Chicano Park and Frederick Jefferson, a Letter from the Editor

I wish the tragic case of Frederick Jefferson was more unbelievable.

Could Jefferson possibly have imagined when he rolled out of bed on Feb. 3 that he would be manhandled by police for jaywalking, savagely beaten on a bloody sidewalk and sentenced to seven years in prison for punching a cop? Did he ever imagine he would be dead seven months later?

Those are things we will never know. What I do know, however, beyond any shadow of a doubt, is that the story of Frederick Jefferson has been misrepresented by the San Diego Police Department and much of the county news media. The convenient story is that he was an angry criminal black man who sucker punched an innocent cop while leaving a violent protest by unruly Mexican-Americans in seedy Chicano Park. SDPD PR trotted out on TV that police legally detained him and treated him humanely in jail. He was given legal counsel, they insist, and a fair trial.

Problem is, none of that is true. Not even close.

There was no violent protest in Chicano Park that day, but a completely peaceful rally. Jefferson encountered the police more than 200 yards outside of Chicano Park, across an intersection impenetrably sealed off by a wall of police motorcycles and a phalanx of cops.

No cops were sucker punched.  In fact, police body camera and witness video clearly show that police initiated the confrontation, grabbed Jefferson from behind and delivered the first blows with metal batons. He was backing away when they repeatedly hit him. He was then beaten, tasered and pepper sprayed point blank in the eyes while pinned to a bloody sidewalk by five police officers while a woman screamed, “Stop, you’re hurting him!”

Eight months have passed since that afternoon and I still hear her words every day.

He was unlucky to jaywalk on the wrong day. Cops were told that morning to beware of anyone wearing red and black because of the “immigration protest”  in Chicano Park on Feb. 3. Senior police officials mysteriously told officers that the fascist protesters were “pro-government” and Latino counter-protesters were “anti-government.”   

Feb. 3 never was an “immigration protest.” White nationalists had come for a second time in three months to deface the historic murals of Chicano Park. They failed. As a gaggle of cops were protecting Roger Ogden and his make-shift Klan members, a couple of cops were swinging their batons at Jefferson. He was scared and defended himself. The tapes showed it. Watch them yourself. Jefferson was backing away, hands open, keeping distance from the officers.

He said he feared for his life and I believe him.

Nationwide, more than 140 black people have been killed by the police so far in 2018.  Jefferson told me he was afraid the cops were going to “Rodney King my ass” that day.

Jefferson might have also been killed that day had there not been witnesses and camera phones watching.

SDPD spokesperson Scott Wahl stood before the TV cameras and lied. He said there was violence in Chicano Park. He said a protester started trouble. He said a cop had been sucker punched by a protester. He said Jefferson was not hurt.

His gullible boss, former San Diego Police Chief Shelley Zimmerman, believed him and parroted the lies to reporters from NBC, ABC, FOX, KUSI, the Los Angeles Times, San Diego Union-Tribune and numerous other news media. It was a low point in her career and a black eye for many journalism professionals too lazy to check out their source’s narratives to see if they were true.

They were not true. We were there. Wahl was not, nor was Zimmerman.

When the battered Jefferson was pealed from the pool of blood on the sidewalk and pushed into a patrol car, his ordeal was just beginning.  For weeks he was not treated for injuries. He was denied visitors. Reporters were not able to speak to him for days, and then only after numerous attempts to chase us away.

I refused to be chased away and returned three times to Bailey Detention Center to speak to Jefferson for my story. Jefferson and I picked up the phones at Bailey and they did not work. It was the only line in the room that would not connect. The folks around us were chatting away.

“You know why,” were the first words he ever said to me. I could not hear him. For 30 minutes I wrote questions in my notebook and held them up to the glass. Jefferson nodded yes or no, smudging out longer answers letter by letter with his finger on the glass as I traced them and wrote brief phrases down to decipher what he was trying to tell me.

He showed me the bruises on his ribs and told me how afraid he was of the correctional officers retaliating because he had struck a cop.

We published our story soon after. SDPD wasn’t happy. Wahl called our newsroom and screamed hysterically at me for 15 minutes and my adviser for 20 more. He called us “idiots,” “morons,” “a disgrace to journalism,” “cop haters” and “fake news.”

Unbelievably, some news media professionals joined in. A prominent TV reporter called us “suckers” and scolded us to “look at both sides of the situation.” Good advice, too bad he did not follow it. He was not the only one. Several reputable reporters were lazy that Saturday afternoon and were spoon fed a load of nonsense by an ill-tempered cop defending his buddies.

We kept reporting the story.  We reported the racist, anti-black Facebook rants of the officer who provoked the incident. We used satellite photography to show that Jefferson and the cops were nowhere near Chicano Park. We meticulously assembled video, eyewitness accounts and historical information to create a complete picture of what happened that day on Logan Avenue.

Many people noticed. Some of the most important people, however, had the information kept from them. That would be Jefferson’s jury.

A skillful district attorney blocked the racist police social media comments, eye witness testimony and our coverage. He packaged an angry, homeless black vagrant for the mostly white jury of senior citizens that he carefully crafted. It was also not representative of the truth.

Hope is dangerous, especially if you’re trying to find it in the justice system with a black man.  What transpired that day on Logan Avenue was police brutality and once again the bad guys got away with it.

Jefferson is no saint.  Prosecutors announced that DNA evidence collected for his San Diego trial linked him to an alleged rape in Baltimore. Maryland law  enforcement officials requested his extradition for trial. It was admittedly bewildering to members of The Sun who had spent eight months defending his basic human rights only to find he may have severely violated an 18-year-old girl.

Jefferson may or may not have been convicted for rape, and we will never know. He was convicted, however, for hitting a cop who unnecessarily provoked a fight over jaywalking. He was convicted in the news media with a false narrative. He was convicted in court in a circus trial. That he did not deserve.

Jefferson is dead, but Chicano Park lives on.  That is why the news media reporting this story needs to get it right and stop smearing the reputations of the park, its creators and its defenders.  It is a form of racism to assume that a large gathering of Chicanos and Latinos must inevitably be a violent riot, anti-American or anti-police.

SDPD and the mainstream media owe an apology to the Chicano Park Steering Committee and all the people who gathered for a peaceful event on Feb. 3.  Each story that paints Jefferson as a violent protestor does a disservice to the park and to journalism. They were wrong—and no one is owning up to that.   

Jefferson is dead, but the malignancies of his story remain. Two violent SDPD officers were not punished and are back to work. Zimmerman rode into the sunset with her gold watch untarnished. Wahl – unbelievably – remains a police spokesperson. No media organizations have corrected their inaccurate reporting. Our flawed justice system stumbles along free of self-examination. Everything is back to the way it has always been.

It’s great that the mainstream media is now reporting on Frederick Jefferson, but where was everyone when he was alive? History loves to document a hanging black man.

Only this time it was in a cell and not from a tree.