A Young Man’s Death in Texas Jail Leaves Unsolvable Mystery: Why?

Donald Earl Price went down in a frenzy of pounding anxiety.

A Sunday morning dispatcher said she may have heard a muted cry crackling across the intercom from the cells at Hillsboro jail, but she thought little of it. It sounded like a man clearing his throat, perhaps a rasping cough. Nothing important. Nothing significant. Besides, jail houses are a cacophony of odd, obscene, usually meaningless chatter.

But this cry was a death rattle.

Sometime before 10:45 a.m. the 21-year-old black man confined to Hillsboro’s windowless holding tank for a probation violation signed off as a functioning member of the human race.

Donald Earl Price had hanged himself. He was found dangling from a strip of torn fabric. He had twisted there for 10 or 15 minutes, locked in a sitting position with his buttocks inches from the floor, his legs akimbo, his eyes fixed on some unknowable thing ahead.

Price was on and off life-support machinery at nearby hospitals for 80 hours.

“If a man wants to kill himself, he’ll kill himself,” said Ed Wheat, police chief in this depressed Cotton Belt community of 7,000 about 60 miles south of Dallas. “But it’s not a good feeling to have somebody hang in my jail.”

Price’s death Aug. 12 received little publicity. Perhaps the feeling was that the inmate was unimportant. He was a triple loser, a school dropout from a broken family who had been caught trying to break into a home. Or maybe his apparent suicide was regarded as a routine occurrence.

Suicide is the eighth most frequent cause of death in America and costs about 29,000 lives a year, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

Nevertheless, Price’s death seemed different. Or that’s what Price’s father thought. Robert Price, a decorated Vietnam veteran, former law enforcement trainee and a respected contractor, said in an interview:

“I don’t believe any of the answers I’m hearing. I haven’t slept a full night in weeks, and I won’t until I get the truth. Nobody’s life is cheap, nobody’s.”

A UPI examination found several puzzling aspects to the case:

How could a man 5 feet 11 hang himself from a shelf that was five feet from the floor?

Why were there no marks or bruises on Price’s neck?

Why were his knuckles bloodied?

How did he cut the noose from a heavy Army blanket--microscopic study revealed it had been cut with something like dull scissors--deprived of any obvious cutting instrument?

Finally, why did Price kill himself, if indeed he did?

To piece together his last hours, a reporter visited Price’s haunts, studied forensic documents and interviewed high school counselors, probation officers, police, friends and relatives. Because of fresh questions arising in the case, the Dallas medical examiner’s office reopened it and temporarily changed its initial cause-of-death finding from suicide to “undetermined.”

Here is a reconstruction:

Saturday, 12:50 p.m. Hillsboro police were called to a civil disturbance on the town’s east side, where tin-roofed shacks shelter many of the poorest and least privileged residents. The address was the home of Donald Price’s paternal grandmother, Carrie Johnson, 87. “Donald never done nothing violent,” she said. “He was just wanting a little money for some baby-sitting. He was acting a little rambunctious that night.”

Relatives told police that Price was wanted as a runaway from a Dallas County halfway house and that they wanted him removed, at least for a while. By checking computer records via radio, police learned of a revocation warrant against him. “It was no big deal,” said a spokesman for Judge Richard Mays, who had ordered Price’s arrest. “He was given probation for burglary of a building.” Price left the halfway house after a few weeks and hid at his grandmother’s home, which had been a refuge through the years.

When police ordered Price to surrender, he ran. In less than a minute, he cleared several large hedges, rocketed through a thicket, over a culvert and into a backyard three blocks away. A cousin, Patricia, convinced him that the run wasn’t worth the risk.

“He was a runner and our people gave foot pursuit,” said Lt. Dana Thomason of the police. “We weren’t going to shoot that boy,” another officer told an investigator. “Why should we? He was harmless.”

No guns were drawn, according to reports. Donald was taken without a struggle.

Sunday, 7:58 a.m. Price was fed breakfast. He was in a recently refurbished, 6-by-12-foot holding cell furnished only with an iron bunk, a commode and the tiny shelf. There were two men in a cell nearby. They reported hearing nothing. He called his grandmother. He was in good spirits and talked about what he planned to do in Dallas. He asked for cigarettes.

9 a.m. Another check. Nothing unusual.

10:45 a.m. Price was found in a coma. He was cut down. There was blood on the wall. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation was administered. An ambulance took Price to Hill County Regional Hospital.

Noon. Price’s father was contacted. A weeping, incredulous Robert Price asked what had happened to his son. Price was told his son had hanged himself with a rope or a metal wire. Price suspected foul play.

He guarded his son’s room day and night, slept less than two hours in three days. “I done what I could,” he said.

Wednesday, 6:21 p.m. Donald Price’s vital signs quit. Transferred to Baylor Hospital in Waxahatchie, he was kept alive with the help of intravenous injections. He had pneumonia. His brain function was minimal due to oxygen deprivation. Death came from complications of asphyxia or suffocation related to the hanging. An autopsy was ordered. The body was taken to the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences in Dallas.

Thursday, 8:30 a.m. James Weiner, an experienced medical examiner, noticed a small tattoo--”LFD”--on Price’s right upper arm. On the throat, Weiner’s forensic reports note “a ligature mark on the right front and side of the neck, consisting of a roughly rectangular area of abrasion.” The neck bruise did not match that of a rope cut typical in a hanging, but was perfectly consistent with that of a thick wool blanket such as was used in the jail. “The wool leaves a broad, less defined mark versus a rope, which leaves a pattern of braiding,” he said. Price probably was conscious while the noose shut off blood from his carotid artery, which takes blood to the brain, the examination indicated. “These vessels are just under the skin. You don’t have to compress the airways to shut off the blood,” Weiner said.

“The circumstances and physical findings indicate that the deceased hung himself,” Weiner wrote in his initial report.

The next month, concerned by apparent inconsistencies in the case, particularly cuts on a woolen blanket that supposedly had been torn, Weiner changed his ruling to “undetermined” cause of death.

He visited the jail. There, he tore a strip from the gray wool blanket, using a sharpened edge of the iron bunk. Under a microscope, the edge appeared shorn cleanly as if with a pair of scissors. “We were able to reproduce the tear identically,” he said.

At the jail, Weiner was also able to reproduce other aspects of the incident, to explain the discrepancy between Donald’s height and the height of the shelf. “We had no problem with the hanging,” Weiner said. “One in 100 will hang themselves from heights greater than five feet. Most are from bedposts, shelves, doorknobs. Very rarely do you see a rope thrown over a rafter.”

As for the bloody knuckles, said another investigator: “The pain must have been excruciating. He was probably beating the wall.”

Nov. 6. The medical examiner’s office reported that it had returned to its original finding: suicide. “The law tells me I have to be 51% sure to make a call,” Weiner said. “In this case, I’m 99% sure. There is no reason to think that it is anything but suicide.”

That leaves the biggest question of all. Why did Price take his life? Friends and relatives offer no easy answers, but a look at Price’s school years reveals a telling pattern.

Price entered Lisbon Elementary School in Dallas on Aug. 22, 1972. He was 6. He was yanked out of school 10 days before Christmas that year and moved to Fort Worth with his family. Three months later, he was back in Dallas. His parents split up and he stayed with his mother, Willie, in public housing. He lived for a while with his grandmother in Hillsboro, then at a succession of Dallas addresses: four moves in three years. He eventually left his mother to live with a brother.

His grades were not good, but he was processed through the system.

“Those were the years in which we weren’t failing many kids,” said Dean Angel of the Dallas school system. “A lot of kids passed who shouldn’t.”

Price quit school when he was in 10th grade. He tried training for office clerk jobs, but that lasted only a few weeks. He joined the Job Corps in San Marcos, Tex., then left suddenly. “He was always a boy who enjoyed his freedom,” his father said. “He was full of joy and strong feeling at just being alive and about. He never was big on classrooms.”

There is a gap in the records. When Price surfaced again, he was caught in the act of burglary. He entered the Dallas County Restitution Center, a halfway house, April 16.

Then he vanished, and turned up in Hillsboro Aug. 8.

Robert Price is convinced, even now, that foul play was involved in his son’s death. He has filed suit against the Hillsboro police, but the bulk of evidence supports the story told by police and hospital authorities, as well as the conclusion of the medical examiner’s office.

Yet answering the how doesn’t answer the why.

For a youth who lived in a chaotic world with little family bonding, who often skipped out when circumstances and institutions became too confining, there may be a clue: the tattoo found by Weiner, the initials “LFD.”

Dallas police officer Steve Torres sees markings like that often. He works the streets where such tattoos are a statement of machismo . It is a street-wise credo: Live Free or Die, LFD.

“Perhaps the boy didn’t want to spend another day in jail,” Torres said. “Perhaps he felt he’d shamed his family, but that shame never showed openly. There may have been underlying pressures.”

Donald Price took that secret with him.