LOCKED IN

The bowels of the George County Mississippi jail are as soul crushing as you might expect them to be.  The small box with 4 or 5 smaller cells, has the stiff smell of urine poorly masked by an equally nauseating hint of bleach.

George County Court House and Jail

I was actually pretty shocked that Sheriff George Miller Sr. was willing to let me check it out in the first place, "Can I go in?" I asked the grey haired, potbellied lawman a few minutes after we'd interviewed him about a local minister arrested for sexually abusing several young parishioners.   Miller, who had  an odd habit of blinking very hard and rapidly when talking. blinked even harder and faster when he was thinking.  "I s'pect," he nodded," and pulled what looked like a skeleton key out of his brown polyester trousers.  As the rusting, heavy metal door labored open, the hinges let out a painful moan, that summoned the handful of prisoners to life, each peering though a small 8 by 12 inch window, slatted with imposing iron bars.  "Don't get too 'cited boys, lunch still an hour off," the Sheriff blinked and twirled his heavy ring of keys on his index finger, looking in corners for contraband

George County Sheriff Miller

The well worn concrete floor, likely laid when the building was construction in 1910, had a slight groove pressed into it, a path that lead from the door of the jail to the cells inside.  I could imagine deputies guiding and wrestling drunken inmates in and out of the sad little boxes, bringing bologna sandwiches on white bread for lunch as the prisoners pleads with his captor, who, in this rural county,  he likely knew from high school,' Daryl, you gonna call my mamma," he might scream, "tell 'er to come get me."

The eyes of the all black jail population, in holdings cells of this predominantly white county, peered out of their sad boxes, "we treat ya'll good in here don't we boys?" the sheriff asked with plantation boss confidence, as he jangled his keys to his side, "yes su," the weary men answered unconvincingly.  

The Moss Point jail was equally as depressing, but lacked the brawny quality of construction of the antebellum George county lock-up.  The exposed PVC pipe dripped dirty water onto the cold crumbling concrete floor.  As you entered the Moss Point jail, the walls were not brick and iron, but simple, cheap Sheetrock, that, were long ago, punctured in places by a rage filled fist or a angrily flung plastic lunch tray.   The old holes in the new walls were there to stay, violent markers in time, never to be patched up.  Oddly the putrid mix of urine and Clorox that I breathed in in George County was ever present inside this jail.  

Moss Point Police Patch

It was in the Moss Point jail that Marcus Malone, a black man, died.  The arresting officers assured everyone; the press, the courts, the Jackson County DA that Malone was alive the muggy night he was arrested on McCall Street for traffic violations and drug charges by 4 white officers.  " "I believe my officers acted appropriately," Chief Butch Gager told me in the parking lot of the Moss Point police department.  Gager never really wanted to be chief, he only took the job because the man who had it before him had to quit when the state pulled his law enforcement licence for incompetence.  Gager, a burly good ol' boy was a street cop, not an administrator, or a leader and his handling of the Malone case would prove.

The cops said Malone died of a drug overdose overnight during his stay at the jail, but 2 inmates told state investigators, that wasn't true, "When they dropped that man on the ground face first, even if he was overdosing, he would of grunted or something," inmate Kenneth Turner said, "He had no reaction at all."

That's how I ended up seeking shade under a Magnolia tree as a monstrous yellow backhoe, began burrowing into the ground at the Moss Point Cemetery.  Ripping the soft, silent Kentucky Bluegrass from the ground and carelessly tossing it to the side.  Malone's body was exhumed at the families request, and another autopsy suggested Malone had been beaten and strangled to death.

After the body was removed from the earth, I found myself standing in the driveway of Malone's mother's home.  The stately woman was exhausted, and weary.  "I just miss my baby," she shook her head, eyes welling up, like they had most every day for the last year.  "I doubt we'll ever get justice." she said as she shifted the strap of her heavy purse from one shoulder to the next, "That's Mississippi," she breathed with sad acceptance.

After federal investigators prodded the state, it appeared, for a moment anyway, that Mrs. Malone may just get that justice.  Three of the 4 officers were indicted and tried.  Officer Steve Strickler who admitted grabbing Malone's chest, "for a second" was acquitted.  The charges against the 2 others dropped.  

I had left Mississippi for my new job at a another TV station here in Utah. by the time the case played out, but when I  read the reports out of my old stomping grounds, I thought about those sad inmates in the George county jail nodding wearily and frightfully when asked by the sheriff, if they "were treated alright." and I could only imagine Malone's mother the day the officer was cleared, burying her face into her hands and mumbling "That's Mississippi."

Mississippi Lessons

(Reporter's Note: My time as a reporter in Mississippi was a great learning experience for me and many of the people I met abhorred racism, this is about the ones who didn't)

"Mayor Polk can't be here this morning, apparently he ate too many watermelons," joked the owner of one of Jackson County's largest auto dealerships, as he held a microphone announcing the beginning the Pascagoula kids parade.  The car salesman was talking about Ira Polk, the recently hospitalized black mayor of Moss Point, Mississippi, a rugged little gulf coast town with a population that is about 70 percent African American.

Mayor Ira Polk

I stood under the towering oak tree, enveloped in the oppressive humidity, saddled with my heavy TV camera, and trapped by a web of black cables.  The armpits and neckline of my buttoned down shirt filled, every second with a measurable saturation of ever increasing sweat lines.  My eyes floated from one white face to another as each peach colored mouth in this upper middle class neighborhood, chuckled carelessly at the racist (and frankly stupid) joke.  I watched as the car huckster, started the parade, "OK Kids, let's get going!" he shouted into the mic and waved as he handed the black cylinder to someone and shuffled out from under the Magnolia tree, as little kids in cardboard boxes decorated as battleships and cars, began their slow shuffle around this well manicured neighborhood.

I awkwardly gathered up my camera, microphone, tripod and light stand, like a vacationer on the beach, trying to usher his cooler, lawn chair and umbrella off the sand before a midday rain shower floods his day.  "Can I talk to you?" I wheezed as I poked my sweaty finger at the wealthy car dealer, "Of course!" he chirped in the slow, friendly drawl I had grown to love during my time as a reporter in Mississippi during the early 90's  "Did you think that watermelon joke was funny?" I asked pointedly as I thrust my mic into his face, "uh, I..." he said caught off guard, expecting me to inquire about the how long the kids floats took to make, or if the heat would ruin the fun of the yearly  Mardi Gras tradition, "I was just pokin' fun?" he reply in a question, as I coiled up my mic cable, and headed back to my tiny office on Market street to broadcast a story about  racism in Mississippi.

As I slammed the trunk closed on the news car, and slid onto the scalding red interior of my 4 door Ford Tempo, within seconds the bag stuffed between the seats of the vehicle began to chip loudly, it was my boss on a new fangled cell phone, "Chris, I just talked to (can't remember the car dealer's name) and he says he made some off color jokes, that you might be putting on the air tonight," News Director Dave Vincent announced into the phone, "Now Chris," he continued  in his grandfatherly monotone, "I think it's pretty clear that these kind of comments happen down here, and although we can't condone them, I think broadcasting them, doesn't do any good for anyone."

Confederate Veteran's Cemetery (Beauvoir)

I'd only been in Pascagoula for a few months when I got a taste of how race and racism was treated in the South.

In Mississippi, as in much of the south, "The War Of Northern Aggression," is quietly revered around every corner.  Just 45 minutes West of Pascagoula, on Highway 90 is Beauvoir, the home of Confederate president Jefferson Davis.  The pristine shrine to the former head of the insurrection is a a museum honoring Davis and Confederate veterans.  The regal, plantation is dotted  with statues of Davis, a presidential library and a Confederate cemetery, often emblazoned, like a field of flowing raspberries, with blood red rebel flags.

Picture taken by MSSC, numbers indicate people on whom they spied

I remember meeting a group of black candidates for Pascagoula's city council at a small restaurant in town.  The place was actually a converted 2 bedroom house  which I don't think was properly licensed to serve food, but they did.  I remember the candidates, sitting in white plastic chairs, that you would typically find on the porch, and laughing and talking about their times marching with Martin Luther King, as the black owner of the makeshift restaurant would joke, and dish out plates of "slick'um" or boiled okra, to the candidates.  The half dozen or so men and women reminisced about their civil rights work and recent news about The Mississippi State Sovereignty Committee, a state agency founded in 1956, to counter a mounting federal push for civil rights.   The MSSC became a de facto spy agency with the purpose of keeping tabs on people in the movement for black rights, and keeping the state's anti-black Jim Crow laws in place. When the records of the agency were finally opened in 1998 it was revealed the covert agency had spied on as many as 87,000 people.  One of the agency's spies actually passed information about three civil rights workers in Philadephia, MS along to the Neshoba County Sheriff, who was later implicated in the murders of the three people.  The agency wasn't shuttered until 1977.  I was 7 years old at the time.  It still stuns me, just a few years before I turned 10 years old, the state of Mississippi was actively working to thwart racial progress.  Slavery ended 115 years ago, but efforts to keep some vestige of the institution in place, lasted into my lifetime.

Mississippi state flag

The candidates, also lamented about the Mississippi's state flag which to this day is still emblazoned with the rebel insignia.  "My great, grandpa was a slave AND he was forced to cook for rebel soldiers to defend that flag," one of the candidates, said in a ministerial baritone as he ate his pork sandwich, and ran his hand across the grey whiskers on his chin, "Every time I see it wave at the state capitol in Jackson," he said looking at his Styrofoam plate, "it hurts a little bit." he trails off as he pushes a hunk of escaped pork across his plate with a white plastic spoon.

As I sat in the small, hot converted restaurant, with a ceiling fan struggling to push the humid air around the small room, I watched the graying black man think about injustice.  I thought about the story about the racist car dealer that I never aired, and the regret I felt, but also the sad realization that in a state with a profound history of racism, my little story likely wouldn't have made much difference.

  

Message Recieved

"Wait, what?" I whisper, furrowing my eye brow and leaning into photographer Nick Steffens, "Did he say the chief resigned?" I ask shocked, seeking clarification. Mayor Ralph Becker had just announced the resignation of popular Police Chief Chris Burbank, over his handling of a sexual harassment scandal involving one of the chief's top leaders. 

Becker's press conference

The bombshell caught me, and pretty much everyone in Salt Lake City, off guard. Minutes after the mayor's comments, news came that the former chief would, himself, address the media regarding the shocking news.

Becker's announcement was held atop the steps of the city county building, looking down on the gaggle of reporters and camera operators who were at a safe distance at the bottom of the concrete stairs, more than a dozen feet away.  Becker, from behind a podium, read from prepared remarks, and did not take questions after turning awkwardly towards the heavy historic doors of city hall and floating back into the sandstone structure.

Burbank addresses the media.

Burbank on the other hand, dressed in his customary blue police uniform, casually sipped water as a dozen reporters and photographers too aim at his meticulously shaved head with tape recorders, cameras and cell phones.  the former chief spoke extemporaneously and took a dozens questions after his comments.

Mayor Becker has always seemed aloof, and at times even disengaged, I remember in 2010, in the wake of the Red Butte oil spill which released 800 barrels of oil, polluting the water near homes a blackening the pond at Liberty Park and coating dozens of ducks with black ooze.

The Mayor had just held a press conference at about 5 PM, and afterwards I asked the Mayor's press handler if he would appear live on our news show at 10PM that night.  "Uh," she said reluctantly, "I think he's pretty tired." I squinted my eyes, and pulled my chin in back towards my chest, "Tired?" I repeated her words back to her, in an effort to emphasis how odd they sounded, "This is the biggest disaster of his administration, surely he can find the energy to talk to the city about how the clean up is going."  "I'll check," she said with a shrug of her shoulders.  A few minutes later she returned, "Yeah, he's not going to be able to make  it."  I didn't say a word, I was stunned.

Department of Environmental Quality

Chris Burbank, seems the opposite of that.  In 2006 he was up late as the street swelled with a crowd angry residents,  after the body of kidnapping victim  Destiny Norton was found in a musty crawlspace in the apartment of her neighbor.  The large mob gathered, seething over the way the police department had handled the case.  A riot seemed imminent.  Burbank, headed out into the night and directly into the angry sea of chaotic, emotional people.  He disarmed them with understanding and charm and at the end of the evening, 2 of the people who were most instrumental in instigating the gang,  actually went on TV and APOLOGIZED to the chief for causing problems.

Burbank's image was that of an open and approachable public servant, but that openness did have its limits I always felt.  Chief Burbank was also a ferocious protector of his and his department's public image.  When I started reporting in Utah in 1999, Salt Lake City's Public Relations department under Chief Rick Dinse consisted of one or 2 people.  

Burbank addresses angry Norton crowd (SL Trib)

After he was appointed Chief 9 years ago, Burbank expanded his PR department greatly.  At last casual count, there are at least 5 in the unit, all with the goal of disseminating information, but also, it seemed, protecting the shield.

  After I'd done an unflattering story about the police department, my relationship, which had, up to that point, always been jocular and easy, changed.  A few days after my critical story aired, I called the police PR requesting to do an interview on an unrelated story, The crew sent out 2 officers, one to grant me an interview, the other to video tape my questions.  "What's this?" I asked as the officer dutifully pointed his small handheld video camera at me, "just documenting everything," he said, staring blankly and uncomfortably at the postage stamp sized screen, occasionally glancing up, then quickly diverting his eyes back to the tiny square.  I wasn't exactly sure why they were pointing the camera at me.  Maybe it was a subtle way of saying, "we have this whole interview on tape, watch how you edit it?" Or perhaps the department was telling me, "see, two can play at this game."  Either way a message, no matter how unclear it was, was being sent.

The two hastily organized press conferences called on that historic day couldn't have been more different in tone and structure, and are, in many ways symbolic, of the way the 2 men operate.  One pulls you in close, both physically and emotionally, the other keeps you at a distance, but both have the same goal: Control the message.

Eyewitness

It's easy to understand why members of the military suffer from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD.  Life in a war zone, being a front row witness to death and injury to a member of your company, or even your "enemy" can and does, understandably leaves a mark, or scar on your psyche.

Recently The National Center for PTSD released a study that suggest, journalists too regularly suffer from PTSD, almost on a daily basis.  I noticed the study on my phone for a few seconds as I waited for a public information officer to come and give me some details about a man who had run over his girlfriend during a fight.

At first I scoffed at the idea that journalists could suffer from the same issues that plague soldiers, police officers and emergency responders, then, as I stuffed my phone in my pocket, a woman, who later told me she was the victims aunt, rushed to the edge of the crime scene tape wailing, and sobbing, "Oh my God! Oh my God!"  She anguished with tears streaming from her eyes, causing pronounced black streaks to angle around her cheeks, and drop on her white blouse leaving a dark spot above her clavicle.  As she thrust her arms into the sky, asking for answers, I found myself obligated, I had to intrude into her inner pain to see if I could find any answers about what had happened.  "Tell me! Tell me!" she pleaded with me, "what do you know, please, what do you know!"  I solemnly explained to her that a man had run over a woman during an argument, and she was taken to the hospital in critical condition, "Oh God, That's my niece, Oh Lord, that's my baby!" She then ended our conversation abruptly, "I don't have nothing to say to you!"  Then a friend coddled her head against her chest, while darting a look of absolute hatred deep into my eyes, as she ushered the grieving aunt on a crooked line to the curb where the 2 sat down, and wept privately.

"All in a days work," I thought to myself, as I peered over the police tape at officers taking pictures near a pile of bloody clothes, and talking with witnesses, while dutifully scribbling details into their small notebooks.  After the news cast, as I drove silently back to the station, I thought again about the PTSD study, and realized, no matter how much I wanted to deny it, I had just been through a traumatic experience.  Clearly nothing like the victim of this horrible crime, or her aunt, stricken with a terror punctuated by a lack of details, but a trauma non-the-less.  I found myself at the edge of tragedy, cloaked by shear grief, forced to insert myself into a private moment of despair, and engulfed in the usual rampant hate of the "media."

During my 20 years career I have witnessed plenty of horrifying scenes.  The remains of a woman struck by a train, and a man who smashed through his windshield during a Thanksgiving Day auto accident.  Early one morning on I-90 in Pascagoula, Mississippi, I stood under a dark, humid Mississippi sky as the highway patrol unraveled white sheets over the bodies of 5 teenagers who where riding in the back of a pickup that crashed into the jersey barrier late that night.

I've always been able (I thought) to bury the grisly carnage into a mental grave inside my brain.  Like the time my partner and I interviewed a woman whose only daughter had been struck by the school bus she was waiting for one morning.  The mother, heartbroken and likely sedated, spoke to us for  a few scattered moments and we left.  In our news vehicle, my partner poured himself behind the wheel, sat silently for a few minutes, then turned to me, "I can't do this anymore," he said as his  eyes filled with tears.  A few weeks later he quite, went home to live with his parents and took a job at a toilet seat factory in northern Mississippi.

It affects you, you feel it, but, are forced to move on, sometimes without properly processing what you have witnessed.

A few days after that woman had been struck by her boyfriend's Lincoln Town Car, I interviewed her mother.  She was stoic, but scared, and broke.  She was now  caring for her daughter's 2 children, and was unsure how she would pay for the medical bills climbing exponentially literally by the minute.

I thought about her for several hours after the interview, but had moved on to other stories the next day.  Last week it was announced the woman struck by the car was dead.  As I heard the news, I picked up the phone, breathed in and out, then dialed her mother's phone number.