DEAD, DEAD, DEAD

The police killings of Pedro Oregon, Ida Lee Delaney and Bryon Gillum

By Steve McVicker

The man in the sport coat didn't look like a revolutionary, but he sounded
like one.

Standing in the hallway of the Harris County Courthouse, Aaron Ruby was
fuming for the press corps gathered to cover the latest chapter in the
police killing of Pedro Oregon. In court, a police informant had just
explained that Oregon's brother was a drug dealer. That, Ruby declared, was
"clearly a fabrication by the prosecution in order to cover up the fact
that [the police] murdered a young man, shooting him twelve times from
behind, after illegally breaking into his apartment."

Ruby belonged to the Justice for Pedro Oregon Coalition, which formed last
July after Houston police officers conducting an ill-conceived narcotics
raid shot and killed Oregon. But his rhetoric, crackling with words such as
"outrage" and "complete farce," echoed that generated by police killings
from a decade before. In 1989, in two separate incidents, Houston officers
shot and killed both Ida Lee Delaney and Byron Gillum: Both were black;
neither death seemed justified. The shootings stunned a city that believed
its police force -- once racist and out of control -- had been tamed.

Almost a decade later, Pedro Oregon's killing provokes the same questions:
Is our police force racist? Can our cops be trusted? What has gone wrong
when they're killing the very citizens they're supposed to protect?

The hangdog expression on Ryan Baxter's face said it all. The 28-year-old
convicted cokehead would rather be anywhere than the witness stand. But
there he was, dressed in an orange jail uniform, in need of a shave,
looking like he could use a few minutes alone with crack pipe. Instead, he
found himself at center stage of the Harris County misdemeanor court of
Judge Neel Richardson.

Baxter had been called to explain his role in the Oregon shooting. Late on
a Saturday afternoon, on July 11, 1998, Baxter testified, he and two
friends drove around Gulfton's decaying apartment complexes in search of a
cheap high. First they bought an 18-pack of beer at a gas station. Then
they scored $35 worth of crack -- five rocks -- which they smoked in a
makeshift pipe fashioned from an aluminum can bent in half. Baxter, sitting
in the front passenger seat, downed a couple of Bud Lights. As the crack's
glow faded, the trio craved more. Around 8 p.m., they drove back to the
heart of Gulfton.

This time two members of the Houston Police Department's southwest gang
task force stopped them, pulling them over near the intersection of Atwell
and Bellaire. The officers noticed the beer and the fact that one of
Baxter's friends was underage. They noticed the small piece of screen that
was part of the jerry-rigged crack pipe. And they also noticed, when they
ran a criminal-history check on their mobile computer, that Baxter was on
probation for drug possession.

Baxter was in big trouble. The possible charges -- public intoxication,
contributing to the delinquency of a minor, possession of drug
paraphernalia -- would be enough to have his probation revoked, enough to
send him back to jail.

He rode in back of the squad car to the police department's Gulfton outpost
on Renwick, a sort of mini-police-station. And he concluded that his only
hope of avoiding jail time was to offer the police a better collar than
himself.

Around 10 p.m. the officers who'd driven Baxter to the substation met with
their sergeant. Officers James Willis and Pete Herrada, both 28, told
Sergeant Darrell Strouse, 34, that Baxter was willing to make a deal: He'd
set up his dealer, allegedly Rogelio Oregon, in exchange for his own freedom.

Houston Police Department policy prohibits using an informant under the
influence of drugs or alcohol, but the cops chose to act on Baxter's
information. It was the first in a series of mistakes that would cost six
police officers their jobs and Pedro Oregon his life.

Using a police cell phone, Baxter arranged to buy more crack in the parking
lot of a Jack in the Box, but the dealer never showed.

Baxter then agreed to take six officers to what he said was his dealer's
residence, the Mark V Apartments, a rundown complex at 6711 Atwell. As the
other officers waited below, Herrada and Baxter climbed a flight of stairs.
With Herrada positioned to one side of Apartment 16's door, Baxter knocked
softly several times. No one answered.

After about five minutes the mission was aborted. The frustrated officers
returned to the Gulfton storefront and were preparing to haul Baxter to jail.

But then the cell phone rang. According to Baxter, it was his dealer. The
desperate informant quickly made arrangements for a new buy.

Once again the six officers converged on the Mark V Apartments. At
approximately 1:30 a.m., they lined up, one behind the other, at the bottom
of the stairway leading to Apartment 16. Once again Baxter knocked. This
time the door opened.

"What's up, vato?" Baxter asked Rogelio Oregon. Then Baxter dropped to the
ground in a way that prevented the door from being closed -- just what
Willis had told him to do.

In a kind of chain reaction, the officers rushed up the staircase, over
Baxter's back and into the apartment. First Herrada, then Willis. Then
Officer David Perkins, 30, followed by Officers D.R. Barrera, 28, and L.E.
Tillery, 30. Sergeant Strouse brought up the rear.

According to police investigators, as the officers rushed in, a second man
in the apartment, Rogelio's brother Pedro, ran through the hallway toward a
back room. As he did, one officer yelled that the fleeing man had a gun. At
almost the same time, a shot rang out, and Tillery, struck in the side,
fell to the ground.

Later the other officers would find out that they hadn't been fired upon,
that instead, Barrera had accidentally discharged his weapon. But later
would be too late.

During the brief, one-sided gun battle that followed, officers fired 33
times at Oregon. According to investigators, 24 of those shots came from
Barrera, who paused to reload his pistol.

When the smoke cleared, Pedro Oregon, a 22-year-old father of two, lay
dead. He'd been struck by 12 bullets, nine of them in his back.

A gun lay on the floor near Oregon's body, but no drugs were found in the
apartment.

Last fall, after several weeks of hearing evidence, a grand jury returned
only a single charge against only one of the officers: criminal trespass, a
misdemeanor, filed against Willis. An internal police investigation was
more critical.

In November Houston police chief Clarence Bradford held a press conference
to announce the firing of the six officers. Pedro Oregon's killing,
Bradford said, was the most egregious case of police misconduct he'd seen
in his 20 years with the department. Mayor Lee Brown echoed Bradford's
displeasure. The firings, he said, were "proof that our system of justice
is the fairest and most democratic in the world." "In my opinion, Texas
state laws were violated, and the United States Constitution was violated."
- -- Police chief Clarence Bradford

Needless to say, activists such as Aaron Ruby were far from satisfied.
Pedro Oregon -- a man not accused of a crime -- lay dead, and the cops
who'd entered his apartment without a search warrant and wrongly shot him
had merely lost their jobs. Instead of being charged with murder, only one
- -- one! -- was charged with trespassing. This, the activists asked, was the
fairest and most democratic system of justice in the world?

Nine years earlier, Lee Brown himself had been police chief and had faced
his own crisis of public confidence. In the predawn hours of October 31,
1989, 24-year-old Alex Gonzales, an intoxicated off-duty HPD officer, after
an all-night drinking binge, was cruising the freeways with two other
off-duty officers. At the time, HPD had no policy forbidding an intoxicated
off-duty officer from carrying a weapon.

After leaving a bar early that morning, Gonzales's attention fell on Ida
Lee Delaney, a Houston Post employee driving to work, when she abruptly
pulled in front of the car in which he was a passenger. In a fit of rage,
Gonzales and the two other officers chased Delaney down a 13-mile stretch
of freeway. Apparently in fear for her life, with no way of knowing that
the men were police, she fired several shots before finally pulling over.
When she did, Delaney shot and wounded Gonzales; he, in turn, shot and
killed her.

Less than a month later, Scott Tschirhart, a white HPD officer who'd
previously been involved in several questionable shootings and the beating
of a handcuffed prisoner, stopped Byron Gillum, a black security guard, for
speeding. Tschirhart went back to his patrol car and from his mobile
computer sent a message asking the dispatcher to find some reason for the
officer to arrest Gillum "because he has an attitude." The dispatcher found
nothing.

Tschirhart later said he believed the security guard was reaching for a
pistol that lay on the front seat of the his car. The officer shot Gillum
six times, including four times in the back. Witnesses said that Gillum was
on his hands and knees, trying to crawl away, as Tschirhart fired his final
shots.

Ada Edwards believed that the two deaths weren't isolated incidents. HPD
officers, she thought, had systematic problems dealing with women and
minorities. Edwards, who'd worked in protest movements such as an
antiapartheid campaign against South Africa, was a product of the
California '60s. And so, naturally, she helped organize a protest group,
the Ida Lee Delaney/Byron Gillum Justice Committee.

Under her direction, the committee held numerous street protests and
converged on City Hall to condemn the shootings and insist on change. The
group demanded that HPD become more ethnically diverse, that officers
receive more sensitivity training and that the city create a powerful
civilian review board to investigate police matters. The committee wanted
the department to change "how officers were recruited, maintained,
evaluated and the whole bit," says Edwards. "For us, it became bigger than
Byron Gillum and Ida Delaney."

The committee never got the review board it wanted. Instead, it saw the
creation of the Civilian Review Committee, which reviews internal police
reports about officer misconduct and passes its recommendations on to the
chief. But Chief Bradford believes the department was indeed changed by the
Gillum and Delaney shootings, that the Houston Police Department is now a
more diverse and open organization and that officers themselves are now
less tolerant of misconduct by their colleagues.

And Bradford himself does not take the position that his officers could do
no wrong, or even that the Oregon shooting was within the legal bounds of
police work. "I know what the department policies are, and I have reviewed
the law in the areas that concern the Pedro Oregon case," says Bradford.
"And I am confident in saying that, in my opinion, Texas state laws were
violated, and the United States Constitution was violated."

Edwards, now 54, has allied herself with an even bigger organization: She's
now the field coordinator for the Harris County Democratic Party. "My life
is 'power to the people,' " she says. "If you don't have it, somebody's
stealing it from you."

She sees the most obvious parallel between the Gillum and Delaney cases and
Pedro Oregon's: cops killing civilians for no good reason. But she doesn't
think that the three high-profile incidents are the only such outrages in
the decade. "If you look at the times in between," she says, "you will see
several similar cases, like the young white brother who was shot in
Bellaire. I think it just takes us about ten years to get over the big
ones. In the meantime, it's like, 'Oh, shit, I'm so tired of this.' But
once you go through that grieving period as a community and it hits again,
it's like, 'Damn!' "

In Harris County it's not easy to indict a cop for a criminal offense, much
less to send one to prison. Alex Gonzales was indicted in the shooting of
Ida Lee Delaney and was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced
to seven years in prison, but the verdict was overturned, and in a new
trial in 1995 he received only 180 days in jail, a probated two-year
sentence and a $5,000 fine.

No charges were ever filed against Scott Tschirhart for the shooting of
Byron Gillum. After being dismissed from the police department, Tschirhart
moved back home to Medina County, west of San Antonio, to work as a
sheriff's deputy.

But in both the Delaney and Gillum cases, the City of Houston eventually
paid large sums to settle civil lawsuits brought by the victims' families:
$650,000 to the Delaneys, $350,000 to the Gillums. The out-of-court
settlements were tantamount to an admission that the city's police
department should have had better control of its officers.

It's still possible that federal criminal charges could be filed in the
Oregon case. But the Oregon family members also hope for vindication in
civil court -- even as they were protesting the unfairness of the county's
criminal prosecution. In March, when an all-white jury found Willis not
guilty of even the trespassing charge, the Oregon family's two big-name
attorneys, Richard Mithoff and Paul Nugent, held a press conference after
the trial. They declared that Oregon was basically murdered, and they
pointed to a sworn statement by one of the officers, David Perkins, in
which he says he never saw Pedro Oregon with a gun. The district attorney's
office, the lawyers complained, had basically thrown the case.

The lawyers further criticized the prosecutors for basing their case
against Willis on the testimony of Ryan Baxter, whom Nugent repeatedly
called a "crackhead." It was Baxter, of course, who explained why the cops
had come to the Oregon apartment in the first place, and Nugent and Mithoff
were obviously concerned that a civil jury might hesitate to award a large
sum of money to an alleged drug dealer. "From the beginning, the police and
the D.A.'s office were out to taint [the Oregon] family name," Nugent
complained.

Such criticism doesn't bother Johnny Holmes -- the cussing,
death-penalty-loving prosecutor with the handlebar moustache -- who headed
the county district attorney's office both during the Delaney and Gillum
cases and now. Prosecutors are often accused of being reluctant to press
cases against the cops, their natural allies in the day-to-day war against
criminals. And in the Oregon case, even before the grand jury had concluded
its investigation, Holmes's comments seemed to indicate that his heart
wasn't in the prosecution, bullets in the back or no bullets in the back.
"An analogy I use," he told the Houston Chronicle, "is that if it is okay
to kill a guy dead, it is okay to kill him dead, dead, dead."

But the criticism stings the prosecutor directly in charge of the case --
the same assistant district attorney who, as a member of the D.A.'s civil
rights division, investigated the deaths of Ida Delaney and Byron Gillum.

"I'm really irritated about [Mithoff and Nugent] saying this was a
whitewash," says Edward Porter. "I believed in my case. I tried my case. I
believed my theory of prosecution was the best we could come up with. The
jury decided he was not guilty, and so be it. That's what the jury's
function is."

Mithoff and Nugent charge that had Porter really wanted to win a conviction
against Willis he would have offered testimony about the proper way to
conduct a drug investigation. Porter responds that he did talk with members
of HPD's narcotics division. Those officers, he says, told him that the
tactic known as "knock and talk," which was used in the Oregon case, is
employed often by HPD officers. They just don't usually have a drunk,
unregistered informant doing the knocking and talking.

Porter indicates that he, too, was surprised that the grand jury chose to
indict only Willis, and only for trespassing; Porter had prepared
indictments on every charge except that one.

But why only Willis? Why trespassing? Porter, in retrospect, can explain
the grand jury's reasoning. In police work, officers must trust fellow
officers to make the right decisions. When the line of cops along the
stairs outside Oregon's apartment started moving, only Herrada and Willis
could see what was happening inside. Of the two of them, only Willis knew
that Baxter was going to fall to the ground. When Herrada saw Baxter drop,
he could reasonably assume that something had gone dangerously wrong and
that he had reason to enter the apartment. But Willis had no such
justification, thus the grand jury's trespassing indictment.

Porter, though, wanted and expected more. The way the officers went about
their business, he says, makes no sense. If Baxter said Oregon's brother
had been selling him drugs for three years, why did the cops rush to the
apartment that very night? Why didn't they check their computers to see
whether anything in the criminal data banks supported the story? Why didn't
they do surveillance to see whether the traffic in and out of the apartment
seemed suspicious? Why did they appoint an unauthorized informant to knock
on the door?

"It's because they didn't want to do the nuts-and-bolts police work,"
Porter says. "The problem with that type of police work is that it's not
very exciting."

Staying within the parameters of the good sense of departmental guidelines
can be boring, says Porter, but if the officers who shot Delaney, Gillum
and Oregon had either stayed within those parameters or used their common
sense, all three victims might still be alive today.