Haunting Past, Bitter Present

Timothy Wind has no job, no money, no friends.

His ulcers remind him daily of his one overwhelming regret: ever stepping foot in Los Angeles.

“I’m kind of tired of being me, I guess,” Wind said quietly from his home in this Indianapolis suburb.

He starts his days sitting at his round, wooden kitchen table and flipping through the classifieds, hoping one day he’ll meet an employer who won’t ask why he left California, why he was fired from the Los Angeles Police Department, why his name rings a bell. Pointless, he tells himself.

In the last 13 years, Wind has failed to move past his role in the videotaped beating of motorist Rodney G. King. In March 1991, Wind, at the time just 10 months out of the Police Academy, was one of four Los Angeles police officers seen hitting or kicking King at the end of a car chase. Wind stood over King, striking him repeatedly with his baton and kicking him. The subsequent acquittal of Wind and the other officers of criminal charges in the case touched off the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

Now, the videotaped beating of car theft suspect Stanley Miller, who was struck 11 times with a flashlight by an LAPD officer after a car chase that ended in Compton on June 23, has sparked bitter memories of the city’s darkest days.

Wind, 44, watched the Miller arrest on television.

“They didn’t learn the lessons of Rodney King,” Wind said. “The lessons are that when you use force, when you’re out there doing your job, you’re being watched under a microscope. What are you doing going around whacking people?”

Wind is unrepentant about striking King. The difference between the two beatings, Wind said, was that he used a baton, which the LAPD trains officers to employ to subdue suspects, whereas the officer seen striking Miller, John J. Hatfield, used a flashlight. The Police Department does not train officers in how to wield a flashlight.

For Hatfield, the scrutiny of the last three weeks may be only the beginning, Wind said.

Ten years after the LAPD fired him for his participation in the King beating, Wind lives a lonely, sullen life caught up in the past. When he speaks, his voice carries an ever-present timbre of resignation.

Wind swears that wherever he goes someone sooner or later brings up the King case. He moved his family to Indiana four years ago, after he says he realized Los Angeles would never forget him. But even 2,000 miles away, whether at the law school he attended to pursue a new career in criminal justice or while contacting employers, he feels some still view him as a racist.

Wind maintains that he did nothing wrong in the King case because the officers considered King to be violent, and that his position was proven twice in court, both in the initial trial and in a federal civil rights trial. Wind and Officer Ted Briseno were acquitted in the federal trial while Officer Laurence Powell and Sgt. Stacey Koon were convicted of violating King’s civil rights. A later civil trial ordered the city to pay King $3.8 million, but did not assess punitive damages against the officers.

One of the lingering questions for Wind is why were those other officers able to move on with their lives in one way or another while he remains haunted and paralyzed?

A crucial mistake Wind seems to be making is insisting on landing another job within law enforcement, several legal experts and activists said.

“He can sell real estate, he can get an office job, he can do a lot of things that have nothing to do with law enforcement,” said Jim Kouri, vice president of the National Assn. of Chiefs of Police.

“Everyone still remembers the videotape,” Kouri said of those in the law enforcement community. “Even though he was found not guilty, the fact that this person was involved in excessive use of force, no one’s going to take the chance to hire him.”

Milton Grimes, King’s attorney during the trials, said Wind “made his bed, he has to lie in it.”

“He should’ve been found guilty. He should’ve been punished as the law prescribes,” Grimes said. “He’s caught up in history as people sometimes are. People are going to remind you of the bad more so than the good in life.”

Koon and Powell were each sentenced to 30 months in prison for their roles in the King beating. They both managed to raise funds for their defense, and Koon wrote a book arguing the beating was justified.

Briseno, who testified against the other officers and was later dismissed from the LAPD, said through his lawyer that he has been able to move on with his life. He now works as a security guard.

“He’s found a niche where people will leave him alone,” said his lawyer, Harland Braun.

King consumed most of his $3.8-million judgment in an attempt at starting a rap record label. He has been arrested repeatedly on charges of domestic violence, drug use and drunken driving.

Wind remains frustrated by his belief that he has not deserved the hard times he’s faced over the years.

“We were right,” Wind said of the King case. “We used our training.”

Wind said he sought therapy for about three years following the King beating, but stopped several years ago. He considers himself depressed and disgusted.

The Wind family -- Timothy; his wife, Lorna; and their now 15-year-old son, Jordan -- moved to Fishers, a small town about 21 miles northeast of Indianapolis, after leaving Santa Clarita four years ago.

Fishers was the perfect place to disappear, they thought, where the name Timothy Wind meant nothing.

“I thought it would be a new start,” Lorna Wind said softly. “I thought people were going to be friendlier.”

Wind, who grew up in Kansas City, Kan., and moved to Los Angeles in 1990, still thinks about the L.A. area, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in urban studies and planning from Loyola Marymount University in 1998. Professors there recall some students’ reaction when Wind, who often sat at the front of the class, offered comment.

“There were people who were disturbed when they found out who he was,” said Peter Hoffman, one of his professors.

When Wind was offered a job as a community relations officer for the Culver City Police Department in 1994, some residents gathered petitions to keep him off the force. Wind was allowed to stay and worked there until he was admitted into law school in Indianapolis in 2000.

“I just wanted to find my place in the world and go [to law school] and be left alone,” Wind recalled.

He attended just one semester of law school before some students realized why the name Timothy Wind sounded so familiar. Some were from California and remembered their history. Others connected Wind’s face and name with playbacks of court hearings and news coverage during the 10-year anniversary.

Some students even marched into the dean of admissions’ office armed with questions: Why was he here? How did he get in?

“He’s here to get a legal education,” replied Angela Espada, assistant dean of admissions at the school. “We’re all adults, we all should respect him. You need to let him go.”

Wind, who graduated in 2003, seemed to be doing his best to start a new life. He was president of the Criminal Law Assn. two years in a row and is remembered by professors as a good student with excellent writing skills. One professor offered to help Wind find a job once he passed the Indiana State Bar exam.

But Wind’s first try at an internship, for Indianapolis’ prosecuting attorney, fell through at least in part because of his experience in California.

“He’s paying a penance,” said Scott Newman, the prosecuting attorney at the time of Wind’s application. “He probably feels he’s paid it a hundred times over, but there’s probably more to pay. He can either whine about it or collect himself.”

Wind needs to regain people’s trust, Newman said, and working for the city’s prosecuting attorney -- an elected position -- was aiming too high.

“Being found not guilty is not the same thing as being innocent,” Newman said. “That’s just the reality of life.”

Wind said he devoted his life to law enforcement and cannot see himself working in any other profession.

Some of the few people he has kept in touch with in Los Angeles said Wind has changed from the ambitious man whose experiences included firefighting, serving in the Army Special Forces and working as a police officer in Shawnee, Kan.

“He’s just been emotionally disfigured,” said Ted Hunt, his former Police Academy instructor in Los Angeles, who e-mails Wind a few times a year. “He’s watched all his hopes and his dreams get washed down the toilet.”

Wind dwells on the past, complains about Fishers’ police -- saying he could do a much better job -- and worries about his son’s future.

Lorna Wind said the man she married 20 years ago is nearly gone. “He used to be a lot easier going, a lot easier to laugh,” she said. “He wasn’t so serious about everything. He wasn’t so critical.”

Wind said he’s lost his motivation to build a new life. He has yet to take the bar exam.

“I’m a bit pessimistic these days,” Wind said. “It’s very debilitating to me. I did everything I was supposed to do. I educated myself.”

He spends most of his days alone in his three-bedroom house. Fishers offers middle-class homes, rows of strip malls and wide-open fields. Police officers take their patrol cars home at night and stock them with baby seats and children’s toys on weekends.

“It’s a boring life, believe me,” Wind said as his dog, Maggie, a 10-year-old Lhasa apso, jumped onto his lap. “Anytime you want food, I’m there. I’ve got nothing but time.”

Every morning, Wind mixes orange juice with concentrated fiber to treat his ulcers.

Later, he takes Maggie out to the flat, winding neighborhood roads, slowly walking passed the rows of mailboxes and green recycling bins. Like a police officer, he scrutinizes license plates and gauges car speeds.

Wind drives Jordan to Boy Scouts and model-club meetings, and to Jordan’s part-time job at a supermarket.

“We’ve accepted that Tim is going to be at home and I’ll be the one working,” Lorna Wind said on a recent Sunday morning before leaving for her job selling furniture on commission. “I never planned to be a stay-at-home mom anyway.”

The family struggles have included three miscarriages and Lorna’s layoff from her job as a department store manager.

“I’ve seen the strain all this has caused, I can see that it’s worn her down, worn us down,” Wind said, rubbing his forehead.

Later, as he turned his attention back to the Miller beating and Hatfield, now assigned to home pending the outcome of investigations into the case, Wind mentioned perhaps the greatest challenge facing the officer.

“He has to preserve his sanity,” Wind said. “It’s going to be a long process.”