Minnesota Man's Pain Remains After Police Run-In

By Curt Brown, Washington Post

October 14, 2007 — Sprawled on his stomach outside a gas station in Golden Valley, Minn., Al Hixon had a police officer's boot planted on his neck and pepper spray shot deep into his nostrils, scorching his lungs. Moments earlier, Hixon had been pouring oil into his blue Jaguar -- a quick stop on what was going to be an ordinary Saturday of shuttling his daughters to birthday parties.

"I couldn't breathe, and was vomiting mucus and gasping for air," he said. "I thought I was going to die, and asked: 'What did I do? What did I do?' "

Police were responding to a report of a robbery at a bank outlet inside a supermarket near the gas station. And Hixon -- civic- minded, well-educated and black -- had suddenly become a suspect.

"If this is a black thing, you've got the wrong black man," Hixon remembered telling the officers. He said that one told him to shut up, adding: "That's what you all say." Except the 911 dispatcher had told officers repeatedly that the robber, who took $7, was white.

It has since been a harrowing two years for Hixon, 47. For months, he sat around and stared, growing distant from his wife and three children. Flashbacks led to treatment for depression. The personal drive that prompted him to start a construction company and win awards for his volunteer work withered into missed appointments and apathy.

He never imagined he would have to endure such treatment living 1,000 miles north of his childhood home in segregated Alabama.

So much about it still doesn't make sense.

A federal jury agreed last month, awarding him $778,000, including $450,000 in punitive damages. It's one of the largest excessive-force jury awards in Minnesota, and the case is rekindling questions about whether police are as colorblind as they should be.

Hixon has made a career of renovating kitchens and homes, but he has found rebuilding his life a trickier project. With help from mental health professionals and neighbors, his "healing process has gone from a crawl to a shuffle," said his wife, Sheri, a social worker.

Golden Valley business leaders urged Hixon to become president of their Lions Club this year, a step toward his attempt to reengage in his community.

"I was living a middle-class lifestyle in a nice neighborhood with a nice family," Hixon said. "Everything was okay. Then I took my beating. It's been a journey, and it's been difficult to go from what I considered a normal life to all this."

He hasn't driven the Jaguar in two years, considering it bad luck, and wishes he never took it out of storage on what started as such a normal April day in 2005.

Hixon checked on a carpet installation that morning. Then he went to remove his car, which he had stored in the garage of a neighbor. Hixon turned the key and smelled smoke. So he drove to the gas station and bought oil.

It was 1:45 p.m. and his head was under the hood.

In the blur that followed, Hixon was surrounded by gun-pointing Golden Valley police officers responding to the bank robbery. He was thrown face down on the pavement and handcuffed.

Officer Mario Hernandez shot pepper spray into his lungs before Hixon was tossed into the back of a squad car.

Soon after, officers apprehended the bank robber and arrested two alleged accomplices in a nearby van. The accomplices were black.

Eight jurors, all white, began their deliberations in St. Paul, Minn., on Sept. 13, sifting through the contradictory testimony of Hixon and the police. At one point, two jurors even got down on the floor to reenact the handcuffing scenario.

"The officers' story didn't make sense at all," said juror Jean Shonka, 65, a retired school secretary from Bloomington. "He wasn't threatening them."

The case was about excessive force, not race. U.S. District Judge Richard Kyle had limited the trial's scope, ruling that police had a reason to believe Hixon could have been involved in the robbery.

"We didn't care that he was black, white, purple or green," Shonka said. "Our feeling was, no matter what the circumstances, no human being should be handled that way."

Hixon, who grew up in Birmingham, Ala., in the 1960s, has memories of church bombings and police with fire hoses dispersing civil rights marchers.

He studied electrical engineering at Tuskegee Institute and was plucked from a PhD program at the University of Florida to join Honeywell in the Twin Cities in 1989.

He met his wife while volunteering at inner-city schools, working with pregnant teens and gang members. He earned a McKnight Award for community service in 1995. When gang activity spread to a Golden Valley basketball hoop a few years later, he worked with police and City Council members to remove the hoop -- and the problems.

After Hixon's run-in with the Golden Valley police, family, friends and neighbors noticed a dramatic shift in his personality. The once-gregarious guy, whose three kids called him "Daddy Bear," had grown sullen. The guy nicknamed "Tent Man," because he erected the tent at his daughters' track meets, was no longer helping with homework.

"He used to be cooking, talking and laughing," said Verna Cornelia Price, a friend. "Afterward, he was just sitting in a chair, distracted and unattached and not saying anything."

Reluctantly, he sought mental health assistance and was found to have chronic post-traumatic stress syndrome and depression.

Now, there are good days and bad. Hixon seems his gregarious self, addressing Caribou Coffee workers by their first names and talking about a Lions Club grant opportunity with the manager of the U.S. Bank branch that was robbed.

Yet after the trial, Hixon slept for most of two days. He takes antidepressants and regularly sees a psychologist and a psychiatrist.

Golden Valley Police Chief Stacy Altonen, police patrol union president Rob Zarrett and the city's lawyer in the case, Jon Iverson, all insist that Hixon's skin color had nothing to do with what happened at the Sinclair station.

What really irks Hixon and his supporters has been the lack of an apology.

"He happened to be in the wrong place, at the wrong time -- and he was the wrong color," said Price, who is black and has a PhD in education. "In our subconscious, we've been socialized to get the black guy in our society because he's supposed to be the problem."

Iverson disagreed: "With all due respect, what happened with Al Hixon wasn't the most important thing that happened that day. It was a bank robbery and three were arrested in association. You can't break the entire scene down into an isolated incident."

Bill Finney, the retired St. Paul police chief, thinks a prompt apology might have quelled the dispute. He recalled a 1990s SWAT- team drug bust in which his officers busted down the wrong door and found a woman on the couch recuperating from surgery.

"I went over and said: 'Ma'am, here's why we did what we did, and I'm sorry and we'll fix the door,' " Finney said. "I told her we were trying to get some bad actors out of her neighborhood, and 99 percent of the time we do. But this was the 1 percent we were wrong."

The woman never sued.

According to Iverson, Hixon was signaling legal action within a month of the encounter, so lack of an apology needs to be put in that context.

"I can't order people to apologize," said Altonen, the police chief. "The city stands behind these officers."

And Al Hixon continues trying to return his life to where it was before that violent Saturday. When he closes his eyes at night, the scene still replays itself.

"At my age with my educational background, I never imagined something like this could happen to me," Hixon said. "It's something I'll have to deal with the rest of my life."

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