The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston's Racial Divide (19 page)

Behind them, Smut Brown had scrambled across the backseat to follow Boogie-Down out of the car when he saw the skidding cruiser hit his two friends. “They like disappeared,” he said. Boogie-Down and Marquis had been in front of him and then, in a flash, they were gone. “My mind was racing so fast that I know I seen them there, then after that I didn’t see them anymore.” Smut was on his own. “I thought Boogie-Down was dead, to tell you the truth.” He eyed the fence erected along the right side of the cul-desac. He hit the ground running. “I ran straight towards the fence.”

Mike pushed the car door hard into the Lexus, trying to make enough room to get out. He’d seen Craig leap out of the car and race after the driver off to the left, but lost sight of them. The security guard in the backseat, Charles Bullard, also headed that way. Craig, in a matter of seconds, caught up to Tiny Evans. Tiny had stopped and raised his hands. Craig hit him in the face with his fist. “I ran up to him, I punched him. And I grabbed him by his arm, turned him around, twisted his arm behind his back.”

In the other direction, Mike saw the front and back doors of the Lexus pop open. He watched the other suspects scrambling out of the passenger side. He thought he saw two of them heading toward the fence off to the right. He twisted his body, thickened by his clothing—the black sweatshirt and the three-quarter-length black parka.

Squeezing his way out, Mike ran behind the Lexus. The sound of screeching wheels caught his attention. He hesitated and looked back to see police cruisers braking to a halt. “I kind of glanced up to make sure it wasn’t going to hit me.” One cruiser skidded along the right side of the Lexus. Police sirens blasted and cruiser lights sliced up the night, and Mike thought the sight of the cruisers flooding into the dead end was a good thing. “There was more help coming.”

As he ran behind the Lexus, he looked inside. “I could see the doors to the Lexus were wide open and I could see inside the car and see that there’s no guns hanging out.” The quick appraisal meant no one was looking to shoot at him, and the four suspects were all out.

Mike looked and caught sight of the suspect who bolted from the Lexus’s backseat and was running over to the fence. He took off after the suspect, hard on the man’s heels, barely hindered by the long down jacket and pumping his legs like a football running back.

Mike saw the man throw himself onto the fence and kick his legs up. The section of fencing was missing an iron bar, making the top unstable and barbed. The suspect was gaining traction and tumbling over the top when his brown leather jacket got snagged on one of the sharp prongs.

This was Mike’s chance. “He’s dangling from the top of the fence.” Mike reached up and grabbed a sleeve. He held on to it tightly. He briefly looked at the suspect, but in that moment did not recognize Smut Brown. Mike tried pulling the suspect back, but the physics were against him. The suspect was already too far onto the other side. The last thing Mike wanted to do was let go—he had the suspect in his grip—but he had to.

The suspect dropped onto the hill on the opposite side of the fence and rolled. Mike took a step back. He was thinking about his next move, “whether I wanted to jump over the fence and get cut up or hurt versus trying to find another way.”

The answer was to go straight ahead—up and over.

Mike stepped and reached for the fence. Then from behind, he felt the first blow, “a real sharp, painful blow.”

He turned to his right to see what the hell was going on.

Kenny Conley and Bobby Dwan raced downhill toward the cul-de-sac and saw the snarl of cruisers ahead of them screeching to a halt. Kenny had slowed to get through the bottleneck at the entrance to the dead end of Woodruff Way and then accelerated again.

They were now the seventh or eighth cruiser behind the Lexus. Directly in front of them, they saw another officer from their station—Joe Horton—who was driving a one-man cruiser.

“It was very hectic,” Bobby said. “The sirens were going. Lights were flashing, which if you look at them, they blind you. It was pretty dark other than the lights flashing. There were car doors open from people jumping out and running around.”

Kenny, looking through the chaos, noticed the one suspect exit the rear of the Lexus and run toward the chain-link fence. He slammed the car brakes, and the cruiser began skidding to a stop at the top of the dead end. He did his best to keep an eye on the man running toward the fence.

Kenny was locked in—tunnel vision. In those split seconds, he did not pick up on the commotion Bobby was noticing farther down along the fence. He saw only the suspect on the other side of the fence—a man whose name he would later learn was Robert “Smut” Brown.

Bobby, climbing out of the passenger seat, had glimpsed three or four people over near the fence. The officers had surrounded someone. “I was just thinking they’re cuffing him.” In the other direction, meanwhile, Bobby saw Joe Horton run to the left after another suspect who was already on the ground. Bobby made the quick calculation. The guys at the fence had a suspect and probably didn’t need him. “It seemed to me they were all set.” Horton, in contrast, was running alone toward a suspect. The call wasn’t close. “I worked with Horton,” he said, and so he ran over to assist him.

Kenny hustled to the front of the cruiser and ran into Bobby. Kenny was heading right, Bobby was heading left. They crisscrossed past each other and kept going. “The last time I saw him,” Bobby said about Kenny, “he was at the fence ready to go over.”

Kenny got over quickly. “There was no bar on top,” he said. “I put my feet up and was kind of wiggling and I jumped.” He dropped to his feet and stumbled. Up ahead, he saw the shadowy figure of Smut Brown leap off a little wall onto a street.

Kenny took off after Smut. Smut headed to the right, ran across the street and through a parking lot. He ran behind a building and up a hill through some woods. “He was probably forty feet in front of me,” Kenny said. Smut hopped over a chain extended across a cement staircase, ran up the stairs, and then headed across another lot. Kenny followed.

They’d run the length of a couple of football fields when Kenny drew his Glock semiautomatic handgun. “Fucking stop!” he yelled.

Smut did, and he raised his arms. “You don’t have to shoot me.” Smut did not turn around. He yelled he was not armed. “I haven’t done anything.” Kenny ordered Smut to get down on the ground on his belly. Smut did, with Kenny’s help. “I pushed him with my forearm on the back of his shoulder blades.”

Smut did not resist. He was worried. He had seen plenty back at the fence, a stampede of cops beating a man he thought was Marquis. Smut was worried he was next—that this officer with the gun was “going to come and jump on me.”

But it turned out he didn’t have to worry. Kenny put his gun back in its holster, leaned over the drug dealer, and snapped on a pair of handcuffs.

When Mike turned to see what had hit him, he was hit a second time. His head exploded, and he could not see. His only thought was wondering why he did not feel more pain. “I just remember saying, like, Ouch, to myself.” It was a strange question to be asking, as if his mind had left his body and taken up a position of clinical observation.

The first blow to the back of his head had rocked his brain, causing it to collide with the inside of his skull. The trauma triggered an inflammatory response of infection-fighting cells. Mike’s head began swelling immediately, a bump the size of an egg.

The second blow then ripped open the right side of Mike’s forehead. Blood began pouring from a laceration along his hairline that was nearly three inches long. Next Mike was pulled off the fence, and he fell toward the front of the marked police cruiser that was to the right of the Lexus. More blows followed, ferocious blows. Mike’s radio fell to the ground by the front of Dave Williams’s cruiser.

He was down on all fours, wobbly like a dog on its last legs. He lifted his head and saw a puzzling image. “It looked like an officer,” he thought. But that was crazy, a hallucination. Mike looked again, but the initial impression would not vanish: It was a cop, a white cop. “He was standing in front of me.” Mike tried to raise his head up higher to get a better look. But the only thing he saw was a boot coming flush into his face.

Now Mike felt the pain—pain in his face, his head, his shoulders, his back. The kick was followed by more blows. He curled his arms over his head for protection against the blows to “all sides of my body, from different directions.”

He fought to stay conscious; he wanted to see who was doing this to him—and why? Blood ran from his nose and mouth. He was alternately conscious and semiconscious, and he’d lost any sense of time. The blows to the head happened so fast, but now everything seemed to be happening in a clouded slow motion.

“I don’t know how long it took in actual time,” he said.

Then, suddenly, it stopped. There was quiet, too. “I saw that there’s no one, there’s no one there.” Mike was alone. He struggled to get back up on all fours. He crawled to the rear of the nearby cruiser. “I used it to lift myself,” he said. “I was having trouble breathing and standing.”

He tried to balance himself. His hands swished in the blood on the car’s trunk—his blood. He was facing the end of Woodruff Way with the hole in the fence. Then he detected that someone was standing a few feet away. He heard the man saying something. But in the thick fog that had overtaken him, he could not make out the words right away.

Mike then realized the man was ordering him to submit to an arrest. Mike couldn’t believe this. He looked and saw a black officer. It was Ian Daley, but Mike didn’t know that; all he saw was the uniform. Mike began trying to explain who he was, but blood, not words, spit from his mouth. The officer seemed disgusted and jumped back a step. Mike heard the man yelling at him to put his hands behind his back.

Mike couldn’t believe this. He felt sore and dizzy and like he might fall down. The officer was looking to cuff him! Then Mike had an idea: He flailed at his black parka, trying to open the jacket enough so the officer would see “something on my waist, my badge or something. I was just trying to identify myself.”

The arm movements only alarmed Ian Daley, who, seeing Mike’s handgun holstered on Mike’s belt, drew his own weapon. Daley held the gun in his right hand, supported at the wrist by his left hand. His index finger rested on the trigger.

Mike pulled at the parka’s zipper; he couldn’t believe this. Then something was different. The officer must have seen Mike’s badge and realized finally he was not one of the suspects. Mike heard the officer’s voice: “Oh shit. Oh my God.”

Mike took a step forward. But the officer just stood there. “He did nothing,” Mike said later. Mike took another step, but walking was too much. Everything around him was spinning. “I don’t remember falling but I remember being on the ground again.” His head hurt, and he held the spot on his forehead that was bleeding the most.

He knew he was losing consciousness. “I just wanted to like sleep.” He was alone again, struggling as he blacked out to fathom the unfathomable: How could this be?

While Kenny Conley was handcuffing Smut Brown, other officers arrived, including a patrol supervisor and a black officer who returned Kenny’s flashlight, which had fallen during the foot chase. Kenny didn’t know any of the officers—they were all from the immediate police districts while Kenny was far from his in the South End. He handed off the suspect to two officers who arrived in a police wagon.

Then he retraced his steps through the woods. He was checking for anything Smut might have discarded during the run, but he didn’t find anything. He made his way back across the street and up the short hill to the fence surrounding the dead end. The scene surprised him. The area was all lit up. “The whole street was just lined up with cars.”

He stood there and took it all in. Officers were all over the circle, including a bunch he knew: Dave Williams and Jimmy Burgio in uniform, and Gary Ryan and Joe Teahan, dressed in street clothes, from the gang unit. But what caught his attention was an ambulance, where paramedics were loading a black man strapped to a gurney into the back. The injured man was dressed in baggy jeans and a hooded sweatshirt.

“What happened?” Kenny asked.

“It’s a cop,” replied a security guard standing at the fence. The guard then recited the story already circulating around the dead end: “Hit his head on the ice.”

PART II

True Blue

CHAPTER 9

“8-Boy”

W
hen Kimberly Cox approached her husband in the acute care unit of the Boston City Hospital, her first words to Mike had a clinical purpose: to determine his level of responsiveness. She found Mike able to talk, but he was groggy and only “semi with it.” Mike would try to speak, but he was unable to summon the words to complete a sentence. He complained about his head, with its swollen black mass, about feeling dizzy, about pain in his flank and in his abdomen. “He just looked very much out of it.”

Mike also complained about his right hand, and Kimberly noticed his right thumb had ballooned. It was determined Mike had torn a ligament and hyperextended the thumb and finger—injuries that most likely occurred as he tried to break his fall.

Kimberly watched as the more than three-inch laceration on his forehead, still bleeding when she arrived, was treated and stitched. Nurses wiped off the blood caked around his swollen nose and mouth. More sutures were used to close the deep cut inside his upper lip, while the many smaller cuts and scratches were cleaned and bandaged.

Mike kept clutching his midsection, saying he felt as if he needed constantly to pee. Kimberly found a portable urinal and supported him. “I noticed that the urine was really dark.” She sought out one of the attending physicians, showed him the urine, and asked that the doctor “dipstick it.” The test showed traces of blood, hematuria. The doctors ordered further testing to explore the possibility of kidney damage and internal bleeding.