Does DaRoyce Mosley Deserve to Die?
Raised in Kilgore’s poorest black neighborhood, he was an honors graduate with a bright future—until he was convicted of killing four whites. But the case is still hotly disputed, and the question remains…Does DaRoyce Mosley Deserve to Die?
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Although other black neighborhoods are scattered around Kilgore, which is about 15 percent black, none is as dilapidated as Goat Hill, which is on the northwest edge of town. Many of the frame homes look like their roofs are about to buckle. Concrete blocks prop up the front porches. Few homes have air conditioning units; one has carpet stapled to the outside walls to provide insulation in the winter. A ditch runs through Goat Hill where water and oil dripping from a leaky pipeline settle for weeks at a time. It is a barren world of unwed pregnant teenage girls, aimless young men who don’t finish high school, mothers and grandmothers who, if they work, usually find jobs as domestics for the richer whites, and a few grown men who have not abandoned their families. About the only white people who set foot in Goat Hill are members of a new drug-prevention program called Turn Around Kilgore. On Saturdays the mostly prosperous white citizens march in front of the homes of suspected drug dealers and chant, “Hi-de-hi-de-hi-de-ho, drug dealers got to go.”
Charline Mosley Jackson was only fourteen and unmarried when she gave birth to DaRoyce. She told me that she had been a teenage drug abuser. Charline had four more children. But she spent much of her time on the streets, moving from man to man, often leaving home for a couple of days. DaRoyce is not sure who his father is. When he was eight, he got a job bagging groceries in return for meat and bread to feed his younger brother and sisters. On nights when the electricity in the house was turned off because Charline hadn’t paid the bill, DaRoyce built a fire in the bathtub to keep him and the other children warm.
One evening the children heard Charline screaming in the front part of the house. Her brother, Ray Don Mosley, had come by, started an argument, then pulled out a knife and slashed Charline across her breasts. To those who knew Ray Don, the attack was no surprise. “When we were growing up, we all ran the other way if we saw him,” said Tracey Arch, a student at Kilgore Junior College and a former Goat Hill resident. “He’d rather hit you than talk to you.” Ray Don’s parents, Raymond and Francis Mosley, couldn’t control him when he was younger. “Ray Don’s mind was just different, that’s the only way I can explain it,” said Francis, who works as a cook at a local nursing home. “He always talked about how he hated white people and wanted to get them.” As a teenager, Ray Don turned to small-time crime. By the late eighties his adult rap sheet included aggravated assault, sexual assault, drug possession, attempted burglary, and fraud. In a statement to a private investigator, a Kilgore woman said that after she had accepted Ray Don’s offer of a ride home from a party, he drove down a dirt road and held a gun to her head while another man raped her. Another woman, an ex-girlfriend, said in a separate affidavit that Ray Don had gotten angry and held a shotgun to her head. “Oh my, you should have seen him,” Francis told me, “jumping on his women and dragging them up and down the yard.” Francis Mosley had made it a point to warn her grandson about Ray Don. She took DaRoyce to see him at the county jail. “This is my own son I’m talking about now,” Francis would tell young DaRoyce, “but you be careful of him. He gets so mad his eyes turn blood red.”
Through most of his childhood, DaRoyce hardly saw Ray Don. When DaRoyce was in elementary school, his mother dumped her children at the home of her uncle and aunt, Joe Rogers and Johnnie Mae Johnson, who lived just outside Kilgore in the community of Fredonia. Charline didn’t return to see them for at least a year. While the other children were split up among various relatives, DaRoyce stayed with Joe Rogers and Johnnie Mae. The Johnsons didn’t have much money for their own children—Joe Rogers was a self-employed auto repairman and welder—but they treated DaRoyce like a son. Most important, they kept him away from Goat Hill. “Before he came to us, he lived in a shack that half the time didn’t have water or gas,” said Johnnie Mae. “I remember when his mother came back around and told him he could move back in with her in Goat Hill, he said he’d rather stay with us.”
It was astonishing, people said, how DaRoyce pushed himself to succeed at school. He made A’s and B’s, earning the name “bookworm” from his family, most of whom hadn’t made it through high school. “I was the only black kid in the honors advanced classes at school,” DaRoyce said. “So who else was I supposed to talk to, other than the white guys?” He started to go to white kids’ parties. He even went along with one of his white friends to Kilgore’s august First Presbyterian Church. DaRoyce was remarkably outgoing: He loved teasing people and being a class clown in high school. But he told me he didn’t always like hanging around other black kids or going to their parties because there was usually a fight. “DaRoyce would get upset at the way the tougher black kids would act,” said Kathy McMillan, the mother of DaRoyce’s friend Aaron, who is white. “One night Aaron and DaRoyce were driving around and stopped to talk to some girls. Then another car of black kids came by to talk. Well, the girls went back to their own car a few minutes later and their purses were gone. Everyone knew who took them—the black kids. DaRoyce was so upset. He kept saying this was the kind of thing that gave all blacks a bad name.”
It had to have been a difficult balancing act for DaRoyce. “The black guys in the neighborhood would say, ‘Look at DaRoyce. He’s trying to be better than us. Look at that honky lover, that Uncle Tom,’” DaRoyce told me. “I didn’t want to be white. I just wanted to make something of myself.” But many white students refused to accept him. Some taunted other whites who were close to DaRoyce. In his senior year in high school, he lost his starting position on the basketball team after he broke his hand in a fight with a white classmate who had called his buddy Aaron a “nigger lover.” “I went over to that guy’s house,” DaRoyce said, “and I told him I don’t disrespect people and I hadn’t given him any reason to disrespect me. And I said I didn’t appreciate that ‘nigger’ shit. One thing led to another and we ended up fighting.” At another party he attended with Aaron, a fight broke out and DaRoyce got in the middle of it. He suddenly found several white guys surrounding him, including some members of the Kilgore College football team. “Everybody started shouting, ‘Let’s lynch the nigger,’” said William Linn, who was also there. “DaRoyce got the crap beat out of him. Then, after he left, the cops arrived and one of the white guys hosting the party told them, ‘Man, everything was fine until that nigger DaRoyce came around.’”
When I asked DaRoyce about his exposure to racism in Kilgore, he shrugged as if it was of little importance to him. “You have your prejudiced people, you expect that,” he said. His white friends said DaRoyce never seemed especially angry about race relations or felt a need to settle any scores. The polar opposite of his uncle Ray Don, DaRoyce never had a single brush with the law. As the superintendent of schools would later say, DaRoyce was “a happy-go-lucky student—part of the better class of students who obeyed authority and followed directions.”
But after graduation in May 1993, when some of his white friends headed to Austin or San Marcos for college, DaRoyce made a fateful decision. He decided to spend a year at Kilgore College to get some basic courses out of the way and save money to attend the University of Texas at Austin. Because he didn’t own a car, he moved back to Goat Hill to live with his grandparents, Francis and Raymond Mosley. “DaRoyce kept saying, ‘I’ll be joining you, I’ll be joining you,’” said Aaron McMillan, a handsome UT pre-med major who dresses in starched shirts, pressed khakis, and Roper boots. “Now all I think about is how different things would be if he had just gotten out of town.”
No one can say for certain what happened that year at the Mosleys’ rickety three-bedroom house, where a painting of the Lord’s Supper hangs on the living room wall and a lucky horseshoe is nailed to the front porch. Ray Don was not around: He was on his way to prison for violating the conditions of a probated sentence he had received for stealing a Pontiac Firebird. DaRoyce spent much of his spare time in Goat Hill hanging out with a teenager named Chris “Caboo” Smith, his teammate on the Kilgore High basketball team until he had been shot by a neighborhood teenager after an argument, leaving him paralyzed. In the afternoon Caboo would wheel himself out to the street and talk to whoever came by. Among the young men who whiled away their time in front of Caboo’s house, it was crucial not to be considered soft—not to cave in when challenged at basketball games in the park or act too sweet for a girl. Some of the homies liked to talk about “jack moves” and “gank moves”—Goat Hill slang for robberies. “But DaRoyce acted very polite,” said Tracey Arch. “My mother was always surprised by the way he addressed her as Mrs. If we were all hanging out by Caboo’s, and someone’s mother drove by, DaRoyce would hide the beer he was drinking to show respect.”
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