219: High Speed Chase

Ira Glass

Not long ago, Cory was driving home with his girlfriend, Dominique, from his job with the Chicago Transit Authority. He's a painter for them. When somebody spray paints graffiti on a subway stop, he's the guy who paints over it. He's 26. She's 22. So they're driving home.

Ira Glass

They wrote on the window. And from that point, things happened pretty quickly. They guy curses at him and throws a beer can, which actually comes through the window and lands inside spilling beer on Dominique. Cory throws one of those sample sized paint cans back at the guy. And then the other car, a gray SUV starts to follow Cory and Dominique. Cory tries to lose him making turns, driving through a parking lot. Here's Dominique.

Ira Glass

This is probably as good a place as any to tell you who was chasing them. They were being pursued by five white off-duty police officers from Cook County Sheriff's Office who'd been drinking at a cocktail fundraiser for the sheriff, and then after that at a bar. They were not in uniform.

Lawyers for the officers declined our requests for interviews. But we do have a recording of them made the night of the shootings when they called 911 from their SUV on a cell phone.

(SUBJECT) 911 DISPATCHER Counter emergency TC-14. How may I help you?

Ira Glass

This is officer Robert Jones telling two different 911 dispatchers that he's in pursuit of a vehicle and they should send backup.

Ira Glass

Actually, they're following a tan Ford Explorer. They're in a gray Chevy.

Ira Glass

Although there were five officers in the car following him, on the 911 tape, Officer Jones gets the number wrong a couple times saying there were six officers or seven.

Their side of it is this. They say they were chasing a reckless driver, and that they only started shooting after somebody shot at them. No gun was found in Cory Simmons' car. He denies having a gun.

But listening on the 911 tape, it does seem possible that the officers thought they heard shots, even if none had been fired.

Ira Glass

Also on the tape, you hear the officers in the background laughing and saying boom, boom, boom. And then there's this when they point to an alley in pursuit.

Ira Glass

Some time passes.

Ira Glass

The chase ended when Cory and Dominique finally spotted a police station and ran inside saying somebody was chasing them trying to kill them. When the officers were brought in, they first denied firing their guns. But of course there were bullet holes in Cory's car. So the police were asked to turn over their guns for ballistic tests to see if they'd been fired. Dominique and Cory said that at first, they refused.

When the police came to trial on charges of attempted murder, aggravated discharge of a firearm, official misconduct, and obstruction of justice, the judge said that they had only been guilty of bad judgment, that there wasn't enough evidence to convict them on any of the charges. Even though the five officers were drinking and using their guns, and firing a gun from a moving vehicle, both of those things in violation of department rules, they weren't even convicted of official misconduct.

Ira Glass

Cory says he's heard of police brutality, of course, but he never thought something like this could happen to him driving home from work one night. And one of the interesting things about this story is what a non-story it is. Here in Chicago where the whole thing happened, it's made of paper a few times. But there is no big public uproar. It's not the subject of speeches. You don't see politicians on TV backpedaling and prevaricating. It has not made national news at all as far as we can tell. Five cops go drinking and shoot at a middle class black couple, whatever.

Ira Glass

Tiffany Ferguson is one of the lawyers who's going to represent Cory Ferguson and Dominique Mapp in a civil suit against the police.

Ira Glass

WBEZ Chicago, the Public Radio International. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, High Speed Chase. We bring you not one, no, no, but two, two stories high speed car chases and the law. Actually I guess it's kind of a special law and order edition of our program. You'll hear the crime, and you'll hear how the justice system dealt with the crime. Yes, in the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate and equally important groups, the police to investigate crimes, and public radio reporters who interview them after the fact. These are their stories. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Let's call this Act 2, Cowboys and Indians. In this act, another high speed chase, though the participants in this particular case began running after each other across the plains and deserts of this country long before the invention of automobiles. I'm talking about Native Americans and white people. In South Dakota, after all of these years, the two groups are still not getting along. Things are so bad that some people compare race relations in the state to Mississippi in 1960.

And last fall after a high school girls basketball game, an incident between a group of Native American girls and a group of white boys escalated to the points where shots were fired from a speeding car. What happened in the months that followed did not seem fair to either side. Susan Burton tells the story.

Susan Burton

Basketball is big just about everywhere in South Dakota. It's big and small towns, big on Indian reservations, and there are plenty of parents from both places who never miss a game. On November 1, Lucille Weasel Bear drove five hours from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to a small town called Miller to see her daughter Arlene play in the district finals.

Miller seemed like a typical small town, railroad tracks at one end, a dairy queen at the other. Lucille surveyed the one along main street, parked outside the armory, and went straight in.

Susan Burton

Tonight the Crow Creek Chieftains were playing the Wessington Springs Spartans. And it was a big game. The winner would have a shot at making state. The loser's season would be over. The trouble began as the Crow Creek players entered the gym. Jessica Squirrel Coat is the team's MVP, the kind of girl who people talk about as if she's famous, an honor student, strikingly pretty with long black hair to her waste.

Susan Burton

From the stands, Lucille heard the war whoops too. This happens every so often at basketball games, and it's disturbing.

Susan Burton

On the video of the game, you see the silver flash of pom poms, you see Wessington Springs' best player racing down the court, her blond ponytail flopping behind her. You see Jessica shooting three-pointers. You can't hear any racial remarks. But she and the other Crow Creek players insist they were said.

Near the end of the third quarter, Jessica and the girl with the blond ponytail collided. Together they stumbled into the wall. The other girl fell to the floor and lay very still. It looked like she hit hard and was hurt. A foul was called. The mood in the gym got worse. There was booing.

The blond girl got up. Jessica stepped away from the wall and went to line up next to Lucille's daughter whose nickname is Chub. As Chub and Jessica passed the Wessington Springs fans, Jessica heard somebody yell something at her.

Susan Burton

This is Jessica's mother, Jenny.

Susan Burton

Wessington Springs had won the district finals by two points. The Crow Creek girls collapsed exactly where they were when the buzzer sounded, mid-court under the net.

Outside the gym, the night was starry and cool. Parents got into their cars and followed the Crow Creek bus up to the Dairy Queen for dinner. There were 30 or so Native Americans inside. It smells like Indians, a girl from Crow Creek heard someone remark. Jessica ordered a double cheeseburger and strawberry banana smoothie. The Crow Creek players say they kept being served hamburgers that only had bottom buns. They say that when they complained, they were told, are you sure you're not just eating the top bun and bringing it back?

Crow Creek is a boarding school. And Jessica and Arlene had permission to ride back to campus in their friends pickup. There were six girls in the car. They cracked a couple windows to get some air, smoke a cigarette. They drove south on the main street. And a few blocks later they came to a vacant lot. It seemed like a hangout spot. There were cars there, eight or so boys standing outside them.

At this point, accounts differ. The boys say they said nothing. The girls say they could see the boys flipping them off under the streetlights. They say they heard them swearing at them. One girl said she heard a racial epithet. Jessica tells the rest of the story with her uncle, Jake Thompson, the vice-chairman of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux Tribe, who later called for a federal civil rights investigation into the events surrounding this night.

Susan Burton

Jessica sat in the back seat holding her smoothie. She says she heard the boys swear at them again. In reaction, she passed the smoothie to the front of the car.

Susan Burton

The smoothie hit a white car. Two of the boys jumped inside of it and peeled out of the lot. The girls sped down the main street bouncing over the railroad tracks on their way out of town. Now there were two cars from the parking lot chasing them. At times, they were going almost 90 miles an hour.

Then the white car swerved out alongside the girls and one of the boys thrust a shotgun out of the passenger window. They've got a gun, the girls screamed. Go back to town. Go back to Dairy Queen.

Susan Burton

The girls were on the floor. They heard the shots but nothing hit the car. Go, go, they screamed to the driver. She raced through Miller running lights. Finally she made it to Dairy Queen. The Crow Creek Chieftains' bus was still there. The parents were still inside.

Susan Burton

This left one girl still stuck in the car.

Susan Burton

The two boys deny making any racial remarks. The girl who was stuck in her seat belt went to the restroom and locked herself in. Her aunt and her cousin shut themselves in there with her. Most everyone else watched the windows waiting for the police to arrive.

Susan Burton

Ten minutes after the boys made their vandalism report, the police department got a call from Dairy Queen about the shooting. An officer arrived. And as he began to talk to the girls, the white car returned to the parking lot. People pointed and shouted, do something. Stop those boys. They're the ones that did this.

Susan Burton

The officer set out after the boys. People hovered in the entryway making telephone calls. The news was starting to spread. Some kids back at Crow Creek heard the shooting report on their police scanners. Two women who worked at Dairy Queen took the girls to the police department. They wrote brief statements.

Later, much was made of the fact that they didn't mention the racial slurs in their statements. They only mention the shooting. But the main reason for the omission was that their coach was in a hurry to get them home and the girls weren't instructed on exactly what needed to be in their accounts. The boys were found and questioned, and then the night was over. The girls drove back to school in their pickup and the boys went home with their parents. They had not been arrested. Nobody had been injured. The case would be under investigation.

The people in Miller felt that something bad had happened in their community that night, something that never should have happened. But for them, it was an isolated incident. But on the reservation, from that very first night when the police decided not to arrest the boys, the shooting was seen as symbolic of the way justice operates in South Dakota. The system doesn't take crimes against Indians seriously, they say, and punishes them more harshly than it does whites.

1,500 people live in Miller. On the day I visit, a high wind screams down the main street lifting hundreds of soda cans out of a collection bin.

Susan Burton

Jim Jones is the Hand County State's Attorney. He was in charge of prosecuting the Crow Creek case.

Susan Burton

Jim Jones is meticulous and focused. He smokes long cigarettes called Liggetts and exhales in tidy rings. He's 48 years old and has lived his entire life in Hand County. He started working on the Crow Creek case the morning after the shooting. He had the handwritten statements the girls had given to the police. He had the ones from the Miller boys. No one had said a thing about racial remarks.

Susan Burton

Racism isn't something people in Hand County deal with much, because there's basically just one race here. The Chieftain basketball team drove in from the county next door.

Susan Burton

The South Dakota press quickly picked up news of the incident. Some stories implied that people in Miller weren't taking the crime as seriously as they should.

Susan Burton

Jim Jones has a folder of all the articles in front of us on his desk. He starts to flip through them and try to find parts to read. He gets so frustrated that he shuts the folder. He thinks the stories make him look like he didn't know how to handle this case, that he didn't care about getting justice for the Native American girls. He says the press reports made things especially awkward for him with the Crow Creek girls and their families. It's hard enough to cross from one world to another in South Dakota.

Some Indians say that living conditions on the reservations get worse as you drive west in South Dakota. And Pine Ridge is the westernmost reservation in the state. But it's radio station, KINI FM, makes Pine Ridge seem a lot less bleak. It broadcast everything from country songs to pow wow music to the names of the children who are graduating from the Little Womb School's kindergarten class.

Susan Burton

Arlene Weasel Bear not only plays power forward on the Crow Creek basketball team, she's an MVP in golf and wrestles well enough to have gone with the team to Tokyo. She has five sisters, and in the living room, a large collection of awards and photographs adorns the walls. A basketball magic markered with her nickname, Chub, sits on top of the TV.

Being in this room is like standing inside a scrapbook. There are Head Start graduation photos and prom pictures. Then, amidst all the medals, Arlene's mom, Lucille, points out a newspaper clipping.

Susan Burton

This was the second time something traumatic happened to Arlene when she left the reservation for a basketball game. The first time was during a tournament several years ago when a white woman said that Arlene was a boy and her team should be disqualified. Someone took Arlene and a couple of her teammates into a stall in the bathroom and checked. Arlene's mother and some other parents took legal action. But the case was thrown out of court.

This year, after the incident in Miller, Arlene and the other girls all had a tough time recovering. The girl who couldn't unbuckle her seat belt in the Dairy Queen parking lot is still so upset that she doesn't want to talk to me on tape. Jessica's mother says that Jessica's personality changed. Jessica was the Crow Creek homecoming queen. She has so many friends that people say she's doing one of seven rights of the Sioux Nation, making relatives. But after Miller, she'd stay in her dorm room, just lie on her bed and listen to her pow wow CDs. She'd pray with her medicine bundle, which she made a couple years ago after she felt a sharp pain in her leg like someone was using bad medicine on her when she came down from making a layup during a basketball game.

After the basketball game in Miller, Arlene went back to the dorms at Crow Creek. But she started calling home more than usual. A couple weeks later, she came for a visit and announced that she didn't want to go back to school and she didn't want to talk about the incident.

Susan Burton

When she came home, her dad took her out back and taught her to shoot a gun. He thought it might relieve her anger. But it just gave her flashbacks of hiding on the floor of the car. Arlene left the clothes from the Miller night in the laundry basket for three weeks. Eventually she started wearing them again, but not together, the pants with a different shirt and the shirt with different pants.

At home, Arlene's mom told her, whenever you're ready, come and talk. But Arlene was silent and she refused to leave the house.

Susan Burton

For two weeks Arlene sat on the couch. Maybe she'd quit school. Maybe she'd quit basketball, which seemed to make white people hate you even more. Then one night, she headed out in the car.

Susan Burton

This is Arlene's mom, Lucille.

Susan Burton

Arlene and Lucille talked about how she wanted to kill herself, quit school, never wanted to play ball again. And by the morning, Arlene believed that she was stronger than the awful thing that happened. And she was ready to go back to school. Lucille told her she couldn't let that one boy take everything away. She taught her a lesson a lot of Native American mothers teach their children. You can't let racism ruin your life. But it exists. And you have to be practical about it.

Susan Burton

Again, Jessica's mother, Jenny.

Susan Burton

For the Native Americans, this is the context for the shooting. Lucille tells me about a host of racial incidents where there was a comment or a look against her or one of her girls. Some whites in South Dakota believe that Native Americans get everything from the government for free including their houses, which, of course isn't true.

Ira Glass

Coming up, white kids in the town of Miller explained how the Indians have it all wrong about the night of the shooting. In a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, High Speed Chase. Susan Burton's story about South Dakota continues.

Susan Burton

In Miller, it's hard to get the teenagers to talk about the Crow Creek incident. Most of them are sensitive about the way their town has been portrayed. One girl tells me that because of the Internet, people all over the United States probably think Miller is a racist town. And we're not racist, they tell me. The chief of police says that after the story started appearing in the paper, the teenage witnesses he interviewed would just clam up when he got to the race questions, just not say anything at all.

Because the boys are juveniles, their names haven't been published in the press. And they're not talking to reporters. Their lawyers did not return repeated phone calls. The teenagers in Miller are very protective of them. Many won't say the names. But every teenager in Miller knows why that one boy fired a shotgun.

Susan Burton

The boy was famous for taking care of his car. It's a Buick sports car with a bra on it. And he paid for it himself. The explanation is related with fervor by all the teenagers. This is honestly how they see it. Even teenagers who are sympathetic to the Crow Creek girls, like Nicole, high school junior.

Susan Burton

In a sense, the disagreement over what happened that night is a dispute over where the story begins. And for the teenagers in Miller, the story begins right there. It starts the moment the smoothie smacks down on the car. The teenagers all tell me how the newspapers and the Native Americans started bringing things into it, the war whoops, the racial remarks. They thought this was adding parts to the story that didn't make sense. They just don't see any connection between the racial remarks and the high speed chase. Most of the Miller teenager don't even believe that their crowd made racial remarks that night.

One of the teenagers who does is Jennifer. She's 16 and was working at Dairy Queen the night of the shooting. If anything, she says, the racial comments went both ways.

Susan Burton

This is Candace. She's 16 and wore a coat with a faux fur collar. She's the only teenager I talked to who wore thrift store type clothes, like kids in the city wear.

Susan Burton

Candace has lived in Miller for three years now. But before this, she lived in a lot of other places. Her family moved 20 times before she was five, she says. It was because of her dad. He wasn't in the Army. He was in the New Age Movement.

Susan Burton

Candace likes Miller. She says there are good people here. Not everyone says bad stuff a basketball games. Candace sees the tensions that do come up as part of an ongoing history.

Susan Burton

If there's a frontier mentality at some South Dakota schools, frontier country is looking more and more like it used to. Native prairie grass is growing over abandoned farmland. There are more buffalo on the planes than anytime since the 1870s. And the population is shrinking, enough so that the region meets the 19th century census bureau definition of frontier, six people or fewer per square mile.

Susan Burton

Jennifer Ring is the only ACLU staffer for two states, North Dakota and South Dakota.

Susan Burton

The 2000 census showed some rural counties losing 10% to 20% of their population in a decade while the number of Native Americans in the state grew 23%. It's hard to say exactly what that means since Native Americans have probably been severely undercounted in previous years.

But the changing demographics are dramatic in some communities right near the reservations, border towns. Some of the ACLU's current voting rights cases involve efforts by whites to block the new influence of Native Americans in local elections, like for school boards. But some of the biggest complaints are with the criminal justice system.

In the past few years, there have been a handful of deaths the Native community feels haven't been taken seriously by law enforcement. They feel that racial profiling is rampant, that they're punished more harshly than whites. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission looked into all this a couple years ago. They invited Native Americans and others to come to a Holiday Inn and tell their stories. Dozens showed up.

Susan Burton

Governor William Janklow claimed the hearings weren't a true portrait and commissioned his own study to figure out exactly what was going on. Its release has been delayed.

The problem seems even worse when you consider the fact that according to a 1999 Justice Department study, American Indians are more likely to be the victims of interracial violence than any other race. And more than 60% of the time, the aggressor is a white person. In comparison, blacks are victimized by whites about 12% of the time.

Susan Burton

Sheriff Doug DeBoer from Miller.

Susan Burton

When it came time for the Miller boys to be punished, the people of Miller wanted Crow Creek to know that they took the crime seriously. The State's Attorney, Jim Jones, charged the boys with aggravated assault and petitioned to transfer them to adult court where they could face up to 90 years in prison. But he and the police did not see the crime as part of a larger pattern of interracial violence. Chief of Police, Ernie Stirling ran the investigation.

Susan Burton

In the end, the police investigation couldn't prove that the two boys in the car were the ones who made racial remarks back on the side of the road or at the game. So like most of the town, State's Attorney Jim Jones concluded that this was not a racially motivated incident.

Susan Burton

The judge declined to try the boys as adults, which is what happens under South Dakota law if a teenager seems like he can be rehabilitated in the juvenile system. But for Jessica and Arlene, this decision just seemed to confirm that the crime wasn't being taken seriously. Here's Arlene.

Susan Burton

Hearing that the legal system didn't consider this a racially motivated incident just made things worse. Now Jessica figured that the boys would just get probation. She no longer had any confidence that the court system was going to handle things right. She even felt like her own high school was trying to pretend that what happened wasn't so bad. At one point Jessica, the homecoming queen, almost walked out of a boy's basketball game in which Crow Creek and Wessington Springs attempted to make peace.

Susan Burton

The Hand County Courthouse is the grandest building in Miller. Inside, there are marble columns and a stained glass dome. As you climb the stairs, it's like you're entering another time when people were making up the rules of the country.

On the morning of the boys hearing, every single person in the courtroom is white. There are other cases first, mostly drinking offenses. A 19-year-old in Levi's refuses to say where he got the beer and gets ten days in jail. The court reporter blows her bangs off her face. Jim Jones rises to respond to the judge's queries.

And then suddenly the sheriff pushes open the door and Jessica, and Arlene, and their mothers, and several others walk into the room. The attention shifts. People edge around trying to see what the Native Americans in the courtroom are doing here. And then it just starts into motion, a regular case on the list. This will not be a trial. The boys have entered a guilty plea and the judge will just give them their sentences. A boy with spiky hair appears and the proceedings begin.

His lawyers spends a lot of time talking about the car. The boy is very protective of it and has been upset when it's been paintballed in the past. The lawyer says that the boy has never been in trouble before. The boy stands and mumbles, I would just like to tell the court and everybody involved in this incident that I'm really sorry and I regret it every day of my life. That's it.

Then Judge Jon Erickson begins. In every lie, there's an element of truth, he says. The truth is you went around the girls. But it wasn't to avoid smashing into them as you said in your statement, but rather to cut them off. The truth is you went to the police station. But the impression that you're trying to give here today, that you were going to be truthful about this, is not true. I don't see any remorse. I don't see that you're a bit contrite.

Judge Erickson named more parts of the boy's story he doesn't believe. He chastises him for his behavior. And he continues, if I read the news reports correctly, there are some who say the only way to be fair in this case, the only way to do justice, is to punish you harshly. If I thought for one moment that by treating you harshly I could cure racism in the state, I would probably do so. If I thought for one moment that could cure the years of distrust between Indians and whites in this country, I would do so. But fortunately for you, I can't do that. Instead, I'm required to make a reasoned judgment.

In South Dakota, a judge can either give juveniles probation or send them to juvenile detention. The judge chose the more severe option for both boys, the Department of Corrections.

Just before the proceedings ended, Jim Jones announced that there were victims and the families present and asked if any of them would like to approach the bench.

Susan Burton

Here's Arlene's mother, Lucille.

Susan Burton

Lucille sat in the witness chair swiveling a little from side to side. She focused on one of the boys who'd been in juvenile corrections before. She told him that she didn't feel sorry for him, that she didn't think that he felt sorry for the girls. She said that he'd had all these chances to better himself, to improve. She said, he should have been obedient to his parents. Lucille looked at the boy's mother.

Susan Burton

Again, the State's Attorney, Jim Jones.

Susan Burton

Arlene was crying when her mother spoke.

Susan Burton

The girls in the families felt like the hearing was a success, that this time the justice system took a crime as seriously as they did. They liked the things the judge said when he scolded the boys. And they were glad that the people in the room heard the Indian point of view from Lucille. They told me about so many cases where things never seemed to get resolved fairly and bad feelings lingered. But this was settled. They could put it behind them.

After the hearing, Lucille hugged her daughters.

Susan Burton

The people on the reservation and the people in Miller never came to agree on where the story began. But for Lucille and her daughters, here's where it ended: They got in their car and drove to Crow Creek. They went to the casino, and ate cheese balls, and folded Arlene's graduation announcements. The girls joked with the waiter. They didn't even talk about court.

Ira Glass

Susan Burton lives in New York.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Jonathan Goldstein and myself with Alex Blumberg, Wendy Dorr, and Starlee Kine, senior producer Julie Snyder, contributing editor Susan Burton, Rebecca [? Carroll ?], Jack [? Hitt, ?] Margie [UNINTELLIGIBLE], Alix Spiegel, Nancy Updike, and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Chris [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Susan Burton's story was produced with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

To buy a cassette of this program, call us here at WBEZ Chicago, 312-832-3380 or visit our website where you can also listen to our programs for free, www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life comes to you from the city of Chicago. Richard M. Daley, mayor. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International.

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WBEZ management oversight between Torey Malatia, who wants you to be absolutely clear about his location at all times.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

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