An in-custody death in 2014 raises more concerns about the police department’s ability to investigate itself

Six years ago today, on Aug. 5, 2014, members of the Baltimore Police Department’s Warrant Apprehension Task Force brought a man named Tyree Woodson into the Southwestern District Police Station where he died in the bathroom of a gunshot wound to the head. News reports immediately began to follow the police version of events , alleging that Woodson snuck the gun into the station in a medical boot and shot himself in the head. After over a year of exhaustive reporting, we showed that the story was much more complicated than that. 

This story was published through Democracy in Crisis in partnership with the Baltimore City Paper in 2017. We are republishing it now because it had disappeared from the Baltimore Sun’s City Paper archive and the Baltimore Police Department has never adequately addressed the questions raised here. You can read “What Happened To Tyree Woodson?” in seven chapters below.

A single shot from a Glock .40 caliber pistol rang out from the bathroom of the Southwestern District Police Station in Baltimore on Aug. 5, 2014. Tyree Woodson, a 38-year-old African-American man the police described as a member of a gang, slumped down dead against the wall.

It was summer 2014. More than 100 people had already been murdered that year and then-Commissioner Anthony Batts blamed the spike in crime on the Black Guerrilla Family (BGF). The revelation, in April of 2013, that BGF had almost complete and brazen control over the Baltimore City Detention Center had shocked the entire country–and bolstered Batts’ ideas about gang violence.

It was in this context that police reported that a violent gang member had killed himself in the bathroom of the Southwestern District.

Crammed into our editor’s office for a meeting the next day, the entire City Paper staff was puzzled. It just didn’t make sense. The Baltimore Police Department suspected that Woodson shot himself in the head with a gun he snuck into the station. He had been arrested, they said, for attempted murder. He was very dangerous–and yet, perhaps, he had not been searched. And it was strange that this guy, portrayed as a hardened criminal, would turn the weapon on himself rather than a police officer.

Then-Deputy Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez pointed this out himself in his press conference. “I am very grateful that this individual elected to use that weapon on himself and not to engage any other officers or civilians that may have been inside the police station.”

Soon, TV newscasters started suggesting Woodson snuck a gun into the station in a medical boot–which was on his foot because he had been shot several days before.

The police, the coroner, and the State’s Attorney’s Office all concluded that Woodson’s death was a suicide, closing the books on the case.

Woodson’s mother, Verdessa McDougald, and his fiancée, Tahesha White, never believed the that story. McDougald told Charles Anderson, the Force Investigation Team (FIT) detective, that she believed Southwestern District police officers killed her son. But there is no indication that her questions about the case were ever followed up on by investigators. That’s because Anderson only visited McDougald’s home after the investigation was closed. While it was open, investigators took statements almost solely from other police officers.

I know that because I read Anderson’s notes–whatever wasn’t redacted, at least–in the 606 pages that I received from the Baltimore City Police Department through a Maryland Public Information Act request. Something about Woodson’s death would not let me go. His life and death seemed to offer an important look into the way that Baltimore City works–all the ways it can eat up a life and leave the survivors feeling shattered in the aftermath.

Even after spending months looking over all of the available evidence, I am not sure what happened to Tyree Woodson. But it is clear that his death presents an unvarnished look at what happens when police departments investigate their own officers, especially for incidents that occurred within their own stations.

The internal charges against some of the officers charged in the 2015 in-custody death of Freddie Gray show that having outside agencies oversee the investigation of officers may be a better, if still deeply flawed, route to take, because the internal investigation of the officers involved in the death of Tyree Woodson makes it clear that internal investigations often raise as many questions as it answers.

The post What Happened to Tyree Woodson? A Reexamination of a Death in Police Custody – Intro appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Chapter 7:

UnFIT for Duty

According to police records, a homicide detective called the Force Investigation Team at 2:45 that afternoon. Det. Sergeant Tashawna Gaines inspected the weapons of Pow, Converse, Price Thompson, Carvell, and Dzambo. These detectives were also photographed at homicide.

Det. Michael Boyd obtained a warrant to collect DNA from Pow. There was no match. The only DNA match on the gun came from Woodson.

In the photographs taken by crime scene technicians, Woodson is lying on the floor rather than sitting in the stall. His tattoos were photographed. One says “Kill or Be Killed” and another “Hellbound.”

In addition to a knife, a watch, cigarettes, and a lighter, Mattingly wrote in his report that Woodson had counterfeit money. Someone photographed gloved hands fanning it out.

Det. Hollingsworth was eventually asked about the gloves he used when he moved the gun on the major’s orders. “The gloves were thrown in the trash container once I moved the suspect [sic] gun,” he wrote in a statement. “I was never directed not to throw the gloves away.”

FIT’s follow-up question about the gloves came a full week after the incident. It’s a small detail but it made me wonder how serious this investigation could have really been. No one, it seemed, checked the trash can in the bathroom for gloves or any other evidence that may have been discarded in the crime scene.

Investigators failed to question McDougald and White about whether or not Woodson had been searched and about the phone call Woodson made only minutes before his death. No one from the police department even notified them of Woodson’s death. According to White, they heard about it on the news.

“When I turned on the news they were saying it was a 38-year-old guy who was supposed to have shot himself in the police station,” White told me on the phone. “We found about it on the news, [then] his mother went to the police station and I just bust out crying and I told his mother there’s something not right about this story.”

“Based on police investigation, the manner of death is classified as SUICIDE,” the chief medical examiner’s post-mortem report read the day after the incident. Since the FIT investigation was incomplete, the circumstances surrounding the death were likely drawn from Mattingly’s report.

Over the next few days, there was a weird series of emails between FIT detective Tashawna Gaines and Bethany Durand, the assistant state’s attorney looking into the case. Gaines requested a meeting with Durand but, despite repeated requests, wouldn’t tell her what they would discuss, writing only that “there are a few issues to discuss that will be discussed during the meeting not via email. Thanks.”

Durand expressed annoyance at this secrecy and asked for a phone call–which never came. But after the meeting Gaines wrote that “the issues and misunderstandings” were “appropriately addressed.”

The State’s Attorney’s Office did not bring any charges against any of the officers. There is no publicly available evidence of further investigation.

The Baltimore Police Department had repeatedly declined to comment on the case. Spokespersons have confirmed that Pow, Converse, Price, and Thompson are still on the force. Late last year, a spokesperson wrote: “Detective Mattingly is still employed with the Baltimore Police Department but is in a non-active status. He has expressed, and is in the process of resigning.”

Finally, on March 2, 2015, someone from the police department visited the home of Verdessa McDougald. But Det. Charles Anderson, with whom she had previously spoken on the phone about retrieving her son’s property, did not come to ask her questions; he came to tell her that her son’s death had been ruled a suicide–seven months after the fact.

“Ms. McDougald stated she had a copy of the ME’s report”–which had been completed since September of the previous year–”and she believed they were working with the police department.”

Anderson wrote: “I advised Ms. McDougald that the Medical Examiner’s office is independent of the police department and their conclusions are established by evidence collected from the autopsy.”

Anderson said McDougald’s “primary concern” was that then-Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake “never came to speak to her about her son’s death,” adding that “she also stated she believed that Police Officers from the Southwest District killed her son because GOD told her that they were responsible.”

McDougald was concerned that no one from the mayor’s office ever visited her, but denies that was somehow more important than her claim that the police had killed her son.

“I told him that I didn’t believe that my son had killed himself, and to this day, I still don’t,” she said of the visit.

No one ever visited White. She lived with McDougald for a while after Woodson’s death, but without him to join them together, they had a falling out.

“My life is gone without Tyree. That was a big part of my life and my kids’ life and his mother. And everyone else is going on with their life like it never happened because the police,” she said. “He was in their care.”

Though they no longer speak, this is the main point stressed by both McDougald and White: We may never know exactly what happened with Tyree Woodson, but we do know he was in police custody and his life was their responsibility.

The post What Happened to Tyree Woodson? A Reexamination of a Death in Police Custody – Chapter 7 appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Chapter 6:

Last Minutes

Before they took Woodson to the precinct, Thompson waited outside with him while Price went into the house to talk with McDougald and tell her they would be searching the home.

From this moment on Woodson was in police custody and we must rely almost solely on the FIT report to get a picture of what may have happened in the moments leading up to his death. It is important to keep in mind that none of the officers upon whose statements the following narrative is based gave any statement until several months after the event.

Price and Thompson took Woodson to the Southwestern District station and locked him in an interview room. According to a statement by Det. Kevin Carvell, he met Thompson there. Thompson told him Woodson had been searched.

Carvell said he handcuffed Woodson to the wall. He told Woodson to contact him if he needed anything and “closed the door and that was the last time he saw Mr. Woodson,” according to the FIT report.

Det. Matthew Dzambo took Woodson to the bathroom while he waited for the detectives. “When they entered the bathroom, Det. Dzambo searched the bathroom and each stall to ensure no weapons or contraband was lying around,” the FIT report reads. When Converse and Pow returned, they went into the interview room and told Woodson, back from the bathroom, that they had recovered a weapon from his mother’s house and believed he had used it to shoot his cousin.

“Detective Converse believes Woodson had leg irons on his feet but doesn’t recall if he was handcuffed,” the FIT report reads.

Again, I wondered, if there was a gun in his shoe, how could someone have put leg-irons on Woodson and not noticed it? It is possible that, if he got a gun into precinct, Woodson could have placed it in the bathroom on this first trip so that it was no longer on his person during the rest of his time in the precinct.

When Pow and Converse finally questioned Woodson in an interview room, they did not record it, but according to Pow, Woodson “admitted Jerome McDougald shot him and his girlfriend and also stabbed his friend. He was very respectful and concerned about the future of his family. He wanted his family relocated and admitted he was always BGF. He was very concerned in going back to jail because he was a primary witness in a murder case, which concerned members of the BGF.”

Then, according to the FIT report, Woodson agreed to look at the photos and do a photo array, but said he wanted a cigarette first.

The detectives led him to the lot behind the station. Pow “stated it was odd because they ask Mr. Woodson if he needed a lighter and he said he had one.” He also pulled out a pack of cigarettes. In his statement to FIT investigators, Det. Pow said it didn’t set off any bells “because it was just cigarettes,” even though Woodson was supposed to have already been searched.

Then they showed him a photo of the man who shot him and he initialed it. Converse said Woodson got emotional. Woodson allegedly told them he would give a recorded statement if they let him use the phone.

In his statement to FIT, Pow said that he left Converse and Woodson to go get a tape recorder but when he came back he heard Woodson say, “Baby I’m going to be gone for a long time, I love you.”

Converse said Woodson told White “he is going to jail and not coming home.”

White, at this moment in the narrative, is Woodson’s only documented contact with anyone outside of the Southwestern District following his arrest. And yet she said the FIT investigators never asked her about the phone call. There is no notation in the files that indicate any attempt to contact her.

She told me that Woodson was calm and collected on the phone. He was acting like he always did when he got arrested and was trying to calm her down. She was upset because of what the detectives who had searched the house had been telling her.

“The polices had been saying he’s going away for a long time, he’s not coming home, but they would not let us see what they had to supposed to have recovered,” she said.

That’s why she was upset. Woodson, who was calling from his cell phone, kept telling her to calm down and that he would call her when he got to Central Booking.

“I heard noise in the background like an officer was saying something and that’s when Tyree’s phone had hung up,” she said.

The detectives both told FIT investigators that Woodson started crying and wanted to use the bathroom.

According to Pow’s statements to investigators, he walked Woodson, who hobbled along on his crutches, to the bathroom. Pow did not check the stalls as Dzambo had done, but he asked Woodson if he wanted him to hold his crutches. According to Pow, Woodson didn’t respond and went into the stall. As Pow stood outside the stall, by the window, Woodson would have had to pull his jeans down and sit on the toilet while also removing the gun from wherever it was concealed. In the crime scene photos his pants are down but not his boxers.

If this is what actually happened, then Woodson sat there on the toilet with the gun in his hand facing a choice. He could either turn the gun on himself or on Pow.

If he was always BGF and was trying to protect his family, as police alleged, the answer was obvious. Killing himself would have been one thing, but killing a cop would have been a more forceful statement. George Jackson, founder of the prison gang, was charged with killing a correctional officer in prison and later smuggled in a gun to take other guards hostage. More recently, the gang seemed to want to retaliate against cops for shutting down its jailhouse operation, with stories spreading about the gang’s intention to target white cops in Maryland and New York.
[/vc_column_text][vc_single_image source=”external_link” alignment=”center” custom_src=”http://www.trbimg.com/img-5925322d/turbine/bcpnews-woodson-images-20170523-009″ caption=”Tyree Woodson and Tahesha White (Courtesy/Tahesha White)” css=”.vc_custom_1596405046276{padding-top: 20px !important;padding-bottom: 20px !important;}”][vc_column_text]If this is what happened, it’s hard to overstate the danger Pow, unknowingly, faced at that moment. But according to Pow, he didn’t notice anything until he heard a loud pop and a “clanking sound.” Then he saw the gun fall to the floor between the stall as a piece of plaster fell from the ceiling.

When he opened the stall door “Mr. Woodson was slumped over with blood coming out of his mouth. He was leaning back on the stall after he shot himself.”

Officers outside the door noted that they saw Pow run out and say, “My fucking suspect just shot himself,” according to the handwritten notes of a FIT investigator that ended up in the file.

Det. Chris Hollingsworth told investigators he was standing outside of the District Detective Unit office when he heard the shot. He said he cleared the hallway and called his sergeant. When he went into the bathroom, the ranking officer, Maj. James Handley, told him to move the gun–in case Woodson was not dead. Hollingsworth moved the gun behind a trash can, he said.

Again, because of the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights, most of the statements we can use to reconstruct what happened were not given until months after the incident. The one police narrative that was written that day was written by Dale Mattingly.

Although integrity issues had prevented him from making a statement while Woodson was alive–and discredited the testimony of those who relied on his report to inform their own–Mattingly was given the final say on the day of Woodson’s death. He stood over the dead man and emptied his pocket. There is no photograph of Mattingly in the report and no evidence that his gun was tested.

Mattingly wrote that he pulled into the precinct parking lot at 2:42 p.m. He heard a call for a medic on the radio. When he walked in someone told him that “the individual that was injured was in the men’s bathroom.”

“Upon entering the bathroom, I Officer Mattingly observed Southwest District Detective Hollingsworth in the bathroom standing at the stall where a black male Officer Mattingly knew to be Tyree Woodson was with a single gunshot wound to the head.”

Mattingly asked Hollingsworth what happened.

“He shot himself and I moved the gun behind the trash can,” Hollingsworth said.

In the photos of the crime scene, the glasses that Woodson’s mother gave to one of the officers were lying on the side of the sink. Pow’s story about taking Woodson into the bathroom doesn’t account for them. And no one asked.

Mattingly’s report does not mention Pow at all. There is a door log in the investigatory documents, detailing when people entered the precinct after FIT arrived. I tried to file a public records request for the regular door log to the precinct, to see when Mattingly arrived, but such records are not maintained for officers, only visitors–so it is impossible for an outsider to know who was in the precinct when the gun was fired.

When I called Handley, who was the ranking officer, and asked if he knew that the report of the incident was written by a cop who the dead man had just accused of fabricating charges against him, Handley refused to answer and directed me toward internal affairs, whose investigators made up the FIT unit.

The post What Happened to Tyree Woodson? A Reexamination of a Death in Police Custody – Chapter 6 appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Chapter 5:

Getting the Boot

According to the police report, late in the night of July 30, 2014, Jerome McDougald, Woodson’s cousin and the man police believed shot him, was standing on Baltimore Street buying a loose cigarette when a silver or gold four-door car pulled up. The driver said “Hey, yo” and shot McDougald in the upper right thigh and the left ring finger.

Pow wrote in the report that he had anonymous witnesses who ID’d Woodson as the shooter. It was enough to get a warrant. On Aug. 5, police put Woodson’s mother’s house under surveillance, waiting for Woodson, who was supposed to visit his probation officer that morning, to come out.

White was still in pain. She said she woke up before Woodson that morning and took a pain pill. She knew he didn’t have to be up for a while and so she did not wake him. She went back to bed beside him.

“All I remember when I was sleeping was that Tyree gave me a kiss on my cheek and told me that he would be back when he come back from his PO. So I said OK and dozed back off,” she said.

Woodson’s mother was making a cup of coffee in the kitchen when he came down the stairs. He told her he’d see her when he got back from his parole officer and she told him to be careful.

She said that after she heard the door close she realized he had forgotten his glasses–he was always forgetting them–and started to run outside to bring them to him. That was when she saw the plain-clothed police officers.

She said that one of them told her that Woodson was in their car. She asked if she could give him his glasses and they told her to go inside. She gave the officer his glasses, she said.

She ran upstairs and woke up White and told her police were outside arresting Woodson. McDougald had to help White put on her shirt because of her injuries. White said that when she downstairs, she looked out the window.

“There were all these officers out there that had on regular clothes. I don’t know if they had the little bulletproof vests on but I couldn’t even tell they was polices,” White recalled. “When I walked to the door, it was a screen door, right there they was patting Tyree down, his crutch things . . . was on the ground, they had Tyree up against the car and they was checking him and once they checked him they put him in the back of the car.”

Woodson’s mother doesn’t know if the officers ever searched her son, but she knows they should have.

According to the FIT report on Woodson’s death, Warrant Apprehension Task Force detectives Earl Thompson and Sterling Price both affirmed that Thompson searched Woodson.

In his statement, Thompson said he was behind Woodson and reached around him to check the waistband of his pants. “He jingled Mr. Woodson’s pants” and searched both legs, the FIT report reads. Thompson said he took a lighter but left money in Woodson’s pocket. “Detective Thompson noticed Mr. Woodson was wearing a medical boot, so he tapped the boot without go [sic] inside to prevent causing further injury to Mr. Woodson’s wound,” the report reads.

This is a key moment in the mystery of what happened to Tyree Woodson.

When I first started looking into this case, I had a friend who was wearing a tall, hard, plastic medical boot and I assumed that’s what Woodson was wearing. The word “boot” is used in all of the official documents.

At the time, Lisa Robinson, a reporter with local NBC affiliate WBAL, actually showed viewers a long, hard, plastic medical boot on air.

“Now Woodson, according to his mother, had been shot in the foot a couple days ago and was wearing a boot on his foot similar to this one,” Robinson said. Then she held up a boot. “Sort of a brace,” she described it.

Robinson could not comment on where she got the idea that Woodson was wearing “sort of a brace,” but McDougald insists he was wearing nothing of the sort.

“He didn’t have a medical boot. He had on a shoe. A blue shoe that has the two straps,” she said. “What they showed on the news was not what was on his leg.”

White and McDougald are no longer in contact–they had a falling out after Woodson’s death–but White described the shoe in the same way McDougald had.

“The shoe they had on the news wasn’t the same shoe. He had on a blue shoe, a little blue one that go over the top of the foot, a low top,” White told me.

“I watched y’all and y’all checked this man before you locked him up and the shoe, why would y’all put this high-top shoe on the news like that’s the shoe he had on when he honestly had on a blue shoe that strapped over with his toes hanging out?” she said again.

In the crime scene photos of Woodson’s death, you can see his sock where his toes stick out of the front of the shoe and the same sock where the shoe dips down for his ankle. This is not a boot for a break or a sprain but appears to be what is called a “mesh post-op shoe.”

It seemed impossible to me to conceal a Glock in a shoe like that. But I’m not a firearms expert and just to rule out the possibility, I had to try.

I did the best I could to replicate the situation. I called Shock Trauma trying to find the exact shoe Woodson would have been wearing. On the phone, Lisa Clough, the director of media relations, seemed interested in helping and asked me some questions. But when I wrote her a follow-up email, she responded that “we are unable to comment on any patient that has been in our care.”

I did have a picture of the shoe and I bought the closest thing I could find to it at St. Agnes Hospital. I also tried to find the exact make and model of firearm that killed Woodson. I was unable to find the Glock 23, but I was able to get a hold of a Glock 17, which is roughly the same size–the 17 is slightly taller and the 23 is slightly longer, but the guns seemed similar enough to at least test a theory.

I strapped on the shoe and, to my surprise, the gun did fit in the hospital shoe if I stuck the barrel toward the toe and had the grip come up the side of my ankle.

I had imagined it would be a “if it doesn’t fit, you must acquit”-type moment. But reality is more complicated.

I tried to walk around and the gun did not fall out, especially after I tightened the straps. And if I walked awkwardly, well, I was wearing a medical boot, so of course it would look awkward.

But when I ran my hands down my leg, in a sort of pat-down, the bulging handle of the pistol was obvious. The entire handle stuck up and outward at the ankle. If Thompson either shook the legs of Woodson’s pants or tapped the “boot” and the gun was there, it would have been hard to miss.

And, as I would discover, once he was in custody, Woodson interacted with numerous other officers, none of whom noticed a gun.

The post What Happened to Tyree Woodson? A Reexamination of a Death in Police Custody – Chapter 5 appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Chapter 4:

Homecoming

Because the cameras in the courtroom often faced outward from the bench, toward the gallery, I inadvertently watched Woodson’s mother and his fiancée as they watched the trial. When I finally found White, her trust was even harder to earn than McDougald’s.

Eventually, she agreed to meet me–and then backed out. “I would love to talk to u also but it would have to be after Thanksgiving the holidays is really hard on me and my kids since Tyree been gone,” she wrote me.

We had another appointment in early December 2016 but she backed out again. When I wrote her back in February, she did not respond.

Finally, in April, we had a long phone conversation, punctuated by sobbing, as she told me about her life with Tyree.

White said she met Woodson through a mutual friend soon after he had finished a stint in jail. They started talking and hanging out and had been dating for five years by Christmas 2012. She had two children and they all lived together.

When I asked what it was like to live with him, White said: “Tyree was always that type of person that just do stuff, you don’t even know it’s coming. You just got to prepare yourself for everything.”

For instance, he took her to the Poconos for Valentine’s Day one year. And when she wasn’t ready to come back, they stayed another week. “We had a good time. It was like horseback riding. We got to take pictures. They had like comedy shows there, like restaurants where we can go and have fun. We had a jacuzzi in our room,” she said.

He also surprised her with a marriage proposal, she said, telling her he needed to get a new watch battery at the jewelry store and springing a ring on her instead. She happily accepted.

“Tyree was a good father figure to my kids he was great with them he spent a lot of time with them helping them with homework taking them out and just being a father to them,” she wrote me a few weeks after our first conversation. She said he especially loved steak and crabs, but, in reality, she wrote, “he like to eat all food lol he was like a fat boy at heart.”

She also told me her version of what happened on the day after Christmas in 2012.

She said she was cooking that day–tacos, she thinks–and sent Woodson to the store to get the seasoning. When she heard the story the police told about what happened, she said “it all seemed like an inside job, plotted and planned so he wouldn’t come home and would stay locked up all of that time.”

She also told me that during the trial one of the officers “was smiling in my face, saying that Tyree wasn’t going to come home.”

Woodson did come home, though, and moved into White’s Hollins Street apartment with her and her children. He never got his car back, even though all of the charges were dropped, so Woodson arranged to pay for a rental car by the week and went back to working with his uncle, James McDougald, doing construction and odd jobs.

On July 25, Woodson and White went to McDonald’s to buy dinner. When they left the apartment, White told me on the phone, she could see that the club next door was open because the parking lot was starting to fill up. When they got back, there were even more cars around.

“He was carrying the food, I was carrying the drinks and all I know is like we was walking through the split and I heard gunshots,” White recalled. The split is a little walkway they had to go through to get to the apartment. “But when I heard the gunshots I didn’t even know I was shot until like the third time. When I got shot that’s when I dropped all the sodas. Tyree was just screaming for me and stuff and he dropped the food and he picked me up and ran us to the apartment building.”

Woodson laid White down beneath the steps, where she would be covered from fire.

White’s son came out and was screaming for her and Woodson ran toward him, to get him back inside.

White passed out there under the stairs, and when she came to she saw Tyree and her son and neighbors all standing around. Tyree was “screaming and hollering for someone to get his car keys because the ambulance had not came.”

White had been hit four times: twice in the lower back, once in the chest, and once in the neck. She slipped in and out of consciousness.

Woodson didn’t know he had been shot in the foot at first. But when the medics were there, he lit a cigarette and someone told him he shouldn’t smoke because he had been shot, White recalled.

“When I came to I was in the hospital. All my family was there. Tyree’s mother was there, a lot of people was there, and everybody was like crying and stuff like that,” White recalled. “Tyree was coming there, being pushed to my room in a wheelchair. He had made them discharge him . . . so he could come be with me.”

She said she was still heavily medicated when the detectives first came to see her. “They kept trying to bring Tyree into the hallway, so I remember them coming the whole time I was there making me feel uncomfortable and making Tyree feel uncomfortable.”

The story White told me about that night and the events that followed was similar to the various police reports filed by Det. Matthew Pow, who got the case–but there were a few big differences. Pow wrote in his progress report that Woodson wanted to be relocated in exchange for talking. Pow told Woodson he would have to identify the shooter. Woodson told him to talk to White. She refused to talk to anyone. In White’s story there was no talk of relocation, but there was a lot of pressure from the detectives.

“The third time when they came, they was telling him to come in the hallway and I told Tyree I didn’t want him going in the hallway, whatever he had to say to them he could say it to me,” she said.

“Why don’t you go ahead and tell your fiancée who shot her?” White recalled the detectives said to Woodson. “And he was all like ‘I don’t know who shot us, like I told y’all that the last two times you came.’”

“And that’s when the other officer, he was basically trying to talk to me like they know who shot us, [saying] Tyree needs to let me know what’s going on, basically making it try to seem like the reason I got shot was because of Tyree.”

White said that Tyree started crying and the detectives said: “Let your fiancée know she almost died because of you. It’s all because of you, she would have never got shot.”

The detectives told Woodson and White that they knew that Woodson’s cousin, Jerome McDougald, shot him. But White was suspicious. “I was actually cool with his cousin’s baby mother. We knew each other before we even started dealing with them, before I even met him, before she met his cousin and all that,” she said. “So all I know is when I had got shot she was reaching out to me and making sure that me and my kids were OK.”

She said that Woodson stayed with her at the hospital unless he was taking care of her kids or running errands for the family. He had moved back in with his mother, and White joined them there when she was released from the hospital a few days later.

The post What Happened to Tyree Woodson? A Reexamination of a Death in Police Custody – Chapter 4 appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Chapter 3:

Moving On

The two lawyers squaring off in the case had an evident dislike for one another. Grant McDaniel, the prosecutor, was a lumpy white man, with a penchant for following up statements with a high-pitched, breathy laugh, as if indicating that what he is saying is so obvious it is laughable that he even has to say it. He had been a prosecutor for more than 15 years and carried himself in the courtroom like he had seen it all.

Woodson’s lawyer, James Rhodes, is black, like Woodson. He wears sharp suits and had a Van Dyke mustache. Whereas McDaniel seems slightly annoyed, Rhodes wore an air of perpetual outrage.

Rhodes started by arguing that the charges were entirely false, fabricated by the officers.

“You know when it’s a fabrication? When the state gets up here and even they have trouble putting it in order,” he said in his opening remarks. “Pay attention specifically to Officer Mattingly’s testimony.”

It turned out that no one would have the opportunity to pay attention to Mattingly’s testimony. While the two lawyers and the judges were trying to schedule their various witnesses, McDaniel said he would not be calling Mattingly because he had “moved on.”

No one asked what he meant by “move on,” but I found myself thinking that Mattingly was no longer with the department, which didn’t make sense because I had seen records of arrests he had made since 2014, and I knew he was still on the force when Woodson died three months later.

As the state made its case, the other three officers present that day provided testimony that followed the narrative contours of the statement of charges written 17 months earlier. Rhodes asked one detective after another if they had taken notes at the time. None of the officers had. Rhodes asked them, with evident delight, how they had refreshed their memories. They all said they had read the statement of charges, written by Mattingly.

“You’re referring to someone else’s statements!” he said finally, his eyes flaring. He turned to the judge to say that if all the other officers based their testimony on Mattingly’s statement, Woodson deserved the chance to confront his accuser.

The judge, Jeffrey Geller, asked both attorneys to approach the bench for a private conference obscured from the jury by the sound of white noise. But when a case is done, Maryland law makes bench conferences public and it was there on the screen (Maryland law prohibits me from “broadcasting” that footage, however, so it is not shared online along with the other documents available on DocumentCloud).

In the bench conference, Geller asked McDaniel what he meant by “moved on.”

“In all due candor I was asked by the police integrity unit if I could present the case without him and I said I could–I don’t have any other information than that.”

Rhodes was furious. “‘He has moved on.’ That’s exactly what I was told,” he said, sounding almost stunned.

“I recall when talking about timing for testimony, the phrase ‘moved on’ was used,” Judge Geller said.

“If there is a potential issue with this detective and him being able to testify that should have been brought to my attention,” Rhodes said. “If it’s about his integrity, yes, it’s something I should have known prior to trial.”

McDaniel said he didn’t know what the issue with Mattingly was. The judge dismissed them and told the state to “find out the issues and turn it over.”

Earlier that year, the police department settled a suit against Mattingly for $50,000. As in most settlements, the terms insure that the officer is not admitting guilt. In the complaint, a 13-year-old boy alleged he was walking down the street in July 2011 when Mattingly pulled up and ordered the boy to come over the the car. When the boy kept walking, Mattingly chased him to a fence where he was thrown to the ground and punched in the face numerous times by Mattingly, the suit alleged.

According to the complaint, Mattingly said the boy had been carrying a pot plant.

The complaint further alleges that the officers got another call and dropped the boy off at his grandmother’s house without charges. His mother called an ambulance and when Mattingly allegedly heard about that, he arrived on the scene, handcuffed the boy to his bed, placed him under arrest, and remained in the hospital room with the boy for five hours. Mattingly then took him to juvenile booking, where no charges were ever filed.

The department settled, one of more than 100 such settlements which had cost the city nearly $6 million (plus another $5.7 million in legal fees used to defend officers in these cases) by 2014, according to a Baltimore Sun investigative report.

It is not clear whether this was the reason that the State’s Attorney’s Office did not want Mattingly to testify in Woodson’s case.

Jenifer Layman, who worked in the police integrity unit, appeared before the court explaining that “due to volume, due to triage, due to miscommunication with our office,” this situation was handled poorly, but she assured the court that there was nothing potentially exculpatory in whatever had not been disclosed.

She said that Mattingly was under ongoing investigation by the State’s Attorney’s Office “and it does concern his integrity.” She mentioned “prior bad acts” that can call credibility into question.

Layman assured the judge that there was no effort by the state to “play fast and loose and hide the ball” and that “had the right pieces fallen into place that letter would have been disclosed.”

After she left, McDaniel, Rhodes, and the judge tried to figure out how to proceed. Judge Geller acknowledged the rules had been violated but said he would not dismiss the case like Rhodes asked. He would, however, read the “missing witness” instruction to the jury, informing them that if a witness integral to the state’s case isn’t called, it may be because that witness’ testimony would harm their case.

I sat and watched this unfold on a computer screen in a small room that used to be a U.S. Marshall’s office. I could hardly believe what was happening. At the time, the State’s Attorney’s Office maintained a “do not call” list of officers who had integrity issues and could create problems on the stand. But here was an assistant state’s attorney saying that the arresting officer had “moved on” so that he would not have to testify.

I paused the tape to clear my head. I knew McDaniel’s name was familiar. A quick search reminded me that McDaniel himself “moved on” when Marilyn Mosby fired him shortly after taking office. He said he was fired “without cause.” Mosby’s office later declined to comment on McDaniel’s involvement in this case.

When I hit play again, I watched McDaniel’s case against Woodson take another blow. Although the judge didn’t dismiss the entire case, when the prosecution rested, he issued a judgement of acquittal for all of the assault charges related to Woodson either trying to run over officers or smashing into their car, agreeing with the defense that no evidence had been presented to support them. There were no photographs of either car–the police still had Woodson’s. No work order reports from the police department for repairs to the car. No injuries. And no witnesses from the crowded shopping center.

But Woodson was still facing the drug charges, so he took the stand in his own defense. I could see how people called him “the professor.” He sat there wearing his glasses propped on his nose between a long, almost scholarly beard and a bald head.

Woodson was not effusive on the stand. His answers were generally confined to yes or no. But as it came out, Woodson said that his fiancée sent him to the store. He had only been gone for five minutes, he said, before he was stopped and inexplicably arrested.

“I wasn’t informed of why I was being arrested,” he said, adding that he never knew what he was being charged with until he was at Central Booking.

He was never on Ashton Road, where they said they first spotted him, at all, he said. And he did not have heroin capsules either on his person or in the car. He did not crash into officers or try to evade them.

“The police are lying?” McDaniel asked on cross-examination.

Woodson’s lawyer objected and the judge sustained it.

“So they’re mistaken?” McDaniel amended his question.

“They’re lying,” Woodson answered.

The jury found Woodson not guilty on all remaining counts.

“When we came out of the courthouse, one of the officers was sitting outside of the courthouse, just sitting there,” McDougald said. “And when my son’s girlfriend came out she said to the guy, she said, ‘Well how do you like us now? My fiancée beat the charges.’”

McDougald felt that the officers had it out for Woodson and told White to watch what she was saying. When Woodson came out, McDougald said, that same officer, whose name she does not remember, gave him a dirty look.

“Now that was May 5. August 5 they pick my son up and say they want to question him about a shooting and my son never comes home,” she said.

The post What Happened to Tyree Woodson? A Reexamination of a Death in Police Custody – Chapter 3 appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Chapter 2:

Flexing Their Muscles

Almost a year after Woodson’s death, some information started to come out. As a result of a public information act request, The Sun’s Justin Fenton discovered that Dale Mattingly, the detective who wrote the report of Woodson’s death, “had been one of four officers who arrested Woodson in 2013 on various assault and drug charges. Woodson was acquitted at trial of all charges in May 2014, three months before his death.”

I was curious about that case so I went to the courthouse to pull up the statement of charges, which were written by Mattingly and detailed an encounter between Woodson and the officers on Dec. 26, 2012.

It was the day after Christmas and outside it was snowing and icy. Mattingly, a Southwestern District detective, was driving around with three other drug detectives–knockers or jump out boys, as they are called on the street.

Anybody who lives in the city, follows Baltimore crime, or has even watched “The Wire” has heard of knockers. Operations units like this, which used to be called flex squads, have long been the center of controversy.

The Southwestern’s flex squads were officially disbanded in January 2006 when a detective named Jemini Jones was accused–and later charged and acquitted–of raping a suspect in the same precinct house where Woodson died. But even though they were no longer called flex squads, the plainclothes drug units continued to draw complaints.

Fabien Laronde, a detective in the Southwestern, was finally fired from the department after he allegedly filmed and threatened a witness and a reporter at a court proceeding to reveal his internal affairs files–which came about only after more than 50 defense attorneys argued his integrity issues were so severe they could not fairly defend their clients without access to the files.

But to hear them tell it, these rough-and-tumble units get the job done and bring results, driven by statistics toward what a former detective likens to hunting.

“When I did it, it felt like hunting,” said former Baltimore Police Det. Michael Wood in a phone interview last year. “That’s what it felt like, and I was hunting people for those stats and numbers that you had to get because it’s just the way things are incentivized.”

This all came to mind after reading the first few sentences of Mattingly’s report from Dec. 26, 2012.

Woodson 2012 Police Report (Text)

The detectives were huddled up in their uniforms, instead of plainclothes in their car, when, according to Mattingly’s report, they saw a man named Charles Owens “who these officers knew as a narcotics dealer” approaching a black Acura, which, according to Mattingly, “these officers knew to be the vehicle of the defendant Mr. Tyree Woodson also an area narcotics dealer and supplier.”

Mattingly wrote that Owens was “looking up and down the street as if he was nervous looking for a police presence” before he got in. It was a “high drug trafficking area” near the Westside Shopping Center and Owens’ nervousness prompted a stop.

Two of the detectives, Warren Benn and Mark Verkest, got out of the car and walked up to the Acura. According to Mattingly’s report, Woodson slammed the car into reverse and took off, “almost striking” the officers.

Woodson made it to the end of the block in reverse. Then he turned around and into the shopping center as Mattingly and Det. Wayne Ambrose followed in the car.

Although the weather was bad, Mattingly described the shopping center as “crowded with holiday shopping patrons.”

Woodson tried to cut between two cars and got stuck, Mattingly wrote. Mattingly’s car pulled in behind the Acura, blocking it in.

According to the report, Woodson then put his car in reverse again and struck Mattingly’s car “hard enough and enough times to push the officers [sic] vehicle backward.”

Mattingly and Ambrose remained in the car, according to this account, without responding to Woodson’s alleged vehicular attack.

Mattingly wrote that he followed as Woodson fled the shopping center, throwing items from the car. Other officers later testified that the sergeant on the radio ordered them not to chase Woodson because of the bad weather.

It was hard for me to picture this so I drove over the the West Side Shopping Center, which has a grocery store, a Family Dollar, a video game shop, the KC Hair Outlet, a Western Union, an Advance Auto Parts, and a Wells Fargo Bank. The parking lot is strange–it’s really two parking lots smashed together, a shopping center on each end. The roads surrounding the shopping center also run at confusing angles. It’s not hard to see a car trying to cut through getting stuck, but slamming repeatedly into a police car and then escaping without drawing considerable attention seemed unlikely.

But Woodson didn’t escape. According to Mattingly’s statement of charges, they found Woodson’s car, abandoned in the middle of the road, the door open and drugs laying in the driver’s side of the car in plain sight. They caught Woodson and Owens as they fled on foot.

Woodson was charged with possession with intent to distribute, conspiracy for the seven heroin caps, several serious assault charges stemming from the claim that he had attempted to run the officers over and had intentionally struck the car the officers were in.

Woodson was denied bail, probably because he allegedly assaulted officers in an attempt to flee; the District Court has no record of the bail review hearing because, a clerk said, the equipment was malfunctioning on that day.

Woodson remained in jail for 17 months before he could tell his story in court. But first, he had to survive.

It later came out in a series of indictments and news reports that 10 days after Woodson’s arrest landed him in the city jail, Tavon White, the leader of BGF at Baltimore City Detention Center, was recorded by federal agents boasting about controlling the jail. “I make every final call in this jail,” he said on the tape. “Everything come to me. Before a motherfucker hit a nigga in the mouth, guess what they do–they gotta run it through me. I tell them whether it’s a go ahead and they can do it or whether they hold back. Before a motherfucker stab somebody, they gotta run it through me.”

While in jail awaiting trial, Woodson was brutally attacked. He told his fiancée that a correctional officer, or CO, opened the cell doors so the assailants could leave their cells and enter Woodson’s. Numerous COs were later revealed to be working for and even sleeping with White. It’s unclear why Woodson was attacked, or if COs were actually involved or if White actually gave his approval. But whatever promoted it, Woodson was hurt so badly he was hospitalized. According to his mother, he got a knife to protect himself. He was caught with it and charged.

So by the time Woodson finally got to court, after almost a year and a half, the original charges had multiplied.

When the case finally came before a judge, the state offered Woodson a deal: three years. He refused, facing instead a mandatory 40 if he was convicted on all of the charges. That’s a pretty big gamble if you have the word of four officers stacking up against yours.

I went to the court reporter’s office to watch a video of the trial. I was hoping to see Det. Mattingly. What I saw instead was shocking.

The post What Happened to Tyree Woodson? A Reexamination of a Death in Police Custody – Chapter 2 appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Chapter 1:

Piecing Together the Past

Verdessa McDougald lives in a small, brick house in Southwest Baltimore. I had been trying to talk to her for months, occasionally calling, mostly leaving messages, letting her know I was still interested in what happened to her son.

I had questions about the documents I had been looking at and I hoped to run them by her. I also wanted to get a better sense of Woodson’s life. Eventually, she agreed to meet with me.

She wasn’t quite ready when I arrived at her home so I stood on the sidewalk in front of the door, waiting for a few minutes. The block was quiet, slow. One older man shuffled by. The block, McDougald told me when I went inside, is like a family–she calls one neighbor her son. But she still spends most of her time alone since Woodson is dead and her other son, Maurice, whom she calls Greasy, is locked up.

“See that hat up there?” she asked, shortly after letting me in, pointing to a brand new white baseball hat wrapped in plastic and sitting up on a shelf. Tyree’s name was written across the brim in pink cursive, a white dove detailed with the same pink lying beside it on what could be called a shrine to her dead son.

McDougald said that Maurice was locked up at the time of Woodson’s funeral and he asked everyone to wear pink, his favorite color, “because that way it will feel like I am there.”

She said she wanted to find a photo album that had the same color as the hat and the dove. “I just haven’t found one yet. I’m going to do all his certificates, pictures from when he was born up until he passed. Also I want to put his baby picture on the wall right there. And a recent picture of him on the wall right there.”

That’s how we ended up on her couch, flipping through old photo albums and looking at pictures of her son.

I’m struck by a picture McDougald took of Woodson in 1980, when he was 4 years old. In the photograph, framed by her fingers gripping at the album in which it lay covered in laminate, he is kneeling down in front of a toy muscle car, bright red with yellow flames, wearing a blue tracksuit with white stripes, a new watch on his wrist. On his head, a motorcycle helmet, the word “POLICE” printed on its visor, sat with a slight tilt on his brow.

“Ain’t that something,” McDougald said. “He liked police and then they kill him.”

McDougald, whom people call Mama Dessie, is a 59-year-old light-skinned African-American woman with soft brown eyes buried in the burrows of her cheeks, the kind that probably got pinched a lot when she was a kid. She had Woodson when she was only 18 and raised him as a single mother. In the photographs, Woodson has her cheeks, puffing out as he smiles.

“He started wearing glasses when he was young,” she said. “I think he used to throw them away. He would come home and say he lost them. He didn’t like them but then people used to start calling him ‘the professor’ because they’d say ‘you look like a little professor with them glasses on.’”

Her eyes lingered on the image, reluctant to leave it, even as she turned the page.

“I used to always buy him books and always read to him. See he got books over here, books over here,” she said pointing at another photograph, where he is surrounded by children’s books. “I used to always keep books for him and make sure he’d read.”

Woodson was seven years older than Maurice, who called him Unk. Because McDougald was struggling with drugs, she told me, Woodson helped family members raise his little brother.

In 1992, McDougald was arrested with cocaine. She spent three years locked up. She said she read and she prayed and she wrote poems that she sent to her sons.

“I lock myself away from everything and everyone because only there/ I can find happiness everlasting that never end. I search for that/ Deep down in my soul,” she wrote in one poem later published in an anthology.

In another, addressed directly to her sons, she refers to “A love you never knew” and ends with “Never wanting to be set free/ Wishing you were here with me.”

McDougald was set free, from jail and from drugs, she said. But Tyree’s troubles with the law had already begun. He was first arrested at 14. His first adult charge came right after he turned 18. He was first convicted on drug charges in 1995, the same year McDougald was released. In 2001, he was charged with 15 counts, the most serious of which was attempted murder. According to court records, he was using a number of aliases at the time, including Donte Allen. He was found not guilty on all counts.

In 2002, Woodson was charged with attempted murder again, but the prosecutors decided not to pursue those charges.

The last time he was locked up, he had been away long enough that his grandmother didn’t recognize him when he surprised her at a barbecue. After that, McDougald said, he started working and he was getting his life together. But the police, she said, wouldn’t leave him alone.

“Eight years before my son was ever shot, police threatened him. Southwest District cops threatened him,” she said. “My sons had told me that what they said to them was ‘We know y’all sell drugs. We can’t catch y’all but we gon’ get you off the street one way or another.’”

The post What Happened to Tyree Woodson? A Reexamination of a Death in Police Custody – Chapter 1 appeared first on Baltimore Beat.