos were old and fading, stained with red and yellow blotches from where sunlight had interacted with the chemicals. I tried the water fountain. It trickled like stale mud. There was no noise. The place had the lonesome whiff of decay. A suburban courthouse built long ago to fulfill the promises the city couldn’t deliver—only to find that suburban justice couldn’t deliver the promise either.

  I stood and watched the girlfriends and mothers of the defendants whisper in a corner near the window.

  Back in the courtroom, the lawyer for Cooley, the boss of the Black Mafia Family, made a convincing argument.

  “Your honor,” said Steve Fishman, “if my client, Mr. Cooley, sells dope all around the United States, what’s that have to do with the murder of an individual? Did Darnell Cooley have something to do with keeping Anthony Alls from testifying? I don’t have to submit any evidence that Mr. Cooley had nothing to do with Alls’s murder.

  “It doesn’t matter if he sold mounds of cocaine. There is no evidence to connect him to it.”

  Judge Moiseev was unmoved. She allowed Alls’s statements to be entered as evidence and bound the three over for trial.

  The defendants frowned. Before deputies dragged them back to jail with their hands manacled, Woolfolk leaned toward Little Miss Piggy with her moist mouth and poked out his nose toward her tits as though sniffing for a bouquet of lilacs. Little Miss Piggy tilted toward him and smiled like a wet nurse.

  Fishman, who also represented Monica Conyers in her federal bribery case, is a very good lawyer. It’s said about him that he’d win more cases if he actually represented more innocent people.

  Unperturbed, Fishman buckled up his briefcase and left.

  When the courtroom cleared, I approached the judge.

  “That was ballsy of you,” I said to her. “There’s not a whole lot of evidence.”

  “Your article put a lot of pressure on everybody,” she said. “Let the next judge deal with it. I’m not running for reelection.

  “Besides,” she said of Woolfolk, “bodies seem to follow that guy wherever he goes.”

  * * *

  How right she was. A few months later, the estranged wife of the unwilling hit man received a text message from his phone: “Your boy is dead,” it read.

  Somebody whacked the hit man. His body has never been found.

  But Sergeant Martel had a second theory. “He might’ve sent the text himself in an effort to avoid child-support payments. We ain’t dealing with St. Joseph here.”

  As for the three members of the Black Mafia Family—they all took a deal for three to five years in prison.

  Not much, but better than nothing.

  FORGET WHAT YOU SAW

  IT WAS JUST after midnight and the streetlights were out on Lillibridge Street. It is like that all over Detroit, where whole blocks regularly go dark with no warning or any apparent pattern. Inside the lower unit of a duplex halfway down the gloomy street, Charles Jones was pacing, unable to sleep, something on his mind.

  His seven-year-old daughter, Aiyana Mo’nay Stanley-Jones, slept on the couch as her grandmother watched television. Outside, television was watching them. A half dozen masked officers of the Special Response Team—Detroit’s version of SWAT—were at the door, guns drawn.

  The SWAT team tried the steel door to the building. It was unlocked. They threw a flash-bang grenade through the window of the lower unit and kicked open its wooden door, which was also unlocked. The grenade landed so close to Aiyana that it burned her blanket. Officer Joseph Weekley, the lead commando, fired a single shot, the bullet striking Aiyana in the head and exiting her neck. It all happened in a matter of seconds.

  “They had time,” Mike Carlisle told me when I called him. He was waiting at the airport to chauffeur some Italian auto executive to the Chrysler headquarters. “You don’t go into a home around midnight. People are drinking. People are awake. Me? I would have waited until the morning when the guy went to the liquor store to buy a quart of milk. That’s how it’s supposed to be done.”

  But the SWAT team didn’t wait. Maybe because the cameras were rolling, maybe because a Detroit police officer had been murdered two weeks earlier while trying to apprehend a suspect. This was the first raid on a house since his death.

  Police first floated the story that Aiyana’s grandmother had grabbed Weekley’s gun. Then, realizing that sounded like bullshit, they said she’d brushed the gun as she ran past the door. But the grandmother said she was lying on the far side of the couch, away from the door. Plus, grenades are rarely used when rounding up suspects, even murder suspects. But it was dark. And TV may have needed some pyrotechnics.

  “It was a total fuckup,” a police commander in charge of this total fuckup told me the next morning. “A total, unfortunate fuckup.”

  In tow was an A&E crew filming an episode of The First 48, its true-crime program. The conceit of the show is that homicide detectives have forty-eight hours to crack a murder case before the trail goes cold. Thirty-four hours earlier, Je’Rean Blake Nobles, seventeen, had been shot outside a liquor store on nearby Mack Avenue; an informant had ID’d a man named Chauncey Owens as the shooter and provided this address.

  Compounding the tragedy is the fact that the police threw the grenade into the wrong apartment. Chauncey Owens lived in the upstairs flat with Charles Jones’s sister.

  Owens, a habitual criminal, was arrested upstairs minutes after Aiyana’s shooting and charged with the slaying of Je’Rean. His motive, authorities say, was that the teen failed to pay him the proper respect. And Jones—the father of the slain little girl—was later charged with Je’Rean’s murder too; he allegedly went along for the ride.

  As Officer Weekley wept on the sidewalk, his colleagues trying to console him over his wayward shot, Aiyana was rushed to the trauma table, where she was pronounced dead. Her body was transferred to the Wayne County morgue and Dr. Schmidt.

  I went to visit the doctor. A Hollywood starlet was tailing him, studying for her role as the medical examiner in ABC’s new Detroit-based murder drama Detroit 1-8-7. The title is derived from the California penal code for murder: 187. In Michigan, the designation for homicide is actually 750.316, but that’s just a mouthful of detail.

  The starlet giggled as she sliced up a dead man’s brain.

  “You might say that the homicide of Aiyana is the natural conclusion to the disease from which she suff
ered,” Schmidt told me.

  “What disease was that?” I asked.

  “The psychopathology of growing up in Detroit,” he said. “Some people are doomed from birth because their environment is so toxic.”

  * * *

  When I was a teenager, my mother and I were working in her little flower shop not far from where Aiyana would be killed. It was a hot afternoon around Mother’s Day and I walked across the street to the liquor store for a soda pop. A small crowd of agitated black people was gathered on the sidewalk. The store bell jingled its little requiem as I pulled the door open.

  Inside, splayed on the floor underneath the rack of snack cakes near the register, was a black man in a pool of blood. The blood was congealing into a pancake on the dirty linoleum. His eyes and mouth were open and held that milky expression of a drunk who has fallen asleep with his eyes open. The red halo around his skull gave the scene a feeling of serenity.

  An Arab family owned the store, and one of the men—the one with the pocked face and loud voice—was talking on the telephone, but I remember no sounds. His brother stood over the dead man, a pistol in his hand, keeping an eye on the door in case someone walked in wanting to settle things.

  “You should go,” he said to me, shattering the silence with a wave of his hand. “Forget what you saw, little man. Go.” He wore a gold bracelet as thick as a gymnasium rope. I lingered a moment, backing out while taking it in: the bracelet, the liquor, the blood, the gun, the Ho Hos, the cheapness of it all.

  The flower shop is just a pile of bricks now, but despite what the Arab told me, I did not forget what I saw. Whenever I see a person who died of violence or misadventure, I think about the dead man with the open eyes on the dirty floor of the liquor store. I’ve seen him in the faces of soldiers when I was covering the Iraq War. I saw him in the face of my sister. I saw him in the face of my sister’s daughter. And I saw him now, on the face of a willowy child in a casket. Another innocent, whose death triggered a series of events that almost set the ghetto on fire.

  * * *

  Je’Rean Blake Nobles was one of the rare black males in Detroit who made it through high school. A good kid with average grades, Je’Rean went to Southeastern High, which is situated in an industrial belt of moldering Chrysler assembly plants. Completed in 1917, the school, attended by white students at the time, was considered so far out in the wilds that its athletic teams took the nickname “Jungaleers.”

  With large swaths of the city now rewilding—empty lots are returning to prairie and woodland as the city depopulates—Southeastern was slated to absorb students from nearby Kettering High as part of a massive school-consolidation effort. That is, until someone realized that the schools are controlled by rival gangs. So bad is the rivalry that when the schools face off to play football or basketball, spectators from the visiting team are banned.

  Southeastern’s motto is Age Quod Agis: “Attend to Your Business.” And Je’Rean did. By wit and will, he managed to make it through. A member of JROTC, he was on his way to the military recruitment office after senior prom and commencement. But Je’Rean never went to the prom, much less the Afghanistan theater, because he couldn’t clear the killing fields of Detroit. He became a horrifying statistic—in Detroit more than five children are murdered every month.

  Je’Rean’s crime? He looked at Chauncey Owens the wrong way.

  It was 2:40 in the afternoon when Je’Rean went to the Motor City liquor store and ice cream stand to get himself an orange juice to wash down his McDonald’s. About forty kids were milling around in front of the soft-serve window. That’s when Owens, thirty-four, pulled up on a moped.

  Je’Rean might have thought it was funny to see a grown man driving a moped. He might have smirked. But he said nothing.

  “Why you looking at me?” said Owens, getting off the moped. “Do you got a problem or something? What the fuck you looking at?”

  A slender, pimply-faced kid, Je’Rean was not an intimidating figure. One witness had him pegged for thirteen years old.

  Je’Rean balled up his tiny fist. “What?” he croaked.

  “Oh, stay your ass right here,” Owens growled. “I got something for you.”

  Owens sped two blocks back to Lillibridge and gathered up a posse, according to his own statement to the police. The posse allegedly included Aiyana’s father, Charles “C.J.” Jones.

  “It’s some lil niggas at the store talking shit—let’s go whip they ass,” Owens told his crew of grown men.

  Owens switched his moped for a Chevy Blazer. Jones and two other men known as “Lil’ James” and “Dirt” rode along for Je’Rean’s ass-whipping. Lil’ James brought along a .357 Magnum—at the behest of Jones, because Jones was afraid someone would try to steal his “diamond Cartier glasses.”

  Je’Rean knew badness was on its way and called his mother to come pick him up. She arrived too late. Owens got there first and shot Je’Rean clear through the chest with Lil’ James’s gun. Clutching his juice in one hand and two dollars in the other, Je’Rean staggered across Mack Avenue and collapsed in the street. A minute later, a friend took the two dollars as a keepsake. A few minutes after that, Je’Rean’s mother, Lyvonne Cargill, arrived and got behind the wheel of the car that friends had dragged him into.

  Why would anyone move a gunshot victim, much less toss him in a car? It is a matter of conditioning. In Detroit, the official response time of an ambulance to a 911 call is twelve minutes. Paramedics say it is routinely twice that. Sometimes they come in a Crown Victoria with only a defibrillator and a blanket, because there are no other units available.

  The hospital was six miles away. Je’Rean’s mother drove as he gurgled in the backseat.

  “My baby, my baby, my baby. God, don’t take my baby.”

  They made it to the trauma ward, where Je’Rean was pronounced dead. His body was transferred to Dr. Schmidt and the Wayne County morgue.

  ROCKET DOCKET

  THE RAID ON the Lillibridge house that took little Aiyana’s life came two weeks and at least a dozen homicides after the last time police stormed into a Detroit home. That house too is on the city’s east side, a nondescript brick duplex with a crumbling garage whose driveway funnels into busy Schoenherr Road.

  Responding to a breaking-and-entering and shots-fired call at 3:30 A.M., Officer Brian Huff, a twelve-year veteran, walked into that dark house. Behind him stood two rookies. His partner took the rear entrance. Huff and his partner were not actually called to the scene; they’d taken it upon themselves to assist the younger cops, according to the police version of events.

  Huff entered with his gun still holstered. Behind the door was Jason Gibson, a violent man with a history of gun crimes, assaults on police, and repeated failures to honor probationary sentences. Even so, the judges continued to revolving-door him back onto the streets, because the overwhelmed jails and courts could barely process the murderers and rapists and politicians. This often leads to murder.

  Gibson was a tall, thick-necked man who, like the television character Omar from The Wire, made his living robbing dope houses. Which is what he was doing at this house, authorities contend, when he put three bullets in Officer Huff’s face, killing him.

  A neighbor who now tends the lawn of the abandoned dope house out of respect for Huff wondered why so many cops had even showed up to the routine home-invasion call. “The police hardly come around at all, much less that many cops that fast on a break-in.”

  Some newspapermen I worked with believed Huff may have been running a dope house in the duplex. That was the word their sources were giving them. Like the neighbor now tending the lawn, reporters and cops alike wondered why Huff and a half dozen cops rushed to a run-of-the-mill call that wasn’t even assigned to them by the dispatcher.

  I couldn’t have cared less why they all showed up that evening. I was more interested in the
fact that once Huff went down and the gunfire went off, it was the cops who shot each other.

  But the biggest mystery behind Officer Huff’s murder is why Gibson was out on the street in the first place. A few years earlier, Gibson attacked a cop and tried to take his gun. For that he was given simple probation. And he failed to report to court.

  Why would a menace who tried to disarm a cop be given probation? The answer is as sad as it is simple. The Detroit jails and the courts are administered by Wayne County, and the county government is as corrupt and mismanaged as the city’s.

  The standard reason for men like Gibson getting probation is that there aren’t enough jail beds. But the truth is, half the jail beds sit empty because there is no money to pay deputies to guard the inmates.

  In order to relieve this “overcrowding” in the jails and courtrooms, something known as the “rocket docket” was concocted. Put simply: if someone is not accused of a capital crime like murder or rape, they are funneled through the court’s rocket docket at light speed and generally given probation or an electronic monitoring anklet. Too many times, dangerous men escape into the ether, which Gibson did.

  Police caught him again, a year before he killed Huff. That time, he was in possession of a handgun stolen from an Ohio cop.

  Again Gibson went through the rocket docket and was set free on $2,000 bond in January. Incredibly, he showed up for his trial in circuit court in February.

  But then the circuit court too has its gangrenous limbs in need of pruning. His judge, Cynthia Gray Hathaway, adjourned the trial without explanation, according to official paperwork. Known as “Half-Day” Hathaway, she was part of an extended clan of judges related by blood and marriage who held great power over the halls of justice. And because judges are elected in Michigan, name recognition means everything and legal ability almost nothing. For this reason you could find Hathaways rooted on the benches from family court to the Michigan Supreme Court.