by Jim Hanas
ew reports suggest
a rumored gang-initiation practice that resulted in alarming faxes being
sent across the city in 1993 -- but nothing more dangerous than that --
was common knowledge in the Shelby County Sheriff's Department at that time.
Tales of an initiation rite in which gang hopefuls drive with their headlights off and then shoot the first motorist to flash their headlights at them has hit the news twice in Memphis in the last four years. The first time was in August 1993, when a flurry of anonymous faxes detailed the alleged practice, prompting then-Criminal Court Clerk Minerva Johnican to call a press conference to deny that the faxes originated in her office and disclaim any known basis for the rumor.
The tale surfaced again last month when Sgt. Richard Parker of MPD's Organized Crime Unit included the light-flashing gang-initiation story as fact in testimony before the Tennessee General Assembly. This prompted The Commercial Appeal to suggest in a March 21st editorial that such an initiation rite had in fact existed, but had been kept from the public by law-enforcement officials. But as the Flyer reported on March 27th, a March 22nd article in the CA reversed the claim of the editorial, while law-enforcement officials downplayed Sgt. Parker's testimony.
Now it appears that the information in the 1993 faxes came from the Shelby County Sheriff's Department.
In debunking the myth during a newscast on August 13, 1993, WMC-TV Channel 5 traced the first faxes to the offices of the Community Health Agency (CHA), a state and federally funded agency that works closely with juvenile court. On camera, Nancy Lawhead, then director of the agency, confirmed that the faxes had originated at CHA, saying that an employee "had heard some information that led him to believe that this was true."
The employee, Karl Woods, believed the information, because he had heard it as part of in-service training he received as a reserve officer in the Shelby County Sheriff's Department. Woods confirms that he typed the information based on what he had been told in training and placed it on a bulletin board at CHA offices just to warn his fellow employees about the potential threat. Ann Marie Thrasher, another former CHA staff member, says she faxed the sheet to a friend, who then faxed it to Channel 5. Another reserve officer from the time confirms that the initiation rite was repeated as fact within the Sheriff's Department "as a matter of daily routine."
All of this would seem to amount to a cover-up -- except there was nothing to cover up. Both then-Deputy Police Director Eddie Adair and then-Shelby County Sheriff's Chief Deputy Ray Mills responded to the faxes by saying that they were not official warnings and that no such shooting had occurred in Memphis. The whole tale is widely considered to be a fully debunked urban myth that originated in Chicago sometime in 1993. According to Greg Knox, director of the National Gang Crime Research Center in Chicago, "It became a popular urban myth, but I've never known of any cases happening."
The new reports do, however, raise the question of what the Sheriff's Department knew -- or thought it knew -- at the time. On the one hand, the information might have been disseminated to regular and reserve officers with the belief that it was true. In that case, the Department's responses to the faxes would constitute shielding the public from what it took to be fact.
On the other hand, and perhaps even more embarrassing, is the possibility that the department did not think the tale was true, but disseminated it to officers, for whatever reason, anyway.
In either case, the Sheriff's Department is now keeping quiet. Department spokesperson Kay Pittman Black could not be reached in her office on Monday. Sgt. Travis Taylor, a member of the Violent Drug Gang Task Force, says in response to claims that regular and reserve officers were briefed about the rite, "They didn't get it from the Sheriff's Department."
Asked if he believes such a rite ever existed, Taylor replies simply, "No sir, I don't." (Staff writer Phil Campbell contributed to this story.)