TAPES FROM GRAND JURY TELL THE TALE OF A DRUG BUST GONE BAD

Robert Piekutowski and Keith Kierzkowski were undercover detectives, trying
to sweep the streets of drug dealers without getting anybody hurt. Not
them. Not the bad guys. And certainly not a stranger they weren't even
trying to arrest.

Earl Murray was a street dealer who sold crack cocaine and was about to be
arrested for it.

Ronald Beasley was a stranger to the cops, and he had the misfortune to be
in the passenger seat of his buddy Murray's car one gray afternoon on June
12, 2000.

They all came together on the parking lot of the Jack in the Box restaurant
in Berkeley, where Murray planned to sell drugs and more than a dozen
detectives stood ready to arrest him.

But there was no drug buy that day, and no arrest either.

Surrounded, Murray threw his car into reverse in an attempt to escape.
Piekutowski and Kierzkowski, two white detectives, unloaded their pistols,
firing 21 shots at the two black men, neither of whom, it turned out,
carried a gun.

The detectives told their story to a St. Louis County grand jury: Murray
nearly ran them down with his red Ford Escort, the officers said, and
Beasley got shot by mistake. The jurors accepted the killings as
self-defense and voted not to indict. More than a year later, a federal
investigation concluded that the officers fired "out of fear and panic" and
that the car never moved toward them.

Nearly two years later, police and their critics remain at odds over his
colleague, Kierzkowski. Barati testified that he was confident the Escort
had moved forward "five to eight feet."

In a recent interview, McCulloch said Barati's testimony "obviously is
completely wrong."

McCulloch said prosecutors discussed whether to charge Barati with perjury.
"Nobody other than him says it moved anything close to that," McCulloch
said, adding, "I can't say to any degree of certainty that he lied about it."

McCulloch made his perjury comment in response to questions and only after
federal prosecutors had said publicly in their official findings of the
shooting that the testimony "raises concerns as to the truthfulness of this
witness."

Barati's DEA boss, Corcoran, says that because of the fast-paced drama on
the parking lot, he's not surprised that even a highly trained agent saw
things so differently from other witnesses.

McCulloch also says he disputes the findings of Baker, the Justice
Department's collision expert.

"The car did move in a forward direction," McCulloch said. He said he based
that upon a statement in the federal prosecutor's report that after
colliding with the Explorer behind it, Murray's car gave the appearance of
moving "in a rocking manner."

"Cars don't rock in one direction," McCulloch said.

Baker told the Post-Dispatch that it was obvious the driver was "trying to
get the hell out of there in reverse. The car was never in drive."

At the high speed at which the engine was revving, he said, "it would have
leaped toward the police officers in front and crashed into their car."

"I wouldn't be here, folks"

McCulloch said that what the witnesses saw or didn't see isn't the issue
anyway. What is important, he said, is that the two shooters believed that
their lives were in danger.

"It was never really a concern or an issue that (the car) traveled forward
any appreciable distance towards the officers," McCulloch said.

McCulloch acknowledged that he never sought independent evidence into
whether the car had moved forward. He said the county police, the Missouri
Highway Patrol and FBI all assured him that "it wasn't possible" to
reconstruct the event weeks after the shooting.

But Baker, who's been an expert witness in hundreds of collision
reconstruction cases, says "its the norm" to reconstruct accidents from
even years ago. "We've done some from the '80s," he says.

U.S. Attorney Ray Gruender, who hired Baker, announced the results of the
federal investigation last Oct. 3, about 13 months after McCulloch and the
county grand jury were done.

In a 23-page report, Gruender and top officials from the Justice
Department's Civil Rights Division endorsed Baker's findings and concluded:
The Escort traveled only in reverse -- away from the officers who shot the
occupants.

McCulloch said he never read Baker's report.

The Justice Department investigation was narrow in scope, limited only to
determining whether the dead men's civil rights were violated. Gruender
said they weren't, although he found the shooting "troubling."

But Gruender said his hands were tied: He said the standard of proof for a
federal civil rights charge is much higher than for a state manslaughter
charge. The federal charge requires proof of criminal intent; the state
manslaughter charge does not. Only McCulloch and the county grand jury
could charge the detectives with manslaughter.

Grand juries vote in secret, with nine votes required to indict. McCulloch
said he didn't know the actual vote, only the outcome: no indictments. The
names of the jurors have never been released.

Police and the DEA maintain that while their arrest effort ended
tragically, they would not hesitate to plan their next arrest in exactly
the same way -- including doing it in another public spot. They said no
bystanders were at risk during the shooting on the restaurant parking lot.

That's not what Lloyd Metz II told the grand jury.

He's a limousine driver who stopped at the Jack in the Box for four tacos
and an iced tea as the drug buy began. Terrified, he fled when the gunshots
started. Metz told grand jurors that if he had been parked in his usual
spot, "I wouldn't be here, folks."

When police feel threatened

One police witness surprised the prosecutor by vividly explaining to grand
jurors why police react they way they do.

Officer James R. Shoemaker was the county police armorer for 25 years,
until his recent retirement. Shoemaker has been in two gunbattles, and
estimated he and his partner have taught half the officers in the area how
to shoot.

Shoemaker said police are trained to fire their weapons until empty, as
they did at the Jack in the Box.

"You shoot until the perceived threat no longer exists," he said.

When Shoemaker started to compare the Jack in the Box shooting to a
notorious police shooting of an unarmed man in New York, he was interrupted
by the grand jury prosecutor: "... That's not what we are asking today."

Another witness was Tracie White, Murray's girlfriend. She told the grand
jury he was strictly small-time:

"Earl was not rich like the rich drug dealers who drive Lexuses and BMWs
and wear the finer things. ... He was a Reebok man, a jogging suit. He'd
ask somebody, could he borrow $50."

On the last day of grand jury testimony, the prosecutor presented an
investigator from his office, who had laboriously researched police records
of the two dead men. He recited their records in detail, including every
arrest record he could locate, whether or not charges were ever brought.

Soon after that, the grand jurors met privately and voted a "no true bill"
- -- the legal form that means they had decided against holding anyone
criminally responsible for the deaths of Murray and Beasley.