Lost Boys

The infirmary's emergency room nurse located a faint pulse, but moments later Reginald's vital signs vanished. An ambulance rushed him to Palestine's Memorial Mother Frances Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 12:57 p.m. on April 17, 1999.

The autopsy found small fragments of hard blue plastic in his colon that looked like he had tried to eat his state-issued razor blade. The doctors noted ulcers on the heel of each foot and fresh abrasions on his cheek, jaw, shoulders and legs -- but they could have happened while transporting the body, the internal affairs report says. As for the large burn on his chest, the autopsy says it is consistent with the mark of the defibrillator used to try to resuscitate him.

Reginald was dehydrated, but not enough to have killed him; he wasn't HIV-positive, and there weren't any lesions on his brain to explain his bizarre behavior. According to the autopsy, internal affairs investigators suspect Reginald had been discarding the contents of his food trays for the past month. Pathologists noted that his body was emaciated and said that recent, rapid weight loss made him more susceptible to infection; his lungs were hemorrhaged and showed edema and congestion. He had pneumonia, they said, and declared the death natural.

The family doesn't believe there was anything natural about Reginald's death. His aunt held a press conference at the National Black United Front, asking if TDCJ thought the family was crazy enough to believe that Reginald died of pneumonia and no one had noticed he was sick or tried to treat him. She spoke on radio and TV stations, demanding to know what really happened to her nephew. "We have this lock-'em-up, hang-'em-high mentality," says Kofi Taharka, chairman of the Houston chapter of the BUF. "Once people are in the system, there isn't as much concern for them as there should be. But they're still human beings."

Janet Talton put up flyers asking people to call the Michael Unit and ask the warden, "What happened to Reginald?" With the BUF, she protested in Huntsville and all around Harris County declaring former TDCJ executive director Wayne Scott a murderer.

Two years later, protests have died down, because Janet's doctor told her to stay away from stress -- and Reginald's mother tries not to think about him; she says she's done enough crying. She had wanted to visit him the Easter before his death, but her car didn't run. "I should've followed my feelings," she says. "I should have found a way to get there."

Less than a month after his brother's death, Robert smiled through Vonda Higgins's testimony at the May 11, 1999, trial. Robert grinned as the now quadriplegic woman talked about how she can't even cough by herself -- in three days a simple cold turned into pneumonia, and she almost had a heart attack when an ingrown toenail she couldn't feel caused her blood pressure to skyrocket.

In the hallway afterward, Higgins says, Robert's mother screamed at her, "She needs to tell the truth. She emptied her weapon on my son." Higgins looked at Judy and said, "Wrong case." (Another officer had recently shot up a boy, but it wasn't her, she says.)

Robert's probation officer, Julie Groh, testified that his mother "tended to really minimize the problems that she was having with Robert. It was hard to believe everything she was telling me, because I think she didn't want to believe a lot of what was happening."

Judy testified that the twins haven't seen their father since they were in kindergarten and "they never got over it." She blames their bad behavior on his absence, and she thinks Robert never got over his brother being locked up. She blames the police, society and the apartment manager who had it in for her son; she doesn't blame herself or her boys. Robert was arrested with 4.2 grams of cocaine on him and later was sent to six months of rehab at Vernon State Mental Hospital, but she insists that "somebody else drugged my son." Yet he was diagnosed as an addict with substance-induced psychotic disorder (he was found face down in the urinal eating his own feces, and one morning after breakfast he ate his cereal box too). Robert's June 21, 1997, hospital discharge summary says Robert started getting stoned when he was 14, smoked up every day by the time he was 15 and used fry (marijuana dipped in embalming fluid) at least every three months. Plus, he told his probation officer that he drank and smoked marijuana laced with angel dust. "He was just doing childish things," Judy said on the stand. "Nothing that was harmful-like."

Judy doesn't deny that Robert was dealing, but she says he had only one rock on him and he never brought drugs into her house. She says Robert told her that after the exchange, he walked off and the police officer shouted that he was under arrest and then shot him from behind. She thinks the police should be going after big dealers, not small fry like her son, who was trying to earn some quick cash. She testified that Robert had no idea that Chaison was an officer when he shot him, but thought he was a crackhead.