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Tomorrow freedom comes, 24 years late

Alan Crotzer hopes to start a normal life - with pork chops and banana pudding - after the state attorney asks he be freed.

By CANDACE RONDEAUX
Published January 22, 2006

	[Times photo: James Borchuck]
	Alan Crotzer, 45, has been in prison since 1982 after a rape victim picked his face from a photo lineup. DNA will help free him.

TAMPA - Alan Crotzer still cries when he thinks about the way his mother screamed that day.

After spending nearly 24 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit, he has heard and seen a lot of things. But even with freedom just a day away it's her voice that echoes in his head.

It was 1981, at the close of a four-day trial. The jury had just found him and another man guilty of robbing a Tampa family and raping a 38-year-old woman and a 12-year-old girl. A deadening silence filled the room as the judge sentenced Crotzer and his co-defendant, Douglas James, to 130 years in prison.

Crotzer's mother collapsed.

"I heard someone scream my name, then I turned around. It was my mom. She was on her hands and knees, crawling on the courtroom floor, crying," Crotzer said in an interview at the Hillsborough County jail Saturday. "It hurt her so bad."

Dorothy Crotzer will not be there Monday to see her son walk out of court a free man. She was not there last week when the Hillsborough State Attorney's Office said DNA tests and other evidence showed there was significant doubt Crotzer, 45, was guilty.

She died of lung cancer six years ago.

Yet, even as months turned into years, Crotzer's mother never gave up on him. Every few weeks, after she had saved enough money for the three-hour Greyhound bus ride, she would visit him in the prison. Often arriving late at night, she would stay in a motel alone, waiting for dawn to break so she could see her second born.

She wasn't always the perfect mother, he said, but she was there, and she was strong for him.

"One time she came up, I saw the gray in her hair and it touched me and I started to cry," said Crotzer, who is now gray at the temples himself. "But she wasn't having it. She said, "Shut up, boy. You ain't never cried on me before and you're not going to start now. Dry up.' "

He cannot stand to think about how prison kept him from her funeral. He has seen a lot of things in his lifetime behind bars: men stabbed to death, drug addicts and pimps running convict hustles. But he doubles over and sobs when he thinks about not being with his mother at the end.

A lifetime ago, there weren't so many tears. Back then, Kool & the Gang was singing about a Celebration. Olivia Newton-John was getting Physical. Ronald Reagan was president. And, Sandra Day O'Connor was about to become the nation's first female Supreme Court justice.

He was just a kid then, 20 years old, fresh out of prison after serving a term for holding up a store and stealing some beer. He was getting himself together. He had a landscaping job, a girlfriend and a young daughter he was trying to support in St. Petersburg. He didn't own a car, so he mostly rode bikes with his friends around the neighborhood. They laughed, hung out, listened to Earth, Wind & Fire and the Bar-Kays.

There were no cell phones. Computers were a novelty. MTV had just started. Hip-hop was new and crack hadn't devastated the neighborhood where Crotzer grew up yet.

Now, he has spent half his life in prison, but he's not angry about the things he missed. He's disappointed in the justice system, but doesn't hold a grudge. He knows he's been lucky in some ways.

"God has been keeping me. It seems like he always put someone in my life to help me through these times," Crotzer said.

In those early days after his arrest on July 10, 1981, it wasn't always easy to keep the faith. When the victims insisted that he was the ringleader, Crotzer still had a little hope left.

"I thought that when the people saw me, they would see I was the wrong person," he said. "I was looking for a fair and impartial trial. I believed in that."

But he knew he was sunk when the girl's father jabbed his finger in the air and said he was the one.

"He was angry. I understood. It was a terrible crime, and he had a lot of hate in his heart. I mean, that was his daughter" who was raped, Crotzer said.

Later, on the witness stand, the victims' descriptions of their three assailants didn't add up. The girl said the man who raped her was about 6 feet tall and 170 pounds, and fingered Crotzer, who is 5 feet 7. One of the men said he first identified Douglas James as the ringleader, but changed his mind after he learned his wife said Crotzer was the man with the shotgun.

But it was the woman's testimony that proved most powerful. She pointed to Crotzer from the stand. Yes, it was him, she said, the man in the red and blue shirt.

"That is the one that raped me. Alan Crotzer," the woman said.

It took more than two decades to undo those words. All the while he sat in his small prison cell, with its bare, white cement block walls, trying hard not to become hard and bitter like so many of the men around him.

"I didn't want to be institutionalized. I didn't want to be in that mold. Prison ain't nowhere to be. You have to be tough," Crotzer said. "I had to make sure I didn't hang out with the wrong crowd. Hear no evil. Speak no evil. See no evil. Walk with your head up. Walk alone."

He was not always alone. There were others who believed him, others who knew he was innocent. Douglas and Corlenzo James, the two men who were also convicted of the July 8, 1981, robbery and rapes, told him they knew he had gotten a raw deal. They admitted that it was their childhood friend who was with them that night, not Crotzer.

"They said, "We feel bad about what happened to you. But don't cop out, you didn't do nothing,"' Crotzer said.

The James brothers' three sisters knew, too. Pearl Daniels said she and her sisters Sharon Watson and Margie James tried for years to tell authorities the truth about what happened. But it was Crotzer's attorney David Menschel, investigator Jeff Walsh and Sam Roberts, a former volunteer with the Innocence Project, a group that uses DNA testing to ferret out wrongful convictions, who got the right people to listen.

"They were a huge help," Menschel said.

For that, Crotzer said, he will always be grateful.

"I have so many people that I want to thank," he said.

On Monday morning, he'll get to thank them in person after a judge hears the state attorney's motion to throw out Crotzer's conviction and sentence.

He's nervous about the cameras and all the questions reporters are going to throw at him when he walks out of the Hillsborough courthouse. He's worried, too, about how it'll be on the outside.

"I know it's going to be different," Crotzer said.

He'll have to start again - find a job, get a driver's license, settle into a place to live.

"I just want to be normal. I want to get my rights restored. I want to be like everybody else," he said.

But before all that he's going to get a few things he has been dreaming about. Pork chops. Banana pudding. A hot bath.

Then he's going to the cemetery to pay his respects to the woman who brought him into this world and never left him.

Times researcher Angie Drobnic Holan contributed to this report. Candace Rondeaux can be reached at rondeaux@sptimes.com or 813 226-3337.

[Last modified January 22, 2006, 01:03:12]