1960's Community Activist Joseph Pannell Fights Cold case fuelled by race and politics

• Originally published in the Toronto Star on February 5, 2005 [here]

By: PETER EDWARDS AND HAROLD LEVY
STAFF REPORTERS

CHICAGO—There is no plaque on the house at 2337 West Monroe St. on Chicago's West Side, except one that says: ``No soliciting, no loitering, no trespassing.'' But neighbours here don't need a sign to be reminded of why it is so infamous.

It was here, before 5 a.m. on Dec. 4, 1969, that Illinois Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed in what the Chicago Tribune called ``the most famous or notorious police raid in Chicago's history.'' Hampton was shot twice in the head while lying in his bed and West Side residents are still quick to label his death in a hail of police bullets murder.

The revolutionary Panthers died out more than a quarter-century ago, but the group's leaders are still warmly remembered in this neighbourhood. And while Hampton was a familiar face on West Monroe, his next-door neighbours say they say they have no memory of a 55-year-old Toronto librarian linked in media reports to the Illinois Black Panthers.

Joseph Pannell has been in custody since his gunpoint arrest last July outside the Toronto Reference Library near Yonge and Bloor Sts. For the past 13 years, Pannell has lived in Toronto with his Canadian wife and their children, under the name Gary Douglas Freeman.

Now he is fighting extradition to the United States, where he faces charges of attempted murder and aggravated battery stemming from the March 7, 1969 shooting of Chicago police cadet Terrence Knox. His extradition hearing is scheduled for May 2 in Toronto.

The pursuit of Pannell, who twice skipped bail in the 1970s, has consumed the former police officer. ``Please send him back here so that I can have my day in court,'' said Knox, in a telephone interview.

Thirty-six years ago, at a time when Chicago was a crucible of racial tension, the Pannell case received scant media coverage. It originally rated just three paragraphs on an inside page of the Tribune, with no allegation of a connection to the militant Panthers.

 But the reopening of what one Chicago investigator has called the coldest of cold cases is raising disturbing questions of race, politics and power.

``I wonder if a black man had been shot by a police officer 36 years ago, whether this kind of pursuit through the decades would've taken place,'' said Pannell's Canadian lawyer Julian Falconer, who is not allowing media interviews with his client.

``These are questions which will no doubt be addressed.''

Terrence Knox will never return to the corner of 76th St. and Drexel Ave. on Chicago's South Side. It is where, in 1969, he was shot in his right arm by a man he says is Joseph Pannell.

It's a half-hour drive out of downtown Chicago, past tony Navy Pier condos on Lake Michigan and massive McCormick Place, site of the tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention, where television cameras captured images of police attacking anti-war protestors.

As you approach the South Side neighbourhood where Knox was shot, you see the Cheap Store, the New Dorchester Hotel (``Transients Welcome'') and a mural picturing a young African-American boy with the words: ``Don't shoot. I want to grow up.''

These were mean streets. The Black Panthers never managed to make significant inroads here and the neighbourhood remained the turf of the Black P-Stone Nation, an often-violent alliance of street gangs.

In his victim-impact statement filed in Toronto court, Knox said on the afternoon of March 7, 1969, at the request of neighbourhood school officials anticipating violence, police officers had been asked to stop youths who looked of school age. One of them, he said, refused to be searched.

 While he was radioing an officer for help, Pannell shot him three times in the arm, Knox was reported as saying in news reports after the incident.

He was just a 21-year-old police cadet studying law enforcement at St. Joseph College in East Chicago, Ind. when he was shot. Now he says he's just recovering from a heart attack and his right arm remains paralyzed from the 1969 incident.

He was drafted by the military in 1970, but was rejected because of his injury. Knox later blamed the shooting for hurting his policing career. When it came to promotions, the Chicago police department was known to give preferential treatment to military veterans and Knox complained publicly after failing to be promoted to sergeant in 1974.

``I feel like I'm being penalized for doing my job,'' Knox said at the time. ``I left half my arm on the street when I was shot and now I think I'm getting a raw deal.''

He ended up working in police intelligence, where investigators were compiling thick files on Black Panthers like Hampton. Nothing has yet been presented in court to definitively link Pannell to the organization.

 Knox left the police force less than a decade after the shooting to become head of security at a Chicago hospital.

Joseph Coleman Pannell grew up in Washington, D.C., where he briefly attended Howard University. His mother, Pauline Gray, remembers his passion for African-American history.

At an early age, he became interested in the life of Frederick Douglass, the famed abolitionist, orator and journalist who also lived in Washington and was active in the underground railroad, helping former slaves flee to freedom in Canada.

``He read everything he could get his hands on about Douglass,'' Gray recalled.

In addition to his love of reading and writing, she said, he also had a love for sports, especially track and boxing. He was fast enough to be offered a scholarship to Bowling Green University in Ohio and tough enough to have been offered a pro boxing contract at the tender age of 16.

By 1969, Pannell was 19 years old and AWOL from the navy, living on the South Side in an entirely African-American neighbourhood with a rich history. One year earlier, businesses on Chicago's West Side had been torched during the rioting that followed the April 4, 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. When the smoke cleared, there had been 3,120 arrests and nine civilians killed, six of whom died from bullet wounds. Ninety police officers were injured.

 One of the lingering memories of the riots was then Mayor Richard J. Daley's orders to Chicago police: ``Shoot to kill.''

Marc Kadish was a lawyer in his mid-twenties when he first met Pannell in 1970. He remembers his former client as a man of many interests. But few things, Kadish says, interested him more than politics.

``We were both being motivated by some of the same things, such as opposition to the war and a desire to have society changed,'' recalled Kadish, 62.

``The same currents that affected many people in the late '60s were affecting he and were affecting me. But we faced them from different backgrounds and different experiences. So I found him to be very engaging, very intelligent."

In a 1973 newspaper account, an unidentified lawyer described Pannell as a poet. ``My client has a great many talents,'' he said. ``And it's a shame to confine him to jail when he can better use his talent for writing poetry for the black community.''

Early news reports in Chicago did not describe Pannell as a Black Panther. His case was written about a dozen times in the Chicago Tribune before he was finally connected with the organization in December 1977, when he was described as "reputedly a Black Panther."

The Panthers, founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, were prone to revolutionary, often violent rhetoric and had bitter enemies in both local street gangs and the police force. But they were also known for their community initiatives, like their free breakfast program for children. The FBI was said to have been responsible for the group's eventual demise, stirring rivalries within its numerous factions.

 In an affidavit filed last year after Pannell's arrest, Kadish stated that some Black Panthers referred Pannell to him in the 1960s, but that he was not a member.

Former Panther Bill Jennings, who worked at the party's national headquarters in Oakland, Calif., and describes himself as the ``party historian,'' says he can't recall Pannell. Neither could some 200 former Panthers who attended a recent reunion in Chicago after Pannell's arrest in Toronto.

"His name came up and people said he was not a member of the organization,'' Jennings recalled in an interview, noting that many non-Panthers helped out in the breakfast program. "I don't know why they are trying to say he was a party member."

`My client has a great many talents. And it's a shame to confine him to jail when he can better use his talent for writing poetry for the black community.'

Unidentified lawyer in 1973 news report speaking about Joseph Pannell

 
 Had Pannell pleaded the case at the time, he likely would have served a few years in jail and then gotten on with his life, Kadish said. Instead, the two decided it was worth fighting, although they couldn't always agree on tactics.

The lawyer says there was one bone of contention in their relationship. While Kadish just wanted to get him acquitted, Pannell wanted him to focus on larger issues of social injustice.

Said Kadish: ``He had an ideological way of looking at the world that he and I came to disagree with.''

Pannell subsequently jumped bail and was recaptured.

 A second court date was just days away in the summer of 1974. Kadish was returning from defending members of the American Indian Movement at the Pine Ridge Reservation at Wounded Knee, S.D.

"His trial was set on a day or two after I got back, and he simply didn't show up," Kadish recalled.

Pannell apparently fled the country alone and Kadish says they haven't spoken with each other in more than 30 years.

Terrence Knox has clearly been frustrated by Pannell's freedom.

 Pannell, who was arrested shortly after the shooting, skipped bail in 1971. And it was Knox who arrested him in 1973.

 But Pannell fled again after being freed on $10,000 bail. This time, he headed north to Quebec.

Knox sued Pannell in civil court for his injuries and a circuit court judge awarded Knox the forfeited bond, minus $1,000 in court costs. The Cook County Board blocked the transaction and Knox never received the money.

His interest in apprehending Pannell has never waned.

Lt. Tom Keane of the Chicago police's cold-case squad says officers began working on the case last spring after Knox called senior members of the force.

``Knox made some inquiries into the hierarchy of our police department,'' said Keane. ``In our office, two people worked on it full-time under supervision of the sergeant.''

 According to court documents, Canadian authorities soon matched fingerprints from the 1969 crime scene to those of a ``Mr. Freeman'' who was arrested and fined $300 in 1983 after failing to pay duty on a camera he brought into Quebec. The record of that customs case is what brought eventually Pannell's freedom to an end.

Keane, who has been a police officer for 33 years, said this is the coldest of the cold cases he has seen reopened.

 ``Wish you'd send him back,'' he said. ``The wheels of justice can turn slowly.''

Pannell's lawyer, Falconer, said it would be tough to stage a trial today for the 1969 shooting, as witnesses have died and evidence has been destroyed. Falconer told the Star that "the complete mishandling of evidence" means that "an otherwise clear case of self-defence on the part of Joseph Pannell" now becomes "a matter of his word against that of a police officer.''

He said he is also concerned that Knox appears to be playing the dual role of victim and police insider. ``Terrence Knox appears to be driving this entire process and that may or may not be a problem,'' Falconer says. ``But popular wisdom is that, for obvious reasons, we usually don't have involved parties manning investigations.''

But Knox insists the case is about victims' rights.

``I hope, think, that the Canadian system is sensitive to understand that victims have rights,'' he said.

 ``I know you have a pretty good judicial system up there.

``He's had over 30 years to stand trial, to present his case, and he's chosen to flee.''

Natericia Coehlo didn't know her husband back in 1969. Born in Portugal and raised in Montreal, she is a stranger to Chicago's West and South Sides.

 Coehlo is, however, very familiar with softball diamonds. For years, Coehlo and her husband, a man she has known as Gary Freeman, travelled with their children, pursuing the sports dreams of their daughter. She has gone on to win a softball scholarship to a Buffalo college.

``We have probably been to every softball diamond in this area — to Niagara Falls, to the east end,'' she said. ``That's our life. Very boring people. We are not exciting at all.''

She smiles at her use of the word "boring," perhaps at the happy memories or perhaps at the irony.

Their children have been their central focus. "Our life has been about them. Raising them, being the best parents that we can be."

Coelho, like her husband, is a librarian. On July 27, Pannell came to pick her up from the Asquith St. entrance of the Toronto Reference Library.

``I could see shadows,'' recalled Coehlo, who goes by the nickname Terrie. ``I thought he was being mugged. I opened my door because I thought he was being hurt.

``The guns, the dogs ... All I could hear was the dogs barking. They had Gary down on the ground.''

While the incident was chilling, Coehlo said she thinks the police handled it safely.

``I wasn't mistreated,'' she said. ``I'm grateful that they didn't hurt him and I wasn't hurt either. I don't think that just because you're a cop, you're a bad person.

 ``I don't think that being a cop means you're a good person either."

Coehlo said she met her husband at Concordia University in Montreal in 1979 and doesn't know much about his Chicago days. In court, she said that before they were married in Vermont in 1982, Pannell told her his real name.

`Please send him back

 here so that I can have

 my day in court.'

Terrence Knox

Shooting victim and former police officer

 
 While he told her he was sympathetic to the Black Panthers' programs of neighbourhood empowerment, she said he assured her he was never a member.

``The first time that he actually met a Panther was when he was arrested,'' Coehlo said.

She remembers that he has painful memories of discrimination dating back to when he was a child, growing up in Washington, D.C. If his lawyers allowed him to be interviewed, she said, "he would probably talk about having to ride in the back of the streetcar."

Coehlo said he would also likely tell the story of having to take his younger brother to a department-store washroom when he was about 6 years old.

"He went to the coloured washroom and that was filthy, filthy, filthy. There was no way he was bringing his little brother there."

 It was a desire for cleanliness, not an attempt to make a political statement, that pushed him to take his little brother into the white washroom.

They were chased out of the store by a man, who shouted: "You two little niggers! What are you doing?"

"It was quite traumatic," Coehlo said. ``He lived in a clean house, a clean environment. Why would he want to go otherwise?"

She says her husband is someone who is totally devoted to family, is articulate and knowledgeable and loves the music of Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and many others. The death of legendary jazz singer Sarah Vaughan in 1990 inspired his poem, ``Bon Voyage, Sarah'':

 Long ago

her voice escaped

 Into a trajectory that

bounds upon nebulae

surges through black holes

& courses towards

the edges of eternity ...

Extra-terrestrials

will trace the honey

back to our little

turbulent stone & think

its inhabitants to be

the pollen carriers

of the universe ...

Coehlo describes her husband as a man who loves running and cycling with his children, and had the discipline to twice complete the Montreal Marathon. He didn't pressure his children into sports, she said, though his son also went on to win an athletic scholarship and play in the CFL for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats as a wide receiver.

 She says the man she loves is deeply moved by the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his belief that, "All men are great because all men can serve."

Coehlo cringes at the thought of her husband spending time in Toronto (Don) Jail, where he slept on a bottom bunk, near an open toilet, or in the cell he now shares with another inmate in a super-jail in Penetanguishine.

She says it breaks both of their hearts to be only able to meet once a week, for about 20 minutes, with a thick pane of Plexiglas between them. They talk by phone, and when their time is up, the phone simply cuts out.

"It's almost like your life support system has been cut. It's a deep sadness that I cannot describe."

Coehlo declined to comment on the incident in 1969 that changed her husband's life, other than to say:

"He was not just going to stay there and allow himself to die. I'm not going to tell you more ...

 ``That day, Joseph Coleman Pannell lived no more ... He came over to Canada to start a new life.