April 2, 2004

Memo to Police Chief Gerry Whitman:

You should have cut the guy loose.

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I know. "Easy for you to say," you'll tell me, "the guy has a career, a family, a mortgage and bills like the rest of us."

Too bad, Chief.

James Turney, quite clearly, is in the wrong line of work.

Not only is he making life extremely tough for you and his fellow officers, he's making it downright knee-rattling scary for those of us in Denver with kids.

How many more children are you going to allow this man to kill?

Twice in the span of two years he's shown up at Denver homes where teenage boys were acting up, being the fools teenage boys with teenage problems, compounded by physical disabilities, will be.

And twice, he's killed them.

C'mon, Chief. Like you, I've waded through the sorrow and the horrific tears shed by the families of those two boys, people who desperately loved them, who believed summoning your officers would help them calm their troubled sons.

Instead, James Turney arrived and killed the two boys.

And for the Paul Childs shooting, all the officer will receive - if your recommendation is approved - is a 20-day suspension? Will you lightly slap his gun hand, too?

Tell me, Chief - just so others will know, too - exactly what does it take for a man or woman in your shop to get flat-out fired these days?

The man killed two disabled boys in the span of 18 months, two boys who fell to their deaths as their mothers looked on in horror.

The first boy couldn't even hear James Turney and the others' commands. The second boy, wanting only to go out and see the neighborhood your officers had earlier graciously driven him around to see, likely thought, through his disability, that James Turney and the others were there to take him for another ride.

Huh? Knife? Huh?

Blam! Blam! Blam!

That's the way it went down, Chief. You know this. James Turney could have stepped out of the way and let the other officer with the Taser do his work. No, he decided to kill Paul Childs.

Twenty days?

Have you ever met Helen Childs or Regina Keith, Chief?

OK, I am certain you must have. Did you pick up the phone and tell them about the 20 days?

How about JoAnn Smith, Gregory Smith's sister? That little girl still sticks with me, Chief, the way she walked me around the house the day after James Turney killed her brother, how she was so brave telling me what she did.

She called him Tank, Chief. Everyone did.

I remember standing with her at the top of the stairwell, just off the kitchen, of the tiny Garfield Street house where Tank died, the way she demonstrated where James Turney stood as he fired, the way she recounted in her squeaky little voice how her brother slumped over. The thing I remember is how calmly she recounted it all, Chief, the way she said James Turney had his gun out, ready to go, before some of the other officers there that day.

She nearly cried when telling me how she watched this all play out, how she knew her brother wasn't wearing his hearing aid that day, how he never liked wearing it.

JoAnn Smith knew her brother couldn't hear the officers telling him to drop the little pocketknife in his hand, how she knew it, too. And she watched it all.

You should call up JoAnn Smith to your office and tell her about the 20 days.

I know, too, what you are thinking. It's what a lot of people are thinking. Oh, he's going on about this only because he's black, and those two boys were black.

Perhaps this is so, Chief. The only men who've ever pulled a gun on me wore a police officer's uniform. I didn't even have so much as a knife.

It happened three times before I was 18. I often wonder still whether they did the same thing back then to white boys in a different part of the city.

Everything in America is about race, Chief. It is why others, too, will want to hand you your head in the coming days.

Yet what I understand more has nothing to do with race, but with sorrow. The picture of a sobbing mother, a sobbing sister hunched over the lifeless body of someone they loved, people who'd only asked your officers for assistance.

You ever had the mother of a boy killed by one of your officers marvel to you that her boy didn't scream or cry out when the bullet struck?

I have. All I saw, and still see, is her. "Not a word," I remember her telling me. "He just fell down. And he died," she whispered, "so quietly."

Tell me, Chief, what does it take?

Twenty days?

Shame on you.

Bill Johnson's column appears Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. Call him at 303 892-2763 or e-mail him at johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com.

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