Who Shot The Sheriff?

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Then there is Sid Dorsey, the outgoing sheriff. He says he's beginning to feel like a suspect, especially since prosecutors announced that a grand jury will look into allegations that he used on-duty sheriff's deputies to work at his private security business and allowed jail inmates to work at the neighborhood improvement organization of his wife Sherry, an Atlanta councilwoman.

Dorsey, 50, spent 20 years at the Atlanta police department, going from beat cop on the city's meanest streets to one of the city's top homicide investigators. He was honored as lead detective in an infamous case of murdered and missing children in the early '80s. But through the years, the plain-talking, broad-shouldered detective also had less shining moments. He has shot and killed three people, including a 13-year-old boy who was part of a large gang that jumped Dorsey, took his gun and beat him badly when he was on patrol in low-income Pittman Park in 1967. Having lost his weapon, Dorsey procured the gun of a nearby club owner, chased down the youth he thought had his gun and shot him dead. A year later, he shot and killed a knife-wielding suspect who had confronted him and his partner on Ervin Street, now in the upscale McGill Place condo neighborhood but in those days a run-down section known as Buttermilk Bottom. In 1970, during an off-duty fray at a gas station, Dorsey flew into a rage when a man turned loose a spring-held air hose that accidentally struck Dorsey's car. The man pulled a knife, Dorsey retrieved his gun from his car, a tussle ensued, and Dorsey shot the man. Dorsey was charged with manslaughter, but prosecutors dismissed the case.

He later left the Atlanta police department to go to law school and start a private security company, which he still owns, but he says it is in limbo because of the controversy involving his tenure as sheriff. "Nobody wants to hire me now because of all this," he says. "I don't know what I'll do for a living. I don't know of any corruption at the jail. If there is any corruption, it's been embedded into the system for many, many years. The accusations have been blown way out of proportion."

He can only imagine what people who know him are saying behind his back. "I've been treated like a suspect, so I'm acting like a suspect," he says. "I don't dare try to make any inquiries or find out anything at the risk of being accused of obstruction of justice. I can only let events take their course." But he too has theories about the assassins. "It was certainly an amateur," he reasoned. "A professional would not have been that reckless. It had to be someone very angry and very vindictive. A professional would have gone in with a .22 or .32 with a silencer, fired one or two shots maximum, and been out of there, what with all those people inside [Brown's house] and the risk of being seen. And it had to have been someone who knew his whereabouts."

As for motive, Dorsey, who is carrying a gun these days for protection, surmises that the stakes must have been very high or the reasoning extremely vengeful. "My God, what reason could someone have had to commit such an aggravated crime against the man in front of his own house--at such risk of being seen by people in the house or in the neighborhood?" He insists he would have gained nothing by murdering his political opponent. He had already lost the race. Besides, he adds, "I don't even know where the boy lived."

To find the killer, police have conducted more than 300 interviews, following 100 tips phoned into a hot line. They have seized security videos from the supper club, shown photo lineups to witnesses and dug into the flower beds for shell casings. Rewards in the case have risen to $71,500 without a break.

The lack of noticeable success has caused murmurs among DeKalb's African-American community. A black nightclub comic joked that the murder of an elderly white security guard would result in an instant arrest, while this case leaves investigators scratching their heads.