Accidents or Police Brutality?

By Bennett H. Beach

In two cities, patrolmen are accused in the deaths of blacks

Ron Settles, 21, of Carson, Calif., was called Bull by his friends. He was a 200-lb. senior running back for the Cal State Long Beach 49ers, good enough to be scouted by the Dallas Cowboys. Ernest Lacy, 22, of Milwaukee, was a very different sort: a skinny unemployed man with a history of mental disorders who sang in a church choir and was sometimes scared of his family's two dogs.

But there were similarities too. Both were black. Both were involved in incidents last summer in which they were forcibly arrested by white patrolmen. And both died in custody under questionable circumstances. Outraged, the black communities in Long Beach and Milwaukee marched and demonstrated to protest what they charged were examples of police brutality. Last week authorities in both cities seemed to agree. The Los Angeles County district attorney's office said it was ready to seek indictments of several policemen in the Settles case; and in Milwaukee, a coroner's jury studying the involvement of five patrolmen in Lacy's death urged that all five be prosecuted.

Settles was cruising to work in his Triumph TR 7 on the morning of June 2 when he was stopped for speeding in Signal Hill (pop. 5,600), a city surrounded by Long Beach. According to Officer Jerry Lee Brown, Settles refused to cooperate. Two other policemen helped bring him to the Signal Hill lockup, where he was booked for resisting arrest, assaulting a police officer and possession of cocaine Two hours later, Settles was found dead in his cell, hanging by a mattress cover.

Suicide, said the police. Murder, charged Settles' parents and black leaders. A rally on the Long Beach campus raised several thousand dollars to cover the Settleses' legal fees in a coroner's inquest and a $50 million suit against the police for wrongful death, negligence and violation of civil rights. When a demonstration in front of the station house was announced, the police boarded their windows and asked the county sheriff for protection.

Last month the jury at a Los Angeles County coroner's inquest ruled that Settles had died "at the hands of another, other than by accident." The key issues concerned the nature of Settles' injuries and whether he was killed by the mattress cover found around his neck. Officer Brown and five colleagues invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and refused to testify. The family's attorneys relied heavily on Bernard Bradley, 24, the only other prisoner at the jail when Settles arrived. Bradley testified that he had heard Settles moaning and screaming as three officers beat him. Bradley also said he had seen no mattress cover in Settles' cell, a claim backed up more recently by two other men who had been in the same cell earlier that day. Nor, said Bradley, had Settles sounded suicidal; rather, he talked about his eagerness to telephone his parents for bail money.

Two examiners from the coroner's office testified that Settles' injuries were consistent with hanging. They were supported by a videotaped re-enactment of the hanging, using a mannequin. But one of them, Dr. Ronald Kornblum, acknowledged that a choke hold can cause death by asphyxiation and leave the same internal and external signs that appear in a hanging death.

After the jury's decision, the county board of supervisors demanded a thorough investigation of the 28-member Signal Hill force, which is the target of at least three other brutality inquiries. The prosecution, heavily dependent on the testimony of one or two of the implicated officers who may turn state's evidence in exchange for immunity, will probably reach a grand jury by the end of the month.

In the Milwaukee case, Ernest Lacy was helping his cousin paint an apartment on July 9 when he took a break and headed for a nearby market to get a snack. As he walked along Wisconsin Avenue, Lacy encountered three Milwaukee patrolmen, burly members of the department's tactical squad who were looking for a suspect in a rape that had just occurred in the neighborhood. They tried to subdue Lacy whose mental disorders had included acute schizophrenia. According to some witnesses, Lacy was pinned to the street; one patrolman reportedly placed his knee against Lacy's neck, handcuffed the young man's arms behind his back and raised them high above his head. Later, in the paddy wagon, another arrested man noticed that Lacy had stopped breathing.

Police eventually charged someone else with the rape.

The coroner's jury of three blacks and three whites spent a month listening to 100 witnesses. The cause of death, the jurors concluded, was an interruption of the oxygen flow to Lacy's brain due to pressure applied to his chest and to a nerve in his neck. Their ruling last week was the most severe one allowed. It recommended that the three men who arrested Lacy be prosecuted for "homicide by reckless conduct," and that one of them, plus two officers who were in the paddy wagon, be tried for "misconduct in public office and failure to aid a prisoner in their custody."

Chief of Police Harold Breier, 70, who holds a life appointment, called the jury's report "a terrible miscarriage of justice" and warned that it would damage morale on the force. The autocratic Breier, likened by his detractors to J. Edgar Hoover was bold enough to wade into an angry downtown demonstration last August by citizens protesting Lacy's death. Spotting the chief, the crowd chanted: "Fire Breier He's a liar."

Breier's confrontational tactics cause some authorities to wince. In Milwaukee as in Los Angeles County, community leaders have not forgotten that the acquittal of four patrolmen accused of the fata beating of a black businessman was the spark that ignited the murderous Miami riot of May 1980.

--By Bennett H. Beach

Reported by Holtis Evans/ Los Angeles and J. Madeleine Nash/ Milwaukee

With reporting by Hollis Evans, J. MADELEINE NASH

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