Jail scuffle 'took the fight right out of him'

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By MARY JO MELONE

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 30, 2000

The traffic light went red as Tom Dugger's Dodge Shadow slipped into a St. Petersburg intersection. His foot hit the brakes and as he backed up, he struck the car behind him.

Dugger doesn't much like cops. He left as they arrived.

Later that day, April 4, the police banged on his door and charged him with leaving the scene of an accident. They found a warrant out against him, too, for overdue child support.

Dugger, an angular man with a complexion the color of a fading leaf, was arrested for the 25th time in his 44 years. He knows that means many people won't believe his story. He is unmoved.

"I know what I saw," he said Friday when we talked at his apartment. Here is the story he tells:

Because he says he has liver cancer, Dugger was put in the county jail's hospital, in an eight-man cell. "They had the lights off. It was kind of late," he said. He was too upset to sleep and began talking to the man closest to him. The man, on a mattress on the floor, was homeless. His name was John L. Preston.

"Probably around 3 or 4 in the morning, he started getting strange," Dugger said. "We'd be talking and all of a sudden he'd change the subject. He started saying, "They left the door open. . . . I could have left any time I wanted.' "

Other inmates told Dugger to ignore him. Preston was delirious with alcohol withdrawal.

By the next morning, he was spouting the Constitution. When Dugger and a few others were led out to go to a hearing, Preston tried to follow.

A deputy grabbed him in a hallway. "He threw him backward on the floor, hard, and I mean hard," Dugger said. "That took the fight right out of him."

Preston's glasses were broken. One earpiece was pushed into his eye, Dugger said. The guard yelled for help. Four male officers appeared and grabbed Preston's arms and legs. Simultaneously, Dugger said, they each dropped one knee on Preston -- on his neck, chest and both sides of his groin.

"I heard the air go out of him. It's a terrible sound. He never made another sound after that."

A nurse gave Preston an injection. He was then strapped into a chair. When Dugger returned from court a half-hour later, Preston had not moved.

"His tongue was hanging out, down to his chin, and it smelled." The front of his pants were wet, as though he had urinated on himself. Dugger, who had spent time in a Vietnam medevac unit, recognized the odor as that of human excrement.

Dugger was certain. The man was dead. He called for an officer.

The Pinellas jail must be jinxed. Or something is wrong. Preston is the sixth person to die there in the last nine years. His death is still under investigation, to determine how he died and whether any department rules were broken. A spokesman, Greg Tita, is quick to say that so far, the answer is no. But the official version of events and Dugger's are far apart.

In the official version, Preston was taken to a single-man cell and died after he was restrained for 25 minutes face-down on a bed. He vomited, suffered a seizure, stopped breathing. This version doesn't explain how officers got him to the bed.

Tita suggested the scene Dugger described, of four officers striking Preston with their knees, couldn't have happened. There would have been too much confusion for the officers to act in unison, Tita said. But he did say deputies are taught to knee suspects if they have to.

Tita wouldn't say whether Preston was tied to a chair. Dugger said he never saw Preston tied to a bed or placed in a single-man cell.

Tom Dugger is the first person other than sheriff's officials to give a public account of John Preston's death. "Whether they meant to kill him, I doubt it," he said in a moment of uncharacteristic charity toward the cops. "They meant to hurt him. They were punishing him for getting out of his cell."

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