A Freed Lifer Just Lets It Go

The white prison van jerked to a stop on the dusty shoulder of 60th Street West in Lancaster. A uniformed guard pulled open a side door and out stepped DeWayne McKinney, a free man after a mistake that took 19 years from his life.

Throughout his 20s and 30s, McKinney had been punished for a crime he didn’t commit.

A few hours earlier, a judge had ordered McKinney released. He did so at the request of Orange County prosecutors, who said McKinney had been wrongly convicted of murdering a Burger King manager, and that they now believed someone else had done the deed.

On the side of the sun-swept road, just outside the gates of the state prison, McKinney stood frozen. He was scared of the uncertainty, frightened of freedom. But he would soon find his way, aided by an inner strength and the unexpected kindness of strangers moved by his story.

McKinney fell in love and married, rekindled a relationship with a son born shortly after his arrest, and developed new friendships, including a surprising bond with the judge who sentenced him to life.

He has become a celebrity on the Christian lecture circuit, leaving congregations in suburban churches spellbound with his soft-spoken account of keeping the faith. His tale has prompted students at UC Irvine and Western State University in Fullerton to form “innocence projects” that are sifting through dusty case files looking for others like him.

Two years after his release, McKinney still can’t believe his good fortune. But thoughts of his new life are always tempered by memories of his old life, and what he overcame.

Occasionally, the memories make him shudder. But most of the time, he said, they give him strength.

“Understanding what you truly lost, it makes you embrace what you have,” said McKinney, now 41. “I’m who I am today because of those 20 years.”

Confident Police Would Realize Their Mistake

Dec. 17, 1980. He sat in a holding cell in the Orange County Jail, waiting for police to realize they had made a mistake. An officer had accosted McKinney outside a friend’s apartment complex in Ontario, his gun pointed at McKinney’s chest. “Freeze!” the officer shouted.

At the Ontario police station, McKinney, then 20, learned he was a suspect in a robbery-murder at a Burger King in Orange six days earlier. Detectives had a hunch that Los Angeles gang members were responsible, and they collected dozens of mug shots from the LAPD. A witness was shown McKinney’s picture and said he looked like the gunman.

McKinney was no stranger to the inside of a police station. He grew up in South-Central Los Angeles and drifted into gang life after his mother died when he was 12.

McKinney was sent to juvenile hall for cutting a woman with a knife. A few years later, he and some gang friends were arrested with a gun outside a jewelry store. He was sent to the California Youth Authority for attempted robbery.

But this was different. This time he’d done nothing wrong, he told himself.

Deputies led McKinney into an auditorium for a lineup where he would be viewed by three witnesses to the murder. McKinney stood among five other men, each of them wearing black beanies, just as the killer had.

On the other side of the darkened glass, Burger King workers Richard Shewbert and Donald Bulla thought they saw something familiar in McKinney’s eyes.

That’s him, they told the detectives. No. 3.

19 Years’ Worth of Laughter and Tears

It was nearly dinner time when McKinney stepped out of the prison van. He was wearing a pair of Levis and sneakers that were two sizes too small.

He hitched a ride to Palmdale, where he met Byron Pedersen, a volunteer prison minister, at a barbecue restaurant. They had become fast friends at the state prison in Lancaster, where McKinney spent seven years. Now, they ate ribs and talked.

They laughed and cried and prayed together, and patrons realized they were witnessing something special. McKinney left the restaurant with a job offer from the owner.

So much time had passed, McKinney didn’t expect anyone to care about what had happened to him. But nearly everywhere he turned in Orange County, he found an outstretched hand, a donation, a hot meal.

An investigator for the public defender’s office who had worked on his case let McKinney stay at his house in Costa Mesa for several weeks. A dentist and doctor treated him for free. A chiropractor gave him an adjustment, a driving school donated lessons and a Newport Beach bicycle shop chipped in a 10-speed.

For several weeks, McKinney could be seen wobbling around Costa Mesa and Newport Beach on that bike, a new cell phone wedged between his ear and shoulder, living proof that it is possible to forget how to ride a bicycle.

At the DMV, a clerk recognized McKinney at the back of a long line and motioned him to the front. “You’ve waited long enough,” the clerk said, smiling.

Thousands of dollars in donations flowed into a trust account established by the public defender’s office. An 11-year-old boy mailed a crumpled $5 bill. A software company CEO sent $3,000.

“I have a different attitude toward the death penalty now. They make mistakes . . . and he was one of them,” said Brian Fargo, former CEO of Interplay Entertainment in Irvine, a software entertainment company. “I really empathize with a guy who served 20 years for nothing.”

Often, people who met McKinney walked away surprised. He spoke not of bitterness, but of gratitude. More than once, he said he believed God may have wanted him in prison all those years, instead of on the streets. “I lost a lot, but I also gained,” McKinney said.

He received numerous job offers and accepted one at UC Irvine, running audiovisual equipment in lecture halls.

Friends and family worried about whether McKinney, an African American with inner-city roots, would fit in in Orange County.

“That surprised me [that] he would live there, the place that actually sent him where he was for 20 years,” said his sister, Brenda Dennis of Gray, Tenn. “He said he doesn’t have any grudges.”

Some of McKinney’s new friends worried more about whether he would be able to handle freedom.

“In the beginning, knowing everything I knew about men getting out of prison, I was very apprehensive. I did think it could go either way. I thought it was a make-or-break thing,” said Nancy Clark, an addiction counselor who let McKinney live rent-free for several months in a Costa Mesa apartment. “We’re talking about a guy who came out of prison without a pair of socks or anything. He didn’t have a toothbrush.”

Attempts to Prove Innocence Thwarted

The gunman entered the Burger King around closing time on Dec. 11, 1980. He jumped a counter and forced several employees into a walk-in refrigerator. Then he shot manager Walter Horace Bell, 19, in the back of the head.

At McKinney’s trial in 1982, four Burger King employees identified him as the killer. McKinney and several relatives insisted he was at his sister’s home, 20 miles away, at the time. The jury convicted him of first-degree murder. The prosecution demanded the death penalty, but the judge sentenced McKinney to life in prison without parole.

McKinney remained adamant about his innocence. Hoping to clear his name, he took a lie detector test arranged by his public defenders. But the polygraph examiner found evidence of deception in some of McKinney’s answers.

McKinney also told his lawyers that two prisoners he had encountered at the Orange County Jail could vouch for his innocence. The prisoners told McKinney that they took part in the Burger King robbery and knew the identity of the gunman. McKinney’s lawyers investigated but were skeptical of the prisoners’ accounts. They considered the case closed.

McKinney tried to think of prison as a haven from the violence of the streets. But life on the cellblock was also fraught with danger. Gang rivalries flourished. McKinney’s focus was survival.

He told himself that, one day, someone would correct this mistake. He tried to block out the reality by reading western novels by Louis L’Amour, which he collected in swaps with other inmates.

Five years into his life term, McKinney was living among hostile Crips gang members at San Quentin, one of five prisons where he served time. He was on the notorious east block. The inmates, not the guards, seemed to be in control. McKinney strapped magazines to his chest with torn bed sheets to protect against a stabbing.

McKinney had already survived two knifings, one in a courthouse holding cell in Orange County, the other at the state prison in Folsom.

Now, in 1987, he sat on his cell toilet, pressed a double-edge razor against his left wrist, and cut himself again and again. He thought he’d either die or be moved to a safer cellblock.

McKinney’s wrist was bandaged in the infirmary and he was placed in an isolated cell, under suicide watch. For once, he felt safe. There were no other inmates to worry about. But when his wounds healed, he was sent back to the east block.

Reunited With a Son Who’d Become a Man

A few days after his release on Jan. 28, 2000, McKinney walked cautiously through an apartment courtyard in a working-class neighborhood of Fontana. He rapped a wooden door softly, then waited for the moment he’d dreamed of for so many years.

Anthony Dozier, now 19, was born a few months after his father’s arrest and was given his mother’s last name.

During the early years, Anthony and his mother visited McKinney several times a year. But eventually, McKinney told Anthony’s mother to stop bringing him to prison. He urged her to find a strong man to marry, someone who could be a role model for his son. Marie Dozier did as McKinney asked. She married another man, and when Anthony entered his teens she cut off his visits to prison.

Now, McKinney was standing nervously outside his son’s front door, not sure what kind of reception to expect.

The door swung open and Anthony emerged, beaming. Father and son embraced.

“How you doing, Daddy?” said the son.

The pair took a long walk, beginning a father-son bond nearly two decades late.

McKinney decided to take the relationship slowly. Two or three times a month, McKinney drove to Fontana to visit Anthony. He’d take his son to the few places he knew in Orange County. They played video games in an arcade on Balboa Island, shopped for clothes at Triangle Square, spent an afternoon riding Jet Skis. He wanted to teach Anthony, who works at a Fontana pizza parlor, that there’s life outside his tough neighborhood.

“The greatest part is we’ve become more than strangers. We’re father and son. That’s the greatest part, how we evolved,” McKinney said.

“It’s been cool,” Anthony said. “We talk about guy stuff.”

Earlier this year, Anthony’s girlfriend gave birth to their child. On a recent Saturday night, McKinney spent the evening putting together a playpen for his grandson. It was a perfect night, the kind he wished he could have spent with Anthony.

Speaking About an ‘Unspeakable Situation’

After 19 years in prison, so many things surprised McKinney: automated teller machines, the Internet, cell phones, self-serve soft drink dispensers.

But few things amazed him as much as the interest of strangers in hearing his story.

Within two days of his release, McKinney was summoned to the front of a crowded Lancaster church hall. He held a microphone and spoke softly about a jailhouse conversion to Christianity and the faith that sustained him all those years.

“I was placed in an unspeakable situation for something I didn’t do,” he began. “Two years ago, I met God. I realized there’s nothing he can’t do as long as we believe. If I trust in him, he can take me anywhere.”

By the time McKinney finished, the crowd of more than 500 was on its feet, many of them moved to tears by his forgiving demeanor and tale of rewarded faith.

“You couldn’t see any resentment there. That’s what touched people the most,” said Dave DeBose, who was in the audience that day at Desert Vineyard Christian Fellowship. “For a long time after that, people were inquiring about DeWayne.”

McKinney was invited to speak to law students, college classes and more church services than he can remember. He was honored by Death Penalty Focus, a group opposed to capital punishment, at a reception in Santa Monica where he mingled with the casts of “The West Wing” and “The Practice” and with singer Jackson Browne.

“He touched everybody in the house. His simple decency is what came through,” said actor Mike Farrell, a death-penalty opponent. “This is a man whose simple presentation of the facts is a nail in the coffin of this whole idea that our system is infallible.”

McKinney’s road to freedom began in 1997. While in the Lancaster prison, he bumped into one of the two inmates who, in the Orange County Jail 16 years earlier, had told McKinney that they were involved in the Burger King robbery and knew who the gunman was. McKinney’s original public defenders had dismissed the prisoners’ story.

Now, McKinney asked the inmate to write a sworn statement explaining that McKinney wasn’t involved in the crime and naming the real killer. McKinney mailed the statement to the public defender’s office, where it piqued the interest of a new set of attorneys.

Public defender’s investigators soon tracked down the second prisoner, who told them that he was the getaway driver that night. Both prisoners--behind bars for crimes unrelated to the robbery-killing--implicated a career criminal as the Burger King gunman.

The investigators also interviewed two witnesses whose testimony had helped convict McKinney in 1982. After viewing a photo of the man identified by the prisoners, both witnesses said that he--not McKinney--was the gunman.

The public defender filed a motion for a new trial. The district attorney’s office initially objected, but after their own review of the case, prosecutors said they would seek McKinney’s immediate release.

The announcement was made by Orange County Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas, who as a deputy D.A. in 1982 had asked a jury to give McKinney the death penalty. A judge threw out the conviction and ordered McKinney freed.

The newly identified suspect has served time for cocaine possession, burglary and fraud. Prosecutors said they do not have enough evidence to bring charges against him for the Burger King slaying. The two prisoners who implicated the suspect have never been prosecuted for their roles in the crime.

McKinney has sued the Orange Police Department and his original lawyers. But he insists he harbors no bitterness toward anyone.

Last month, McKinney met with Rackauckas and announced his support for the district attorney’s reelection. He said he respected Rackauckas for seeking his release rather than demanding a new trial, which could have prolonged McKinney’s imprisonment by several years.

A few weeks after his release, McKinney was waiting in line in a coffee house near Costa Mesa’s Triangle Square shopping center. An older man walked in, his tie loosened and face creased with a smile. The last time McKinney saw Judge David O. Carter, Carter was sending him to prison for life. This day, the judge had a different message.

“Someone in the system owes you an apology,” Carter said with tears in his eyes. “We’re sorry.’

It was the beginning of an unexpected friendship. A few weeks later, Carter invited McKinney to speak to a church group and to students in a college class he teaches. The students were moved, Carter recalls.

“It’s such a powerful statement about finding peace, solace and stability in the darkest moment of our lives,” said Carter, now a federal judge. “Because when you meet him, he’s one of those people who’s living what he believes. You can see it and you can feel it. If he has bitterness, it’s not something that he wears on his sleeve. That’s the very quality that makes people believe in the new DeWayne McKinney.”

Unlikely Romance Blooms Into Marriage

A few months after his release, McKinney met a woman through friends at his Costa Mesa apartment complex.

They sat in a friend’s garage office and talked. She told him about the places she’d visited. He told her about his years in prison.

To friends, their romance seemed unlikely. Jeanine Clinard practices Buddhism. McKinney is a devout Christian. But something clicked. She had a way of teaching McKinney how things work on the outside without making him feel awkward.

On Christmas Day 2000, McKinney gave Jeanine a box the size of a television. Inside, she found a diamond engagement ring. Last spring, at a small chapel in Las Vegas, they were married.

They live in an apartment near South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa. They struggle to pay the rent, buy groceries, make car payments.

“I don’t trip on those things,” McKinney said. “Every morning is a blessing. Every morning when I go outside and I hit the air, I’m thankful.”

Because they work different hours, McKinney often spends his evenings alone at their apartment. He’ll exercise at the apartment complex gym, then soak in the Jacuzzi under the night sky.

“Me and the stars, you can’t beat that. Every night I sit in it, I just thank the Lord.

“I’m still beyond belief that I regained my freedom,” he said. “I’m still amazed that I’m back.”