ZERO TOLERANCE TAKES TOLL IN HAYS COUNTY
Drug Warriors

November 5, 1999: Alexander "Rusty" Windle was not a drug dealer, but
he died like one. Before dawn on May 24, nine law enforcement officers
from three different agencies surrounded Windle's home, a modest
duplex in a subdivision a few miles outside the sleepy Hill Country
community of Wimberley. Windle's house was one of over a dozen hit
that night in and around Wimberley, in the culmination of a four-month
undercover marijuana sting conducted by the Hays County Narcotics Task
Force. Windle, a 25-year-old electrician's apprentice, had been set up
by a confidential informant, a man he had met in a Wimberley bar
frequented by electricians and other tradesmen. According to arrest
warrants obtained by the task force, during a two-week period in
March, Windle twice delivered half-ounce bags of marijuana -- just
enough to make the crime a state jail felony -- to the informant, a
47-year-old ex-con from Montgomery County, north of Houston.

The task force had supplied the informant with a motel room, cash for
drug buys, and a miniature recording device. According to a desk clerk
at the motel in question, Kasia Zinz (a close friend of Windle's who
was also arrested in the May 24 roundup), the room became a party
hangout for Wimberley youth, with the informant providing the beer and
barbecue, and his new friends supplying the marijuana. "He asked
everybody to get him pot, he practically begged you for it," Zinz
recalled. It didn't seem to matter to the informant whether the people
he set up were actually dealers or not. It took Windle six days to
make his first delivery, according to the warrant. On another
occasion, he failed to come up with a half-ounce at all, returning
instead with a small bag weighing only a few grams. The warrant states
that he apologetically refused to take any cash for it.

On May 17, the informant disappeared. A week later, armed with three
warrants, officers arrived at Windle's house just before 5am. Two
agents, dressed in the black pants and T-shirts of the task force,
approached the front of the house. A sheriff's deputy covered their
backs. Three more agents dressed in black entered the back yard, and
one additional sheriff's deputy staked out each side of the house. The
ninth officer, a federal agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
and Firearms (ATF), watched from the shadows of the driveway. Only the
four officers in front of the house saw what happened next.

They described their observations in separate sworn statements to the
Texas Ranger who investigated the incident. Officers Chase Stapp and
David Burns approached the front door, and Stapp rang the doorbell and
knocked. The officers' accounts differ on whether or not they
identified themselves as police. Burns reported hearing at that point
what he believed to be the slide action of a rifle bolt. He
immediately dove off the porch and took cover behind a brick wall. The
door opened as Stapp began to retreat, knocking over a potted plant on
the porch. All four officers reported seeing Windle, dressed only in
blue jeans, point an assault rifle at Stapp. Ducking and stumbling
backward, Stapp drew his .40-caliber Glock semiautomatic and fired
four rounds. Windle was hit once in the leg and once in the chest,
falling back into the house. The four officers rushed in and began
CPR, but Windle died before the ambulance arrived.

That is the officers' story. Local news crews, already tipped about
the sweep by the police, rushed to the scene of the shooting. The
morning news carried footage of Windle's front yard filled with
officers and a shot of his AR-15 assault rifle lying in the yard where
the police had placed it. There were intimations that Windle was not
just a heavily armed dope pusher, but also an arms dealer, wanted by
the ATF for weapons charges. Officer Stapp (who has since been cleared
of wrongdoing by a grand jury) was praised by his superiors, who also
congratulated themselves in a press release later that afternoon for
making a dent in the "unchecked" flow of marijuana trafficking and use
in the Wimberley area.

But there are several problems with the official story. Astute viewers
would have noticed the absence of a clip in the gun lying in the yard.
Although both Burns and Stapp reported hearing the rifle's bolt action
before the door opened, Windle never fired a shot, and according to
the Ranger's report, the gun was later found to be completely
unloaded, with the safety engaged.

None of Windle's friends doubt that he came to the door with a gun --
anyone would have, they maintain. "You can't tell me that any cop that
was there at his house that night wouldn't have come to the door with
his revolver," if he heard a pre-dawn disturbance outside his house,
said Zinz. "What good is the right to bear arms, if you can't bring a
gun to your own door?" That Windle knowingly would have pointed his
gun at a cop they find much harder to believe. "He wasn't some kind of
extremist, or a wacko," said his boss, Ernest Olsen. "I chew out
enough asses in my business, and you get 'em heated up from time to
time, and Rusty, it just wasn't in his nature. He'd just say, 'I'm
sorry, you're right.'"

Accounts from other suspects arrested on the same night also cast
doubt on the officers' version of events. Kasia Zinz was arrested at
her boyfriend's house by a second team of officers, at about the same
time Windle's house was hit. According to Kenneth Schlanker, her
boyfriend's roommate, the cops failed to identify themselves at all.
When he opened the door, they were crouched before him, their guns
already drawn. A second suspect (who asked that his name not be used
for fear of losing his job) said he got the same treatment: no
identification, and guns unholstered. According to San Marcos defense
attorney Billy McNabb, the requirement to "knock and announce" is a
well-established common-law doctrine for police visits, unless the
officers have a reasonable suspicion it would endanger their lives.
"That's why we have that policy, to avoid tragedies like this one," he
said.

San Marcos Police policy likewise requires a reasonable expectation of
endangerment before the threat of deadly force (that is, drawing a
gun) is used. Serving an arrest warrant for a nonviolent, low-level
drug offense does not generally fit that category.

"I think they saw a rifle, had their guns already drawn, and
panicked," said Zinz.

When the police searched the house, they found just two baggies of
pot, totaling less than an ounce. Windle's friends and family say he
was no different than most of the other suspects netted in the work of
that evening: a working person duped into getting a bag for someone he
thought was a friend. The task force called them "street-level dealers."

Big Job, Few Results

The 13-member Hays County Narcotics Task Force was formed in June of
last year by combining personnel from the narcotics divisions of the
San Marcos Police Department and the Hays County Sheriff's Office. The
squad is also assisted by a special liaison in the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Agency (DEA), one ATF officer (who serves other counties
as well), and a retired CIA agent who serves as a special crime analyst.

Multi-agency drug task forces became common across Texas in the late
Eighties, following changes in federal drug laws, which, among other
things, allowed such task forces to take advantage of "asset
forfeiture" as a potent new means of funding their operations. By
working in conjunction with a U.S. Attorney, task forces technically
"federalize" their investigations, allowing them to keep a much
greater portion of returns -- from seized cash, weapons, vehicles, and
even houses associated with drug-related crimes -- than they could
under state laws.

Still, despite Hays County's seemingly propitious location along I-35,
a major drug corridor, the county task force's numbers in its first
year were unimpressive: 43 pounds of marijuana seized, 1.4 pounds of
powdered cocaine, and less than 10 grams of heroin. Not that Hays
County narcs haven't been active. As of August 1997, almost one in
three persons on probation in Hays County had been convicted of drug
crimes. But the returns have been limited. The force spent
considerable manpower and resources on the four-month Wimberley
investigation. Yet approximately 30 of the 35 charges eventually filed
were for fourth-degree felonies, meaning they involved delivery of
small amounts of drugs. The majority of charges were for marijuana.

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Wanting a Fresh Start

Rusty Windle came to the Hill Country to get a new start. He was born
and raised in West Palm Beach, Florida, a violent, crack-infested
community in decline, a place his mother refers to as the "armpit of
Florida." "He told me stories about that place, of people getting shot
right in front of him," his girlfriend Kristie Izzo recalls. "I never
wanted to see it." Windle and his younger brother rarely saw their
father, who left the family when Windle was two. He took after his
mother, a tough single parent who worked as an electrician. He dropped
out of high school, married at 18, and had a son, Christopher. The
marriage fell apart, but Windle never forgot his son, diligently
sending $200 per month in child support from Texas, according to
Kristie, even though the mother would never let Windle visit the boy.

"At some point in time he wanted to have a real relationship with
him," said his friend Kasia Zinz. "That was one of the things he lived
for." Zinz and her longtime companion Steve Williams were two of the
first people Windle met when he came to San Marcos; he was 18, with no
high school diploma, no job, no friends, and a serious drinking
problem. The middle-aged couple became surrogate parents to Windle. He
sobered up, got a job as a short-order cook, and then drove a Pepsi
truck for several years before becoming an electrician's apprentice at
Olsen's Electric in Wimberley. He developed a reputation as a quiet,
extremely dependable, even-tempered, and likable man.

He was also known by both his friends and the police as someone who
liked guns. Windle's mother had taught him how to shoot in Florida at
a very early age, and his grandfather had given him his first gun. In
Texas, Windle became an avid outdoorsman. He spent much of his free
time hunting with Steve Williams, who also introduced him to arrowhead
collecting. By the time he died, Windle had a considerable collection
of both arrowheads and guns. Williams' landlord, a Pearl Harbor
veteran who also enjoyed hunting, allowed the two friends to build a
backstop on land behind Williams' trailer in Wimberley, where the two
could safely shoot whenever they wanted to. Five years ago, Windle
bought an AR-15 at a Wimberley flea market for $80. The gun, a
military assault rifle resembling an M-16, didn't have a receiver, the
mechanism that loads and fires the bullet. It became a project for
Windle and Williams to get the gun working again. Windle eventually
found a receiver for it, though not the correct one. "I'm a Vietnam
vet, and I can take 'em apart and put 'em together," Williams said,
but they never got the gun working the way it was designed to.
Eventually, the two got it to fire by inserting a metal pin into the
receiver, but the semi-automatic rifle would never fire more than one
shot at a time without jamming. Windle kept it anyway. It was a
decision that changed his life.

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A Triple Bad Deal

The politics of pot smoking in San Marcos reflect the vicissitudes of
national drug policy. In 1974, the city council sent a resolution to
the Legislature calling for decriminalization of the drug. Nationally,
the push for drug policy reform was also peaking, encouraged by a
surprisingly receptive Nixon administration. By the mid-Nineties, the
pendulum had swung to the opposite extreme: More people have been
incarcerated for marijuana-related crimes during Bill Clinton's tenure
than during any previous administration.

In Hays County, prohibitionist sentiment has reached a fever pitch,
particularly in
the battle for the hearts and minds of young people. The
prohibitionists are led by Sue Cohen, director of the Hays Caldwell
Council on Alcohol and Drug Abuse. Cautious, middle-aged, and with a
background in business rather than social work, Cohen agreed to an
interview in her office only after repeated assurances that the
subject would not be marijuana legalization. "We don't want to be
accidentally interviewed by one of those pro-marijuana papers," she
explained.

Like enforcement, drug education has also been federalized, with about
70% of the funding coming from federal grants. Curriculum and results
are closely monitored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services. In the early Nineties, San Marcos received millions from the
Partnership for a Drug Free America campaign, with the goal of making
San Marcos a "model zero-tolerance town." But Hays County had no more
success with D.A.R.E. and other school-based educational programs than
any other Texas community. Rates of usage for all age groups in Hays
County remain considerably higher than state averages.

"Marijuana activists will say, 'You're losing the drug war,' but my answer to
that is, what if we didn't have these programs -- then what would our
numbers be?" Cohen asked. It's hard to imagine that they could be any
higher. Surveys of self-reported drug use taken annually from 1991 to
1996 showed that -- after five years of pep rallies, T-shirts, and red
ribbons -- rates of marijuana use among Hays County high school
students had more than doubled, with use among eighth-graders
increasing over 500%. The school district's response was to stop doing
the high school surveys.

Cohen lays much of the blame on her major adversary, the
"pro-legalization lobby" in San Marcos. A couple of miles down the
interstate from Cohen's office, in a cramped one-car garage attached
to an inconspicuous two-bedroom frame house, sits the nerve center of
the legalization camp, KIND radio. In 1997, local marijuana activist
Joe Ptak founded KIND ("kind" is street slang for primo-quality pot)
- -- an unlicensed "pirate" station operating from a low-power
transmitter -- to support a local medical marijuana initiative.
Spearheaded by Southwest Texas State University psychology professor
Harvey Ginsberg, the initiative made it to the ballot following a
citywide petition campaign. Coming in the wake of the successful
statewide medical marijuana campaign in California, the initiative
made national news, but also prompted a considerable local backlash.

The Hays Caldwell Council went into high gear (Sue Cohen was then
assistant director), producing a fact sheet on "the dangerous hoax" of
medical marijuana, and giving presentations at schools, libraries, and
neighborhood associations. Medical marijuana, business owners were
told, would be bad for economic development. The DEA sent in
personnel, also for "educational purposes," blitzing the town with
cautionary flyers. Neither the DEA nor the Hays Caldwell Council is
legally permitted to use federal or state funds for politicking or
lobbying. "We walked a fine line," Cohen admitted. "Actually, [the
initiative] was the best thing they ever did for us, because people
came out of the woodwork to get involved."

But in fact, Ginsberg recalled, voter turnout for the initiative was
only slightly higher than is typical for any San Marcos election. Out
of 20,000 registered voters, about 2,100 came to the polls: Roughly
700 voted for the initiative, and 1,400 against. Ginsberg, relying
chiefly on the 45-watt radio station to get the word out, was
considerably outspent. Despite the outcome, the low turnout seemed to
show more than anything that most people didn't care one way or the
other.

The spectre of sick people smoking pot -- even if it might have
been, as Cohen insists, a smokescreen for legalization -- failed to
move Hays County residents to the polls in large numbers. The
controversy definitely got the state's attention, however. In the next
legislative session, Hays County State Sen. Ken Armbrister, a former
police officer, sponsored a bill to ban consideration of any local
initiative that would contravene a federal drug law. It passed easily.

Ginsberg says he has no intention of trying again, despite subsequent
successful initiatives in Washington, D.C., Oregon, Arizona, and
Maine, and the recent defection of New Mexico's Republican governor to
the legalization camp. Meanwhile, the federal education money keeps
coming, and the battle continues; Red Ribbon week, the Hays Caldwell
Council's biggest campaign of the year, descended on every school in
the county in mid-October.

KIND radio, meanwhile, has begun broadcasting the names of suspected
drug informants. (A day after the bust, KIND was the first to break
the true identity of the Wimberley confidential informant, based on a
tip from a law enforcement source.)

"They've been very irresponsible," remarked Cohen, who says all of her
employees have attended the citizen police academy, and gone on police
ride-alongs in many cases. "We have a very professional organization here,"
she said of the task force. When asked if the raid on Windle's house might
have been overkill, Cohen shakes her head. "Marijuana is illegal," she said
simply. "Whether it was 20 ounces or 20 pounds, they are still
obligated to enforce the law." Windle's death was a waste, she
conceded. But "if a law officer had been killed or injured, that would
have been a triple bad deal."

Making the Cases

The gun that got Windle killed may also have been responsible for
drawing him into the task force's net in the first place. Windle and
several other electricians spent last winter at Rio Bonito, a Blanco
River resort where they rented cabins at off-season rates. One of
Windle's neighbors, a middle-aged electrician named David
Stringfellow, had befriended a man known to him as Roger Dalton, who
was living at the nearby 7-A Resort in Wimberley.

Although the district attorney's office has yet to reveal that Dalton
was the informant, or release the terms under which he was retained, a
comparison of warrants and court records confirm Dalton's role in the
arrests, as well as his true identity: one Roy Parrish. It's unclear
how Parrish came to be employed by the task force. "Some do it for
money, some do it to work off a case [i.e. an indictment of their
own], some do it for revenge type reasons," according to Stapp, who
since the shooting has been promoted to assistant commander of the
task force.

Parrish's criminal record reveals that, apparently in the Eighties, he
served two two-year sentences in the penitentiary, one for burglary
and one for drug dealing. (Among the many aliases listed on Parrish's
rap sheet is the name "Rodger Dolson.") If Parrish had been arrested
recently for a third felony charge, he presumably would have faced a
lengthy prison sentence.

"Hays County police will offer almost anyone the chance to flip on
someone," in exchange for leniency, said San Marcos attorney Billy McNabb.
"Typically they're given a quota: Go out and get anyone you can until
you've made 'X' number of cases." Declining to comment on the specifics of
the Wimberley operation, Stapp said in general it's up to the D.A.'s office
to make those types
of deals. But, he said, "We don't just work with anyone; we have some
guidelines."

The Mole

When Roy Parrish moved into Cabin Number 14 at the 7-A Resort, he hung
a Vietnam-era flag on his porch that declared, "Kill 'em all, let God
sort 'em out." He claimed to be an electrician from Houston who had
been injured on the job and had come to Wimberley to recuperate and
wait for his settlement. He had an ugly wound on his arm that seemed
to support his story and a briefcase full of prescription drugs that
never left his side. Zinz, a desk clerk at the 7-A, recalls that he
quickly befriended a young couple living two cabins down.

"He had a fridge full of beer, and he barbecued on the porch almost every
night," she said. Parrish encouraged his new friends to bring anyone
they knew to the cabin, and Zinz says she soon started to get
complaints from neighbors about the constant music and partying. She
says she personally witnessed minors drinking at Parrish's cabin. "I
rarely saw the guy when he wasn't looped." Zinz says he began asking
her to get him pot, almost every time she saw him.

Kristie Izzo recalls Parrish coming to Rio Bonito frequently to visit
David Stringfellow. Eventually, he started coming to Windle's cabin as
well, on one occasion bringing a joint to smoke, then asking Windle to
get him some more. Parrish came on strong. He was loud and boisterous,
with a beer gut, tattoos, scraggly brown hair, and a prominent scar
that extended from the right corner of his mouth all the way up to his
cheekbone. "He was too friendly," according to Izzo. Then he asked
Windle to get him cocaine. "We'd only known him a week," she said.

Somehow, Parrish knew that Windle was a gun collector, and that he
knew how to make a silencer. Steve Williams says he and Windle used
them for poaching: hunting deer on other people's land, usually at
night. Sticking anything on the end of a gun to muzzle the sound is
illegal, but it is a frequent practice in the Hill Country, especially
among working-class hunters who can't afford deer leases. The most
common method is to put a plastic soda bottle around the end of the
muzzle. Windle was a little more ingenious. He fashioned silencers out
of toilet paper rolls, old butane bottles, anything that would fit on
the end of a gun.

"He was like a little Boy Scout, always making stuff," according to his Rio
Bonito neighbor and friend Andy Wood. In one of Windle's two previous
busts, in February of 1998, SMPD narcotics officers raided a friend's house
where Windle was staying. The cops didn't find Windle's friend or his
alleged stash, but Windle and Izzo were in their room, smoking pot. Both
got probation for the
quarter-ounce bags they had on them, and Windle's AR-15, which had a
homemade silencer on it, was confiscated. The gun was returned and no
charges were filed, but Steve Williams now believes that the ATF took
an interest in Windle at that time. (Windle's only other conviction --
the "weapons charges" alluded to on the local news -- was a $200
ticket for illegally transporting a firearm; Windle was pulled over
while moving his things to a new house, and a pistol was found in a
box on the floorboard.)

Perhaps prompted by the task force, Parrish began bugging Windle to
make him a silencer. But Windle was reluctant, according to Izzo.
Eventually, he gave Parrish a metal tube and some washers -- about $10
worth of parts available at any hardware store -- but never assembled
anything for him. Parrish promptly turned the goods over to the ATF
agent working with the task force. No charges were ever filed for the
silencer, but about three weeks after his death, Windle received a
letter notifying him that the materials had been "confiscated."

After the War

There is much to be done after a shooting. The police don't put things
back where they were after executing a search warrant, nor do they
help clean up the blood after the body is removed by the coroner.
Returning to the now-empty duplex with Izzo, Zinz, and Windle's
brother Nick, Steve Williams pointed to where pools of Windle's blood
had soaked the carpet in the dining room. The grim task of cleaning up
(the landlord let it be known that he would not be responsible) fell
to Windle's roommate, Burt Chumley, and his girlfriend, Melissa
Abernathy, who had been asleep in the back of the house at the time of
the shooting. They moved out the same day. The couch where Chumley's
brother Blake had been sleeping -- directly in the line of fire -- was
the only furniture remaining in the duplex.

Williams showed me where the forensics team had pulled a stray bullet out
of the wall just above the couch. (Blake was hustled out the back door by
officers so
fast, he didn't even know Windle had been shot.) Andy Wood was the
first to call Windle's family in Florida, breaking the news to his
grandfather and brother. He, Izzo, Zinz, and Williams packed up
Windle's things so that his mother wouldn't have to see the mess.

Windle's mother and brother arrived the next day, and a wake was held
a few days later. Windle's family would have seen him soon; he was
planning a temporary move to Florida at the end of the week to be near
his ailing grandfather and to look after his brother, with whom he was
very close. Windle also wanted to be near his son, who turned seven on
the day he was shot. His mother took his ashes back to Florida, where
his son Christopher helped spread them. "She told us that he seemed to
understand who it was and what it meant," Izzo said.

Windle's wasn't the only life disrupted by the events of May 24. His
ex-wife and son will lose their child support. Steve Williams was
evicted from his trailer. Burt Chumley and Melissa Abernathy have gone
to live with Chumley's parents. Several arrested that night lost their
jobs. David Stringfellow, arrested for allegedly selling half a bottle
of Vicodin to Roy Parrish for $30, is still in jail five months later,
on a parole violation. Stringfellow had been living with his mother, a
72-year-old woman who told me that Parrish tried to solicit her for
pills as well.

The drug war breaks up families, a reality that Sue Cohen said the police
seemed to sincerely appreciate. She recalled an instance in which the task
force arrested and jailed the parents of a family with seven children. It
was Officer Chase Stapp, she said, who called her office asking for some
"Drug-Free" T-shirts for the kids.

"It's Like Waco"

Quiet, rail-thin, with a deeply creased face and short, wiry gray hair,
Steve Williams doesn't become animated until he starts talking about the
shooting. At the duplex, he can't resist walking through the incident one
more time, demonstrating how the cops' version just doesn't make sense.
Windle fell a good 10 feet from the door, around a corner. He thinks the
task force came to the house looking for trouble. He thinks they may have
shot Windle before he reached the door. He demonstrates how they could see
Windle through the windows, but Windle couldn't see them. He doesn't know
what to believe.

"It's just like the thing in Waco: 'The Davidians were all
a bunch of idiots and they shot at us and then they set themselves on
fire,'" he said. "Now come to find out it was all a bunch of lies." Back at
his place, Williams holds a Glock like Chase Stapp's, coated in nylon,
lightweight, fast, deadly. See how the clip can hold 14 bullets, how the
safety automatically disengages when you pull the trigger.

"This is what it's beginning to be like here in the U.S.," he said. Zero
tolerance.
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