A Whodunit of 2 Lawmen, Assassination

When Derwin Brown jumped into the race for DeKalb County sheriff, he made a simple promise: I won’t be sleazy.

Every single sheriff since 1964 in the suburban Atlanta department had been investigated, indicted or imprisoned.

And that included Brown’s opponent, incumbent Sidney Dorsey, a scandal-dogged cop who had killed two men during his career.

“We deserve better,” was Brown’s mantra.

With that line--and rock-solid police credentials--Brown easily won the election.

But on an icy, wet night just three days before he was to pin the silver star to his chest, someone jumped out of the bushes in front of his house and shot him 11 times.

Police called it an assassination. And the hit was clean. With no witnesses and few clues, detectives were left with little to go on save a handful of spent 9-millimeter shells. Despite a lack of evidence, however, it’s hardly a secret that one of the people under suspicion in the Dec. 15 slaying is Dorsey. The ex-sheriff is the focus of a grand jury investigation, and his alibis already have been checked. He has denied any involvement with the slaying.

“There’s something really rotten here,” said Al St. Lawrence, president of the Georgia Sheriff’s Assn. and an acquaintance of both men. “I’m not pointing any fingers, but the murder certainly smells like it was tied to the election.”

Brown, 46, and Dorsey, 60, had been at each other’s throats for months. Brown was calling for a complete audit of everything Dorsey did while in office--and he made it known that he was going to fire several members of Dorsey’s inner circle.

Many of those people are suspects too, and they have been questioned. At least one former deputy has had his home searched.

With the leading theory being that the killer might be connected to the department, Brown’s death may well confirm what he had been saying all along: that the DeKalb sheriff’s office is totally out of control.

It’s a frightening reality that has prosecutors carrying guns for the first time and a judge and a reporter under round-the-clock police protection.

“We have to solve this case for the public’s peace of mind,” said J. Tom Morgan, the DeKalb County district attorney, who is leading the investigation. “If the sheriff-elect isn’t safe around here, who is?”

The Parallel Careers of Two Peace Officers

DeKalb County is not some Georgia backwater. It’s not newly minted Atlanta either. It’s somewhere in between--a suburban mix of 597,000 good old boys, immigrants, poor blacks, rich blacks, Jews, Muslims, farmers and Volkswagen Beetle-driving dot-com-ers. A few miles east of the urban core, it’s home to Emory University, the Indigo Girls and the best health food stores for hundreds of miles.

It’s here that Derwin Brown and Sidney Dorsey--two charming, iron-willed African American men--set off on parallel careers in law enforcement. Brown started on the streets of Decatur, pulling long patrol shifts, working narcotics, climbing his way up the ladder at the DeKalb County Public Safety Department. Dorsey emerged as a tough-as-nails homicide detective for the city of Atlanta.

The two had equally interesting but very different lives outside of work. While Brown was pounding out columns on black pride for a weekly newspaper and organizing community groups, Dorsey was pursuing the finer things, starting his own security business, riding horses, driving fancy cars. In 1996, he became the first black sheriff in DeKalb.

Dorsey’s ranch home, the one with the 40-foot white limo out front, is in the most urban part of DeKalb--not far from the crumbling cotton mills and curvy Candyland streets that ring Atlanta’s business district.

He hasn’t been leaving it much lately. Dorsey knows investigators and others are following his every move.

One recent afternoon, Dorsey sat in his living room. He’s strong, much younger-looking than his years and has thick hands the size of oven mitts. As he stared blankly out the window, an undercover squad car glided past.

“I know people are talking about me,” he said. “And that worries me. You know how bad they want to solve this? I had nothing to do with it, but they may grant somebody immunity to pin this on me.”

People fear Dorsey. He killed one man in the line of duty in 1965, another during a fistfight at a gas station in 1970. Both times, he was cleared of any wrongdoing. Still, two people who crossed him recently were put under police protection after Brown’s slaying.

Dale Cardwell, a reporter for Atlanta’s WSB-TV, broke a story last year about on-duty deputies working for SID Inc., Dorsey’s private investigator firm.

And DeKalb Superior Court Judge Hilton Fuller has appointed a court monitor to look into alleged jail brutalities--including a report that guards left inmates strapped for hours in a restraining device known as the “black chair.”

Running the 3,700-bed DeKalb County Jail--the biggest such facility in the South--is the sheriff’s primary responsibility. Street-level law enforcement is left to the county’s Public Safety Department.

The fact that the sheriff is not top cop in DeKalb may be one of the reasons behind the culture of corruption, said Doug Teper, a Democratic state lawmaker from Decatur.

“People just haven’t been paying attention to who they elect or what really happens over there,” he said.

Dorsey’s predecessor, Pat Jarvis--a former Atlanta Braves pitcher--was sent to federal prison two years ago for taking bribes. The sheriff before that was indicted in the killing of a 16-year-old boy in his front yard; he was later acquitted. The sheriff before that was convicted of skimming a 5% cut off every bail bond.

And now Dorsey is under a cloud. For the past eight months, the district attorney’s office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation have been probing a number of allegations against him--ranging from improperly using on-duty deputies and giving out sheriff’s badges to shady friends to reports that his wife, an Atlanta councilwoman, used jail inmates to paint houses of political supporters in her district.

In a recent interview, the Dorseys denied doing anything improper.

“And let’s be real,” said Sherry Dorsey, a former model 20 years her husband’s junior. “Think we’d kill someone to paint houses?”

A few years back, Sidney Dorsey found a hidden listening device in his office. He never determined who was spying on him.

“It was all political. I was the first black sheriff. I opened business to black firms,” he said. “They wanted to bring me down.”

Who?

“The system.”

Brown ‘Had No Fear’ to Follow His Beliefs

Derwin Brown stepped into Dorsey’s world in the spring, when he launched a campaign for sheriff that was based on reform.

He had always been one to shake things up. In high school on Long Island, N.Y., he lobbied the principal to teach black history classes. As a young cop in DeKalb, he sued his bosses to promote more African Americans. More recently, he filled the pages of the Champion newspaper, a black weekly, with strident columns about oppression and hosted a local cable TV show called “The Naked Truth.” He also organized a community group for black men and their sons.

“Derwin had no fear to follow his convictions,” said his mother, Burvena Brown. “He didn’t even carry a gun.”

He clearly had the right stuff for sheriff: a degree from the FBI National Academy, a captain’s rank and 20 years on the force.

It didn’t take long for Dorsey to realize that Brown was a threat, especially after he called for a massive investigation of the jail and an audit of its $47-million annual budget. Dorsey tried to cast Brown as a tool of the local media. He even accused him of believing in aliens, based on a column that Brown had written. Brown mocked this by having a campaign worker show up at rallies in an E.T. costume.

In July, Brown forced Dorsey into a runoff. By election time in August, the news was out that Dorsey was under investigation. Brown won by a margin of almost 2 to 1.

Corrine Mull, a DeKalb public defender who had clashed with Dorsey over the treatment of inmates, said she’ll never forget what one of Brown’s aides told her shortly before he was cut down. “He said that the new sheriff’s policy was: What you do unto the lesser of mine, you do unto me,” she said. “What a change.”

Brown wasted no time moving toward change, sending termination letters in November to 38 sheriff’s employees (among a staff of 700), notifying them that they would be fired Jan. 1 as part of the transition. He also expanded his plan to scrutinize all multimillion-dollar jail contracts for food service, medical care and bonding.

“You know what they say: Follow the money,” said his brother, Ron Brown. “Someone was obviously very concerned about what my brother would discover.”

Already, Derwin Brown’s instincts are proving sound. Interim Sheriff Thomas Brown (no relation) last month evicted seven bonding companies from the jail because, under Dorsey, they had been getting free office space despite collectively owing the county $400,000.

Thomas Brown, the former public safety commissioner, is the leading contender to win the sheriff’s office in a special election in March.

Dorsey hasn’t been arrested or interrogated in connection with Brown’s slaying. But in early January, the district attorney requested that a special grand jury link the Dorsey corruption allegations to the murder investigation. Even Dorsey’s wife should be questioned, Morgan said. Investigators have already checked into where he was at the moment Brown was killed.

“I’m not going to say exactly what connection the Dorseys may or may not have had to this,” Morgan said in an interview. “My request speaks for itself.”

A group of county judges decided to split the investigation into two panels, one focused on jail issues, the other on Brown’s death. When the two panels convene later this month, they will have wide-ranging investigative powers and the long arm of a subpoena.

Nobody is following the twists and turns in the case more closely than Brown’s grief-torn family. His teenage sons, Robert and Michael, recently had giant tattoos etched on their bodies.

“R.I.P. Dad,” says one.

“JUSTICE” says the other.

Phyllis Brown, thin as a wire but steely tough, is insisting that the new sheriff fulfill her husband’s vision of rooting out corruption.

“Derwin should not have died for nothing,” she said.

She is convinced that only by turning the department upside down and shaking it to see what comes out will she learn the truth about who was lurking in the bushes that night.

And help quiet the memory of her husband lying at her feet, 10 red flowers in his hand.

That night, Dec. 15, was her birthday.

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Times researcher Edith Stanley contributed to this story.