The Beating of Billy Ray Johnson
On a Saturday night three years ago, a mentally disabled black man from Linden was taken to a party filled with white kids half his age. A few hours later, he was dumped by the side of the road, bleeding and unconscious. But of all the crimes that were committed, none was worse than how the small East Texas town responded—and who were considered the victims.
Lee says: I’m heartbroken by this story. As a black mother who has children it breaks my heart that I have to teach my children about things to this nature. I have a child who attends school in the Linden ISD and each week he has a new story to come and tell me about something that has occured at school. He recently made a comment about how he felt as if one of the teachers at school didn’t like blacks. He stated that a group of white children were playing together on the playground and when the black kids went to join in the the play they were all made to stand in timout by one of the teachers. So racism is still alive and well. I was speaking about a personal experience that I had encountered once and was told by a white lady that she has never experienced any racial behavior while attending school and my response to her was "why would you". (May 1st, 2011 at 2:38pm)
DAYBREAK WAS STILL MORE THAN AN HOUR away on the morning of September 28, 2003, when Cass County sheriff’s deputy John Elder turned down Old Dump Road. Above the tree line, the sky was moonless and dark. Cass County is pressed deep into the northeastern corner of Texas, hard against the Arkansas and Louisiana state lines, and it is crisscrossed by back roads that meander into the woods, under pine awnings and over low-water crossings and past unincorporated communities not found on maps. Elder followed the blacktop as it tacked back and forth, and after roughly a mile, he spotted a silver pickup idling at a T in the road. Two young men who had called the sheriff’s department were sitting inside. “He’s over here,” the driver called out, motioning for the deputy to follow him. Elder fell in behind the pickup as it headed to the left, down a county road that had few houses or mailboxes or signs of life.
They came to a stop after half a mile, and Elder could make out a figure on the ground, huddled in the fetal position. He was a short, slight black man, and he was wearing only a T-shirt and jeans despite the cool weather. Elder knelt down, and after fishing the man’s identification out of his pocket, the deputy saw that he was Billy Ray Johnson. Around Linden, the county seat, Billy Ray was often seen hanging around the courthouse square or walking by the side of the road, and he was what people in town politely called “slow.” Elder could see that he was alive but in bad shape. The bottom half of his face was bruised and swollen, and his breathing sounded labored. His upper lip was cut, and blood had pooled on the ground under him. His entire body had been badly stung by fire ants. The deputy tried to wake him, but Billy Ray was unconscious.
Elder called for an ambulance and then inspected the pavement, searching for evidence of a hit-and-run. But he found no skid marks or broken glass, and so he turned to the two white men who had led him out there to ask them what they knew. Elder recognized the bigger, heavyset one with the crew cut as 24-year-old Corey Hicks, who had served in the Navy and now worked at the sheriff’s department as a jailer. Elder wasn’t familiar with Corey’s friend, 19-year-old Wes Owens, who stood with his hands in his pockets and said little. “Now, how did y’all find him?” Elder asked.
Corey shrugged. “We were just riding around,” he said, explaining that they had been at a party until early that Sunday morning. “We drove up on him and saw him laying there.”
Elder nodded and didn’t probe further. Billy Ray smelled of alcohol, and in the absence of any evidence of a hit-and-run, the deputy guessed that the 42-year-old had been out walking and had hit his head when he passed out. The two young men who had led him there were nothing if not helpful; when the paramedics arrived and loaded Billy Ray’s limp body onto a gurney, they helped lift him into the back of the ambulance.
But by the following morning, Billy Ray had yet to regain consciousness. A CAT scan found that he had suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage, a serious brain injury that can be caused by blunt force to the head. While he lay in a coma, word spread that he had last been seen Saturday night at a pasture party with some white boys half his age. Still, the sheriff’s department did not grasp that it had a criminal investigation on its hands until Lieutenant Ray Copeland, the department’s chief investigator, began receiving anonymous phone calls—three that week, all from what sounded to him like the same soft-spoken white man. “Y’all need to look into what happened to Billy Ray,” the caller said, and hung up.
What the investigation unearthed was a story that no one in Linden wanted to believe: Billy Ray, who is mentally disabled, had been taken to a party, ridiculed, called racial slurs, knocked unconscious, and then dumped by the side of the road. Even the strangers who had come to his aid were not Good Samaritans but two of the perpetrators. Had the town’s white residents condemned what had happened to Billy Ray, the incident might have faded into memory; the crime pivoted on a single punch. Instead, they closed ranks, and juries in both criminal trials that followed declined to give the defendants more than a slap on the wrist. Now Morris Dees, one of the nation’s preeminent civil rights lawyers, has taken up Billy Ray’s case, and Linden—a place most Texans have never heard of—will likely become the focus of national attention when the wrongful-injury lawsuit goes to trial this spring. Whether a new jury will see things differently depends on how Linden perceives its own role in this drama: as a community that must redeem itself or as a small town unfairly maligned by outsiders.
BILLY RAY GREW UP LESS THAN TWO miles from where he had been found, in a sagging white trailer on Old Dump Road. He was raised by his widowed grandmother, Era Lockett Taylor—Miss Era, as she was called—after he was born with meningitis to mentally disabled parents. Billy Ray had five brothers, two of whom were also mentally disabled. (Relatives and neighbors raised all but the youngest son, Bonnie.) As a boy, Billy Ray was able to grasp simple concepts his mother had never mastered, like how to dial a phone number or pay for something in a store, but he couldn’t learn to read or write, and he was often the butt of other kids’ jokes; on the school bus, his cousins handed over their lunch money to his tormentors so he would be left alone. After he had to repeat the fifth grade, Miss Era pulled him out of school for good, and they lived in the woods, apart from the world, for more than twenty years.
Miss Era discouraged anyone from bothering Billy Ray by keeping a 12-gauge shotgun propped beside the door. (A light pole on her property, which is pitted with lead shot, attests to her vigilance.) “No one messed with Billy Ray while Miss Era was alive,” said his cousin Lenda Beachum. “We were all scared to death of her. If she said, ‘Jump,’ we asked her, ‘How high?’” Even as an adult, Billy Ray came into town only when Miss Era needed to pick something up at the store, and when she did, he would sit quietly in the passenger seat, gazing out the window. “Everybody always thought he was a nothing and a nobody,” said his cousin Lue Arthur Wilson. “I felt sorry for him being stuck out there all by himself. I used to stop by with my guitar and play music for him—he liked Lightnin’ Hopkins and Jimmy Reed and Elmore James. I’d play until Miss Era would say, ‘Billy Ray, ain’t you tired of hearing that fuss?’ And then I’d have to get going.”
Billy Ray’s transistor radio was his constant companion, and each day he sat on whichever side of Miss Era’s trailer allowed him to pick up a stronger signal. He liked to slide on his sunglasses and listen to the R&B stations out of Shreveport and Tyler; at night, he picked up shows that were beamed in from faraway places like Nashville. Though life with Miss Era was tightly circumscribed, he had his own way of traveling beyond Old Dump Road. His grandmother’s property was littered with the skeletons of half a dozen or so gutted, rusted-out cars, and he spent hours tinkering with them and taking his favorite ones out for test drives. Sitting behind the wheel, he would steer as if he were flying down the highway. He seemed not to care that the car he was driving had no transmission and was jacked up on concrete blocks in the middle of Miss Era’s pasture.
Billy Ray lived with Miss Era until 1995, when she died of cancer and he found himself, at 33, on his own. “She was all he knew,” said his younger brother James. “He’d never been out in the world, never been with people his own age. He’d never had a drink until Miss Era died.” Billy Ray stayed for two years in James’s rent house and then moved in with his mother, who was living in a public housing project a few blocks from the courthouse square. Free to go where he pleased, he spent his days walking around town, nodding and smiling at strangers, but without Miss Era to look after him, sometimes he was at loose ends. A sandwich might be his only food for the day, or some peanut butter straight out of the jar. He bought a snappy new suit with one of his disability checks, but he didn’t understand that it needed to be cleaned, and he wore it again and again until he looked like the homeless person that many people in Linden assumed him to be.
On the weekends, Billy Ray helped out at his cousin Lue’s honky-tonk, the Bee Hive, a black club on one of Linden’s back roads where patrons brought their own coolers and anyone was welcome to play the blues guitar. Billy Ray swept floors and picked up empty beer bottles and largely kept to himself, and yet customers enjoyed laughing at his expense. “People thought it was funny to make an ass out of him,” Lue said. “They’d say, ‘Come on, Billy Ray, you going to dance tonight?’ And so he’d stamp his feet and stick his neck out and shuffle around for them. He couldn’t dance, but he loved the attention.” At the projects, Billy Ray was an even easier mark. “He was real popular once a month when he got his disability check,” Lue said. “Women would sweet-talk him, crackheads would hit him up for loans. They’d say, ‘Can I borrow some money and pay you back tomorrow?’ Billy Ray didn’t know no better. He was everybody’s friend.”
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