A Life’s Tragic Finale Spotlights Sad Statistic

Even though he’d played trombone with Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie, his death might have merited no more than a paragraph on the obituary page had Taswell Baird Jr., an 80-year-old African American, not had the misfortune to become this city’s homicide No. 100 for 2002.

For days, reporters had dogged the Oakland Police Department’s homicide unit, quizzing investigators even when they were doing nothing more than dashing out for a salami on rye.

Lt. Brian Thiem, commander of the unit, complained that nobody cared but the media, which was on a stakeout: waiting for Oakland’s 100th homicide of the year.

In this city -- which last year had the highest murder rate in California, with 85 slayings -- the bulk of the homicides involve one felon killing another, what Mayor Jerry Brown calls “taking care of business” homicides, “one man stealing another’s stash or not paying debts.”

But Baird’s sad story was one of what the mayor would call the 5% or 10% that play to people’s worst fears. It was, Brown acknowledged, “symbolic of a lack of caring” and an example of young people’s “disregard for another human being.” It was not unique to Oakland, he added a little defensively, even if it seemed to magnify the city’s problems.

Baird was assaulted at dusk Nov. 5, election day, while the polls were still open. With Californians elsewhere bored by the frictionless gubernatorial race, Oakland was focused on the more personal -- crime.

Four years ago, Brown staked his reputation on returning Oakland to greatness. He has brought business to the city and gentrified some neighborhoods, for which he has been both praised and vilified.

But his ongoing campaign to lower crime suffers from the rising homicide rate, although the total to date remains well shy of the record 165 killings of 1992. Leading up to the election, Brown urged voters to approve an advisory measure to put 100 more police officers on the streets and three other measures to increase hotel and parking taxes to pay for it.

On that day, Taswell Baird was returning from the local market to St. Mary’s Gardens, a “quality senior community,” in west Oakland. His legs weakened by arthritis or possibly Parkinson’s disease, he whipped around the block in an electric wheelchair.

An independent man, Baird did his own cooking and shopping, earning a little extra money each month by shopping for two other men in his apartment building. He’d probably just received a check from them and gone to cash it, said his longtime friend Ruby Slaughter, 89. That would explain his having had $80 in his waist-pack, she said.

Although Baird was not a bragger, residents knew he’d taken up trombone at the age of 12 and, along with his older brother Bill, traveled the country, playing with the jazz greats. He told residents such as 92-year-old Clarence Judice, who wears a three-piece suit and polished wingtips every day, that he’d played with Duke Ellington.

By the time Baird arrived at this HUD-subsidized housing, though, he had quit playing his trombone. He continued to play jazz on his stereo. And like other residents, he shot pool, watched football and, Slaughter said, played the lottery, “like the rest of us.”

When his brother started to become careless, showing cash in front of young tough guys who might try to take it, Taswell had Bill move in, giving him the bedroom and sleeping for several years on the couch. As Bill’s condition worsened -- he suffered from dementia -- assistant administrator Jeannie Thomas remembers watching Taswell maneuver his wheelchair and a shopping cart while patiently advising his brother to come along or sit on the bench while he moved their groceries. Taswell protected his older brother until Bill’s death a few years ago.

St. Mary’s Gardens sits hard by the freeway downtown, in a neighborhood that by sunlight appears calm and deceptively safe. An old housing project that had festered with crime was torn down, and handsome, well-kept, private apartments have sprung up. A few houses with peeling paint and trash-littered yards remain, but they seem more the aberration.

Residents such as Judice, sitting on the bench, will tell you that the bus stop down on the corner isn’t safe. Go there and you make yourself a candidate for robbery. And so they wait by the wooden benches out front until they see the bus actually wheeling down the block before they risk hobbling over to the stop.

Baird was not afraid to move about. He often went to the store to pick up milk, grapes and other groceries. Years earlier, residents were allowed to use the back entrance to the building to reach the store across the way. More recently though, that was shut to all but drivers as a safety precaution, because the administrators’ windows face only the front and they couldn’t monitor an open door in back.

On the day he was beaten, Baird rode his wheelchair from the back of his building to the front, his groceries in plastic bags looped onto his handlebars. Shortly after he rounded the corner to the front, a man reported to be about 19 or 20 and wearing a dark leather jacket punched him in the chest, kicking him to the ground.

A small man, Baird was 5-foot-6 and, according to the coroner, weighed 114 pounds at the time of his death. His screams couldn’t be heard through the glass of the apartment building.

But a caregiver just leaving work heard. With two bags full of recyclable tin cans, she hit the attacker until she saw him reach into his pocket. Afraid that he might pull a knife or gun, she fled. But by then, the administrators inside St. Mary’s Gardens had heard her screams.

“It was something horrendous,” said assistant administrator Thomas. As she held on for a 911 operator, she watched the young man pummel the old one. “Someone he didn’t even know,” she said several weeks later, “someone who was so defenseless.”

The attacker pulled the $80 from Baird’s waist-pack, fleeing on foot with his accomplices. Badly injured with a broken pelvis, Baird lay on the ground, but remained sufficiently coherent to ask for his inhaler, which had spilled onto the grass and which he needed for his emphysema. A pillow was placed under his head.

On that day, Oakland citizens voted in theory to support putting more cops on the street, but only by a bare majority. Many people think the police are part of the problem. And voters opposed all three measures to increase the hotel and parking taxes to pay for more officers.

Baird lived for a couple more weeks. But on Nov. 22, he died, becoming a statistic, a symbol, and gaining the sort of publicity that was his due in life.

That he basically lost his campaign for safer streets hasn’t deterred Mayor Brown. “We’re going to try different strategies. We’re going to reprioritize,” he said, ticking off plans to “maximize the use of sworn personnel, taking people out of desk jobs” and putting them on the streets. “And we’re looking at having non-sworn personnel take burglary reports.”

Brown railed against the state that he once governed -- for sending prisoners out into the community with a bus ticket, $200 in cash, no training, no housing and no jobs. He talked about the drug problems that “are part of America,” about the trade deficit, the disappearance of factory work and unskilled jobs.

Brown considered the case of Taswell Baird and the unknown assailant.

The blame is shared, he said, by “bad schools, bad parents, the bad economy, a bad media, gansta rap and bad values.” To solve it would take “almost a moral revolution,” he admitted.

And then the mayor of Oakland added, in a way that only he could, “I don’t shrink from that.”