Tapes Tell Incomplete Tale of Police Beating

It was a pleasant day, sun shining, afternoon sliding into evening on July 6 when Coby Chavis pulled his tan 1997 Ford Taurus into the Thrifty gas station on Century Boulevard at Freeman Avenue in Inglewood.

Chavis, a 41-year-old Inglewood man, is employed in construction scaffolding and has a history of run-ins with police. He was, he said, on his way to visit his father. With him was his son Donovan Jackson, 16, a student at Leuzinger High School in Lawndale.

Within hours, Jackson’s image would be flashed across the nation, his body pictured being thrown across a police car, his face struck hard with an officer’s fist. Those images, which riveted Southern California and reached to Washington and beyond, offered one part of the story of Jackson’s confrontation with Inglewood police.

A fuller story emerges, however, from participants, police reports and segments of videotape shot from various angles. In addition to the widely broadcast tape by itinerant videographer Mitchell Crooks, gas station security cameras shot photographs every three seconds; some of those have been made public, others, still unreleased, have been viewed by The Times.

Those accounts lend some credence to the police contention that the televised blows to Jackson came after several minutes of scuffling and raised tempers.

But they also capture the incident’s pivotal moment, when Inglewood Officer Jeremy J. Morse threw the youth onto the police car and punched him--and all accounts concur that Jackson was dazed and in handcuffs when that happened.

Morse has been indicted on felony assault charges; his partner, Bijan Darvish, is charged with filing a false report.

The events that left Jackson hurt and those two officers facing the possibility of prison unfolded over roughly 11 minutes.

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5 p.m.

Chavis stopped under the station’s broad red-striped canopy to draw gas from a pump in the northwest corner of the station. He sent his son to pay. Jackson went into the station’s closet-sized mini-mart, where a cashier works in a steel-and-glass booth.

Jackson is slight, weighing 136 pounds. He is known to classmates as quiet and easygoing, if a little slow academically. He was, in fact, classified for special education on the basis of what his family says is an “auditory processing disorder,” which would mean he doesn’t easily understand what people say.

At the moment that his father pulled into the station, though, his family says, Donovan Jackson was a typically hungry teenager who had a hankering for some potato chips. Inside the mini-mart, he picked a bag from the small selection, paid and opened the door to return to the car.

Outside, deputies from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department were on their regular patrol.

The Thrifty station lies on a heavily traveled commercial strip between the Hollywood Park racetrack and Los Angeles International Airport. Its neighbors are a humdrum mix of fast-food outlets, auto repair shops and budget motels serving LAX.

Although it is in Inglewood, a patchwork of various police cruisers typically plies Century Boulevard in front of the station, which lies within a mile of three other jurisdictions: the cities of Los Angeles and Hawthorne, and the unincorporated Lennox area, which is patrolled by the Sheriff’s Department.

It is not uncommon, officials say, for one agency to make a stop in the other’s territory. “Normal, routine stuff,” said Assistant Sheriff Dennis Dahlman, who worked the sheriff’s Lennox area as a patrolman for 11 years.

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5:02 p.m.

A sheriff’s cruiser passed the station, heading east on Century. Noticing the Taurus, deputies rounded the block and pulled into the station. Nothing in their report offers a hint about what drew their attention. Dahlman, who has answered questions for the Sheriff’s Department about the case, said that issue remains under review.

Once in the station and behind the Taurus, Deputies Carlos Lopez and Daniel Leon noticed that the registration tag on the car’s rear license plate had expired in April. They ran a quick check of Department of Motor Vehicle records, which confirmed that it was expired.

Ordinarily, Dahlman said, deputies who spot a recently expired registration simply ask the driver to take care of it. But when Lopez and Leon approached Chavis and asked for his driver’s license, they discovered another problem: His license, he said, had been suspended.

Jackson, meantime, had emerged from the mini-mart with his potato chips; the gas station tape indicates that Jackson walked toward the car at 5:02:39, carrying something in his left hand. According to Chavis and lawyers for the family, the deputies saw the boy approach and ordered him to drop the bag of chips.

In his report after the incident, Lopez didn’t mention any chips, but said he asked the youth not to get back in his father’s car. Either way, the deputies didn’t get what they wanted.

Jackson “stopped and faced me,” Lopez wrote. “I noticed he was breathing hard and had an angered facial expression.” Jackson mentioned that Chavis was his father, Lopez recalled. The deputy said he told the boy “to hold on and allow us to finish what we were doing.” Jackson, he said, “stood outside of the vehicle intently staring at me.”

Lopez said later that he interpreted this as an indication of defiance and anger. Jackson’s family maintained that it was the natural reaction of a frightened, perhaps panicked, teenager, whose disability may have made it difficult for him to respond appropriately to the deputy.

Dahlman said Lopez “was just trying to get the kid out of the problem.” He added that Jackson “didn’t seem to understand.”

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5:05 p.m.

At this point, according to Lopez, Leon told Chavis to get out of his car, and the videotape shows him being led to the police car. The deputy then began to pat down Chavis.

As he did so, another deputy passed by, walking with Jackson.

Here, the accounts begin to diverge. According to Chavis, Lopez checked Jackson’s pockets--apparently looking for weapons--and sat him down in the patrol car.

A few seconds later, Chavis said, his son stood up, drawn by the sight of more officers approaching--the first of four Inglewood officers who arrived in two squad cars. They pulled in, according to Inglewood officials, to see if the deputies needed help. Lopez’s version of the searches of Jackson and his father differs from that offered by Chavis. He says that while his partner was patting down Chavis, Jackson “turned the left side of his body away from me and placed his left hand in his left pocket.” He then “moved his left hand within his pocket as if he was manipulating something.”

Lopez said he asked Jackson if he had anything in his pocket, but the youth didn’t respond. “He continued looking at me as if he was angry at me,” he added.

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5:06 p.m.

From this moment, the situation rapidly went from tense to violent, according to the tapes, officers and Jackson and Chavis.

According to the deputy’s report, Lopez asked Jackson to face the Taurus and put his hands on the roof. Again, he didn’t respond. So Lopez said he began patting him down. Jackson’s response now, he said, was to tense up and refuse to obey orders to put his hands behind his back. Lopez said he told him that he was just checking for weapons and “it was not a big deal, and to relax.”

Jackson didn’t relax.

In his report, Lopez said he decided he would have to hold the boy in the patrol car while his partner completed the investigation of Chavis.

But that did not prove easy. Seconds after Jackson passed near his father, the deputy patting down Chavis began to struggle; the two fell to the ground and wrestled before officers succeeded in putting Chavis in handcuffs.

Two Inglewood officers helped briefly with cuffing Chavis. In one unreleased tape, one of the officers can be seen pausing over Chavis, then suddenly looking up and hurrying toward Jackson and the officers confronting him.

Darvish reported the following exchange:

“Have a seat in the car,” Lopez said.

“I’m not getting in the car!” Jackson yelled.

“We then saw Jackson’s eyes open up very wide and begin to stare at Deputy Lopez,” Darvish wrote. “Jackson’s nostrils then began to flare and he started to breathe very heavily. Fearing that Jackson was about to become combative, Officer Morse asked him to get in the car, however, Jackson refused and continued to stare at Deputy Lopez. Jackson then clenched both of his fists and raised his arms.”

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5:07 p.m.

According to an account written by the Jackson-Chavis Justice Committee, a support group established soon after the incident, Jackson had just stood up to watch the Inglewood police approach when he was hit--unprovoked--by one of the officers, after which “other officers began to hit Donovan all at once.”

That blow, if it occurred, is not definitively captured on tape. Police reports and Chavis concur that officers knocked Jackson to the ground, and one of the security camera sequences does show the youth on the pavement as an officer jerks his arm quickly.

From that point forward, the security cameras clearly depict a scuffle.

Chavis, in an interview long after the incident, said the Inglewood officers “took turns beating [Jackson] in the face. My son did nothing.” During this pummeling--according to Joe Hopkins, who briefly served as the father’s attorney--one of the other officers accidentally struck Morse in the head, causing him to bleed. One officer, he said, then put his knee in Jackson’s back.

The officers, Hopkins said, then “slammed” Jackson onto the pavement after picking him up by the seat of his pants. Morse, he said, hit the boy twice with a closed fist.

Law enforcement officials offer a significantly different account. The versions presented by sheriff’s deputies and Inglewood police are not identical, though they generally parallel one another.

In his report, Deputy Lopez said Jackson “lunged at me, raising his hands in front of him.” Lopez said he crouched and tried to push Jackson into the patrol car, but couldn’t.

Darvish, slightly more specific, said Jackson had hit Lopez in the upper chest and lower neck with both fists. Darvish added that he put his hands on the back of Jackson’s neck, and the three officers managed to pull Jackson down.

“As we were going to the ground,” Darvish added, “Jackson was able to free his arms from Officer Morse and Deputy Lopez.”

“As Officer Morse was pushing Jackson’s hand away, the button on his uniform broke off, causing Jackson to lose his grip,” Darvish continued. “Jackson then used his right hand and grabbed the top portion of Officer Morse’s left ear. Jackson then pulled his hand in a downward motion, at which time Officer Morse felt a sharp pain on the left side of [his] head.”

Later, Morse would be seen bleeding from below his left ear.

Worried that Jackson was pulling him into a vulnerable position, Darvish wrote, “I punched him two times in the face, using my right hand.”

On the security tape, other Inglewood officers are visible in the altercation with Jackson. And in a clearer view of that section of the altercation, the scrum appears intense, with officers and Jackson tumbling over one another.

Finally, one Inglewood officer, Mariano Salcedo, grabbed Jackson by the legs, Darvish wrote. The two deputies and Morse then turned him onto his stomach--at this point, the two agencies’ accounts mesh--and handcuffed him.

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5:08 p.m.

Chavis and his supporters insist that Jackson did not struggle during the tussle on the ground, and that the officers were the sole aggressors. Moreover, Chavis said that one of the Inglewood officers grabbed an 18-inch, silver-colored chain-link necklace that Jackson was wearing and dragged the boy a foot or two by it until the chain snapped under his weight. By then, he said, Jackson was unconscious.

That is not visible on the gas station tape, but the gaps in the action and the quality of the tape make it impossible to rule it out.

Four days later, Jackson’s neck bore deep marks in the shape of the chain.

As officers and Jackson were struggling, Crooks was across the street, relaxing in Room 215 of the Backpackers Paradise Hostel. He heard a woman screaming that police were beating a man, and he jumped to his feet, grabbing his video camera. Standing on his balcony, he began filming.

Crooks’ tape begins just before 5:08 p.m. (the time code on his camera is slightly different from the settings on the gas station cameras). All the officers are gathered around Jackson, who on the tape appears to be lying still on the ground, a moment also captured from another angle by a gas station camera.

In both views, Morse can be seen lifting the boy--who was so limp as to appear unconscious--by the back of his pants and collar. Crooks’ video then shows Morse slamming the boy down, face first, onto the trunk of the police cruiser.

Morse then stood behind and over Jackson, whose dazed face hovered just above the trunk. Darvish was next to Morse, with one hand on the boy’s back. Morse was holding Jackson’s neck with his left hand.

Suddenly, as Morse moved from Jackson’s left to right, he briefly released his hold on the boy’s neck. After quickly reaching down toward his own crotch, he reached back up and grabbed the boy’s neck again with his left hand. Darvish put a second hand on the boy’s back, apparently to help hold him down. Then Morse, grimacing, slugged Jackson in the face with his right fist.

It is for this behavior--the slam on the trunk and the punch to the face--that Morse has been indicted. His defense so far has rested on his allegation that Jackson, while slumped over the trunk, reached back with his handcuffed hands and grabbed Morse’s testicles, squeezing them.

Through that sequence, Morse was in and out of the video frame. The tape does not show Jackson’s hands.

Morse’s contention that he was grabbed does not account, however, for his action in slamming Jackson onto the car. Darvish’s report says only that the officers “assisted Jackson to his feet.” Morse’s lawyer, John Barnett, said that was precisely what the officer was doing when he picked up Jackson and slammed him down.

Prosecutors evidently think otherwise: Darvish’s description of that sequence is what landed him an indictment for the felony of filing a false police report.

After Morse hit Jackson, the tape shows another officer, apparently Salcedo, grabbing Morse by the arm and then using his own arm as a wedge to separate Morse and Jackson.

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5:11 p.m.

Salcedo and Morse then marched the boy to the police car. He was booked on suspicion of interfering with a police officer, but prosecutors have decided not to charge Jackson with any crime.

Throughout the incident, much of the tape that recorded it is silent. The security tape has no sound.

But Crooks’ tape is accompanied by voices. One is obviously that of Crooks, the other that of the woman who alerted him to the incident. While Jackson is still lying on the ground, surrounded by the four Inglewood police officers and two sheriff’s deputies, she can be heard yelling--apparently to Jackson and his father--”Please, you guys, do not resist them!”

Then, in an aside, apparently to Crooks: “I just don’t want this boy to lose his life.”

At the end, Crooks can be heard lamenting that he has filmed over footage of his trip to New York.

“I’d better get money for it,” he says.*

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

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Investigating the Videos

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Investigators are trying to reconcile conflicting accounts of events

July 6 at a Thrifty gas station in Inglewood. A widely viewed amateur video shows police manhandling and punching 16-year-old Donovan Jackson. Careful study of additional video from the gas station’s security cameras may shed light on what led up to that infamous scene.

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Station security cameras and various accounts

5:00 p.m. - 5:02 p.m.

Coby Chavis and his son, Donovan Jackson,

drive into station. Jackson walks to

mini-mart to pay for gas as Chavis gets ready to use pump.

5:02 p.m. - 5:05 p.m.

Sheriff’s cruiser pulls into station; deputies question Chavis about lapsed registration and suspended license. Jackson emerges from mini-mart, met by deputies.

5:05 p.m. - 5:08 p.m.

One of two Inglewood patrol cars pulls into station. Chavis is patted down, and handcuffed while on ground. Jackson and

several police officers wind up scuffling on the ground.

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From Mitchell Crooks’ videotape

5:08 p.m. - 5:11 p.m.

Handcuffed Jackson lifted from ground, slammed onto squad car. Inglewood Officer Jeremy J. Morse punches Jackson before police escort him to another squad car.

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Sources: Gas station video, Mitchell Crooks’ video, police reports, witness accounts

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Graphics reporting by JOEL GREENBERG / Los Angeles Times

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Times staff writer Beth Shuster contributed to this report.