Who Shot The Sheriff?

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In his eyes, Derwin Brown was the guardian of decency. He was the host of a public-access TV show, The Naked Truth 2000. Among his regular topics were local politics and society's war against black males. He also wrote a weekly column, "Tell It Like It Is," for the Champion, a black paper in DeKalb. As far back as 1994, he wrote that the Confederate flag "represents an act of treason, the enslavement, rape, murder and torture of Africans and African Americans. It is beyond belief that any sane person would want to preserve such a hideous legacy." He had few friends among the area's white supremacists.

All the while, Derwin had political aspirations. Some thought it was merely for the school board, but in 1996, he ran in a special election to replace the sheriff. He fared poorly at the polls. Four months later, he tried again and got only a fraction of the votes, losing to Sidney Dorsey, an Atlanta homicide detective who became the county's first black sheriff. The two men had a cordial relationship, but that turned when Derwin announced he was again running for sheriff. The moment television-news cameras caught jail inmates working on projects for Dorsey's wife, Derwin went on the offensive, all but calling Dorsey a crook during campaign stops.

To his family and friends, Derwin wanted to be sheriff for reasons grander than ousting Sid Dorsey or cleaning up corruption. As Derwin saw it, jails are part of a prison-industrial complex for young black men. More than once, his brother Ron heard him describe prisons as a big business in which the mostly black inmates became "raw materials" in a heartless system set up only to bring in even more bodies. Says Ron Brown: "He saw the prison system as a modern form of slavery."

Though a Republican at heart, Derwin knew that victory lay with the Democratic Party, which predominates in DeKalb. Indeed, in the summer primaries, there were no Republican candidates. So a victory over Dorsey, the Democratic incumbent, would mean a virtual victory in November. The primary, however, was too close to call among the four candidates, and Dorsey and Derwin, the top two, were forced into a runoff. An already bitter battle dissolved into a war of personal attacks.

One day, while working at her brother's campaign headquarters, a vision came over Renee Brown like a flash of fear. "I saw my brother dead," says Renee, 42. Hysterical, she rushed outside for fresh air. Her brother and a friend came to check on her.

Derwin Brown wrapped his big arms around his sister and reminded her that he had survived being an undercover narcotics detective and even an Internal Revenue investigator. "Renee, I'm not afraid," he told her. "I am on a mission. When you find something in life that you're willing to die for, that's your mission." If he sensed danger, he never started carrying a gun. Nor did he warn his family to be careful, though he had trained his wife and kids to shoot. "If he felt that any of us were in danger," says his wife, "he would have said, 'Phyllis, when you leave the house, take a gun.'"

There had been much foreboding during the campaign. With Brown campaigning so heavily on eliminating corruption and reforming the jail, his manager and several other volunteers--many of whom were off-duty cops--swore they were being followed. Late one night the candidate and another county official were shadowed by a mysterious man in a dark Ford Expedition as they stood on a sidewalk outside a Decatur restaurant and talked about the extent of the corruption, possibly involving bail bondsmen at the jail. Jack Stanford, a DeKalb police officer and close campaign aide, even suggested Derwin and the others begin carrying guns. None of it spooked Derwin. "All of us be careful," he would say.

Derwin Brown wound up winning the runoff election by a rate of 2 to 1. Not long afterward, J. Tom Morgan, the local district attorney, asked to meet him at the county courthouse. Morgan had been elected 10 years earlier on promises to rid the jail of corruption. The county has a long history, dating to the 1960s, of sheriffs being accused of fraud, bribery or cronyism. Now, he confided to Derwin, his office was targeting Dorsey.

From then on, Derwin and the district attorney met regularly, discussing the progress of the investigation and figuring out ways to get to the bottom of the mess awaiting the sheriff-elect. Derwin planned a top-to-bottom audit of the jail's contracts and a review of the seven bail bondsmen who had questionable connections to the jail. Derwin, who set up a transition team of campaign loyalists and career cops to run the sheriff's department, also had narrowed a list to 62 jail personnel whom he wanted to demote or fire.

Stanford, who had joined the transition team, was among advisers and friends cautioning Derwin against notifying jail employees that he planned to fire them, fearful they would destroy files or sabotage databases. "There's nothing they can do we can't fix," Derwin told him. His wife says he anguished over the firings, coming to her one night in early December to ask whether she thought people would rather know right away or wait until after the holidays to discover they were getting axed. "Derwin was not the bad guy. He was not firing people just to fire people," Phyllis says. "He really did not want to do that because he understands; he has a family."