Inside the Algiers Motel manor house annex, Carl
Cooper, Michael Clark, and Lee Forsythe had been listening to music with Juli Hysell
and Karen Molloy. A sudden gunshot from
outside broke a window, causing the occupants of the annex to retreat to what they thought was safety.
What happened next is rife with conflicting
statements and conjecture, as the aftermath of traumatic events inevitably are. The ad hoc team led by the cops stormed into
the annex. The first casualty was Carl Cooper,
who was shot dead in a first-floor room even though he was checked in to a
third-floor room.
Responsibility for Carl’s death was never
established, though he was felled by a shotgun blast in which the shot was consistent
with the type of shotgun then carried by the Detroit police. No one in the raiding party ever admitted to
being the first to enter, claiming Carl was already dead when they arrived.
The group advanced into the building, rounded
up the occupants, and moved them into a downstairs corridor. The officers lined them against the wall and struck
each in turn, demanding to know who had fired the shots and where the gun was.
Pulling Roderick Davis from his brace position
along the wall, a patrolman threw a knife to the floor and ordered Roderick to
pick it up. Understandably wanting to
avoid being shot by the police in “self defense,” Roderick refused. After beating Roderick, they moved on to
Michael with the same result followed by Lee.
It got uglier pretty fast. Patrolman Senak was enraged that Juli and
Karen, two white women, were socializing with black men. Senak forcibly stripped the two, and shouted
abuse at them: “Why you got to fuck them?" he demanded. "What’s wrong with us, you n----r lovers?”
Senak then decided to ratchet up the
terror. Roderick Davis was pulled away from
the wall and hustled into a nearby room.
National Guard Warrant Officer Ted Thomas went with them.
After shutting the door Senak ordered Roderick
to lie face down on the floor. Senak
fired his weapon into a wall, then winked at Thomas. Thomas stepped out of the room. A patrolman asked him if Senak had killed
Roderick, and Thomas said yes. Michael
Clark was led into the room next and told to lie on the floor. Depending on the account, either Thomas or Senak
fired into the ceiling. Returning to the corridor, Senak bragged, “I killed them two motherfuckers!”
At this point the girls urged their companions
to tell the officers where the gun was, and told the officers that its owner,
Carl, was already dead. According to later
court testimony this was about twenty minutes after the police and soldiers had
entered the annex. Challenged as to why
it took her or anyone else so long to mention the pistol and its late owner,
Juli Hysell responded simply that they were scared.
That’s reasonable enough. Patrolman Senak was not appeased, however,
and asked who wanted to go into the room next.
Naturally, there were no volunteers.
Patrolman Ronald August was handed a shotgun, and he then pulled Auburey Pollard from the line. They started toward the
room where Roderick and Michael had been taken, when WO Thomas, not wanting to
give away the game, said to go to a different room.
Accounts differed as to whether August actually
knew what had just happened was a game. Thomas, whose trial testimony established
much of what occurred in the annex, recalled that Senak said something to
August as he handed him the weapon but wasn’t certain whether Senak had made
the situation clear. In any case, Thomas
went with August and Auburey into the room.
Thomas saw August fire his weapon and Auburey crumple to the floor
dead.
Although Thomas testified he was frightened by
the shooting, other witnesses have him leaving the room grinning. “That n----r didn’t even kick!” he crowed. That said, Thomas would testify he decided to
take his team and leave the motel at that point, telling Senak that what the
police was doing inside was their business and not his or his men’s. Using renewed gunfire on the street as an
excuse, most of the raiding party hastily left.
Except Thomas ended up staying after all. We next find him in a room with Patrolman
August, Juli, and Karen. One of the
patrolman in the annex asked Thomas and security guard Melvin Dismukes to
escort the girls, who were injured and mostly unclothed, to their room in the
main hotel building next door, where they were told to stay put until curfew
ended at 5:30.
As for the remaining prisoners in the annex,
the police, their own curfew notwithstanding, ran them off with the threat that
if they stayed they too would be killed.
They were led out past Auburey Pollard’s lifeless body; up to this
point, the youths had thought the execution game was simply a sick joke. Told to run for their lives, they did. A couple of them ran several miles away from
the Algiers without shoes.
Fred Temple, however, wasn’t afforded the
chance to escape. Patrolman Robert
Paille shot him dead, allegedly in a struggle over Paille’s gun.
None of the deaths at the Algiers Motel were
reported to Detroit police homicide detectives by the patrolmen, despite this
being required by regulation. Instead, it was the
motel’s own private security who found Carl Cooper, Auburey Pollard, and Fred
Temple and contacted the authorities.
The coroner’s office removed the bodies in the early morning hours of July 26th, but the detectives called to
the scene decided that with sporadic gunfire still going on in the street it wasn’t safe to
stay. A knife was found in the annex,
but no firearms or expended cartridges.
That morning, the news media were told by the
police only that the boys had been killed in an exchange of fire between snipers and themselves. It would be several more days before hints of
what had actually taken place began to surface.
Next:
The Aftermath
© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar
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