FBI Visited Her, Grandmother of Denny Defendant Says

The 81-year-old grandmother of a man accused of beating trucker Reginald O. Denny said Wednesday that an FBI agent questioned her in Vicksburg, Miss., about the case, seeking information that could be used against her grandson in his trial.

Lubertha Williams said the agent spent about half an hour at her home Tuesday and asked several questions about her grandson, Damian Monroe Williams, 20.

“He asked me if I knew anything about Damian being in a gang,” Williams said in a telephone interview. The agent’s visit, she said, “was such a surprise to me. I never confronted anything like this.

“I got the impression that he was trying to get information that could be used against Damian.”

She said the agent, whose name she could not recall, asked whether she had seen the assault on Denny at the intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues as rioting broke out in Los Angeles on April 29, 1992.

“I told him it was worldwide,” she said. “Everybody saw it.”

He also asked her, she said, about the period in 1988-89 when Damian Williams and his mother, Georgiana, moved to Mississippi from Los Angeles to help care for her when she was critically ill.

Word of the apparent visit outraged Georgiana Williams and left an investigator for her son’s defense team questioning the strength of the prosecution’s case.

“As the defense investigator on this case, I know the prosecution case against Damian Williams is not as strong as they are leading the public to believe,” said David Lynn. “This is just further evidence of that.”

He said it is harassment for authorities “to go to an 81-year-old grandmother this late in the game to try to elicit some information for the prosecution.”

Lynn said he believes the purpose of the agent’s visit “was to find out if Damian had allegedly confessed to his grandmother. If he had, they would have subpoenaed her.”

Georgiana Williams pointed out that Superior Court Judge John W. Ouderkirk, who is presiding over the trial of her son and a co-defendant, instructed the defense that it could only contact prosecution witnesses through letters forwarded by prosecutors and mailed back to the court.

Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office, declined to comment, saying, “We’re not going to comment on what the FBI is doing.”

John Hoos, an FBI spokesman in Los Angeles, said he had no knowledge of the agent’s visit.

Mickey Overton, a spokesman for the FBI office in Jackson, Miss., said he could neither confirm nor deny any investigation involving his office.

Damian Williams and Henry Keith Watson, 28, face multiple felony charges, including attempted murder, stemming from the assault on Denny and 12 others at Florence and Normandie. Their trial is scheduled to begin July 26. Antoine Eugene Miller, 21, had been scheduled to be tried with them, but Ouderkirk on Monday granted Miller a separate trial.