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)
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One afternoon in October, Lue took me to the house on Nelson Street where Billy Ray had been living with his mother in September 2003—a gray, dilapidated frame house where two days’ worth of rain had turned the hard-packed dirt yard into a pool of mud. It was still home to Billy Ray’s mother, Lizzie Mae Stephenson, who was slumped inside on a faded flower-print sofa, her body folded into its cushions. She was a small, frail woman in her seventies, and she did not seem to notice when we came in. The house was illuminated by a single bare bulb, and the rooms looked as if they had not been cleaned in years. Unwashed clothes were piled in heaps on the floor, and half-eaten plates of food rested on the kitchen counters. Roaches climbed the walls and skittered across the dining room table. Lizzie sat, staring at the wall, loudly humming a weird, gloomy tune. Her son James’s girlfriend, Tina Thomas, had stopped by to check in and was trying to engage her in conversation, to which Lizzie at last responded with a few low, guttural sounds. She looked around the room, and when her eyes focused on me, a stranger, she looked frightened. She lifted herself off the couch and hurried into the bathroom, locking herself inside.
Lizzie, the family told me, had not been mentally disabled at birth. When she was an infant in Sulphur Springs—a little more than an hour’s drive west of Linden—her parents, who were itinerant sharecroppers, had been coming back from church one Sunday when a group of white teenagers started throwing rocks at them. Lizzie was struck on the head, over her left eye, and the impact had cracked her skull open. She was forever changed, according to her sister Essie Lee Pryor; as a child, she was unable to do even menial work, and when the rest of the family picked cotton, she sat and watched. Even the children Lizzie went on to have who were not mentally disabled had never known a normal life. One son is currently in prison for aggravated assault; another was murdered in 1995. As I listened to Tina try to coax Lizzie out of the bathroom, I wondered how her life—and Billy Ray’s—might have turned out if not for the cruel trajectory of one rock.
When Lizzie emerged, she sat down beside me, and I explained that I was working on an article about Billy Ray. At the mention of his name, she covered her face with her hands and began to cry out, “My son, my son, my son …”
THE PASTURE PARTY HAD ALREADY gotten under way that Saturday night when Wes Owens eased his pickup away from the bonfire and headed for the Country Store to buy some snuff. Wes was everything that Billy Ray was not. He was from an influential Linden family and had been a popular varsity football player in high school. But in a small town like Linden, which has 2,275 residents, even the most divergent lives are somehow connected, and when Billy Ray ambled into the Country Store that night, he and Wes stopped to shake hands. Their families had been acquainted for a long time; Billy Ray’s father and two of his brothers used to work summers picking peas and hauling hay on Wes’s grandfather’s farm. The Owenses had given the Johnsons food and secondhand clothes over the years, and Wes had sometimes offered Billy Ray rides around town.
As they stood and talked that night, Billy Ray wore his usual lopsided grin. And then Wes—“the life of the party,” according to friends, a guy who liked to be the center of attention—had an idea. He casually mentioned that he had invited some people to his father’s place up the road, and he asked if Billy Ray wanted to join them.
Billy Ray shook his head. “I’m waiting on a ride,” he said.
“I’ll bring you back up here when your ride’s supposed to be here,” Wes offered. Though Wes had never invited him to a party before, Billy Ray was not in the habit of questioning things. He agreed and climbed into Wes’s truck.
Wes drove less than a mile up the road to his father’s property and turned into a wide, grassy pasture where pickups were parked in a circle around a bonfire. According to court documents and police records, it was after midnight when they arrived, and about a dozen people were sitting on their tailgates drinking beer. When they looked to see who Wes had brought from town, they burst out laughing. One girl overheard twenty-year-old Colt Amox snicker, “Wes has a crazy nigger with him.”
Wes would later say that he had never intended for Billy Ray to become the night’s entertainment, but from the moment they arrived, the joke was on Billy Ray. Wes introduced him to his friends, making up nonsensical names for them as he went. Colt was “Bolt,” while others were “C’mon,” “We-pee,” and “Casey Macaroni.” Guileless, Billy Ray nodded and told each of them, “You can just call me Bill.” Wes turned on some music and handed Billy Ray a beer, and soon he had Billy Ray dancing to Lil’ Kim’s “Magic Stick.” Wes passed an imaginary stick back and forth to him while the group looked on and laughed. When the fire began to fade, Wes had him unload wood from the bed of his truck, and the errand became a game to see how much firewood he could pile on as he raced to and from the pickup. “Come on, Billy Ray, you can get more than that!” people shouted. Someone suggested that he reach into the fire and pull out one of the burning logs, and as Billy Ray bent down to comply, Wes stopped him. “Don’t be stupid,” he said.
The teasing had started to make some people uneasy, and before long, more than half the group decided to go home. Erica Hudson, a freshman at Tyler Junior College, told Wes as she was leaving, “It’s not right.”
Corey Hicks, who had recently gotten off work at the jail, drove up as the party was thinning out. He lived with Wes’ sister, with whom he had two children. When Corey arrived, he turned to a heavy-lidded eighteen-year-old named Dallas Stone. “Why did Wes bring this stupid nigger out here?” he asked.
Dallas shrugged. “For a joke,” he said.
Only six people remained at the party, including Billy Ray, and everyone was drinking heavily. As the night wore on, a pretty twenty-year-old student named Lacy Dorgan—the only woman left at the party—wandered off to throw up, and Wes followed her. The dome light inside her Mustang was on when she and Wes started having sex a few minutes later, and Corey watched them from a distance.
Bored and drunk, Corey, Colt, and Dallas nursed their beers while Billy Ray sat alone by the bonfire. Dallas would later claim that Corey said, “I wish someone would beat this nigger up.” Corey was known for using incendiary language when it came to blacks, and several years earlier he had started a fight at a party with six black men in which he did not come out the victor. He couldn’t beat up Billy Ray himself, he told Colt and Dallas, or he might lose his job, but he thought someone else should. After some goading, Colt agreed to do it, and the three friends all started to laugh. (Colt denies making this pledge.)
Until that point, rap music had been playing, but Colt switched it to country, which elicited complaints from Billy Ray. “If you don’t like the music, you can go,” Colt told him.
“You’d better leave, before the KKK comes and gets you,” Dallas taunted him.
Billy Ray seemed to think they were joking, and he laughed along with them. “I’ll go after I finish my beer,” he said.
Dallas knocked the beer out of his hand. “You’re finished now,” he said.
Wes had dashed up, pulling on his pants as he ran from Lacy’s Mustang, but it was too late. Colt, who had been a pitcher at Linden-Kildare High School, took a swing at Billy Ray, hitting him squarely in the face. He delivered a knockout punch. Billy Ray fell to the ground and stopped moving.
For nearly an hour the group debated what to do as Billy Ray lay a few feet away from them, unconscious. Wes thought they should call an ambulance, and both Dallas and Lacy offered to drive him to the hospital. But Corey overruled them and began barking orders. He did not want the police involved, he said, because his job was on the line. They were going to take Billy Ray to a back road and leave him there, he insisted, assuring the group that he would eventually wake up and walk home. At one point during the discussion, Wes grabbed Billy Ray and lifted him to his feet, trying to make him stand up on his own. When his legs would not support his weight, Wes let him go, and he fell backward, hitting his head on the ground. Finally they loaded him into the bed of Colt’s truck, and Corey led the way while the others followed. Rather than driving a mile north to the hospital, he headed in the opposite direction, toward Old Dump Road. Wes thought Billy Ray might still have some family out there, but they decided against leaving him near a house for fear that someone might see them.
As Corey drove, he asked Lacy, who was riding with him, if she would sit closer. He and Wes’ sister were having problems, he confided, and he had liked her for a long time.
“Why did this happen?” Lacy asked, changing the subject. “Why?”
“Because he’s a fucking nigger,” Corey said.
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