GRANDMOTHER'S FIGHT AGAINST DEALERS PUTS HER IN PRISON

When Granny plugged a drug dealer with a .22-caliber revolver, her
neighbors considered it a community service.

He recovered and is already out of prison. Elizabeth Mitchell-Dulaney --
"Granny'' to friends -- has 18 more months to serve.

In the gray chill, she will walk the asphalt yard at a medium-security
women's prison today.

Her 66-year-old, stroke-slowed body is held back by coiled razor wire. But
her soul, she sings, is free.

"I do like my spirituals,'' she said, citing a favorite:

"Why should I feel discouraged,

"Why should the shadows come,

"Why should my heart be lonely,

"And long for heav'n and home.''

She has asked God for forgiveness. She has asked the governor for clemency.
And she has asked her five great-grandchildren, whom she was raising, for
forbearance.

But she does not apologize.

On Labor Day 1999, as friends and the children picnicked behind her
rambling, frame house on the South Side, she snapped.

The moments are still fresh in her mind. Little Ivory ran in, "Great
Granny, someone threw a rock over the fence and hit Brian.''

She put down a steaming pan of ribs. Marched out the front door. Asked a
neighbor who did it. Saw the smirks. Saw the white men.

She is black. Until that afternoon, her lawbreaking experience was limited
to expired license plates.

But in those moments, she made the wrong decision.

She ran for an old revolver locked upstairs. She fired at a curb.

"Don't come any farther,'' she yelled.

They kept coming. They were in the street, closing in on the sidewalk gate
where she stood. She heard the ugly words, the racial slurs.

"Snitch,'' they screamed. She had tipped off police to a neighboring drug
house.

The gun felt light in her hand. She squeezed the trigger.

Alan Holley fell; he would require a colostomy. She fired again. A bullet
bounced off a pager worn by Holley's brother, Ken Fitch.

As a crowd gathered around the bleeding man, Mitchell-Dulaney walked inside
and phoned police.

"I just shot some men. Could you please send an officer?'' she asked.

Mitchell-Dulaney made two big mistakes.

An appeals court noted she had a "duty to retreat.'' She could have
gathered her family, run inside, bolted her door and phoned police. In the
year of the shooting, Columbus police records show she summoned officers to
her house no fewer than 30 times.

And she might have used a more powerful gun. A homicide charge might have
been harder to convict on than felonious assault.

Holley recovered. He served only two years at Orient Correctional
Institution for drug trafficking. A month after the shooting, police raided
Mitchell-Dulaney's next-door neighbor.

Virginia Smith and her sons were running the largest illegal
prescription-drug operation in Franklin County, prosecutors said.

None of this helped Mitchell-Dulaney, an ordinary woman caught up in the
gangrene of the drug trade.

"They set my back door on fire once,'' she said. "They threw bricks through
my window.''

Three years of being battered and threatened churned inside Mitchell-
Dulaney that afternoon. She'd had enough.

A stack of letters sits before her on a table at the prison, the Franklin
Pre-Release Center on Harmon Avenue.

One neighbor writes that Granny was harassed because she put up a fence
that forced the drug dealers out of the alleys and into the open.

Richard Manuel, an area businessman, wrote the governor that he'd seen the
crowd armed with baseball bats and lead pipes that day, but didn't know
Granny was in the middle.

"She was given a sentence of 3 1/2 years for what all her neighbors
consider a favor to society.''

A spokesman for the governor said they request is under review by the
parole board and will then be forwarded.

Meanwhile, Granny prays.

"The hardest part is that I lost my dignity,'' she said. "I never undressed
even in front of my grown daughters.''

Out of respect, fellow inmates turn their backs as she is strip- searched.
As she says this, tears spill down her checks.

The law says Mitchell-Dulaney had no right to shoot someone not on her
property. Yet.

Her crime was one of patience. But she is not sorry she shot her tormenters.

Granny went to prison to be free.