Stop police violence and cover-ups!

Unite St. Petersburg through JUSTICE and REPARATIONS to the families of unarmed African teenagers killed by law enforcement in St. Petersburg

by Penny Hess, African People’s Solidarity Committee

Download the "Justice and Reparations" pamphlet (PDF)

Stop police violence against young black men!

Javon Dawson, 17-years-old, murdered by St. Petersburg police on June 7, 2008

The evening began with congratulation and celebration of another school year completed.

Around 10:30 pm more than two hundred young people poured out onto the streets as a private graduation party at Shining Light Masonic Lodge in South St. Petersburg ended.

With the teenagers still laughing and talking outside at least twelve St. Petersburg police officers arrived on the scene.

17-year-old Javon Dawson

Within minutes 17-year-old Javon Dawson lay dying on the ground with two bullets in his back.

The shots that killed Javon were fired by St. Petersburg Police Department rookie, 24-year-old Terrence Nemeth. A sharpshooter and Iraq war veteran, Nemeth had spent four years as a Marine on the battlegrounds of America’s war for oil in the Middle East.

Nemeth claims he was defending himself and the crowd from gunshots fired by Javon as he was allegedly running away.

The teens were shocked, traumatized and frightened by the police violence that resembled TV news videos of war scenes on the other side of the world.

His younger brother Keon tried to aid Javon as he was left bleeding and convulsing on the grass for hours. When a friend took off his shirt in an effort to cover Javon he was pepper sprayed and threatened by police himself.

Known by his nickname “Hollyhood,” Javon had just completed hissophomore year at Gibbs High School. Gibbs High principal Antelia Campbell called him a “good kid.”

Javon was popular, known for a great sense of humor, and loved by his large, tight-knit family and classmates alike. Friends described him as “quiet” and “funny” and someone who did not “get in trouble.”

Javon’s sophomore English teacher Carolyn Pendergrass, talked about the last conversation she had with him before the end of the school year. In response to her question, “In five to 10 years, what do you see yourself doing?” Javon answered that he would like to have his own computer business. Pendergrass told him she would help him make a plan to accomplish that goal next school year, she recalled in a St. Petersburg Times article.

One neighbor and school friend of Javon’s testified, “I don’t think he deserved to die. I never saw him fight. Never saw him get mad. All you saw was him trying to flirt with girls.”

Javon was described by his family as a pretty typical “happy teenager who liked joking with his twin sister, downloading music and eating boneless barbecue ribs,” according to the St. Petersburg Times.

Javon’s mother stated she “never even heard him curse.” His MySpace page included photos of him with friends and family and the usual banter between friends.

The cover-up

In an attempt to cover up the truth, the police and State Attorney have consciously tried to paint a negative picture of this young unarmed black man. Despite their slander of Javon, his family and his community, Javon had no record of arrests or prior encounters with law enforcement. No drugs or alcohol were found in or on his body.

Though Javon was known for being quiet and amiable, the authorities want us to believe that Javon suddenly became a brazen outlaw that night, brandishing a gun and wildly shooting at the police, carrying out some kind of suicidal death wish.

There are too many questions about the state’s story. If Javon were shooting into a crowd why didn’t he hit someone? If he had a gun why were there no witnesses to this? Why were no bullets found?

As Javon’s younger brother Keon, who was with Javon that night, observed of his brother’s murder, “He’s a black boy with dreads, gold in his mouth. Add it up. They shot him. Now they’ve got to have something to cover it up.”

Ruling of justifiable homicide and police “code of silence”

The official report issued by State Attorney Bernie McCabe on August 12, 2008 declares that Terrence Nemeth was justified in shooting Javon Dawson twice in the back and killing him.

Full of “evidence” that is dubious and conflicting, McCabe’s report is a blatant cover-up of the truth.

McCabe ruled that Nemeth was justified in the murder even though he admits that Nemeth is the only person who claims to have witnessed Javon with a gun at the time of the shooting.

In the report McCabe states, “Despite the hundreds of people in the area of the shooting no witnesses have been located that have been able to give a complete account of what transpired at the time Dawson was shot, except Officer Nemeth.”

It is important to note that every one of the dozen or more other police officers present on the scene denied witnessing the shooting, a clear indication of the police “code of silence,” protecting the crimes in their own ranks.

A teenaged witness cited in the report states, “Javon Dawson was not the type of person to have a gun.”

Nemeth had been on the force for 18 months at the time of the killing of Javon. There is no indication that Nemeth was ever tested for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) prior to being hired by the police department.

Violent behavior in Iraq war veterans with PTSD is manifesting around the country. A series in The New York Times last January documented more than 120 cases of U.S. veterans of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan who have committed or have been charged with murder.

In the short time Nemeth has been on the force, McCabe relied on the officer’s testimony in court to attempt to convict suspects in over 90 cases. This is an indication of the incestuous relationship between the State Attorney’s office and Nemeth, and is a clear conflict of interest.

Other aspects of State Attorney McCabe’s report used to “justify” the murder of Javon do not stand up to scrutiny as well.

A gun was supposedly found by police “near the body,” while no bullet casings from the gun were present. No statement has been made as to whom the gun is registered, and no fingerprints were taken from it. No powder residue was found on Javon’s hands, only on his shorts, which most probably came from the shots that killed him.

We have to raise questions about this mysterious gun. Five years ago four Miami policemen were sent to prison for planting guns in cases of police shootings. In Huntington Beach, Florida in 2006, police officers were forced to admit that they planted a loaded revolver in a man’s car during a DUI accident investigation. So it is not unusual at all for so-called evidence to be planted by police.

Allegations by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and McCabe that Javon’s DNA was on the gun are extremely questionable. Official reports stated that the chances of the DNA found on the gun belonging to another African person were about one in 30,000.

Other forensic experts questioned this. “One in many trillions is considered a good match, so the numbers aren’t strong,” observed David Foran, director of the forensic science program at Michigan State University, who was quoted in the St. Petersburg Times.

McCabe’s DNA “evidence” would never hold up in court. The St. Petersburg Times quoted Debra Figarelli, a DNA technical leader at the National Forensic Science Technology Center in Largo, FL, as saying, “Unless they found spent casings at the crime scene that they would be able to trace back to the 17-year-old’s weapon, it doesn’t sound like this (DNA report) is a whole lot of information.”

Figarelli’s analysis clearly exposes some of the serious problems with McCabe’s DNA “evidence.” However it is important to point out in regard to her quote that the only proven “crime” at the scene was that Javon Dawson was murdered by Terrence Nemeth and, secondly, there is no evidence at all that the weapon belonged to Javon.

Grief and outrage in the black community

African community demonstration following the murder of Javon Dawson	Javon Dawson’s brother and stepmother speak at the Uhuru House

On June 8, the day after the murder of Javon, grief stricken family members and friends flooded into the Uhuru House on 18th Avenue South in St. Petersburg for the weekly Sunday afternoon open community meeting of the Uhuru Movement.

Javon’s stepmother, Ollie Godfrey testified to the outraged and distraught audience that afternoon, “This is an injustice in our community because that could have been anybody’s child laying out there last night. They said he was in the hospital. We went to the hospital, and they said he wasn’t there. We went back out there, and they left him lying out there for four hours like a dog in the streets. We know that the police are going to put it the way they want to, to make themselves justified, but it was not justified to shoot somebody in their back. I don’t care what the circumstances were.”

Javon’s body was not released by authorities to the family until four days after his murder. It took calls to Mayor Rick Baker’s office from hundreds of concerned supporters from throughout St. Petersburg and the country to force the city to turn over Javon’s bullet-ridden body to his family. No reason for the hold up was given.

Out of the Sunday meeting the Justice for Javon Dawson Committee was born. The committee has struggled tirelessly for the cover-up of this case to be exposed and for justice to be served. The committee, led by the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement, has mobilized demonstrations, held press conferences, spoken out at city council, handed out tens of thousands of leaflets and knocked on doors in the community.

Members of the Justice for Javon Dawson Committee at a press conference

The Justice for Javon Dawson Committee called on Florida Governor Charlie Crist to remove State Attorney Bernie McCabe from the case because of McCabe’s close working relationship with the St. Petersburg Police Department and Officer Terrence Nemeth in particular.

When Bernie McCabe came out with his ruling on August 12 justifying the murder of Javon Dawson by Nemeth, the community was outraged.

DeAndre Brown, 27, in a random interview by the St. Petersburg Times as she was coming out of a grocery store on 22nd Street South, summed up the sentiments of many: “You know they weren’t going to find the police guilty of nothing. It’s always the black man that is guilty.”

An immediate press conference was called at the Uhuru House that same day denouncing McCabe’s justification of Javon’s murder. The Justice for Javon Dawson Committee vowed to intensify its demand that Gov. Crist overrule McCabe’s report.

Members of the Justice for Javon Dawson Committee at a press conference

The next day, August 13, more than 30 Justice for Javon Dawson Committee members and supporters traveled five hours north to Tallahassee, the state’s capital, to demand a meeting with Gov. Crist.

After a protest on the grounds of the capital building and a militant sit-in of Crist’s office, a representative of the governor met with members of the committee and presented them with a letter calling for a review of McCabe’s justifiable homicide ruling.

It was the first time that a governor in Florida has made such a request regarding any of McCabe’s rulings. Crist called for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to oversee the review. McCabe was subjective and vindictive. “If you don’t think [the report is] compelling,” he sniffed, “I’m sorry.”

Gov. Crist’s precedent-setting review of McCabe’s decision was a real victory for the committee and for all justice-loving citizens of St. Petersburg. The struggle now is for the FDLE to conduct a transparent process outside of the usual channels of Florida’s good old boy network.

Uhuru Movement and the movement for justice for Javon

Omali Yeshitela

Since its beginnings in the 1960s when Uhuru Movement leader Omali Yeshitela, then known as Joseph Waller, snatched down the offensive racist mural that hung on the landing of St. Petersburg’s city hall for decades, the Uhuru Movement has organized the African community in the face of injustice.

The police killing of Javon Dawson was the fourth such case of a blatant police murder of a young African man in the past several years.

The Uhuru Movement has led tireless community opposition to murders by law enforcement of three other African teenagers: TyRon Lewis in 1996, Marquell McCullough in 2004 and Jarrell Walker in 2005, all of which sparked community outrage.

All of these murders of young black men were ruled justified by reports from Bernie McCabe. All the reports involved questionable “evidence” and cover-ups of the truth.

The demands of the Justice for Javon Dawson Committee are:

1. Establish an open, community-based police review board with subpoena power.

2. The city of St. Petersburg must pay reparations to the families of Javon Dawson, TyRon Lewis, Marquell McCullough and Jarrell Walker.

As Chairman Omali Yeshitela summed up, “We shall not rest until justice has been brought to this community. The police cannot simply murder people without any consequences.”

Next: Cover-ups, lies, violence and corruption in law enforcement: Military-style policing and the “good old boy network” must go!