RUNNING FROM HIS PAST : After Doing Jail Time for a Murder He Didn’t Commit, Fenner Starts a New Life in Seattle

The cell is always the same. A bed, a sink, a toilet. Enough room for three steps in one direction, four steps in the other.

He is always wearing a light green jump suit. The charge is always first-degree murder. The sentence is always life.

But Derrick Fenner didn’t do it. He screams that he didn’t do it. The iron bars close in, and he begins sweating and then he screams it again, over and over.

“Then right in the middle of my dream, I tell myself, ‘Wake up, man,’ ” Fenner said. “ ‘Wake up, wake up, wake up--as fast as you can.’ ”

It was just a 15-yard run. Three seasons ago, North Carolina star Derrick Fenner could run 15 yards through Atlantic Coast Conference defenses backward .

But this was last Friday night, and Fenner was just another rookie trying to earn locker space with the Seattle Seahawks. So when he avoided one San Francisco defender in the backfield, swerved around other 49ers toward the outside, then tiptoed along the sideline to complete a 15-yard touchdown run, there was a need for emotional release.

Fenner raised his knees high in a furious dance. He spiked the ball. Then he faced the end-zone seats and pumped his fists to the crowd and screamed.

“I guess I lost my mind,” Fenner said.

That can happen when your last touchdown was nearly three years ago. That can happen when, since then, you’ve truly almost lost your mind after spending 44 days in jail on a murder charge of which you were eventually cleared.

The Seahawks expect this freedom of spirit from a man who has come here seeking just that. Derrick Fenner, 22, is playing to break out of a past that includes a spoiled childhood, a misused college career, and enough drug and shooting incidents that he will begin the season with the Seahawks Sunday in Philadelphia on probation.

While he’s at it, he would like to be free of those dreams.

On summer mornings during training camp, Fenner often awakened and found roommate Willie Bouyer standing over him.

“He would say, ‘Man, what are you kicking for?’ ” Fenner recalled. “I didn’t know what to tell him.”

Since he was drafted in the 10th round by the Seahawks last spring, though, Fenner has had nothing but his nightmares to kick about. He made the team as a backup running back after leading Seahawk running backs in exhibition games with 129 yards and two touchdowns. Those figures included 75 yards in nine carries in the nationally televised exhibition finale against the 49ers.

Across the East Coast, from Fenner’s hometown of Oxon Hill, Md., to Chapel Hill, N.C., friends were watching that game. Some will need to watch a season of those games before they believe.

“The whole time I was watching that run, I was just hoping he has found the discipline to come back the next day and work harder,” said Lawson Holland, Fenner’s former backfield coach at North Carolina.

Childhood buddy Marcus Washington cheered so loud from his Maryland apartment that the neighbors complained.

“I knew he was going to score that touchdown because it was do or die for Derrick,” Washington said. “For him, it’s always come down to do it or die.”

For a man about whom his former high school coach, Michael Pearson, said, “He’s like a cat with nine lives,” this would indeed seem to be his last football breath.

The Seahawks drafted Fenner because, at 6 feet 3 inches and 235 pounds, he still looks like the man who was once compared with Bo Jackson. They also appreciate that he was was once the country’s top young runner, leading the ACC in rushing as a sophomore in 1986 with 1,250 yards, including a single-game conference-record 328 yards against Virginia.

That was all before he lost his scholarship because of poor grades.

But they say here that he will need to look better than Bo, and will have to do more than just run.

“I called him in and told him, even though his past is behind him, what has happened is a matter of public record, and he can’t lose that,” said Seahawk Coach Chuck Knox, who has turned misfits from Los Angeles, Buffalo and Seattle into seven division champions. “I told him that in every town, there will be a bad element seeking him out, looking at him as easy prey.

“I told him, ‘You’re here not just to make the team, but to stay off the streets.’ ”

Or?

Knox shrugged and said: “He was a 10th-round pick. It’s no big loss. We figure no one is going to fault us for giving a guy a chance.”

It was under those specific guidelines that Fenner arrived in Seattle early this summer with his own agenda.

“After what I’ve been through, I knew I could do anything and everything they wanted,” he said. “You want me to run hard? That’s nothing. You want me to take a hit? You can’t hit me hard enough.

“By now, man, you just can’t hurt me anymore.”

He started learning his limits on June 2, 1987. He was working in the North Carolina weight room, confident that his attendance at the coming summer school session would make him eligible the next season. A detective showed up at the door.

“He told me I had two choices,” Fenner said. “I could come back to Maryland on my own, or they could bring me back.”

Ten days earlier, outside an apartment complex in Hyattsville, Md., one frequented by drug dealers, Marcellus Leach, 19, was shot and killed. A juvenile who was shot in the argument identified Fenner as his assailant.

As lawyer Fred Joseph later showed, however, at the time of the shooting Fenner was buying shoes at a men’s store, after which he went to dinner at a Chinese restaurant.

“But they didn’t want to hear none of that from me,” Fenner said. “It was the case of some detective, once he found out who I was, trying to get publicity for himself. Maybe a promotion.”

Two months after his 20th birthday, Fenner was in the Prince George’s County jail, charged with first-degree murder, attempted murder and unlawful use of a handgun. Charges had also been filed in an earlier incident, in which Fenner was stopped while driving a borrowed truck. In the truck were found a .38-caliber revolver and 25 vials spotted with traces of cocaine.

There was a chance that Fenner could be hit with two life sentences. He decided he wasn’t going to stick around the jail to find out.

“You ever watched a movie where the guy gets framed and can’t do anything about it?” Fenner asked. “Try living that. It is so terrifying, you can’t imagine it.”

At first, Fenner considered grabbing a guard’s gun and trying to escape. After several sleepless nights, he began considering an exit of a different sort.

“I was going to kill myself,” he said. “I figured I could have jumped out of the window and done it. We were on the first floor, but it was a high first floor.

“Then I figured I could tie up my bed sheet and hang myself.”

Between thoughts of suicide, though, Fenner thought of his life, and how such a sweet thing could have become so biting.

He grew up as the only child in the home of Spear and Clara Fenner, blue-collar workers in a middle-class suburb who were determined that Derrick would do better.

“So anything I wanted, I got,” Fenner said. “Sure I was spoiled. A spoiled brat.”

The problem was, Fenner needed little. His athletic ability and intelligence, most agreed, would carry him anywhere.

He was so wonderfully built and coordinated that, after starring on the basketball team in his first two years in high school, he was recruited for the football team at a dance.

“I saw his feet move at this high school dance and I thought, ‘How come this boy isn’t playing football?” said Pearson, his Oxon Hill coach.

Pearson soon learned he was asking for trouble. Fenner had done nothing worse as a child then watch a buddy throw a brick through a store window, for which both were detained by police for a couple of hours. But there remained an unnerving aura about him.

“He was bigger than everyone else, but he was a boy in a man’s body,” Pearson said. “He would walk around like, ‘I’m good, I’m cocky, I’m the man.’ ”

Once it was obvious that he was going to be a football star--he reeled off a 65-yard touchdown run the first time he carried the ball--it got worse. He didn’t care for school. He didn’t care about doing anything any harder than necessary.

“He wouldn’t go out of his way for anything until his back was against the wall,” Pearson said.

For instance, when it became clear that he wouldn’t get a college scholarship unless he made the honor roll in all four quarters of his senior high school year--taking algebra and chemistry among other classes--he made it. And soon he was headed for North Carolina and then-coach Dick Crum.

“I warned Crum, one thing you have to do for Derrick is stay on him,” Pearson said. “You’ve got to make him do things. You’ve got to push him.

“But money talked. Derrick did great, so they let him miss classes and be late until finally they threw him out.”

What happened during Fenner’s two years at North Carolina is the subject of debate. Fenner said that Crum never understood or listened to him.

Holland, Fenner’s backfield coach, said Fenner never understood himself.

Crum, now the coach at Kent State, would not comment.

The only thing agreed upon is that, from the time Fenner drove down in the red BMW bought for him by his parents to the time he returned home to jail, one of this country’s best athletic abilities was wasted.

“I think it was that car,” Pearson said. “His parents never should have sold their Lincoln to buy him that car. A boy his age, what did he need a BMW for?”

Certainly not for driving to the football field. He was late for practices. Late for planes. He missed buses. Missed classes. His sophomore rushing total is even more impressive when considering he was suspended and benched for nearly as much time as he played.

“He was never a problem on the field or in the classroom--the problem was getting him there,” said Holland, who now coaches wide receivers at Wake Forest. “He would be walking to class at 10 till 8, and somebody would ask him to get an orange juice, and somebody would ask him to go see a movie, and there goes his morning. He couldn’t say no to anybody.”

Said Fenner: “I was a star so fast, I was having so much fun, it was too much. I needed to be settled down. But Crum couldn’t relate to me. He was used to the All-American boy. I wasn’t from that part of town. He never talked to me. I never talked to him.”

By the time he missed the Aloha Bowl after the 1986 season because of grade problems, Fenner felt as close to his team as Honolulu is to Chapel Hill. Once he walked into the jail cell on the murder charge the following summer, the separation was complete.

“It’s funny, but when Carolina was recruiting me, they told my family, ‘Let him come here and we will be his family,’ ” Fenner recounted with a smile. “Some family. Soon as there was trouble, they abandoned me. That family was the first to run.

“You know, not one coach visited me in jail? Crum wouldn’t let them come.”

When Fred Joseph, the lawyer, met his new client a couple of weeks after Fenner’s incarceration, he saw a man who wanted to abandon himself.

“He looked terrible,” Joseph said. “He was begging for assurances that I could get him out, and I couldn’t give those assurances.

“But right away, I believed his story. I don’t always believe my clients, but I believed him.”

Joseph and associates visited the scene of the crime and obtained about 25 statements, a couple of them crucial.

“The young man who said Derrick had shot him--we found people who said he had told them he didn’t know who shot him,” Joseph said. “It turns out that once the police put the finger on Derrick, everybody in the neighborhood jumped on board.”

Said Fenner’s friend, Washington: “That’s what happens to a superstar on the streets. He shows up at one place once, and everybody thinks he hangs around there all the time.”

Many claimed to have seen Fenner’s red BMW at the shooting. Joseph proved that at the time, it was being repaired in North Carolina. He also had evidence of Fenner’s being at the men’s store and Chinese restaurant.

Soon afterward, he persuaded a judge to set Fenner free on $100,000 bond. By that time, Fenner had survived by keeping his eyes open and his thoughts centered on the NFL.

“When I was able to sleep, I would see myself running, scoring, the crowd going crazy,” he said. “I decided to hang in there and not do anything stupid because one day, I was going to make the Pro Bowl.”

He said he worked out daily in the jail’s weight room but still wonders how he avoided trouble with other inmates.

“They would walk around whispering, ‘He’s a killer, a killer,’ ” he said. “They were all looking to see what I was made of. If I was a punk, they’d have taken me.”

Nearly five months after his release, on Nov. 30, 1987, prosecutors dropped the murder charges. A childhood friend, Tyrone Davis, is now serving 50 years in the Maryland penitentiary for second-degree murder in the case.

Fenner’s lawyer got him a plea-bargain deal on the drug charges that put him on three years’ unsupervised probation.

“He was crying when I gave him the news, and I realized that I didn’t need to say anything more, no advice or anything,” Joseph said. “Those 44 days in jail gave him more of an education than most Ivy League schools. Every time he carries the ball, every time he scores a touchdown, that will not diminish the memories.”

Or the underlying bitterness that makes Fenner wonder.

“If I was the opposite color, in a higher class, I would not have been put in (jail),” Fenner said.

With the ties broken at North Carolina, Fenner tried to complete his college eligibility at Gardner-Webb College, a small school in Boiling Springs, N.C. All was going well until the rest of the South Atlantic Conference decided that he was scholastically ineligible.

“They made up some rule just to keep him out,” said Holland, who helped Fenner enroll there.

Despondent, Fenner found more trouble on Christmas morning 1988, when he was grazed by a bullet while standing up for a friend in an argument outside a nightclub. No charges were filed, but on Fenner’s sculptured upper body, the bullet left a scar. And that was enough to convince him to move out of town until he could land with a team in the NFL.

Friends helped relocate him in Ann Arbor, Mich., last January, where he was given permission to use the University of Michigan’s facilities in preparing for the draft. The NFL later conducted a security check, which Fenner passed.

All that remained was for Fenner to be drafted by the ideal team. Maybe a team whose coach grew up on the streets of a mill town in Western Pennsylvania, a team that could put up with Brian Bosworth, a team in the farthest corner of Fenner’s world.

“This is the perfect place for him,” said Seahawk quarterback Kelly Stouffer, noting that Knox does not allow the hazing of rookies. “We have all kinds on this team, and everyone is accepted. The coaches won’t stand for anything less. With no hazing, nobody feels like an outcast.

“We all know about Derrick, but it isn’t like, ‘Hey, stay away from him.’ We all live in glass houses. He is already one of us.”

Not that he isn’t still Derrick Fenner.

He is still cocky, for instance: “When I got my first hit this summer I thought, ‘God, that wasn’t hard.’ In the NFL, I expected to get blasted.”

He still is only going to make one change regarding that flashy BMW: “Yes, I’m getting rid it. I’m buying a bigger one.”

And he even wants to return to North Carolina to get his degree.

“I’m the kind of guy who likes to make people shake their heads and say, ‘OK, so I was wrong,’ ” Fenner said. “I want to go to Carolina and see that.”

But for now, Fenner is mostly just a rookie with recurring nightmares. Sometimes, while walking through a downtown area, he will turn up his nose and be knocked backward by a smell.

“It will be the smell of the jail,” he said. “I’ll smell it in the strangest places. It will hit me and my mind will rewind and everything will come back to me.

“I shake my head real hard and keep walking. Sometimes the smell goes away. Sometimes it doesn’t.”