Long, Hard Road to Justice, Freedom

Rickey Dale Thomas had never been to Sulphur Springs, Tex., a place where he says “you can just feel the racism,” until the day he landed in the Hopkins County Jail, one of 100 inmates in a space built for 46.

Texas authorities believed differently. They insisted that Thomas and two buddies from Arkansas were in Sulphur Springs on Oct. 20, 1989, and jumped an 89-year-old woman and her daughter in the driveway of their home, running off with a purse filled with $27.

That evening, Texas state troopers stopped a truck with three men inside. Two had identification showing they were Darrell Carter and his half-brother Anthony Carter, from Hot Springs, Ark., the same hometown as Thomas. The third had no ID and said his name was Richard Thomas.

That set of circumstances set into motion Thomas’ arrest, conviction and life sentence after a trial in which nobody thought twice when a white witness to the robbery testified that he saw “three niggers” attack his wife and her mother.

Hot Springs police said Thomas ran with a group of men led by Darrell Carter who were constantly in trouble.

While Thomas indeed had been in and out of trouble with the law since 1983, he said he had done nothing to deserve a life sentence that could have kept him in prison for a minimum of 15 years. And he had pulled together convincing proof to show he hadn’t committed the crime.

Even when the prosecution switched the indictment two weeks before trial, saying the attack had occurred Oct. 20 rather than Oct. 29 as originally charged, Thomas submitted a stack of alibis.

He had a computer printout from the Chula Vista Fuddruckers restaurant where he had worked the day of the attack, a handwritten payroll log, and several witnesses who saw him in Chula Vista that day. All but one of the witnesses could not afford to travel to Texas and the court refused to pay expenses.

Jurors were confused over the records but not about the testimony of Texas state trooper Henry Sibley, who picked Thomas out of a photo lineup and insisted that he had seen him with the Carters that night. A signed Dallas motel registration form also bore the signature of a Richard Thomas.

And jurors noted a guilt by association. The $27 robbery was just one of a series in Sulphur Springs during 1989 and police had set their sights on Darrell Carter as a suspect, joined by the FBI because Carter was from out of state. They had been tailing the Carters the night they stopped the truck.

After a three-day trial, the jury found Thomas guilty. A separate jury convicted Anthony Carter in October, 1990, sentencing him to 80 years in jail. Darrell Carter is serving time on unrelated federal charges.

From the time of his conviction last October, resulting in a life sentence, until recently, Thomas had little hope that he would ever be freed despite a barrage of publicity in his favor.

Sometime this week, however, it is likely that he will be free, ending a nine-month ordeal that amounted to a case of mistaken identity and what many describe as blind justice in an East Texas town.

After the television show “Street Stories” aired a segment on Thomas 10 days ago, and indicated that a man named Ricky Knox knew Thomas and might have been using his name, an FBI task force in Salt Lake City found Knox living in their city with an outstanding warrant.

After his arrest a week ago, Knox signed a written confession, which prosecutor Frank Long, the district attorney in Hopkins County, wants to scrutinize before he goes to a judge to free Thomas once and for all.

Thomas and his supporters are furious with Long, arguing that he had plenty of evidence before and after trial that proved Thomas’ innocence. Long did not returned several calls for comment.

“He has had the opportunity to do the right thing for a long time,” said Clifton (Scrappy) Holmes, a Texas attorney who is helping Thomas with his appeal. “This never should have been tried. Everything that’s been done to prove Rickey innocent has been from the media or from us. Frank Long has done nothing.”

The travails of Rickey Thomas are rooted in what he and his supporters believe is the deep prejudice of East Texas, where they say it mattered little who did time for the crime, so long as it was a black man.

“East Texas is not well-known for its fair judicial process,” said John Boston, a camera store manager in Austin who has made several appeals to the governor and attorney general of Texas on Thomas’ behalf. “It is unbelievable what has been done to this guy.”

To say that Thomas had never crossed the law would be untrue.

He was arrested in 1983 for burglarizing a Hot Springs, Ark., pawn shop with Anthony Carter and received five years’ probation. By late 1986, he was back in trouble again, having stolen a couple of tires and a briefcase with a gun inside after someone refused to pay him for a stolen auto body part.

He did 16 months of a three-year sentence starting in April, 1987, and by the time he was paroled in August, 1988, he was ready to leave town. He notified his parole officer in Arkansas that he wanted his parole transferred to Tennessee, where two of his brothers were living.

While in Memphis during November, 1988, he had two misdemeanor drunken driving arrests and Tennessee authorities decided not to extend his 30-day parole transfer. An Arkansas correctional officer said Thomas was to be back in his home state no later than Feb. 24, 1989.

Rather than return to jail, where he probably would have had to serve another six months, Thomas grabbed his younger brother and fled as a fugitive to Chula Vista, where his sister lives.

He took a job at Wendy’s in Clairemont, where he met Debbie Lopez. Thomas flipped hamburgers and Lopez stocked the salad bar.

“I said to her, ‘How about going to a little Italian restaurant where we can have some nice red wine?’ ” Thomas recalled. “The next thing you know, we have a baby daughter. Now I want to do the right thing and marry Debbie.”

Clairemont was too far a drive, so Thomas applied for a job closer to home at Fuddruckers. He was hired the day he requested work, one of the restaurant’s more enthusiastic employees.

“He was one of the best workers we ever had,” said Ted Felber, one of the Fuddruckers managers who remembered Thomas working the day of the Texas robbery. “In fact, he was probably the most hard-working kid I’ve ever been associated with in my entire life.”

After nearly two years in California, Thomas was pulled over by Chula Vista police for driving without his headlights on on Jan. 1, 1991. Discovering a warrant for his parole violation in Arkansas, police sent Thomas to San Diego County jail, learning that he also was wanted in Sulphur Springs.

Thomas fought extradition to Texas, but agreed to go back to Arkansas, where he knew he would have to serve time. Chained in a van with 10 other prisoners who had to be picked up and taken to various spots throughout the country, Thomas was taken from San Diego to Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Colorado and Texas before arriving in Arkansas.

Without any winter clothing and with only one shower during the seven-day trip in mid-March, Thomas arrived in Arkansas, where he worked on the “hoe squad, picking peas on my knees and grabbing cotton,” he said. “Everything you can do with a hoe we did.”

Realizing that Texas still wanted him, Thomas filed a motion for a speedy trial and allowed extradition to proceed.

His conviction came from a jury that included one African-American. His life sentence was based on his past criminal history and strong Texas laws punishing those who commit crimes against the elderly. The sentence also meant he was to serve a minimum of 15 years in prison.

He entered Hopkins County jail on July 28, 1991, and says he has been “a hostage ever since.” The time he was to serve in Arkansas has been served in Texas under an agreement between the corrections departments of the two states.

“They say there is justice for all, but it’s not true,” he said. “You can have all the laws you want, but what’s the value if they work the wrong way? I’m no saint. I’d never say that. I messed up, but I paid my dues. I do not owe society a thing.”

Even after last October’s trial, attorneys for Thomas dug up new information. They found new witnesses who passed polygraph tests after stating they had seen Thomas in Chula Vista the day of the Texas robbery, including someone who cashed his paycheck that day and someone else who produced a record of Thomas picking up his dry-cleaning as well.

Last January, a Texas judge denied a motion for a new trial.

Life in jail has been six to a cell, one hot meal a day, not enough room to eat, and a few altercations with the other inmates. For $5, Thomas was able to buy a bunk. But he has almost unlimited access to a telephone, which he uses continuously to place collect calls to relatives, friends and reporters.

Since his conviction, word of Thomas’ plight has spread throughout Chula Vista. His co-workers, neighbors and attorneys contacted local and national media, held press conferences, and even staged a barbecue to raise money for Thomas’ defense. So far, about $3,000 has been collected.

“Someone who didn’t have the family support Rickey had or didn’t get the same amount of press might never have gotten out,” said Chris Reeber, who was Thomas’ public defender in San Diego. “This shows how someone can get railroaded, all at the hands of one or two people.”

It was Thomas’ appearance on the Phil Donohue show earlier this year that provoked the most attention. At that point, a contingent of people headed by John Boston in Austin staged rallies calling for Thomas to be freed.

In fact, Thomas and Lopez are scheduled to fly to New York to reappear on the Donohue show two days after he is released. The two days will be spent in Austin, Thomas said, “so my girlfriend and I can get reacquainted.”

Thomas is overwhelmed by the reaction his case has generated.

“You hear people saying this is a black-and-white thing, but then you have all these races and nationalities standing up for me, standing up for a cause,” he said. “I am thankful for everyone who has believed in me. It makes me feel good that people in the United States, no matter what their color, can be so kind.”

Of all the joys that freedom may bring Thomas in the next few weeks, Sea World is at the top of the list.

“I remember how excited I was the first time I went,” he said. “And I have a little girl who likes fish. Sea World has a whole lot of fish. I want to take her to the shark tank, the penguin tank and to see Shamu.”

Lopez, 22 and originally from Corpus Christi, is planning to fly to Texas this weekend and hopes her fiancee will be released this week, possibly as soon as today. When Thomas entered the Hopkins County jail, Simone was one year and seven months old. She has seen her father only three times in the eight months since.

“She was just starting to walk,” Lopez said. “Now she’s running and talking and brushing her own hair and putting makeup on. Rickey calls all the time and Simone thinks he’s at work. She asked just the other day when he was coming home from work.”

Lopez said they plan to marry sometime before Simone turns 3 in December.

Talking by phone in the Hopkins County Jail, Thomas thinks about what he will tell his daughter when she’s older.

“I’m keeping a scrapbook and I want to tell her that her daddy had to suffer,” he said. “Some of my best moments have been taken away from me. Simone might have knocked something over and I’d want to tell her I’d whip her butt or she’d do something really nice and I’d want to compliment her. But those moments are lost.”

When he gets back to Chula Vista, Thomas hopes that Fuddruckers will give him his old job back. If not, he may have a movie deal or two. Perhaps someone will write a book and he’ll receive royalties.

If not, it doesn’t matter, he said.

“I’m from the South and I’ve got a strong back,” he said. “I’ve picked cotton and I can do a lot of things. But I’m in no hurry. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do on life.”