In Silent Testimony

By John Cloud/Bridgeport

A gritty, wet snow fell on the day the town said goodbye to Karen Clarke and Leroy Brown Jr. The ice closed schools and slicked streets in Bridgeport, Conn., and residents slid helplessly and angrily through their daily tasks. So by the time 600 arrived for the funeral at Refuge Temple Church of God, on Main Street, it seemed as though God had forgotten this place, a small city with big-city problems. "Violence is let loose like a wild boar on our streets!" thundered the Rev. Courtney Williams, a phalanx of fellow ministers behind him hollering agreement, along with worshippers who sobbed and shouted. "There's an insatiable appetite for blood...the blood of our princes... Don't let Prince Leroy's death go in vain!"

One week earlier, Leroy--an eight-year-old whom family called B.J.--was shot in the back and head as he and his mother raced up their stairs, trying in vain to escape an intruder. His mom Karen Clarke, 30, was shot twice in the back. It looked like an execution, for B.J. was the star witness in a murder trial.

One summer day in 1997, Rudolph Snead, his mother's boyfriend, had picked B.J. up from basketball, his daily passion. Someone in another car shot at Snead. A bullet grazed Snead's forehead and broke glass that cut B.J. Police charged Russell Peeler with the attempted murder; both Snead and B.J. identified Peeler as the shooter. Peeler and Snead knew each other and were said to be fighting over money.

The state probably would have had a tidy case against Peeler, but Snead was murdered before he could testify who had shot at him. That left only one witness, a third-grader whose smile was sunny and persistent, who should have had no cares but to tell his jokes and read a favorite book, Double Trouble in Walla Walla. Instead, B.J. agreed to tell authorities what he knew about guns and blood. Prosecutors planned to call him as the key witness in what was now to be Peeler's murder trial.

B.J. Brown was reportedly worried about helping the law. To know what a remarkable kid he was, one has to understand the community around him. When gang leaders commandeered swaths of Bridgeport and other cities in the early 1990s, the never easy task of finding witnesses became all but impossible. A 1996 federal study found that law officers in eight urban areas reported that violent acts of witness intimidation "occur on a daily or weekly basis." In Los Angeles a stunning 1,000 homicides in the first half of the decade went unsolved because no one stepped forward. At B.J.'s funeral last week, a family friend made the point without numbers: "Some of us men, grown men, can't stand up. B.J. did that."

The murder rate is down a bit in Bridgeport, but other violent crimes aren't. "There's still a subculture of drugs and guns," says state senator Alvin Penn. "We may develop around it, but that subculture hasn't disappeared." The residents are sick of it. At the funeral, grievers bellowed amens when the Rev. Williams asked the assembled politicians to do more to catch criminals and--here the loudest cheers went up--protect witnesses. Many people here have come to believe that cops abandoned B.J., left him to fend for himself in the same community where the man he would name as a criminal was living.

While most people suspect a connection, police haven't charged Peeler with the Clarke-Brown murders, though they were questioning him about them at week's end. Peeler was wearing a monitoring bracelet at the time of the killings, and his lawyer has said he was at home.

From the pulpit, Williams noted that the state budgets only "30,000 lousy dollars" a year for witness protection, and lawmakers were rushing last week to fix that. But few states spend much guarding witnesses, in part because most are not nearly as angelic as B.J. "A lot of witnesses are dirt-bags"--criminals themselves who don't want or need protection, says Eric Sterling of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation. Many face incarceration and want a deal. The federal Witness Security Program is limited to people with important evidence in big cases. (Of those who get in, 98% have been involved in crimes.)

Only California has a major state program; it began a year ago with a budget of $5 million. Only a fifth of that has been spent, and there are limitations, chiefly that the state can't do much for witnesses who don't want to switch jobs, change their kids' schools and otherwise uproot themselves for a court case.

B.J.'s mother was trying to make a new start. She had a solid job at U-Haul and a duplex in a middle-class neighborhood. She recently told B.J.'s father that she "was finally getting somewhere in life." Patrolmen watched her place last year for a few days, but police say she called them off. It was intrusive and, she reportedly said, conspicuous. In the icy clime of Bridgeport, the coldest truth about these murders may be that there was little that could have been done to prevent them.