American Warlord (11 page)

“That was his first-time killing,” he testified.

Cindor Reeves said the rumors that Chucky killed prisoners for sport enraged his father. And when Bernice learned of her son’s forays to the battlefront, she also grew livid, Reeves recalled. “She was so angry, but Chucky apparently enjoyed it.”

The details of what Chucky saw and did in the summer of 1992 are secrets he is determined to keep. What is clear is that the father-son reunion had introduced him to a world with fundamentally different notions of right and wrong, law and order, power and powerlessness. He returned home to Orlando forever changed by the experience.

One fall afternoon in 1992, a pretty thirteen-year-old named Lynn Henderson walked home from school with a friend.
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Lynn was still in junior high, a petite Korean-American girl with large, round brown eyes, a shy smile, and a soft voice that trailed off as she spoke. Their route took them along Kensington High Boulevard in Pine Hills, a quiet street of drab single-family homes set back by parched lawns and lined with looming yellow pines. The block was the portrait of the stultifying boredom of the suburbs just outside Orlando’s city center, silent except for the hum of traffic in the distance, the residents largely remaining behind closed doors or on screened-in back porches. Lynn had grown up not far from there in a three-bedroom ranch house with a swimming pool tucked in a cul-de-sac near a pond called Horseshoe Lake. Her parents—a Korean mother and an American father—had raised four children in their Pine Hills home after moving to the area in the 1980s. Lynn was the youngest of three sisters.

As they walked by, a voice called out to the girls. Lynn looked to see a boy sitting alone on the front steps of one of the larger houses on the block. She didn’t know him, but something about him immediately struck her.
He’s obnoxious
, she thought. Nonetheless, the girls stopped. Lynn’s friend knew him: she played Pan—the traditional Trinidadian music—with him in his stepfather’s steel drum orchestra.

Chucky was lean but broad-shouldered, with strong arms and a knowing smirk. He’d arrived home from Liberia weeks earlier, and his return to school had not gone well. That afternoon he was at home for a specific reason: he was under house arrest, with an electronic monitoring device strapped to his ankle to ensure that he didn’t stray into the streets of Orlando. The anklet he was wearing, Lynn would soon learn, was the take-home prize for a brush with the law after returning from Liberia. It kept him confined to his home, but didn’t prevent him from asking for Lynn’s number as she walked by.

The racial barriers that had once existed in Pine Hills and that might have separated the two teens had collapsed by that time. In Lynn’s house, race was never an issue. Her father, as an American serviceman, had met her mother, a South Korean citizen, while serving in U.S. Army Intelligence in South Korea. The family had moved to Orlando, like many others, from the Northeast. Lynn was bused to a school where her first friends were largely African-American—many of them from West Indian families. She was neither intimidated nor impressed with the older boy who was asking for her number; she just saw him as a juvenile delinquent.

Chucky offered little to counter that impression. Two years older than Lynn, he should have been enrolled at nearby Evans High School. But by the time he was fourteen, he’d simply stopped attending school altogether. Despite her initial repulsion, something about Chucky convinced Lynn to begin seeing him.

Chucky ran with a tough crew of Pine Hills kids—a group who called themselves the Blunt Headz.
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Most of the boys had family roots in Haiti, Jamaica, or Trinidad, and all had had more than a few encounters with the law. One story about an arrest was something of a local legend. Chucky and several friends drove to the mall in upscale Winter Park and, once inside a department store, grabbed clothing and bolted, stopping only to smash the front window as they tried to make their escape. Their caper was hardly a success, but it had earned Chucky the pedigree of being something of a criminal.

Over the next few months, Lynn began sneaking over to Chucky’s house in the afternoons, telling her parents, who both worked, that she was at her friend’s house. Chucky remained confined under house arrest at the time, though she didn’t know the details of his legal situation—and didn’t care to ask. For all his reputation and tough-guy swagger, he showed kindness and tenderness to her. She saw another side of him: a teenage boy who came off more like a grown man, who had presence despite saying very little, who commanded fear and respect within the neighborhood. She was, by her own admission, naïve. They spent hours in his room, listening to music and talking. “He was a bad boy,” Lynn said. “But he was always nice to me.”

Initially, Chucky’s family life didn’t come up in conversation. But as Lynn spent more time at his house, she came to know his parents. Bernice was kind to her, but Lynn also saw her “very verbal, very aggressive” side, a contrast to the quiet, hardworking demeanor of Roy, to whom she remained married. Lynn noticed that though Chucky had taken his stepfather’s name, he never used it. He went by Charles or Chuck, and to his parents, he was Charlie. Even though he was known to most as Chucky, he took offense when people he was not familiar with used it. Eventually she learned that Charles was his father’s name and that Chucky had taken a trip the prior summer to Africa to visit him, an experience Chucky had little to say about at the time. Like many Americans, Lynn knew little about Liberia back then. The name Charles Taylor meant even less to her.

As their relationship developed, however, she began to see a darker, more volatile side to Chucky. He remained extremely close to his mother, though the two fought often. This volatility carried over to other relationships. Lynn noticed Chucky’s “wishy-washy” relations with others—one moment he would be close with a person, the next they would be on the outs. Lynn wasn’t scared away by any of it, though. In fact, the more time she spent with Chucky, the closer she felt to him. What began as a teenage crush, over the course of the school year, turned into something completely different.

“I was totally, totally in love with him,” she recalled.

An average Saturday night for Lynn included a stop at the nearby roller-skating rink, the Funtastic Skating and Entertainment Center. The rink drew hundreds of kids every weekend, some as young as four, from the surrounding neighborhoods, for what one local preacher described to the
Orlando Sentinel
as a “powder-keg situation”: horny, unattended, and often armed minors from different gangs converged on one location.
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From Lynn’s perspective, it was relatively harmless teen fun, but the
Sentinel
’s reporter was aghast at the scene surrounding the dance floor, where “the littlest ones watch, eyes wide, index fingers curved to mouths, while kids as young as eight crouch, bump and grind as if to simulate sex. Floor-level speakers that tower over their heads pound out songs about sex and violence from groups such as 2 Live Crew.” Often a night at the Funtastic would be punctuated with violence. In most cases, these were minor scuffles, but in at least one incident the rink was the site of a shooting. “All the fights were about nothing,” a member of the sheriff’s gang unit told the
Sentinel.
“This is where they try to impress other kids by fighting.”

Orlando had set up a dedicated program to cope with children like Chucky called Treatment Alternatives to Street Crime, or TASC. Chucky stood out among the crowd of hoodlums he ran with because of his experience in Liberia. The events of that African summer remain a closely held secret—one that Chucky was reluctant to share with the few people close to him, including Lynn. His stepfather saw Chucky as a “tough” but “normal” kid. For Bernice, the problem was simple: Chucky moved with the wrong crowd.
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But in September 1993, following a scrape with the local police, court officials ordered a mental health assessment of the boy.

The case officer knew little about Chucky other than that his juvenile court records showed “an extensive history of aggressive criminal charges.”
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When the two sat down, Chucky came across as extremely guarded. But as they spoke, a picture began to emerge. The counselor suspected that drugs and alcohol fueled some of Chucky’s criminal impulses, but there was something deeper at work as well: he had difficulty controlling his anger, and as Chucky acknowledged, he’d even considered killing himself.

In fact, Chucky had already tried to take his own life. The suicide attempt was a family secret—he never brought it up to Lynn. Instead it was Chucky’s mother who eventually confided to her the details of what had happened. One afternoon, shortly after mother and son had returned from Liberia, Bernice discovered Chucky lying in the bathtub bleeding heavily from his wrist. He had cut vertically, slicing through flesh and tendons. Bernice pulled him from the bathroom, brought him downstairs to their car, and rushed him to a nearby emergency clinic. No clear event had precipitated Chucky’s attempt on his life: no fight, outburst, or insult appeared to have pushed him over the edge. The family’s response to the suicide attempt was unusual according to Lynn: Chucky was not hospitalized and received no medical or psychiatric care beyond physical therapy. Between Lynn and Chucky, the incident wasn’t open for discussion. It represented a vulnerability that she otherwise didn’t see in her boyfriend, who even as an adolescent sought to portray himself as manly and deserving of respect. For Chucky’s stepfather, the suicide attempt blindsided him. “For any parent, when a child does something like that, it’s terrifying,” Belfast recalled.

According to Lynn, however, Bernice ascribed the suicide attempt to something beyond her control.
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During Chucky’s summer visit to Liberia, one of Charles Taylor’s former wives had given him a gold ring. The ring, Bernice explained, was cursed. “She thought it was black magic,” Lynn said.
The ring
had pushed Chucky to attempt to take his own life, Bernice told her. It was a telling statement. In some Trinidadian traditions, where Baptist Christian churches often melded European and African mysticism, mental illness is attributed to curses and demonic possession. This superstition, as one study noted, served to provide “escape from unpleasant reality, and diminution of guilt by projecting blame onto an intruding agent.”
⁷

In Trinidad, the cure for a curse like this was a “bush bath,” a mixture of roots and herbs concocted as part of a prayer-filled ritual.
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Chucky, however, faced a different kind of healing process. He bore deep scars on his wrist from the suicide attempt and had to work with a physical therapist to regain the full use of his hand.

It was a missed opportunity for Chucky’s family to pursue the psychological causes of his pain. His mental health assessment only touched on his behaviors: the frequent run-ins with the police, the suspected drug and alcohol abuse, the violence and aggression. A psychologist would have likely tried to understand whether these behaviors reflected deeper problems: whether he was narcissistic, callous, or manipulative; whether environmental factors were at work, like an unstable environment at home or the rejection of a parent; in short, whether he was demonstrating age-appropriate antisocial behavior or was developing into a psychopath. Even if those signs had been discovered, however, Chucky would have likely gone undiagnosed. In 1993 the American Psychiatric Association did not permit the diagnosis of patients under the age of eighteen with any type of antisocial personality disorder.
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The mental health community was split on the point; some viewed adolescence as a transitional period where socially deviant behavior may be isolated, while others saw it as the moment when lifelong disorders first emerge and when prevention of future behaviors can be pursued.

In any case, Chucky continued on his own trajectory, his parents unable to rein him in and blind to the risk that his antisocial behavior would become more dangerous. Ample evidence pointed to this possibility. Like other cities around the country, Orlando was experiencing the lethal combination of children and guns, and in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Pine Hills became a front line in this crisis.
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In one incident, two ten-year-old children and a twelve-year-old were arrested for breaking into a home and attempting to steal shotguns. In another, a Pine Hills homeowner was surprised when a barbecue was hurled through his front window; moments later teens in ski masks stormed the house. Before the homeowner could stop them, a teen opened fire, shooting him in the thigh. One of Chucky’s neighbors, a seventeen-year-old boy, was shot twice in the back as he left a local fair by two teens who peppered his car with 9mm and .45-caliber pistols.

On the night of February 25, 1994, nearly a year and half after he first met Lynn, Chucky got his hands on a .38 automatic pistol.
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He walked along North Pine Hills Road with two friends, seventeen-year-old Daniel Dasque and Philip Jackson, a twenty-one-year-old who had been arrested two years earlier after leading Orange County sheriff’s deputies on a high-speed chase through Pine Hills. The young men made their way past the one-story Eglise Baptiste Philadelphie Church, toward the Indialantic Drive intersection. Chucky wore a red sweatshirt and black baseball cap. Tucked into his pants was the pistol. He was not the only one armed, according to a police report; either Jackson or Dasque held a concealed stock barrel .410-gauge shotgun.

At around eight-thirty p.m., the trio spotted a lone teenager walking toward them. Steven Klimkowski had grown up nearby but did not know Chucky or his friends. He had only just stepped out of his house. Within moments, Dasque confronted him and demanded money. Klimkowski replied that he didn’t have any.