Girl May Have Visited ‘Crack Alley’ : Probe Turns to Drug Area in N.Y. Racial Attack Case

WAPPINGERS FALLS, N. Y. —  The gasoline station on a busy six lane highway near where Tawana Brawley disappeared for four days in November does a booming business--in bumper stickers. For a dollar each, buyers have two choices.

“I’m from ‘Wappingers Falls’ . . . and I didn’t do it!” one sticker proclaims.

“I’m not from Wappingers . . . and I didn’t do it either,” reads the other, designed for visitors.

In the more than four months since Tawana, a black 16-year-old former high school cheerleader, was found dazed and wrapped in a garbage bag near the Wappingers Falls apartment her family had recently vacated, tensions have risen as scores of criminal investigators, demonstrators and news gatherers from around the world have converged on this tiny village in Dutchess County north of New York City.

Tawana, who charged that six white attackers--including a man with a badge--sodomized her, scrawled racial epithets on her body and chopped her hair, has become the focus of intensive and controversial state scrutiny; in addition, she has become both a celebrity and a cause.

Comedian Bill Cosby and Ed Lewis, the publisher of Essence magazine, have offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to arrests in the case. One day, the doorbell rang at the Brawleys’ new apartment here. It was heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson, who promised Tawana a $50,000 college scholarship and gave her the top-of-the-line Rolex watch from his wrist.

But many residents of this community of neat private homes, apartment complexes, shopping centers and dwindling farmland in the Hudson River Valley have grown increasingly skeptical and bitter as Tawana, after initially telling her sketchy story, refuses to cooperate with investigators and maintains a resolute silence on the advice of her advisers and attorneys.

In an interview with The Times Wednesday, the teen-ager’s mother, Glenda Brawley, insisted that her daughter will continue to remain silent. Before Tawana speaks, she said, a special state prosecutor appointed by Gov. Mario M. Cuomo must be replaced.

“We still need a special prosecutor so we can get the case on the road,” she said. “I don’t see any results except to call a grand jury.”

Probe Turns to ‘Crack Alley’

In recent days, the focus of the investigation has moved across the Hudson River from Wappingers Falls to an area of Newburgh, N. Y., known to police as “crack alley.” The three blocks of South Street, bounded on one end by a cemetery and the other by a steeply rising hill, could well be a tough section of Harlem uprooted and shipped upriver. Detectives are looking into reports that Tawana may have visited South Street during the time she was reported missing.

According to police, one of the reports came from the teen-ager’s own aunt, Juanita Brawley. On Nov. 24, when the aunt contacted Newburgh police about Tawana’s disappearance, she told the officer who interviewed her that unidentified friends had seen Tawana in the South Street area. The police asked for a picture of the teen-ager to circulate to officers on the beat.

But the family did not bring the picture until four days later, hours after Tawana had been found. The gap is especially puzzling to investigators, who wonder if they were being manipulated.

“She may have been abused, but not by six whites,” one detective close to the case contended. “It’s like misdirecting attention from where it should be placed.” Increasingly, investigators are focusing attention on Newburgh’s thriving drug trade in an effort to determine whether there is any link between her disappearance and reputed local narcotics traffickers.

‘Wasn’t Into Crack’

However, Marlo Roberts, who said she was one of Tawana’s friends, dismissed such suggestions. Seated on the stoop of a house on South Street, Roberts, 18, said that she and Tawana would sometimes sit on the stoop “laughing and joking.” She called Tawana “a nice person” and said she “wasn’t into crack or nothing like that.”

“All the white people are trying to get together and cover up for all the cops who did that to her,” she charged.

As Roberts talked, an apparent drug deal was going on a few feet away. A young man in jeans reached into the back of a vehicle parked at the curb and took out a small paper bag. He ran to the window of a truck that paused momentarily and gave the driver the bag. He was only two doors away from a building with window signs urging “Down with crack.”

“There are crack houses around here,” Roberts said, adding that Tawana had occasionally visited the area with Todd Buxton, her former boyfriend, who lived in a nearby housing development. On the day she disappeared, Tawana visited Buxton in the Orange County Jail in Goshen, N. Y. Buxton, 17, was serving a six-month sentence for reckless endangerment. He had fired a gun at another teen-ager.

Vanished After Bus Trip

After visiting Buxton, Tawana caught the last bus back to Wappingers Falls, abruptly getting off near the service station that now sells the bumper stickers. It was then that she dropped from sight.

The racially charged stalemate in the case began after Tawana, her lawyers and her constant adviser, the Rev. Al Sharpton, a pastor without a parish, refused to let the high school student speak with the media or cooperate with authorities.

Sharpton has accused Cuomo of racism and “allowing bigotry to run rampant” in the state. He has sought to make the case a national “litmus test for justice” and, with no success, to interject it into the presidential campaign. Efforts to reach Sharpton for this story were unsuccessful.

Tawana’s refusal to talk first frustrated a local grand jury and then New York State Atty. Gen. Robert Abrams, who was named special state prosecutor by Cuomo. The governor appointed Abrams after Dutchess County prosecutors withdrew because of an unspecified conflict of interest.

Investigator Arrested

In a bizarre twist, one of Abrams investigators assigned to the case was arrested late Tuesday in Brooklyn on charges of selling three ounces of cocaine to an undercover narcotics officer. Through a spokesman, Abrams said the arrest of William West, 39, “will have no effect on the case whatsoever.”

Sharpton and Tawana’s lawyers have charged that Abrams cannot conduct a fair investigation and have staged demonstrations, marches and news conferences--all designed to gain public support for their position. They have supervised Tawana’s activities, even to the point of moving her to an undisclosed site to avoid any contact they cannot control.

In Wednesday’s interview with The Times, Tawana’s mother refused to discuss her daughter’s whereabouts or any specifics of her story, but she voiced approval of Sharpton, even though many civil rights leaders have criticized his tactics.

“I could care less what people think about Sharpton,” she said. “They’re more concerned about Rev. Sharpton than (about) these attackers running around here with badges attacking people.”

‘Little Clown Shows’

Such sentiments have been a polarizing influence here. At the apartment complex where Tawana was found, Donna Boone was playing recently on the swings and sliding board with her young son and daughter. “Everybody’s getting pretty frustrated with the lawyers running around starting little clown shows,” said Boone, who is black. “The people who did it to her are sitting around laughing.”

Laura Vino, who lives in the building the Brawleys occupied before they moved, agreed.

“There’s been a lot of misunderstanding,” said Vino, who is white. “What started out possibly not as a racial problem is now turning into one . . . . Now, it’s getting to a point where people are very hostile about it.”

Some of those people are buying the bumper stickers, she said. Over 1,000 of the stickers have been sold.

“Everybody just wants to get the whole thing solved and get rid of it,” Vino added. “If this happened to this poor girl, then we hope the s.o.b.s pay for it. If this happened to her, then I’d personally go and see them be hung. But there are so many stories. You just don’t know what’s true.”

A special state police task force and the FBI have the same problem.

After Tawana was found outside the apartment building that her family had recently vacated, laboratory tests were conducted to determine if she had been sexually attacked. No evidence of an attack was found, but investigators said it was possible that the evidence disappeared over the four days she was missing.

Inept Investigation

Detectives found evidence that marijuana and hashish had been used in the empty apartment, and the heat had been left on. However, they found no evidence that the teen-ager had used drugs. Some ineptitude in the initial investigation has complicated later scrutiny. For one thing, the apartment door was left unlocked by local law enforcement officials after Tawana was found on the grounds outside the building. Thus, it is impossible to know whether evidence was added or removed from the apartment.

When the ambulance crew members took Tawana to the hospital, they found wads of cotton-like fibers stuffed in her nose and ears. But these were discarded at some point in the effort to revive her with smelling salts and cannot be tested in a forensic laboratory.

Another complication is the lack of communication between local law enforcement agencies. In large measure, Newburgh, just 60 miles north of New York City, has become a county seat of crack. Dealers from as far away as Miami have been arrested in Newburgh. Even though the drug business draws customers from several nearby communities on the other side of the Hudson River, police departments in those jurisdictions have little interaction with Newburgh, a veteran detective said.

“This could be the Pacific Ocean,” the detective said, gesturing toward the Hudson River.

Inquiry Continuing

Even without Tawana’s vital cooperation, the inquiry goes on. The initial Dutchess County grand jury heard testimony from a number of witnesses. In an interview, one of the witnesses recalled the day Brawley’s stepfather, Ralph King, showed up at the courthouse where people were waiting to testify. “He was very hostile,” the witness said, noting that he had shouted racial epithets against whites.

Investigators would like to know more about Tawana’s family life and why friends have indicated that she was worried about going home the night she disappeared. But they remain stymied. They would also like to find the friends to whom Tawana’s aunt had referred in her initial missing person report.