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They came looking for answers

The frustration was evident as 200 people, mostly black, turned out for a town hall meeting to discuss the Jennifer Porter case.

TAMPA - They were angry and sad, accusatory and befuddled.

Almost a month since a white woman was sentenced to community control after pleading guilty to an accident that killed two black children, about 200 people - most of them black - packed into a Tampa church to ask what they think are unanswered questions.

Why was Jennifer Porter never charged with vehicular homicide? Why wasn't her father prosecuted after admitting he washed blood from his daughter's car? What did Porter's attorney mean when he told TV cameras recently that black leaders needed to stand up and tell the community the truth?

The answers sometimes prompted jeers and grumbles. One remark drew tears from Lisa Wilkins, mother of the dead children, who stormed out briefly to compose herself.

"We are not here to retry the Jennifer Porter case," said James Evans, executive director of the Tampa Bay Academy of Hope, who organized Thursday's three-hour town hall meeting at Beulah Baptist Church. Rather, he said, the purpose of the meeting was to address weighty questions about racial disparities in the justice system to the people who know them best:

The prosecutors, attorneys, law enforcement officials and black leaders involved in the case.

Porter, a 29-year-old teacher, pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of a March 2004 accident that killed Bryant Wilkins, 13, and his brother Durontae Caldwell, 3, and injured Aquina Wilkins, then 8, and LaJuan Davis, then 2.

On Nov. 5, she avoided prison time, sentenced instead to two years of community control, three years of probation and 500 hours of community service.

Panelists included state attorney Mark Ober, Porter's attorney, Barry Cohen, Hillsborough County public defender Julianne Holt and representatives from the NAACP and the George Edgecomb Bar Association, a black lawyers' organization.

"My question to you is: Why wasn't my son afforded the same opportunity Miss Porter was?" asked Kadani Rivers, a black woman whose son, 16, has been prosecuted several times.

Ober fielded many such questions from people who said that if Porter had been black, the outcome would have been different, the prosecution would have tried harder.

Cohen, who had said a day before that he wouldn't attend the community event, took the microphone several times. Black attorneys failed to tell their community the case for vehicular homicide wasn't there, he said. And, he said, all the facts hadn't come out: The children, retreating from the path of a white van, backed up into Porter's lane, he asserted.

"It wasn't like she mowed them down," Cohen said to boos and yells.

"She did!" a man shouted.

Wilkins ran out of the room as the grumbles rose.

Ober said Porter's parents had been given immunity from prosecution, because they needed them to confirm that Jennifer Porter was driving the car.

Evans counted the meeting a success, an opportunity for people to talk about their frustrations and give voice to their concerns. "This isn't just a black issue," he said, "it's a community issue."

Wilkins said at the end that she hoped people would bind together, but it was clear she was still grappling with her own anguish. She said she asks herself every day if things would have turned out differently if she hadn't let her children go to the park that day.

Where was everyone when she really needed their support, she asked, "when I needed someone to hold my hand?"