After his name appeared on a hit list, J. Tom Morgan and his family were under constant surveillance. In an exclusive essay, he reflects on that time
Credit: J. Tom Morgan
On Dec. 15, 2000, Derwin Brown was shot to death in his own driveway, three days before he was to be sworn in as sheriff of DeKalb County, Ga., one of the largest counties in metropolitan Atlanta. I was the elected district attorney. When I went to the crime scene later that night, I noticed a bouquet of roses strewn on the driveway. I later learned sheriff-elect Brown was bringing home roses to surprise his wife Phyllis for her birthday the next day.
At that time, I did not know that the investigation and prosecution of the case would take 20 months. I did not know it would end with a sitting sheriff accused of ordering the assassination of the man who’d beaten him at the polls. And I did not know that my own name was on a hit list.
After learning that, an investigator who worked in my office went with me everywhere except inside my own home. My daughter, a teenager, stopped inviting friends to our house so that they wouldn’t be questioned by law enforcement. My 12-year-old son started crawling past windows in our house. My wife was caring for her aging mother, working full-time and making sure we still made it to our kids’ sporting events and piano recitals. I’ve told the story of the murder and prosecution in the book A Rainy Night in Georgia. The story of what my family endured — because of me, because of my job — has come to light while writing the book. Turns out, they were protecting me from their own fears.
Credit: J. Tom Morgan
At Thanksgiving that year, an investigator from my office joined us at the table. He had two concealed pistols on him. We told our guests he was a friend with no family nearby and nowhere else to go for the holiday.
But my kids knew better. They had always been a part of my life as a prosecutor and elected public official. My daughter designed my campaign yard signs and learned how to drive by traversing DeKalb County to put them up. Her school was visible from my office window, and she kept her tennis gear in my office since it was on the way to practice. My kids grew up playing in the courtrooms on the weekends and taking field trips to my office with their classes. I didn’t understand until much later how much they were managing on their own as I was managing this case. My daughter has told me since that there were things she didn’t share with me at the time so I wouldn’t have one more thing to worry about while I was trying a case that could get me killed.
I spent that entire period thinking I was the one protecting my family. It didn’t occur to me until then that they’d spent it protecting me, too.
There is a weight to that I still haven’t fully worked through. The investigators guarding me, the people who worked in my office and were willing to take a bullet for me, were people I cared about — we worked together, we were friends and neighbors; I’d been to their weddings, held their children. They didn’t sign up to put their lives between mine and whoever wanted me dead, and yet they volunteered to do that without question. My own children absorbed a version of the same thing without being asked either, and did it well enough that I didn’t find out until I sat down 20 years later to write about it.
If I could go back, I would have done things differently. Maybe I should have moved out of the house, but at the time, I didn’t want to disrupt my family any more than I already had. I underestimated the risk — we all did. Nobody thought someone would actually kill a sheriff-elect, either, until they did.
The case ended in a courtroom in my hometown of Albany, Ga. in Dougherty County after the case was removed from DeKalb County due to excessive pretrial publicity. I stood at the podium and read the verdict aloud, on live television, in the same courthouse where I was sworn in to the bar.
While writing this book and reading the court transcripts with my daughter across the table from me, I kept coming back to how much of this case depended on people who never agreed to be part of it. The investigators. My wife. My kids, doing the mental math about what to tell me and what to keep to themselves, at ages when they should have been in school focused on learning real math.
We are still, I believe, the best system of justice in the world, and we are on a bumpier road than I’d like. Holding people in power accountable takes prosecutors willing to take real risks. It also takes families willing to absorb what those risks cost, usually without being consulted, and often without the person they’re protecting even knowing it’s happening.
I found that out from my own children, 20 years after the fact.
Credit: J. Tom Morgan
HIS DAUGHTER’S SIDE
We had protection when someone tried to kill my Dad’ is not a common icebreaker. I was 16 at the time, driving myself around a four-square-mile town where you can’t go to the grocery store without knowing half the people there, and we were living a movie-style drama in real time that I wasn’t allowed to tell any of my friends about.
There were things I didn’t tell my Dad back then either. Not because I was scared to, but because he already had a murder case and a hit list. He was facing his own mortality, and he sought justice anyway; the least I could do was to keep it together. I remember once, driving down Clairemont Road in Decatur, Ga., when I lost it. I broke down in tears; I was angry; I hit the steering wheel. I pulled over, with my brother in the car, and cried. Then, I calmed down, I got back on the road, and I kept going.
“I think of this time whenever I hear of threats against our elected leaders, or when cases come into the news and seeking justice is on the shoulders of a district attorney. I think of the people not in the news: the families behind the scenes, the kids who are living with fear, who are living through a trauma. Because of my own experience, I have become more grateful for the selfless and risky work of dedicated public servants and more empathetic to the emotional impact on their families.
Credit: Prometheus
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