The challenge
to find

the real
story

By STEVE MURDOCK
STOCKTON

The Delta Liquor and Sporting Goods -

store at 519 West Charter Way is a
crowded, dreary establishment that
— to a predominantly black clien-

The store, which sells on credit to at
least some customers, is owned by a
white man, Frank Taylor, and occupies

a building owned by Jimmie M. Rish-
wain, a former mayor of Stockton who
was removed in a recall election.

The two clerks on duty in the store
at 12:30 a.m. on Sunday, June 2, 1968,
were white. One of them, Fred E. Lar-
sen, 26, has been charged with harbor-
ing “a severe hatred of black people.”

Nothing in this set of circumstances
is very different from those in thous-
ands of ghetto liquor stores across the
nation—except that violence and death
erupted that night in the Delta Liquor
and Sporting Goods store.

And today a 25 year old black man
is on trial in superior court on a charge
of robbery.

In addition, a $30 million suit pends
in federal court—filed by the widow of
the dead man against the store’s owner
and the two clerks.

The robbery trial proceeds at a
leisurely, almost tedious, pace before
a larger daily audience than would at-
tend most robbery trials because this
is no run-of-the-court robbery case.

Larsen didn’t know it when he pulled
the trigger of his .38 caliber revolver
that Sunday morning, but the man his
bullets killed was Theodore (Ted) Wat-
kins, 27, a star offensive end for the
Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Canadian
Football League and a man who had
just signed a new $20,000 contract.

And the other clerk, Louis Huerta,
27, didn’t know it when he pulled his
.38 and shot a second black man that
he was wounding Watkin’s young broth-
er, Clifton H. Watkins, 25, a communic-
able disease specialist with the U.S.
Public Health Service in Sacramento
and a man who makes $8,000 to $9,000
a year.

These circumstances have made the
case of major concern to the black
community in the San Joaquin valley—
even though it was temporarily wiped
off the front pages two days after it

-happened by the assassination of Sen.
Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles.

And the district attorney’s office, ap-
parently fearful that police premises in
the case will be proven false, is resort-
ing to what appear to be unusual efforts
to obtain conviction.

Instead of proceeding on an ordinary
felony complaint and putting the po-
lice case to the test of a preliminary
examination in municipal court, the of-

, fice of District Attorney Laurence Dri-
von went before the San Joaquin Coun-
ty Grand Jury in June and obtained an
indictment of Watkins by that route.

And the prosecutor in the case. De-
puty District Attorney John Parslow,
acts like he is trying a murder case,
which—in a sense—this is, but not

_ from the prosecution’s point of view.

Drivon’s office has proceeded from
the beginning on the assumption the
killing of Watkins was justifiable homi-
cide.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—APRIL 3, 1969—Page 8

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Ted Watkins

And Parslow, a heavy-shouldered
young man who acts like he has seen
too many Perry Mason television mo-
vies, has been seeking by meticulous
use of scientific testimony regarding
ballistics, blood samples and such to
prove that the Watkins brothers at-
tempted to rob the liquor store.

The defense, which is being handled
by Lawrence K. Karlton, a scholarly-
appearing Sacramento attorney with a
background in labor and civil liberties
cases, was still waiting its turn when
this was written, but some of its inten-
tions are known.

For example, Karlton has said in re-
lation to Larsen, “I will prove this wit-
ness has demonstrated a severe hatred
of black people.” Larsen denied this

‘when cross-examined by Karlton, but

the defense attorney has intimated he
has witnesses on tap who will testify
to the opposite.

The defense is expected to base its
case on the contention the elder Wat-
kins attempted to cash a check to pay
for a purchase of wine on the evening
in question and that Larsen’s refusal
—accompanied by racial insults—led to
a fight, during which Larsen pulled a
gun.

In the resultant struggle — during
which, the defense is expected to claim,
the elder Watkins was fighting for his
life—the front window of the store
adjoining the cash register was broken
and Larsen pumped four bullets into
Watkins.

The younger Watkins, a handsome,
well-dressed man who wears his hair
in a modified natural style, is expected,
in the defense version, to contend that
he sought unsuccessfully to come to
his brother’s aid, and then—fearing for
his own life — fled the scene, being
wounded outside the store by the sec-
ond clerk, Huerta, who was emptying
trash adjacent to the parking lot and
fired at the fleeing Watkins in response
to the shots inside the store.

Part of Watkins’ story came out in-
directly last week when a Sacramento
police lieutenant, Michael O’Kane, tes-
tified as to a statement he obtained
from the surviving brother after the
shooting.

“He told me,” said O’Kane, “that...
he was standing in front of a magazine
rack—with his back to his brother.

“He heard an argument, turned and
saw his brother with what looked like
a whole salami in his hand.

“He said his brother then started
over the counter (toward the store
manager, Larsen) and Watkins (the
defendant) tried to stop him.”

O’Kane quoted the defendant as say-
ing he was also hit in the melee be-
tween the two men—who then wrestled
into the front window, breaking it.

“There were shots . . . Then the
clerk (Larsen) fired at me,” O’Kane
said Watkins told him.

O’Kane’s testimony was given first in
the absence of the jury because of Karl-
ton’s contention that the wounded Wat-
kins was in no condition to give an in-
telligent waiver of his right to remain
silent.

Although the younger Watkins in this
statement says Larsen shot at him,
ballistics testimony hold the bullet that

rons

.

actually struck Watkins came from
Huerta’s gun.

Huerta’s excuse for shooting Wat-
kins is the allegation Watkins threat-
ened him, a contention the defense is
expected to challenge.

Watkins is expected to contend he
fled because he feared for his life—a
not exactly unfounded fear in view of
what happened to his brother, who al-
legedly was left stretched out behind
the counter for 40 minutes before an
ambulance arrived.

Watkins, in point of undisputed fact,
fled all the way to Sacramento where
he was arrested when he sought medi-
cal treatment.

Karlton is expected to put Watkins’
widow on the stand in Superior Judge
Maxwell M. Willens court as well as
witnesses from Canada to establish the
dead man’s character and the defense
contention the root of the slaying was
racism—not robbery.

The slaying of the elder Watkins,
whose home was in nearby Modesto
and who played his college football at
Stockton’s University of Pacific, has
stirred deep anger in Stockton’s black
community. ;

Two days after the shooting two
young black leaders, Ralph Lee White
and Waymon Berry, charged the Delta
Liquor and Sporting Goods store —
where another black men was wounded
two years ago—‘“is getting to be a
shooting gallery.”

Berry, a spokesman for Stockton’s
Black United Conference, told the City
Council in protesting the Delta store
and another store (since closed), “The
only thing we are getting from these
stores are dead young black men...”

Berry and others came to the council
meeting carrying protest placards, one
of which read, “Liquor store declares
open season on blacks.”

The store, located just a few blocks
from Stockton’s nearly all-black Edison
High School, carries the usual liquor
store hodge podge of merchandise plus
some items peculiar to the area such
as fur-lined caps with ear muffs—suit-
able for farm workers in the delta or
hunters bound for the cold sloughs of
the San Joaquin river.

Frank Taylor, owner of the store, is
a man who wants to keep on doing
business no matter what.

He admitted on the witness stand the
other day—while being cross-examined
by Karlton—that after he arrived at the
store the night of the shooting he rang
up a five cent gum sale on the cash
register.

He did this with the place full of
police, with Watkins’ body still on the
floor and in disregard of the possibility
the cash register and its tape might
become important evidence in the case.

In fact, almost everything seems to
indicate the case was treated as “just
another holdup’—until the identity of
the two men involved became known.

The slain Watkins was apparently no
man to take an insult lightly.

In Canada he was known as a “black
power’ advocate and published a
mimeographed newspaper called Al Kita
Sudan or The Black Book.

San Joaquin county’s elegant new
courthouse provides a modern setting

for these proceecings, which—like all
such cases—seem .emoved from reality
when a succession of respectful and
generally inarticulate policemen take
the stand to describe what was obvi-
ously a rage-filled encounter in a sordid
ghetto liquor store.

Black people, almost all of them el-
derly, make up at least half of the
audience each day as this minuet is
stepped out. They sit in the oppressive,
respectful silence that envelopes a
courtroom and listen to the fantastic
amount of criminal detail that can
evolve any time, any place, anywhere
in this nation when an angry black man
does something like trying to cash a
check or buy a bottle of wine.

The rigid requirements of court de-
corum have a way of sealing off the
passion of events, and one sitting in
that courtroom each day has some dif-
ficulty—and this must also be the
jury’s problem—in reconstructing the
precise circumstances of what must
have been a confrontation with intense
racial content.

There’s a nervous quality to this
trial—anxious sheriff's deputies in the
role of bailiffs, testimony about racial

hatred—both ways, whites for black —

and blacks for whites—and the inescap-
able feeling is that white Stockton
would like to sweep this entire case
under the rug.

And pervading the entire proceed-
ings is the fact that the real issue is
not being joined.

The dead man—Ted Watkins—was
not some stereotype, wine-soaked po-
tential check-passer, a type not un-
known to liquor store clerks.

He was a professional athlete who
had just signed a $20,000 a year con-
tract in Canada. He had money in the
bank

here—had a perfectly respectable pub-
lic job, working as an inspector for
the U.S. Health Department in Sacra-
mento.

So the key to this case is its basic
contradictions.

The men involved were not stereo-
typed ghetto hoodlums—no matter how
logical it is that the ghetto, out of des-
peration, produces hoodlums.

The point is that—whatever happen-
ed in the store that June night—the
actions of these men were interpreted
by the clerks involved in terms of 4
racist stereotype.

And so the great contradiction of this
situation is that two black men prob-
ably never had less reason to hold up
a liquor store. ‘

But this is the fact, the fact of moti-
vation, that tends to get lost at the
trial.

Perhaps, before this is over, the real
situation will emerge, but any one sit-
ting in the courtroom has to wonder.
The first—and only—headline The Pe0-
ple’s World carried on this case on June
29, 1968, read, “The real story of Wat-
kins slaying.”

That may have been somewhat pre-
sumptuous. Maybe the real story will
never be told.

But the challenge of our time is tO
‘ry and find the real story.

His young brother—the man on trial

People’s World J