October 17, 2003

I should own another house today because I would have bet the one I own that Denver District Attorney Bill Ritter would never bring charges against officer James Turney.

I've in the past chided the DA both publicly and privately on his record in such matters, one that actually doesn't exist because he's never once brought charges in the some 70 officer-involved shootings that have occurred on his watch.

On this one, though, the DA has done the right thing. As much as I might hate to admit it.

Bill Ritter would never be able to make a charge stick in this, the latest shooting by James Turney of a disabled, knife-carrying black teen.

I know this because I listened to Ritter and read his 30-plus page investigative report on the shooting death of 15-year-old Paul Childs.

It is the saddest, most gut-wrenching thing I have read in some time. You put it down, walk away from it and clearly see the young boy did not have to die that way.

Of all the tragic characters in the DA's long narrative, none is sadder than the retarded and now dead teenage boy who, it is clear, wanted only to escape the locked cage he saw his mother's home to be.

He simply wanted to go explore again, to take the bus once again, maybe to Boulder or down south to Interstate 225 and County Line Road, as he had in the days leading up to his death.

Grabbing a knife and silently following his mother around the house with it - something he had never before done - was an apparent plea to be let out of the house.

It was July 5 and, maybe, he was remembering his incarceration from June 25 to July 1 in the adolescent psychiatric unit at Children's Hospital, an evaluation time that was ordered after the cops had found him miles from home on County Line.

Maybe that is why he fished through the kitchen drawer and found the knife. Maybe, too, it is why his sister, Ashley, a year older than he, called the police when he picked it up.

She'd long known the cops were a calming force in his life. They would always bring Paul Childs home, or get him and her mom the help they both needed.

Like two nights before, on July 3, when she called the police after Paul tried to go exploring and her mom grabbed him and sat atop him in their front yard.

The officers that day lifted Helen Childs from her son and helped her get him back into the house. They helped her fix the lock on the screen door that would keep Paul inside, the one she would keep locked for the next two days until four officers arrived, ordered her to flee through it and shot her boy dead just inside it, a knife still clutched in his hand.

James Turney could not have not known that Helen Childs, Ashley and two of Paul Childs' cousins never took Paul's threats that seriously as he stalked his mother through the Thrill Place house.

He couldn't have known the boy's mother had sat for a while in her bedroom, waiting for her son to calm down. Or that a cousin had actually snatched the knife from him at one point, telling him, "Stop playing."

"Put down the knife," they kept telling the boy. Zombielike, he heeded none of it. The police will help, Ashley clearly thought, as she sat on the family sofa and dialed 911.

Her description to 911 operators of what was happening in the house was much more dire than what those in the house would later recount. What's clear is that everyone there that July 5 afternoon believed the police, whom Paul revered, would do what they'd always done:

Defuse everything and make Paul behave.

James Turney was the first to arrive at 5550 Thrill Place. He was quickly joined by three other officers, two carrying Taser guns. He would order Helen and Ashley Childs and the two cousins out of the house.

Helen Childs fumbled with the screen-door lock. She and the others ran out, James Turney keeping a foot between it and the threshold, wedging it open.

"Drop the knife!" he and the other officers yelled at the boy. Paul said nothing. It was like he was high on drugs, Turney and the others would recount later.

One would aim the Taser laser beam on him. Another would put his Taser away and draw his gun. Turney drew only his service weapon. Only seconds had elapsed.

It had happened so quickly.

James Turney stood with his gun smoking in his hand. The 15-year-old retarded boy, the one Turney would later remember as the one he'd helped home not too long ago, lay in the doorway of his mother's home dying from the four slugs pumped into his body.

A distinct melancholy surrounded Bill Ritter on Thursday morning as he announced his decision. He simply could not prove, he said, a crime had occurred "beyond a reasonable doubt."

He spoke of sharing Helen Child's pain, and of sharing the frustration of an entire community over the shooting, a community in which he lives. "I hear it every day," he said.

He was followed to the microphone by the Rev. Reginald Holmes, president of the Greater Denver Ministerial Alliance and pastor of the New Covenant Christian Church.

The reverend, too, wore a melancholy, totally resigned and detached expression as he sought for the right words.

"Painful. Absolutely painful," was all he could come up with.

He understood the DA's reasons for arriving at his decision, he said. "Still, we're talking about a child here that was killed. Having it all explained away so clinically is . . . painful."

Yet what does he now tell his congregants? Certainly we as citizens of Denver must have learned some moral lessons. Certainly change can come from this tragedy, he said. But what?

How does he tell those who look to him for guidance to understand? Yet again.

Yes, the officer likely was within the law when he shot and killed Paul Childs, the Rev. Holmes grimaced. And he understands the law, he said.

But people make laws, he said, and something needs to be done.

When it was all over, I thought mostly of Ashley Childs and her mother, Helen. What must they be thinking? Would they risk ever calling the police again?

A clue is Helen Child's final statement to police the night her boy died.

She had spent the final hours of her son's life trying to persuade him not to let the police see him with a knife, how they would pull guns on him.

Remember what the social worker said, she'd warned her son of his incessant running away.

"That social worker told him," she said to investigators the night of July 5, " 'You gonna learn the hard way.'

"If you haven't learned why you was in Children's Hospital," she had told her son, begging him to drop the knife, "you are gonna learn the hard way."

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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