Police clean-up may hold clues to man’s beating

COLUMN GOSIER E-mail: Click here Archive

By ELIJAH GOSIER

© St. Petersburg Times, published February 6, 2001

ST. PETERSBURG -- The last time Barbara Church talked to her son, Dwayne Witchard, he said he was going to send her money so she could buy a dress to wear to a friend's wedding. That was in November 1999.

"He was always free-hearted," Church said. But she told him she didn't need the money.

He called again in December and told family members he was about to get married, but Church was at work when he called.

Church's turned-away eyes well up as she ponders the possibility that he will never talk to her again. Somebody in Jackson, Miss., made that a probability in February 2000, beating him so brutally that he is partially paralyzed and unable to walk or speak. Now, the 29-year-old lives in a St. Petersburg nursing home. And though the family brought him here from Mississippi, they have no idea how he got to where he is. They know nothing of what happened to him.

"I work at a nursing home," said Church, a nursing assistant. "I work with people like that every day, but I never thought it would be at my door."

She turned away, trying to hide the tears. "I just want him to talk."

Lt. Daryl Smith, too, wishes he could talk.

Smith heads the Jackson Police Department's Internal Affairs section, which includes a relatively new Public Integrity unit that investigates criminal conduct by police officers. The unit has been busy.

It was Dwayne's bad luck to be in a city where the person selling you drugs could be a cop. Thirteen have been arrested in the last 16 months. One began her federal prison sentence last week, and others are in various stages of the judicial process.

Smith gives a one-word reason for most of the arrests: "Dope."

Ironically, the presence of corrupt cops in Jackson may also be Church's best hope of ever finding out what happened to her son. Smith is on a clean-up campaign.

Smith's unit was formed about the same time Witchard moved to Jackson from Mount Olive, about 40 miles away. The internal affairs unit was beefed up and the integrity unit formed to combat the widespread -- and well-known -- corruption in the department.

St. Petersburg police Chief Goliath Davis said Jackson's reputation is common knowledge in police circles around the nation.

"We were starving for manpower, and we were a little lax in background checks and weeding out undesirables, and we got a few of those in the department," Smith explained.

"A few of those" may be an understatement. About five years ago, a management survey showed that 80 percent of the department thought the other 20 percent was corrupt.

To make matters worse, this barrel of rotten apples answered to nine different chiefs by Smith's count.

So when Dwayne Witchard moved to Jackson and continued dealing drugs -- as his family suspects and his criminal history suggests -- few would be surprised if some of his co-workers and competitors wore Jackson PD uniforms.

The police corruption and Witchard's involvement with drugs feed the family's theory that police officers were responsible for his beating.

But those same factors also may be the reason they find answers.

Daryl Smith hates corrupt cops and is proud of having sent 13 of them to jail, proud that his work has given Jackson a better police department. That is not to say that Jackson police officers were the culprits in Witchard's beating, but it says that Smith will investigate until he finds out. In the process, the assailant, of whatever ilk, may shake out.

When Smith says of Witchard's misfortune, "If one of our officers is responsible, we want to know that," his words don't have to say he accepts the possibility that one was; his voice does.

The investigation is under way. Smith said last week he has narrowed to three the emergency calls that could have been for an ambulance to pick up Witchard. If one turns out to be the call, Smith hopes it will lead to some of the answers in this vexing case.

And there are many questions begging for answers:

Why did no investigation begin when an assault victim, apparently discovered in a ditch, turned up at a hospital near death?

Why was he taken to a nursing home miles from Jackson, where the only other patients were elderly? Why did administrators at that nursing home have discussions, documented in a daily log, about heightened security measures for Witchard?

Smith acknowledged last week that the investigators have a lot more work ahead of them than behind them.

But even that admission is light years ahead of where Jackson police were a couple of weeks ago, when they said they had no knowledge of Witchard or the incident, or even the missing-person report his mother filed.

At least now they acknowledge Witchard's existence, so much of which was lost beside a road in Jackson.

© St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.