A deeply satisfying read that is the true crime version of a courtroom thriller novel.
It happened long before the Black Lives Matter movement had a name. Before George Floyd. Even before Rodney King, ;at a time when the wrongful 1967 sentencing of Ruben Carter was barely acknowledged beyond Bob Dylan’s 1975 ballad, “The Hurricane.” This book’s subject, of a racist white cop terrorizing a black citizen, had a twist that differentiates it from the above-mentioned tragedies: this time, a cop died as a result of the racially charged altercation.
It was a Sunday, late afternoon, in the spring of 1985. San Diego. In a section of the city predominantly populated by Black people, police patrolling the area were on the lookout for a young Black kid who was reported to be armed when he had some kind of run- in with another guy on the street, in front of witnesses, in an incident that seemed to be gang related. Meanwhile, a 23-year-old Black man was driving a handful of friends and acquaintances back from an outing at a public park. A cop who saw the pickup truck filled with young people of color decided they looked like Crips or Bloods, and that one of them might be the pistol-brandishing guy they were told to locate. The officer connected with another cop driving in that vicinity and the two police vehicles, sirens and lights now going, followed the truck as it pulled up in front of someone’s home.
And then a vicious confluence of factors and events resulted in a death. The factors: one of those policemen, and the one who took charge in approaching the citizens in the truck, was a racist white hothead named Donovan Jacobs; and the driver of the truck, the one whom Jacobs approached first, was a mentally unbalanced guy named Sagon Penn, who happened to be proficient at the art of tae kwon do. The events: Jacobs started by insulting Penn by way of insinuating he was a gang member (he wasn’t, nor was anyone else riding in the truck), Penn refused to take his license out of his wallet when Jacobs demanded to see the card, Penn tried to just walk away from Jacobs, both cops started beating Penn, Penn stunned the officers by being able to ward off their baton blows with his martial arts mastery, an enraged Jacobs upped his attack on Penn, Penn got hold of Jacobs’s gun … And then what happened, happened. In front of a small crowd of witnesses.
You can read about the incident and its multi-layered aftermath in Peter Houlahan’s true crime book Reap the Whirlwind: Violence, Race, Justice, and the Story of Sagon Penn, due out from Counterpoint Press later this summer. In the deeply researched, exhaustive book, Houlahan (his 2019 title Norco ’80, about a bizarre bank robbery, is a superb read) explores the story from a multitude of angles and often in the voices of those involved.
As the city of San Diego and the justice system tangled with the question of who was ultimately at fault for the death that occurred that spring day in ’85 (it was the other cop, not Jacobs, who got killed by Penn’s gunfire), a whole plethora of aftermath events occurred. There were two long court trials that included hung juries and a celebrated defense attorney with a flair for the dramatic, some members of the police willing to speak out against their colleague Jacobs and others who covered for him, a war between conservative and liberal influential members of the local media, an incident wherein a former cop who blamed Jacobs for the other officer’s death may or may not have been the target of a hit job meant to make him pay for speaking out against another policeman, and on and on. The big question everyone faced and that so many had conflicting opinions about: was Penn the victim of racial profiling and police brutality, who merely acted in self defense, or were Jacobs and the slain officer simply doing their job in a legal manner when they encountered an unruly potential suspect who refused Jacobs’s routine request of handing over his driver’s license and then utilized karate on the cops before stealing one of their weapons and using it on them? Imagine the opposing televised orations we’d hear on Fox News and MSNBC if this episode played out now.
Houlahan’s documentary-esque book reads like a thriller and offers a panoramic view of the original altercation and everything that occurred as a result.
Houlahan’s documentary-esque book reads like a thriller and offers a panoramic view of the original altercation and everything that occurred as a result. The author spent four years talking to involved parties, reading newspaper articles and other relevant materials, and just generally unearthing the many layers that were at hand. We readers come away from the book with a strong sense of time and place in the San Diego of the mid-to-late 1980s, we feel we know Sagon Penn and Donovan Jacobs and many other people who were or became integral to the drama, we get the racial divides existent in the city at the time, we react to the many stunning twists and turns that came out of the two extensive trials. And Houlahan is balanced in how he presents the story, not taking sides but rather telling all that he learned from a wide variety of angles and via many opposing perspectives and allowing us to draw our own conclusions as to who were the real victims and villains in the tragedy.
Reap the Whirlwind is a deeply satisfying read that is the true crime version of a courtroom thriller novel. It’s likely to stir up powerful emotional responses from any reader who has strong feelings one way or the other about matters like racial discrimination, police brutality, and deaths of cops in the line of duty.
The morning as I write this, my Twitter feed is filled with posts about George Floyd, as it’s the month and day of his death from four years ago. What would’ve happened if George Floyd had been able to free himself from Derek Chauvin’s choke hold, grabbed Chauvin’s gun, and started firing, resulting in the death of one of the other cops on the scene? This book tells you what did happen when that kind of scenario played out in San Diego in 1985.
Brian Greene writes short stories, personal essays and critical pieces on books, music, film and visual art. His features on noir fiction and films have been published online by Criminal Element, Crime Reads, Literary Hub, The Strand, Crime Time, Crimeculture, Mulholland Books, and others, and in print by Stark House Press, PM Press and Paperback Parade. He lives in Durham, North Carolina. briangreenewriter.blogspot.com/Twitter: greenes_circles
Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of NoirCon 