The Fence - Dick Lehr [102]
New details surfaced. The most telling was this: Mike, as he was balled up on the ground, heard a voice in the cloak of darkness all around him. “Stop, stop, he’s a cop!” It was a voice Mike recognized, a voice he knew well: Dave Williams’s.
Kimberly awoke and found her husband shaken and agitated. Mike could not turn off the voice ringing around inside his head: “Stop, stop, he’s a cop!” He told Kimberly what had happened, about this new information. And the next day he drove to the courthouse. He walked into Bob Peabody’s office and told the prosecutor. Mike didn’t exactly know what it all meant. Maybe Williams was a beater who called off the attack after recognizing him under the bulky hoodie and coat he wore. Maybe Williams was not a beater and had stopped the others from hitting him. Either way, Mike was convinced Williams was a key witness. He had a new twist to Williams’s own jangle of You know I know you, Mike. It was now Mike’s turn: Dave, I know you know something.
CHAPTER 13
Cox v. Boston Police Department
Bob Peabody faced Dave Williams. “Officer, at any time while you were there did you yell out, ‘Stop. He’s a cop!’?”
“Negative.”
“Is that a yes or no?”
“No.”
“You did not yell that out?”
“No, sir.”
“You did not yell it out once or twice?”
“I didn’t yell that out at all, sir.”
“And you’re sure of that?”
“Positive.”
“And that is the truth?”
“Absolutely.”
Peabody asked Williams the question five times. Minutes later, he tried a sixth. “You categorically deny that you uttered the words, ‘Stop. Stop, he’s a cop!’?”
“I never said that, sir.”
The heated exchange came more than an hour into Williams’s appearance before Peabody’s grand jury. It was Friday, the first of December, and seven months into Peabody’s investigation. Just as other witnesses had, Williams first checked in with a court officer stationed in an anteroom to guard the door. Williams then waited for Peabody to come out and get him. He walked into a room that was more an amphitheater than a courtroom, with three ascending rows of chairs where the twenty-three jurors sat. The bank of windows in the rear provided plenty of light, especially in the afternoon when the sun set. Williams took a seat in the flat area. His chair faced Peabody seated at a desk.
The prosecutor was getting nowhere. While he was uncertain whether Williams had actually delivered a blow or two, he was convinced Williams saw it all—“a bird’s eye view,” was how he put it.
Williams pushed back hard. “I have no idea what happened to Mike,” he told the grand jury. “I didn’t see anything of that nature, anyone striking Mike.” Under oath, he elaborated on the skeletal accounts he’d initially given in his written reports. He said he’d bolted from his cruiser and chased the suspect named Jimmy “Marquis” Evans who ran from the Lexus’s front passenger seat. “He was running. I drew my gun, and I told him, ‘Get down. Get down. Get down,’ and he did. And I ran up to him. I just kept him at gun-point.” He said he was in no position to see anything at the fence.
The account of a foot chase didn’t square with the tight geography at the end of the cul-de-sac, but Williams was unflappable as he addressed any inconsistencies. When Peabody pointed out Williams had written in one January 30 report, “both suspects fell down a steep hill,” Williams acknowledged the inaccuracy as a harmless mistake. “I put down ‘steep hill’ but I knew it wasn’t—I couldn’t tell whether the hill was steep or not.”
Williams parried every incriminating remark others had made about him. He acknowledged saying at the hospital that it looked as if cops had beaten Mike, but insisted he was simply thinking out loud, putting words to what everyone in the room was thinking. “We were talking to Mike,” he said. “We realized that something had happened that shouldn’t have, basically.”
Peabody brought up Craig Jones, who