Who Shot The Sheriff?

By Timothy Roche/Decatur

Was the killer already in the room that Friday night? A woman in leopard-spotted pants sat in a booth, talking intently amid the laughter and conversation inside MVP's Interactive Video Cafe, a high-tone supper club in the suburban outskirts of Atlanta. By the front door, a long line of patrons lingered, waiting for tables to open. Against a backdrop of deep blue walls and soft neons, guys in designer shirts and leather jackets leaned against the polished-oak bar, curling glasses of cold beer. Three men in dark coats and blue jeans had rushed to take a table close to the jazz band. But they did not seem interested in the music.

Onstage, Derwin Brown crooned his best Barry White into the microphone. He didn't want the night to end. He had come here to celebrate his wife's 46th birthday--and he had stayed on even after she left for home feeling tired. There was much more to celebrate: in three days, he would be sworn in as the new sheriff of DeKalb County, in suburban Atlanta. The night was as much in his honor as hers; relatives and close campaign supporters had feted him in the lounge's VIP room earlier. Soon he hoped to make good on his promise to get rid of corruption at the local jail and maybe someday--if he had as much energy as he did ambition--reform the nation's prison systems. The cafe's chef had made crab-stuffed chicken especially for Brown, who spent the evening shaking hands, swapping stories and holding court. With a glass of Hennessy, he was sitting in a booth with the female volunteer from his election campaign in the leopard-print pants when the band's lead singer picked the couple out from the crowd. Brown, 46, all 5 ft. 10 in., 245 lbs. of him, could not resist the request to sing Tonight Is the Night in Barry's baritone: "You're knockin' on my door and you're ringing my bell/ Hope you're not impatient after waiting so very long... A whole year I put you off with my silly hang-ups/ And we're both old enough to know right from wrong."

At about 11 p.m. on that Dec. 15, after quick bows and goodbyes, DeKalb's sheriff-elect headed home alone in a rented white sedan. The drive was less than two miles; the destination, a neighborhood of older brick ranches and split-levels built before two-car garages came into style. The Browns' house, with Mediterranean arches along its front walk and gun-metal blue trim, is among the nicest on the block. It has a narrow front yard and a paved driveway. Derwin and Phyllis Brown's son, Robert, 18, looked out a front window to see his father, who had parked in the street, walking up the driveway with a bounce in his step, carrying Christmas gifts he had bought that afternoon. There was also a bouquet of red roses for his wife in the car. Expecting him, Phyllis had displayed his new blue sheriff's uniform in the den. Derwin had designed it himself, with gold stars and braid, and he had been anxious for the tailor to finish it. His good friend and confidant Robert Crowder had brought it to the house. Friends and family had been watching TV, talking about the trip to Helen, Ga., where Phyllis and Derwin planned to escape before Christmas. Everybody was relieved; the election was behind them, the long battle finally over.

Robert looked out into the rain pounding the driveway and saw his father suddenly look to his right. Almost simultaneously, Phyllis and the friends and family in the house jumped. She thought the series of pops was firecrackers. Then she recognized the sound as gunfire and immediately did what Derwin had taught her. She ordered everyone to get down on the floor and crawl away, because the den has wood siding. She figured they would be safer behind brick walls. She also figured it was the house next door that was under attack.

Young Robert had turned around only a heartbeat before the shooting began. It looked as if his father had lurched forward, but he was not sure. He ran to his parents' bedroom, tearing open drawers. "Where's Daddy's gun? Where's Daddy's gun?" he yelled. The 9-mm handgun was missing. Robert opened the closet where Phyllis and Derwin kept shotguns and rifles inherited from her father and his grandfather, who had been hunters. Robert found the rifles but no ammunition. "Why are you even looking for guns?" his mother asked him, still thinking the shooting was next door. "This is not going to be the shoot-out at the OK Corral. This is not the wild, wild West."

When the shooting subsided, Phyllis called 911 and peeked out a window. Between the two cars, she could see an object. It didn't look like a person. "What is that?" she asked the others. A friend said it looked like shopping bags. That's when it began to register: if Derwin had dropped the bags from their afternoon shopping trip, he might be pinned between the cars, crouching down. Or, she thought, maybe he had made it around the cars and was trapped against the house. She opened the door. "Derwin, Derwin!" she shouted into the darkness. "Come on in." When she heard no response, Phyllis stepped outside and looked down to her left. Her husband's body lay by the door. Blood oozed from both sides of his mouth. "Hold on!" she cried. Looking into his eyes, she knew he was already dead.

The killer had not been alone. Somebody was spotting for the gunman, and possibly somebody else was driving a getaway car parked a street away. They had been waiting as the cold December rain fell hard and mist dimmed a streetlamp and the Christmas lights draping the eaves of the Browns' home. The shooter had pumped six 9-mm bullets into Brown's slumping body, then had walked around the cars in the driveway, aiming his semiautomatic, Uzi-like pistol closer and firing again from the other side. Eleven of the 17 shots fired hit Brown. It took all of 10 seconds. The assailant was determined to kill. But why?

The brazen murder made headlines across the country--and so did the search for a motive. "I can't say absolutely that it was a professional hit," says DeKalb district attorney J. Tom Morgan, "but it was obviously a planned assassination." For a man so well liked, investigators have learned, Derwin Brown had plenty of enemies. Theories and motives abound as two grand juries prepare to hear evidence. Corruption at the jail was supposedly so prevalent that Brown campaigned on auditing the books, firing the culprits and replacing three decades of cronyism. "Clean it up," his supporters had shouted into bullhorns the year before as they drove slowly through the towns of Decatur and Lithonia, taking Brown's homespun, outspoken style and reformist message to predominantly black neighborhoods. He was the kind of man who spoke his mind, but he did not think anyone would kill him for it. Says Phyllis: "The scary thing about this is anything is possible. It could have been somebody who was just pissed off about a job. It could have been somebody who had a hand in the cookie jar and was going to get it cut off."

DeKalb County has one of the nation's most affluent black populations. This is not backwater rural Georgia but an urbanesque suburb of Atlanta. In fact, part of the city dips into a corner of the county. It is home to Emory University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Increasingly, DeKalb is the Atlanta area's most racially and ethnically diverse county, with white residents along the northern boundaries seeing power shift to upscale blacks.

DeKalb is one of those rare counties in which law enforcement is handled by two separate agencies. The sheriff oversees the jail, serves warrants and provides courthouse security, while a countywide police agency conducts criminal investigations, writes traffic tickets and makes arrests. Brown came up through the police department, where for 22 years he was a popular but controversial crusader. He grew up in Lakeview, a suburb on Long Island, N.Y. His father George was a probation-officer training specialist in Nassau County. His mother Burvena was an executive secretary who quit working to raise kids. They encouraged their four kids to read and to appreciate their black heritage. His younger brother Ron says Derwin cherished memories of a visit Martin Luther King Jr. paid to their church. As a teenager at Malverne High School, Derwin worked to launch an African-American studies program. He later earned a degree in sociology and criminal justice at C.W. Post college and attended the FBI Academy.

In the mid-1970s, he came to Atlanta to visit his aunt, who owned rental property across the street from the grandmother of his future wife. Phyllis, an Atlanta native, was not impressed by their five minutes of chitchat. Still, a few months later, when Derwin returned to look at Atlanta University's graduate program, he asked her to show him around. Phyllis took him to a college sorority party. "It was love at second sight," she says. They married in 1977, and two years later, Derwin went to work for the DeKalb police department.

The Browns bought their house on Glasgow Drive for $10,000. There, they raised a daughter and four sons and, through the years, celebrated Derwin's promotions, from street cop to narcotics detective to lieutenant to captain and eventually to assistant precinct commander. Derwin passed on his sense of racial pride and civic duty to his kids. His son Michael, 17, says his father "understood, just like Malcolm X, that you're going to lose a soldier in a battle. He took that in, and he wasn't afraid. Yet he still pressed forward."

Their home on Glasgow Drive was also where the Browns hunkered down whenever Derwin caused one of his fire storms. Not long after joining the police force, he helped lead efforts to add more black officers to the ranks. Then, two decades later, he helped the push to unionize the department. In the 1990s, his wife and family say he became increasingly critical of the sheriff, Pat Jarvis, a retired Atlanta Braves pitcher, who eventually pleaded guilty to accepting kickbacks in a deal that sent him to jail for 15 months.

In his eyes, Derwin Brown was the guardian of decency. He was the host of a public-access TV show, The Naked Truth 2000. Among his regular topics were local politics and society's war against black males. He also wrote a weekly column, "Tell It Like It Is," for the Champion, a black paper in DeKalb. As far back as 1994, he wrote that the Confederate flag "represents an act of treason, the enslavement, rape, murder and torture of Africans and African Americans. It is beyond belief that any sane person would want to preserve such a hideous legacy." He had few friends among the area's white supremacists.

All the while, Derwin had political aspirations. Some thought it was merely for the school board, but in 1996, he ran in a special election to replace the sheriff. He fared poorly at the polls. Four months later, he tried again and got only a fraction of the votes, losing to Sidney Dorsey, an Atlanta homicide detective who became the county's first black sheriff. The two men had a cordial relationship, but that turned when Derwin announced he was again running for sheriff. The moment television-news cameras caught jail inmates working on projects for Dorsey's wife, Derwin went on the offensive, all but calling Dorsey a crook during campaign stops.

To his family and friends, Derwin wanted to be sheriff for reasons grander than ousting Sid Dorsey or cleaning up corruption. As Derwin saw it, jails are part of a prison-industrial complex for young black men. More than once, his brother Ron heard him describe prisons as a big business in which the mostly black inmates became "raw materials" in a heartless system set up only to bring in even more bodies. Says Ron Brown: "He saw the prison system as a modern form of slavery."

Though a Republican at heart, Derwin knew that victory lay with the Democratic Party, which predominates in DeKalb. Indeed, in the summer primaries, there were no Republican candidates. So a victory over Dorsey, the Democratic incumbent, would mean a virtual victory in November. The primary, however, was too close to call among the four candidates, and Dorsey and Derwin, the top two, were forced into a runoff. An already bitter battle dissolved into a war of personal attacks.

One day, while working at her brother's campaign headquarters, a vision came over Renee Brown like a flash of fear. "I saw my brother dead," says Renee, 42. Hysterical, she rushed outside for fresh air. Her brother and a friend came to check on her.

Derwin Brown wrapped his big arms around his sister and reminded her that he had survived being an undercover narcotics detective and even an Internal Revenue investigator. "Renee, I'm not afraid," he told her. "I am on a mission. When you find something in life that you're willing to die for, that's your mission." If he sensed danger, he never started carrying a gun. Nor did he warn his family to be careful, though he had trained his wife and kids to shoot. "If he felt that any of us were in danger," says his wife, "he would have said, 'Phyllis, when you leave the house, take a gun.'"

There had been much foreboding during the campaign. With Brown campaigning so heavily on eliminating corruption and reforming the jail, his manager and several other volunteers--many of whom were off-duty cops--swore they were being followed. Late one night the candidate and another county official were shadowed by a mysterious man in a dark Ford Expedition as they stood on a sidewalk outside a Decatur restaurant and talked about the extent of the corruption, possibly involving bail bondsmen at the jail. Jack Stanford, a DeKalb police officer and close campaign aide, even suggested Derwin and the others begin carrying guns. None of it spooked Derwin. "All of us be careful," he would say.

Derwin Brown wound up winning the runoff election by a rate of 2 to 1. Not long afterward, J. Tom Morgan, the local district attorney, asked to meet him at the county courthouse. Morgan had been elected 10 years earlier on promises to rid the jail of corruption. The county has a long history, dating to the 1960s, of sheriffs being accused of fraud, bribery or cronyism. Now, he confided to Derwin, his office was targeting Dorsey.

From then on, Derwin and the district attorney met regularly, discussing the progress of the investigation and figuring out ways to get to the bottom of the mess awaiting the sheriff-elect. Derwin planned a top-to-bottom audit of the jail's contracts and a review of the seven bail bondsmen who had questionable connections to the jail. Derwin, who set up a transition team of campaign loyalists and career cops to run the sheriff's department, also had narrowed a list to 62 jail personnel whom he wanted to demote or fire.

Stanford, who had joined the transition team, was among advisers and friends cautioning Derwin against notifying jail employees that he planned to fire them, fearful they would destroy files or sabotage databases. "There's nothing they can do we can't fix," Derwin told him. His wife says he anguished over the firings, coming to her one night in early December to ask whether she thought people would rather know right away or wait until after the holidays to discover they were getting axed. "Derwin was not the bad guy. He was not firing people just to fire people," Phyllis says. "He really did not want to do that because he understands; he has a family."

Three weeks before Christmas, he decided to send letters to only 38 sheriff's employees. Within days of the mailing, he met with some of them and decided to let eight stay on. Some friends noticed that Derwin had a lot on his mind, too distracted by the tasks ahead to act like himself. On Friday, Dec. 15, Brown finished a sheriff's training course an hour south in Forsyth. He invited his friends to drive down to watch his graduation. Over lunch, he announced he was having an impromptu celebration later that night at his favorite restaurant. They were all welcome to show up. The change of plans surprised Phyllis because she thought they were going to a county commissioner's Christmas party.

MVP's Interactive Video Cafe is not much to look at from the outside. It sits in a sprawling lot of a large strip mall anchored by K Mart and a Kroger supermarket. Inside, however, a mostly upscale African-American clientele drinks margaritas or Cognac and dines on $17.95 entrees of blackened pork chops, charbroiled salmon and barbecued ribs. On different nights, the restaurant features live jazz, comedy or karaoke. The restaurant had set aside its plushly decorated VIP room for the Brown party. At one point during the evening, the hostess took an odd telephone call from two women who asked whether they could come to the party without invitations. Phyllis and her son-in-law noticed a man rush to get a table near them as the party was breaking up and the band was about to play. He seemed almost creepy, sitting and staring until two more men joined him. About then, Teresa Hood showed up in her leopard-print pants. A county employee, aerobics teacher and part-time fashion model, she had worked on the campaign for a short time. But she had not been around too much lately. Phyllis had never thought much of her; nor did others on the campaign. As far as Phyllis knew, Hood had not been invited to the celebration; nor had she been invited to the graduation in Forsyth, but she attended it nevertheless. Phyllis watched as her husband and Hood found a booth away from the crowd. They appeared to be talking intently. Phyllis then asked a friend to drive her home and told Derwin she was feeling tired. "I'll see you in a few minutes," he replied. He was with Hood when the band asked him to sing. Others say he saw her to her car, but Hood says no. Whatever happened, he soon headed home himself. He would not see his wife again.

A task force of detectives from four agencies, including the FBI, has yet to solve the Derwin Brown mystery. "We're not ignoring the possibility that he was killed for some reason other than he was going to be sheriff," says the new interim sheriff, Tom Brown, who is not related to Derwin. "We don't want to get into the possibility of narrowing our investigation too much and missing something."

The police have talked to Hood, who has changed her phone and pager numbers several times recently, out of habit, she says, not because she is hiding. She says on that Friday night, Derwin Brown talked to her about handling his press. She says she does not understand why the Browns or others would suggest she knows more than she is telling. "How could I signal the killer? How do you do that? I don't know anything about killers," she says. She says she admired Derwin as well as his wife. And even though Hood was busy with charity work, caring for her sick mother and not active on Derwin's transition team, she says she called him often. "Hey, Coach," she'd say. "It's me. I'm checking in. Tell me what we need to do."

Interim sheriff Tom Brown and others confirm that the investigation is now focusing primarily on the jail's finances. Forensic auditors are examining contracts and other records related to the private companies servicing the jail, which, with 3,750 inmates, is one of the largest east of the Mississippi. Among the most scrutinized are the companies holding contracts to provide health care, maintenance and food service at the jail.

Investigators and auditors are also looking into the blatantly improper arrangements between the sheriff and seven bail-bonding companies that have been allowed to set up shop inside the jail without paying rent. State law prohibits bondsmen from having such access. Investigators are also looking for possible wrongdoing at three of the bonding companies, including one formerly owned by civil rights pioneer Hosea Williams. Apart from not paying rent, the companies may have been allowed by former sheriffs to operate without posting $150,000 cash or property bonds, contrary to jail policy. After being sworn in, Derwin planned to evict the bail bondsmen, which would have had deep financial consequences. A legit bonding company in DeKalb County can generate $40,000 a month. There may have been other ways to boost income. Already, auditors are trying to account for $400,000 in bond forfeitures that are missing, overdue or otherwise not collected. This supposedly was the topic of conversation between Derwin Brown and the county official (clerk of court Jeanette Rozier) when the man in the Ford Expedition was watching them during the runoff election. Other bondsmen in town say they can find no record in the clerk's office of as many as 150 criminal cases in which they hold bonds. The companies are required to file quarterly reports listing the status of all bonded cases. "They were just not there, no docketing, no nothing, no record they ever existed," says the owner of a bonding company not targeted in the investigation. By not being forced to pay the full bonds of defendants who don't appear in court, the companies could benefit by keeping the money.

Then there is Sid Dorsey, the outgoing sheriff. He says he's beginning to feel like a suspect, especially since prosecutors announced that a grand jury will look into allegations that he used on-duty sheriff's deputies to work at his private security business and allowed jail inmates to work at the neighborhood improvement organization of his wife Sherry, an Atlanta councilwoman.

Dorsey, 50, spent 20 years at the Atlanta police department, going from beat cop on the city's meanest streets to one of the city's top homicide investigators. He was honored as lead detective in an infamous case of murdered and missing children in the early '80s. But through the years, the plain-talking, broad-shouldered detective also had less shining moments. He has shot and killed three people, including a 13-year-old boy who was part of a large gang that jumped Dorsey, took his gun and beat him badly when he was on patrol in low-income Pittman Park in 1967. Having lost his weapon, Dorsey procured the gun of a nearby club owner, chased down the youth he thought had his gun and shot him dead. A year later, he shot and killed a knife-wielding suspect who had confronted him and his partner on Ervin Street, now in the upscale McGill Place condo neighborhood but in those days a run-down section known as Buttermilk Bottom. In 1970, during an off-duty fray at a gas station, Dorsey flew into a rage when a man turned loose a spring-held air hose that accidentally struck Dorsey's car. The man pulled a knife, Dorsey retrieved his gun from his car, a tussle ensued, and Dorsey shot the man. Dorsey was charged with manslaughter, but prosecutors dismissed the case.

He later left the Atlanta police department to go to law school and start a private security company, which he still owns, but he says it is in limbo because of the controversy involving his tenure as sheriff. "Nobody wants to hire me now because of all this," he says. "I don't know what I'll do for a living. I don't know of any corruption at the jail. If there is any corruption, it's been embedded into the system for many, many years. The accusations have been blown way out of proportion."

He can only imagine what people who know him are saying behind his back. "I've been treated like a suspect, so I'm acting like a suspect," he says. "I don't dare try to make any inquiries or find out anything at the risk of being accused of obstruction of justice. I can only let events take their course." But he too has theories about the assassins. "It was certainly an amateur," he reasoned. "A professional would not have been that reckless. It had to be someone very angry and very vindictive. A professional would have gone in with a .22 or .32 with a silencer, fired one or two shots maximum, and been out of there, what with all those people inside [Brown's house] and the risk of being seen. And it had to have been someone who knew his whereabouts."

As for motive, Dorsey, who is carrying a gun these days for protection, surmises that the stakes must have been very high or the reasoning extremely vengeful. "My God, what reason could someone have had to commit such an aggravated crime against the man in front of his own house--at such risk of being seen by people in the house or in the neighborhood?" He insists he would have gained nothing by murdering his political opponent. He had already lost the race. Besides, he adds, "I don't even know where the boy lived."

To find the killer, police have conducted more than 300 interviews, following 100 tips phoned into a hot line. They have seized security videos from the supper club, shown photo lineups to witnesses and dug into the flower beds for shell casings. Rewards in the case have risen to $71,500 without a break.

The lack of noticeable success has caused murmurs among DeKalb's African-American community. A black nightclub comic joked that the murder of an elderly white security guard would result in an instant arrest, while this case leaves investigators scratching their heads.

Tom Brown, the public-safety chief appointed to be interim sheriff until a special election in March, has picked up where Derwin Brown was forced to leave off. He's auditing the books, and he has suspended several jail programs and fired four jail staff members whom Derwin had targeted, including a correctional officer whose home has been searched, whose alibi has been challenged by police and whose lawyer says drives a dark suv. Two weeks ago, Tom Brown and other county officials also evicted the seven bail bondsmen from the jail. Now, he wants to run for the job.

So does Geraldine Champion, 60, a former Atlanta homicide detective who had run against Dorsey and Derwin Brown in the Democratic primaries. After losing to Derwin, she joined his transition team. She went to his graduation lunch in Forsyth, but her feet hurt the night of his party, and she stayed home. If Derwin ever felt threatened, she did not sense it: "He never imagined that something serious was going to happen." Neither did she. But now she does. After announcing her plans to run again in March, she asked authorities for special police protection as a political candidate.

Phyllis Brown remains under police protection as well. On a table in her living room is the bouquet of long-stem roses Derwin bought for her birthday. Police had confiscated them as evidence from his car, but a friend in the department returned them. The flowers have shriveled into dark red clumps of memories. On another table across the room is the folded American flag from her husband's funeral. She has not forgotten her last image of Derwin, the hollow look in his eyes. It keeps her searching for answers, she says. Come March, she may run for sheriff. She has no experience beyond being a cop's wife, but she says her husband left her with the qualifications: she has his team and his vision. But nearly five weeks after his murder, the holiday lights still hang from the Browns' home. Derwin normally took care of those things.

--With reporting by Anne Berryman, Mike Billips and David Nordan/Decatur

With reporting by Anne Berryman, Mike Billips and David Nordan/Decatur