This April Fools' Day, Diana Wiley watched Tyrone Childs fall on his knees and collapse in a dusty, littered backyard in Ajo, Arizona. She remembers thinking the pistol that Pima County sheriff's deputy Mark Penner fired at her lover must have had fake bullets. Why else would the .45- caliber gun make such a silly, toylike noise as it pumped seven rounds into Tyrone's slumping body?
But as Diana ran forward with her seven-month-old baby Veronica in her arms, she saw blood leaking from Tyrone's mouth and nose. The twenty-year-old father of her two children was dead. This was no April Fools' joke.
Last Friday, deputy Mark Penner pleaded innocent to second-degree murder charges in Pima County Superior Court. Meanwhile, his superiors at the sheriff's department, which investigated the case with the Pima County attorney, had started termination proceedings.
Officials at the sheriff's department refused to comment on the specifics of Penner's case.
On the advice of his lawyer, the 23-year-old deputy refused to talk to either the press or a sheriff's review board about the shooting. Penner's attorney was not available for comment. But after the tragedy, newspapers reported Penner told a co-worker that Tyrone Childs threatened him and made a "furtive movement" as the deputy tried to arrest him on burglary and assault charges.
Childs, a Native American, was unarmed when he was shot. And although he had traces of cocaine and more than twice the legal limit of alcohol in his body when he died, two eyewitnesses to the tragedy tell New Times that Childs did not threaten Penner or make any attempt to hit the officer.
FOR TYRONE'S 71-year-old great-aunt, his death brings back horrible memories of a July night in 1972. That's when Martha Childs Celaya was called to the hospital to claim the body of her nineteen-year-old son Phillip, who had been gunned down by a Pima County sheriff's deputy outside an Ajo bar. It's odd. Two cousins in the Childs family killed in Ajo by Pima County sheriff's deputies in less than twenty years. Several members of the Childs clan told New Times they feel both shootings were racially motivated. The sheriff's department denied it then; it denies the allegation now.
Martha Celaya wonders if the investigation of Tyrone's death will leave his parents feeling as betrayed and bewildered as she still does about the loss of her son. Although Phillip's death was ruled a justifiable homicide, to this day there are lingering questions about what happened that night. Martha still suspects evidence was destroyed to cover up a cold-blooded killing. She still wonders why an eyewitness was ignored. She wonders if the same things will happen in Tyrone's death.
THE WEEK BEFORE Penner entered his innocent plea, nearly a hundred of Tyrone Childs' relatives gathered in Ajo for an all-night wake. The Childses are members of the Hia-Ced O'odham, or Sand Papago, clan of the Tohono O'odham nation. Tyrone's open casket lay in the front yard of his parents' house. An ivory-white curtain, garlanded with white and blue carnations, was tacked up behind the coffin. A picture of Jesus with a bleeding heart hung in the middle of the curtain.
Men stood silently in groups beneath the rickety branches of a huge ironwood tree and women sat in folding chairs facing the casket. They said the rosary and listened to the bittersweet strumming of guitars. All night long they stayed, praying and talking softly and watching the night breeze toy with the curtain and carnations and picture of Jesus.
The next day they loaded the casket onto a blue-and-white pickup and marched on foot behind the truck to the local Catholic church, where an Anglo priest in brightly colored Native American vestments said a funeral mass. And then they buried Tyrone on the family ranch at Ten-Mile Wash, so named because it sits ten miles north of Ajo near a desert arroyo exploding with yellow-blossomed paloverde trees.
THE CHILDS FAMILY is sad and bitter about the treatment its members have gotten in Ajo since the 1951 death of their patriarch, a legendary Anglo pioneer named Tom Childs. They figure that because Tom Childs married a Native American woman, the people in Ajo have resented them.
"They have always hated us because we are Indian," says the family historian Fillman Childs Bell, daughter of Tom Childs. "In the old days, Ajo was a segregated town. There was an Indian village and Mexican village and Anglo village. Even the swimming pool was segregated--first the Anglos swam and then the Mexicans swam and at the end of the week, right before they changed the dirty water, they let the Indians swim."
Ajo, a town of about 4,000, stretches around a Phelps Dodge copper mine near the Mexican border in southwestern Arizona. Phelps Dodge closed the mine in 1984, but Ajo still looks like a drab company town. Because it's an unincorporated community, Ajo doesn't have its own police force. Instead, it's always been policed by Pima County deputies. Pima County sheriff officials, however, deny they have singled out the Childs family for any sort of persecution.
And even Fillman Bell admits that not all the Childses are model citizens. Phillip and Tyrone were both drunk when deputies shot them, and both boys had clashed with lawmen before. LES CHILDS, the school janitor who is Tyrone's father, says his son died because of a barroom brawl. As Les tells it, an Ajo man in a bar kicked Les a few months ago and broke his back. Tyrone swore vengeance. He broke into the man's house and beat him up, Les says, and the cops charged him with burglary and assault.
Penner was trying to arrest Tyrone on those charges when the shooting occurred.
Pima County court records show that Tyrone Childs was not a hardened criminal. He was never convicted of any felonies at Superior Court. At the time of his death, he owed the Ajo Justice Court $808 in fines and 55 hours of community service and was in trouble for not getting counseling for alcohol abuse, records show. He pleaded guilty to several traffic violations, under-age consumption of alcohol, hitting his sister and shoplifting a package of cigarettes from the local Circle K. Diana Wiley, Tyrone's girlfriend, insists that her lover had returned to Ajo from Phoenix in late March to serve his jail time for avenging his father's broken back.
Things hadn't gone swimmingly for the couple in Phoenix. Tyrone had a few odd jobs in construction and even worked as a dishwasher at the Sheraton San Marcos in Chandler, she says. Tyrone had been in Ajo three weeks before he was shot. Just minutes before his death, Tyrone hoisted his nephew Louie on his shoulders, picked up a couple of cans of vegetarian beans and walked a few yards from his parents' house to visit Diana, who was staying with friends. Diana remembers seeing Penner pulling into the alley behind the house. She says Tyrone deposited Louie and the beans with her and turned around to face the cop.
Diana, who will probably be a witness for the prosecution if Penner ever goes to trial, insists that her lover did not threaten the cop either physically or verbally before the shooting. "There were no threats. Tyrone did not say he was going to kill the officer.
"He walked toward the officer and kept asking him, `Why? Why?'--he had his hands in the air the whole time. Then the officer took out his gun. Then he put his gun away and pulled out his club and hit Tyrone. Then he took his gun out again and fired." DIANA'S ACCOUNT of the shooting is backed up by Jimmy Vanegas, a 38-year-old runner who happened to be jogging by when the shooting occurred. Vanegas tells New Times he did not hear any threats, either. He says Tyrone was walking toward Penner, and Penner was backing up. Then the shots were fired, Tyrone buckled and Penner reloaded his gun. "The cop had a blank look on his face. He was scared or something," he recalls.
"Somebody must have pumped a lot of shit about the Childses into this rookie cop. Somebody got that rookie so pumped up and scared."
Penner was clearly upset by the shooting, judging by the way witnesses say he paced back and forth by his car until another deputy raced up and checked Tyrone's body for any sign of life, Vanegas says.
Tyrone's corpse lay in the alley for seven hours, until the coroner came. Pete Manuel, a family friend, says the family was outraged by the delay because some Native Americans believe "wherever a dead man drops, his spirit stays." Manuel says most Native Americans are saddened and bewildered by the shooting and have bad feelings about the cops. "Why don't they send these guys to fight in Panama, instead of Ajo?" he asks. NO ONE IN AJO seems to know very much about deputy Mark Penner. He was engaged to be married this May to an Ajo woman, and a friend of the family says he always seemed like a "very nice person."
But he was also, apparently, a gung ho ticket-giver. One merchant, who asked not to be identified, has a store fronting Highway 85, the well-traveled road connecting Phoenix to Rocky Point, Mexico. "He stopped so many people I doubt he even had time to clock 'em," the merchant says.
Sharon Robinson, an Anglo woman who operates a vegetable stand on Highway 85, says Penner was a "little biddy guy" who scared her to death one night in March when he tried to arrest her drunken son Steve for disorderly conduct. Robinson claims that the whole incident started when Penner gave 25- year-old Steve a ticket for going up the wrong side of the street on a bicycle. Steve escaped into the house, Sharon says, and Penner followed--allegedly without a search warrant. She admits that Steve was belligerent, and says she wedged herself between Penner and her son, trying to keep them apart. Sharon swears Penner "put his hand on his gun" during the scuffle, which ended up with Steve spending the night in jail.
Like several other locals, Jimmy Vanegas claims Ajo is "rookie city" for the Pima County Sheriff's Office, a place where rookies can get good training before they transfer to other stations. What's more, the twelve-man Ajo section of the sheriff's department seems to be overstaffed.
But Major Russell Davis of the sheriff's department, who headed the shooting review board that looked into Tyrone's killing, tells New Times the sheriff's office in Ajo is neither overstaffed nor a training ground for rookies. Some cops actually like Ajo and ask to work there, he says.
THE STORIES ABOUT Tom Childs, the patriarch of the Childs clan, still circulate around Ajo. At the turn of the century, Childs and his father discovered the rich copper deposits and filed mining claims, which they later sold to Phelps Dodge's predecessor. Childs obtained grazing rights to thousands of acres of federal land, bought other land for himself and settled down at his ranch at Ten-Mile Wash. He married a Hia-Ced O'odham woman and they had twelve children. He adopted countless others and often served as many as 75 people at his table each day. Childs may have been Anglo, but his children say he had tremendous respect for his wife's Native American relatives, who often lived with the family at Ten-Mile. "We always thought of ourselves as Indian," says Fillman Bell. Childs prospered as Ajo prospered, selling meat and groceries and ice to the mine. He opened up the first fishing establishment at Rocky Point and shipped shrimp on ice to Phoenix.
"As long as my father and mother were alive, everything was very, very good," says Martha Childs Celaya, Tom's daughter. But by 1951, both Childses had died and the empire had started to crumble. Tom Childs' children began sensing that people resented their Native American blood. They began believing that both the federal government and Phelps Dodge would just as soon they left Ajo.
First, the federal government failed to renew grazing allotments that Tom Childs figured would be in the family forever. Some of that land was rich in copper and silver, and the Childses suspected that Phelps Dodge, eager for expansion, might have lobbied the government not to renew the grazing allotments. The family says the cops harassed them incessantly.
Martha Childs Celaya, who had built a house on her father's grazing allotment near the town of Ajo, watched in dismay when the federal government kicked her off her property in 1971, then bulldozed her house to the ground. "My father told me to live there, that it would always be mine, that no one would bother us there," she says. She moved to Tucson, and now lives in a little house beneath the freeway overpass.
THE SHOOTING OF Tyrone Childs was traumatic for his great-aunt Martha. It brought back all the horrible memories of July 3, 1972, when her nineteen-year-old son Phillip was shot and killed by a Pima County sheriff's deputy during a scuffle near an Ajo bar. Phillip was drunk that night and had walked into an Ajo bar asking for more booze. When the bartender refused, Phillip threw an ashtray. The bartender called the deputies.
According to the family, Phillip's brother had gotten him drunk because it was the eve of his birthday. The alcohol was a test of his manhood. Phillip was so drunk, in fact, that when the bartender refused to serve him, he climbed into the family's pickup and passed out. Phillip's sister, who witnessed the shooting, says the deputies yanked the boy out of the truck by his hair. Phillip fought back. Suddenly, three shots were fired and Phillip was dead. Martha can't shake the terrible memory of how she burst into the morgue that night, not believing her son had really died. "My minister was a woman and she was waiting for me. She said, `Martha, you behave.' I said, `~~I never have caused trouble for anyone. I just want to see my son.' "They killed him like a dog because they think we're dogs. The blood was still dripping and his hair was full of brains. I saw his flowered pants and I remembered he'd just asked me for Levi's and I had told him to wait until we had money. All those things come back."
Martha contends that Phillip's body was hastily washed and his clothes burned before a thorough homicide investigation was conducted. Later that night, the deputies told the local justice of the peace that the boy had taken a gun from one of the officers and was trying to shoot them. The police contended only one officer had shot and only two shots had been fired. The judge ruled the shooting a justifiable homicide. A few weeks later, despite the protests of Native American activists all over the country, a one-man grand jury and a Pima County Superior Court judge sided with the deputies. Phillip's sister, who insists she heard the third shot that might have implicated another deputy in the killing, was not allowed to testify before the grand jury, Martha says. And Martha insists that she herself saw three different bullet holes in her son's corpse. As outraged as she was over the "justifiable" rulings, Martha says she was afraid to make an issue out of her son's death, afraid to push for more investigations and hearings. Not long after Phillip died, she says, she received frightening anonymous phone calls that threatened to kill her other children if she cooperated with authorities in any further investigation. "So I hid and didn't talk to anyone," she recalls.
Martha still thinks her son, like Tyrone, was killed because he was a Childs. But Major Russell Davis of the sheriff's office remembers the earlier shooting because he was a deputy at the time. He tells New Times: "To my knowledge, there was virtually no evidence to substantiate those allegations. It was a pretty straightforward case."
Martha Celaya admits she wouldn't mind now if authorities took another look at Phillip's case. "Not because I want revenge, I'm not that way. But maybe it can help someone else."
AJO ISN'T THE booming mining town it once was. Phelps Dodge, which owned about 85 percent of the town, including most of the houses, couldn't make a profit on copper anymore. The company closed the mine in 1984. Many of the younger people left town in search of jobs, leaving vacant houses behind.
Phelps Dodge still owns the utility company and the town mercantile store, but it is starting to sell off its houses to retirees. So far, says real estate agent Roy Miller, about half of the company's 600 houses have been sold. Miller says about 4,000 people live in Ajo full-time.
Newcomers, of course, don't know much about the Childs family. Take, for instance, two retirees from Ohio who met last week at Dago Joe's restaurant for a cup of midmorning coffee. Both requested anonymity. They said they came to Ajo for the climate and "friendly people" and because "nothing ever happens here." As for Native Americans, well, if you leave them alone, they'll leave you alone.
Some of the old-timers who know about the Childses' colorful history say their charges of racism are overblown. "Sure we were segregated," says Roy Shelly, who's lived in town much of his life. "But that's because the Indians wanted to live in the Indian village. And the Mexicans wanted to live in the Mexican village.
"My opinion is that the Childs have been treated no better or no worse than anyone else around here."
Martha Celaya wonders if the investigation of Tyrone's death will leave his parents feeling as betrayed and bewildered as she still does.
An ivory-white curtain, garlanded with white and blue carnations, was tacked up behind the coffin.
"There were no threats. Tyrone did not say he was going to kill the officer."
"They killed him like a dog because they think we're dogs."
