Public awareness of Algiers Motel Incident
emerged slowly.
By July 29th, Congressman John
Conyers’ office had been informed of the killings and the Detroit Free Press had interviewed at least some of the people
present. By the 31st it was
common knowledge.
The nature of the survivors’ escape had a lot
to do with the confusion. The two older
men present, Charles Moore and Robert Greene, went separate ways. Moore claimed he left in his car to drive
home while Greene, not wanting to risk further police contact by breaking
curfew, holed up in the motel’s front office.
The younger men scattered, while Juli Hysell and Karen Molloy stayed put in their room.
Michael Clark made his way to a phone booth to
call Carl Cooper’s folks, informing them their son was dead. Roderick Davis and Larry Reid were arrested
in the adjacent city of Hamtramck for violating the curfew order. James Sortor and Lee Forsythe arrived safely
to the Cooper house, where they corroborated Michael’s story.
The first published eyewitness accounts were
all over the map. Greene told reporters
Warrant Officer Ted Thomas was the main shooter. As the story developed Patrolmen Ronald August
and Robert Paille, likely in an effort to simultaneously ease their consciences
and cover their asses. went to their superiors and gave formal statements. Paille pointed to David Senak as the
instigator of the raid and subsequent killings.
The police and prosecutor’s office
investigators then sought out the other witnesses. Juli Hysell and Karen Molloy were so shaken
by their ordeal—Juli suffered a head wound requiring seven stitches as well as
a concussion—that representatives from Conyers’ office acted as intermediaries
to arrange the meeting with the investigators.
The prosecutor’s staff, all of them white men,
made a show of intimidating the witnesses during the interviews to the point
where the identifications of the culprits were less than certain.
At this point another witness came into the
mix. It was a woman named Lawanda
Schettler, who lived near the Algiers Motel annex. Mrs. Schettler was sitting in her car across
the street from the annex. She saw two
black males with either rifles or shotguns walk past two white girls sitting on
the porch steps. The girls seemed
frightened and skittered away.
The men entered the annex. Mrs. Schlatter heard angry shouts, then
gunshots. She hurriedly drove away, not
seeing what happened afterward.
Schettler’s account left open the possibility
that Carl Cooper died at the hands of someone other than the police. However, there was no corroboration. Also, Mrs. Schettler had been drinking
that night and had in fact been on a beer run when she stopped in front of the
motel. (It seems the authorities
enforced the curfew selectively. Mrs.
Schettler, who was white, was not so rule conscious as to have stayed indoors. What’s more, she had planned to purchase her
adult beverage from the very kind of unlicensed “blind pig” which had been
Ground Zero for the 12th Street uprising.)
Even more damningly for Schettler’s account,
her husband, who had a reputation as a neighborhood law and order type and a
couple of citizen’s arrests to his credit, was later quoted on the record as
saying he was sick of liberals whining about civil rights. For
their part, the police hinted that maybe Carl had a “contract” out on him, but
nothing came of the story in the end and the raiders remained the focus of
media scrutiny.
Robert Greene’s accusation of WO Thomas was another
account convenient for the police and their accused officers. So was security guard Melvin Dismukes’
participation in the raid. In his book, John
Hersey mocked Thomas’ desire to avoid blame while not implicating the
cops. Thomas admitted later he was unsure
during the multiple questionings he was subjected to exactly who he was giving
evidence for. Nevertheless, after
several lineups of police officers Thomas and another Guardsman present at the
Algiers that night, PFC Wayne Henson, identified David Senak and Ronald August
as the officers who beat the prisoners and fired their weapons.
While Wayne County prosecutors dithered over
charging Senak, August, and Paille, they wasted no time bringing charges
against Dismukes for assaulting James Sortor and Michael Clark. Dismukes’ exact role in the incident, like
those of everyone else involved, is unclear.
He was the only civilian and the only identified African-American in the
raiding party, which probably factored into the decision to charge him first.
Dismukes’ story has become even more tangled in
the present and has been recently subjected to a large dose of spin. A trailer for the newly released dramatization
of the Algiers Motel Incident, Detroit,
portrays Dismukes (played by John Boyega) undergoing a hostile police
interrogation after the shooting. An
extended version features Melvin Dismukes himself discussing his treatment by
the police and how he had wanted to clear his name from the start. The film also claims the first two victims
died before he entered the annex, which is unlikely given the commonly accepted
timeline of events.
As for avoiding the consequences, he needn’t
have worried. The all-white jury deliberated
a scant 13 minutes before pronouncing Dismukes not guilty.
But was he innocent? Kathryn Bigelow’s telling of it makes it seem
so. As a matter of fact, she makes him
out to be the unsung hero of that long night and a protector of the victims
into the bargain. (In one scene, Melvin
even whispers to one of the youths, “I need you to survive the night.” Very moving.
Very dramatic. And probably
bullshit.)
Dismukes undeniably had a hard time of it in
the years following the incident, experiencing death threats against him and
his family. But his decision to join the
raiding party and his presence in the annex even after it was no longer needed
do not balance his pleas of guiltlessness.
Justice remained elusive for the victims and
their families. Senak, Paille, and Dismukes
were charged with conspiracy, charges which were ultimately dismissed. The U.S. Attorney’s office then brought their
own conspiracy charges against the three defendants in the aborted state trial,
as well as bringing charges against August.
Two years and a change of venue later, all four men were acquitted.
Paille’s confession to shooting Fred Temple was
tossed because the officer hadn’t been first read his Miranda rights, so he was
never prosecuted. In the end, the only
participant in the raid ever to actually go to trial for murder was Ronald
August for shooting Auburey Pollard. Predictably,
he was found not guilty. In the end, the
only convictions handed down in the Algiers Motel Incident were from a mock
court convened by civil rights activists.
The four “defendants” were sentenced to death.
If it was common today for law enforcement
officers who kill black citizens in the absence of a credible threat to be
convicted, the Algiers Motel Incident would be a distasteful memory of a less
enlightened time. Instead, it’s a bitter
example of how the more things change, the more they stay the same. What is even more chilling than the fact that
the motel murders happened is that David Senak was found to have shot and killed two other men the previous day for which he
was never held to account.
The reasons are pretty clear to anyone who has
even casually followed the news for the last five decades. The raiders’ evasion of justice in 1969 was
no different than that of Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for his shooting
of Michael Brown. The consensus among
middle class whites then as now was that the victims weren’t victims at
all. If they had been conducting
themselves lawfully, they would never have attracted police attention. No one entertained the notion that Carl Cooper’s crime was poor judgment by
firing the starter pistol, while the others were guilty by their association
with Carl.
It didn’t help the prosecution that the
survivors of the incident had led less than stellar personal lives. The Detroit
Free Press lamented in December 1968 that while the police officers and Mr.
Dismukes had yet to go to trial, their victims had been arrested and convicted
of myriad offenses. Lee Forsythe, who
had been afraid of Carl Cooper’s starter pistol, received a 20-year sentence
for the armed robbery of a furniture store.
(The take: $190.) Karen Molloy
and Juli Hysell were each placed on probation and fined for soliciting and
prostitution. Michael Clark and James
Sortor also compiled police records along the way.
Considering people’s tendency in such cases to
conflate an individual’s behavior on other occasions with their deserts of
abuse during the incident in question, it’s unsurprising nothing was achieved
in the end. The consequences for the
members of the raiding party were mixed.
For Melvin Dismukes, this meant threats and verbal abuse over the years. He continued in his security career,
ultimately working for the Detroit Pistons.
Ronald August remained with the Detroit police until he quit in
1977.
Theodore Thomas receded into the obscurity
of private life, working for Stanley Door in Flint until his
retirement. His 2007 obituary mentioned
his service in the U.S. Air Force and the Michigan National Guard, his widow,
his five children, 13 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. There was, of course, no mention of his part
in the Algiers Motel Incident.
Robert Paille left the police and worked at
various jobs.
And what of that heroic defender of law and
morality, David “Snake” Senak? He, too,
left the police and operated a construction business for a number of
years. He lives in a small town upstate,
where he serves on a local zoning appeals board. He’s also active on Facebook, where he posts
about his grandkids and his faith. (It
always seems that some of the worst people are also the most overtly
religious.) All in all, a nice, bucolic life with
nary a care.
If they ever think (or thought) back to that
night in July 1967, I wonder if any of the raiding party ever experienced any
true regrets over their actions. Dismukes
considers himself as much a victim as the people he helped detain and abuse in
the motel annex. Thomas was torn between his duty to report
what he saw and his loyalty to the system. Paille and August only came forward about the
raid to soften the blow of the consequences that never befell them.
The first two men, while their actions and
omissions cause us to question the orientation of their moral compass, were
caught up in circumstances beyond their control. The latter two were run of the mill products
of American law enforcement culture and its ingrained racial and socioeconomic
prejudices. At some point, they should
have said no and did not.
Given what’s known of his record, David Senak is
in a category of his own. A violent,
misanthropic man placed in a position of authority is a recipe for
disaster. His actions have been duplicated
in various forms over the years albeit less brutally and in a less calculated
manner. The as yet unlearned lesson of
the Algiers Motel Incident and the untold number of police shootings before and
since is that as long as societal mores effectively sanction such killings,
they are doomed to continue.
© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar
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