Death of Football Player’s Cousin Raises Cry of Racism : Police: Pittsburgh Steeler’s relative died after struggle with white officers. Charges are weighed amid protests.

Ray Seals is a defensive end for the Pittsburgh Steelers, but he had much more to think about Monday than that night’s game against Cleveland.

He was weighing doubt and suspicion, pondering death, wrestling with the eternal American issue of race. He was wondering just what role prejudice may have played in the snuffing out of his cousin’s life.

Jonny Gammage, 31, died in the earliest hours of Oct. 12, after five police officers from three south suburbs struggled with him by the side of a dimly lit, four-lane road just inside the city limits.

The Jaguar he’d been driving--Seals’ car--was still running. The music kept blasting as he was pinned to the ground so hard that his chest was compressed, unable to take in air. The officers are white. Gammage was black.

In a coffee shop on game day, the 30-year-old Seals wondered how to keep Pittsburgh calm, with marches and countermarches, protests and counter-protests still leading the evening news and making the local papers.

But he also remembered his own bitter brushes with police scrutiny.

For a month now, the entire region has groped for answers along with Seals, especially to the question most on his mind: Would Jonny Gammage be alive now if he’d been born white?

No, said Officer John Vojtas, a policeman from neighboring Brentwood who was involved. “Race has no bearing on this case. It never did.”

Yes, said Beth Beeler, a white hospice nurse who served on a coroner’s inquest jury that two weeks ago unanimously recommended criminal homicide charges against all five officers.

After listening to 38 witnesses testify during a three-day inquest, “I felt very strongly that it had a racial element,” Beeler said. “There were preconceived notions that came into play. If you’re black, you must have criminal intentions. If you drive a Jaguar, it must be a stolen car. I think they were more physical toward him than they might have been if he were white.”

At the inquest, the officers said that Gammage was pulled over for erratic driving and then became involved in a fight.

Dist. Atty. Robert Colville has ruled out first- or second-degree murder charges--a decision with which the Gammage family lawyer, Robert del Greco Jr., agrees. First-degree is premeditated and second-degree must be committed during a felony, such as rape, arson or kidnaping. A conviction could lead to a sentence of life in prison.

Colville is expected to announce next week exactly what, or whether, he will file charges against each officer on the scene when Gammage died. The possibilities include third-degree murder, which carries a 20- to 40-year sentence; voluntary manslaughter, a 10- to 40-year penalty, or involuntary manslaughter, with a five-year maximum but possible probation.

The coroner’s jury specifically rejected manslaughter charges, Beeler said.

The officers have been taken off the streets--reassigned to desk jobs or placed on leave by the departments of neighboring Brentwood, Baldwin and Whitehall.

“I want them all to go to jail,” Seals said. “This is worse than Rodney King. Rodney King is alive. . . . My cousin can’t be replaced.”

The football player agonized. What should he believe? How should he react?

Seals has stayed aloof from demonstrations staged by local black activists. “There’s people marching that don’t want to see this happen again, who do believe the police are racist.” But also, Seals believes, “there’s people that are doing this for their own reasons, that have their own motives.”

Three hours earlier, about 150 people chanted angrily on the steps of the Romanesque courthouse: “The jury said murder! The jury said murder!” The Gammage case, they fumed, was just one in a series of incidents in which civilians, usually black, have died at the hands of white police.

“If there’s no justice and no peace, we will have to go to war!” shouted Pearl Story Nelson into a bullhorn open to anyone with something to say.

About eight miles away, the working-class borough of Brentwood also has been a hub of fury. When protesters gathered at police and council headquarters, residents turned out to support their 15-member force.

Some townspeople organized a separate “Hands Across Brentwood” event. The police chief believes he will be fired over complaints that he was not sufficiently supportive of his officers, Vojtas and Lt. Milton Mulholland, when the news first broke.

The officers’ advocates wear Brentwood Police Assn. T-shirts that depict men on horseback firing six-guns, with the slogan: “Good Ole Boys.”

They are getting to Seals. “Here I am, trying not to make it racial. But when I turn on the TV, I keep seeing them marching. ‘We’re good ole boys. We support the good ole boys.’ ” To Seals, the phrase holds a white-supremacist connotation.

Seals invited his cousin to move from their hometown, Syracuse, N.Y., to Tampa, Fla., when he went to play for the Buccaneers in 1988. Gammage worked for community service and economic development groups. He also ironed Seals’ shirts and met visiting family at the airport.

In April, 1994, when Seals joined the Steelers, he offered Gammage a job running charitable activities and helping to operate a T-shirt business. Gammage got players to autograph pictures, which he sold to raise money for Christmas toys. He consulted with 20 poor parents, shopped personally for gifts for their children and made sure each was individually addressed.

Seals installed him in an apartment and gave him use of the Jag.

Gammage had been visiting friends in nearby Pleasant Hills on the night he died. As he drove along Route 51 through Brentwood, he was driving erratically, frequently applying the brakes, said Police Chief Wayne Babish.

It would have been impossible to tell the driver’s race at that point, Babish added; he has since gone out to check the scene of the traffic stop for himself.

Mulholland, who was on patrol that night, began following Gammage. By the time the Jag pulled over, it had run three red lights, Babish said. Baldwin Officer Michael Albert, along with Whitehall Officer Michael Albert and Sgt. Keith Henderson, arrived to help.

When Vojtas showed up, said his attorney, James Ecker, he asked the driver to keep his hands on the dashboard. But Gammage, Ecker said, kept dropping his hands out of sight, then putting them back.

His client, said Ecker, kept telling Gammage: “You’re making me nervous. You’re making me nervous.”

Gammage, less than 5 feet, 7 inches tall and weighing about 165 pounds, suddenly charged out of the car, Ecker said. In the melee, Vojtas’ thumb was bitten nearly to the bone. Gammage had a knee and a baton pressing on his back, but he kept flailing--probably, two forensic pathologists testified, because he was fighting to breathe.

“I acted in accordance with the way we were trained,” Vojtas said.

“If you look back at my record,” he added, “I have no problem with any race of any kind. I never have been labeled racist.”

In his 11 years on the force, Vojtas has been disciplined twice, according to City Councilman Robert Cranmer: once for lying to the chief and once for losing control of his gun, which killed his girlfriend in 1993. Judith Barrett’s death was ruled a suicide, but her mother filed a court document in July signaling her intent to sue Vojtas, the Brentwood Police Department and the borough for wrongful death.

And Brentwood, said Cranmer--who last week was elected an Allegheny County commissioner--has a reputation for racial intolerance. He gave examples: A black doctor moved in and then quickly out after a cross was burned on his lawn. High school teams with black athletes don’t like to play at Brentwood because they get “hassled.” Subsidized housing was vehemently opposed.

Such comments fueled rage in town. “We are honestly worried that what he is saying could even possibly encourage some sort of retaliation,” wrote Mae and Ed Gannis to the weekly South Hills Record.

Seals doesn’t know how to feel. A mountainous man with a huge gold cross around his neck, he doesn’t want to believe that his appearance in a luxury car would make a cop suspicious. But he’s pretty sure that it has.

“I’ve been stopped; I’ve been followed,” he said. Once in Florida, a police officer pulled Seals’ Mercedes over for no apparent reason and made it clear that he’d run a computer check on the car’s tags.

Seals thinks his NFL player’s card has gotten him off the hook more than once.

He’s never been stopped in Brentwood, Baldwin or Whitehall, however. And he knows he never will be. “I’ve been out that way before. But I won’t be back again.”