Civil WrongsUndue Process: The killer wore a badge

Civil Wrongs Season 6

For a long time, there was a piece of their father that brothers Solomon and Daryle Hatley felt they couldn’t access.

Many of their memories of Eugene Hatley involved his drinking, when he seemed to battle invisible demons that his sons couldn’t understand. 

The first big clue to his secret came just after his funeral in 1984. The boys’ mother told Daryle, then just about to graduate high school, that his father Eugene had suffered a horrific loss as a child when his father, Phillip Hatley, was killed by Memphis police.

Eugene was just five years old on that winter morning in 1939 when an officer, drunk and in a rage, chased his father through their home and then shot him in the back as he fled through the backyard — all within earshot of little Eugene.  

“She just felt like he never could really get past that trauma in his life,” Daryle Hatley said.

It wasn’t until 2024 that the Hatley brothers were able to fill in the blanks and get a fuller picture of their grandfather’s death and understand its enduring effects across generations. 

Elena Kuran, a law student studying racial violence, had reached out after spending a semester digging through archives. 

“The first call I ever had with Solomon, I presented my research and I remember he was quiet for a moment and he just reflected that there had been a silence around what happened to his grandfather,” said Kuran, a researcher from the Civil Rights & Restorative Justice project at Northeastern University in Boston.

The Hatley brothers grew up in the same neighborhood where their grandfather was killed yet never knew he was shot while fleeing a rookie officer with little supervision or training. The news came almost as a solace. 

“I accepted it as a deliverance, a relief, a place of solitude to know what was going on,” said Solomon Hatley. “I wasn’t mad at my father, I wasn’t mad at my grandfather. I wasn’t mad at anybody in that. I’m not throwing bricks at the grave, it’s just that I (didn’t) know.”

Police violence and its attendant trauma are concerns woven into the American fabric, yet few cities have struggled as long or as hard with these ills as Memphis. Decades after Phillip Hatley’s death, Memphis police shot another Black person while fleeing. The 1974 death of Edward Garner resulted in a lawsuit that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and, for a time at least, led to major reforms.

Yet decades later, the city’s struggle with police violence remains palpable. Following the brutal beating death of Tyre Nichols in 2023, federal investigators found that the Memphis Police Department still has a significant number of inexperienced officers who lack supervision and the skills needed to de-escalate situations that can lead to violence. 

And now, President Donald Trump is sending National Guard troops and a range of federal agencies here to augment local law enforcement already plagued by community mistrust. While some people believe federal intervention will help reduce crime, others fear the initiative will provide cover for further abuses.

Shot in the back

In 1939, Phillip Hatley, 43, was a mill laborer and World War I veteran living in the Binghampton community, which at the time was just outside the Memphis city limits. He was married to Willie Mae Hatley and they had three children: Alma, Eugene, and Robert.

On the morning of Jan. 22, 1939, Phillip Hatley was making breakfast with his family when two police officers, Elmer F. Broens and Roy G. McElroy, arrived in the neighborhood —  in uniform and inebriated, despite having just finished a shift. 

The officers would later deny they were drunk and, as newspapers reported, their defense lawyers brought in supporting witnesses. But people in the neighborhood along with four other officers testified that they were. 

The newspapers described Broens as a wiry redhead. Both officers were 26 years old and had spent less than a year on the police force. The officers said they were investigating a robbery in the neighborhood. They forced Hatley outside and into a police car.

A neighbor later testified Broens acted like a “wild man,” beating Hatley and shoving his pistol into his mouth. Somehow, Hatley escaped Broens’ patrol car and fled into his house.

As Hatley ran out the rear door of his house and through the backyard, Broens fired at him from the porch. At first, Hatley was able to get up and continue across the yard. But Broens shot him two more times in the back and Hatley fell over a wire fence shared with his neighbor. 

Phillip Hatley’s wife, Willie Mae Hatley, told reporters that she didn’t see the shooting, but she and the children heard the shots from the bedroom. 

The police commissioner at the time, Clifford Davis, was a former Ku Klux Klansman who would go on to become Memphis’ long-time representative in Congress. Even Davis, a hardened racist, did not condone the actions by Broens and his partner. The newspapers quoted him as saying Hatley’s killing was “inexcusable” and that, “drinking will not be tolerated on the police force.” 

Otis Sanford, a longtime Memphis journalist and author of the book, “From Boss Crump to King Willie,” which covers Memphis politics during this era, said Davis’ motivations were to protect the reputation of the police department.

“Most people didn’t really care all that much when a Black person was killed back in that day,” said Sanford, who also serves as chairman of the Institute for Public Service Reporting’s advisory board. “In this particular case, it was the fact that they were drunk, off duty… all of that made the city leadership say, ‘No, we can’t have this.’”

Hatley was buried in the Memphis National Cemetery a week later, on January 30. The next day, the officers were indicted. 

They were on trial less than a month later. There weren’t many witnesses to the actual shooting, and McElroy was quickly acquitted once it was determined that he was across the street when Broens shot Hatley. 

The newspapers followed every day of the trial. Broens gave dramatic testimony, even stumbling out of the witness box to make his point. His defense? Hatley had attacked him in his patrol car.

“He didn’t shoot him in a close context in the car as self-defense,” said Kuran, the Northeastern University researcher. Instead, Hatley was running away, she said.

After five days of arguments and testimony, the jury took only one hour and 15 minutes to find Broens innocent. 

For Kuran, an aspiring lawyer, the case is symbolic of the checkered history of the U.S. legal system and how it often continues to fail to bring meaningful justice and racial healing. 

“There needs to be recognition that law is a powerful tool for justice, but it’s also imperfect,” Kuran said. “There’s nothing in a courtroom that’s going to make anyone whole right now. It’s how families and affected communities get to articulate their own vision of healing or justice.”

‘Here comes the truth and light’

Equipped with this information, the Hatley family is processing how to apply this knowledge. 

Solomon Hatley is a pastor who often teaches about healing through prayer and Bible lessons on his podcast, TikTok, and a YouTube channel. 

So, when Kuran contacted him about her research on Phillip Hatley, he felt he gained a missing piece of his identity that now could make him whole. 

“And when she started explaining it to me, that’s when it seems like that world of darkness started shedding,” he said. “It just started falling. And now, here come the truth and light.”

The path to that truth and light winds across decades. 

In the weeks after Phillip Hatley’s 1939 killing, the Black community rallied around his 24-year-old widow and their three children. 

The so-called “mayor of Beale Street” Matthew Thornton started a fundraiser to support the Hatley family. Lewis Swingler, the editor of the Black newspaper, Memphis World, joined the fundraising efforts, too. The goal was $1,000, according to another local newspaper, The Commercial Appeal. That’s about $23,000 in today’s money.  

And to seek more support after the trial, Phillip Hatley’s brother, James Hatley, wrote to President Roosevelt, asking him to investigate the killing. 

An official replied, saying that the federal government could not interfere in a state case and wished the family well. 

But for all the support and attention Phillip Hatley’s survivors received, the family did not pass on his story to the next generation.

Daryle and Solomon’s father, Eugene Hatley, was five years old when Phillip Hatley died within earshot of him and too young to fully comprehend what had happened.

The Hatley brothers’ grandmother, Willie Mae Hatley Cason, remarried and had six more children. They spent some time with them growing up, but the story of Phillip Hatley was not passed to them either.

“There’s a silence on this. See, when something is silent throughout a family, it’s just silent. And people don’t want to talk about it because of the trauma,” said Solomon Hatley. “Sometimes, you stop and you say, ‘But didn’t they see …  my dad’s behavior? Don’t they know that that was connected?’ No, they were not as sophisticated back then as we are now.”

But lately, the brothers and their families have been meeting regularly at Solomon Hatley’s house to discuss creating a family foundation to keep his story alive and serve the community. 

“They’re not going to be like my brother and I: shielded in silence of what went on with Phillip Hatley,” Solomon Hatley said.

Before, any time Daryle Hatley’s children would ask questions about their grandpa’s side of the family, their normally talkative father wouldn’t say much. 

“So having that clarity made me really happy,” his daughter Tiara Hatley said. “It just sounds kind of weird because the normal feeling would be grief, but to see my dad finally have those questions answered in his own life, that made me happy to be able to see him happy.”

Another fatal shooting

Thirty-five years after a Memphis police officer killed Phillip Hatley while he was fleeing, another Memphis police officer shot and killed 15-year-old Edward Garner while he was fleeing. 

Garner’s case made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and set a new standard for when police are authorized to shoot people. That ruling could have made a difference for Hatley.  

Edward Garner’s sister, Diana Garner, was 11 years old in 1974 when a police officer shot and killed Edward as he was trying to jump a chain link fence behind a house that police believed he had just burglarized. 

Her father, Cleamtee Garner, carried his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court with the help of local lawyers and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. 

While all the cameras were on her father, she was behind the scenes mourning her protector. 

“My brother, he was my hero,” she said. “He was so good to me. He took care of us.”

Diana Garner and her older brother Charles Garner are the last survivors of the six siblings. 

“Well, Edward, we call him lil’Jean. That was his nickname in the neighborhood,” Diana said. “He was real small. One hundred (pounds) at the max, if it was that. But he minded our parents. Well, I guess he didn’t that night, but we had to go to church, we had chores. And on the weekends, it would be like family day.”

The Garners grew up in the era of “when the streetlights come on, you should be in the house.” They lived in North Memphis and would play outside most of the day when they weren’t at school. 

But on the night of October 3, 1974, Edward was supposed to be at home.  

A few streets over from the Garner home, a woman had called the police because she believed someone was robbing the house across the street. 

Two officers arrived about 15 minutes later and split up to search the property. One of the officers who responded was Elton Hymon. He had joined the Memphis Police Department a little over a year earlier. 

Hymon later testified that as he walked around to the side of the house with his gun drawn, he saw Edward running toward the backyard fence. He told him to stop, hoping that his partner would come around the other side soon to arrest him because there was a fence blocking Hymon’s path to him. 

He said Edward paused for a while. And then he tried to jump the fence. 

So, Hymon did what Tennessee law and police department policy at the time trained him to do: He shot at Edward, a fleeing suspect, with deadly force. 

“We called it the fleeing felon statute,” said Walter Bailey, a longtime civil rights lawyer in Memphis who initially picked up the case. “That authorized using whatever force necessary to stop a fleeing felon. That was the language of it. If he were a fleeing felon, that statute authorized that you could shoot him dead.”

As more police came to the scene, they determined Edward had stolen $10 and a pendant watch. 

Hymon had called an ambulance, but Edward died sometime after 11 p.m. His oldest brother Curtis Garner was the first to see him.

“So, he had to go around there to identify the body,” Diana Garner said. “And man, it messed him up. It did. He was 20 and everybody just changed. Everybody in the whole family changed after that.”

Their father, Cleamtee Garner, couldn’t even bring himself to go to the funeral. 

He had repeatedly coached all of his children on how to act around police officers, to stay alive, she said. He had even turned in Edward when he found out he had stolen from another home, according to his lawyers. 

Legal fight for reform

Amid the heartache, Bailey saw an opportunity to force police departments to require more justification to shoot a suspect other than simply running away.

“And Memphis was notoriously known for that,” Bailey said. “I said, ‘Well, hell, I don’t have to sit there and stomp my foot. I can get up and take legal action.’”

Steven Winter, who back then was a 25-year-old Legal Defense Fund lawyer, said there was little hope that the courts would rule in their favor.  

“Because virtually every court that had ruled on the issue had ruled against us, right?” he said. The “common law fleeing felon rule that police could use deadly force to stop the fleeing felon had been a common law rule literally for centuries.”

Their main argument was that shooting a non-threatening suspect was the same as punishing them, which would violate their right to due process.

“Common sense argument was, you know, the job of the police officers (is) to arrest them and why do we arrest people? To put them on trial,” Winter said. “But if you shoot them, then you can’t put them on trial. So, clearly… it’s disproportionate.”

And in the lead up to the Supreme Court, Bailey and Winter got help from an unlikely place: the police officer who killed Edward Garner. 

Hymon, who is Black, had been on the police force for less than two years when he killed Edward. And in those first months, he said he was caught in between his fellow Black officers who encouraged him to keep his head down and “go along to get along” and many white officers who bragged about abusing Black people.

“We were notches on the gun,” Hymon told the Institute for Public Service Reporting in a rare interview. “And they were bragging about how many notches they were going to get, and try to get tonight, you know, that type of situation. It was just like open warfare on us.”

And since Hymon was the only living witness to the shooting, there was little evidence to build a case around restricting police use of force. 

But in his testimony and deposition, Hymon told Bailey and the court that he was reasonably sure that Edward did not have a weapon. 

“And that’s what carried the day for us,” Bailey said.

Hymon said he agreed with the Supreme Court’s decision to restrict police use of deadly force. He had seen too many police abuses to disagree. 

But he also said, even today, he still feels justified in shooting Edward. He said he was thinking about the possibility that the people inside the house could be injured or worse. 

“I’m just shooting now because I can shoot? No, no, like I said, my main concern was who was left and what the situation was on the other side of the wall. That’s what I was trying to process,” Hymon said.

But during the Supreme Court arguments, Winter argued that the law required that the officer’s actions cannot be judged on what could be happening. “The Fourth Amendment requires police actions to be governed by what the officer does know,” Winter said during the arguments in 1984. 

Henry Klein, who argued for the state, said that the burglary alone should let an officer know that the suspect is violent. 

“The idea that an individual who will break and enter is the type of individual that has a great propensity or likelihood for violence,” Klein told the Supreme Court justices.

But lawyers for the Garner family demonstrated that most burglaries at the time, while serious and frightening, were not violent. 

“The statistics we’ve marshalled in our brief are very, very clear and convincing,” Winter argued in 1985. “Ninety-two percent of all burglaries occur when nobody is home. Only 8% of all (burglars) are armed with guns. Burglaries result in confrontations between the burglar and the victim only 2.8% of the time, and half of those never escalate beyond a shouting match.”

The family’s lawyers again turned to statistics to show that when states prohibit police from killing a suspect for fleeing the scene of a possible felony, it’s better for everyone. 

“Arrest rates do not go down. Crime rates do not go up,” Winter told the court. “The only thing that is affected by a more restrictive deadly force policy is a rate of officer safety and the rate of officer safety improves under these more restrictive policies.”

Hymon said killing Edward was not his intention. He said he was aiming for his torso as police are trained to do, but the bullet went to his head instead. 

After that night, Hymon said he poured his energy into shooting practice so that he would never repeat that mistake. And until his retirement in 2009, he said he never had to fire his weapon again. 

“The grace of God for one thing, but I just never got into those situations again,” Hymon said. “I don’t know how it happened that I can say other than grace.”

Ultimately, the Supreme Court ruled that a police officer could use deadly force only if they have reason to believe that the suspect could kill or seriously injure the officer or others. 

“It’s brought about a significant guardrail on the use of deadly force,” Bailey said.

But Winter said subsequent rulings watered down the decision, especially as qualified immunity for police officers was strengthened. 

“In 10 years after Garner, it was an average of 50 to 75 people per year who didn’t die who would have been shot but for Garner,” he said. “So, it had a very significant impact for a period, but then the Supreme Court started cutting back on it and numbers went back up again.”

Tyre Nichols beating death

The Memphis Police Department has struggled mightily in the decades since the Garner decision. Scores of its officers have been arrested for corruption and violence since 2000.

In 2023, the department found itself back in the national spotlight after five officers assigned to a special unit called SCORPION were charged with beating motorist Tyre Nichols to death.

Now, nearly three years later, controversy surrounds the outcome. Between plea deals and verdicts, all five officers were convicted of federal crimes. But federal convictions for three of the officers are now in jeopardy following a judge’s order for a retrial. In state court, those  same three officers were acquitted of all counts, including  second degree murder charges.

The outcomes have piled trauma on top of trauma, said his mother, RowVaughn Wells. 

“And when they read that verdict yesterday, that was them taking my son’s life away from me again,” she told a group of supporters after the state trial. 

Nichols’ death also prompted a U.S. Department of Justice investigation released a few weeks before the second anniversary of that fateful night.

The federal investigation highlighted problems that went far beyond one isolated case. The 73-page report found that MPD often conducts unlawful stops and searches, discriminates against Black people and uses excessive force. The report detailed that many officers were inexperienced, lacked supervision, and that the department failed to thoroughly investigate allegations of misconduct. 

Micaela Watts, a reporter at the Institute for Public Service Reporting who has been writing about Nichols’ death and fallout since the beginning, said the department had lowered recruiting standards a few years prior when city leadership raised the alarm that there weren’t enough officers on the streets. 

“So, it was an awful perfect storm,” she said. “It was no recruit left behind.” 

The report cited several examples of how Memphis police unnecessarily escalated situations that should have been routine — seriously injuring and sometimes killing them. The Institute for Public Service Reporting asked the Memphis Police Department for comment but received no reply.

Meaningful change in Memphis policing has faced many obstacles.  

A few weeks after the state trial of the officers who beat Tyre Nichols to death, President Donald Trump retracted the report. But local leaders have vowed to continue to implement reforms. Mayor Paul Young opposed one proposal: a “consent decree,” or an agreement between the city and DOJ that creates federal oversight. He said a consent decree would be too expensive. But Young did assemble a task force to address the report’s findings. Yet, eight months after the task force was created, there have been few updates about the group’s work. 

In 2023, community organizers pressed the City Council to pass potential solutions, such as de-prioritizing traffic stops that are not an immediate threat to the public. But less than a year later, the Tennessee legislature blocked its implementation.  

So far, it’s uncertain which specific reform will reduce violent encounters with police. The public continues to hash out what will make everyone safer.

Regardless of how these cases affect the community conversation on policing, families, like the Garners and Hatleys still grieve over what their lives could have been. Even decades later. 

“Man, I miss, I miss him. And he would have been something,’’ Diana Garner said. “Although it was said during the trial, some of the comments were, like, he wasn’t going to be anything. He wasn’t going to have anything but a factory job. That’s mean. To me, that was mean. You don’t know your life (will) turn out,” Diana Garner said.

When Charles Garner talks about the killing of his younger brother, the pain is still evident in his voice. 

“I mean, it was wrong. You don’t do nobody like that. A kid? Uh-uh. That wasn’t right no kind of way you put it,” he said. “It ain’t right. I can’t deal with it.”

As he started crying, Diana wrapped her arm around his shoulder. 

“It’s all right, big bro,” she said. “We got to continue to be strong.”

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