Life seems good for Freddie McCollum Jr., at least from the looks of things.
His six-bedroom colonial, with a goldfish pond and little waterfall out back, stands on eight wooded acres in a suburb of Charlotte, N.C. Near the pond is a custom-made grill "big enough to roast a cow," as McCollum proudly put it. There's a 65-inch TV in the den, and in the big garage sit McCollum's rides: a black Cadillac Escalade, a bright-red Dodge Viper and two top-of-the-line motorcycles, a Harley-Davidson Fat Boy and a Suzuki GSX.
Not many years ago -- before he was beaten and maimed by Prince George's County police, before he sued the county and walked away with $1.8 million -- McCollum scratched out a living as an insulation installer, sputtering around the Washington area in an '88 Olds Cutlass. His wife, Martha, drove a '91 minivan with a leaky radiator and no heat or air conditioning. Their home was on a crowded street in Temple Hills.
Today, McCollum, 57, has a tidy stock portfolio and owns a small but thriving freight-hauling company, with three 25-foot trucks and three drivers. The jury award provided the capital he needed to get started. "Business is good," he said recently as he gave a reporter a tour of his home. "Charlotte's booming. Sometimes I'm so busy, I have to turn down jobs."
Yet he said: "I wish this had never happened. The way my life was before, I was working regularly, I was healthy." Now he is plagued by physical and emotional pain that he fears will never go away. "I feel vulnerable. Night brings on different feelings. At night, I pace, check the locks, check the house alarm."
McCollum, who lost an eye and suffered lasting damage to his left hand in an encounter with police that began with a traffic stop, is one of dozens of people to successfully sue Prince George's since the late 1990s, alleging they were mistreated by police. In the past four years, jury awards and out-of-court settlements in such cases have cost the county nearly $10 million. So severe is the problem of police misconduct that Prince George's last month resolved a long-running federal civil rights investigation by agreeing to make wholesale improvements in the training and monitoring of officers.
For years, the names of the aggrieved -- people allegedly beaten with fists and nightsticks, falsely arrested or needlessly mauled by police dogs -- have flashed before the public in news articles, including many in The Washington Post. Then, after pocketing hefty jury awards or settlement checks, they fade from view.
But their lives go on, some changed dramatically, like McCollum's, and others altered in smaller ways.
'Thankful for What I Got'
Robert Zimmerman got caught in the act.
On a snowy night in January 1999, Zimmerman and an accomplice broke into a home under construction in Upper Marlboro and started loading major appliances into a van. When police showed up with a dog, the two men fled across a field and hid in bushes. Much later, Zimmerman testified that he came out of the bushes with his hands up and sprawled facedown on the ground, but the dog attacked him anyway, biting his left leg and left arm.
After pleading guilty to theft and burglary charges and serving 18 months in jail, Zimmerman, now 38, sued the county, claiming that the dog had been sicced on him needlessly. A jury awarded him $2.5 million, which a judge reduced to $200,000.
"I was thankful for what I got, because I never had anything," said Zimmerman, who lives in Fairmount Heights with his wife and two children. "But I was kind of upset [by the reduction]. I could have been an investor. I could have been influential in my community. I could have done something with the Boys Club or the schools."
He said he found employment as a house painter and drywall installer after getting out of jail. He rode the Metro to jobs and got lifts from friends and co-workers, he said. Then came the jury award, part of which went to his attorney.
"I no longer have to catch the subway to go to work," said Zimmerman. He said he bought two SUVs -- a GMC Yukon for himself and a Kia for his wife -- paid some credit-card and medical bills and a large chunk of his mortgage, and had repairs done to his small home. He said he has spent all but about $1,000 of the lawsuit money.
"I've got the basic stuff I never had before," he said, but added, "I still struggle now and then."
Homeless, Not Penniless
For some people, the basic stuff is just enough.
On cold nights, before Willie Walker, 37, goes to sleep in the cab of his old tow truck, parked in an alley in an industrial area of Northeast Washington, he drapes wool blankets over the windows and cranks up a small space heater. An orange extension cord snakes from the heater to a power outlet in a nearby auto body shop. The $100 a month he pays the shop's owner for electricity is a luxury that Walker, who is homeless by choice, can well afford.
Before dawn one day in November 1997, back when Walker parked his tow truck in Capitol Heights, he was strolling to a convenience store with a container of food, intending to heat it in a microwave oven. Thinking Walker looked suspicious, a police officer stopped and searched him. Walker later testified that he considered it "offensive" to be frisked in the groin area, so he ran away. A police dog caught up with him and bit him on both legs, leaving scars.
Acquitted of assault and other charges, Walker sued the county over the dog bites and won $135,000. His attorney took a share of the award, plus a fee for handling the criminal case, leaving Walker with about $60,000. For $7,600, Walker said, he upgraded from a 1973 tow truck to an '80 model and bought a used motorcycle and an '80 Ford Fairmont, which he also parks in the District alley. He left Capitol Heights, he said, "because I don't trust the police in Prince George's."
On his attorney's advice, Walker said, he consulted a financial adviser and put the bulk of the $60,000 in four mutual funds. He ordered the statements sent to his sister's home, where he occasionally visits and assesses his financial position. He said he has about $10,000 in the accounts after losing a lot in the stock market slump.
One night recently, Walker reached under the seat of his tow truck and pulled out a statement from Van Kampen Investments of Jersey City, showing he had $2,687.61 in that account after a Jan. 5 withdrawal of $500. He said he had to buy a replacement transmission for his truck, which he uses to earn a modest living.
Although he doesn't plan to reside in a tow truck for the rest of his life, and would like to find a good deal on a trailer home, Walker said he is comfortable for now in the alley with his space heater.
An apartment, he said, "would be six, seven hundred dollars a month. That would go fast."
Serving Time, Staying Clean
Julius LaRosa Booker lives rent-free.
In a federal prison in Upstate New York, where he is serving a sentence of 31/2 to 10 years for assault, Booker wears $70 Nike basketball sneakers. For the time being, those white-leather, size 10 high-tops are the only material possession Booker has to show for his six-figure lawsuit settlement with Prince George's County.
But material goods aren't everything, he said in a telephone interview.
"My best chance is to stay drug-free," said Booker, 39, who is serving a D.C. Superior Court sentence and hopes to be paroled soon. "Trouble only came with the abuse of drugs and alcohol. I've been clean five years now."
On an October night in 1997, Booker was in a stolen van in Capitol Heights, smoking crack with a prostitute, when Prince George's police showed up. He ran away -- until a police dog sunk its teeth into his right calf. In a lawsuit, Booker alleged that an officer beat him on his head and back, handcuffed him, then let the dog resume biting.
Booker suffered nerve damage that left him with a permanent limp. Although the out-of-court settlement he reached with the county bars him from disclosing the amount of money he agreed to accept, a source familiar with the case said Prince George's paid $100,000. After his attorney took a share of the settlement and Booker paid off some debts, including substantial medical bills, $30,000 remained, he said. That was early in 2000.
Before Booker could enjoy the money, however, he was locked up on the assault charge. He said he asked relatives to mind his fortune. Then in 2002, about the time his mother died, Booker said, he found out that two-thirds of the $30,000 was gone. Booker's attorney said he looked into the matter and learned that the money had been used to pay for nursing home care for Booker's mother, Esther. The lawyer said he put the remaining $10,000 in a money market account for Booker.
"If it was for my mom, that's okay," Booker said. "I'd give her anything that I got."
He said he has adorned each side of his Nike high-tops with the initial E, in memory of his mother.
"If I had been out, I would have asked my mom what she wanted," Booker said. "Bought her a house, maybe a car. She was there for me whenever I needed her, even when I was doing bad."
'I'm Out of Here'
Cristi Wineke said she enjoyed living in Bowie, where she grew up.
She enjoyed the townhouse that she and her husband owned and their tight network of relatives and friends. And she enjoyed taking her black Labrador retriever, Mugsey, for walks in the neighborhood.
She and Mugsey happened to be standing on a grass strip in front of the home of a Prince George's police officer one day in September 1995 when the Lab did his business. In a lawsuit against the county, Wineke testified that the officer, Cpl. Francis A. Masino, angrily confronted her on the street and ordered her to get rid of the droppings. She said that she asked Masino for a bag but that he ignored her, so she walked away, intending to return later to clean up the mess.
Wineke, now 32, was two months pregnant with her first child at the time. She said Masino grabbed one of her arms, knocked her to the ground and beat the back of her head, rupturing her left eardrum. Masino, who was not charged with a crime, testified that he subdued Wineke in self-defense after she slugged him in the chest. In 1997, a jury ruled in Wineke's favor, awarding her $113,000 and ordering the county to pay her attorneys' fees.
Although she loved her neighborhood, she said goodbye to it.
"Relocating from [Masino] was my top priority," Wineke recalled. "I didn't want our kids going to school together. I didn't want any part of him. My husband was reluctant to move, but I persuaded him."
They sold the townhouse for about $100,000, she said, and with their equity, plus the lawsuit money, they bought a $240,000, four-bedroom home near the Chesapeake Bay in Calvert County, a house worth more than $400,000 today.
"There's all kinds of kids here, there's nothing but families," said Wineke, now a mother of three. "But if Masino ever moves to this neighborhood, I'm out of here."
Lacking Only Happiness
Freddie McCollum Jr. moved much farther away, to Weddington, N.C.
The incident that changed his life began about 9:30 a.m. June 27, 1997. A Prince George's police officer stopped McCollum's car near his Temple Hills home, suspicious because McCollum's front license plate was on the dashboard instead of the bumper. According to testimony in his lawsuit, McCollum went to his home to retrieve his driver's license and the officer tried to stop him. Backup officers soon arrived, one with a dog, and pursued McCollum into the house.
McCollum said he tried to hide in the attic, where he had fled out of fear. He said police stomped on him, beat his face and ribs with batons and loosed the dog on him as he begged them to stop. He lost his right eye and suffered bites and broken bones that permanently disabled his left hand. Police charged him with assault and other crimes, but he was acquitted in a trial.
Officers said that the attic floor gave way and that they and McCollum fell. The officers said McCollum suffered his injuries in the fall -- in which no officers were injured. The jury in his lawsuit sided with McCollum in April 2000, awarding him $4.1 million and ordering Prince George's to pay his attorneys' fees. A judge later reduced McCollum's award to $1.8 million.
Since that day in 1997, McCollum said, doctors have performed 13 operations on his face and seven on his left hand. The pain continues, he said. And he said the incident exacted a heavy emotional toll. Because he was unable to work in the late 1990s, he said, his wife held two, sometimes three jobs at a time, as they struggled with mounting bills.
"She'd get home from one job, check on me, then rush to the next job," McCollum said.
Not long after the county cut him a check, he and his wife headed south.
And now he wakes up in his spacious brick home, drives to work in luxury, grows his prosperous business and relaxes at day's end in front of his giant TV. About all he wants for, he said, is peace of mind.
"There were no consequences for those officers," McCollum said. "They go on to live normal lives with their families, and your life is destroyed. I will never, ever want to live in Prince George's again."
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