Residents say that instead, Dawson, naked and delirious, was handcuffed and beaten by the cops on the parking lot of Jensen's Supermarket a short distance from his house. He died a short time later at the LBJ hospital.

Anthony Dutrow, a meat packer and Socialist Workers candidate for mayor of Houston, went with campaign supporters to the supermarket to talk with working people there about what happened and to discuss the socialists' stand against police brutality. Campaign supporters also collected signatures to place Dutrow's name on the ballot.

JoAnne Johnson, a resident of the neighborhood since 1995, came by the store, signed the petition for Dutrow, and volunteered right on the spot to help collect more signatures. She introduced Dutrow to the store owner in order to get permission to post his campaign leaflet on the outside of the store.

Johnson asked people to sign the petition for Dutrow as a way to protest police brutality and Dawson's death.

"I watched the whole thing," Johnson said. "What the police did to Mark on Friday was not called for. He was already handcuffed and hog-tied, and 15 or more police kept beating him with a stick. Yes, the police killed that young Black brother."

Johnson talked with neighbors, friends, and customers of the grocery store and the gas station across the street and took the petition to the projects. Some had also witnessed the assault, and many had heard about it. Johnson succeeded in getting more than 70 people to sign Dutrow's ballot petition.

Other residents in the area also gave socialist campaigners a warm response. Evelyn Davis eagerly signed up. She said that despite the fact that Houston mayor Lee Brown is Black, "He is backing the police 100 percent. I hope he gets out." She also said that the cops were laughing and talking as if nothing happened after Dawson was taken to the hospital.

Another neighborhood resident who signed the petition said she didn't like Brown since he was police chief in Atlanta and sent Wayne Williams, a young Black man accused of child murders, to prison without sufficient evidence. Altogether more than 150 people signed petitions around the grocery store.

"According to witnesses I spoke with," Dutrow said, "more than a dozen Houston cops chased down Mark Dawson, corralled him with their police cruisers, handcuffed him, threw him facedown on the pavement, then brutally beat him with their billy clubs. Within a few minutes his body fell limp. Mayor Lee Brown, himself a former Houston police chief, agrees with Houston police chief C.O. Bradford that 'correct police procedure' was used.

"My campaign joins with the residents of this section of Northeast Houston in demanding that the killer cops be prosecuted. This is yet another example of the 'correct police procedures' that workers face, and will face every day, under capitalism, a system that breeds the inequalities that cops accept as a license to treat workers, especially those who may be Black, Latino, Asian, or poor, as less than human.

"Despite the eyewitnesses, who say the police used excessive force, the cop who attended the autopsy claimed that "they found no trauma that would have been fatal."

The socialist campaign has collected 2,000 signatures to place Dutrow on the ballot so far. Organizers of the Militant Labor Forum here are planning a speakout September 22 against police brutality featuring the Dawson case.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home