Officers with the Drug Enforcement Unit of Darlington County killed Ernest Russell, Jr. in October of 2011. His life wasn’t worth a single damn then, and it’s not worth a single damn now.
Last year, at around this moment, South Carolina suffered a crisis. No, it wasn’t the killing of nine people at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston. It was a derivative crisis. South Carolina’s lethal indifference was under attack. For decades, centuries even, respectable whites have empowered a culture where racial enlightenment amounts to little more than politely ignoring racial inequity. South Carolina was under the public eye in that moment. Surely when you fly the Confederate Flag on your state house grounds, and a young white man uses that rag for motivation in slaughtering nine respectable negroes, you can’t sit idly by and maintain that mantle of racial forwardness. You have to do something. I feared in that moment that South Carolina’s collective doing something would be the political equivalent of a high school practice hero. We all knew the guy. He dove for fly balls when he could have coasted under them. He went all out in practice to impress the coaches. But he didn’t accomplish much, or really help the team. It was all a show, a contrived act designed to draw attention to himself and his efforts.
And that’s what we did. Profile pictures changed. Everyone urged me to “Pray for Charleston,” as if it was the city itself that was victimized and not the insular black community there. It was all real nice on the surface, and surprisingly difficult to challenge, too. Who wants to be the guy banging the drum during the rare moment of racial harmony? I lost friends when I tried to be that guy. Cautioning against the danger of fake action, I wrote:
When you say "Pray for Charleston," you make yourself a member of the sub-set of victims. As if this guy was dropped onto planet earth from somewhere else, divorced from the reality of white supremacy that we've helped to protect and nurture, to inflict his terror. As he did something to YOU, or to US. He didn't. The average 25-year old white guy drinking his way through a summer on King Street does not need my prayers. He needs to face the cold reality that when he is silent on issues of race every day through the year, he helps to support the structure that de-humanizes black people in such a way that this sort of crime can happen.
He needs to face, as we all need to face, that discussions about names of old racists on buildings, or nice little moments where the governor of our state longingly remembers Strom Thurmond, ARE connected to this crime. When you generalize this crime, and make yourself among the victims, you remove from yourself the responsibility that should come with this crime. "Pray for Charleston" says, "Pray for Me," as my city has suffered such a great loss. The truth is that we as white folks are not in any way a victim of this, but rather, we're the people who have the ability and responsibility to bring change to the institutional structures that celebrate white supremacy.
I wrote, too, that the removal of the Confederate Flag should serve as a starting point, and a promise, rather than as some sign of our moral renaissance. The flag’s removal was treated as triumph in racial achievement, when it should have been a covenant with our black community to listen, to learn, and to act in the face of future inequality. But it wasn’t. Rather, it was a collective off-loading of guilt, a political “black friend” stand-in, giving respectable whites the cover they’ve needed to carry on with lethal indifference.
A year later, we’re faced with a reckoning, an audit of sorts on whether or not that facade of racial harmony was real or whether it was White America’s attempt to extricate itself from an uncomfortable conversation as quickly as possible.
The people of Darlington elected to the Sheriff's Office an under-educated racist eight years ago. I find it hard to blame them. Under-educated racists land in local office in places like Darlington like arrows landed in shields during the fight scenes of 300. Over Wayne Byrd’s tenure, I’ve expressed concern that the culture he’s cultivated might eventually lead to the killing of a black man. When my parents expressed concern that I took such a negative view of their neighbor, I explained that I wanted to change the Darlington culture before I had to come home and lead protests after some black man was slain. I made those arguments in 2012, 2013, and later, years after Ernest Russell, Jr. had been killed right under my nose.
I never knew, and there’s reason for that. The media in my town is complicit in a malignant scam. Newspaper owners and television station general managers have traded in their journalistic accountability for insignificant relationships with the corrupt power brokers. It’s not surprising, of course. When you’re in the bubble, being friends with a small-town sheriff seems like a big deal. After all, his re-election slogan claims that he’s “Unbought and Unbossed.” It’s why, when considering whether to write this piece, I was forced to consider whether the writing would bring on repercussions for my family members. Notwithstanding the fact that they’ve supported the Sheriff’s campaign publicly, there was a real fear that negative writing might bring physical violence or other harassment against them. I shuttered the doors to truth in favor of being a Good Son. I like justice, but maybe I like my parents’ continued breathing a bit more. That fear’s at the root of the problem, too. When the Sheriff’s cultivated a culture of silence so strong that you fear contextualizing his corruption, it’s sign enough that the town’s culture is in desperate need of an exorcism.
Ernest Russell’s death went largely unreported, save two articles released the day of the killing. Those read more like press releases from the Sheriff’s Office, giving sparse facts about how officers “were forced” to fire on a citizen. Somehow, nine bullets flying into the body of Ernest Russell failed to move the needle in a town where not a single murder was reported in 2011. The media didn't give a damn. Ernest Russell’s life was worth less than the feelings of Darlingtonians who might be forced to re-consider their lethal indifference in the face of the news.
That’s what I thought, at least. Surely if the death of Russell is revealed in a real way, as it was when the Washington Post’s Radley Balko wrote about it this week, the people of Darlington would rise up to correct the injustice. One razor or another tells the thinker to always assume negligence before you assume malice. People were just ignorant of the facts. They weren’t blatantly condoning state-sponsored murder of a fellow resident, right?
That’s all up for debate now. Reports suggest that even though Radley Balko leveled accusations that the Sheriff’s Drug Enforcement Unit conducted a no-knock raid and killed a man for largely no reason, then covered it up, the town’s people have responded with a giant “oh well.” Aw-shucks bullshit reveals that the value of Ernest Russell’s life ranks right up there with the value of the other black lives that were long ago abandoned in Darlington.
The facts of Russell's killing suggest something sinister. Deputy Ben Weatherford burst into Russell’s residence and killed the man within five seconds. Weatherford screamed only the words “Show me your hands, motherfucker,” despite telling State Law Enforcement Division investigators that he’d announced himself and given Russell a half-dozen warnings to drop the gun. Weatherford fired while a confidential informant was still in the room. And about that confidential informant, the Drug Enforcement Unit had sought her assistance in gaining a search warrant that could have led, at best, to misdemeanor gambling charges for Russell. Though Radley Balko’s piece suggested that police have been cracking down on gambling recently, this is only selectively true. In the small town of Darlington, any citizen with a lick of sense can tell you at least two places where you can go to play college football parlay cards like the ones Russell was suspected of selling. Gambling is as Darlington as apple pie. Just ask any of the 500 or so people who participate each bowl season in a bowl pool that’s included city leaders, local radio personalities, and countless of those Serious-Faced Deacons From Your Local Baptist Church.
There are other facts, too. The Drug Enforcement Unit was a joint effort between the local law enforcement offices and the Fourth Circuit Solicitor’s Office (South Carolina’s name for the DA’s Office), run by elected official William Rogers. Rogers sat in his role as Solicitor on the Board of Governors of the Drug Enforcement Unit. Worse, the Solicitor’s Office received an equal share to the Darlington County Sheriff’s Office of money seized in raids by the DEU. Rogers, the man charged with making the decision on whether to seek a criminal indictment against Ben Weatherford, was both in a supervisory role of Weatherford’s unit and had a financial stake in the outcomes of raids just like the one that killed Ernest Russell.
If that conflict of interest wasn’t blatant enough, other facts cast aspersions both on the ethics of the Solicitor and the motives of the men who killed Russell. Russell had been arrested in 2007 on allegations of sexual assault of a minor. The allegations stemmed from reports from his daughter. In 2011, Russell remained out on $75,000 bond for the crime. He’d yet to be taken to trial. Surely the nearly five-year delay in taking a poor, black accused pedophile to trial must send a strange signal to those familiar with South Carolina criminal justice. Russell was just the sort of man the Solicitor’s Office would have loved to have tried, if they could have. The only reason a solicitor would wait that long to pursue that case was if he had trouble making the case.
Russell’s criminal defense lawyer must have agreed. She had filed a motion for speedy trial relief a few months before the raid killed her client. It was entirely possible that a court might have ruled that Russell’s speedy trial rights were violated. There was a chance, maybe even a good chance, that the state was going to lose its case on a Sixth Amendment “technicality.” The Sheriff’s Office must have known that. The name of Darlington Police Chief Danny Watson was on Russell’s original arrest warrant. Watson shared a place on the governing board of the DEU with Wayne Byrd and solicitor William Rogers.
As Balko reported, the State Law Enforcement Division, charged with investigating police-involved shootings, never seems to have watched the body cam video captured by an officer who ran in after Weatherford. It’s not even clear whether Weatherford knew he was on camera. The man wearing the camera came from Hartsville, another city entirely, and Weatherford’s own Sheriff’s Office didn’t use body cameras at the time. The County took great pains to keep the video out of the public light, emboldened by a state law that makes body cameras non-requestable under the Freedom of Information Act. While the video itself doesn’t show much of what happened in the last few seconds of Russell’s life, it does show one thing—Ben Weatherford lied, badly, about what prompted him to shoot. SLED never asked about the discrepancy. It sent a report to the Solicitor's Office suggesting that the shooting had been justified.
William Rogers agreed. He and chief assistant Sherrie Baugh declined to file charges, closing the case quickly.
How Russell died and why members of the Drug Enforcement Unit created a dangerous situation for all involved is certainly up for dispute. Weatherford claims Russell raised a gun at him. The crime scene photos show the gun a few feet away from Russell, laying on his desk near some papers and a stapler. No blood was found on the gun. Russell was said to have raised the gun in his right hand, but the gun fell to the left. Russell’s body didn’t fall at the angle you might expect if the gun had spun out of his hand to the left. He fell directly forward, his face embedding in the desk as if he’d been curb-stomped. Making matters worse, Russell’s arms ended up under the desk, a curious place if he’d been pointing a gun at Weatherford. Police experts interviewed in the civil case wondered why Weatherford yelled at Russell to “show me your hands motherfucker” if Russell had been pointing the gun at Weatherford. That command, those experts argued, seemed more appropriate for a scenario in which Russell’s hands had been out of sight, as they were when he finally fell to his last resting position.
Police are boxed in, as well, by a tricky justification. They’d used a confidential informant, who had to have warned them about Russell’s gun. It’s his right to have one, of course. South Carolina has a strong castle doctrine and an even stronger culture of gun rights. The ability of Russell to protect himself from intruders is sacrosanct there. That Weatherford knew about the gun and charged in anyway suggests that he wanted a dangerous situation where he might have been able to justify killing Russell. It’s why police experts urge officers to use no-knock raids sparingly, if at all. The evidence suggests that Russell wasn’t holding a gun when he was killed, and problematically, it suggests that even if he was, he was justified in doing so in light of Weatherford’s negligent tactics.
If a black man is killed off Main Street in the middle of the afternoon and no one knows about it, did it really happen? It did, but no one gave a damn. No one gave a damn to investigate when Byrd claimed that his officer had been “forced” to kill a citizen. No one gave a damn to investigate who Ernest Russell was, or why the police had failed for seemingly the first time to provide negative details about the victim. We found out every time Michael Brown Googled “where to buy weed in Ferguson,” but police didn’t care to tell the public that Russell was under active indictment for child sexual assault. Surely that wasn’t coincidental. The office didn’t want people to start asking why a man who the office suspected to be a pedophile had turned up dead in an unexplainably aggressive raid before he ever had a chance to have his day in court. The Sheriff bet that no one would care enough about Ernest Russell to ask any further questions.
And he was right. Ben Weatherford is still a member of the Darlington County Sheriff’s Office. Reports indicate that he’s put in to work at SLED, the same state agency that covered up his crime. He’s since flipped his police vehicle, going in excess of 100MPH in a 35MPH zone, only to receive a week’s worth of suspension from his Sheriff. And that’s Sheriff’s been re-elected since Russell was killed. He routinely tweets racially incendiary material from his private Facebook page, including a chilling meme about police “killing thugs” that was re-tweeted, coincidentally, by Ben Weatherford.
To not know can be excused. It’s a shame, of course, that my hometown’s segregation has left it so racially disconnected that a man could lose his life to gunfire without a single person I know even hearing about it. But that can be chalked up to the ambivalence of living. The average Joe and Jane living off Medford in Darlington isn’t a warrior for equity. Mostly, they’re warriors for their own lives, and children, and hopes and dreams. But when word of widespread corruption was dropped in their lap, many shrugged it off.
If democracy is to mean anything, it must mean that a small town that receives the big bright spotlight of national media in exposing widespread corruption should rise up to vanquish the corrupt from public office. If democracy can’t accomplish that, then what can it accomplish? What hope is there for a black community where 42-percent of children are born into poverty if the populace can’t even be motivated to care when a brother is killed and the the local media colludes with law enforcement and the prosecutor’s office to keep it all quiet. The incident has cost the county $500,000 in settlements so far, with plenty more to come. And even that couldn’t move the notoriously fiscally conservative white power base to give a single damn about the killing of Ernest Russell.
Some limbs can be saved when they’re infected by gangrene. In some cases, the malignancy can be cut and the wound healed. It can grow again. But some limbs are so mangled that the only logical next step is to cut them off. My hometown is at that point of no return now, if it hasn’t been before. It’s been presented with an opportunity to at least pretend that it’s concerned about voting into office those who will treat the poorest and blackest with human dignity and respect.
But it looks right now like my town’s thrown aside that opportunity, opting instead for the same old Lethal Indifference that led to the killing of Ernest Russell, to the desecration of its once-proud black community, and to the abandonment of every last child born into poverty in the neighborhoods that surround the place where Russell lost his life.