The Valley of the Shadow of Death

by Kermit Alexander

  Cox said he initially thought “perhaps my attorney will help me” but became highly suspicious when Cook told him that his codefendants were “singing like canaries.” When Cook asked Cox if “you got anything you want to say,” Cox became convinced that Cook worked for the DA and “that it was all part of a setup.”

  In fact, what Cook said was true. Both Horace Burns and Darren Charles Williams had talked to the authorities and implicated Cox. However, for Cox, talking would have surrendered his very self-esteem and dignity, his sense of control. Cox himself said that talking would have “been betraying myself, my brothers, my sisters, everything.”

  In the words of Cox’s junior high school teacher, Donald Bakeer, “One child told me that whether Tiequon was guilty or not did not matter because he definitely ‘would take the rap and never say that he was not involved.’ ”

  * * *

  On January 6, 1986, following jury voir dire and the impaneling of a death-qualified jury, the prosecution began its case against the accused executioner.

  Even less than in the Burns case would the prosecutor spell out motive. Norris simply had to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that Cox was the shooter, and that he acted intentionally and with premeditation, and he would meet his guilt-phase burden.

  The prosecutor continually spoke with our family, assuring us he was confident of conviction. While he was compassionate and understanding of our grief, our anger, he pled with us to keep as calm as we could and let him handle the case. Aware of my personal quest for justice and sensing my rage, Norris had Detective Crews keep a close watch on me. His fears were real. It took all of my self-control not to jump the low railing and wring his neck.

  My family and I were squeezed tightly into the small public gallery.

  The proceedings were about to begin.

  The jury was seated.

  Judge Boren entered the courtroom.

  Bailiffs were stationed throughout.

  Sterling Norris stood on the left of counsel table, nearest the jury. Shortly he would make his opening statement.

  The defense attorneys, Ned Cook and Joanne Rotstein, stood to his right. Beside them was their client, Tiequon Cox, shackled, dressed in L.A. County Jail blue, his large chest pushing the shirt outward, muscular arms visible beneath short sleeves.

  Cook urged him to wear street clothes to court. Cox refused.

  Cox stared straight ahead with no apparent emotion.

  Jurors would describe him as “disconnected,” “far away and distant . . . barely making eye contact with the jury.”

  Judge Boren recalled Cox as “enduring the trial,” “sitting serious and sullen, but proud,” giving off the air of “I’m not going to be broken.”

  When I looked at Cox I saw an insolent young gangster, caught up in his closed-off world, who couldn’t care less about us, about society. He acted as if put upon, angry that he was forced to sit through these proceedings. As if we had done him some wrong.

  As I looked at him in profile, he had light skin and long cornrowed hair. On his neck the letters NH tattooed above RSC, standing for Neighborhood Rolling Sixties Crip.

  Suddenly he turned to face the gallery. I thought he was going to stare right at me, actually make eye contact. But he never seemed to see me. He looked right past my family and at his Rolling Sixties homies who sat nearby.

  With a defiant look, he flashed his gang sign, right hand extended from his body as far as the shackles would allow, thumb, index, and middle finger outstretched, with the ring and pinky finger curled in. The fingers formed the Roman numeral VI for Sixties.

  He turned back around and continued his forward stare.

  I heard my sister Mary, who sat next to me, gasp. She grabbed my shoulder.

  “Oh my God, Kermit. Do you know who that is?”

  26

  AUTUMN IN WATTS

  IT IS A windy autumn day in Watts, sometime in the early 1970s. I am on the sidelines of a Pop Warner football game, watching my team, the Watts Wildcats. The boys playing are eight and nine years old.

  My sister Mary and her husband, Caldwell Black, the team’s coach, stand nearby.

  As I watch the boys play, I automatically view the game from a technical standpoint. I constantly analyze which players show innate athletic ability and advanced skills. I try to project which ones have promising futures.

  On this fall day, one player stands out. He is a running back on the Wildcats’ opponent, from a team in South Central. I have never seen him play before. I’m immediately taken. He is faster, more agile, and more physical than the others, clearly on a different level. His combination of speed, flexibility, and pure instinct reminds me of a young O. J. Simpson. Properly coached, the boy’s skills could take him into high school football and perhaps into college and even the pros.

  He is electric. He shows early signs of style and grace.

  However, as I watch the game, I see that the boy plays with anger and venom. He cannot control himself. He spikes the ball angrily upon scoring. When he runs the ball, and his blockers fail, he slaps them upside the head. At one point he yells at someone on the sidelines.

  A flashback within a flashback, now to my childhood, and the team coached by the priest: my own father walking onto the field, pulling me physically to the sidelines, and sitting me down. The words still echo: “He doesn’t play until he can control himself.”

  As I continue to watch the boy intermittently dazzle and implode, I can’t believe that no one does anything.

  Where is the kid’s coach? I wonder. Where are his parents? Will nobody talk to him? This kid could really be something, but he can’t control himself. He needs help.

  From the sidelines I shout in frustration: “Somebody needs to do something. Somebody ought to help him.”

  Everyone agreed. No one did a thing.

  * * *

  Back in court I barely heard Mary’s voice as it warbled through my head.

  “That’s the kid that was always in trouble in Pop Warner,” she said, pointing at Cox. “Look at what he’s done.”

  Like the family funeral, again a blue haze, an inability to focus or compute.

  As I forced myself to look, recognition slowly registered. I superimposed the image of the killer before me onto the child I saw on the field that autumn day. Cut the cornrows, remove the tattoos, the same light skin and piercing green eyes. Unmistakable.

  Recognition turned past into present.

  Words long gone were reborn.

  “There’s this player on the other team, he’s known in the league, he’s incredible, but a real problem child.”

  Even back in Pop Warner he had a reputation.

  All of the guilt came crashing down. My community service, my work as a motivational speaker, my time as a probation officer. My whole life had been devoted to making a difference, to mentoring, to turning difficult cases around.

  Kermit Alexander, NFL star who rose from the projects of Watts: Who had more street credibility? Who better to walk the walk?

  But what had I done that day in Watts?

  Now I flashed back to my night prowls on the streets of South Central, to the Holy Cross Cemetery, to the endless soul-searching as I tried to grapple with my feelings of failure.

  This was deeper than missing the morning cup of coffee on the day of the killings. This was a fundamental breach in my life’s meaning. I now understood my role in the tragedy. I could have helped the kid and didn’t. I always preached, take control. I always held forth on the power of one little moment, one intervention. “A few minutes of time can change a life,” I heard myself saying.

  But for whatever reason, that day, my eyes went blind. I shunned the dirty work of engaging a toxic youth, for the easy one of analyzing his technical skills. I really sat up and paid attention when he carried the ball. I really dropped the ball when I failed to stand up and take him on.

  I betrayed the moment. I neglected an opportunity. In street lingo, I “slipped,” let down m
y guard.

  And worst of all, Madee would have been beside herself. Oh, I could hear her. “Kermit, how could you?” she bellows. “Now go do something. Coach him. Befriend him. Help him out like you do all those other kids.”

  The game I always held up as an alternative to the streets isn’t a magic charm that simply works on its own. You can’t just let kids on the field and watch ’em go. It’s what you do with them that counts, it’s the lessons learned at play.

  And there was my chance, and all I did was call out others. I was as bad as my old probationers. They always said it was someone else’s fault: “Some other dude did it.” The old refrain from county jail: “SOD,” always Some Other Dude. Just like them, I pointed the finger elsewhere. Not my problem. Let some other dude deal with it.

  There’s no saying what would have happened, but at least I could have tried, at least I would have been true to myself, to the family creed.

  Madee spoke up again, a voice from my youth. “Now Kermit,” she always said, “on your way home from school, you do something good for somebody. That lady’s house that you pass by every day on your way home, she’s eighty years old. You put down your books and help her carry and unload her groceries.”

  My father again, “He doesn’t play until he can control himself.”

  Stop it, I felt like yelling. Instead I cringed.

  As I tried with Ivan—to assure him it was not his fault—some of my family now tried with me. How could I have known? There’s no saying it would have made any difference. Of course I wasn’t to blame. And as with Ivan it did no good.

  Now I felt on trial, an accomplice. I was damned, at once sickened by the vile killer, yet yoked to him. Forever I would carry the guilt that I played a role in the making of a monster. I let him into our lives, allowed him to drag us back into the world I had tried so hard to escape.

  I asked everyone else, where were you? Now I heard everyone ask, where were you? It’s just like the old African proverb: point the finger of blame outward and you point three at yourself.

  27

  BORN OF THE SOUTH

  THE COX FAMILY, like mine, was born of the South, both children of its plantations and its pain.

  One of Tiequon’s great-grandmothers went into labor and gave birth while “on the job” in the cotton fields. One of his great-grandfathers was convicted of quintuple murder over a gambling dispute and sent to prison for twenty years. Another great-grandfather was shot and killed on the streets of Dallas following a barroom brawl.

  Health issues plagued the Cox family. Sickle-cell anemia, heart and lung problems, as well as grand mal seizures ran along the paternal line.

  The family past also revealed persistent poverty and lack of education, early marriages with lots of children.

  Seven of Tiequon’s great-grandparents were African-American, one was Portuguese, likely the source of his light skin and eyes.

  They came from Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. And they came west as part of the Great Migration, traveling to Los Angeles by segregated bus in the 1950s.

  The dominant figure in Tiequon’s maternal line was his great-grandmother, Annie Ellsworth—then known as Annie Scott, later as Joan Pickett—who settled in L.A. in 1919.

  Ellsworth supported herself through domestic labor and as a nightclub entertainer. She married twice and carried on other relationships during the 1920s and 1930s. The affairs were typically stormy, involving alcohol, infidelity, and physical abuse. Her children reported that she took little interest in their education, with only one of the three finishing high school.

  In 1944, Ellsworth began investing in property, purchasing a house in the Sugar Hill section of Los Angeles. While restrictive housing covenants, forbidding sale to blacks, affected most of L.A., the seller violated the law because Japanese internment had left a glut of housing on the market.

  Ellsworth, ambitious to extend her holdings, felt the bite of L.A.’s housing policies and entered the litigation challenging their constitutionality. In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Shelley v. Kraemer, declared restrictive covenants to violate the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Over the following decades Ellsworth accumulated real estate that would be worth over a million dollars by 1984.

  In the same year as the Shelley suit, Tiequon’s future mother, Sondra Lee Holt, was “born via a low forceps delivery,” to Ellsworth’s daughter, Audrey, and her husband, John Lee Holt.

  Holt was described by relatives as irresponsible and unwilling to work or provide support. From the time his daughter turned three, he sexually abused her. “He waited until the house was quiet at night,” Sondra recalled, “and then came into my bedroom when I was asleep. When he first started to rape me, I did not understand what was happening, but only knew it hurt and left me scared and confused.”

  By the time Sondra was six, her mother was addicted to heroin and committed to a state hospital. Upon returning from rehab, she continued to party and drink around the children, often leaving them with others. She dated a string of men, most of whom were drunken and abusive, often in Sondra’s presence.

  By age seven, Sondra, born with scoliosis, a curvature of the spine, required a corrective spinal fusion, leaving her in a full-body cast.

  Psychologically damaged from abuse and the strains of surgery, Sondra struggled with school. She displayed borderline mental functioning and her intelligence was graded as “dull-normal.” By her early teens she turned to drugs and alcohol as a way of escaping the violence and hopelessness of her home life.

  Her drug habit landed her for much of 1963 and 1964 in the California Youth Authority, where she served time for possession. She was paroled in February 1965.

  The following month she returned to the eleventh grade, where a school physician found her to suffer from mental illness, classifying her as “somewhat disturbed.” Failing all of her classes, she dropped out.

  In April 1965 she went to the doctor and learned that she was three months pregnant. She would continue to drink and use drugs throughout the pregnancy.

  * * *

  Tiequon’s biological father, James Cox, was one of twelve children. Born in Texas in 1946, he subsequently moved to California with the family.

  Throughout his life James suffered from grand mal seizures, caused by fluid pressing against the brain. He often blacked out and then later came to in the hospital. From a young age, he had problems with self-control and showed a sudden temper.

  James met Sondra at a party when he was seventeen. Later that night, Tiequon was conceived.

  As James later recalled, “I was in the county jail when I found out Sondra was pregnant with my child. . . . I was released from jail on July 31, 1965, and a week later I was in front of the preacher. My father picked me up from the jail and on the way home we stopped and he bought me a suit. That is how I learned I was getting married the next week. I think I was the last in my family to know that a date had been set.”

  James described Sondra as “a warrior” who “stood toe-to-toe with anyone, man or woman, and settled arguments by physical fights. She never backed down from a fight and didn’t need much cause to get into one.”

  After their marriage they lived together for a couple of months, but by Thanksgiving of 1965 they separated for the first time. James left Sondra after she tried to shoot him. One week later Tiequon was born.

  In the years following his birth, James would see him occasionally, after Sondra lost control, disappeared, or was institutionalized. James would take the boy to his great-grandmother’s house.

  During the first five years of Tiequon’s life, Sondra was arrested ten times, the offenses including assault with a deadly weapon, resisting arrest, disturbing the peace, drunk in public, attempted murder, and assault and battery on a police officer. During this time she bore two more children.

  One relative said of Sondra’s relationship with her kids, “She loved them one minute, and hated them the next. She was both suicidal and homicidal. More th
an once, I saw her pull a gun on Tiequon, Demontray, and Edrina.”

  When Tiequon was three and a half, Sondra attempted to kill herself, and her children, by turning on the gas stove and lighting it. The police arrived and took her to the hospital to treat her burns. The responding officer described her as “confused, violent, homicidal, and hyperactive.”

  A year later, a four-and-a-half-year-old Tiequon witnessed his mother in a fight outside the house with her pimp. She screamed at him that Edrina was his and began strangling the girl in front of him. As onlookers pried the baby away, Tiequon was “hollering, yelling, and crying.”

  When Tiequon was five, Sondra turned up the gas on the stove and left the children alone. Tiequon took his siblings, one by the hand, the other in his arms, and led them through the rain to his nearby grandmother’s house.

  Of this period in Tiequon’s life, a psychiatrist would later write:

  Sondra was Tiequon’s initial, primary attachment figure; the person who represented physical and emotional safety. Children like Tiequon are placed in an impossible bind by this type of negative and unreliable attachment: to survive, they must form an emotional attachment to a parent like Sondra, despite the parent’s unreliability, despite the abandonments, and despite the abuse they suffer at the hands of the parent. The pain is enormously magnified, because it is inflicted by the very person to whom he had to turn to help him survive the pain. Abused children like Tiequon experience an excruciating conflict as they try somehow to integrate the fact that the abusive parent is both the source of their pain and their only hope for comfort.

  In 1971, following another incident, the three children were removed from Sondra’s custody. For the next five years they lived with their great-grandmother.

  Her home was located on West Seventy-Seventh Street, a well-tended block of green lawns and trimmed hedges. Here Tiequon and his siblings received solid material support from their well-off great-grandmother.