Shorty was well known to the police. Between July 23, 2001, and January 29, 2003, he was charged with offenses ten times. His alleged crimes ranged from unauthorized use of an automobile and other vehicles to theft by receiving stolen property, criminal trespass, burglary, retail theft, and drug-related offenses. Remarkably, each charge was either withdrawn or dismissed. For a long time I was puzzled by Shorty’s ability to escape criminal charges unindicted; he truly seemed to be a Teflon man. His history began to make sense in December 2009 when the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a series of articles under the banner “Justice: Delayed, Dismissed, Denied.” “In America’s most violent big city,” the investigation discovered, “people accused of serious crimes are escaping conviction with stunning regularity.” The statistics told a depressing story of administrative incompetence. “Only one in 10 people charged with gun assaults is convicted of that charge. . . . Only two in 10 accused armed robbers are found guilty. . . . Only one in four accused rapists is found guilty of rape.” In most big cities prosecutors win about half their cases; in Philadelphia they win 20 percent. “It is a system that all too often fails to punish violent criminals, fails to protect witnesses, fails to catch thousands of fugitives, fails to decide cases on their merits—fails to provide justice.” 2 In Philadelphia, Shorty’s ability to walk away from arrests now appeared more the norm than the exception.
Despite Shorty’s record, police sergeant Troy Lovell, who patrolled the area, described Shorty as pleasant, friendly, and “respectful.” At the time of his death, Shorty’s blood alcohol level was just shy of legal intoxication and showed that he had recently ingested a substantial amount of cocaine, which had mixed with the alcohol to form a potent new compound. One man, intimately familiar with the Philadelphia street scene, claimed that street mechanics generally were addicted to drugs. Whether or not this claim is accurate, Shorty surely did not spend much of his income on rent. He lived near the scene of his death on a tiny, desolate street of rundown row houses that angled alongside railroad tracks. Even by the standards of the neighborhood, his room rent must have been low.
West Oakland Street, where Herbert lived in a first-floor room and Shorty died, is a narrow, one-way street of small, poorly kept row houses, perhaps a slight step up from where Shorty had lived. Everyone acknowledged the neighborhood to be dangerous. It embodied the decline, decay, and abandonment that scarred much of North Philadelphia.
The house in which Herbert lived was owned by the Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation, which had purchased it for $1; its certified market value for 2007 was $8,300. Of the 6,947 people who lived in the census tract in which West Oakland Street was located, only 45 were white; the rest were largely African American; only 118 had been born outside the United States—compared to 9 percent of the city’s population—and more than three of four had been born in Pennsylvania. More than two of five house holds consisted of women with no husband present. Nearly a third were house holders living alone, with 16 percent of women and men over age sixty-five living by themselves.
Just 60 percent of house holds had incomes from earnings, and these averaged only $24,859 in 1999; a third had income from Social Security; 11 percent from Supplemental Security Income (SSI); 19 percent from public assistance; and 17 percent from pensions. Median house hold income was $16,367, and 41 percent of families fell below the poverty line. It was a neighborhood that had seen much better days.
Although in 1936 the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) slammed it for its “Negro concentration,” until the 1950s the neighborhood remained more than half white with roughly half of families owning their own homes. Clothing and furniture factories, long since gone in the early twenty-first century, were nearby, as were railroad yards and other businesses. The proximity of the subway connected the neighborhood easily with the rest of the city. Mansions even lined a nearby major street. Today, abandoned houses and vacant lots appear to easily outnumber the mostly small businesses—fast food restaurants, an auto supply dealer—that remain.
Herbert’s fatal encounter with Shorty began sometime during the evening of August 3, 2005. Herbert, hungry and without money, borrowed five dollars from Shorty, promising to pay him back that night or the next day. He was expecting a government check. With the money, he says, he went to a local restaurant to buy some chicken. Later, still hungry and without money, Herbert went to a friend’s house where he unsuccessfully tried to borrow more money. On his way home, he ran into Shorty, who was working on a car on West Oakland Street. Shorty demanded his money on the spot. When Herbert told him he did not have any money, Shorty struck him. In the fight that followed, Shorty knocked Herbert to the ground and was punching him when two passersby intervened, pulling him off. Herbert immediately went home where, he claims, fearful for his safety, he retreated to the second floor. Shorty appeared in front of his house with a pipe three feet seven inches long. He started knocking out windows, yelling, “I want my money!”
Henry Fairlee, who lived on the second floor of Herbert’s house, entered the unlocked front door—unlocked because the lock always was broken—and told Herbert to go out to talk with Shorty so he would stop breaking windows. This is Herbert’s version. Fairlee tells a different story. He claims to have been one of the people originally pulling Shorty off of Herbert. He claims, too, that Herbert came tearing out of the house with a knife in hand, swinging his arms and lunging at Shorty, who had not yet picked up the pipe. At this point, according to Fairlee, Herbert stabbed Shorty, who then went to his toolbox for a pipe before returning to the house into which Herbert had retreated.
Fairlee was the only civilian witness for the prosecution, and he lacked credibility. He was in custody for two parole violations. He had a record of felonies—breaking and entering, burglary, receiving stolen goods. On the witness stand, he had trouble staying awake, his head periodically lolling against the side of the dais. Contradictions riddled his testimony, and he even contradicted his testimony at the preliminary hearing. He either erred or lied about the length of the pipe, claiming under repeated questioning that it could not have been between three and a half or four feet long. For Fairlee’s version to be valid, moreover, Shorty, who had just sustained a mortal wound to his heart, would have to have been able to locate and wield the pipe. The medical examiner reported that only three inches of the six-inch knife blade had penetrated Shorty’s chest, an outcome unlikely if a six-inch blade had been thrust into him with great force, as Fairlee claimed. Another witness, interviewed by the police, was waiting outside the courtroom. He had told the police he had seen Herbert run from the house with a knife that he plunged into Shorty. The prosecuting attorney, however, did not call him to the stand.
Herbert, of course, tells a different story. He denies, first of all, that Fair-lee was one of the people who pulled Shorty off him at their first encounter. Herbert said he wanted to go to his brother’s to borrow some money but was frightened. He could not exit the back door because the yard was so full of debris that it was impassable, and he did not have a telephone with which to call the police. Because the neighborhood was so dangerous and he feared intruders, Herbert kept a knife—an ordinary kitchen knife with a six-inch blade—above his doorway. He pocketed the knife and went outside onto the stoop. Shorty immediately knocked him down, whether with a blow from the pipe or by leaping and kicking is not clear. Herbert ended up on the ground, underneath Shorty. This was the moment when Herbert pulled the knife from his pocket and stabbed him. On the witness stand, Herbert often appeared confused; he tried to answer the questions put to him, but he seemed not always to understand them. Yet, when his attorney asked, “Did you intend to kill Shorty?” Herbert unhesitatingly responded with force, “As God is my witness, I did not.”
When Sergeant Lovell—a twenty-year veteran of the Highway Patrol, six feet four inches tall, African American, handsome, and articulate—arrived, he first noticed Herbert sitting on his stoop drenched in blood. Herbert complained of his cut