The Horse Killers
Bored and angry, a group of kids in a small East Texas town took out their hostility on a horse, whose violent death shocked the world.
(Page 2 of 4)
The five had much in common. Like Oliver, they lacked reliable father figures, and their mothers worked for low wages—though each child was far better off than Oliver. All five of them had been given after-school tutoring; all five, wrote one administrator to the Hardin County authorities, “were hand-scheduled to make sure they had the teachers who we felt could give them the opportunities they needed.” Yet they were often disruptive in class, given to defying teachers’ orders, and consistently involved in hallway skirmishes with classmates. They bullied, stole change from other kids. Four of them had been placed on probation in the spring of 1995 for breaking into the school on one or two occasions, vandalizing the classrooms, and stealing money out of the vending machines.
Sam, the only one who didn’t participate in the burglaries, was a college scholarship-quality football player and the smartest of the group—“But also the meanest,” says one of the teachers. He was heard to address one black lawman with “Hey, boy” and once lunged at a teacher and had to be restrained in a headlock by the principal. Though county authorities couldn’t prove it, they believed that Sam had been involved in a drive-by shooting in 1994 and a related aggravated assault the following year—“The two most violent juvenile crimes we’d had till the horse incident,” says one official. Sam was more astute at covering his tracks than his twelve-year-old brother, Doyle, who in addition to the burglary had twice been shipped off to the authorities for disorderly conduct at school. Mason, a frequent runaway whose mother had long ago told probation officers, “I can’t control him, and I wish you’d send him somewhere,” was perhaps the most openly rebellious of the lot, while Willie saw more sport in bullying his smaller classmates. Willie and his twelve-year-old sister Charisse were inseparable, and the latter was every bit as hard-edged as the former. Charisse took her schoolwork more seriously than the rest until her wayward attention span or hot temper would inevitably do her in. “They were all scared of her—white kids, black kids, even the teachers,” says one faculty member.
The company that Oliver fell into was, by all accounts, unsupervised—“a pack of kids running around like a pack of dogs,” as one local law enforcement official puts it. They roamed the streets of Silsbee day and night. School sports would have been available to them had they not been thrown off the teams or kept from trying out because “their stubborn behavior and poor attitude made them impossible to work with,” according to one coach. When disciplined, several of them would claim that they were being singled out because of the color of their skin. In fact, most of the Silsbee teachers were white; then again, about 30 percent of the students were black and seemed to get along fine with the faculty. It dismayed faculty members to hear children so readily playing the race card.
Then again, a few of the veteran teachers had an insight into the matter. After all, they had taught the children’s mothers too.
"IT WAS A RACIST THING, THAT’S WHAT it was,” Joyce says as she disperses her cigarette smoke and stares furiously at the ground. “They’ve done ’em so wrong. Shackled down and all. Locked up like animals. The good Lord ain’t sleepin’, I’ll tell you that.”
“They come from good homes,” chimes in Darlene, her voice louder but less bitter than Joyce’s. “Good homes! Sometimes I pull double shifts trying to make ends meet. I don’t have no record. They try to make it sound like they was runnin’ wild.”
“Like we was drug addicts,” spits out Joyce. “Street women. You can’t watch any child seven and twenty-four. It ain’t like that. I felt like telling ’em, ‘Okay, just take me to jail, ’cause I was wrong. I wasn’t paying more attention.’ But we was working. Every last one of us was working. Working hard.”
There is a pridefulness about the woman that must be terrifying to some, including the waitress at the local Golden Corral who tiptoes up and asks if Joyce would like her glass refilled, a question Joyce sullenly answers in the affirmative only after it is asked three times. Her attractiveness is the hard kind, while Darlene is rounder and more genial. In the restaurant, everyone is staring at us. The two women are conspicuous in every way, and they are not apologizing, not for anything. Darlene and Joyce work together at a retirement home. They have known each other since childhood, during which time they cultivated fearsome reputations. (“Darlene would meet you at the candy machine, and if you didn’t give her your change, she’d whup you,” remembers one former classmate. “And Joyce was just as mean as a snake.”) Though they have little good to say in return about their birthplace—“Hardin County: Hard On Blacks” is their summation—they have remained in Silsbee, as if daring the city to make the first move. In the meantime, they have raised their children to wear chips on their shoulders as they have, to grow up in a posture of resentment, and to obey a singular commandment: “Thou shalt not respect any white authority figure.” Today, each woman has two children in state correctional facilities, all four having been punished for their role in the killing of Coach Woodard’s horse.
“When they sent Sam off, they made him get down on his knees and they shackled him,” Joyce remembers in her low, venomous voice.
“And my Charisse—when I go visit her in that reform school, they bring her out in shackles,” moans Darlene. “They got her in a place where they don’t let her see sunlight or nothin’. And if they get bad, they get strapped down to a chair. I told her, ‘Girl, behave, you do what you have to do. But don’t you let them strap you down to no chair.’”
“Jesus ain’t sleepin’,” murmurs Joyce.
“Now, my boy Willie owned up to what he did,” Darlene says. “He said that he hit that horse one or two times.”
“They were chunking sticks at it,” nods Joyce. “But the horse was still alive when they left. Those children did not beat that horse to death.”
One of the more embarrassing elements of the mothers’ shared sense of victimization is that they promote this classic child’s lie—namely, that a second group of children actually arrived on the scene and killed the horse after their own children had vacated the premises. Repeatedly the two women undercut their own credibility: criticizing the media for sensationalizing the horse-killing case and then asking me if I intend to pay for this interview; extolling their sense of parental responsibility and then falsely claiming that they are meeting the court-ordered restitution payments for the horse’s death; and generally refusing to acknowledge that their children are somewhat less than angelic.
All the same, there is something inherently sympathetic about their predicament. It has been all too easy to criticize the mothers, all too easy to forget the fathers who long ago abandoned the household. No thanks to the fathers, the women are not welfare mothers; they do not have arrest records. There is little doubt that they truly believe they are doing the best job possible of raising their children. In fact, Joyce offers me a challenge: “You come to our houses, and you tell me if we live like street trash.” And after we hop into the car and drive to her apartment, I find that she is right: It is neat and modestly fashionable—and Darlene’s house, though forbidding in appearance from the outside, is warmly cluttered with pictures of her two incarcerated children.
The public response to their children’s crime has staggered the two mothers. Men and women they grew up with have written to the Silsbee Bee, suggesting that the children be neutered or beaten to death. People they have never met, from all over the world, have labeled their children monsters. After Joyce, in the heat of indignation upon her children’s arrest, made the unfortunate remark to a reporter that “if they’re gonna make me pay restitution for that horse, I better get some of that meat in my freezer,” one student told her that a schoolteacher had remarked to her class, “They ought to give her the meat with maggots in it.” A schoolteacher! “People get shot every day,” Darlene says with a sigh. “A baby got killed around here recently, and the next day everyone forgets about it. But every day we hear it: horse killing, horse killing.” It wasn’t teenage white kids in nearby Lumberton selling crack on schoolyards, it wasn’t a drive-by shooting in Kountze—it wasn’t those less-publicized crimes, it was an animal, only an animal, and after all, it was still alive when their children left…
My Library
