SEATTLE — It was in the late 1970s that Joe Lewis Clemmons left the impoverished Delta region of Arkansas and moved to the Pacific Northwest, starting a migration for his family that would continue for decades.
He wanted something better for his family — a family so big Joe was one of 21 kids, although six died young. He wanted a haven from Lee County’s violence and racial hostilities.
“Joe started the string of us coming out here,” says his niece Carol Henderson, who now lives in Renton. “The whole reason for him trying to get his family to venture out here was for better opportunities and to do something different.”
The migration Joe set in motion would, a quarter-century later, sweep up his nephew Maurice Clemmons, who was a 32-year-old parolee when he settled in Seattle in 2004. Maurice told a parole officer he planned to become a plumber. Maybe he would work for his Uncle Joe, transporting the elderly to appointments.
But when Maurice moved to the Northwest, he brought with him the demons of his Arkansas past. On Nov. 29, he shot and killed four Lakewood police officers, a crime that has shattered families and generated such tension between Washington and Arkansas that both states’ governors talked at length Thursday to lower the heat. All four officers were parents; nine kids have lost a father or mother.
Maurice Clemmons was shot and killed by a police officer on Dec. 1 after a two-day manhunt. In the aftermath, his family, in Arkansas and Washington, faces scrutiny from the police, the media, the public. Some of his relatives and friends have been arrested, accused of rendering help to a wanted man. One of his aunts turned him in, only to see her home busted up and tear-gassed in the manhunt. Some family members fear retribution, even though they weren’t involved.
Henderson, an administrator at Swedish Medical Center, says: “It affects us, carrying that name, when we go to work, hearing, ‘You should be ashamed of who you are and where you come from.’ “
A bleak beginning
The Clemmons family comes from Marianna, Ark., the seat of one of the poorest counties in one of the country’s poorest states. Unemployment pushes 30 percent; the typical family gets by on $24,000 a year, not even half the national median.
One longtime resident calls the town “landlocked” — no freeway, no Mississippi River, not even a stop for the railroad anymore. In places, cotton fluff forms a haze that stretches almost to the horizon. Trim brick ramblers share property lines with clapboard shacks or trailers set on cinder blocks. Dozens of homes stand empty. One dilapidated house, owned by a member of the Clemmons family, is now home only to feral cats.
A web of one- and two-lane roads — most paved, some not — radiate from a square dominated by a statue of Robert E. Lee, the county’s namesake.
Maurice Clemmons was born here in February 1972, during a period of tumult blamed to this day for the town’s collapse. The year before, to protest discrimination, black residents staged a crippling boycott of white-owned businesses. Riots broke out, with homes and stores set afire and people shot at. A county judge almost ran down two black protesters with his car; when they urged his arrest, he pulled a pistol and ordered them from the courthouse.
The violence drove jobs away. The Coca-Cola bottling plant closed. So did the factory where Maurice Clemmons’ father worked, making frames for automobile seats.
With Marianna offering so little, it’s small wonder Joe Clemmons left for Washington.
Maurice Clemmons’ mother, Dorthy Mae, was one of Joe’s 20 siblings. She raised six kids, working two jobs. Looking to get out, she settled upon Little Rock, 85 miles west.
There, 16-year-old Maurice Clemmons embarked on a seven-month crime spree. He robbed a woman in a hotel parking lot, punching her in the face. He burglarized the home of a state trooper. He got arrested and expelled for bringing a pistol to his high school. Years later, Clemmons would write from prison he “fell in with the wrong crowd” and “wanted to fit in and be accepted.” He described his youth in rhyme: a “16-year-old misguided fool, whose own life he was unable to rule.”
At 17, Clemmons was sentenced to 108 years in prison. To Clemmons’ family, the sentence was outrageous. He was staring down time that seemed more suited to rape or murder.
In prison, Clemmons continued to find trouble: battery, sexual assault, theft, drugs, weapons. Most violations occurred early in his prison stint, says Pulaski County Prosecuting Attorney Larry Jegley, who reviewed Clemmons’ correctional records. “They got him under control,” Jegley says. “He started to get it after a while.”
After serving 11 years, Clemmons appealed for clemency to then-Gov. Mike Huckabee.
In his petition, Clemmons said there was “absolutely no excuse” for his criminal past. He came from a good Christian family and was raised better than that. He lamented the shame he had brought to his family’s name. He was a changed man, Clemmons wrote. No longer would he “do evil.”
Prosecutors twice opposed parole for Clemmons. But a Pulaski County judge, Marion Humphrey, favored clemency, saying Clemmons’ cumulative sentence was too long. Huckabee granted the request in May 2000, citing Clemmons’ youth when the crimes were committed.
Last week, his decision in the spotlight, Huckabee said he was influenced by Arkansas’ history of disproportionate sentences for poor black men.
After his release, Clemmons spent some time in Seattle. But in 2001, he burst into a house in Camden, Ark., and, at gunpoint, robbed the occupants of $10,000 stashed in a plastic Wal-Mart bag.
Clemmons returned to prison for three more years before being released on parole in 2004.
Once out, Clemmons wanted to leave Arkansas for Washington, but Washington refused to take him unless he had a sponsor. Rickey Hinton, Clemmons’ half brother, stepped into that role — and Washington signed off, even though Hinton was a felon.
An Arkansas parole form said Clemmons was to be released “only” to Washington state, where he had family and a job prospect.
Move to Seattle
Employers don’t line up for convicted felons who never finished high school. But by the spring of 2004, Clemmons had his first job — bounty hunter for Metro Bail Bonds in Tacoma, tracking down criminals.
“I read him as a guy that was in prison most of his life, but he wasn’t too bad of a guy,” says Dave Regan, the company’s owner.
Still, Regan let Clemmons go after a month or so. Clemmons was too aggressive, he says.
Clemmons’ first place in Seattle was an apartment he shared with Hinton and a white bulldog puppy. In June 2004, Clemmons married his girlfriend, Nicole Smith, a manicurist he had met three years earlier in a Seattle nightclub. Smith had a teenage son, a young daughter and almost $60,000 in debt, driving her to declare bankruptcy.
Since his release from prison, Clemmons held some legitimate jobs. But evidence now suggests he also may have committed a variety of crimes, all while evading arrest. Take the summer of 2004, for example, when he traveled to Little Rock to get married. Marion Humphrey, the judge who had urged Clemmons’ release, officiated, reinforcing the sense of a new beginning. But just one month later, an armed robbery took place in a Little Rock hotel room. From the hotel registry and other evidence, it appears now the robber was Clemmons.
Postal records link Clemmons to packages of marijuana shipped through the mail in 2005. He bears a striking resemblance to the sketch of a suspect in a series of armed robberies throughout the Puget Sound area between April 2008 and April 2009.
Whatever the source of Clemmons’ money, he appeared to hit financial difficulties last spring. In May, the first of six subcontractors filed liens for unpaid work on his custom house. In July, Clemmons began missing that house’s monthly mortgage payments of $1,100. By November, the bank issued notice it planned to foreclose.
Assault on deputy
Although parolees should avoid trouble, Clemmons kept company with ex-cons.
In 2005, the FBI suspected Clemmons was helping an old prison friend, Gerard Wells, now on the agency’s “Most Wanted” list. Clemmons told authorities he bought a plane ticket for Wells, who was accused of running an Arkansas auto-theft ring. Wells remains a fugitive.
Clemmons also re- established ties with Darcus Allen, who had been convicted of two murders in a liquor-store holdup and served time in prison with him. Earlier this year, Allen fled to Washington after being linked to a bank robbery in Little Rock.
Eddie Davis and another of Clemmons’ cousins, Joseph Pitts, have been convicted of drug charges.
On May 9, both were with Clemmons when 911 calls started coming in from Clemmons’ neighborhood.
Throwing softball-sized rocks, Clemmons had broken out windows in at least seven cars and three houses. When a Pierce County sheriff’s deputy responded, Davis and Pitts were outside the house. At that point, neither was a suspect. Yet when the deputy asked for Clemmons, Davis “stood defiantly in my way,” the deputy’s report says. The deputy stepped forward. Davis pushed. The deputy stood firm. And the fight was on.
Pitts jumped in, too. Then Clemmons came running out of the house, the deputy wrote. Clemmons clenched his fist and landed three blows to the deputy’s head. Another deputy arrived, and he, too, was under attack. It wasn’t until the second deputy drew his gun that the fighting stopped.
Davis and Pitts both wound up being charged with assault. Each pleaded guilty and was sentenced to jail.
Clemmons was charged with seven felony counts of assault and malicious mischief.
Out on bail
By last spring, Clemmons and Nicole Smith had been married for nearly five years.
In the early morning hours of May 11, the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department was summoned once again to the couple’s home.
Smith told sheriff’s deputies that Clemmons had molested her daughter, now 12.
At least that’s what Smith said at first. Soon after, she took it back, refusing to cooperate with investigators, sheriff’s reports say.
If convicted of the rape charge, Clemmons likely was facing a “third strike” and a life sentence.
On the eight felony charges, Clemmons’ bail was set at $190,000.
On the fugitive warrant, he was denied any bail at all.
Still, Smith set out to secure his release. She wrote to Stephen Morley, a North Little Rock attorney. Morley, in turn, wrote to Arkansas parole administrators, asking them to lift their state’s fugitive warrant. Smith may even have made a personal appeal. Corrections officials in Arkansas rescinded their no-bail warrant on Clemmons — infuriating their Washington counterparts, who were desperate to keep Clemmons behind bars.
With her husband’s release now possible, Smith put up the family’s home as collateral to secure a $190,000 bond. Clemmons was released from the Pierce County Jail on Nov. 23.
Mental breakdown
Before last spring, accounts of Clemmons’ criminal behavior centered on violence, money, street reputation. But then a new element surfaced: madness.
When Clemmons was arrested for assaulting the sheriff’s deputy, he told the officer: “Here’s what I want your report to say. President Obama. He’s my brother.” The officer thought maybe Clemmons was talking emotional kinship. But then Clemmons continued: “Many white people will be killed” if they do not right their ways. Clemmons called himself “the beast.”
Clemmons’ relatives described a man suffering a mental breakdown. Clemmons said he was the Messiah. That Nicole was Eve. That he could fly. That he was going to save the world. That his family needed to undress, all of them together, at 4 in the morning — “on the dot,” because that was “God’s number.”
In October, two Western State Hospital psychologists interviewed Clemmons at the Pierce County Jail to determine if he was mentally fit to stand trial. Asked if he thought about hurting others, he said: “Sometimes I think about it … a person gets enough … everybody thinks the police can’t lie.”
Clemmons recounted hallucinating about “people drinking blood and people eating babies,” but said those visions had passed. The psychologists concluded that Clemmons’ insight was “adequate.” His capacity for abstract thought? “Adequate.” They found “no evidence of a mental disorder” at the time. They concluded he could assist in his defense and was fit for trial.
On Nov. 26, three days after his release, Clemmons celebrated Thanksgiving with family and friends in the small town of Pacific.
A relative said Clemmons told the gathering that he planned to kill cops, that he planned to kill children at a school, that he planned to kill as many people as he could at an intersection.
Three days later, on Sunday morning, Clemmons walked into a Parkland coffee shop near his home. He approached the counter and, without saying a word, flashed a gun. He turned and began shooting at four Lakewood police officers drinking coffee and working on their laptops. One officer managed to return fire, wounding Clemmons.
All four officers were killed: Sgt. Mark Renninger and officers Tina Griswold, Ronald Owens and Gregory Richards.
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