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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NOT UNTIL MARCH 2005, a year and a half after the arrests, did the first defendant go to trial, and from the start of the State of Texas v. Christopher Colt Amox, it was apparent that justice might be hard to come by. Cass County district attorney Randal Lee had his assistant district attorney, Tina Richardson—a black woman who was the county’s only other prosecutor—try the case. But during the five-day proceeding, Lee did not assist her or take part in the state’s prosecution. “I drove fifty-five miles each morning to attend the trial, and I never saw the district attorney walk across the hall,” said the NAACP’s Dennis, who had previously attended a less-high-profile trial of a black defendant at which Lee had been present every day. “A DA who wants to bring the full judgment of his office down on an individual is going to make sure that jurors see him in the courtroom. It was obvious from the start that the full resources of the DA’s office had not been thrown behind this case.”
Colt, the defense’s only witness, took the stand and testified on his own behalf. “I want everybody to know the truth,” the clean-cut young man told the jury, which was made up of ten whites and two blacks. Colt’s attorney, Corky Stovall, began by guiding him through a show-and-tell of photos that pictured him smiling beside black teammates and acquaintances and then brought him to the crux of the message that he needed to impart to the jury: He had acted in self-defense. “He was coming toward me,” Colt testified, explaining that he had feared Billy Ray and had taken several steps away from him. “I mean, he could have hit me, stabbed me, shot me. I don’t know this man from anybody … Once he got to me, I felt like he was going to hit me, so I hit him, one hit in the mouth.” Colt denied ever using racial slurs, and he told the jury that he had made bad decisions—like driving Billy Ray into the woods and then washing out the bed of his pickup afterward—because Corey had pressured him to do so. Even the false accounts he had given to investigators had a noble justification. “I was trying to keep my friends out of trouble,” he told jurors.
In her cross-examination, Richardson pressed Colt to explain how the well-built former athlete could have felt physically intimidated by a man whom she estimated to weigh just over one hundred pounds—and who, unlike Colt, had had no friends with him to back him up. “Even a small person can shoot somebody or stab somebody,” Colt replied.
But Richardson overlooked one of the most powerful pieces of evidence that the state had to discredit his defense, which the FBI had turned up during its investigation: The morning after the assault, when Dallas had showed up for work at the Dairy Queen, he had confided in a friend that Colt and Corey were planning on making up a story to tell police that cast Billy Ray as the aggressor. Dallas, who had turned state’s witness, was not questioned about this at trial. He only testified that he had not seen Billy Ray behave aggressively toward Colt and that the assault had been unprovoked.
After several hours of deliberation, jurors acquitted Colt on both felonies—aggravated assault with bodily injury and injury to a disabled person by omission—which had each carried the possibility of a ten-year prison sentence. In doing so, they rejected the idea that Colt had targeted Billy Ray because of his race. They settled instead on a lighter charge, misdemeanor assault. The jury also recommended a suspended sentence: in other words, no jail time. Billy Ray’s family wept as the verdict was read.
A similar scene played out when Corey was tried two months later. There were plenty of unflattering facts entered into the record; Wes, who had also turned state’s witness, testified that Corey had said of Billy Ray, “Someone needs to whip the shit out of him.” But the jury was disinclined to convict him of assault when he had not thrown the actual punch. Corey was found guilty of injury to a disabled person by omission, or essentially failing to render aid. The jury was split along racial lines over the proper punishment, with its one black juror a holdout for jail time. But in the end, once again, the jury recommended a suspended sentence. When I met with the jury foreman, a warehouse manager named John Reed, he explained that some jurors had thought Billy Ray—who had taken the stand to give a few halting answers—had faked his symptoms and had practiced seeming slow and walking poorly. “As far as I’m concerned, everyone’s to blame,” Reed said. “Wes Owens shouldn’t have carried him out to that party, and Billy Ray should have known better than to go drink beer with a bunch of white boys.”
Judge Ralph K. Burgess, citing the graveness of the crimes, set aside the juries’ recommendations and gave each of the defendants short jail terms. Corey received a sixty-day sentence, to be served at the Cass County jail, which he had been summarily fired from during the investigation. The other three received thirty-day sentences. But the penalties were little consolation to people like Lue, who had fed and bathed Billy Ray between his stopovers at different nursing homes and who had seen firsthand how his cousin had suffered. “The verdicts sent a message: ‘It’s okay to treat a black man that way,’” Lue said when I visited him last fall. He showed me a small item he had clipped from the Cass County Sun, which he had glued to a piece of loose-leaf paper for safekeeping, about a black man named Burks Mack, who had illegally dumped some tires near Old Dump Road. For his crime, Mack had received six months in the county jail. “The only way I can figure it, a bunch of old tires is worth more than Billy Ray,” he said.
Lue echoed the sentiments of many blacks in Linden when he told me that the outcome would have been different had the races of those involved been reversed. “I didn’t go to law school, and I’m not a well-educated man,” said the Vietnam veteran and retired steelworker. “But I know enough to know that something ain’t right. If four black men had taken a mentally retarded white man to a party, made a monkey out of him, called him racial slurs, assaulted him, dumped him by the side of the road, and lied to the police about it, you can bet they would’ve gone to the penitentiary for a long, long time.”
THE CIVIL SUIT, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has filed on Billy Ray’s behalf, is slated to go to trial on April 2. Based in Montgomery, Alabama, the nonprofit group takes on high-profile civil rights cases, as it did most famously in 1987, when lawyer Morris Dees won a $7 million verdict that bankrupted the United Klans of America after two of its members in Mobile lynched a young black man named Michael Donald. Billy Ray’s suit, which names the four defendants, is seeking unspecified damages to cover the cost of speech and physical therapy as well as long-term care. “This justice system totally failed Billy Ray and his family,” Dees told me. “We want to give a jury the chance to correct an injustice in their community by presenting all the facts, many of which were not available to the juries in the criminal cases.” When I asked if he was worried about the odds of finding twelve impartial people to impanel, Dees claimed to be unconcerned. “These jurors grew up in a Christian community, and they know what’s right from wrong,” he said. “We have to present the case so they can see that Billy Ray is a human being who deserves to be treated just like anyone else.”
Just as hard as winning a settlement may be extracting any money from the defendants, who have spent the past three years working menial jobs while their friends have gone on to college. Wes intermittently works construction in Alaska; Colt is a truck dispatcher in Mount Pleasant; Dallas works for a heating and air company in Little Rock, Arkansas; and Corey is employed at a company that finds jobs for felons and minorities. They have all left Linden.
Billy Ray currently lives in a nursing home in Texarkana, where I went with Lue to visit him one afternoon last fall. Bouquets of plastic flowers brightened what was otherwise a dreary place. Just beyond the entryway, an Alzheimer’s patient wheeled himself down the hall, which smelled of bleach and urine. An obese man in a nursing gown sat next to a beat-up piano, chewing his lower lip and watching Gunsmoke. We went to Billy Ray’s room, where a small window afforded a glimpse of the sidewalk outside; his roommate dozed while a TV droned in the background. Billy Ray broke into a grin when he saw Lue, and he nodded at me, wordlessly sticking his hand out in greeting. He was even thinner than in the photos I had seen of him. His T-shirt hung loosely from his delicate frame, and his gray sweatpants were secured at his waist with a belt. He wore his hair in braids, and each time he smiled, he revealed a few wildly uneven teeth. Along the side of his shoes’ thick white rubber soles his name was written in indelible black ink.
Billy Ray sat quietly with his hands clasped in front of him while Lue asked him a few questions. He had trouble making even simple conversation, and when he did, his words came out as strange, mangled sounds that Lue often had to decipher for me. Still, he was eager to communicate; he showed us his collection of audiotapes, which he kept in a plastic bag, handing over each cassette for us to look at. Afterward he took us on a tour, and he proved to be popular with the nurses. “How you doing, Billy Ray?” said each woman who strode by, and he returned the attention with a shy smile. He did not need a wheelchair any longer, but he still walked stiffly, with his shoulders hunched over, moving like a man nearly twice his age. When we passed a woman with snow-white hair, Billy Ray pointed at her and said, “We friends.” We followed him outside into the courtyard, where he stopped and stood in the sunlight for a moment and closed his eyes, taking in the warmth of the late fall afternoon.
When we went back inside, we sat down in the lounge to talk. Lue said that it would be all right to ask Billy Ray about the assault, but as soon as I broached the subject, he began folding and refolding the white jacket in his lap.
“Do you remember anything about that night?” I asked him.
“Bonfire,” he said, nodding.
“Do you remember anything else?”
He thought for a long time. “Country Store,” he said.
“Do you know how you were hurt?”
“No, ma’am.”
“What do you think about what happened?”
Billy Ray furrowed his brow, and Lue and I had to lean forward to hear what he said next. “Wasn’t right,” he said, shaking his head. “Wasn’t right.”
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