Endless Evil: The Drug War's Continuing Collateral Damage, Part 1

In September 2009, 28-year-old Jonathan Ayers pulled into a gas station in Stephens County, Georgia, to withdraw money from an ATM. Ayers, a pastor, had just given $23, all the cash he had in his pocket, to Johanna Barrett, a drug addict alleged to be a prostitute to whom Ayers had been ministering. His purpose was to help Barrett pay rent at the motel where she was living with her boyfriend. According to friends and family members, it wasn’t unusual for Ayers to give the money he was carrying to help those to whom he was ministering get out of a jam.

Shortly after Ayers returned to his car from the ATM, a black Escalade tore into the parking lot. Three police officers, all undercover, got out of the vehicle and raced toward Ayers’s car. The startled pastor started his car and attempted to flee the parking lot. As he pulled out of the gas station, his vehicle grazed Officer Chance Oxner. Officer Billy Shane Harrison opened fire, putting a bullet through Ayers’s window that struck the pastor in the stomach. Ayers continued to drive, fleeing down the road for about a thousand yards before eventually crashing his car. He died at the hospital. His last words to his family and medical staff were that he thought he was being robbed. The police found no illicit drugs in his car, and there was no trace of any illegal substance in his body.

The police officers were part of a multi-jurisdictional drug task force. They had been following Barrett, who they say was selling small amounts of illicit drugs to support her own habit. They latched on to Ayers when they saw him hand her money while she was under surveillance. Rather than investigate further, at which point they would have discovered that Ayers was a pastor with no criminal history, they chose to confront him as if he were a violent fugitive on the lam. Subsequent investigations by the DA’s office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation found no wrongdoing on the part of the police. It took a lawsuit by Ayers’s widow and some reporting from a local TV news reporter to discover that Harrison, the officer who shot Ayers, had received no training in the use of lethal force. In fact, he had so little training that under Georgia law he wasn’t legally permitted to carry a gun or work as an active-duty police officer. Even now, while Abigail Ayers’s lawsuit is still pending, there has been no disciplinary action taken against the officers involved in Jonathan Ayers’s death. He is collateral damage in America’s drug war.

Ayers’s story is too familiar. Consider Isaac Singletary, an 80-year-old man shot and killed by undercover police in Jacksonville, Florida, in 2008. The cops were posing as drug dealers, soliciting clients from Singletary’s front lawn. When Singletary came out of his home with a rifle to scare off what he thought were loitering drug pushers, the undercover cops panicked and killed him. Once again, no one was to blame. Jacksonville Sheriff John Rutherford described Singletary as “an honest citizen trying to do good.” Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida called Singletary’s death one of the “challenges in fighting crime.” The officers who killed Singletary were cleared of any blame.