Ambush in the Night

Vernon Jordan is shot down in Fort Wayne. The biggest question: Why?

We cannot ignore the awful pressures faced by black people today. We cannot pretend that what happened in Miami was a purely local event flowing from purely local conditions. The pressures that built to an explosion in Miami are present everywhere today ... Yes, we know our days of sacrifice and struggle are not over. Our struggle is for America's soul... Our faith has been sorely tried. It has been burned in the furnace of racial hatreds. But always, black people have revived their faith in America ...

Only five hours after he delivered this warning--and affirmation of faith in his country--Vernon Jordan, 44, president of the National Urban League and one of the nation's foremost black leaders, drove back to the Marriott Inn where he was staying in Fort Wayne, Ind. As he stepped from the fire-engine red Pontiac Grand Prix, a burst of rifle shots shattered the muggy night. Jordan slumped against the trunk of the car, then collapsed on the pavement, his head resting near the left taillight. He was alive, but he had been grievously wounded by two bullets from a .30-06 rifle.

Once again the specter of political assassination seemed to threaten a nation that still vividly remembered the murders of Martin Luther King Jr., of Malcolm X, of John and Robert Kennedy. Black leaders, including Chicago's Jesse Jackson, the N.A.A.C.P.'s Benjamin Hooks, and Joseph Lowery, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, rushed to Jordan's hospital bedside. So did Jordan's wife Shirley, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, and their daughter Vickee, 20, a junior at the University of Pennsylvania. Senator Edward Kennedy, who had been campaigning in nearby Ohio, called the shooting "another reminder of the senseless violence that stalks our land" and hastened to Fort Wayne. Jimmy Carter personally phoned the hospital three times to check on Jordan's condition and made plans to go to Fort Wayne this week. The President described the shooting as an "assassination effort"--a term that was immediately challenged as unsubstantiated, and a blunder at a time when calm and caution would have served the situation better. Added Carter: "It is ironic that this life would be attacked, because he has spent it fighting against the causes of violence."

Across the country, the nation's restive black communities reacted with dismay and concern but stayed quiet, in part because the identity and motive of the would-be killer (or killers) remained complete mysteries. Local officials insisted that there was no racial tension in Fort Wayne that would account for the coldblooded attempt to slay Jordan. The industrial city of 200,000--12% black--has had no serious racial incidents since the 1960s. Said Fort Wayne Mayor Winfield Moses Jr.: "Anyone who is expert with guns could have done this."

At first, law enforcement authorities suspected that the shooting was what Police Public Relations Director Daniel Gibson delicately called a "domestic-type thing." This notion apparently rested chiefly on the fact that Jordan's companion in the car was an attractive blond divorcee, Martha C. Coleman, 36, a longtime civil rights activist in Fort Wayne. Within hours, however, police discarded that theory and pursued another: that the would-be killer was, as Gibson put it, "an individual, possibly involved alone--an isolated-type incident." In other words, police now felt that the case might follow the same pattern as the shootings of King, the Kennedy brothers and George Wallace--a killer stalking his victim to avenge imagined grievances.

Still police did not rule out the possibility that the shooting had a racist motivation. Indeed, Coleman told police that while she and Jordan were returning to "ELLS the Marriott Inn, three white youths in a car had taunted them. Police doubted that the youths had time enough to race to the motel and shoot Jordan.

Nonetheless, FBI Director William Webster dispatched 20 agents to Fort Wayne to investigate whether there had been a conspiracy to violate Jordan's civil rights. This was a device that enabled the FBI to investigate the case--the agency has jurisdiction only when federal laws are violated--but apparently it was misinterpreted by Carter as evidence that the shooting was an attempted assassination. Webster cautiously called Carter's use of the word a "possibly acceptable interpretation of the available facts." But another FBI official had a blunter reaction to the President's statement. Said he: "Premature is the kindest word. We haven't eliminated any theories. It could have been night riders, or someone who heard Jordan's speech, or someone who knew the woman and didn't want her riding with any man. There's all sorts of speculation, but it's still speculation."

Among the first suspects to be questioned by police in Fort Wayne was an unidentified white man who had made abusive comments about Jordan at the Marriott bar the night of the shooting. Police officials quickly concluded, however, that the man had nothing to do with the case. Next, police sought to question Jon Thompson Douglas, 40, a welder from Grabill, a small town about ten miles northeast of Fort Wayne. The morning after Jordan was shot, Allen County deputy sheriffs arrested Douglas for operating a motorcycle while drunk and confiscated three unloaded rifles, including a Remington .30-06, that were tied to his motorcycle. Douglas insisted that he had paid a drinking buddy $100 for the rifles just that morning. After he was released from the county jail that afternoon, he returned home, where he told TIME Correspondent David S. Jackson: "I never even heard of Vernon Jordan before yesterday." The barrel of the .30-06 was dirty, and a local ballistics expert tentatively concluded that the rifle had not been fired recently. Further tests at the FBI laboratory in Washington confirmed that opinion.

Even with 20 FBI agents and all 30 Fort Wayne police detectives assigned to the case, about the only thing that could be established for certain immediately was that Jordan had received no hint that he might be the target of violence in Fort Wayne. He had gone there to be the guest of honor at a $17.50-a-plate fund-raising dinner for the local Urban League. He arrived Wednesday afternoon, checked into ground-floor Room 180 at the Marriott and held a half-hour press conference at which he described Carter's presidency as "an Administration of promises made and promises unkept."

After a 45-min. cocktail reception, he spoke for an hour at the dinner to 400 people, two-thirds of them black. His speech was urgent but hardly incendiary. Said he: "The economy is in trouble, democracy is in trouble and we seem lost at sea without a leader." After the speech, Jordan lingered for a couple of hours with about 100 Urban League members in the Piper's Glen Room at the motel. He smoked a cigar, nibbled on hors d'oeuvres and talked with well-wishers about the civil rights struggles of the past and his hopes for the future. At about midnight, he left with Martha Coleman. Married and divorced four times, she is a supervisor for the local International Harvester Co. plant and has been a member of the Urban League for three years. According to police, the pair drove in her car to her handsome, two-story white frame house on tree-lined Lafayette Esplanade in a racially mixed neighborhood in south central Fort Wayne. For two hours or so, Coleman told police, they drank coffee and chatted. Shortly after 2 a.m., Coleman drove Jordan back to the Marriott, where he was gunned down.

Only one shot was heard by witnesses. Motel Guest Patrick Gillespie of Chicago thought an M-80 grenade had exploded. "It rose me right up out of my bed," he said. Mrs. Coleman described the noise as a "thud which sounded like a stone hitting the windshield." This may have been the sound of Jordan slumping against the car. "Help me, I've been shot!" he cried. When she saw him wounded and bleeding, she dashed inside the motel and asked the desk clerk to summon police and an ambulance. Then she called her lawyer.

Within minutes, paramedics wheeled the unconscious Jordan into the emergency room of Parkview Memorial Hospital, where surgeons operated on him for 4 1/2 hours. They found that the first bullet had torn a fist-size hole in the lower left side of his back, sliced through his intestine and exited from his chest. A second bullet had broken into at least two pieces, apparently as it glanced off a chain-link fence a few yards from Jordan. Fragments struck him in the right thigh and upper left chest. During the operation the doctors removed three small fragments of the first bullet and the damaged section of Jordan's intestine; the pieces of the second bullet were not removed, because they were not threatening his life. Said Surgeon Jeff Towles, who has had extensive experience with gunshot wounds: "There was an explosive effect like nothing I've ever seen before." He said that Jordan would have been killed if the angle of the first shot had been a centimeter different from its actual path. After surgery Jordan was listed in serious but stable condition in the hospital's intensive-care ward.

At the scene of the shooting, police discovered a .30-06-cal. shell casing on a grassy mound in a triangle formed by an exit ramp from Interstate 69, about 40 yds. from where Jordan collapsed. Three patches of matted grass were found in the area, indicating that at least one gunman had been waiting for Jordan with a hunting rifle. But the FBI refused to speculate about whether more than one assailant was involved. Police scoured the area by helicopter and on their hands and knees. They searched nearby trash bins and sewers and interviewed guests but turned up only one additional bit of evidence: the nearly intact first .30-06-cal. slug, which was lying in the crack of a sidewalk near Jordan's room. Said Mayor Moses: "It was not a Saturday-night type of shooting. The gunman was an expert marksman and he knew guns." The mayor described the shooting as "professionally executed," then amended his remarks: " 'Expert,' I suppose, is a much better term than 'professional.' "

At the hospital, the spacious lobby quickly filled with reporters, politicians, black leaders and pajama-clad patients, several of them in wheelchairs. Jesse Jackson suggested, despite a total lack of evidence, that Jordan might have been the first on an assassin's "hit list" of black leaders. Jackson maintained that Jordan's wound was "seemingly well placed by a professional, which is a political statement." He called on the nation's blacks to stay calm. Said Jackson: "We don't want another 1968 [when riots followed King's murder]. We need leadership. We must respond to this crisis with jobs and with justice."

Suddenly the Rev. Samuel Walker Jr., a local Baptist minister, demanded silence of everybody in the room, bellowing: "All the ministers! All the newsmen!" As they gathered around, he prayed: "Help us, O Master, not to become angry but to love in times like these." Several people in the audience shouted: "Amen."

That plea, and others like it, was being heeded across the country. There was no indication that the nation's ghettos would erupt in anger and in grief as they had after the assassination of King. For one thing, times have changed; despite high unemployment among blacks, basic community relations in many cities are somewhat better than they were in the 1960s. For another, Jordan, though widely respected, does not have King's evangelical, emotional appeal to the black masses. Far from serving as the symbol of black aspirations, Jordan plays a conciliatory role, bridging the gap between black and white communities (see box).

Thus, besides shock, there was bewilderment among black and white leaders over why Jordan would be a killer's target. Said William Brown, executive director of the Urban League branch in Hartford, Conn.: "Vernon Jordan is the voice of reason, and if this voice is silenced, we are back in the early '60s." Exclaimed Gary Avery, chairman of the N.A.A.C.P.'s voter registration drive in Atlanta: "When people like him get shot, who's safe?"

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