ADDICTIONS LEAD TO A TRAGIC END

Family, friends tell Dudley's story

TARBORO -- Dorothy Lynn Clark last talked to her brother in September, when
he called collect from the Wake County jail, where he was being held on
trespassing charges. "Dot," he said to his older sister, "I'm coming home."

James "Lee" Robert Dudley arrived home in October in a hearse.

What police allege happened to him Sept. 30 was a brutal crime that barely
registered in the city beyond the neighborhood surrounding the convenience
store in Southeast Raleigh where it occurred. It was a "drug-related" crime
involving people on the edges of society.

Four men and a 15-year-old boy beat Dudley with their fists, then shattered
his skull with a heavy chunk of asphalt, police said.

Dudley was an alcoholic and cocaine addict who managed to work most of the
time but was homeless. In his worst moments, he stole from his
mother-in-law.

His sister Dorothy, a licensed practical nurse, had something to say about
her brother to the men accused of killing him. Addressing them as if they
were sitting next to her in the den of her two-story home in Tarboro, she
said: "I don't care if he hung on the wrong street. I don't care that he
stayed in the shelter and was homeless. He felt every one of those blows you
gave him."

He never hurt anyone as much as he hurt himself, she said.

Joseph Anthony Frazier, 48, whose address is listed on arrest warrants as
"Anywhere, Raleigh"; Tomaris Lamont Parker,18, of 420 Dorothea Drive; Dorsey
Donnell Lucas, 26, of 534 Dorothea Drive; and Travis Devon Sanders, 25, also
described as homeless on arrest warrants, are in the Wake County jail,
charged with first-degree murder.

A 15-year-old whose identity has not been released also has been charged.

"It's always difficult to identify with anyone with that horrific address,
'Anywhere, USA,' " said Bonnie Stone, coordinator of Vigils Against Violence
who makes sure homicide victims in Raleigh receive public remembrance.

"We learned in the schoolyard, five to one -- that's not right. It isn't
fair," she said after a recent prayer vigil for Dudley.

A brutal argument

Raleigh police Lt. Chris Morgan would not confirm a motive for the slaying.
But Dudley's sister and two Raleigh friends said it grew out of a drug deal
gone bad. Dudley, they say, went to the South Street Supermarket in the 500
block of West South Street to get high.

He bought alcohol with no problem, then found a crack dealer who sold him a
$10 piece of soap.

"They sold him a dummy," said friend Robert Daye, 43, who lives in Raleigh.

When Dudley realized he had been duped, he returned irate and highly
intoxicated. Witnesses said an argument between Dudley and a group of men
boiled over into violence.

Daye and another friend, Mitchell Asbury, 46, described how Dudley vainly
fought off his attackers while backing up a sloping parking lot at the
store.

"He fought them until he fell right there by the fence," Asbury said while
pointing to a rusted chain-link fence near the rear of the store.

When the beating ended, Dudley lay unconscious. He died two days later at
WakeMed.

"I hate what happened to him," said Daye, who had worked and hung out with
Dudley over the past five years. "He loved to laugh and have a good time. He
had a temper, but I hate what happened."

A tough childhood

Dudley grew up in Lawrence, an Edgecombe County hamlet awash in cotton
fields about eight miles north of Princeville. He was the fifth-oldest of
seven children living in a small, unpainted wood house.

Dorothy Mae Dudley worked as a field hand for area farmers to support her
children until she suffered a heart attack in 1978. When the children were
old enough, they worked with their mother in the fields, Clark said.

"We primed and hung tobacco, picked cotton, picked corn, cucumbers,
whatever," Clark said. "We picked until 5:30, then we'd pile it all up. The
farmer would come and pick it up, weigh it and pay us. We done pretty good,
too; at least it seemed like we did, anyway."

Life was tough, but the family was never destitute. "We always had somewhere
to lay our heads, and we wasn't hungry, but that was about it," she said.

James Dudley never liked farming. He usually drove the tractor.

Their father, James Young, was around, but he never had much dealings with
the children, said his only daughter.

"When [Dudley] got older, about 15 or 16, he liked hanging more with his
daddy, which wasn't good because Daddy liked to drink," Clark said.

Her brother didn't like school and dropped out when he turned 16 because he
wanted to be like his father, she said. "I loved my daddy, but he won't
worth a flip," Clark said.

Dudley was married, had a child and was driving a taxi in Princeville in
1990 when his mother died. It was six years after his father died of colon
cancer.

"Right after that, things started getting foolish," Clark said. In 1991,
Dudley started smoking crack cocaine, she said.

"His cravings just kept getting stronger and stronger," Clark said,
recalling a day in 1993 when Dudley became so desperate for crack he locked
his mother-in-law out of her house and stole money she had stashed in a
cabinet.

A good worker

Dudley separated from his wife and arrived in Raleigh later that year to
live with a cousin. He eventually found a job traveling around the country
with a trucker, unloading furniture, Clark said.

One Raleigh employer described Dudley as a good worker when he wasn't
drinking or getting high.

"He would go out with a trucker who always came here looking for him and
stay out for three months at a time," said Mike McKinney, manager of Trojan
Labor, a temporary employment agency on Capital Boulevard.

The workday at Trojan Labor begins at 5:30 a.m. Dudley usually showed up
about 6:30 a.m. "to see if something had popped up," said McKinney, who last
saw Dudley a week before he was killed.

"He didn't go out that day," McKinney said.

About two weeks later, the state medical examiner's office in Chapel Hill
delivered Dudley's body to a Princeville mortuary for cremation. His remains
were buried near a clump of trees in Lawrence.

The picture on the obituary for Dudley's memorial service Oct. 7 was his
September mug shot from the Wake County jail.