Tyrone's struggle
Work release, a new job, drug recovery, a community corrections officer who cares and a woman who loves him -- it wasn't enough for a felon released into Spokane.

By Julie Sullivan
The Spokesman-Review

Follow Tyrone Brown Series of Colin Mulvany photos illustrate Brown's struggles.

Tyrone Brown blew into Spokane in the sky blue colors of a Long Beach Crip, to a town wide open as a boulevard.

He made $1,500 selling crack on a good day and $500 on a bad one, hustling dope so hard one detective said every time he set up surveillance on West First or East Sprague, Brown was out there first.

He packed drugs into the tire rims of an '84 Cutlass and drove from California to Washington. He taped bags of cocaine to his body and boarded planes to Spokane. He sold crack to fathers and their sons, to prostitutes, to pregnant women.

Once, police chased him through the Otis Hotel and he jumped from the third floor into a Dumpster, a gang member carrying a gun and cocaine, running so fast no one could catch him.

He was important and sought after. He got respect.

He got caught.

The case was built with baby steps: three sales of crack cocaine, including to an undercover cop Christmas Eve, 1993.

It ended with two years and two months in the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla.

When that ended, he came back.

The background
Tyrone Lemar Brown, age 33, also known as Brian Keith Brown also known as Department of Corrections number 994088.

He's been in and out of prison in Washington since 1992 for drug convictions, including two crack deals while he was in work release in Spokane in 1993.

He is finally released from Walla Walla last November, and promptly blows it.

"I got a bus ticket and $40 and went and done what I do best," he says. He's picked up in a police raid on an East Central crack house and gets 70 more days in Brownstone Work Release downtown.

Work release demands he get a job and he finds one telemarketing. He works evenings downtown at Dakotah Direct, where the young people pouring out at shift change look like a high school hallway when the bell rings.

Walking to work through the STA Bus Plaza one day in February, he recognizes a man he once beat badly over a drug deal.

The man does not recognize him.

Brown is in pressed slacks, a Winnie the Pooh tie and an animated conversation. No rag on his head, no hood, no attitude. He is walking with Crystal Groom, a 21-year-old friend, and they are laughing, talking about life, which for Brown resumes on Wednesday, Feb. 11, when he can leave Brownstone Work Release.

That morning, the Washington, D.C., native is up and ready in less than an hour. He packs his clothes, Walkman, boom box and papers into three cardboard boxes and walks out of work release into an ice cold rain.

"I'm about at the end of this nightmare, and that's what it's been, a long nightmare."

He has no ties in Spokane, no family here. The only support he can point to is Groom, whom he'd met while he was in work release as he walked through or ate lunch at the bus Plaza.

At various times, corrections counselors tried to talk him out of settling here. "If you've got no family it's twice as hard,' one officer says.

He might leave the city. Might find work as a long-distance truck driver. But he likes the idea of fishing this summer in Riverfront Park.

"It's my little fantasy."

He likes Spokane.

"It's slow here. I can walk down the street and not be looking behind my back."

Starting over
Freedom starts on West Second, at the New Washington Apartments.

On Feb. 11, Brown walks three blocks west of the Brownstone and up one flight of stairs to Room A-14.

Unfortunately, it's occupied. Roger "Stump Daddy" Snydor, just released after eight years in Walla Walla for murder, is moving out of the room Brown wants.

But not until tomorrow.

"Sometimes I wish I had bunk beds," says Manager Linda Wolfe.

Nearly a quarter of the New Washington's tenants are felons supervised by the Department of Corrections.

For $191.25 a month, Wolfe offers former inmates a room with access to a kitchen. In return, she gets rent up front and an easier building to manage. When a Department of Corrections tenant becomes a problem, she calls his community corrections officer.

"Calling his CCO is better than calling his mother," she says.

She works to keep the building clean but it has a reputation for drug trade. Wolfe says she doesn't always realize a tenant is a drug dealer. She didn't realize one woman down the hall had 13 cats in her room, either.

She is cautious about Brown, though, and at first refuses him because of his drug history.

"His eyes filled up with tears," Wolfe says. "I thought I saw sincerity there. So I said, 'OK.' He needs a shot if he's going to change his life."

She cuts Brown a deal to move in a little later that day, cuts another with Snydor to move out a little early, and offers her Suzuki Samurai to make it easier on everyone.

Brown wants a television. He walks to a downtown pawn shop where an inebriated couple is haggling with the owner. Later, the owner says the man is an ex-offender who killed his first wife.

Brown carries an $80 TV set back. He unpacks his belongings, smooths bedding that Stump Daddy left behind, then dresses carefully for his "parole officer," now called a community corrections officer.

"I can't go see my P.O. looking like myself. He can't see no rag. I've seen him send five guys back to prison already. I don't want to be number six."

By the time Brown arrives, community corrections officer Paul Schmidt has already visited four offenders at their homes, opened two new cases, completed two hours of paperwork with a sex offender and met three other felons in his office on North Maple.

The 6-foot-5 Schmidt is responsible for 40 of the "maximum" or most closely supervised felons in Spokane County. Brown is No. 41.

Brown admits he has had a bad attitude, that he used and sold drugs.

"Drugs destroy people's lives. Have you ever thought about what you did to the people you sold to?" Schmidt asks quietly.

"No," Brown says.

"I could never sell to anyone if I let my feelings get involved."

Schmidt spells out the plan: Brown must see a community corrections officer two to three times a week, undergo frequent drug testing and attend a substance abuse support group that meets weekly at the Brownstone Work Release.

"My job is not to send you back, it's to keep you out," Schmidt says.

The conversation doesn't end when the meeting does. The question of hurting people turns over and over in Brown's mind.

He once sold crack to a customer who had a heart attack. He felt bad. After that, Brown says he always gave the man's son crack for free.

Working for a living
Brown earns about $6.75 an hour telemarketing. He hopes to become a team leader for "editors" who monitor other telemarketers' calls and make nearly $10 an hour.

Mollie Patshkowski, of the state employment program Corrections Clearinghouse, says telemarketing jobs are perfect for someone coming out of prison. It's a good way to build experience, self-esteem and normal friendships.

"For them, just finding clean and sober fun is almost as important as finding a job." Problems arise, she adds, when people tire of the amount of money they earn.

For Brown, that comes within a week of leaving work release.

Working just four hours a night, he spends his days hanging around the STA Plaza and his nights watching television, "hiding out" from his old associates.

He is tense and moody and so broke he has to borrow $1.50 from his apartment manager so he can catch the bus to see his community corrections officer.

"I got nothing, I can't even eat. That is a hard place to be."

His friend, Groom, bought him a pager and at midnight a co-worker calls looking for cocaine. Brown figures he could arrange a deal and make $400. Instead, he sits, nervously twitching.

"I love attention. When you have dope, you have women looking at you. I got to find someway else to get attention."

New relationship
He starts going over to Franchester White's house. Even at 10 p.m., she's willing to make him a pork chop.

He met her at the STA Bus Plaza the first week of January when he stood next to her making jokes that mostly offended her.

She takes business courses in the mornings at Spokane Falls Community College, and works evenings at the food court at Fairchild Air Force Base.

She is 20 years old, pretty and quiet and a long way from Louisiana, which she left to get away from strict parents.

White knows Brown sees other women. She will learn he's been married before, that he has a daughter. That he once pistol-whipped his wife. That he is a gang member and was in the penitentiary.

It doesn't change what she likes about him, which she says is "everything."

"He's a kid at heart."

With the state's permission, he soon moves into White's apartment that she shares with an uncle on West Pacific.

"I think he needs to be with other people, someone who's going to tell him it's going to be OK," she says.

Anger
It's March and Brown is storming.

"I'm trying to be independent and society is branding me. I'm pegged as the bad guy. Nobody is giving me a fair shake."

He wants White to move with him to a one-bedroom apartment at 405 S. Maple.

Brown has been battling White's relatives. First, the uncle who shares the apartment with them. And, her parents long-distance. White has told her family about her boyfriend's past and they're worried.

"If I get stressed out again some people are going to pay for that," Brown says. "If I'm going back to jail, I'm going to go back for a reason and someone might just pay for that. I'm not one to be played with."

He says in Spokane you can kill and get away with it.

He talks and talks, and White listens and listens, silently. After awhile, she begins rubbing his back, his head. He talks until he is calm, almost exhausted.

"I didn't expect it to be so hard when I was at the Brownstone," he says. "I thought I'd go pick up a dope sack and resume my life."

Family ties
His dad was the devil, this much he knows.

He once picked up Brown's mother and threw her through a window. Brown was born light-skinned and it so enraged his father that he carried the baby out one night and left him in the snow. Then he went inside and fell asleep.

In retaliation, Brown's mother stabbed her husband seven times in the face, retrieved the baby and fled to a friend.

The friend became Brown's stepfather, an older, quiet man who drove truck. They raised a blended family in a four-bedroom home in D.C. where Brown graduated from high school. He also began driving truck.

Both his mother and stepfather died while Brown was in Walla Walla.

He doesn't say how he went from long-distance trucking to the Long Beach 20s, named for the city streets that marked their territory. But he was already in his 20s when he joined the California gang, looking for direction, acceptance and loyalty.

In other words, for a family.

Suspicious minds
Another Monday, another urinalysis.

"I think you're all selling my urine," he says to community corrections officer Chris Schilling as they head to the men's room on March 16.

"It's not my favorite time of the day either," Schilling retorts.

The state pulls a net of requirements and officers around Brown because of his history. Schmidt visits his house unannounced. Schilling grills him twice a week from his office.

Each visit, Brown is asked to urinate into a small plastic cup -- two fingers is enough -- that is shipped overnight to a Tacoma laboratory. Once a month, Brown must pay $15 to Superior Court to pay off $810 in court fines. He must also pay $20 a month for the cost of his supervision.

Brown decides to quit his job telemarketing when he's passed over for a promotion. But when Schilling asks how work is going, Brown says "Great."

Girlfriend? "Great."

Life? "Great."

"He's not sharing," Schilling says later. "I learned a long time ago, if someone is happy where they're at, they're not moving."

Schilling talks to Brown about looking for a better job, going to 12-step substance abuse meetings, getting training, making contacts, changing his thinking.

"All you're doing is surviving," he says.

"That's what I'm doing." Brown admits.

The officers are watchful. Silently, they pick up the net.

More anger
By mid-March, the couple's empty apartment at the Maplehurst on South Maple has become a home.

Brown buys a second-hand couch and chair using one of his paychecks from Dakotah. They get a microwave and go to J.C. Penney and have a formal portrait taken.

White's aunt, DeLois Johnson, is coming to visit. White's mother is concerned enough about her daughter to send her closest relative. Johnson flies in at midnight from California.

The following morning, she is reading her "God's Little Devotional Book for Women" when there's a knock.

Schmidt and a partner, backed by police officers, ask Johnson to wait in the lobby. She's in her pajamas. They handcuff Brown and search his apartment.

The landlord has seen a marked increase in traffic since Brown moved in, and suspects drug dealing. Another tenant also complained that when she looked in the open door, Brown pushed her in the face.

The search fails to turn up anything. Brown tells an officer he wouldn't be stupid enough to deal here. But the household is upset.

"They embarrassed me," Brown says, growing angrier.

"If I'm going to back to the penitentiary it's going to be for killing someone and not for a stupid case of selling crack, if someone is going to jam me up."

"Why would you say that?" the aunt asks looking at him with surprise.

She leaves a few days later, cutting her visit short.

She liked Brown at first, bought him tennis shoes, said she would give White's mother "a good report." But later she pulled her young niece aside and said she does not need that man in her life.

Hanging out
He hasn't been to Dakotah Direct since March 13.

"We're doing OK," White says. "We're living on my pay and our savings."

He says he's trying to get on at a Burger King where his partner Bones works. Bones is an old friend who did time. Bones is not thin. So why's he called Bones?

"He breaks them."

Brown spends more time watching television and hanging out with Bones. He starts drinking, downing beers in the evening and three Long Island ice teas in less than two hours.

"My new drug."

At the substance abuse group at the Brownstone, a treatment counselor tells him, "I can look at you and see so much hatred in you Tyrone."

"It makes me want to look at myself in the mirror," Brown says. "He makes me feel I'm a walking time bomb."

He says he's learned not to meet people's eyes, because they can figure you out.

"It's easier to be jokey and clown around so they don't know what's deep down inside."

Marry me
By April, he and White had been together nearly three months and both know they want to get married.

"I'm ready for it," he says. "She's good for me, she puts up with my attitude, she's my backbone."

"I didn't think I was going to like him at first," she says. "But he's funny and crazy and pretty soon I got feelings that I leave school 30 minutes early just to be with him."

Eventually, she quits school altogether.

When he yells at her, tells her he hates her, she is quiet and waits until he's himself.

"He's not abusive," she says. "Every other relationship I've had has been abusive. I give him respect and he gives me respect."

When a woman friend approaches him romantically, White pulls an earring out of the woman's head in a fury. She is quiet, she says, but not weak.

On April 7 at Northtown Mall, Brown slides a black box across the table between A & W cheeseburgers. Inside is a small diamond ring he paid $99 cash for. He says a sister he hasn't seen in years sent him $300.

"I love you and I want you to be my wife."

She is quiet, eyes bright with tears.

"I say yes."

"Everyone is looking for him to fail," she says later. "The CCOs, the cops the people at work release."

She wants him to succeed.

"I'm at a point in my life I want to slow it down," he says. "I done it all, bad times, good times, it's time to slow it down."

They plan a May 2 wedding in Coeur d'Alene.

Two weeks later, she takes a pregnancy test.

Positive.

He can't believe it.

"You're pregnant?"

White says "Yes."

"You sure you're pregnant?"

"Yes."

She is overjoyed. She calls her mother. The baby is due on Dec. 23, a Christmas baby.

On April 30, Brown disappears.

Going down
May Day is hot. It's 80 degrees and he's wearing a winter coat, hood pulled up, when friends spot him in the alley behind the Merlin Apartments. He is twitching and pacing, waving them away, "Not safe."

He misses two support group meetings at the Brownstone, three visits to his community corrections officer.

Schmidt drives to the Maplehurst, knocks. Nothing. He calls. Nothing. He sticks a third business card in the door. He reaches White and tells her Brown needs to report or face a felony warrant.

Brown comes into Schmidt's office in the mid-day sun, a shadow of himself. He is eight pounds lighter, his fingernails are long and dirty. He's coming down hard.

"I did get high, I'm not going to pull no punches with you, Paul. I did get high. I thought I had it whipped but I guess I don't."

He starts shaking. He starts to cry.

He met an old friend at Dick's who was waiting for a drug delivery. They went behind the Merlin and used. Between Wednesday and Saturday afternoon, he did $1,600 worth of cocaine.

"So you were were stressing because you had no job, a child on the way and your girlfriend was working and you weren't?" Schmidt asks.

"Yes. When I was high all the problems went away, but now they're still here."

The officer asks what he told White when he finally came home.

"I lied, lied, lied."

He took every cent she had. She couldn't find $1.50 in the house for bus fare to get to work and back.

Schmidt could jail him. But he is struck by how disgusted Brown appears to be with himself. How contrite.

Instead of jail, Schmidt orders Brown to follow a 7 p.m. to 9 a.m. curfew and make 10 job contacts in the next 36 hours. Then, he'll face a state hearings officer.

"I swear I'm not going to let you down," Brown says. "I'm not going to use."

Schmidt says he hears this story from a lot of offenders.

Brown has been through the state's best drug treatment for offenders, through counseling and aftercare. He's refused to consider job training or school.

"Once a person gets so many chances," Schmidt says, "what else can you do?"

Last chance

The night before his hearing, Brown doesn't come home.

He hasn't come home most nights.

Since White told him about the baby, he's often stayed out and he's been snappish and angry when he is there. Sometimes when White gets home from work, the house is full of people she doesn't know. He gets angry if she wants to lie down after working all day.

It seems like she hardly knows him since the news about the baby.

But it's the baby who helps keep him out of jail.

At the hearing to determine his punishment, Brown pleads for the chance to get treatment.

"I'm still a drug addict," he says. "I need help." In the hours since he confessed to Schmidt, he's applied for more jobs and gotten on a waiting list for the state's free in-patient treatment program.

State officials decide that treatment outside prison may be the best thing. Brown has behaved better in the last three months than any time previously, they note. Sending him back now would ensure he misses White's pregnancy. They want to give him a chance.

Brown is ordered to wear an electronic monitor, join a corrections work crew and then enter the treatment program.

Brown bursts out of the meeting with a different attitude.

"What is this with a bracelet? I'm not going to work for free picking up litter.

"I'll just get a job," he says, "I'll just get a job."

A job, of course, would make him ineligible for the free treatment.

The bust
He becomes ineligible anyway.

Five days after the hearing, three months since he left work release, he's picked up by Spokane police. Brown says he was coming from a 12-step meeting with friends, shook a passerby's hand and was hauled in as the only African American in the vehicle.

The Spokane Police see it differently.

They say they stopped him near the Merlin Apartments in an area known for drugs and prostitution. He had no car insurance and was driving with a license suspended in both his name and an alias. A piece of rock cocaine half as big as a pencil eraser was on the floor at his feet. When he was taken to jail, he left a crack pipe in the back of the police cruiser.

In jail, he blames Schmidt.

"You just want to send me back to jail."

Schmidt, flabbergasted because he offered every chance, is not giving any more.

He recommends Brown get 150 days. Brown is headed back to Walla Walla.

White will be seven months pregnant when he's released. She is exhausted and angry.

"This is my first baby, you know, and he's not going to be able to help. I'm scared to death, really.

"I love him," she says. "But I don't want to go through this anymore."

He swears he loves her more than any woman. That he needs to turn to God and the Bible. That nothing like this will ever happen again. He's focusing on her.

Also, he says, he needs two pairs of pants, two shirts and money for the prison store.

"Tell Fran I love her."

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