Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  Once Jamie was charged, any hope of shielding Jonathan dissolved. The boy would go to school with the trial and the guilty verdict and the sentence unfolding, and kids sneered, “Your brother’s a cop-killer!” Fists flew. Jonathan began dreaming of playing pro ball, making big money, and using it to fund the appeal that would spring Jamie from jail.

  “He started taking things more seriously,” said his mother, Tez Baldwin. “So it was a disaster that turned blessing because Jonathan always has said, ‘I want to be able to help my brother.’”

  Jonathan was nearly thirteen when, in May 2002, a jury convicted his half brother of murder in the third degree and he was sentenced—with extreme prejudice—by Common Pleas judge John D. McBride. He’ll be eligible for parole in 2021. “I intend to oppose any parole being granted before the expiration of the maximum sentence,” McBride told Brown at the Beaver courthouse.

  His father also faced a stiff jail term. Seven months earlier, Jeff Baldwin had been arrested on charges of robbery and aggravated assault; police said that he tried to rob two undercover officers with a knife during a drug buy. “Mistaken identity,” Jeff said. “Some guy took my ten dollars and drove off and I thought it was the same guy the next three days when I see him. Because it was dark and I wear glasses. And it was the wrong guy. Turned out to be the attorney general going on a drug bust. And they got me for forty-two months for ten dollars. Honestly.”

  That version gained no traction, but the idea that Jamie got framed became a constant of Aliquippa life. “A lot of people know it,” Jonathan said, “but there ain’t really nothing that we can do right now.”

  News accounts of the verdict detailed Naim’s pre-death allegations of Aliquippa police involvement—disallowed by McBride and thus unheard by the jury—and Brown’s attorneys and family all declared him railroaded. A columnist in the next morning’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette labeled the case “a first-degree miscalculation.” Brown has proclaimed his innocence ever since.

  “Innocent: a hundred percent,” he said in prison in Marienville, Pennsylvania.

  “Some of my family members say I should lie. But if it means lying to get parole, I’m not going to do it. I’d rather say nothing before I lie to a person. If they tell me I must admit and show remorse for a crime I didn’t commit, I won’t. If they want me to show remorse for things I was involved with up until I got arrested, I can do that. But I can’t own up to things I didn’t do.”

  Maybe this is to be expected. With his appeals all but exhausted, Brown’s lone hope for freedom before 2021 depends on convincing the outside world that he suffered an injustice. He has spent the years since poring over evidence, searching for holes in the prosecution’s case. Five weeks after telling police that she had “no doubt” that she saw Brown on Linmar at the time of the murder—and that she feared retribution—Monica Horton faxed in a recantation, saying that she “came to realize that I had just testified against the wrong person.” In 2005, Rayetta Lee, who told police the morning of Naim’s slaying about Brown’s intention to kill a cop, sent a notarized statement to Judge McBride, the Pennsylvania governor and Department of Justice, and the Allegheny Times stating that her testimony was “all lies.”

  “Jamie Brown never told me anything at all about the alledged [sic] crime against Office Naim nor any of hist other criminal activities,” Lee wrote. She then apologized to the Brown family. “What I hope to come out of this true confession is that one day soon Jamie Brown will be set free.”

  Regardless, others placed Jamie Brown on Linmar the day of the murder. His codefendant, Acey Taylor, told state police that he saw Naim shot dead and identified the shooter as Brown. Pennsylvania law does not allow statements of codefendants to be used against each other at trial, so the jury never heard that, either. And the state’s star witness, Darnell Hines, declared that he was just 20 feet away when he saw Brown fire several shots at Naim.

  With a mumbling delivery that signaled impairment or boredom, Hines hardly cut a commanding figure on the stand. A staff psychologist at Aliquippa Middle School placed his reading at a third-grade level, his IQ in the upper 70s. He changed his story multiple times early in the investigation; Hines first told police he heard and saw nothing that night, then he said he just heard the gunshots. After 26 days in custody—during which he complained that he was being pressured “to lie” and say he saw “them shoot that cop”—Hines flipped and said that he did see Brown fire repeatedly on Naim. He then passed a polygraph examination. A decade later, he hadn’t changed his story.

  “I don’t care what anybody says,” Hines said in 2012. “I saw it.”

  Still, many in Aliquippa and Beaver County remain uneasy with the verdict. The Naim case became the town’s unhealed wound.

  “And it’s going to be a wound: a lot of people feel he didn’t do it,” said Beaver County detective—and Aliquippa High running backs coach—Timmie Patrick, who helped track and arrest Brown forty hours after the crime at his girlfriend’s Hopewell apartment. It always struck Patrick as odd that, with police swarming like never before, the No. 1 suspect hadn’t run. When the cops came for him, Jamie Brown was having sex.

  “Whether we got the right guy?” said Andre Davis, longtime Aliquippa assistant police chief and police chief from 2011 to 2013. “I mean . . . only God knows.”

  “No,” said Quips offensive coordinator Sherman McBride—no relation to the judge. “I think it was cops.”

  “I just know the wrong guy’s in jail,” said Aliquippa mayor Dwan Walker. “Now, [Brown] ain’t no angel. But I’ve walked and talked to him. Dude’s intelligent. He’s not just going to say, ‘Man, I’m going to kill me an officer and I’m going to stay home and let ’em catch me.’ If I knew somebody said my name? I’m gone. I would’ve got the hell out of here.”

  Was Brown capable of shooting someone? Few doubt it. He carried three convictions for aggravated assault, two as a juvenile, the first when he was fourteen for shooting at a rival. But his knack for sidestepping hard time helped feed two other popular feelings: that Brown was too smart to commit such a crime, and that long-frustrated authorities were looking to nail him for anything. “Jamie Brown was involved with some real heavy hitters,” said Peep Short. “He was doing well—as far as getting the drugs, distributing the drugs, and making money. Why would Jamie bring all this heat on himself? Kill a cop? Nah: he ain’t stupid. He was doing too well to do that.”

  Notwithstanding Judge McBride’s vow, the trial’s divided outcome ensured that conspiracy theorists would never lack for ammunition. Acey Taylor, described by the prosecution as Brown’s “lookout and cheerleader,” was acquitted on charges of murder and conspiracy. Although Brown was depicted during the two-week trial as a police-hater aiming to execute an officer to send a message, the jury found him not guilty of first-degree murder and conspiracy. Though Naim was shot from behind by someone lying in wait, after twenty-five hours of deliberation the jury could not bring itself to declare premeditation. By definition, “third-degree murder” is a random act of recklessness or maliciousness.

  “Can I rationally explain their verdict to you?” Judge McBride said of the jury at Brown’s sentencing. “No, I cannot, nor would I attempt to. In short, they did perform their duty as jurors.”

  Jeff Baldwin claims that his three-and-a-half-year stint at the state prison in Somerset was “great for me”: he learned to be patient, to care for other people, to value life. But it did have its downside. He missed Jonathan’s first two football seasons—and not just at Aliquippa High. Period. Jonathan never played a proper game in pads until 2004, the fall of his freshman year. Until then, all the boy’s time and effort had pointed to a basketball career. Tez wouldn’t let Jonathan lift a weight, but drilled him endlessly: push-ups on a pair of chairs; up and down the stairs, two steps at a time on his tiptoes, little sister on his back.

  Jeff would call from prison: “Make sure you jump your rope!”
Jonathan jumped.

  It couldn’t be helped: father’s reputation filtered down to son. But if one person made mention of Jeff being a jailbird, too many others had their own family brushes with the law. So mostly they’d talk of how they’d seen Jeff play in his prime. Crime was one thing. But taking someone apart because they weren’t half the player some relative was? Fair game.

  “Yeah, you don’t want to stop the tradition in your family and then hear, ‘Well, he’s nothing like his father,’ or ‘He’s nothing like his cousin,’” Jonathan said. “That makes you play even harder. You don’t want to stop the family tradition of someone who was a stud.

  “Growing up in Aliquippa, everybody’s competing. Everybody has to be the best. It feels like, if you lose, everybody talks about it: People gettin’ on you. So you never want to lose because you don’t want to have to go through that.”

  Soon enough, Jeff, directing strategy from prison, had Jonathan going to football camps, learning and showing off skills. It became clear that he’d soon have to make a choice. Basketball would remain a factor through high school—he’d get plenty of Division 1-A scholarship offers for hoops—but by the time Jeff got out, everyone around Jonathan had it figured: the NBA was stacked with 6-foot-4 leapers. But the NFL? Football was his best chance to get paid.

  “I started to get notoriety in football,” Jonathan said. “Before you know it, I was sitting in an office with my parents and Coach Z and Sherman, and they were telling me, ‘In football there’s not ten people in the country who can do what you can. But in basketball you go to New York and there’s twenty-five people who can do what you can.’ When I thought about it like that and talked to my parents later on, I was like, ‘They’re right.’ Obviously it was the best choice for me.”

  Tez and Jeff finally married in August 2005. Tez didn’t think about leaving when he was locked up. “The way I was raised, you never kick somebody when they’re down,” Tez said. “If I was to walk away, it would be when he’s at his strongest point—not his weakest. And when I say it was terrible? It was terrible. But I just couldn’t see myself walking away. . . .

  “And that’s what Jonathan wants. He has it stuck in his head that we’re going to be together forever—regardless of whether I’m happy or Jeff’s happy. That’s what makes him happy. We’ve had some down periods even once Jeff came home and I was, like, ‘I want out.’ And Jonathan just wasn’t having it. Like: ‘You got to work this out. You’re my mom, I love you; that’s my dad, I love my dad. . . .’ He has a different kind of love for his dad.”

  It all helped. Jonathan became an all-state basketball star, a state titlist in the 4x100 relay, and one of the nation’s top-rated high school receivers, ending his Aliquippa career in one of Western Pennsylvania football’s greatest shootouts. In any other game, Baldwin’s 180 receiving yards and three touchdowns would’ve been legendary; in Aliquippa’s 2007 AA semifinal against Jeannette, it wasn’t even close to good enough. With perhaps the greatest individual performance in WPIAL history, Jeannette quarterback Terrelle Pryor—who went on to star at Ohio State—rushed for five touchdowns and threw for two more; he totaled 421 total yards by himself, and also forced two fumbles as a defensive back, in leading Jeannette to a 70-48 win. No two WPIAL teams had ever combined to score more.

  Jonathan followed his dad’s trail to Pitt, caught 57 passes for 1,111 yards and eight touchdowns as a sophomore. Off-field life proved tougher: groping a girl’s buttocks on a bus landed him in court for indecent assault; the charges were dismissed. And after his production dipped during his junior year, Jonathan fired off a bratty—and hastily recanted—text about the Pitt coaches’ play-calling, speculating that they were “purposely trying to disrupt my draft stock.”

  By Aliquippa standards, such incidents were decidedly small-bore. If anything, believing that his brother and dad had been railroaded by police made Jonathan less willing to court trouble. “That’s why, when I’m in Aliquippa—I have a son now—I really don’t go out,” Jonathan said in 2011. “I just stay in the house and try and be with my son as much as possible. Because you’re walking that tightrope. Sometimes people may get jealous. You don’t know how people are going to react. Very seldom you see me walking.”

  His son, Jaden, lived then in Linmar with his mother. Jonathan already had him “prepped and ready”: Whenever he called “down-set,” the boy would get into a wide receiver stance. When Jonathan called “hut,” he would know to run. Still, sending Jaden outside made him nervous.

  “You don’t know,” Jonathan said. “When people are mad, they don’t care what’s going on. If they’re shooting in broad daylight and your kids are out they might get hit by a stray bullet. You don’t want to be—it’s God’s will, either way—playing football and your son is outside playing and you get called that your son got shot. Now what?”

  19

  Iron Buttons

  Now what? More than ever, that is the Aliquippa question.

  The old ones worry. Not about themselves: They had their run, the men who returned from World War II into a world of high wages and uniquely leveraged union muscle, the women who swept the porches of homes their forebears could never buy. What’s lost can’t hurt them now. No, the old ones worry about their kids who are well beyond being kids, the ones whose drifting lives and careers over the last thirty years reveal just how vital the vanished factory, mill, and mine were to America’s idea of itself.

  Nobody grew up with the dream to work such jobs. They were filthy, boring, exhausting grinds, a drain on health, a daily assault on the senses. Yet the value of a J&L becomes more apparent with each fleeing decade, even as the idea that the old industrial model can never return hardens into orthodoxy. Technology made manpower quaint: In 1980, it took 399,000 American steelworkers to produce 101 million tons of raw steel; in 2011, 97,000 American steelworkers produced 86.2 million tons. Manufacturing’s share of U.S. Gross Domestic Product is now half—22.7 percent to 11.9 percent—of what it was in 1970. The remaining “blue-collar” jobs require more education, training, computer skills. The days when a thick accent and a set of calloused hands were enough to find high-paying, secure employment are history.

  “Those types of jobs—if they exist at all—are a much smaller part of the economy,” said University of Pittsburgh labor economist Chris Briem. “And those jobs aren’t coming back.”

  Still, it’s not enough to say that American big industry built the bridges and rails that propelled the greatest economy in history, the tanks and battleships that beat Hitler and Tojo and won the Cold War, the skyscrapers that signified modern ambition and wealth. The more mundane fact is that places like J&L also served as social catch basins, places where those lacking academic skill or interest could fix a toe into the American flank and start climbing. J&L gave the Aliquippa workingman dignity—not to mention income enough to own a home, raise a family, take a paid vacation—and thus a stake, like that engendered in the rich and educated, in keeping the entire system humming.

  Today’s low-wage, low-security service industry jobs offer little choice—much less pride—to the unskilled. The forked road offering careers in cut potatoes or crack, McDonald’s or a meth lab, have led an increasingly dispossessed lower middle class off the American grid and into the wild. “I always think about: if the mill was still going my second son would’ve been satisfied,” said Gilda Letteri. Her son, Bobby, born in ’59, wasn’t the student that his siblings were. He tried college for two years, at nearby California University of Pennsylvania, worked J&L for one, 1979, and then headed up to Bucks County. He’s in his mid-fifties now, and still renting.

  “There was nothing wrong with him, but he was one of these young boys who was very impetuous and did everything he wasn’t supposed to do,” she said. “And today—I still wish—if the mill was there, or some sort of factory, he would be fine. He’s a carpenter now.

  “Last year he didn’t work very much
at all. This year he’s working. He’s building a house with a contract, but no stability for him. I’m always on his back about this. There’s another young man on our street, and the mother always tells me—now he has a job, he’s working here and lives with his parents, but he’s also fifty-two—the same thing. If J&L was here, he would have his own home and be different than he is now.”

  Perhaps. But for decades now, there has been an oft-floated notion that most Americans—no matter their lack of skill—simply find menial labor beneath them. Hence the need for, say, illegal Mexican immigrants: They do the jobs no one else will. That this is actually a logical by-product of the American Dream doesn’t make it easy to discuss on the stump or at 4th of July celebrations. Who wants to be the lone voice saying that the nation’s hallowed vision of itself, almost by design, makes each succeeding generation more prideful, less resourceful, lazier?

  “You came to the country with a brown bag with your clothes in it, and the only thing you had in terms of asset was your body,” Beaver County developer C. J. “Chuck” Betters said. “It’s so vivid to me: each generation wanted to make it better for their kid, to the point where we’re sitting today—in a country that doesn’t know how to use a shovel. Or want to.

  “I’m more of that generation than today’s. I dug so many ditches with picks and shovels that people wouldn’t believe it. I know how long it would take me to dig a ditch, put a gas line in. I look at guys with a shovel today, I want to fuckin’ pick it up and beat ’em over the head with it.”

  Even Aliquippa’s ironfisted avatar of the glory days, Mike Ditka—secure in his restaurants and TV work—admits to helplessness. Long before his own grown sons, Mike and Mark, began piling up drunk-driving arrests in Illinois, he’d sensed them being buffeted by the values of a flashy, leverage-as-you-go economy. “I’ve had a big house and a lot of cars, have a few hobbies like that,” Ditka said. “But the only time you’re a success is when you’re happy and know it. I’m pretty happy right now. I don’t owe anybody anything. Our country is stupid because of the credit-card thing and if you get caught up in that shit, you’re going to die. I’ve got kids that’re caught up in it up to their ass.