By PETER APPLEBOME with ROBERTO SURO, Special to The New York Times
Published: May 11, 1990
Officials in this small town where he had been found comatose on a jail cell floor labeled his death an accident and wanted the body returned quickly. But officials 100 miles away in the city of Tyler, where he had been taken for medical treatment and where he died, thought the death was suspicious and refused.
Last week, more than two years after the 34-year-old black truck driver was beaten to death in this hamlet in the East Texas piney woods, a jury in Tyler convicted three white officers of his murder.
The story of the killing of Mr. Garner on Christmas night 1987 is a story of race and of a legal battle between officials in a backwoods town and those in a small city.
One jury acquitted the officers of civil-rights violations in a hometown trial that saw white residents cheer the verdict as if celebrating a Friday night football victory. Another jury convicted them of murder.
''There was kind of a line drawn in the dust and you had to get on one side of the line or the other,'' said J. T. Roy, an investigator for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama, a civil rights legal organization. ''And Loyal Garner just became a bartering chip, no matter how brutally he was killed. What mattered was the issue of whether the outsiders were going to win.''
Despite the conviction and an agreement by local officials to pay an undisclosed amount to the Garner family in the settlement of a civil lawsuit, the case lives on in appeals and in the resentment of local whites who feel they have been put under a spotlight for the sort of crime that they feel can and does happen elsewhere.
''I guess this is the only town in the country where this happens,'' a local businessman, Robert Gilcrease, said sarcastically. ''Like a car wreck, it happened. It can happen to you, it can happen to us. People here don't understand why it still gets all this attention.''
Set in a lush landscape of thickets and lakes near the Louisiana line in deep East Texas, Hemphill typifies what a University of Texas English professor, Donald Graham, calls ''the unmythic, unglamorous part of the state.''
This is not the expansive Texas of endless spaces and possibilities; it is a world far more like the Deep South than the West. But if its racial history is distinctly Southern, this is the gritty, outer edge of the South without any illusions of antebellum nobility.
For blacks, who make up about 20 percent of Hemphill's 1,350 residents, life had been a long, silent accommodation with economic and political powerlessness - until, that is, Mr. Garner was murdered, and local blacks for the first time turned to protest marches, even founding a local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
The Arrest Clamor, Then Clash In a Jail
By the standards of the poor timber town of Florien, La., Loyal Garner's $5.50 an hour job with the parish government was a mark of success.
Married with six children, Mr. Garner came from a well-known and respected family in town. He had never been in trouble with the law. He drank a beer or two socially but no one recalls seeing him drunk. His was a regular Sunday presence at the Pilgrim Star Baptist Church.
On Christmas Day 1987, Mr. Garner and two friends set out on the short drive to Newton, Tex., to pick up an automobile that he planned to overhaul. But on the way, Mr. Garner crossed paths with Thomas Ladner, Hemphill's police chief. A lifelong resident and one of the dominant forces in town, the 275-pound Chief Ladner was respected by many people in Sabine County and was feared by many others.
About 8 P.M., shortly after crossing the state line on the bridge that spans the Toledo Bend Reservoir in his black 1975 Ford custom cab pickup, Mr. Garner was stopped by Chief Ladner and Sabine County Sheriff's Deputy James Hyden. Mr. Garner was arrested for drunken driving and his two companions, Alton Maxie and Johnnie Maxie, were charged with public intoxication.
Conflicting Alcohol Readings
The Maxie brothers said Mr. Garner had drunk two beers. No alcohol test was given Mr. Garner and laboratory tests after his death gave conflicting readings on whether he had alcohol in his body. All accounts agree on the events immediately after the arrest.
The three men accepted their arrest peacefully and were not handcuffed when they were put in the back of a squad car.
At the Sabine County jail, a one-story structure just off Hemphill's town square, they were put into a detoxification cell. After a while the three began banging on the cell door, demanding to make a telephone call to their families.
Chief Ladner walked back to the cell and loudly asked who was making all the noise. ''I was,'' Mr. Garner answered. Accounts of what happened next are contradictory.
The Maxie brothers and other inmates said Chief Ladner, without provocation, hit Mr. Garner five or six times with a metal slapjack while Deputy Hyden stood in the doorway with his hand on his gun. The inmates said Mr. Garner was then taken to the jail's processing room where the beating continued, with Sheriff's Deputy Billy Ray Horton in attendance.
Reports of Earlier Beatings
The officers said Mr. Garner, drunk and abusive, was hit once in self-defense by Chief Ladner and was then injured in a scuffle as officers tried to restrain him. But their story varied over time.
Former inmates of the Sabine County jail have since said that beatings had taken place there from time to time. But when a jail guard came to work the morning after Mr. Garner's arrest to find him comatose on the concrete floor, it was clear this was serious.
Mr. Garner was taken to the nearby Sabine County Hospital and then to Tyler Medical Center, a larger facility 100 miles away, where neurosurgery could be performed. He died the next day.
Because he died in Smith County, where Tyler is the county seat, and not Sabine County, where Hemphill is situated, officials both inside and outside Hemphill had legal standing in the case. And a tug-of-war began.
A Smith County Justice of the Peace, Bill Beaird, says that about an hour after Mr. Garner died, Sabine County Judge Royce Smith, the top elected county official, called him to say that Hemphill officials had already determined the death was an accident and wanted to come and pick up Mr. Garner's body. Judge Smith said Sheriff Blan Greer could vouch for that.
Refuses to Release Body
Mr. Beaird, repeating what a nurse had already told Hemphill officials, politely but firmly said he could not release the body, pending an inquiry. He repeated the same message when Mr. Smith called still again.
''Let me put it to you in plain English,'' Mr. Beaird recalls saying. ''That body ain't leaving here until such time as I get through with it to make some kind of determination or have the information available so I can hold an inquest.''
At his office, Mr. Smith declined to comment.
Mr. Beaird's decision meant that eyes outside Hemphill would view the case, and it set in motion a two-track courtroom drama that is at the heart of the legal issues still surrounding the case.
Within days, an autopsy in Tyler cited a massive brain hemorrhage from repeated blows to the head as the cause of death. Before a week had passed both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Texas Rangers had heard the Maxie brothers tell their story of the beatings. Soon the Southern Poverty Law Center, known for vigorous civil rights lawsuits, filed the civil suit on behalf of the Garner family that allowed them to take depositions from local officials.
On Jan. 4, Chief Ladner and the two deputies were indicted in Hemphill by the state on felony charges of violating Mr. Garner's civil rights, and they were suspended from duty. Local officials said at the time that a murder indictment would have required proof of an intent to kill.
In Tyler, District Attorney Jack Skeen was aiming for a murder trial. On March 4, a Smith County grand jury indicted the three Hemphill officers for homicide.
When a trial date in July was set in Tyler, an earlier trial, in May, was scheduled in Hemphill.
Mr. Skeen, the Smith County prosecutor, said, ''It seemed to us at the time that the judge in Hemphill was doing everything he could to have it tried down there first.'' The Town An Ingrown Place Defending Its Own Like the old domino players who meet daily under the cedar tree on the square, Hemphill has been a place where little has changed over the years. With its three-story brick courthouse dominating a placid square ringed by aged brick businesses with metal awnings, Hemphill is small enough that any visitor who is not one of the 1,350 residents in town immediately sticks out.
Longtime residents still resent those they call the ''lake people,'' the retirees and newer residents who live along the rich bass fishing lakes nearby. The lake people grouse about the ''piney woods mentality'' of the oldtimers. But otherwise Hemphill lives by its own slow, amiable rhythms far from airports and Interstate highways.
Suddenly, there were satellite trucks from the big city television stations camped out on the square. Not everyone in town liked all the indicted officers, particularly Chief Ladner. But they liked the outside scrutiny even less, and before long the town was rallying around the officers.
Officers Were Local Men
Some saw law enforcement under siege. But it was more personal than that. All three officers were local men who were entrusted with keeping the peace, whether it meant investigating a robbery or making sure high school students stayed in line.
And if there were numerous stories of brutality at the jail, the three were as much a part of the local scene as the domino players. The best liked was probably Mr. Horton, a 60-year-old former cattle rancher who had gone into law enforcement after his wife died of cancer a few years earlier.
In rallying around the officers, many residents felt they were simply doing what people in small towns tend to do: helping out neighbors in trouble. The fact that the dead man was an unknown black jail inmate only heightened their natural instincts.
Even though a special prosecutor had been brought in from outside the county, most local blacks assumed from the start there would not be a conviction in Hemphill. And the beginning of the trial in the sweltering, baby-blue third-floor courtroom did little to change their mind.
Judge O'Neal Bacon of the local State District Court refused to disqualify potential jurors who attended a benefit fish fry for the officers. The judge ended up sitting a jury of 11 whites and one black, a housekeeper who worked for one of the white jurors.
It's Us Against Them
They heard the conflicting accounts of the events Christmas night. They heard the results of the Tyler autopsy, and they heard Dr. Grover Winslow, a local physician who attends to the jail and who had posted bond for Mr. Horton, testify that Mr. Garner had alcohol and Valium in his body and could have died of some mixture of the two.
In his closing argument, John Seale, a defense attorney from nearby Jasper, made explicit what had been welling up since the day Garner died.
''So what has this case become?'' he asked. ''It's become an indictment, not against these three men, but against Sabine County and everything that has to do with Sabine County.''
The appeal worked. On July 15, the second day of deliberations, to cheers of delight from the packed courthouse, the jury announced it that it had acquitted all three men.
The murder trial in Tyler was to start in a week, but the very day after the Hemphill verdict, defense attorneys moved for dismissal of the murder charges on the ground of double jeopardy, the legal prohibition against trying a person on the same charge twice.
So far, the legitimacy of having two trials has been upheld, with the case now before the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans.
Last month prosecutors in Tyler began presenting their murder case to a jury in Tyler. But while Mr. Seale in Hemphill had insisted that Hemphill was on trial, Mr. Skeen in Tyler tried to convince jurors of the reverse, that they had to prove that Smith County was capable of providing the justice that Hemphill had not.
The jury in Tyler, which during the oil boom grew to a city of 81,000 that now takes its cues from Dallas instead of the small towns of East Texas, was allowed to see the grotesque autopsy photographs of Mr. Garner that the judge in Hemphill had excluded on the grounds that they were inflammatory. And there were two new witnesses.
Dr. Ronald Donaldson, a Tyler neurosurgeon, gave graphic testimony about the severity of Mr. Garner's wounds. Ronnie Felts, a former Hemphill Mayor, became the only Hemphill official to break ranks and testify for the prosecution. He told of Mr. Ladner's conflicting accounts of the incident.
Difference Was the Juries
This time the jury found all three defendants guilty.
In the end, Mr. Seale said, ''The difference was two different juries in two different towns.''
Weeping openly in the courtroom, Mr. Skeen demanded life sentences. ''Establish by your verdict the real meaning of Smith County justice. This is Loyal Garner Jr.'s last chance.''
The jury sentenced Mr. Ladner to 28 years in prison, Mr. Hyden to 14 and Mr. Horton to 10. Officials say that primarily because of prison overcrowding, it is likely they will serve only a year for every 10 they were sentenced to if the guilty verdict stands.
The Future Separate Ways In Same Rhythm
For a brief instant after Mr. Garner's death it seemed like everything in Hemphill was subject to change.
There was an emotional meeting at a black church in which blacks and whites, for the first time in the town's history, came together to share what they had in common and what still divided them. There was the town's first protest march and the formation of its first chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
But two and a half years after he died, Mr. Garner's death divides blacks and whites as much as anything ever did. There are widespread doubts by blacks as well as whites as to whether race had anything to do with his murder. But no one doubts that on the stark, small canvas of Hemphill, its aftermath has become another profile in black and white.
For Blacks, an Awakening
For blacks, Mr. Garner's death became a galvanizing event, a reminder of how far they still have to go.
''Sometimes,'' said Will Smith, a black and the pastor of the Fairdale Church of Christ, ''it takes death to bring life. If Loyal Garner's death did anything, it brought an awakening to the people of Sabine County. We're awake now. We're no longer asleep.''
There was no such revelation for whites. Some reacted with hostility, like one businessman who confidently said local blacks would not turn out for the protest march after the acquittal in Hemphill because they knew they would never get a job if they did. But for most, the case remains an isolated incident kept inexplicably alive and blown out of proportion by outsiders.
For Whites, Depression
Most whites are genuinely horrified and depressed by the depiction of Hemphill as a town where bigotry lives, noting with much truth that because of the compression of small town life, blacks and whites probably interact more in a place like Hemphill than in most large cities.
''We were made out like we were racists, like black and white don't speak to each other or sit next to each other at the drugstore,'' said Mary McNaughten Pritchard, one of the jurors in the Hemphill trial. ''People are people. We think nothing of a black girl being given a ride to a district ballgame by a white family. We're just everyday people, there's no black and white about it.''
But sometimes the old antagonisms surface in an entirely unvarnished form.
Robert Gilcrease was lamenting the town's negative image at his business where he sells plastic fishing lures when a customer strode in and began assailing a visiting reporter for the ''lies'' being written about the town.
''You all keep writing about a 'brutal beating,' '' the customer said. ''I'd say it would take more than three licks to the head to make a brutal beating. Far as I'm concerned, it's just another dead nigger.''
He then offered to provide a first-hand lesson in what a ''brutal beating'' would be like before tearing away in his pickup truck.
Some Progress for Blacks
There have been scattered but real signs of progress, the appointment of the town's first black councilman, a black dispatcher hired at the jail, a black 1988 valedictorian at the high school, and a few blacks hired at local businesses.
There are still no black faces behind the counters at the businesses along the square, and other than the routine interactions of daily life, blacks and whites generally go their separate ways just as they always did. When Hemphill had its annual Mayfest, with fiddle music and Frito Pie and the crowning of a Mayfest Queen on the square Saturday, it was hard to find a black face.
Sheriff Greer is still in office and in charge of the jail. A new police chief and deputy sheriffs have been hired to replace the three convicted men.
And there is a new move afoot to help the convicted officers with their legal fees.
Mostly, for blacks and whites, there are just the same old slow rhythms of East Texas, the lunch buffet at Twitty's, the grousing between the original people and the lake people, the banter of the old domino players and the noisy slapping of the tiles on the table at the corner of the courthouse square.
