Driving Mr. Charlie

By Victor Johnson

There were protests around Parker Center, the headquarters of the LAPD. The officer was not charged with a crime. He did, however, face a board of review. About one year later, he was fired by Chief Daryl Gates. It was revealed that the black officer was once a policeman in Chicago, Illinois. While with that department, he shot and wounded a woman who, like Eula Love, was black.

In recent years, there have been many controversial shootings between police officers and black citizens, many who were unarmed. My book, which is mostly fiction, may raise the question of whether the 1979 shooting was nearly as bad as the ones since. Kelley Jefferson is a fictionalized version of the black officer. I dont even remember the name of the actual officer. His redemption and reinstatement are pure fiction. It is, however, possible that, by todays standards and with a good lawyer, that policeman could have kept his job. Be mindful, however, that the author is not taking a side but is making a prediction based on some recent events.

Other true events helped to inspire this story. In 1953, a home invasion robbery resulted in the death of a sixty-four-year-old widow named Mabel Monahan. One of the killers was a thirty-year-old woman named Barbara Graham. In 1955 she was executed in the gas chamber. Another subplot centers around the US Supreme Court ruling against state-supported school segregation in 1954 as well as the death of John Kennedy and the resulting presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson and Johnsons support of the Vietnam War. The story talks about his decision not to seek reelection in 1968. The movie studio system in Hollywood was also an inspiration for other subplots.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524532727

Victor Johnson

VICTOR JOHNSON, his parents and siblings are native Californians. His father was a police offi cer in Los Angeles following World War 2 service. His mother was a school teacher before becoming a full-time homemaker. Victor graduate from John Marshall High School in Los Angeles, and later UCLA. He worked for the Department of Treasury for 28 years before retirement. Prior to The Stranger in the Park, Mr. Johnson wrote Driving Mr. Charlie. Victor has been married to his wife, Cheryl for 22 years. They have a teenage daughter in high school.

Book preview

Copyright © 2016 by Victor Johnson.

ISBN:      Softcover         978-1-5245-3273-4

                eBook             978-1-5245-3272-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 08/09/2016

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

740239

Contents

Driving Mr. Charlie: Road to Redemption

Bio

36542.png

In California, there lived an African American police officer named Kelly Jefferson. He was a patrolman in the Los Angeles Police Department. He was divorced and forty-five years old. He had two young sons. Kelly most closely resembled the actor Terence Howard. He had a female partner, a white woman named Francine Blake. Jefferson and Blake responded to a business dispute call in the old Newton Street Division of southeast Los Angeles. The dispute was between a woman resembling Taraji Henson and two employees of the Southern California gas company. They wanted to turn off her gas after she failed to pay a delinquent bill. She threatened them with a butcher knife. The two gas company employees retreated to their truck. One of the employees was able to contact the police using the truck’s two-way radio. Jefferson and Blake responded to the call code two, red lights and no siren to minimize excitement. When the officers arrived, they drew their weapons. Jefferson, as the senior officer, gave the woman named Eloise Lowe an order to drop the knife. Officer Blake held her position with her weapon drawn. Mrs. Lowe advanced toward Officer Jefferson. She moved too fast for him to get a hold of his nightstick. She left him no choice but to draw his weapon and shoot. Mrs. Lowe died within seconds.

Later, Officer Jefferson went before a board of review. Chief of Police Donald Gladney felt that because of his department’s tarnished image, it would be best to terminate Kelly Jefferson. The officer relied on a union attorney much like a public defender for his defence. Jefferson earned a decent salary, but was strapped with alimony and child support payments. With twenty-three years on the force, he was seven years shy of retirement. Upon termination, he could only withdraw his contribution to the police pension. The city retained their 50% contribution. He would need to seek new employment.

His cousin named Efram Epps lived in Jackson, Mississippi. Epps’s father, Denver, has been a bodyguard and a driver for a man, Charlie Anderson, for the last forty years. Sixty-eight and ill, Denver Epps is no longer able to perform many of his duties. He receives social security and disability pension from the army as well as a salary from Charlie Anderson, affectionately known as Mr. Charlie. Back in 1974, twenty-eight-year-old Denver drove the forty-five-year-old Charlie Anderson all the way to Hollywood, California for a screen test at MGM studios.

Good-looking and athletic, Charlie had done local television in Mississippi for nearly twenty years while also teaching at the local Jackson high school. Looks notwithstanding, Charlie lacked the talent to satisfy studio head David Selznick Jr.

Kelly decided to apply for Denver’s job.

36547.png

Kelly did not know at the time that Denver was a sick man. Denver Epps was a 1964 high school graduate. The class of ‘64 was known as the single largest group of draftees for the Vietnam War. Young men all over the United States who graduated in 1964 found themselves in military uniforms representing every branch of the military, and by age nineteen in 1965, many found themselves in mortal combat. War historians claim that 58,000 young men died in the war between 1964 and 1973. Denver Epps was in front line combat between 1965 and1966. He was wounded in action. He suffered from bullet wounds that never really healed. His son Ephram learned shortly before his father’s retirement that he (Denver) was dying inch by inch since he was wounded at twenty in1966.

Kelly Jefferson slept for most of the three-day trip from Los Angeles. About one hundred miles into Mississippi, ninety minutes east of Louisiana, Kelly and the other bus passengers observed a graveside funeral service. The bus slowed to a crawl, seemingly to honor the military-like graveside service. Kelly saw older looking men in army uniforms, some women in black dresses with veils over their faces. Somewhere away from the crowd, a large 1963 Cadillac sat parked. Kelly saw what he believed was a large gray-haired man sitting in the backseat behind the driver’s side. He looked amazingly like the old movie star Clint Eastwood. Another reason the bus slowed down was to allow for the fact that the highway was turning into a city boulevard, a twenty-five MPH speed limit. The final stop was only three miles past the graveside