AFRAID NO MORE

Tulia Woman Out Of Hiding, Cleared By Unknown Alibi

The shock has worn off, replaced by a return to the small pleasures of
everyday life. She can drive a car, confident that being stopped by the
police will result in nothing worse than a traffic ticket. Walk into a
government office without fear that every civil servant on a telephone is
plotting her arrest. Stop constantly looking over her shoulder.

Tonya White has been transformed from a fugitive back to an ordinary citizen
and, in the process, become more than a health-care worker in Shreveport,
La. However unlikely, White has earned a place in modern-day civil rights
history, one of the few winners in a controversial drug sting in the Texas
Panhandle that tarnished the reputations of an entire town.

But none of that appeared likely when word of the sting operation first
leaked in the summer of 1999, fueled by a predawn roundup of suspects in the
dusty town of Tulia, about midway between Amarillo and Lubbock. Dozens of
people were arrested, virtually all accused of selling powder cocaine.

In the end, 46 people were charged, the result of an 18-month undercover
operation by a lone cop named Tom Coleman, a drifter who had bounced from
one small-town law enforcement job to another before being hired by the
local sheriff to clean up Tulia.

Thirty-nine of those charged were African-American, 9 percent of the town's
black population of about 430. At the time, no one questioned how a town of
5,000 people, with virtually no industry other than the weekly cattle
auction, could support 46 cocaine dealers.

But as the cases churned through the courts, they slowly grew into a cause
celebre. Ultimately, the suspects were sentenced to more than 800 years in
prison and 100 years of probation -- one defendant alone was sentenced to
341 years.

Two people, Tonya White and Zury Bossett, continued to elude police as the
trials and plea bargains mounted. Bossett was arrested last summer after a
traffic stop in Odessa; her trial is scheduled for July.

That left only White on the run, and in November she returned to Tulia, the
hometown she had left more than three years earlier, to face the charge that
she had sold Coleman 4 grams of cocaine Oct. 9, 1998.

The charge could have sent White to prison for 99 years. But it was
dismissed in April, only a week before her trial was to begin, after an
investigator uncovered new evidence: White had conducted business in
Oklahoma City, where she was living, within a few hours of the time Coleman
had claimed to be buying cocaine from her in Tulia -- 250 miles to the west.

Even before the charge against White was dismissed, efforts were under way
to force the release of those still in prison and, ultimately, to secure
pardons for everyone who was convicted or pleaded guilty.

But even if that happens -- and White's attorney, Jeff Blackburn, predicts
it will take several years -- there are those who say the losses of the past
three years can never be repaid.

The sting sent three of Mattie White Russell's children to prison, and she
risked losing a fourth.

"I didn't think (Tonya) would get off," Russell says. "I knew she didn't
live here (at the time of the sting), but I know how people are in this
town. They love to put people in jail."

A generation of Tulia's African-American population is gone, leaving a
generation of grandparents to raise their grandchildren. Russell, who works
as a prison guard, is raising 8-year-old Roneisha and 5-year-old Cashawn
while their parents are in other prisons.

"It's a struggle," she says.

The children's mother, Russell's daughter Kizzie White, 25, is serving a
25-year prison sentence. A son, Kareem White, 26, is serving a 60-year
sentence; another son, Donnie Smith, 32, was sentenced to 12 years in prison
but was released in January. He now works for a meat-packing plant in
Plainview, 25 miles south of Tulia.

No one claims that all those snared in the sting were strangers to the drug
world.

Smith testified he had sold crack to Coleman but denied using or selling the
far more expensive powder cocaine, as Coleman charged; the jury was
unswayed, finding Coleman more convincing.

Coleman, who is white, testified that he penetrated the town's black
community with the help of a co-worker at the local cattle auction. He
offered no real corroborating evidence from the witness stand: no
videotapes, no audiotapes, no testimony from other law enforcement officers.
Instead, he said, he kept track of details about the deals by writing notes
on his leg, afraid electronic surveillance would lead to his discovery.

The jury sentences mounted: 99 years, 90 years, 60 years, and other
defendants began to plead guilty and accept prison time, even as they denied
their participation in the transactions.

White's case was only the third to be dismissed, says Swisher County
District Attorney Terry McEachern, who personally handled the jury trials
and plea bargains.

The fact that so many defendants were African-American prompted critics,
including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and
the American Civil Liberties Union, to suggest that the prosecutions -- and
the juries that issued the sentences -- were driven by racism. Most of the
white defendants had ties to the black community, including biracial
children.

Coleman's credibility also came under scrutiny.

The son of a Texas Ranger, Coleman had served as a jailer in Denton and a
sheriff's deputy in Pecos and Cochran counties. He was working as a welder
when he was hired by the Swisher County sheriff's office to run the
undercover drug operation, funded by federal money funneled through the
Panhandle Regional Narcotics Task Force.

Defense attorneys later learned that Coleman had built up large debts before
abruptly leaving the jobs in Pecos and Cochran counties, and an arrest
warrant for theft was issued for him in Cochran County during the Tulia
undercover investigation. Coleman was arrested, but the charge was dropped
after he settled the debts.

More critical documents surfaced, too, including a 1996 letter from Ken
Burke, who was then sheriff of Cochran County, to the Texas Commission on
Law Enforcement, stating in part that "Mr. Coleman should not be in law
enforcement."

McEachern defends the work done by Coleman, who was fired from a similar
undercover job in Ellis County last year. "You can always play
Monday-morning quarterback," the district attorney observes.

Coleman, who reportedly now works as a private detective in Waxahachie,
could not be reached for comment for this article.

As for his own role, McEachern says, "I didn't have any input into the case
until it was presented to me by the task force and the sheriff's office."

Once the indictments were issued, he says, "it became my duty to prosecute
the cases that I felt there was just cause for. And that was determined by
the grand jury."

McEachern denies that race was a defining factor.

"I'm sure, because of the publicity, that there are probably some people
that feel like they've been discriminated against," he says. "I certainly do
not feel I've been a part of that or anything else like that."

But Russell sees it differently.

"It's not the kids. It's their parents, people my age, the people that were
on the jury," she says.

"If every black person would move out of Tulia, they'd be satisfied."

As far as Tonya White knew, her role in the case began with a phone call
from her mother shortly after 11 p.m. the day of the arrests. White had just
returned home from the evening shift at a nursing home in Shreveport, where
she had moved the previous month.

"Your brothers and sister have all been picked up," Mattie White Russell
told her. In all, almost a dozen family members were charged, and most of
the rest were friends.

White was worried, but not about herself -- she had not lived in Tulia for
years. In the summer of 1998 she left the high plains of the Panhandle for
Oklahoma City, where she had cousins. The move seemed like an adventure, at
least until she discovered she had no love for a big city and that its
daunting freeway system was no place to be without a reliable car.

In June 1999 she moved to Shreveport, hoping to forge a closer relationship
with her father, a truck driver whom she had met only a few years earlier.

Two months after that first frantic call from her mother, White received
another. "She said, `I seen your picture. They got you for selling.' She
said, `Lay low. Don't call.' "

White's life on the lam began.

As a place to fade into the background, Shreveport suited her fine. It is a
storied but struggling town, pinning its economic hopes on casinos planted
along the Red River.

But the glittering lure of easy money had little relationship to White's
life. She simply found the city to be a comfortable place to live, easy to
get around in but, with a metropolitan population of 250,000 people, half of
them African-American, plenty big enough to ensure employment for someone
willing to work as a certified nursing assistant.

Mattie Russell's warning call triggered a stream of fretful days and
sleepless nights. Unsettled, White told her supervisor what had happened and
was told to take two weeks off to pull herself together.

After she returned to find her schedule had been cut to two days a week, she
quit and began working as a home health aide.

"I was just trying to keep busy. I kept quiet."

It wasn't hard; for more than a year she worked for an elderly woman who
lived just a few houses from the duplex White rents in south Shreveport.

A 1987 graduate of Tulia High School, White became a nursing assistant about
10 years ago. It was a field that, while offering little in the way of
status or money, offered steady employment. "If you want to work, you can
always find a job."

So, with no husband or children to claim her time, she worked, building a
life and a comfortable home, filled with tasteful furniture, green plants
and scented candles.

For two years after her indictment, White lay low. She walked everywhere she
could to limit the chances of being stopped.

She didn't go back to Tulia, although her mother occasionally traveled to
Shreveport. Her sister is in prison in Gatesville, and her brother Kareem in
Abilene, making visiting them too risky. She didn't see her brother Donnie
until his release earlier this year.

Her future was on hold, too: She wanted to go to school to become a
radiation technologist but was afraid to attempt it while the threat of
arrest loomed.

Periodically, Russell called to report that the police hadn't forgotten her.

"She never did tell them anything," White says. "One time she told them I
got married and moved to Africa." But in January 2000 White had to take a
risk. Her driver's license was about to expire.

"That was the scariest thing in the world," she says. "I didn't go to the
main station but to a little bitty substation." As she filled out the forms,
the clerk picked up the telephone. White froze.

"I was, `Oh, Lord. She's calling the police.' "

Eventually her heart rate slowed. The clerk didn't check for outstanding
arrest warrants from other states, and White got her license.

She learned a lesson, too.

"I watch a lot of TV, and I used to say, `Man, that stuff's not real. But
it's real.' "

Looking back, White says she always knew that difficult time wouldn't last
forever.

"I wasn't really on the run," she says. "If they really wanted me, they
could have come and got me."

Finally she grew tired of it. Tired of looking over her shoulder, afraid to
go out at night, afraid to tell her friends the truth.

But her family knew, and she was periodically contacted by defense lawyers,
offering to take her case for a $2,500 retainer. "I'm a poor black woman,"
she says. "I don't have $2,500."

Last September, Blackburn called to say he would represent her for free.

Blackburn had joined the cause after being approached by a lawyer for Cash
Love, who was sentenced to more than 300 years in prison. (Love, who is
white, is the father of Kizzie White's youngest child.)

As he learned more about the sting, Blackburn's outrage grew. "I felt a
little guilty," he says. "Here I am in Amarillo. I do civil rights cases. I
do criminal law. ... And this is the first time I came to understand what
happened in Tulia, the impact it had on the community.

"The collateral damage is extraordinary, the number of breadwinners that
have been removed from that community. ... The black community in Tulia
cannot really recover."

Blackburn and a couple of other Amarillo attorneys began planning a
long-term campaign to handle the remaining criminal cases and file legal
papers asking that those still imprisoned be released; ultimately, they hope
to gain pardons for everyone who was convicted or pleaded guilty. The NAACP
Legal Defense and Educational Fund is also involved and has recruited
lawyers from a number of East Coast firms to help.

Closing Tonya White's case would be one step. So when Blackburn called in
November to say that $2,500 in donations had been collected to post her
bail, White went home.

"It was something," Blackburn says. "It was really a leap of faith on her
part."

White tried to steel herself for the possibility of prison, while
concentrating on the fact of her innocence.

Some of the people arrested may have used drugs or even sold them, she says.
"I don't know, because I wasn't there."

Instead, she repeats what has become a familiar refrain among those critical
of the charges: "I don't see how you could arrest 46 people for doing
something in such a small town like that. ... When you arrest drug dealers,
you're going to find money, guns and drugs. But they went in early in the
morning, and they didn't find any of that? It's unreal."

Through it all, White rejected any thought of a plea bargain, even one that
promised probation.

"She was facing long odds, but we had a strong client," Blackburn says. "She
was determined, and yeah, I was immediately convinced of her innocence. ...
I didn't know we would be able to prove it."

He began looking for evidence that she hadn't been in Tulia on Oct. 9, 1998.
Rent receipts proved she had an apartment in Oklahoma City. Telephone
records showed her telephone was used that day, but Blackburn knew the
prosecution could argue that proved only that someone was there, not
necessarily White.

His legal assistant, Virginia Cave, got the break.

"We were looking for everything at that point," Cave says. "I was talking to
Mattie one day, and it just came up." Russell mentioned that her daughter
had been injured on a job and received a settlement from workers'
compensation.

"We burned a wire to Tonya, and she was, `Oh, yeah. I was getting those
checks. ... Oh, yeah, I had to go to the bank and cash them," Blackburn
says.

She didn't remember which bank -- by this time three years had passed -- so
Blackburn sent an investigator to all the banks near her former apartment.

Because White had withdrawn $8 in cash from a $168 check, depositing the
rest, the bank had noted the date and time of the transaction, Blackburn
says. The notation mirrored the day, and almost the time, she was accused of
selling drugs in Tulia.

Less than a week before her case was scheduled for trial in April, White had
an alibi. McEachern dismissed the charges.

Really, he says now, the deposit slip isn't absolute proof that White was at
an Oklahoma City bank within a few hours of the time she was accused of
selling cocaine to Coleman. "But it created enough doubt in my mind that I
didn't feel I should go forward in that case."

White had been charged with selling 4 grams of cocaine, a second-degree
felony. But Coleman also had claimed the sale took place within 1,000 feet
of a playground, a circumstance that would have upgraded it to a
first-degree felony.

"I'm still shaking," White said weeks later. "Even though I knew I was
innocent, I might have had to do 99 years."

What possessed her to take out $8 in cash, instead of depositing the entire
check or asking for a larger sum? "I don't know what I was doing," she says.
"I might have needed some gas. But thank God for that $8."

The impact of the sting may ultimately be harder to measure than the numbers
of people arrested and the sentences meted out.

Property taxes went up by 6 percent to cover the cost of housing and
prosecuting those arrested, and while many people remain supportive, others
- -- both black and white -- have been critical of law enforcement.

Not even McEachern will claim that drugs are less available in Tulia than
before Tom Coleman came to town.

"I really think that ... it's going to be real hard to stop drugs from being
sold," he says. "That not only goes for Tulia, Texas, but for Houston,
Texas."

As to whether the prosecutions were worth the controversy, McEachern seems
ambivalent.

It is his job to prosecute cases after a grand jury issues indictments, he
says, "but I will not send anybody to prison that I do not believe did the
crime."

Still, he adds, "I don't think anybody could go through the ... turmoil
that's been caused and like it."

But more turmoil appears unavoidable.

As appeals are exhausted, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund will
file writs of habeas corpus seeking to have people freed, says Vanita Gupta,
a lawyer with the fund, which is working with the Amarillo lawyers.

The Legal Defense and Educational Fund takes cases involving possible racial
bias, Gupta says, but the organization also is concerned about legal issues
raised in the Tulia cases.

Gupta first went to Tulia last fall, and the first writ was filed in January
on behalf of Jason Jerome Williams, who is serving a 45-year prison term.
More will follow, Gupta says.

"We hope it won't take (years), but we're going to be here for the long
haul, as long as it takes for the Tulia arrestees to get some real justice.
"Tonya's case was a victory, but we really believe Tonya's case is just one
of the 46."

If McEachern dreads the blizzard of legal paperwork headed his way, he isn't
saying.

"Of course, they're free to file any type of writ that they want to file,"
he says. "I don't think it's going to impact my office. We just take one day
at a time."

So does White, as she shrugs off the shroud of secrecy that surrounded her
for so long.

Few people in Shreveport know her story, and that's fine. "I don't want them
to know. This is where I live."

But she has also moved into a more public role, including a trip to New York
City with Blackburn for a May 8 rally sponsored by the William Kunstler Fund
for Racial Justice, protesting the state of New York's strict sentencing
laws for drug offenders.

White met Randy Credico, an activist with the Kunstler Fund, when she turned
herself in, and she was excited about his invitation to New York.

"That's my dream, to go to New York," she said before the trip. "This is
probably the only chance I'll ever have to go."

She saw the sights, walking the teeming streets until she was exhausted. And
when it came time for the rally, she climbed onto the back of a flatbed
truck to face a sea of people as Blackburn described her case, arguing that
problems with the legal system aren't confined to New York.

White was asked to speak but demurred, feeling overwhelmed by the sheer
number of people. But she was inspired by those she met, including the
mothers of people who had run afoul of New York's drug laws. Meeting
activist Al Sharpton was a thrill.

"He was great, just the way I pictured him," she said. "A little short man,
talking about civil rights."

Whatever twist of fate led to White's being swept up in the Tulia drug busts
has also given her a place, if only temporarily, in the fight against
injustice.

"I never imagined that, but I'm going to start. I want to see what I can
do."