Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  The second bullet entered Naim’s left temple, bored through bone and both frontal lobes. Naim was sprawled facedown, just a hundred feet from Apartment 265, when Aliquippa officers Shawn Young and Dan Cassidy spotted him. His service revolver was still in its holster.

  Medical personnel arrived. As police scrambled to protect themselves, secure the area, and follow up on leads, more than a hundred Linmar residents poured out of their homes. The officers from differing commands, some off-duty, all scared and angry, were hardly gentle with crowd control; in the ensuing days residents spoke of being called “niggers” and “monkeys.” At one point, Sonya Carter recalled, one of her Aliquippa PD colleagues shouted, “Shut up!” and “You niggers, get back!”

  Still, what most struck Radatovich was the coolness of the Linmar citizenry. The mostly black residents there had considered Jimmy Naim one of the “nice” Aliquippa cops, yet in the first minutes and then the long, quiet hour after Naim was attacked, there was only silence. “Do you know how many people called 911?” Radatovich asked. “None.”

  He doesn’t bother to invoke the name “Kitty Genovese.” When the twenty-eight-year-old Queens, New York, woman was stabbed to death in 1964, the news that some three dozen people ignored or watched the attack without calling police became one more signifier of a community—an America—grown cold. The narrative later proved less provocative (one neighbor yelled at Genovese’s attacker, driving him temporarily away from her, and two others did call police during the attack), but if “Kitty Genovese” remains shorthand for detachment from the most basic idea of “community,” the hour after Naim’s death signaled the shattering of trust between a people and its police.

  “We’re knocking at doors, you can see ’em at a window; they won’t answer the doors to talk to us,” Radatovich said. “Not one person even calls 911 to just say, ‘I heard what I thought was gunshots’? Is that normal? No, it’s not. That community is so unified with regard to sports, to pride in their teams and all that stuff. But there’s a divisiveness about it in other aspects. Some of it’s racial. Some of it, whether real or imagined, is in their perception of inequality in how things are done.”

  To the public, it seemed as if the police and prosecutors had the case quickly in hand. Within fifteen minutes of finding Naim’s body, assistant chief Andre Davis asked the state police to assume control of the investigation. Within two days, two suspects had been charged with criminal homicide and conspiracy to commit homicide: Jamie Brown, with his “hit list” already widely reported, and a mentally challenged eighteen-year-old Linmar resident named Darnell Hines. A manhunt was under way, too, for Brown’s partner in the drug trade, Anthony Tusweet Smith, who within six days would be charged with trying to kill a star witness. Once seventeen-year-old Acey Taylor was picked up on April 20, all the suspects appeared to be in custody. Witnesses were singing. Cases were being built.

  The streets and hills and projects of Aliquippa, though, kept bubbling in a state of apprehension. The race riots of the ’70s and the days of mass murderer Edward Surratt had produced paralyzing tension, but then the public viewed the police as at least nominal referees. Now—and especially among black families—most police were viewed at best as hair-trigger hotheads looking to avenge the murder of one of their own.

  “I thought this town was going to fall apart,” said Sherman McBride, an assistant coach at Aliquippa High since 1984, then working for USAir at nearby Pittsburgh International Airport. “They were kicking down doors of guys who didn’t have nothing to do with it. You didn’t know who to trust. Our kids, the drug dealers, the parents, the police—everybody was on edge. It was like the Wild, Wild West: who was going to pull out their gun first?”

  On the Saturday after the murder, during the Quips’ basketball win over Windber in the state tournament in Pittsburgh, a Windber fan behind Aliquippa’s bench yelled for his team to “beat the niggers.” Zmijanac shook off his first impulse to go into the stands himself. He called for a security guard to escort the man away.

  “I’m sure there are people who think all of us are like the lowlifes who did that horrible crime,” Zmijanac told a reporter then. “I think looking at us that way must make them feel superior. I feel sorry for them. They have a problem with their character.”

  On the morning of Tuesday, March 20, “Jimmy’s Last Patrol” began at the Darroch Funeral Home in Aliquippa. A bagpiper played as Naim’s casket emerged and was placed into a silver hearse. More than a thousand officers in more than four hundred patrol cars—some from as far away as West Virginia and Ohio—lined up behind. The parade of cars poured onto Mill Street, crossed over Brodhead Road slow and silent, rolled down Kennedy Boulevard. It went nowhere near Linmar. The classrooms of Aliquippa Elementary School had been emptied; children lined the fence in homemade paper police hats.

  Residents waved small American flags outside the CVS on Brodhead Road. The line of trucks and cars and fire trucks and ambulances swung right into the former heart of town along Franklin Avenue, past a throng of pupils from St. Titus School. The cars rolled past the gorgeous and ever more incongruous library, past the spot where JFK spoke and the old J&L company store had stood. People stepped out of their homes and the few businesses, heads bowed. Naim’s body was carried to the on-ramp of Route 51 just before the old J&L tunnel. Ahead was the funeral mass in Hopewell, a riderless horse at Mount Olivet Cemetery, an officer blowing “Taps.”

  “His funeral was beautiful,” said Sonya Carter. But behind the scenes, the fissures long evident in town had begun to surface in the foundation of Beaver County law enforcement. Reputations of some cops began to crumble; news that a grand jury had been launched to investigate allegations of police corruption in town and county made wholesale disgrace a possibility. Suspicions against cops hardened, often along racial lines. In Aliquippa, Carter’s name was the first to get stained.

  Despite the fact she had been one of the first Aliquippa cops to complain about corruption and the first to raise an alarm about Brown’s hit list, Carter instantly became a suspect figure. Because Naim wasn’t originally scheduled to work Linmar that Thursday night; Carter was. But though her superiors confirmed that Naim himself had asked for the shift change, Carter now found herself frozen out. She had always been considered too friendly, it seemed, with the criminals in Linmar.

  Seven days after the killing, Carter waived Miranda rights, submitted to polygraph testing, and denied any prior knowledge of the shooting. The examiner dismissed the results as “inconclusive” because she was still “too emotional.”

  She remained on the Aliquippa force for two more years. Some officers stopped talking to her; some never trusted her again. “I tried to do my job, and it just kept weighing on me,” Carter said. “I was so paranoid. They kept saying ‘Jamie Brown, Jamie Brown’; I’d hear his name on TV or read it and start sweating bad and getting all scared. It was so bad.”

  She wasn’t the only cop under pressure. Pennsylvania deputy attorney general Linda Barr and the state police made a conscious decision to cut Aliquippa police, Beaver County’s sheriff, and county detectives out of the investigation. The unstated reason: to protect its integrity should the grand jury later find corruption involving any contributing officers, and to rebuild the police-community bond with a distrustful populace. Problem was, nearly all the locals affected were black.

  “It was crushing,” said Timmie Patrick of the Naim slaying. “It divided a community, divided law enforcement; it was just an ugly mark in Aliquippa’s life. You had a law enforcement officer, cut down in his prime; he had a family. You had people who were making it a racist issue and trying to cloud the investigation. Race, corruption—it was the whole gamut.

  “And the one name getting stained was black law enforcement. I was under investigation by the state. You had high-ranking black law enforcement officers—ex-chief Bill Alston of Aliquippa; Peep Short of the sheriff’s office, commander at that time;
Timmie Patrick, county detective; Anthony McClure, county detective; state trooper Mike Warfield: we were all under investigation. And except for Short, we were cleared. We were vindicated.”

  And Aliquippa’s football machine chugged on. Not long after Naim’s death, in the spring of 2001, Diana Gilbert walked into Mike Zmijanac’s office at the high school with her son. Darrelle Revis had just completed a dominant ninth-grade season of basketball at a Christian school in nearby Rochester, had been recruited by prep powers in Pittsburgh and from as far away as DeMatha Catholic High in Washington, DC.

  All the other coaches and friends and family said Darrelle was a surefire star. “He’s going to be an all-American,” Diana said.

  Zmijanac was still coaching both football and basketball then. He’d had Diana in his class, temper and all, and had coached her brother, Sean. Darrelle stood just 5-foot-10. Zmijanac looked her in the eye and said, “No, he’s not.”

  Now Diana had another reason to send her boy away. They lived in town, but she had avoided Aliquippa’s dodgy middle school, spent three years carting him to Beaver Valley Christian Academy. It didn’t fully take. Darrelle always was willful, different, locked up a bit inside his own head. He loved the idea of interplanetary travel, sitting quietly on the porch on Seventh Avenue staring at the stars. He would tell himself, I’m going to outer space one day.

  But local gravity had its pull. Darrelle kept up his grades, but after school would slip into trouble with a Plan 11 crew. His uncle Jamal, Diana’s youngest brother, had a hand in that. “My uncle was older; I used to follow him around, and one thing led to another,” Revis said. “It was kind of a sports thing and then it started getting into people jumping people, beating people up. I used to see my uncle smoke; I never smoked—as bad as I wanted to be an athlete? Nothing’s standing in my way. Smoking is bad for you, drinking, all those things would be a hindrance. But we were in that crew and as we got older things started getting more violent, violent, violent.

  “But as it got more violent and they wanted to use guns, that’s when I backed out. I went my way and they was cool with it. They didn’t beat me up or try to kill me, no. And some of them was my cousins, so they were like, ‘It’s cool. You got other things to do. You’re probably going to be playing ball.’”

  Soon Darrelle had options. He could play high school hoops in Pittsburgh, for his uncle Mark’s old coach. Or at DeMatha, a breeding ground for many NBA players and near his father’s home in Maryland. “I was scared,” Revis said. “My mom was like, “It’s your decision,’ and at that young age, you don’t know nothing. Just going to school, trying to play sports; I’m kicking rocks, and all this stuff was coming. I don’t know if that was the right move. Going to DeMatha: a great school. I thought, This is getting crazy. . . .”

  But finally the lure of that family line, the idea of getting his dunt-dunt-dunt proved irresistible. From his stargazing perch on that porch, after all, young Darrelle had also seen the lights of Aschman Stadium. “I always wanted to bleed red, black, and white,” he said. But not for football. Revis hadn’t played that since Midget ball in Aliquippa, had little interest; he dribbled a basketball everywhere.

  That’s what Zmijanac found Darrelle doing, out on the street the summer before his sophomore year. Diana wasn’t around this time. Zmijanac tried again.

  “You don’t know me well, but I coached your uncles, dad, cousins,” Zmijanac said. “I’m sure you’re a talent. You should come out for football.”

  “Naw,” Revis replied.

  But the hook had been set. Diana had just moved to a house in Plan 12, near the high school, and Darrelle’s footballing friends would hang out in the days before summer practice began, urging him to play. “No, I’m straight basketball,” Revis said. “It’s my love.”

  On the third day of drills, Darrelle walked into the Aliquippa High gym. It was July, and broiling: Six dozen guys were heaving, sweating, running line sprints in a set that would go for the next two and a half hours. Zmijanac took his time, then sidled over and tried to make the question sound innocent. Neither imagined it would lead to the NFL, a Super Bowl ring, a $70 million contract, and a career as one of the best cornerbacks in the history of the game.

  “What’re you going to do to keep in shape?” Zmijanac said.

  “I think,” Revis replied, “I’m going to give this football a try.”

  Coach Z gave his usual shrug. “Get in line,” he said.

  Revis’s experience was hardly rare: More and more, the choice for Aliquippa’s young men was boiling down to football or the street. Both offered a form of celebrity, a path to big money. On one hand you had Ty Law, a national name after he ran back an interception back 47 yards for a touchdown in New England’s 20-17 win in the 2001 Super Bowl, making millions in an All-Pro career with the Patriots. On the other, you had Jamie Brown and his confederates, flush and feared and selling a different kind of rush.

  And though Zmijanac and his assistants succeeded in banning gang colors and thug-life behavior, the line between the program and the problems kept getting thinner. By the time of Jamie Brown’s arrest and May 2002 conviction for Naim’s murder, the fact that he was the son of a onetime Aliquippa football star was lost on no one, especially after Jeff Baldwin tried providing Brown’s alibi for the night of the murder. “He’s innocent and it’s political,” Baldwin said a decade later. “We was together. We went to the store. We were together from, like, six o’clock to like nine o’clock. He had a big Rottweiler and he wanted to get dog food and wanted me to help him. We was together from, like, six o’clock to nine-thirty, however.”

  But Jeff was a problematic witness at best: Two nights after Naim’s death, Radatovitch, Baldwin’s old classmate from the police academy, led a search of the Plan 11 home of Tezmalita Pharr—Jeff’s longtime girlfriend and the mother of their son, Jonathan Baldwin. Jeff was ordered onto his belly; police say they found a crack pipe in his front pocket and, in the house, foil wrappers with scorch marks and traces of white powder and a clutch of Federal .40-caliber bullets.

  “Aww,” Jeff said, when he recognized Radatovich. “It’s got to be you?”

  Sometimes, the line between the two worlds became so blurred that it was hard to see where one ended and the other began. Zmijanac’s coaching staff—stacked with as many as fifteen men, most of them ex-players volunteering their time—featured some who worked full-time in area law enforcement, some who had arrested relatives of players. At least two, running backs coach Timmie Patrick and longtime defensive coach Peep Short, were under state investigation in the wake of Naim’s murder. But they never stopped working with the Quips, no matter the questions, no matter the dirt.

  Still, none ended up taking a bigger hit than Peep Short. With a swift rise in 1999 to the rank of commander—the third-ranking ­officer—in the Beaver County Sheriff’s Office, and impressive work as Aliquippa’s defensive coordinator, by 2001 the forty-year-old Short had put himself on the short list to one day run the department and/or become the Quips’ head coach. Naim’s murder, though, would mark the end of his police career. And it left Short carrying so much questionable baggage that any school risked a public relations nightmare in hiring him to mold young men.

  Short’s version of things is in keeping with his self-image as Aliquippa’s lone teller of truths, no matter the consequence—in Peep parlance, Come what may, motherfucker. Because in the first days after Naim’s murder, with every investigative mind all but convinced that Jamie Brown was the culprit, Short had put up his hand and said no. Again.

  It was he, after all, who along with Sheriff George David had rightly derailed Brown’s arrest for the Samuel murders in 1996. This time, Short felt information that he had uncovered on the Naim murder deserved attention. Two hours following the discovery of the body, an informant told Short that, just after hearing shots, a Linmar resident had seen a white man with a ponytail run by, get into a red
pickup truck, and drive off. Short turned the information over to investigators. Nearly five months later, Short wrote a letter to the state’s attorney general again detailing his findings. Investigators doubled back and confirmed the existence of both Short’s informant and a conversation between them that night—but in their reports made no mention of a ponytailed white man.

  “I think they had to discredit what I wrote in that report,” Short said. “There was a clear contradiction there. I didn’t make it up: They can go talk to the witness themselves. That’s what the lady told me: It was a white male. But . . . see, everybody knows Jamie Brown didn’t kill that cop. Everybody really knows who killed Naim. I was one who always said, ‘Let’s get the motherfucker who did it.’ And motherfuckers know Jamie Brown didn’t do this.”

  Actually, investigators did talk to Short’s “witness.” At 8 p.m. the day after Naim’s death, Connie Walker related to state police that she had come home from shopping the night before and heard gunshots while retrieving bags from her car. No mention in that report is made of a ponytailed white man, or a red pickup. A decade later, Walker says she was never asked about that by the follow-up investigators—but it didn’t matter. “I never seen a guy with a ponytail,” Walker said. “I can’t tell you nothing. All I know is, we liked that Officer Naim.”

  Short contends that his suggestion of an alternate version of the murder was enough to rile those in charge. Peers and superiors say it’s not that simple; it never has been with Peep Short. Just before the one-year anniversary of Naim’s death, Short was forced to resign his sheriff’s position—and the stated reasons had nothing to do with Jamie Brown.

  The first black mark occurred in April 2001, when a prisoner was allowed time to have sex with his girlfriend during a sanctioned visit to Aliquippa for his father’s funeral. Short was not present, but the visit came under his authority—and so tawdry an example of special treatment sparked more allegations and investigations. “They had to make someone the scapegoat,” said Timmie Patrick. “Peep got a raw deal but there are rules, and he broke those rules. But I’ve seen people who did more and got punished less; and there’s things they pulled out of that investigation about other law enforcement officers—who were not African-American—that never came to light.”