Reap the Whirlwind, page 43
He heard footsteps ascending the stairs and a vehicle engine start up outside and then fade away. He lifted his head. “There was blood everywhere,” according to Wheeler. Still bound hand and foot, he wriggled to a nearby rotary phone, knocked it to the floor, and used his nose and tongue to dial 911.
After Wheeler was cut loose and transported to the hospital by paramedics, sheriff’s detectives scoured the house for clues. When they discovered Wheeler’s handwritten note of apology to the San Diego Police Department, they made a call. A high-ranking member of Chief Kolender’s staff who listened to their description of the incident offered an alternative explanation. He said Doyle Wheeler was unstable and probably staged the attack himself. The detectives went through the crime scene again but found nothing to indicate the attack had been staged.
After being treated and released from the hospital, Wheeler told a Spokane journalist the attack was reprisal for his testimony in the Sagon Penn case and that he recognized at least one of his assailants as an informant for the SDPD Narcotics unit, where he’d once been a detective and of which Donovan Jacobs was currently a member. “If Jacobs isn’t responsible for this,” he said, “then somebody is framing Jacobs, and it’s not me.”
When told about the incident, Donovan Jacobs shook his head in disbelief. “If you knew Doyle at all, you would not find that hard to believe that he would set something up to get the kind of attention he likes to seek.”
Assistant Chief Bob Burgreen called Wheeler “a fellow who is really disturbed” and said the story was hard to believe. “I gotta tell you, if something smells like a fish, it’s a fish.” Others in the department disparaged and mocked Wheeler both on the record and off.
The following day, Wheeler responded with a press conference held on the front lawn of his trilevel home overlooking the Spokane River. Wearing a denim suit and cowboy hat, Wheeler faced local, San Diego, and Associated Press reporters and camera crews. “I didn’t stage this. I didn’t shoot myself, didn’t pay to have somebody shoot me,” he said. He then launched into a string of accusations of massive corruption and misconduct throughout the San Diego Police Department, including an allegation that Chief Bill Kolender kept “intelligence files” containing incriminating information on journalists, politicians, and perceived enemies within the department. Kolender shook his head wearily when told. “That’s absolute nonsense,” he responded. “He’s got a lot of problems.”
About the same time, a local Spokane ABC affiliate reported that Wheeler had shown up at their newsroom two months before. “He said he just wanted somebody to hear his story because, if he turned up dead, it wouldn’t be what it seemed to be.” Michael Tuck revealed that Wheeler called him two weeks prior to the attack to warn him of “another in a long line of death threats” by a group of SDPD officers “involved in a small conspiracy who were out to make an example of him and me.”
The San Diego Evening Tribune released psychiatric assessments of Doyle Wheeler that concluded he had a “preoccupation with anger and paranoia toward the police department.” Stevens County sheriff Richard Andres questioned parts of Wheeler’s story and said investigators had not ruled out the possibility that Wheeler staged the event himself or with the help of others.
Just when most following the case were concluding a mentally ill ex–San Diego cop had staged a fake attack on himself to get back at his old department, evidence surfaced to support Wheeler’s story. EMS personnel first at the scene believed it would have been impossible for Wheeler to tie himself up in the position they found him and did not believe the cigarette burns at the center of his back could have been self-inflicted. They said they observed rope burns around his neck and wrists and cuts on his face.
A neighbor reported to police he heard a sharp “bang” minutes before Wheeler’s white station wagon sped away from the scene, and that a “suspicious” dark-blue Toyota Celica hatchback had been parked just off the road at the bottom of the street. A resident of the area contacted police a short time later to report seeing a blue Celica in a parking lot twelve miles away earlier that same day with four suspicious men he did not recognize standing around it. A day later, Wheeler’s white Toyota Tercel station wagon was found abandoned in the same location.
Sheriff Andres also revealed that according to phone records, a call had been placed during the time of the attack from Wheeler’s house to the recorded main phone line of the San Diego Police Department. The caller asked to speak with Donovan Jacobs in the Narcotics unit. After being put on hold, the caller hung up. When informed, Jacobs said the only explanation was Wheeler made the call himself.
Investigators asked Wheeler to take a lie detector test. Wheeler declined, saying he did not trust their reliability. Sheriff Andres told reporters he felt Wheeler would have failed, but an eventual analysis of the recorded phone call by federal officials concluded the voice was not that of Wheeler. After dedicating two thousand man hours to the investigation, a frustrated Andres said his office was out of leads and pulled investigators off the case. Wheeler took a parting shot at the sheriff and his team: “If I were to say they were incompetent, it would be too kind.”
But the case would not go away. The Office of the Attorney General of California again found itself investigating the San Diego Police Department in relation to the Penn case, this time for possible involvement in the attack on Wheeler. Their investigation found no evidence of such involvement, but they also sent Wheeler a letter notifying him, “We have uncovered no evidence to discredit your statements that your injuries were not self-inflicted and that two other men were involved in the incident.” The FBI got involved but could not solve the mystery either.
The final word in the bizarre saga came from SDPD Internal Affairs investigators looking into the possible mishandling of money seized in a drug bust by the Narcotics Street Team unit and team sergeant Dennis Sesma, who had abruptly quit the department when suspicion over the missing money first arose. During the investigation, a drug addict and informant used by the Narcotics Street Team named Leslie Wardwell said Sesma offered him and another man $3,000 to rough up Doyle Wheeler. He alleged Sesma, one of Jacobs’s superiors in the Narcotics unit, told him, “We don’t want him dead. We just want him hurt, messed up, scared, to shut him up.” Wardwell, who was living in Washington State at the time, said they turned Sesma down because it was too much risk and not enough money. The alleged attack on Wheeler occurred three days later.
The $3,000 amount alleged by Wardwell caught the attention of SDPD Internal Affairs investigators. The amount missing from the Narcotics Street Team’s drug seizure was $2,900. Wardwell’s phone records for the period revealed dozens of phone calls from his home to the direct line of the Narcotics Street Team unit. The Narcotics unit attributed them to his work on an unrelated investigation.
When a San Diego Union reporter looking into the story tried to reach Wardwell, his roommate said he had not heard from him in months. The last contact had been when Wardwell called the roommate from a phone booth in Lemon Grove, the city bordering Encanto to the east, claiming “somebody was trying to kill him.” Without more information from Leslie Wardwell, no link between the Wheeler incident and Dennis Sesma, the Narcotics Street Team, or the missing money was ever proven.
DRINKS WERE FLOWING at the Camel’s Breath Inn, a well-worn drinking, darts, and pool table joint in Mission Valley. The place was a favorite hangout for cops, and on an evening in early June 1989, at least fifty of them and their friends were crowded into the bar area for an event called “The Third Annual Doyle Wheeler Wake.”
The event was well-planned and promoted by the organizers. Teaser leaflets were the first to appear several weeks prior, passed around among the SDPD officers. “Never has a man been Missed More!” it read, in dual reference to Wheeler’s departure from the force three years before and the bullet that allegedly grazed the side of his head one year earlier. “Don’t Miss a Chance to Sharpen your Skills!” Fliers promoting the event appeared shortly after, prominently posted in break rooms and locker rooms throughout the department. Attendees were promised a chance to enter a “sharpshooting/ear-piercing contest” and to “practice your knot tying.” T-shirts for sale showed up around the same time. On the back was emblazoned MEMBER OF DOYLE WHEELER HIT TEAM surrounding a large drawing of an ear with a bullet hole through it. On the front it read MARKSMAN, SDPD ’88, SPOKANE. The price tag was eight bucks a shirt. A reported seventy-five were sold, many of them worn by members of the San Diego Police Department at the Camel’s Breath.
Standing in the middle of it all, wearing a DOYLE WHEELER HIT TEAM shirt himself, was the man rumored to be responsible for the design and sale of the shirts. “Cops have a good sense of humor,” Donovan Jacobs told a reporter. Not everyone felt the same. “I think it’s one of the poorest examples of a joke I’ve seen in a long time,” a fellow bar patron not associated with the group said. “It’s absolutely bizarre.” One reporter termed it, “A gathering that conjured up images of law enforcement officers mocking a former officer who might indeed be a crime victim.”
Jacobs disagreed. “It’s so ludicrous for us to believe we would send a hit team,” he said. “Anybody who knows him would have the sense to know he did it himself.” Asked by a reporter to confirm the rumor that he was the man behind the “The Third Annual Doyle Wheeler Wake,” Jacobs demurred with a knowing smile. “You can write I have a good sense of humor.”
THE BLACK COMMUNITY of San Diego could not help feeling that it was being retaliated against by the rest of the city in the aftermath of the second trial. After failing to stop the street renaming in 1986, the Keep Market Street Committee gathered eighty thousand signatures to put an initiative on the November 1987 ballot to repeal the name of Martin Luther King Jr. Way and return its original name. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the Black community. The initiative was a reaction to the loss of heritage,” committee president Tod Firotto persisted, referring to the Market Street name, which held no particular significance to the city. He added that the new name was hard for his “Mexican customers” to pronounce or remember in Spanish.
“The initiative is racism. We can’t avoid that,” said Reverend W. E. Manley, president of the local Baptist Ministers Union. Councilman William Jones warned the referendum would split the city on racial lines. Reverend Robert Ard said, “Do you know what it will look like, not only to the city, but to the world?”
In November 1987, Proposition F passed in a landslide, and San Diego joined Anchorage, Alaska, and the state of Arizona as the only areas in the entire country to rescind an official recognition of Martin Luther King Jr. Urban League CEO Herb Cawthorne called it “a wound that will continue to bleed for a long, long time.”
ON JANUARY 14, 1989, a team of special agents for the Drug Enforcement Agency smashed in the front door of an apartment on Logan Avenue in Southeast San Diego. Inside was what they considered very dangerous members of a drug ring including career criminals, street-gang members, and a notoriously violent Mexican national tied to a drug cartel.
The raid was conducted moments after completing an undercover buy of 6.6 pounds of crack cocaine with an estimated street value of $200,000 from the alleged ringleader.
In addition to arresting five members of the operation, agents seized cash, more cocaine, and two handguns.
Even in a border city used to huge drug busts, this one attracted attention, but mostly because of the identity of the man alleged to be at the center of the operation, Thomas Penn. The father of Sagon Penn had surrounded himself with people he thought he could trust. The supplier, Clyde Spears, was his son-in-law, married to daughter Subrena. His twenty-one-year-old nephew, Raphyal Crawford, was termed “his drug trafficking confederate.” Also arrested inside the apartment was a man listed as Carlton “Smitty” Smith. Locked up in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, Penn, Smith, and the others were facing ten years to life on charges of conspiracy to manufacture and distribute crack cocaine. When federal prosecutors discovered Penn’s apartment and crack-cooking operation was located within one thousand feet of an elementary school, those sentences were automatically doubled.
Few rallied to support Thomas Penn, who had already been openly accused by the Sagon Penn Defense Committee and Black leaders of holding fundraisers and then pocketing the money himself. “There isn’t going to be any community marching over this arrest,” said Reverend George Walker Smith. Penn pleaded guilty and was sentenced to twelve years in federal prison. His son-in-law Clyde Spears received a ten-year sentence. Carlton Smith, the father of six young children and key eyewitness in the Sagon Penn case, received eight years.
Sagon felt betrayed and bitter toward his father over the arrest. He later told a reporter he was grateful for his father’s support during the trial but could not forgive him for abandoning him as a child after the divorce. Now the man had abandoned him again. “I want to give my daughter something that I never had,” he said, “a good father.”
DONNA PARKS WAS granted a domestic violence restraining order against Sagon Penn on July 14, 1989. It forbade Penn from contacting her and granted her primary custody of Brittany. But Parks had included in the request that she had no objection to Sagon having Brittany for visits. The weekly therapy ordered by the court, the threat of parole violation, and the chance to be with his daughter appeared to stabilize Penn. He saw Brittany once a week, with her occasionally staying overnight at his grandfather’s house, where he was living again. The child adored him. Penn had her name tattooed on his chest, thought of her constantly, and began each meal with a prayer for her.
The man now legally known as MeeCee Parks had looked for employment off and on since being released, hoping to find something to develop into a career. There was bartending school, installing carpeting in downtown office buildings, four months at a Kentucky Fried Chicken, several months at a wire-manufacturing facility. He was still handsome and was in good physical shape, but a journalist noticed the contrast to the immaculately dressed, unfailingly disciplined, and ultimately unknowable Sagon Penn the public had seen in the courtroom. He let his hair grow out to shoulder length, wore jeans and T-shirts, and appeared more gangly and loose-limbed. Women pursued him, drawn to his good looks and, some, to his local celebrity and folk-hero status, often overlooking the obvious emotional issues.
He enrolled in cosmetology school, which made use of his artistic talent and sensibilities, where he had perfect attendance and was recognized in a local competition. At the school, he met Annilie Ganon, a woman of Philippine descent ten years his senior who worked in administration. She was loving and protective of him, and he adored her and got along well with her children. But these periods of stability and calm never seemed to last long.
On March 11, 1990, police were called again, this time by a hysterical Annilie, who said Penn had become enraged during an argument, grabbed her by the arm, and threw her to the ground in front of her children. Penn would not utter a word to the police responding to the domestic-disturbance call. When they began to handcuff him, he sprung up from the couch and struck a martial arts pose, screaming that he would not be taken alive. Officers attempted to calm Penn in a forty-minute standoff, during which he called Milt Silverman and screamed he was being shocked with a Taser.
Afterward, Annilie changed her story, denying any physical confrontation or threats toward her children. Two weeks later she called 911 again, this time requesting paramedics to save Sagon, who was unresponsive on her sofa after intentionally overdosing on alcohol, muscle relaxants, and sleeping pills from her medicine cabinet. Penn was kept overnight at the hospital for observation and released.
Annilie blamed Donna for much of Sagon’s decline, saying she was fiercely jealous of their relationship, harassing them both through phone calls in which Parks insulted her and used control over access to Brittany to taunt and torment Sagon. Two days after Penn’s suicide attempt, Annilie was granted an injunction against Parks ordering her to stop the alleged harassing calls.
The next day, Sagon checked himself into the Mesa Vista psychiatric facility for twenty-two days. There he wrote to Brittany constantly, calling her his “pumpkin,” telling her how much he missed her. He tried to see his daughter after he was released, but Donna refused.
The previous incident with Annilie triggered a parole violation for Penn. Upon sentencing, he was taken directly into custody to begin serving sixty days in the Vista jail. Once again, Sagon Penn heard the sound he had grown to fear the most in his life: the sharp metallic locking of a jail-cell door.
44
AFTER SUCCESSFULLY FIGHTING OFF FORCED RETIREMENT, Donovan Jacobs continued to excel at his job in the Narcotics unit. On December 6, 1988, it was announced that his extraordinary investigative work had been instrumental in one of the largest drug arrests in the city’s history, involving large amounts of methamphetamine, cocaine, marijuana, cash, and weapons with a street value of $850,000.
Five months later, Jacobs announced his voluntary retirement set for August 1, 1989. It was reported the thirty-three-year-old with eleven years on the force would be receiving $1,639 a month for the rest of his life. He threw himself a going-away bash cruising and boozing around San Diego Bay on a rented sightseeing boat with two hundred guests aboard.
After leaving the force, Jacobs began law school and was admitted to the State Bar of California in August 1992. Much of his practice developed into representing police officers involved in Internal Affairs investigations and in civil actions. This included bringing civil suits for damages against the assailants of police officers injured in line-of-duty altercations. His own such lawsuit against Sagon Penn was dismissed with prejudice, prohibiting it from being refiled in the future.
