NPR talks with Charlie LeDuff about Detroit, Aiyana, the media, more - mp3, transcript

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http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2010/11/19/04

Reporting from Detroit
November 19, 2010

Earlier this year, seven-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones was killed while sitting on her couch by a stray police bullet during a midnight raid. Some have suggested that the raid was overly aggressive, and that officers may have been influenced by a reality TV crew that was following them that night. Journalist Charlie LeDuff, who wrote about the case for Mother Jones, talks about covering Detroit for the past several years.

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BROOKE GLADSTONE: Some stories seem almost too big to cover, so you start with an anecdote – such as, on May 16th, seven-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones was killed sitting on her couch by a stray police bullet during a midnight raid in search of her father, a murder suspect.

The police used overwhelming force and a stun grenade, even though the door was unlocked. But in this case, the police were accompanied by a reality TV camera crew, and so a tragic inference could be drawn.

Journalist Charlie LeDuff used Aiyana’s death as a way into a long, devastating depiction of his city of Detroit for Mother Jones Magazine. He’s seen the press come and go. Most recently they've been coming, writing reams and leaving. But he suggests all those words still miss the point of the big story. Charlie, welcome to the show.

CHARLIE LeDUFF: Thanks for having me. I love your show.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thanks. Do you think that the fact that a TV crew was in tow encouraged the police to violate their own procedures, as apparently they did, in creating a more dramatic entrance than they needed to?

CHARLIE LeDUFF: Yeah. Talking to a high-ranking police source here, in his many, many years in the business he’s never used a grenade to apprehend a suspect. And so, it is quite possible. We'll find out, I guess, when this thing eventually gets to court, whether they were playing up to the cameras.

And the funny thing about that is this is many months later and there’s been no report released, no official word from the state police, the Detroit police, anybody.

It’s kind of sad in a way. I mean, Detroit’s misery, it’s really selling. We have a couple of TV shows, we have a couple of reality shows, a slew of documentaries, so we're in the media spotlight, but none of it really much amounts to anything in terms of helping the community.

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Link to LeDuff's incredible article in the current issue of Mother Jones:
http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/11/aiyana-stanley-jones-detroit

What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?
A nighttime raid. A reality TV crew. A sleeping seven-year-old. What one tragedy can teach us about the unraveling of America's middle class.
— By Charlie LeDuff
November/December 2010 Issue


IT WAS JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT on the morning of May 16 and the neighbors say the streetlights were out on Lillibridge Street. It is like that all over Detroit, where whole blocks regularly go dark with no warning or any apparent pattern. Inside the lower unit of a duplex halfway down the gloomy street, Charles Jones, 25, was pacing, unable to sleep.

His seven-year-old daughter, Aiyana Mo'nay Stanley-Jones (PDF), slept on the couch as her grandmother watched television. Outside, Television was watching them. A half-dozen masked officers of the Special Response Team—Detroit's version of SWAT—were at the door, guns drawn. In tow was an A&E crew filming an episode of The First 48, its true-crime program. The conceit of the show is that homicide detectives have 48 hours to crack a murder case before the trail goes cold. Thirty-four hours earlier, Je'Rean Blake Nobles, 17, had been shot outside a liquor store on nearby Mack Avenue; an informant had ID'd a man named Chauncey Owens as the shooter and provided this address.

The SWAT team tried the steel door to the building. It was unlocked. They threw a flash-bang grenade through the window of the lower unit and kicked open its wooden door, which was also unlocked. The grenade landed so close to Aiyana that it burned her blanket. Officer Joseph Weekley, the lead commando—who'd been featured before on another A&E show, Detroit SWAT—burst into the house. His weapon fired a single shot, the bullet striking Aiyana in the head and exiting her neck. It all happened in a matter of seconds.

"They had time," a Detroit police detective told me. "You don't go into a home around midnight. People are drinking. People are awake. Me? I would have waited until the morning when the guy went to the liquor store to buy a quart of milk. That's how it's supposed to be done."

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