Bridging gaps with something greater

By Kevin Lee

Deanna’s on my mind every day now. When I watch the news, when I read the paper, she arises. It’s been 14 years since she died, 14 years since she was fatally bludgeoned in the late afternoon, just inside the family business south of the Loop area.

Along with her husband Marc and their four kids, she lived in the apartment beside me for a few years. Truth is, I was more a friend of her husband. We often sat up late, drinking beer, playing backgammon, listening to music from Marc’s expansive LP collection.

But I remember Deanna just as well. She was quiet, incisive, reserved but nice.

They owned a used tire shop on Cherokee Street, in a neighborhood on the lower end of the socio-economic scale. The residents were working class people who sweat for a living and made the gears of the world turn. Deanna was right there with them, able to jump into a job, wresting tires off and on rims as quickly as Marc. I can still see her laughing with customers, grease on her forehead, baby on her hip, a post-modern Rosie the Riveter.

On Friday, June 13, 1996, Marc left the tire store to go drop the kids at church. While he was gone, someone slipped into the warehouse and beat Deanna to death with a tire iron. There appeared to be no robbery.

Another customer discovered her not long after the assailant left. Sirens came, Marc returned and off they went to the hospital. She died a couple of hours later. She was three days shy of her 37th birthday.

“These people were just livid,” a detective told media. “I’ve never been in a neighborhood where everyone universally was outraged at what had happened. Everybody said what a good person she was.”

A memorial service was planned by leaders from the immediate neighborhoods. Names like Robert Battles, Rev. Wesley James of Franklin Street Baptist Church and City Councilman Clinton Johnson were top billed for the event.

The murderer was never found. In fact, the case just slipped from the public consciousness in short order. There was a three-sentence mention in a 2001 Press-Register story on past cold cases but other than that, not a lot.

All of that haunted me when, less than a year after Deanna’s young children were left motherless, another local murder sent the entirety of the city into a tailspin. Robert Ellingwood, a 25-year old from a well-to-do family was shot in Cathedral Square late on a Friday night, not for robbery or anything material, just for death’s sake alone.

Television news primed the fear pump and sprayed it across the town.

The Press-Register’s headline screamed, “SON OF LOCAL DOCTOR SLAIN ON DAUPHIN ST.” The proliferate accounts in the paper dripped with horror and indignation. Sound Off was ablaze with commentary as was the editorial page.

In the first week after Ellingwood’s death, there were no less than 12 articles circulating his murder. In the first month, twice that number. Even now, a Newsbank search of Press-Register archives brings back 80 hits. Among those was one in a story listing Mobile’s most famous unsolved cases.

Another was a follow-up that touted Ellingwood’s death as “the crime that sparked change” in downtown. It cited the increase in foot patrols, the installation of video surveillance and the precinct that officials scrambled to relocate to a spot overlooking where he was slain.

Huge reward sums were offered, a portion from the governor himself. Billboards appeared begging for information. It remains unsolved.

The Ellingwood case was a tragedy, on all counts. A parent’s endurance of a child’s death is an especially terrible thing for the human psyche and this kind of random crime is particularly frightening.

But one tragic aspect of it is often overlooked in the years since in that the scab it pulled from Mobile’s racial wounds was troubling. One member of the Human Relations Commission, created by then-Mayor Mike Dow to promote community unity, was shaken in the wake of the black-on-white crime.

“I’ve been hearing some really scary things,” Betsy Luther told the Press-Register. “It sounds like it’s becoming a race thing.”

The newspaper described a specific increase of volume and vehemence. “The Mobile Register has received an almost unprecedented number of Sound Off calls about the Ellingwood case,” they wrote. “Many of the callers have seen the killing in racial terms, some making unprintable racist remarks.”

Personally, it was hard for me to fight comparisons between the reaction to the Ellingwood tragedy and my friend’s murder. I reminded myself of my bias, but it did little to ease my perception of the discrepancies.

Was it about race? I’m not sure. Deanna was white, as are her kids and husband.

Was it about connections? Ellingwood was from a family of means with ties to Mobile’s upper crust while Deanna was a transplant from Minnesota.

To me those things shouldn’t have mattered. One random murder should be no less important than another, to law enforcement, media, whomever.

So why have memories of Deanna arisen now? Mainly because I see some of the same discrepancies, some of the same ugly public reaction stirring once more.

Kyser Miree’s recent senseless murder in Midtown elicited much the same response as Ellingwood’s death did 13 years ago. Voluminous outrage, coverage, rewards, the whole nine yards. But there’s one major difference these days and you’re utilizing it right now.

Thanks to the Internet, the reactions that could be kept from Sound Off in 1997 are now flooding the comments below stories on the newspaper’s website. The font of racism they shower us with is despicable and alarming. If anyone had any doubts about the origins of Southern stereotypes, about the continuing specters of bombed churches and police dogs and fire hoses, those bits of hatred explain it all.

The more palatable of the public reactions to Miree’s horrific death orbit his young age of 23, the unfulfilled promise and his ability to keep himself on the right path. That’s understandable.

In early August, 18-year-old Prichard resident Jordan Packer was gunned down on an open street in the afternoon. By all accounts, he was a good student and loving family member with a pleasant demeanor who was never in trouble. Police are still stumped as to the killer.

But there’s been no uproar over Packer’s death, no rewards, few news stories. However, there is something other than grieving family and friends his story shares with accounts of Miree’s murder. In the 19 comments beneath one Packer web story, nine of them take an antagonistic stance toward black people as a group, some even conflating politics of “liberal Democrats” with the murder.

No one really wants to slip into the darkness, to fade away forever, but we have no choice. In that case, who wouldn’t want their death to count for something? What will the death of Jordan Packer mean? Could it be we finally look at the gaps in our perception and ask why they persist?

I know what Deanna’s death meant. No police station was built. No cameras were installed. Her departure meant her kids grew up without a mother and Marc continued on without a wife. It meant others lost a friend and a neighbor who wasn’t afraid to let her better nature rule.

A recent search for Deanna’s name turned up her second oldest daughter on a list of law school grads in New Orleans. I have to wonder if for that young woman, Deanna’s death was the force to push her to that end.

So ultimately, down the line, Deanna’s death can at least mean justice for someone else.