S Street Rising

by Ruben Castaneda

  Meanwhile, Prince George’s underwent a dramatic demographic transformation. In 1960, its population was just under 400,000. By 1990 it had nearly doubled, even as whites steadily left. In 1960, only about 10 percent of county residents were black; by 1990 that number was 51 percent, with about 370,000 black residents, versus about 31,000 three decades before. Many of the blacks who moved in were college-educated and had high-paying jobs as lawyers and doctors, as well as in local, state, and federal government. Meanwhile, poverty and high levels of joblessness, addiction, and crime persisted in the communities on and near the D.C. border.

  By the mid-nineties Prince George’s was the wealthiest majority-black county in the country. In November 1994, Wayne K. Curry, a Democrat, defeated Republican Robert Ostrom for the open county executive seat. Curry, who’d also defeated a strong white candidate in the Democratic primary, became the first black county executive in the three-hundred-year history of Prince George’s. He and other county officials ballyhooed Prince George’s affluence as they lured businesses such as restaurants and big-box stores to previously underserved areas.

  For all the changes, however, the culture of the police department remained the same. It was a haven for officers who didn’t hesitate to use deadly force. In April 1995, the department’s T-70 tactical squad was assigned to arrest Jeffrey C. Gilbert, who was suspected of killing county police corporal John C. Novabilski while he was sitting in his squad car, moonlighting as a security guard outside of a convenience store. Before the operation, a police commander showed squad members gruesome pictures of Novabilski’s body, which had been shot repeatedly with a MAC-11 machine pistol. He also told them that Gilbert was a known hit man for drug gangs.

  Six T-70 officers stormed Gilbert’s girlfriend’s apartment. They pummeled him, cuffed him, and took him to a hospital emergency room. He suffered a broken nose, a concussion, and a broken blood vessel in his brain. He remained hospitalized for four days and was in such bad shape that detectives were unable to question him. Sharon worked the case for Gilbert’s defense attorney. A couple of days after the beating, she took photos of the bloodstained wall behind the bed from which the heavily armed officers had pulled the sleeping Gilbert.

  “You would have thought somebody was murdered in that room,” she recalled. “I think their mission was to bring him out alive—but barely.”

  Gilbert, it turned out, hadn’t shot Novabilski. He wasn’t a hit man for gangs. He wasn’t a hit man for anyone. In its rush to capture a cop killer—and exact vengeance—the department had done everything wrong. Rather than conduct a methodical, thorough investigation to identify the culprit, police quickly decided on a suspect based on no solid evidence. Less than forty-eight hours after Novabilski’s death, detectives wrote a charging document alleging that three eyewitnesses had identified Gilbert as his killer. The witnesses allegedly picked Gilbert’s image from a photo array. Police took the charging document to a judge, who signed off on an arrest warrant.

  It was, at best, slipshod detective work. Novabilski’s killer had been wearing a ski mask, making an identification all but impossible. And two of the “witnesses” would later allege that police had shown them a photo of Gilbert and bullied them into identifying him from the picture as the killer.

  When Gilbert was arrested, Lou called a Prince George’s white shirt to suggest the department keep an open mind in its investigation. Four months earlier, two D.C. police officers had been ambushed much as Novabilski had. One was shot while sitting in a fast-food restaurant, the other while sitting in his squad car. Both officers had been wounded but survived. The attacker in one of the shootings wore a ski mask.

  Lou’s heads-up went unheeded.

  Thanks, but we think we’ve got our guy, the Prince George’s white shirt responded.

  Lou and his detectives and the FBI continued to hunt the D.C. police stalker. In late May, they caught a break: Prince George’s police interviewed a woman who alleged that she was being abused by her boyfriend. The woman was about to leave the police station when, almost as an aside, she added that her boyfriend had been the one who was going around shooting cops.

  A witness to one of the D.C. shootings had told Lou’s detectives that the attacker wore braces. Around that time, the woman recounted, her boyfriend had removed his braces—with pliers. His name was Ralph McLean.

  MPD detectives and FBI agents set a trap: McLean’s girlfriend would arrange to meet him at a gas station in Greenbelt, just down the street from the federal courthouse. An FBI agent who resembled McLean’s girlfriend would pose as her.

  McLean apparently sensed the setup. He arrived early, hid in a nearby wooded area, crawled on his belly toward the perimeter established by D.C. and Prince George’s cops and FBI agents, and then sprang up and shot FBI agent William Christian Jr. in his unmarked Bureau sedan.

  The shooting sparked a furious gun battle. McLean ran into the parking garage of a nearby shopping mall. Surrounded by law enforcement, he shot himself in the head. Next to his body was the same MAC-11 that had been used to kill Novabilski. McLean was also in possession of the slain officer’s service weapon. McLean, not Gilbert, had killed Novabilski.

  Prince George’s detectives tried mightily to find a connection between McLean and Gilbert. They couldn’t. The state’s attorney dropped the charges against Gilbert. In time, Gilbert filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the county police. The county would agree to pay him more than $1 million to settle the suit. The FBI and the U.S. attorney investigated the Gilbert beating, but none of the officers involved were indicted.

  A few days after McLean killed Christian and himself, I wrote an article describing the rancor the episode had caused between the FBI and the local police.

  At the time, I thought the brutish, ineffectual way the Prince George’s cops had handled the killing of one of their own was an aberration, motivated by a desire to get payback for their fallen colleague.

  In early 1999, Metro editor Jo-Ann Armao announced a new initiative. Metro staff writers were invited to propose story ideas that would entail more than the usual one or two days of reporting to complete. Ideas for investigative projects were welcome. Staffers who submitted proposals that were green-lighted would be given three weeks to report and write without having to worry about producing daily stories or responding to breaking news.

  It was a terrific idea. If you were covering a busy beat, as I was at the courthouses, tackling an investigative project was nearly impossible. With three free weeks, I could look for more cases of alleged canine-unit brutality.

  Sharon provided background on which current and former canine officers were known for being particularly zealous about releasing their dogs on people. She gave me about a half-dozen case files of police-dog attacks, including the one filed on behalf of Julius Booker. I wrote up a detailed proposal.

  Jo-Ann approved it. I started working on the project in early March. For ten days or so, I did nothing but dig through dusty old files in the clerk’s office in the Upper Marlboro courthouse. There was no way to look up civil suits filed specifically against canine cops, or even against the police department. First I had to go through a computer database to identify lawsuits filed against Prince George’s County. Then I had to pull those files to see if the police department was a defendant. If it was, I’d read the beginning of the lawsuit to determine whether the allegations involved a police-dog attack. If so, I’d put that lawsuit aside and make copies. I went through a similar routine at the federal courthouse.

  It was tedious, painstaking work. But it paid off: Counting the files Sharon provided, I amassed eighteen lawsuits, resolved or pending, against canine officers. A handful of incidents might have been explainable as anomalies. Eighteen suggested a unit on a years-long rampage.

  In one case, a man suspected of stealing a car ran from the vehicle. A pursuing officer shot the unarmed suspect, Bryan Diggs, in the thigh. Diggs crawled into some nearby woods. He reached a barbed-wire fence and gave h
imself up, calling out that he’d been shot. The lawsuit contended that a canine cop, Corporal Stephanie Mohr, then ordered her dog to attack Diggs. It bit him in the left arm. Mohr also allegedly allowed her dog to bite sixteen-year-old Kheenan Sneed in the leg as he slept in a neighbor’s hammock. She then arrived and hit the teenager on the head with a flashlight or a baton, according to the lawsuit. Officers told Sneed and his mom that they’d been pursuing a man suspected of breaking into a store. The teen had done nothing wrong.

  In another case, a man named Robert Frank Taylor broke into a warehouse and was arrested by Officer Daniel Russell and his supervisor, Sergeant Joseph Wing. According to the court documents, Russell released his dog after Taylor was handcuffed. The animal, the lawsuit claimed, bit into Taylor’s right leg as Wing yelled, “Tear it off!” Taylor filed the lawsuit while he was in prison. County attorneys, who usually defended lawsuits against police officers with great vigor, agreed to pay him $15,000 to settle the suit.

  I reported on each lawsuit as thoroughly as I could, contacting the attorneys for the plaintiffs and, if possible, the dog-bite victims themselves. The police department ordered its officers not to talk to me and wouldn’t make any white shirts available for interviews. Instead it responded to a list of written questions. County police dogs are trained to capture suspects by biting them in the right arm, the department explained.

  For months, Sharon had been feeding information to the FBI, trying to persuade the Bureau to open an investigation into the canine squad. Internal police investigations were considered such a joke that the lawyers she worked with advised their clients not to bother filing reports of abuse directly with the cops. Reporting misconduct to the department only gave the accused officers a heads-up that a lawsuit was coming.

  I spent my final week on the project writing a long story as well as a sidebar that profiled three current or former canine cops who’d collectively been named in eight lawsuits. The story explained how, unlike many other police departments, the Prince George’s force maintained virtually no records of dog-bite incidents, aside from keeping track of the number of such encounters. It didn’t keep detailed medical records of injuries or take photos of the wounds.

  The piece would be published on April 5, a Sunday. Sharon called me the Thursday before: “The FBI’s starting an investigation of the canine squad,” she said.

  I called the Bureau, which verified that it was launching a probe into whether the unit had a “pattern or practice” of violating civil rights. I folded this new development into the larger piece.

  Wayne Curry, the county executive, had ignored my phone calls and e-mails requesting a comment. On Friday, I drove to his home, in an upscale section of Upper Marlboro. Curry was outside watering his huge lawn. He had a small dog, which barked and jumped excitedly when I arrived, leaving muddy paw prints on my light-colored pants. Curry laughed.

  He seemed unconcerned about the allegations of canine-unit brutality. “That some people who are bitten by police dogs would file lawsuits is not surprising,” he said.

  The story appeared on the front page. I wondered whether the police department would try to push back and poke holes in my reporting.

  It didn’t.

  A couple of weeks after the canine-unit story was published, the Prince George’s police department sent three supervisors and a corporal to Los Angeles to study how the sheriff’s department there had reduced biting incidents by training its dogs to corner suspects instead. The Post sent me, and I did a story on the new approach.

  In May, Curry and police chief John Farrell held a news conference. By then, Curry wasn’t so dismissive of allegations of brutality by the canine squad. The department’s police dogs would be retrained to capture suspects by cornering them and barking, Curry and Farrell announced. They acknowledged that my articles had prompted them to reevaluate the way the unit operated. Canine officers who didn’t get with the new program would be reassigned, Curry and Farrell said. Within months, virtually every officer in the canine squad had been replaced.

  That summer and fall, I was inundated with tips. Sharon tipped me off about fresh police-dog bites. Lawyers called to tell me about other police-brutality lawsuits. Several defendants called to tell me how they’d been abused by the cops; some called collect from jail. Suddenly I was the go-to reporter for police misconduct in Prince George’s County.

  That September, Post executive editor Len Downie came to the Prince George’s bureau to visit the troops and bat around story ideas. Before he headed to the door to drive back to the main newsroom downtown, Downie made a detour to my desk.

  “You’re doing a good job writing about police misconduct,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I replied. “I’ve got lots more to write about.”

  A great sign, I thought. Downie was typically taciturn, and not promiscuous with praise.

  The tips kept coming. I kept writing. On April 3, 2000, an attorney tipped me off to a staggering civil verdict: A federal jury in Baltimore had awarded Freddie McCollum Jr. $4.1 million in compensatory and punitive damages for a beating inflicted by three Prince George’s County police officers in an encounter that began as a traffic stop for a missing license plate. The officers beat the fifty-year-old McCollum so badly that he lost his right eye and partial use of his left hand. The cops also released a police dog on him.

  Just hours after the McCollum verdict came in, another civil trial, in an unrelated Prince George’s police brutality case, ended in the federal courthouse in Greenbelt. That jury awarded $647,000 to Nelson Omar Robles, a Salvadoran immigrant who was arrested in Prince George’s for a misdemeanor traffic warrant issued by neighboring Montgomery County. After MoCo cops said they were too busy to pick up Robles at the county line, Lieutenant James Rozar came up with a plan: “I’ve got a set of flex cuffs in the car,” he told a dispatcher, “and I was just going to take him over to Montgomery County, handcuff him to a pole, pin his ID to the back of his shirt.” Robles was left helpless for fifteen or twenty minutes before a Montgomery police officer arrived to uncuff him.

  On the same day the McCollum and Robles verdicts came in, State’s Attorney Jack B. Johnson announced that he was unable to obtain a grand jury indictment against seven Prince George’s County cops implicated in the death of Elmer Clayton Newman Jr., who’d died in police custody with two broken neck bones the previous September. The state medical examiner had ruled his death a homicide, but the investigation had stalled because the officers refused to cooperate, Johnson said.

  A couple of days later, Curry called a news conference to announce that he was forming a task force to review county police conduct. His tone regarding allegations of brutality was no longer glib. Speaking about the Robles verdict, Curry said, “I don’t need a jury to tell me that chaining someone to a pole at night unprotected was an act of indecency beyond the conception of most civilized people. I am not the least bit surprised or upset with the jury’s verdict. I am outraged by the conduct.”

  In the hypercompetitive Post newsroom, high-ranking editors often talked about how much they valued “accountability stories” that had “impact.” The canine story and its follow-ups epitomized that kind of piece. Police misconduct had become the hottest issue in the county, thanks, at least in part, to my reporting. The feelings of exile I’d experienced when Jo-Ann assigned me to the county bureau were now a bad memory.

  I felt great about my work. I felt great about working in Prince George’s County. I believed that I was making a difference, and that my career was resurgent.

  I was only partly right.

  By the summer of 1999, I was part of the Post’s recruiting pitch at minority journalist conventions. That year, management put together a flier headlined “Suburban Success Stories” that featured photos of black, Asian, and Latino reporters who were supposedly thriving in suburban news bureaus. Post editors distributed the fliers at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists convention both that year and the next. Next to my pho
to was a brief biography and this sentence: “His recent front-page investigation of savage attacks by police dogs forced the Prince George’s police department to immediately change its policies on training of the canines.”

  In June 2000, Jo-Ann and I shared a shuttle van that took us from the NAHJ convention in downtown Houston to the airport. Politicking didn’t come easily to me, but I made an effort: “It was a good call, assigning me to Prince George’s County,” I told her. “These stories, they’re really making a difference.”

  We made awkward small talk for the rest of the ride.

  Three months later, in September, a federal grand jury indicted Stephanie Mohr, alleging that in September 1995 she had intentionally released her police dog on an unarmed, unresisting homeless man who was surrounded by officers. The incident occurred in Takoma Park, a city straddling the Prince George’s–Montgomery County line. Mohr released the dog because it was new to the canine unit and needed to be broken in, federal prosecutors claimed. Her supervisor, Sergeant Anthony Delozier, had asked a Takoma Park Police Department sergeant who was on the scene for permission to let the dog “get a bite.” The sergeant said yes, prosecutors alleged.

  As I prepared to cover the trial the following spring, I kept knocking out stories about police misconduct. I was so focused that I missed a big development unfolding in my own office.

  In early 2001, I learned that two Metro reporters and a staff writer on the investigative unit were working on two sets of stories about police misconduct in Prince George’s. One would focus on forced false confessions in homicide cases, the other on excessive force.

  At first I was puzzled that I’d been excluded from the project. Then I became angry. I felt as though I was being shoved out of my own hard-won turf. No one in management had even told me the project was in the works. It would be a high-profile series. The paper was clearly gunning for a Pulitzer Prize. Whoever got to work on the stories would likely get a career boost.