A Prayer for the City (20 page)

He could sense the horrible feeling in Courtroom 246 in City Hall, the Berlin Wall as he described the atmosphere, blacks on one side and whites on the other. But at least the Berlin Wall was a wall, a physical impasse. This was different and somehow worse. Without a single impediment, the narrow aisle between the two sides had become impenetrable. Defense attorney Dan Rendine saw it too, particularly as the trial progressed and the tension spiked and sharpened so that it was no longer just a murder trial but a trial about polarity and division and whites seeking vindication and blacks seeking vindication. But neither attorney was there to pass moral judgment. Rendine was there to represent a defendant, and McGovern was
there to convince the judge of the premeditated, first-degree guilt of that defendant, a fifteen-year-old who looked closer to ten and spent much of the trial doodling and hanging his head to the side, as if self-consciously trying to adopt a pose of carelessness and detachment not because he necessarily meant it but because that’s how he thought he should act.

His name was William Taylor, and he was known as Will. He had an IQ of 72, had been in special programs in the Philadelphia public schools in fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, and was performing at a level five to seven grades below what was expected for a child of his age. His parents had never married, and he was raised primarily by his mother. When he was two, they moved to Texas, where, according to a report that was submitted to the court, he was repeatedly abused by someone his mother lived with—beaten with bare hands and struck with a belt across the back, legs, and face. He came back to the city when he was eleven, and his father noted how timid he seemed and wondered whether he might be gay, a sentiment the son seemed determined to rid him of. On a reading examination administered by the Philadelphia public schools after his return, he scored 1 percent, meaning that 99 percent of the students in his age group were more proficient. He scored 2 percent on spelling and 0.8 percent on math. It was noted that Will had a need to be “perceived as a strong and masculine figure” to overcome feelings of inferiority caused by his intellectual limitations. In November 1991, he was arrested for possession of a loaded weapon and was placed on probation. A little more than a month later, on January 10, 1992, Will set off to take his midterms at Audenried High School.

During the trial, it was never clearly established whether Will, in anticipation of his exams, took any papers, pencils, or books to school that day. He may well have thought he didn’t need anything other than the pump shotgun he concealed under his Raiders Starter jacket and then placed in his locker.

School let out early because of the midterms. Somewhere around 11:30
A.M.
, Will and eight or nine other kids passed through the edge of Grays Ferry on their way home. Like so many neighborhoods in the city, Grays Ferry was its own social fortress, with a tradition of suspicion and hatred of blacks.

At Don’s Variety at Taney and Dickinson, a little American flag had been taped to one of the windows, and inside the furnishings included a pinball machine, an ice-cream chest, and a rack for potato chips. The boys
went in, supposedly to buy something to eat. They were not welcomed, either by the elderly woman at the counter or by the man with the mustache and the blue jean jacket who was sitting on a board on top of the radiator. The boys milled about, and the lady told them that if they weren’t going to buy something they would have to leave. They knew they were being watched by the white man in the blue jean jacket. One of the boys, Gilbert Robinson, knocked the man’s hat off as he was leaving, and Robinson was tripped in retaliation.

“What the fuck you do that for?” asked Robinson.

“What are you going to do about it, you fucking nigger?”

“Come on, what do you want to do?”

“I’ll kick your fucking ass.”

They went outside onto Dickinson Street. Robinson didn’t know it, but the white man he was tangling with, a thirty-four-year-old named Keith Duczkowski, was a former Golden Gloves boxer.

“What are you going to do, nigger?”

They squared off in the street in an urban version of
High Noon
, a black teenager against a white man twice his age. Robinson hit him two or three times with a combination of lefts and rights. Duczkowski tried to rush Robinson and started hitting him on the back. A black man in his thirties jumped in to stop the fight. The heated ugliness of it appeared to be over.

Then Will Taylor started arguing with Duczkowski. And then, from underneath the Starter jacket, came the shotgun. It had gray tape on the handle and looked like a long pistol. Those who knew Will had seen it before. But usually he kept it at home, except of course, as his cousin later put it to police, “if we were going to a party, something like that.”

“Watch out,” Will said in the middle of Dickinson Street. Then he pulled down on the lever.

Duczkowski grabbed his side and fell backward, the blue jean jacket darkening with blood from a bullet wound in his abdomen. He got up and staggered backward in the middle of the street at fifteen minutes before noon, with the front window of Don’s Variety still visible, with that little American flag taped to the window.

“Oh my God,” he said.

Taylor stood over him. Those who had been with him had all started running, so it was just the two of them, a fifteen-year-old black boy with a 72 IQ and a history of abuse and an education that was worthless and a habit of carrying his shotgun to parties and a thirty-four-year-old white
man who had a wife and three children and a job as a roofer and lived in an area of the city where blacks were still routinely called niggers.

There was a pause, and no one heard anything for a little bit. Five seconds, ten seconds, fifteen seconds …

The boys who had been with Will had kept on running. They didn’t turn around to see what was happening, but there was no need. The sound of the blast booming down the street told them that Will had fired again.

A man living on Dickinson Street was watching a rerun of
The Fugitive
on television when he heard the shots, and he ran outside with a towel. He placed it on Keith Duczkowski’s stomach in an effort to stop the bleeding.

Someone else called 911.

“They’re on the way.”

“Thanks, I mean I thought I heard a shot, and I, I run out the door, and all I heard was this man screamin’, cryin’ here.”

“They’ll be there. They’ll be there shortly, ma’am.”

“Oh, Jesus! This poor man. Oh! He’s not moving! Oh come on, send it!”

“I’m gone, I’m gone,” Keith Duczkowski whispered in the middle of the street with a towel and a sheet wrapped around him in a vain attempt to stop the rush of blood spreading over his clothes.

It was the last thing anyone heard him say before he died.

“I’m gone. I’m gone.”

Will Taylor ran off before the police came. He found some of the kids, and they went back to a house in their neighborhood and watched some television and got a cold drink. Will thought about what had happened and told a friend that he hoped the guy didn’t die. “It isn’t right the guy’s kids don’t have a dad,” he said. But otherwise he seemed calm and cool. Several hours after the shooting, a probation officer paid Will a visit. Will told him everything was fine, leaving out that he had just killed someone in the middle of the street. The probation officer was satisfied, and even after Will’s arrest for murder, somehow unaware of the charges, he was still satisfied. In a note in the boy’s file, he wrote, “Will appeared to be doing well.” Aside from the fact that the spiral of Will Taylor’s life now included the possibility of imprisonment for life at the age of fifteen, perhaps he was.

The trial ate at McGovern—the racial tension, the conflicting emotions of trying a juvenile. Both sides in the case closed ranks around their own, white witnesses determined to show that Taylor had committed premeditated
murder, black witnesses trying to recant the statements they had given the police.

As much as McGovern liked aspects of the work he did—the sense of doing something worthwhile that very few other lawyers felt—there were significant constraints. As long as he worked for the district attorney’s office, he was also locked into the city, which meant among other things a wage tax, a public school system that could not provide even a nominal education for his four children, a level of service that was spotty at best and nonexistent at worst, and a level of pay that left no real room for upward mobility. On the typical ledger sheet of reasons to leave the district attorney’s office and reasons to stay, it wasn’t even close. But then a case like Will Taylor’s came along, and the qualities that made McGovern such a superb prosecutor—that religious sense of protecting the city from those who were destroying it—came rushing back.

When he gave his closing argument in the Will Taylor case, he became so heated that his voice cracked. He knew his conduct was unprofessional, but it also conveyed his emotions about the case, the image of a fifteen-year-old bringing a pump shotgun to high school midterms. His whole style was a mirror of the way he looked, compact and energized and blunt, the roots of Port Richmond as apparent and as proudly worn as an American flag in the lapel. “All we had was a fistfight in the city,” McGovern told Common Pleas Judge Carolyn Temin. “No one should die over this.”

“Why was Will standing over a man with his guts shot, totally helpless, with his bowels and intestines perforated?” he asked in his closing argument. Why did he fire that second shot? McGovern answered the question: because it was an act of premeditated, cold-blooded murder. “Some people can do it when they’re fifteen, and some people can do it when they’re ninety-five, and some people can never do it.”

During the closing argument, Will Taylor looked at Mike McGovern with mild interest, the kind of interest a young teenager might exhibit while watching a television show he really doesn’t care about very much, a look in that adolescent space between boredom and reluctant amusement. It was a look that crept inside McGovern, and in the privacy of his office after the closing he couldn’t help but reflect on his picture of Will Taylor as a cold-blooded killer who deserved to go to prison for the rest of his life. He knew why Taylor carried that shotgun and flashed it around with as much pride as a father showing off pictures of his children. He knew how in Will Taylor’s world it was a way of proving strength and gaining peer acceptance. “You look at this guy, and he’s four years older
than my son Michael. I love kids, and you wonder about this society disease that we have is corrupting all of us. Does it warp the young ones faster in areas where they are trapped?”

McGovern knew that a first-degree murder conviction would mean that Will Taylor would spend the rest of his life in prison. “I feel sorry for his youth because he wasted his life,” he said. He also expressed sorrow for his family. But then, like a priest questioning his faith, he caught himself. “I don’t play sociologist anymore,” he said. “I just play with the facts on this day. I deal with the adult on trial. I deal with the act as opposed to the action.”

Just as he was acutely aware of the tender age of the defendant, he was acutely aware of the racial hatred that had fueled the confrontation in the first place, cries of “nigger” on a street corner in Grays Ferry a quarter of an hour before noon, the specter of a white man and a black teenager fighting each other in the middle of the street, a black teenager standing over a white man with a pump shotgun in his hands.

“Everybody says, ‘What racial hatred?’ It’s like saying, ‘What elephant in the phone booth?’ ” he had noted during his closing. But none of that ultimately mattered when matched up with the image that McGovern thought about the most—the pleas of a man with his intestines hanging out met not with an ounce of sympathy or even the sound of footsteps as the shooter ran away but with another blast.

“That second shot says a lot,” said McGovern, but did it say enough to convince a judge that Taylor should be found guilty of first-degree murder? Was there sufficient proof of premeditation and intent to kill, or would the judge, assuming she found Will Taylor guilty, come back with a verdict of third-degree murder instead? Although he was loathe even to consider it, that’s what McGovern thought it would be, which meant that when he marked the file, the strokes of the pen across the top would lack their usual spark. It also meant that when the trial was over, when the inevitable moment came when he would have to look into the eyes of the members of the victim’s family and explain to them what had happened, he would feel that he had somehow let them down, that the faith they had placed in him as a prosecutor had been misguided.

The morning of the verdict, a white man in white shorts and sneakers, lingering outside in the hallway, spoke to a friend and succinctly summed up what he perceived to be the thrust of the previous day’s testimony. “You missed the main event. The nigger took the witness stand.”

Will Taylor was brought down the hallway in handcuffs. He wore a black suit that was too big for him, looking like the concentration camp uniforms that the characters wear in Art Spiegelman’s
Maus
. The suit floated on his frame. His face, still with the softness of youth, only added to the incongruity. He walked down the hallway with a look that was calm and resolute, playing out his self-perceived part to the end.

Inside the courtroom, five rows of wooden chairs were divided by an aisle down the center. The right side was completely filled with whites who were friends and family of Keith Duczkowski. The left side was occupied by blacks who were friends and family of Will Taylor. There were plenty of seats to sit in on the left side, unless you were white. Then there were apparently no seats at all. “Do I have to sit over there?” said a white woman as she walked into the courtroom and saw the seating arrangement. She shrugged and looked disgusted. Rather than go near the left side, she found a seat in the jury box.

“This is a courtroom, and I want to remind you to be calm and act with restraint,” said the court crier, sensing the tension, as if the slightest gesture or movement might set off a mêlée, as if all the sad, insoluble hatred in the city between blacks and whites were focused in the silence of this room.