In tragic shooting, some words merely add more heat than light
By MARY JO MELONE
Published May 10, 2004
I am weary, truly weary, of Omali Yeshitela and his merry band of loudmouths.
But I'll give them this: They sure do have a flair for language.
Of late, they have been saying that on May 2, two Pinellas sheriff's deputies assassinated - that's their word - a 17-year-old black teenager who deputies thought had just taken part in a drug deal.
According to the Sheriff's Office, Marquell D. McCullough used his truck as a battering ram. He allegedly struck one deputy's car and then backed up so fast the other deputy had to jump on his own car to avoid getting hit.
When they couldn't get McCullough to stop, the deputies shot him.
This illustrates a simple, almost scientific principle, and it has nothing to do with high octane words like assassination. If you use your car like a weapon against a cop, you are asking for serious, serious trouble.
But the facts, particularly the inconvenient ones, do not get in the way of Yeshitela & Co. Words are their weapons.
Of late, they have also gone after Darryl Rouson, the lawyer who is president of the St. Petersburg NAACP. Uncle Tom, they called him. Judas, they said.
Rouson also questions McCullough's shooting. But assassination is not in his lexicon.
Was excessive force used? Can the testimony of one of the deputies, David V. Antolini, be trusted?
Rouson points to a 2001 incident, in which Antolini was caught misrepresenting information used to get a search warrant.
Perhaps most troubling is what didn't happen that night. The two patrol cars were equipped with video cameras that could have recorded the scene. One camera was broken. The other had run out of tape.
Rouson asks whether that's coincidence.
He is also comparing this to an incident in 1996, when St. Petersburg police shot TyRon Lewis after his car lurched toward an officer and bumped him. That episode led black neighborhoods to explode in protests. A suit by the Lewis family against the city is set to go to trial today.
Rouson's questions are fair. They are more likely to be answered when posed by a man like him. Rouson is doing what he can to work with law enforcement, not oppose it.
In answer to chronic community suspicion of the police, Rouson issued a challenge in March. He urged St. Petersburg's black churches to recruit 50 people to apply to become officers. He said he thought it was the best way to change the department, by working from within.
To Yeshitela, this is selling out, siding with the enemy.
There go those words again.
Deputies say they chased Marquell McCullough for several blocks before he pulled into a parking lot and appeared to stop. He had no weapon on him. That may explain why he used the handiest thing at his disposal, that truck.
The deputies said they called to him repeatedly to get out of the truck. When he tried to ram the patrol car, when he nearly hit one of the deputies, they fired off 15 rounds.
Their suspicions about McCullough appear to have been correct. Deputies say he was carrying 30 pieces of rock cocaine.
I don't see how this is assassination. What it looks like is a kid heading in life's bad direction coming to a bad end.
Tragic? Absolutely.
Assassination? Absolutely not.
Rouson told me last week that the "average black person" fears that if he is pulled over by the police, he may die. Marquell McCullough was not an average black person. He had crack on him. He was breaking the law.
If the facts uphold what I write here, it may be hard for Rouson to swallow, and hard for him to explain to people who put their faith in him but remain suspicious of law enforcement. But better Rouson, who wants to build trust with whites, than Yeshitela. Far better Rouson than a man who uses words like smoke, to cloud and obscure, not to clear.
