The Hustle

by Doug Merlino

  After Mike won the money, Donnico tells me, he called Donnico and told him he had a deal set up to buy a kilo of cocaine for $14,500. He asked Donnico if he wanted to go in on it. “Back then [a kilo] was going for eighteen, nineteen all day. So that was a red flag for me off the top,” Donnico says. “It was way too cheap.” He told Mike he wasn’t interested. The last time Donnico spoke to his brother, Tyrell was out riding with Mike. They talked about meeting later at the home of a girl Tyrell was seeing. Donnico didn’t hear anything from his brother that night. A day or two later, his mom called, asking if he’d seen Tyrell. Donnico told her they’d just talked and everything was fine. A day later, he was at Longacres, a horse track south of Seattle, when his pager started to blow up. One number was from a guy Donnico hadn’t heard from in ages. Donnico called and asked what was going on. He said, “Man, call home. They found your brother dead.”

  On August 12, two days after Tyrell’s dismembered body turned up in the ditch in South Seattle, the Seattle Times published a brief article identifying him as the victim. After it ran, someone called the newspaper and told an editor that Tyrell wasn’t just some kid, but that he’d been a star basketball player who was known and liked in the community. That piqued the editor’s interest; he assigned a journalist to look into it.

  The reporter, Elouise Schumacher, a white woman then in her thirties, had been covering the controversies over nuclear contamination at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and the disastrous health effects it had on people living in the area. It was her first assignment involving black Seattle. “There was a lot of violence around that time, an extra wave of crime,” she says. “We were not out covering it too much. It was maybe us saying, ‘Oh, maybe we should pay attention to this one, not just do it in a paragraph or two.’ ”

  She headed to the funeral, a dispiriting affair in which the mourners were flanked by a phalanx of Seattle police officers. She visited Tyrell’s parents, interviewing them in Tyrell’s spotlessly kept room, with his athletic shoes neatly lined up, his trophies and basketball posters on display, and his oversized stuffed Mickey Mouse. At the time, the police didn’t have any leads they’d talk about, or much to say, except that they thought the murder was related to Mike Scott’s lucky night at dice (Mike has not been seen or heard from since Tyrell’s killing). Coach McClain told her about our team and the efforts he and Randy Finley had made to place Tyrell in a good school. “He had enough talent, enough gifts in sports to soften the blow of being in a private school,” McClain said. “He was a smart young man; there wasn’t any [school] work he couldn’t do. We put a lot of pressure on him, and we actually tried to force him to go.”

  Schumacher framed her article around Tyrell’s friendship with John Doces, the white kid from Bellevue who had met Tyrell through the Adopt-a-Family program. “Their friendship had all the makings of a clichéd movie script: rich, white suburban kid befriends needy, black inner-city youth,” it began. “Only this time there’s no happy ending.”

  When Schumacher turned in the story, the front-page editor rejected it, telling her he thought it was “racist.” “I guess he thought I was portraying him as a dumb kid,” Schumacher says. After spending nearly two weeks gathering the details of Tyrell’s life, Schumacher was distraught—she’d come to feel a personal connection with him. Schumacher left the office and walked around for an hour. Upon her return, she went to the paper’s only black editor, told him the story had been spiked, and gave him a copy to read. He liked it enough to champion it onto the front page, where I saw it on August 26, 1991: Tyrell, smiling on one knee, cropped out of a larger group photo of our team, tucked into the bottom left hand of the paper, right under the news of the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

  The break in the case came when the Seattle police got a copy of Mike Scott’s cell phone bill. The detectives found that calls had been made late into the night on August 7 and then stopped for a few hours. Then, on the morning of August 8, two calls were placed to a number in Los Angeles, at 7:02 and 7:28. The cops got Mike Scott’s girlfriend to call the number. She told the person who answered that it was her phone, and she wanted to know who had been using it. The man on the other end was named Harold. He told her that his cousin who lived in Seattle, Trenino Rollins, had called him the morning in question.

  Trenino “Reno” Rollins also hung out at the 24 Social Club in the summer of 1991, though he wasn’t friends with Mike and Tyrell; at thirty-one, Rollins was more than a decade older than G-Money and T-Baby. About five-foot-ten and 150 pounds, he had hair down to his shoulders in braids, a beard, and a mustache, and was known as a ladies’ man. Rollins was new to Seattle. He later testified that he’d been born in Winnsboro, Louisiana, and, in 1985, had gotten a job installing TV towers that took him around the country. In 1990 he settled in Seattle, where he worked as a welder. When he was laid off, he began selling cocaine. When the Seattle Police later ran checks on Rollins, they did not find any evidence of a prior criminal record from other states.

  At eight in the morning on September 17, 1991, Seattle police detective Hank Gruber and his partner met Rollins coming back from the mailbox at his apartment and told him they wanted to ask him some questions. Rollins lived in the Marina Apartments, a complex near Lake Washington in the Rainier Beach neighborhood in South Seattle, a quarter mile from the spot where Tyrell’s body was dumped.

  After Rollins allowed the cops into his studio, the first thing Gruber noticed was a “super-single” waterbed—an odd size, about four by seven feet. Tyrell’s body had been wrapped in sheets made for just that type of bed. Upon seeing it, Gruber advised Rollins of his rights. He asked if there was a gun in the apartment. Rollins told him there was one under the couch cushion. It was a .22 semiautomatic pistol; ballistic tests later determined that it was the weapon used to execute Tyrell with a bullet to the back of the head. The homicide detectives placed Rollins under arrest.

  When the case went to trial the next year, Rollins maintained his innocence. When first questioned, he told the police he knew nothing about Mike Scott, Tyrell, or the cellular phone, and that he had gotten the gun from his brother. He changed his story in court, where he testified that he didn’t know Tyrell, but that he had bought cocaine from Mike several times. In addition, Rollins said, he had purchased the gun from Mike. He claimed that in the early hours of August 8, Mike had knocked on his door, asked to borrow the gun back—Rollins said Mike told him he had to meet a guy to do some business—and left his cell phone as collateral. In the morning, Rollins said, he used the phone to call his cousin. Later that day, Rollins explained, Mike returned the gun and took his phone back. At the time of the trial, Mike was still missing. Rollins clearly meant to create the impression that Mike had killed Tyrell and then fled Seattle.

  Whatever his story, there was too much evidence against Rollins, who, after all, had handed the detectives the murder weapon. The pattern on the sheets wrapped around Tyrell’s body was the same as that on some that were still in Rollins’s apartment. Forensic investigators also found fibers on Tyrell’s corpse that matched the carpet in the apartment. Finally, the police found Mike’s and Tyrell’s rings in Rollins’s closet—Mike’s a gold band with three diamonds in the middle, Tyrell’s also gold, but with a dollar sign on it. The jury found Rollins guilty of first-degree homicide; the judge sentenced him to twenty-three years in prison.

  After the conviction, Hank Gruber, the detective on the case, went into the King County Jail and asked Rollins to take him to Mike Scott’s body, just to clear things up for Mike’s family. He checked Rollins out and Rollins guided him to another wooded road in the South End. Mike Scott’s body had been dumped down a hill, where it had lain undiscovered. Unlike Tyrell, Mike was still in one piece.

  His murder is still technically an open case. The investigation is the responsibility of the cold case unit, which has the task of looking into unsolved murders—mainly through using advances in DNA technology—committed between 1969 and 1999. The unit star
ted in 2000 with three hundred homicides to investigate; so, far it has cleared about twenty-five. Mike Scott’s is one of the approximately 275 remaining.

  One case the unit has solved is the 1990 murder of a thirty-eight-year-old Central Area woman who worked in the produce section of a grocery store. She was found on her couch, her dress pushed up over her stomach, stabbed thirty times with a pair of scissors. DNA technicians, working at the request of the cold case detectives, matched semen found inside her body to Trenino Rollins. In 2006, Rollins went on trial in King County Superior Court for first-degree homicide. It ended in a hung jury after a ten-to-two vote to convict. Rollins eventually pled guilty to second-degree homicide, for which he received an additional fifteen years on top of the time he was serving for Tyrell’s murder.

  While Rollins is still in King County Jail awaiting transport back to prison in Tucson, Arizona, where Washington State has farmed him out to a corporate-run penitentiary, I go to visit him. When he comes into the visiting area and takes the phone on the other side of the bulletproof glass, he looks almost dignified—pushing fifty, he has a shaved head, round face, and a goatee flecked with gray.

  He nods when I tell him I’m writing a book about a bunch of guys I once played basketball with, and that one of them was Tyrell Johnson. I tell him I want to know what happened on the night of the murder. Rollins nods again, and then tells me he doesn’t want to talk about it at the moment. He says to try him again when he’s back in prison. “In a couple of years, the truth about this whole thing is going to come out,” he tells me.

  For the next few years, I send Rollins an occasional letter asking if he’s willing to talk, but hear nothing back. In the fall of 2009, I contact the public information officer of the prison in Arizona. He relays my request for an interview to Rollins, who tells the prison officials to let me know he has “no intentions” of talking to me, ever.

  One Saturday morning, I sit in the gallery of a King County courtroom. On the other side of a panel of bulletproof glass, a judge is arraigning a black teenager accused of auto theft. I’ve arrived a few minutes before the morning break, and when the judge finishes with the alleged car thief and steps down from the bench, the courtroom guard rushes out and greets me. A tall, slender, middle-aged man with a broad smile, he enthusiastically shakes my hand and ushers me through the court and into a tiny breakroom. We sit at a table topped with gray Formica, the smell of percolating coffee mingling with the cigarettes on his breath. Now retired from his job as a detective, Hank Gruber tells me he works part-time as a bailiff because it lets him keep his health benefits and still have enough time to go deer hunting.

  Gruber sets a thick, black binder on the table. The case, he says, was one of those that just stick in your head. On this type of thing, the family doesn’t expect much from the police, so you feel good if you can nail somebody. “You come out and you’re white and you solve the murder and they think you’re a hero,” he says.

  Gruber tells me the likely motive was to steal the money that Mike Scott had won gambling. The police, he says, think that Rollins did the murder with a partner and mentions the name of the other suspect, who was later convicted of murder and rape in a separate case and is now serving a life sentence in prison. There wasn’t enough evidence to press charges against the other man, Gruber says, but it was a “two-person-type murder.”

  The binder holds a collection of murder scene photos that Gruber used when he taught about crime-scene investigations at the police academy. A remarkably chipper man, he opens the book and takes on the air of someone showing photos of his grandchildren as he flips the pages, which display snapshots of suicides, accidental deaths, and murders. Each one evokes a memory—the particulars of the case, the challenges, how it was eventually solved.

  Eventually Gruber gets to Tyrell’s section. He opens the book to a photo of police and forensic investigators gathered on a wooded road. They hunch over something swaddled in white sheets. Gruber flips a few more pages. Each photo shows another layer of the bundle removed—the sheets are unwrapped to expose a couple of black garbage bags, which are pulled away to reveal a blue blanket. “You sure you’re OK with this? I know this guy was a friend of yours,” he asks before turning the page one more time.

  Tyrell is lying on his back. He wears black briefs. His left leg is sawed off just above the knee, the right leg amputated a bit higher. There is a red crease in his left shoulder where it was partially severed, too. “They were trying to dismember him but they were too lazy or it was too bizarre,” Gruber explains. It happens more often that you might think, he says—a killer starts to hack up a corpse to get it into manageable pieces but then quits halfway through.

  There’s not much to connect this body to the kid I once knew until I notice something around the neck. At first it looks almost as if they tried to cut his head off, too, and I begin to ask Gruber about it, until I see that the thin line is actually a gold necklace. I remember Tyrell flipping one just like it out from underneath his undershirt years before, a bit of flash to add to his basketball game.

  …

  I exit the freeway in South Seattle and drive east a couple of miles before pulling into the parking lot of the community center, a boxy, concrete building that sits next to a complex of athletic fields. I arrive fifteen minutes early. As I get out of the car, a dark green Ford Escort station wagon with a dent in the passenger-side door parks a few slots away. Damian climbs out in a black nylon sweatsuit and his just-purchased white high-tops. We walk into the lobby of the center, which is crowded with kids, all of them African American. A couple of teenage guys standing around the pool table call out and greet Damian as we pass.

  The gym has red cinder-block walls, a sign listing rules of conduct, and a clock over the door with the requisite metal grille. On the sideline stands a row of portable aluminum bleachers.

  The rest of the team begins to show up a few minutes later. Sean walks into the gym in maroon shorts, a gray T-shirt, and flip-flops, grabs a ball, and begins shooting. A few minutes later, Dino enters with Willie McClain Sr., who wears a red nylon track suit and carries a camera in his right hand. Sean walks over, gives McClain a hug, and shakes his hand.

  “How you doin’?” Sean asks.

  “I’m great,” McClain says.

  “You look great.”

  “You too.”

  Sean rubs his head where his hair has receded and tilts forward to show McClain, who laughs and says, “That’s all right. Better you than me.”

  Sean moves over the bleachers and sits down to put on his shoes as McClain keeps talking.

  “I just had a breakfast meeting and I was bragging to them about 1986 and all that we accomplished,” he says. “That should go down someplace in the books.”

  Randy Finley arrives next, his bushy hair and mustache now white. He is followed by Chris Dickinson and Eric Hampton, who, when he enters the gym, throws his arms in the air in a Rocky-like gesture. Maitland, who has driven up from Oregon, walks in wearing khaki pants and a muted, green-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt. Coach McClain’s youngest son, Demetrius, shows up with a friend. Eric’s younger brother, Joe, also comes with a friend. Joe Miller, who was Willie McClain’s assistant coach, shows up, as does Doug Thiele, a former Lakeside teacher who was hired by Randy to tutor Damian, Will Jr., and JT. Maitland’s younger brother, Rob, who used to tag along to games, has flown up from Los Angeles for the reunion.

  As the guys drift onto the court, the sound of basketballs thumping on the floor begins to reverberate off the walls. Willie McClain and Randy Finley huddle and talk while we warm up. Chris and Eric get together in a corner to loosen up.

  “Is that going to do any good?” McClain shouts over at them. “All that stretching?”

  After about fifteen minutes of chatting and shooting around, we gather in a circle at center court to reintroduce ourselves.

  “I’m Doug. I’m a journalist,” I begin.

  “I’m Chris Dickinson, I’ve got a couple kids
, and I work in employee benefits.”

  “I’m Eric Hampton. I am married now. I work for the city of Seattle.”

  “I’m Maitland Finley. I’ve been working in the wine industry in Washington and Oregon. I live in a town called Yamhill down south. I’m single, and, uh, I just have a dog. That’s it.”

  “I’m Coach Willie McClain. I have three men now, they’re not boys. I’m still in the ministry, still working with youth. I’m glad to see you all, you men, back from ’86. All right!”

  “I’m Damian Joseph, I am a teacher and a preacher. I’m a teacher at Zion Preparatory Academy, and it’s wonderful. I love helping kids. And I’m a preacher at Greater Glory Church of God in Christ.”

  “Dino Christofilis. Married with two kids. I have my own investment firm. Glad to be here.”

  “I’m Sean O’Donnell. I’m a lawyer with King County.”

  “I’m Randy Finley. I was the auditioning guy. I just had a wonderful time doing it. And when the basketball season was over, it was hard to let go. That’s why we started the tutoring class and got almost everybody off into high schools. Got ’em graduated and I’ve been hearing all kinds of wonderful things. And Willie, it’s wonderful to see you again.”