Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived (21 page)

And police would hear the name Mark Essex again.

MARK ESSEX’S FAMILY AND FRIENDS BELIEVE THE MILD-MANNERED, SMALL-TOWN KANSAS KID ENCOUNTERED UNEXPECTED RACISM IN THE U.S. NAVY. ANGERED BY IT, HE FELL UNDER THE SWAY OF RADICAL BLACK MILITANTS.
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FROM CHOIRBOY TO REVOLUTIONARY

Mark James Essex’s private war began in the peaceful prairie town of Emporia, Kansas, an American Gothic village once described as “grassland, stoplights, grassland again.”

Emporia was a meatpacking town of fewer than thirty thousand citizens, but fewer than five hundred of them were black in the 1960s. Jimmy—as his friends and family called him—was the second of five children born to Nellie and Mark Henry Essex, a foreman at one of the local meat plants. The seven of them lived in a modest white frame house on the eastern edge of town, near the Santa Fe Railway tracks, an area where most of the town’s minorities also lived.

Jimmy grew up happy but soft-spoken, congenial but unremarkable. He was the kid nobody noticed and few remembered. He loved to fish and hunt, and he was a crack shot. He attended church faithfully enough that he talked about becoming a minister someday. He mowed neighbors’ lawns for pocket money. Jimmy Essex was, both literally and metaphorically, a Boy Scout and a choirboy, not a loner or rebel.

In school, Jimmy was a C student who probably had Bs in him, but he never pushed himself that hard. Short and skinny, he didn’t play sports, although he played saxophone in the Emporia High School band for three years. When it appeared he was better with his hands than with his mind, Jimmy spent his last two years at a vocational-technical school, where he focused on auto mechanics.

In January 1969, after one listless semester at college and worries about being drafted to fight in Vietnam, Jimmy Essex enlisted for four years in the U.S. Navy. After graduating from boot camp with outstanding ratings, he went to dental technician school, where he graduated with the highest honors before being assigned to the clinic at the naval air station in Imperial Beach, California.

Jimmy wasn’t in Kansas anymore. Back home, he’d never seen racism as virulent as he saw in the Navy, where he came to believe black men were still treated as second-class citizens. He suffered racial slurs, ridiculous and meticulous searches of his car when he came and went from the base, harassment in the barracks, extra guard duty, trifling orders from white superiors intended only to exasperate—all irritations that most black sailors encountered but shrugged off.

But not Jimmy Essex.

Although only 5-foot-4 (1.6 meters) and less than 140 pounds (64 kilograms), Jimmy fought back physically. Sometimes he complained bitterly to officers about the racist behavior he experienced. In letters home, he wrote that “blacks have trouble
getting along here.” His constant skirmishing often landed him in hot water and marked him as a troublemaker.

Eventually, Jimmy befriended a black sailor named Rodney Frank, a convicted rapist and armed robber from New Orleans who hid behind his own militant bombast. Frank introduced Jimmy to radical Black Panther literature, to the revolutionary writings of Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton, and to Black Muslim fanatics off-base.

In a matter of months, everything changed. Jimmy Essex, the quiet choirboy from Kansas, was dead. Mark Essex, the angry revolutionary, stood defiantly in his place.

On October 19, 1970, Essex went AWOL. He packed a duffel bag and boarded a bus back home to Emporia. When his parents picked him up at the bus depot, he told them he had come home “to think about what a black man has to do to survive.”

He was angry, bitter, and isolated, obsessed with the wrongs he had suffered and adamant about not returning to the Navy. His worried mother asked the Reverend W. A. Chambers, the Baptist minister who’d baptized Jimmy at age twelve, to speak to her son. Essex wanted to hear none of it. He was not only disillusioned with the world, but with God, too.

“Christianity is a white man’s religion,” he told his former minister, “and the white man’s been running things too long.”

Twenty-eight days later, Essex returned to his base to face a court-martial.

Although he had already pleaded guilty to being absent without leave, Essex’s defense was that the Navy’s entrenched racism was to blame. Hate made him do it. “I had to talk to some black people because I had begun to hate all white people. I was tired of going to white people and telling them my problems and not getting anything done about it.”

The court actually gave credence to Essex’s claims of discrimination and handed out a relatively insignificant sentence, but within weeks, Essex was given a special discharge for unspecified “character and behavior disorders” after a Navy psychiatrist had concluded that Essex had an “immature personality.” In his report, the psychiatrist noted that Essex exhibited no suicidal tendencies, but “he alludes to the fact he ‘might do something’ if he doesn’t get what he wants.”

In the end, the Navy washed its hands of Seaman Mark James Robert Essex, who served for little more than half his enlistment.

Starting in February 1971, Essex spent a few months in New York City, where he voraciously consumed Black Panther Party propaganda and fueled the flames that were beginning to flicker deep inside. He studied the Panthers’ urban guerrilla warfare tactics and started calling cops “pigs.” He also learned that one of the Panthers’ weapons of choice was the .44 Magnum semiautomatic carbine, a light and powerful hunting rifle that was devastating at close range.

EVERY INCH OF THE WALLS IN MARK ESSEX’S UPTOWN APARTMENT WERE COVERED WITH BLACK MILITANT AND RACIST GRAFFITI THAT CALLED FOR A BLOODY REVOLUTION AGAINST WHITE “DEVILS”—ESPECIALLY COPS.
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Back in Emporia, Essex couldn’t adjust. His few childhood friends had all moved away, and he yearned to live in a black man’s city. He worked a series of odd jobs for a year or so, but never with any enthusiasm. His hatred, however, continued to simmer.

Then one day, he walked into the local Montgomery Ward store and bought himself a .44 Magnum Ruger Deerslayer rifle, which he practiced firing in the countryside until the gun had become an extension of him.

Whether Emporia had become too claustrophobic or Essex had decided to launch a new front in his private race war, nobody knows. But in the summer of 1972, he picked up the phone, called his old friend Rodney Frank—also recently drummed out of the Navy as an incorrigible—and decided to move to New Orleans.

To the outside world, Mark Essex appeared to be just another young black man who didn’t know exactly where he was going or why. He entered a training program for vending-machine repairmen and rented a cheap apartment in the back of a shabby house.

But inwardly, he was reaching an ugly kind of critical mass. His defiant, revolutionary outlook grew darker. He began calling himself
Mata
, the Swahili word for a hunter’s bow. He was devouring militant newspapers and books. And he was filling every inch of the pale brown walls in his little two-room apartment with a hateful scrawl of angry anti-white slogans like “My destiny lies in the bloody death of racist pigs,” “Political power comes from the barrel of a gun,” “Hate white people beast of the earth,” “Kill pig Nixon and all his running dogs.”

All references to whites, and that was most of them, were daubed in red paint. The rest were black. He even wrote on the ceiling, taunting the police he knew would eventually visit his frowsy sanctuary: “Only a pig would read shit on the ceiling.”

In November 1972, when Essex heard the news that two black students had been gunned down at Southern University while protesting the white man’s oppression, he declared his own personal war on whites and cops.

After Christmas, he handwrote a note to a local TV station announcing his bloody intentions:

Africa greets you
.

On Dec. 31, 1972, aprx. 11 pm, the downtown New Orleans Police Department will be attacked. Reason—many, but the death of two innocent brothers will be avenged. And many others
.

P.S. Tell pig Giarrusso the felony action squad ain’t shit
.

MATA

The attack happened as Essex had promised, although the letter was not opened at the TV station until days later. It was revealed too late to prevent the murders of Alfred Harrell and Ed Hosli. Nevertheless, it would not only link Mark Essex undeniably to those New Year’s Eve shootings—in which his first victim, ironically, was a black man—but also foretold a bigger, bloodier butchery to come.

“THE REVOLUTION IS HERE”

On the rain-shrouded morning of Sunday, January 7, 1973, Mark Essex girded for battle.

Almost a thousand miles away, Nellie Essex prepared for church, where she would cry and pray for her son’s wayward soul.

Tim Ursin kissed his children good-bye before going to work.

And a whole city awoke to a misty, gray day that would be unlike any before it.

Shortly after 10 a.m., Mark Essex walked back into Joe Perniciaro’s market and stood in the doorway holding his .44 Magnum hunting rifle in his right hand. With his wounded left hand, he pointed at Perniciaro.

SNIPER MARK ESSEX’S BULLET-MANGLED CORPSE LAY UNTOUCHED FOR HALF A DAY ON THE HOWARD JOHNSON’S ROOF UNTIL POLICE WERE CONVINCED NO OTHER SHOOTERS REMAINED IN THE DOWNTOWN NEW ORLEANS HOTEL.
Associated Press

“You. You’re the one I want,” Essex shouted. “Come here.”

Perniciaro recognized him as the bandaged young man who bought the razor five days before. He started to run toward the back of the store. Essex, believing Perniciaro had fingered him to the cops, had come for revenge.

Essex fired one booming shot, blasting a gaping hole in the grocer’s right shoulder and knocking him to the floor, before he turned and ran down the street.

Four blocks away, a fleeing Essex ran up to a black man sitting in front of his house in a beige and black 1968 Chevrolet Chevelle.

“Hi, brother, get out,” Essex told him.

“You crazy, man?”

Essex leveled his rifle at the stunned man’s head.

“I don’t want to kill you, brother. Just honkies,” he said calmly. “But I will kill you, too.”

As the man leaped out, Essex jumped into the car and peeled out in the stolen Chevelle, sideswiping another vehicle before disappearing into traffic.

Police radios crackled with nearly simultaneous reports of a shooting and an armed carjacking in the Gert Town district. Cruisers scrambled to respond, but the stolen Chevelle eluded them. All they had was a description of a slim, young black male, up to 5-foot-4 (1.6 meters), weighing about 140 pounds (64 kilograms), wearing a green camouflage jacket and olive-drab fatigue pants. He was carrying a hunting rifle onto which he’d tied a red, green, and black handkerchief—later identified as the Black Liberation Flag.