After Inglewood Tussle, Teen 'Has to Move On'

By NANCY WRIDE

Sept. 15, 2002 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Most people know him from a videotape: that kid who got slammed and socked by an Inglewood cop.

His large and close-knit family knows him, in the words of an uncle, “to be the least likely kid in America” to tangle with police.

Donovan Jackson, at 16, is a polite neat freak who irons his T-shirts and fusses over his hair. He struggles a bit in school but dreams of college and a modeling career. He has opened doors for his grandmother since he was 6.

He is also, relatives said, particular about his friends, about baking from scratch, about video games--got to be Wrestlemania 18, Spider-Man. He even wants his Cheetos just so. “He’ll say, ‘I gotta have the perfect ones, unbroken,’ ” said Dominick Wells, 18, Donovan’s cousin and best friend.

With the start of the school year, Donovan has returned to his old routine, having escaped the blistering national spotlight after the July 6 gas station encounter with police. Donovan finished summer school at home, to avoid a storm of questions from classmates.

But two months have passed and now, his family said, he wants life to go on as before.

“He’s doing OK in school; he says it’s going fine,” said his aunt, Nancy Goins. “I’m sure the deep feelings are still there about what happened to him.... Donovan’s life has to move on.”

It is Donovan’s senior year at Leuzinger High, the small public school in Lawndale where he and Wells had a class together last year. The cousins were trained as peer mediators--students who can be called in to defuse peer conflicts before they grow violent.

“We figured peer mediation class would teach us to handle things better and deal with almost any situation,” Wells said, shaking his head.

The irony is not lost on Donovan’s loved ones as the racially charged case continues to play out, with numerous investigations underway and criminal cases pending against two Inglewood officers.

Donovan’s childhood dream was to be a cop, as was his father’s. His grandmother worked for 14 years for the Inglewood Police Department that would jail father and son in separate cells after the encounter.

“Donovan would say, ‘Grandma, I want to be a policeman when I grow up,’ ” said Cora McGrew, who retired from the department 11 years ago. “I’d say, ‘No baby, Grandma don’t want you to be a policeman. It’s too dangerous; you could get hurt.’ ”

There may never be agreement on how a vehicle code infraction devolved into a donnybrook. It is undisputed that, on that sunny afternoon in July, at least one white officer struck the African American teenager. Several minutes of the episode were captured on tape by an amateur videographer and broadcast around the country.

Police issued questions and commands to Donovan as he returned to his father’s car after buying potato chips and $6 in gas. Officers told an L.A. County grand jury that he had not responded immediately. Donovan told the grand jurors he had complied.

In the days after the video was broadcast, Donovan’s family told reporters that he had a hearing problem and a speech impediment, which could have accounted for any communications gap between him and the officers.

Donovan has made no public comments about the episode, not even while sitting as Exhibit A last month in the second row at a hometown congressional hearing on police misconduct. His media-savvy lawyer, Johnnie Cochran, has kept him off limits.

But in interviews, Donovan’s friends and family tried to explain him.

“I’d like people to know,” said his uncle, Edward McGrew, a hotel chain executive, “that Donovan is a good-hearted, basic, all-American kid ... that has the same dreams as any other American kid--of one day making something out of himself.”

Wells, who likes to dance and hopes someday to be a “funny hard-core rapper,” adds this assessment: “Donovan is just a wonderful person.”

To know Donovan, his family said, is to understand that he doesn’t talk much. He speaks only when he has something to say. Relatives describe his impairment as an “auditory processing disorder” that makes it hard for him to grasp immediately what he hears.

In the days after the gas station ordeal, Donovan’s cousin, Talibah Shakir, 50, a sixth-grade teacher, said, “He’s been in special ed most of his life.” But she noted that he is also in regular classes.

He was one of 35 students in an after-school modeling program last year. Classmates at Leuzinger said Donovan works hard and has a good sense of humor. He doesn’t swear or disrespect his elders. He was never before in any kind of trouble.

“The parents should be commended for raising such a nice child,” said his former special education teacher, Cresia Green-Davis, newly elected president of the Inglewood Unified School District board, at a recent town hall meeting.

Donovan’s father, Coby Chavis Jr., spoke proudly of his son in an interview in the presence of his attorney, Milton Grimes. A plain-spoken man, Chavis called Donovan “a good kid.”

Born in Inglewood, Donovan started talking normally but developed a stutter by age 4 or 5, said Chavis, 41. It was unclear what provoked the stutter, which worsened as Donovan got older. The hearing ailment and resulting learning difficulties went undiagnosed until he reached fifth grade.

“The tests showed he is normal” in intelligence, Chavis said. But by age 8, Donovan “was withdrawing into his shell,” and school officials had him assessed by a speech therapist. He was eventually placed in a special education program, Chavis said.

“When he talks, he sounds a little like a deaf person, but he always responded; he carries on a conversation like anyone else,” said John Minor, 17, who tutored Donovan in science last school year. “He didn’t stutter; it was more like ... he hesitated, especially during a long conversation.”

By all accounts, Donovan is close to his family and spends much of his free time with his father, who works in construction scaffolding, and mother, Felicia Chavis, 39, whose job involves driving developmentally disabled adults to their work sites.

Wells said Donovan’s parents “are fun to be around. His dad plays video games with us, and his mom feeds us, cooks lots of good food.” Donovan, who learned to cook from his mother, taught him to make fried chicken, Wells said.

When Grandma McGrew came home from heart surgery, Donovan stayed with her, cooking, nursing and cleaning. “Mm-mm, that boy can cook,” she said, chuckling. “He’s like me, makes everything from scratch. Nothing from the box.”

Donovan, she said, is an active member of Peace Apostolic church in Carson, where he attends bible study and group outings. “God bless your day,” says the outgoing message on the family’s answering machine.

Donovan’s parents, together about 20 years, had him before they married in 1999, and Donovan was given his mother’s maiden name, Jackson. The parents faced their share of setbacks: Chavis has spent time in jail, and he fathered two daughters, now 7 and 11, with someone else.

A few months before Donovan’s birth, court records show, Chavis was convicted of selling an undercover officer $25 in cocaine. When Donovan was about 3, a woman obtained a restraining order against Chavis after alleging that he had threatened to kill her. No charges were filed.

When Donovan was about 10, Chavis was convicted of interfering with an officer, a misdemeanor. When Donovan was about 13, the family was evicted from an apartment in a rent dispute.

Relatives said they do not believe Donovan was aware of or affected by Chavis’ past. Edward McGrew said Chavis straightened out years ago. Family members said Donovan’s parents have created a loving family that spends almost every weekend with the larger clan.

Donovan’s relatives said that, if he was slow to answer police officers, he was probably paralyzed by panic.

That Saturday unfolded routinely, with father and son playing video games at home in their boxy tan and stucco apartment building in a well-kept Inglewood neighborhood where bars nonetheless cover most windows. By late afternoon, they had been to the Great Western Forum, where Donovan practiced driving in the parking lot (Chavis merely grinned later when asked how it had gone).

They went to visit Chavis’ daughters, but not finding them home, headed to dinner at Donovan’s grandfather’s place. First, they stopped at the filling station about 5 p.m. for gas and chips.

Two L.A. County Sheriff’s deputies noticed an expired registration tag on Chavis’ Ford Taurus. The deputy who initially approached Donovan told grand jurors that he had found the boy’s demeanor--breathing hard with an “angry stare”--potentially combative, and decided to walk him away from his father, to his patrol car. At that point, the encounter turned physical.

Officers Bijan Darvish and Jeremy J. Morse were indicted by the grand jury. They face a criminal trial--Morse on a charge of felony assault under the color of authority, Darvish on a charge of filing a false report by omitting Morse’s having slammed the youth onto a police car. Morse’s defense attorney has said that Donovan, in cuffs, grabbed Morse by the testicles and would not let go until Morse, in pain, slugged him. Donovan has denied grabbing Morse.

Donovan was arrested on charges of resisting arrest and interfering with a police officer (charges that were later dropped). Chavis was charged with driving without a valid license and registration, and will be arraigned Nov. 14.

Donovan was traumatized by the beating, according to his father, going to sleep each night on his parents’ bedroom floor and wedging a chair under the front door.

“I’ve noticed,” said his aunt, Nancy Goins, “that he seems to want to cling to both his parents more.”

Donovan’s family and friends said police assumed the worst about Donovan and his father, and misread the teenager’s fear as fury, because they are black. The parents have filed a federal lawsuit, alleging that father and son’s civil rights were violated.

“If anybody is a poster boy for changing a flawed law enforcement system,” observed Green-Davis of her former student, “it would have to be Donovan.”