New York Daily News, by Jimmy Breslin

The other defendants left the information booth and pay telephones and ran toward the revolving door yesterday morning as Bernhard Goetz was propelled into the harsh bright light awaiting him in the courthouse lobby. His frail face was without expression and his thin body swayed as the pack of cameramen shoved him. A stranger's eyes peered through large wire-framed glasses.

Goetz never noticed the shadow that covered everything in the building at 100 Centre St. in lower Manhattan. It had been cast by the intensive care unit on the ninth floor at St. Vincent's Hospital, where during the night an alarm went off on a heart monitoring machine and Darryl Cabey, age 19, with one of Goetz' bullets in his back, slipped into a coma.

Nobody in court yesterday morning had been told of this. As Goetz floated across the courthouse lobby, then went up a flight of steps and into a courtroom, he still appeared as a person who had caused many to react in a manner that the most strong-limbed or persuasive of tongue never could achieve. Goetz had people advocating loose fantasy as a new subdivision in law. 

A white, sitting in a corner of a subway car, approached by four young blacks, was asked for $5. He shot them all. Left them on the floor and jumped off the train.

Those who thought it was fine for Goetz to shoot a black in the back, even if it paralyzed the guy for life, not conceivably could be asked to raise their cheers for death.

Goetz came into the courtroom yesterday and sat at a table on the left side of the room. He wore a brown leather jacket with a fur collar, a tan shirt open at the collar and Levis. His lawyer, Frank Brenner, a much shorter man, sat next to him.

The railing in front of the spectators' seats was live with artists who sketched Goetz on tan paper. On the other side of the railing, the desks were covered with the pink, yellow, blue and white papers that run the court world. Now the court workers began to assemble. Four court officers in white shirts, then three women around a desk and then two more clerks came in through one door. Another door opened and a man with an eyeglass case in his shirt pocket peered in, then stepped out, and after him were two women. Three corrections officers walked out of another door. Suddenly, there were 16 people in front of the courtroom.

Goetz, who tried to handle the law alone, kept talking to his lawyer.

One of the women in the front of the room, a woman in a gray pinstriped suit, walked over to the railing to talk to Enid Gerling, an attorney waiting for another case. She wore a tan hat.

"I was telling my friend in Brooklyn that you are the only polite court officer," Enid said.

The woman in the gray pinstriped suit smiled. Then she shook her head as a court stenotypist came in hurriedly, carrying his machine.

"I've got to say something to him, coming in here late," the woman in the suit said.

At 9:35, court officer Tom Pizzo stood in front of the bench and called for everyone to take seats. The judge, Jay Gold, wearing a tan jacket and no robes, walked out.

"Bernhard Goetz," Pizzo said. "One ten/one twenty-five twenty five. Two sixty five oh three."

The 265.03 is possession of a gun. The 110/125.25 is attempted murder in the second degree.

As long as the heart monitoring machine as respirator on Darryl Cabey at St. Vincent's Hospital remained steady, the two numbers on Goetz remained the same. A death at the hospital could change this immediately. The penal code number for murder in the second degree is 125.25. On Goetz' sheet, all they would have to do is cross out the "110," which stands for attempted.

An assistant district attorney, a woman in a brown plaid, said that the people requested adjournment. Then Brenner, Goetz' lawyer, said something to the judge that couldn't be heard. 

"What did he say?" someone in the spectator's rows asked.

"He said that he had been assigned by the court at the arraignment, but since then he has been retained by Goetz. He isn't court-assigned any more."

Then the judge gave the date for the next hearing as Jan. 16.

"Clear the well," Pizzo yelled.

Goetz's lawyer left and then a few minutes later, Goetz came out of the room and into the hallway. A woman leaned against the wall and smoked a cigaret. Next to her was a water fountain with a paper bag stuffed under it. Goetz, with court officers around him, moved down the hall, past a door that had "Men" printed on it in Magic Marker.

Then he was going down a flight of stairs with cameramen shoving. A female court officer wearing a white shirt and handcuffs was directly behind Goetz. She elbowed a cameraman out of the way and pushed Goetz out into the 16-degree air. Goetz walked through the sun to a car. He still did not see the shadow of a hospital room that suddenly could cover his sky.

Some minutes before eight o'clock yesterday morning, Joseph Kelner, attorney for Bernhard Goetz, walked through the chill air and into the studios of "Good Morning America" on W. 67 St. Shortly thereafter, he was on television all over the country and, most prominently, in the five boroughs of this city.

He was putting the case of Bernhard Goetz into politics.

And then at 9:30 a.m., here was Goetz himself. He wore a three-quarter length sheepskin jacket and a vertical striped shirt with a button-down collar, open at the neck.

Gone was the brown leather jacket with fur collar that we saw on Goetz when he turned himself in to police in New Hampshire, and at his first court hearing a week ago.

At yesterday's hearing, Goetz's posture was different. The shoulders were up, not slouched like some common billy goat. The chest was expanded. And his head was up and there was a glow of strength to a face that once seemed so vulnerable.

Watching him, a keen observer understood immediately. Not only was the case of Bernhard Goetz into politics, but so was Bernhard Goetz himself.

If the public decides to stop mouthing and to put its votes behind Goetz, perhaps it can make this 37-year-old subway rider the Mayor of New York.

One of the four shot by Goetz, Darrell Cabey, 19, went into his ninth day in a coma this morning. His backbone is severed because Goetz shot him in the back. New Yorkers claim they stand ready to cheer Goetz' actions. All right, then, let's go all the way. Cheer for gunfire and make Bernhard Goetz the Mayor.

So that people can express their support for Bernie Goetz, who as an expression of law and order shot four young black people on a subway train, two in the back, and didn't even wing a bystander, we print today an important coupon.

If you like what Bernhard Goetz stands for, then let him know. Put yourself on record. You don’t even want Bernie Goetz tried. Forget law, lawyers, judge and court.

Let's draft Bernhard Goetz for Mayor.

No longer will I attack the public will. Instead I print herewith a coupon for the public to show whether we are In a new time, with Bernhard Goetz as your candidate and people applauding the coma of a black he shot In the back.

Many people have suggested this slogan for the campaign—GOETZ: WHAT THEY DESERVE.

We want Bernie Goetz to know how many New Yorkers agree that he should be the next Mayor. The more coupons received from readers, the bigger the response, the more it is possible that a “Draft Bernie for Mayor" movement will gather force and eventually sweep him on to victory.

All politicians say that timing is important to their trade. But this is only the talk of spineless politicians who wait for somebody to fall so that they can step over the body and proclaim their own courage. Bernie Goetz did not wait. He put his own bodies on the floor and then he stepped right over them and thus made his own political timing.

He seems to be a hero at a time when the city has none. And he enters politics at a time when there is no politician around to challenge a Mayor who, despite his mouth that proclaims his invincibility, is quite weak because he has not done the work assigned to a Mayor.

Who knows more about subway shootings, Koch the Mayor or Bernie Goetz?

Who knows how to get things done, Koch the Mayor with his big mouth or Bernie Goetz with a good compact .38?

There are 26,800 New York City policemen and 5,800 civilian employees at a cost to taxpayers of $1,017,000,000 a year.

Yes, that is over $1,000,000,000 for police. Not Including pensions.

Do you get $1,000,000,000 worth of protection?

And there are 3,820 Transit Police, with 338 civilian employees in that department. The cost to taxpayers is $144 million. This doesn’t include pensions.

The total cost of these two police forces is $1,161,000,000.

And there was not one policeman on the No. 2 train when the four young blacks approached Bernie Goetz on Saturday afternoon, Dec. 22, and he shot them all, two in the back, and one of them is in a coma and New Yorkers are cheering Bernie Goetz and paying $1,161,000,000 for police not to be on the train.

What are we paying taxes for, to listen to Bernie Goetz’ gun go off on the seat next to us?

Everyone knows that the most important part of the City of New York, the people riding the subway system, is largely unprotected.

If there can be a motorman and conductor for every train that runs in this city, night and day, then why can't there be two policemen on the train, too?

There is only one Bernhard Goetz. Where are these thousands of policemen? Who cost billions.

When we have Mayor Goetz in this city, there will be none of these questions any more.

We will have only point-blank answers.

That morning, Paul Fava Sr., remembers, with the temperature rising to the 70s and people walking the Bronx streets without coats, his son Paul, 20, spent the morning washing and waxing the family car.

At 1 p.m. his son came in and got dressed in a gray sweatsuit, and the father drove him from their house on Country Club Road to the home of Dennis DeMartino, who lives in an apartment house on Hobart Ave., a block away from the el on Westchester Ave.

"I told him to have a good time," the father remembers. "He was going into the Navy the next day. The recruiting officer from Yonkers was going to pick him up at 6:30 in the morning."

As Dennis DeMartino. 22, remembers it, Paul Fava came into his bedroom and woke him up. Dennis had been home the night before, but had stayed up late.

"Get up," DeMartino remembers Paul Fava saying. "We're going out." 

“Where?" DeMartino said.

"South Street Seaport."

“Why?"

"Because it’s great man,” he remembers Fava saying. “There are people there that bring radios and they chill out. You walk around and see cafes and things."

DeMartino got up and the two had chicken sandwiches and then they got dressed. Fava borrowed a white tank top from DeMartino and put it on under his gray sweatsuit top. DeMartino wore black Levis and a gray and black vest.

DeMartino remembers that he and Paul Fava first started walking over to see a girl named Traci, who lived near Morris Park Ave. They had walked for about 10 minutes when Paul Fava saw two guys he knew who were passing in a car. He whistled and the guys stopped.

"They're two fatties from the neighborhood," DeMartino recalls. 

“Big overweight guys. Paul knew the names. I don’t know the names.”

The two drove them to the girl Traci’s house and DeMartino remembers that Paul Fava went in to pick up $20 that the girl Traci had borrowed from him. He came out, and the two fat guys drove them to the Westchester Square station of the No. 6 line.

DeMartino says he remembers hearing an el train passing overhead as they came up to the stop.

Bus routes start at Westchester Square, where there always are several of them parked near the el stop. As it was a sunny day, the benches around the square were filled with the old, who have made it a popular place to sit. It was nearly 4 p.m. when Fava and DeMartino went up the stairs to the change booth.

“I paid,” DeMartino said. "I have tickets for smoking on the subway and I never paid them. I’m careful about not jumping turnstiles. I pay."

Paul Fava, he remembers, jumped the turnstile. They went up one flight to the downtown platform, where DeMartino immediately lit a Kool cigaret. He remembers he and Fava talking about the girl Traci and then some more about the South Street Seaport.

“It’ll be great," Fava said.

“I’ll go, but I don't know why we're going,” DeMartino said.

DeMartino doesn’t remember seeing anybody else on the platform. He remembers that he wasn’t finished with the Kool cigaret when the cops came.

The police say that they were called by bus drivers who said that somebody was throwing light bulbs from the platform to the street. DeMartino says that he and Fava threw no light bulbs. He scoffs at the idea, saying that both of them were too old. He says whoever threw the bulbs probably got on the train that came into the station while he and Fava were still down on the street.

Robert Francis, 16, a Lehman High School student who also takes weekend courses in art at the Fashion Institute of Technology, remembers that he was standing under the el, in front of a Chinese restaurant, when four or five light bulbs came through the tracks overhead and broke on the street. He is unsure of trains going or coming and he remembers seeing nobody going up or down the stairs. He does remember light bulbs hitting the street. He never heard any other sound.

There are only a couple of 60-watt light bulbs hanging from the roof over the el platform at Westchester Square. The rest of the sockets are empty. People in the area say that throwing the bulbs down is not uncommon.

But the first policeman up the stairs, a policeman answering a complaint about light bulbs being thrown, came onto the platform with his gun out. The police officer was Mervin E. Yearwood, 32. Behind him was Officer William Oates, 37. DeMartino remembers that Oates had his gun out, too, but that it was Yearwood who pointed his gun at DeMartino and then at Fava. Both police officers were black and Fava and DeMartino are white, and in the times in which we live it unfortunately becomes important to say this.

The people who live in Fava's Bronx neighborhood insist that it is their Bumpurs case.

DeMartino heard somebody say, "Get against the wall."

He put his hands against the wall and the officer on him placed a hand flat against DeMartino's back and stood there. DeMartino remembers that he could not see the officer on him, but that he could see Fava and Yearwood.

He remembers hearing nothing. He only remembers that Yearwood’s right hand, holding the gun, disappeared behind the right side of Fava’s head.

He remembers that Fava's knees buckled and his body went down and the head flopped forward and slid down the wall.

He remembers that Officer Yearwood suddenly flopped on the platform and appeared in distress.

“I got no sympathy for him," DeMartino said yesterday. He has been interviewed by the Bronx district attorney's office and is scheduled to be a witness in front of the grand jury that will be asked to hear the case. The policeman, Yearwood, is suspended.

Yesterday Fava's mother, Marianne, 45, was disturbed by this.

“What is to prevent this cop from leaving the country?” she said. She was with her husband, Paul Fava Sr., 46, in the rear of the large health foods store they own on Gramatan Ave. in Mount Vernon, a couple of blocks over the city line.

"I want to call Merola up," Paul Fava Sr. said. “Is this guy under arrest? Are his weapons taken away’ I don't want him to kill himself."

He showed a letter from Merola's office that congratulated Paul Fava Jr. for his testimony to a grand jury that helped send a burglar away for a four-to-eight-year sentence.

“That was his only experience with the law until he got killed by this cop," Paul Fava Sr. said.

At the start, it was over nothing, an alleged $10 sale of pot on a street comer in Queens, and now it has turned into a case that could change the system of law enforcement used in this city.

At approximately 7:30 p.m. last Wednesday, Mark Davidson, 18, was talking to Denise Memminger, 21, on the comer of 132d St and 111th Ave. in South Ozone Park, in Queens.

Both are black. They are from solid New York families. Davidson, in his last year at Martin Van Buren High School, has a mother and brother who work at TWA at Kennedy Airport. His father, a retired postal worker, is in Fort Hamilton Veterans Hospital with bad legs.

Denise Memminger works in the dietary department at Long Island Jewish Hospital. Her father, Raynard, 43. is a night supervisor for United Parcel Service. He has been employed by United Parcel for 19 years. The Memminger name is known in the city’s sports history because a cousin, Dean, played for the New York Knicks world championship team in 1973.

As Mark Davidson and Denise Memminger talked last Wednesday, a gray station wagon pulled up and, as both recall, six policemen jumped out, five in uniform and one in plainclothes. All were white.

They searched Davidson for a marked $10 bill that they said had been given to him 10 minutes before by an undercover cop making a pot buy. Davidson insisted that they had the wrong person. He only had 26 cents in his pocket. The cops then searched Denise Memminger. When they did not find the marked $10 bill, they searched her a second time.

What six policemen were doing out on an alleged $10 pot buy is one small question. How six policemen could be involved in the sale and then manage to miss making the arrest on the spot is another. These points are quite small, however, compared to the charges about what happened next.

The young woman was sent home. Mark Davidson says he was taken to the 106th Precinct. The police already had Joseph Patterson, an older man, at the precinct for being part of the alleged pot sale. Davidson was taken upstairs and says a tall man in a police uniform walked out of an office and demanded to know what Davidson had done with the $10.

Davidson again said he didn't have the money because he was not involved in the sale.

Davidson said the tall man, who appeared to be in charge, took him into a room where, the teenager says, he then was punched in the right eye. Davidson had been to an eye doctor earlier that day for an examination and the doctor now certifies that there was no mark around either eye. Davidson then says that the tall man slammed his head into the wall twice. He says that the tall man then left the room and reappeared in street clothes and with a can of Budweiser beer. Davidson said the tall man again demanded to know about the $10. The tall man called out the door that he would find out Davidson says that when he did not answer, the man put something on his back which gave him an electric shock. He says that he yelled as loudly as he could when he was shocked.

Davidson says he turned around and saw the tall man holding something that was black and fit in his hand and had two metal prongs about six inches long. The man then started to apply the prongs to Davidson's body, front and back, and sent shocks through him repeatedly. Davidson yelled. He says no other policeman entered the room to see what was causing the yelling.

Davidson says that he believes the shocks went on for about 20 minutes. He says he yelled loud enough for anybody in the police station to hear him. He says that he asked to call his mother. The tall man with the instrument shocking his body refused his request, saying that they were not part of a television program. Davidson says the cop threatened to put the shock apparatus to his testicles. At that point, Davidson says, he made up the story about spending the $10 in a store.

After many shocks, Davidson shouted that he spent the $10 in a store on the corner of Linden Blvd. and the Van Wyck Expressway. Davidson says that he made this up in order to get the cop to stop torturing him.

The store owner, Raphael Duran, 39, says that policemen came to his store about 10 p.m. on Wednesday and checked the $10 bills he had in his cash register. The marked bill was not there. Duran said the police did not ask if a young man fitting Davidson’s appearance had been in earlier with a $10 bill.

About the same time, Denise Memminger's father and mother went to the precinct to complain about their daughter’s being searched on the street by male cops twice. Memminger had no pad with him and took down two shield numbers and names on scraps of paper. One was badge number 17937, the officer's name: Aranda. The other was 31698. Memminger wrote down the name as Baladasa.

Memminger said that then a tall cop in plainclothes, who said he was the superior officer in the narcotics unit, came down and was abusive. Memminger says that the tall cop who argued with him fits Davidson's description of the tall man who allegedly tortured him.

“He said that he could do anything that he wanted,” Memminger says of the tall cop. “Then he got into a fight with my wife. I told my wife to shut up. I was on their turf and I didn't want any strange accidents happening to me.”

At 10 p.m. last Wednesday. Davidson was taken to Central Booking at the 112th Precinct in Forest Hills. He was not brought to night court, a half dozen blocks away, until 7 p.m. last Thursday, when he was charged with criminal sale of marijuana in the fourth degree, a misdemeanor. He also was listed as a juvenile offender.

The young Memminger woman had notified Mrs. Davidson of the arrest. Mrs. Davidson went to the police at 10 p.m. Wednesday and was unable to see her son. On Thursday, she retained Marvyn M. Kornberg, who is famous in Queens for his aggressive style. Kornberg began squalling about the electric burn marks on his client's body. In court, the assistant district attorney had the body mark videotaped. A call to the Police Department Internal Affairs Division brought the response that a matter such as this should be turned over to something called the police Civilian Complaint Review Board.

When Davidson was released after being arraigned, Kornberg took him to an office on Queens Blvd.

"Lift up your shirt," Kornberg said.

Davidson lifted his shirt. On his bare skin there were sets of burn marks, of the size and color of burns made by cigarets, in neat twos, as if put there by prongs. There were 11 sets of burns on his chest. Twenty two burns He had 10 sets of bums on his back. Twenty burns. Also, one long bum. which suggested that the instrument was dragged over his back.

"He put them on my rear end, too," Davidson said. Then last Friday, with Queens District Attorney John Santucci overseeing the case. Davidson was examined by a New York City medical examiner, Manuel Fernando. Assistant District Attorney Greg Lasak was present.

The medical examiner said that the burns were caused by electricity and not stabs or cigarets and had occurred within the last 36 hours. The medical examiner said that one long line on Davidson's back was consistent with a person wriggling his body in an attempt to get away from an electric shock.

Santucci then had a search warrant issued for police lockers in the 106th. His staff supervised the search, which was carried out with Internal Affairs officers.

Apparently, the instrument was not found. Kornberg believes it is a stun gun, or an instrument similar to those illegally used at the race track to shock horses.

There now undoubtedly will be a lineup of cops and a grand jury investigation. And, coming at a time of the Michael Stewart and Eleanor Bumpurs cases, the matter of Mark Davidson, allegedly tortured in a Queens precinct, at the least will cause more pressure for a special state prosecutor to be named to handle cases of police brutality. One look at Davidson's body would end most of the opposition to a special prosecutor.

Yesterday in Ozone Park, on a lamppost in front of the 106th, there was a sign for a nonexistent cross-street. Hill St., the sign said. On any other day. this would have brought a smile. Seeing the sign in the gray morning yesterday only heightened the impression that the real police and those on television get confused in the minds of both public and police.

A sergeant named Carl Danielsen was on duty at the desk of the 106th yesterday.

“Is the captain in?" he was asked.

"No."

“Is there somebody in charge?" 

“You’re looking at him," the sergeant said.

He said that none of the officers involved in the Davidson arrest were on duty. He said that maybe a lieutenant would be in by 4 p.m.

In the meantime, a precinct that might be involved in a case of torturing an arrested 18-year-old sat yesterday with only a sergeant in charge. Nice guy, but still a sergeant. Superior officers, who are supposed to keep tight order in the department, were nowhere to be found.

Mark Davidson walked along Queens Blvd. yesterday, past the dry cleaners and the Pastrami King and up to an office building across the street from the courts in Kew Gardens. Technically, he was a defendant on his way to see his lawyer upstairs. In reality, of all the people who have walked this patch of ground before taking up business with the law, Davidson could be the one who could cause the most change in our time.

He is 18 and has never been arrested and he says that policemen of the City of New York in the year 1985 tortured him with electricity. There is evidence that appears to back this up.

His mother, Ladell, her eyes tired, and a friend, Denise Memminger, 22, were with him. Denise had an auburn hint to her hair, wore large earrings and blue jeans and sneakers.

"What did you do all day?" Davidson was asked. He wore a light blue warmup suit and sneakers.

“School."

“He just got home from school before," the mother said. “Give him a bite to eat before we came here."

Last Wednesday. Denise and Davidson were standing on the corner of 132d St. and 111th Ave. in South Ozone Park, an old Queens residential neighborhood. Six cops jumped out of a stationwagon, searched the two, found nothing, then let Denise go and arrested Mark for selling two bags of pot. He was taken to the 106th Precinct. There, last Wednesday night in a second-floor room, Davidson says he was tortured by two cops. He says they used a black electrical instrument that put 42 burn marks on his chest and back. A medical examiner said the burns and the time they probably were inflicted were consistent with Davidson's story.

It is easily the most disturbing story to come out of Iaw enforcement in this city. Torture by electricity represents a collapse into sadism that usually is associated with foreign land, not a New York City police precinct on a street in Queens.

Davidson was on Queens Blvd. yesterday to look at pictures of policemen to see if he could pick out the two who tortured him with the electricity machine, probably something called a Nova 500, which is a small cattle prod.

Davidson yesterday went up to the second-floor office of his attorney, Marvyn Kornberg. He waited there for a call from a district attorney, who was across the street getting photos together.

“Have you spoken to any police?" Mark was asked.

“They talked to a friend of mine," Mark said.

“They said to him, 'Do you know Mark?' He said no. So they said to him, stop lying. He said that he knew me. They said to him, 'You’re a hoodlum, too.'"

“What was your friend’s name?" he was asked.

“Chink. Drina’s little brother."

Somebody in the office asked him, “How clear did you see the faces of the cops?”

Kornberg interrupted. “That’s for a court of law."

“How many times did you ask them to stop?" Davidson was asked.

“I’m not sure. It was a lot.”

The questions were being asked by reporters, who leaned against office walls. Now photographers came in and Davidson was asked to stand up and show the burn marks. He stood and took off his shirt. A big strong handsome kid with these evenly spaced burn marks across his stomach and back. Forty two of them.

“You’re a big kid. How did they hold you down?" he was asked.

“I was handcuffed behind the back."

The lawyer took the electrical device and held it to the young man’s body to show that each set of burns had the same spacing as the machine. Then somebody took the machine off to the side and pressed the button. There was a sharp crackle and blue electricity appeared.

Then the phone rang and Kornberg answered it, nodded and hung up. He told Davidson to put on his shirt and the two walked out of the office. They went downstairs and out onto Queens Blvd., and were immediately surrounded by reporters and television camera crews. If there is anything that can trivialize torture, it is the form of today's news gathering. For as Davidson walked across the boulevard, he was In the same position as any cheap politician or singer or chicken stand owner or whatever it is that constitutes a celebrity that day.

But he walked over to a side entrance to Borough Hall, which is a few yards away from the court building. The homicide division of the Queens district attorney's office has a bureau office one flight up. Davidson walked upstairs with his lawyer and was gone. Inside, he would go over the photos of New York City policemen and try to pick out two who were torturers.

It was five o’clock by now, and from the regular offices of Borough Hall, from the sewer department and the real estate taxation offices, women streamed out and headed home.

One group, seeing the crowd following Davidson, stopped and watched.

“I know who that is," one woman, a burly blond, said. "That's the guy that the cops beat up."

“They didn’t beat him up, they charged him up with electricity," the one next to her said.

“Could you imagine that?” the blond said. “Whoever heard of a thing like that?”

“And in Queens.” her friend said.

Upstairs, Davidson sat at a table and was shown a card on which were eight new color photos of policemen. He looked and immediately pointed at the second picture on the card.

“He put the machine on me," Davidson said. “I don’t have to look at anybody else.”

He then was shown a second sheet of photos. The finger went to one picture immediately.

An officer from the Internal Affairs Division then pulled out an envelope, vouchered by the property clerk—obviously the result of a search—and took from the envelope a small black electrical device. The device had light fingerprint dust on it The Internal Affairs officer asked Davidson if he had seen the device before.

“I can’t tell you, because I was in pain," Davidson said. “But that looks like it."

In another room, there were the six members of the narcotics team that had arrested Davidson last Wednesday night. And now, a Police Department supervisor stepped into the room and indicated that two of the policemen were to leave and go into another room. Apparently, they either were being suspended or arrested.

Then Mark Davidson walked out into a wet Queens night and went home. He had to get up for school in the morning.

In Queens, once so many were raised as the children of policemen, perhaps as many as five members of the Police Department of the City of New York could be under indictment on charges spreading from the alleged torturing with electricity of a helpless and handcuffed teenager in the 106th Precinct in Ozone Park.

Always in New York, a police scandal meant payoffs from bookmakers, prostitutes or the narcotics traffic. Commissions were established. prosecutors had great careers and there was always a sort of hero cop who came forward with assorted tales which enchanted movie producers. But through the gross bookmaking scandal and Serpico and the Knapp Commission, the problem was only over money.

Those policemen expected to be dragged into court in Queens would be there on charges of torturing citizens, an act usually associated with another century or continent. None of the policemen lives in this city. But they have made us all lousy.

This tale of squalor began last April 18, a Thursday, when at 6:30 p.m. the clerk in Part AR-1 of the Queens courthouse in Kew Gardens held up a fresh list of prisoners who had been brought to the courthouse by van from Police Central Booking at the 112th Precinct.

Marvyn Kornberg, a lawyer who was sitting on one of the spectators' benches, asked the clerk, "Do you have a Mark Davidson?"

The clerk nodded. Kornberg walked to the door leading to the detention pens, one flight over the courtroom. In one of the pens upstairs, four young men, all blacks, were sitting.

"Which one of you is Mark Davidson?" Kornberg said. He had never seen Davidson. The night before, Davidson’s mother had reached Kornberg. Her son had been arrested on charges of sailing $10 worth of pot to an undercover policeman. Davidson, who had never been arrested before, was grabbed by a half dozen cops five blocks away and a half hour after the alleged sale. He claimed mistaken identity. Davidson automatically qualified for youthful offender treatment on the charge, and an adjournment contemplating dismissal usually is given in these cases.

When Kornberg called out the name, one tall light kid came up to the cell bars. The others in the cell turned their backs. Among the customs learned by young blacks and Hispanics in this city is one that calls for leaving a man alone when he talks to his lawyer. Any attempt to overhear the conversation is considered a breach of manners.

Mark Davidson had light skin and eyes that were a mixture of green and blue. One of the eyes, the right, was blackened.

“What happened to your eye?’’ Kornberg said.

“The cops did it," Davidson said. He held out his right wrist to show a burn mark made by handcuffs. “They did this, too."

Kornberg was unimpressed. For years, lawyers have stepped out of holding pens and reported to the judge that their clients inside were scarred from police beatings. These claims usually are met with bored stares. Many defendants lie. And the people who actually have been beaten don’t complain too strenuously.

“You’re brought up in one of these ghetto neighborhoods to expect a beating when you're arrested," Kornberg said. "I had a guy whose arm was broken by police and be came out for the arraignment with the arm in bandages. Nobody cared."

But the client this time pulled up a T-shirt that said “Greater New York." He showed Kornberg electrical burns that dotted his stomach and lower back. “The cops did this to me, too,” Davidson said.

Kornberg stared at the burn marks and left Davidson and went downstairs and found an assistant district attorney, David Everett. He told Everett what he had just seen. Everett said that it should be reported to the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division. Everett called from the courthouse and was told by the division that this was a matter for the Civilian Complaint Review Board. Everett then called a special field Internal Affairs unit. The answer was the same.

“This is insanity." Kornberg said. “If this kid upstairs had paid a lousy $20 bribe to a cop, the Internal Affairs would be all over the case. But they don't want anything to do with police brutality. We’re trying to report a torture and all they want to hear is a twenty dollar bill.”

Everett decided that the district attorney’s office would look into the case without the help of police. As Queens District Attorney John Santucci was born in the 106th Precinct, attended school there, represented it In the state Legislature and still lives there, only a few blocks from the stationhouse, there was no question about how intensive the investigation would be. There also was another dimension: If a case of this magnitude, occurring in his own neighbor hood, ever got by Santucci, his present job—a very good job for a guy from Ozone Park—soon would be a memory. His future would be gone. Santucci, who likes both job today and promising future, had flames coming out of the sidewalks in front of the 106th.

At that moment, the most disturbing scandal in the history of the New York City Police Department erupted. Here was a department which allegedly was responsible for an 18-year-old black youth, handcuffed behind his back, being tortured with an electrical device by at least two white cops, with others present, in a precinct in Queens and would not even take a phone call of complaint about it. And the black youth, Mark Davidson, who still was in a cell upstairs in the. courthouse, had a story to tell which, in the hours and days that were to pass, never changed, always checked out and always tested the anger of a listener.

Davidson first told the tale to his lawyer, then to me, then to a district attorney, then a day later in open court at a hearing where he was asked questions for three hours, and then, last Tuesday, to a Queens grand jury.

The word on Queens Blvd. last night was that the grand jury, too, had believed Mark Davidson’s story.

Last Tuesday, after testifying to the grand jury, Davidson and his mother. Ladell, took the bus home to their two-story frame house at 111-11 135th St. in South Ozone Park, Queens.

“I’m so nervous. I don’t know whether to go to work tomorrow or not," the mother said. “I work at Trans World, over at the airport."

“What do they have you doing?"

“In the food department. Tray setups. All the things on the tray. The cake, salad, cup. bread and butter. We set them all up. Then put them in the modules. They told me that I could take off because of this. Maybe I will."

She looked at her son. "He gets his eyes from his grandfather. The girls have been calling. I want him to settle down. He got to get out of school."

“How many days have you missed?" Mark was asked.

“Four."

“He only needs two credits to graduate,” the mother said.

“I'll graduate, don't worry about it,” Mark said.

One of his teachers at Martin Van Buren High School, David Mead, has said that he expects Davidson to graduate, and that he would encourage Davidson to go on to college.

"What tests do you have to pass?” Mark was asked.

“History is one of them. The history is up-to-date stuff. We learn how the White House runs. How the Capitol in Washington runs. About all different laws.”

“Do you talk about law enforcement?"

“We learn the different courts. How someone has the right to go to the State Court of Appeals. Then you got the right to go to Supreme Court." 

“Do you discuss the police?"

“No. The only time we talked about them is when the lady officer was killed in the jail. How the guy who killed her took his case to the Supreme Court. We talked about that."

"Nobody mentioned your case?" 

"My teacher mentioned about the weapon being outlawed. And everybody else said to me. ‘How you feeling?’ That’s all."

“What do you think about what happened?" he was asked.

"I think the district attorney and everybody is doing a good job. I don’t think about the rest of them."

The mother said, “I just worry. That, you know, maybe somebody will try to do something to us on account of this."

“I think you’re a little too prominent for anybody to dare,” she was told.

“So you think that we're out of trouble?" the mother said.

“You are. Nobody else is, though."

I am told that something like 40 New York police personnel, most of them patrolmen, are to be brought into the Internal Affairs Division because of their refusal to tell anything to the Queen's district attorney about alleged torturing by electricity of a handcuffed prisoner in the 106th Precinct.

The newspapers referred to this as a "blue wall of silence," which by the drama of the phrase makes it all seem acceptable. Actually, the 40 are paid dollars by New York City to enforce the law. and yet they refuse to solve a most ugly crime in their own stationhouse.

The 40 are to be read a passage called General Order 15, a departmental rule that gives immunity from criminal charges to anybody answering questions in internal affairs. Once GO 15 has been read, however, the police officer must answer any question, including those about torture in the 106th Precinct, or be suspended on the spot and face a departmental trial that would end the officer’s employment and pension.

There should be 41 people brought into internal affairs. The police commissioner. Benjamin Ward, should walk into the place, read GO 15 to himself, and then suspend himself.

Two weeks ago, this torture broke open on a Thursday night in Queens court in Kew Gardens. Benjamin Ward was in San Francisco. I find it hard to believe that he wasn’t notified that night that something was up. If he was not, then we have a Police Department so dumb that it can’t tell the commissioner what’s going on. Ben Ward stayed in San Francisco on Thursday night. All day Friday. April 19, there was the beginning of a major problem for the police. You had a strong lawyer, Marvyn Kornberg, screaming, and an 18-year-old client with marks all over his body.

At least a couple of district attorneys were listening. I was around with a notebook and pen.

Commissioner Ward stayed in San Francisco. I don’t know what he was doing in San Francisco, the guy gets paid for being in New York and he goes to San Francisco. I am told to be happy about this, that at least people knew where he was this time. There was the Palm Sunday of 19B4 when there were 10 killed in East New York and nobody could find Ben Ward. The whole Police Department couldn't locate him. He was out there somewhere. We had 10 dead in East New York and a police commissioner out on a tear. Beautiful. Well, as I say. things were a lot better this time. At least somebody knew where the police commissioner was: He was 3,000 miles away from Ozone Park.

In this recounting, we are now up to Friday afternoon. There are phone calls being made throughout the Police Department It was known that a newspaper and a district attorney were on to something That creak was the roof about to fall. If the commissioner's office did not call Ward then his people are guilty of the highest of all treachery, which is incompetence If they did call Ward and he did nothing, then we are dealing with the subject of this column, which is Ward getting out of his job.

Go to Friday night. A medical examiner came into Queens District Attorney John Santucci's office and was asked to look at marks on Mark Davidson’s body. The medical examiner purposely was not told anything about the case. He was simply asked what he thought could have caused the marks, and when were they made.

He looked, and then said, "They are electrical burns within the last two days."

An inspector from the Internal Affairs Division appeared out of nowhere in the office. Then there was another. Soon, there were men with braid all over their uniforms rushing about.

“I am in the police tailor shop,” Kornberg said.

Lockers in the 106th were searched. Now it was about 9 p m in Queens, or 6 p.m. in San Francisco, where there were 10 p.m flights to New York. Ben Ward stayed in San Francisco.

On Saturday, there was a sergeant, and nobody else in command in the 106th. All day. Ben Ward was in San Francisco. On Saturday night about 7, the New York Daily News newspaper came out with a column about the torture in the 106th. If there ever had been a chance for the investigation to be put aside, it now was gone. The column in The News newspaper caused the biggest and quickest reaction that I have experienced in a couple of decades. Out in San Francisco. Ben Ward could have had his clothes packed, had a farewell drink, and made a plane that would have placed him at Kennedy Airport, less than 5 minutes from the 106th, at dawn on Sunday. He did not move.

Finally, on Monday, with policemen being arrested in Queens on charges most shocking, did Ben Ward get out of San Francisco and return to New York, which pays him his salary.

The newspapers and TV of course did not bother to contact him in San Francisco. Which is a failing that will be dealt with in the next column. In the past. Ward appeared drunk in public and no newspaper, this one most prominent, did anything about it. The public should have been warned, and it was not.

Upon his return to the city late Monday. Ward became a frightened bureaucrat. He protected himself first. He began firing Police Department commanders on the theory that the alleged torture incidents happened while they were in charge.

What Ward neglected to consider was that it all had happened under his command, and that he had not even been in town, and that he didn't show enough interest in his city, or even enough fear of being unemployed, to rush to New York and to be around, simply as a sign that he cared. His Police Department was wounded in Queens and he sat in San Francisco.

For these and other transgressions against the city and its people for allowing a Police Department to fall apart and get involved in torture. Ward should stand up tomorrow and read himself GO 15 and then dismiss himself as a cop. He is a commissioner of police at a time when it is charged that an 18-year-old in handcuffs is tortured in a police precinct. It is at least poor taste for Ward even to think of remaining on the job.

David Comacho, who is 27, remembers that it was last February, about 3 o’clock on a Friday afternoon, while he was working in the bookstore where he was assistant manager, that he felt the first fever. At 4 o’clock, he went into the back of the store and told the manager that he was going home. Which is why David remembers the time of day so clearly: It was the first time in his life that he left work early.

He took the bus home to his apartment on the second floor of a building on W. Eighth St. When his lover came home, David was in bed with a temperature of 102.

“Some kind of a flu," David said. The fever remained all weekend. He got up on Monday to keep a regular appointment with a dermatologist in Greenwich Village. When he stepped out of the shower, he noticed his right side, particularly the arm. had turned scarlet. When the dermatologist saw it, he said it might be scarlet fever. He sent David to a doctor in Chelsea, who mentioned scarlet fever or German measles. The doctor drew blood for tests and David went home. As he remembers it now, the fever was gone when the blood test results came back. 

“One test showed that the T cells were real low," David says. “I went to see the doctor and he said. 'We have to keep an eye on that.’”

The T cells, if normal, send a silent scream through the body at any attempted invasion. Their count is the measure of the body's immunity system. They are helper cells and suppressor cells. In counting them, there should be more helper cells, 1.6 and up, to each suppressor cell. If the blood revolts, if the helper cells dip and the suppressor cells rise, the suspicion of those reading the results should heighten.

David remembers that he felt well through the first part of March. Then, one day he noticed a red welt on the base of his right thumb. He found another at the ankle. He wasn't concerned and forgot about them. After work one day, during a visit to his dermatologist, he happened to look at the welt on the thumb. It had grown.

“As long as I’m here, you might as well look at this," he said, holding his hand out.

He remembers the dermatologist looking at the thumb closely, then at the ankle, then picking up his head with this small smile and saying lightly, lightly, "Oh, I think that we better do a biopsy on this." David went for the biopsy to his doctor on Seventh Ave. in Greenwich Village. While awaiting the results, he was at work in the bookstore, again on a Friday, and in mid-afternoon he again had a fever and left. He had more blood tests.

On the day he called the doctor for results, the doctors secretary said. "Hello. We have the results of your tests."

"How were they?”

“You better come in. He'd like to talk to you.”

He knows that as he walked from his house to the doctor’s office on Seventh Ave., only a couple of blocks, it was sunny. He doesn't know what he thought about; he had entered the numb confusion of desperate illness.

The doctor told him that he had low T cells and that the welts on his thumb and ankle were Kaposi's sarcoma, which is the name given to a large tumorous lesion, call it anything, it still belongs to the word cancer.

The two, the unbalanced T cells and the tumor, meant that David Comacho, at 27, had AIDS.

In May, they found he had a form of tuberculosis that is rarely seen, for most bodies can throw it off. David Comacho, open to assaults from anywhere, was put into the hospital. His fever shot up to 104 and 105. Then one day the fever was gone and he was home. By now, it was last June. He had two good weeks in July and then the fever returned and he was back m the hospital for half of last August. He got out again and returned to Eighth St. The date this time doesn't count. By now, he measured nothing around him. Week, month, day, night, summer heat, fall chill, the color of the sky, the sound of the street, clothes, music, lights, wealth dwindled in meaning.

The other night, at home, he sat at the table in his large living room and smoked Salem cigarets and drank a container of coffee. The table was covered with medical reimbursement forms. In the last 12 days he said he had received 12 different insurance forms to fill in and mail back.

He has short brown hair and a handsome face. At 139 pounds, he seems a little thin. He was born in Paterson, N.J., attended Rutgers and then came to Manhattan. Before he was ill, he was going for his master's degree.

He is open, likable and thoroughly brave. From his apartment, people could be heard calling to each other on W. Eighth St. David Comacho neither wails nor hides. He announces his illness for his people of his streets. "I want people to know that you can't get it by shaking hands or riding on the same bus. If you could, the whole city would have it by now. And I’m sure I’ve woken up other people. I have more meaning than a statistic in the paper or on television.'' As a member of the Village Independent Democrats, he was chairman of a club dinner at Windows on the World last spring that had the governor as the guest of honor. “I never said anything that night because it was a festive occasion and my illness had no place in it."

Now, sitting in his living room the other night, he had a large welt on the tip of his nose.

“From radiation?" he was asked.

“No. The disease."

“What do you do for it?"

“Nothing."

He held out his right hand. The welt on the right thumb was the size of a thumbnail.

"And for the hand?"

"Nothing."

"They have you waiting for something?"

He shook his head. "I'm not going to let them radiate any more. This was small." He touched his nose. “Now when they radiated, it grew. Look at it now. I'm not going to let them do it any more."

He had five bottles of pills in front of him. “These two are experimental drugs. They come in a box from the disease control center in Atlanta. This is clofazimine." He touched a white plastic bottle. The other, in a glass bottle, had a label that said it was ansamycin. “This one." he said, holding up the white plastic bottle, “when I signed the release form to let them use this medicine on me, the bottom of the form said, ‘The side effects may be permanent skin discoloration from red to purplish black.' I got the tan, which is socially acceptable.”

“Do any of the pills do any good?” he was asked.

"They’re just guessing. The only thing doctors can do is monitor the thing. And all you really can do for yourself is laugh about it. The days you can't laugh are the worst. When I find I can’t make myself laugh, I stay in bed. There's no sense getting up. Other times. I try I force myself out of bed and do 20 pushups. I used to do 40 while the shower was getting warm in the morning. I used to bound up the steps here two at a time. I don't do that any more, but I still can make it up."

“Can anything happen?" I asked him.

“It’s a question of time. They didn't kill polio in six months. Kill is a wrong word. Subdue. If I can last another two years, they'll have some thing to keep it under control. All those Nobels are hanging out there. Someone will grab one of them."

"What about your lover?"

“I'm sure the fear has passed through his mind. We're relieved that studies have shown that partners do not have a great susceptibility to it. His T-cell count is fine. What do we do now? You don’t have much sex with a 104-degree fever. No exchange of body fluids. Nobody knowledgeable would do that, anyway.”

"Where is he tonight?"

“He's in Texas. He has a play he wrote opening there. He has to carry almost all the expenses here. I get only $440 a month from Social Security. The rent here, forget it, it’s $850. A friend of ours looked at all my bills and at my income and said, 'David, you just can't make it like this.' I said, 'Well, then we're just going to have to have a smash hit on Broadway.’"

David put on a sweater and an Army field jacket and went downstairs. He waved into the open doorway of a clothing store and the two women at the counter smiled and called out to him. Then he went down the front steps and into the life of Eighth St.

And then I called David up Friday to check on a couple of things and he answered the phone with a dull voice.

"You're not laughing," I said.

"No. I Just got off the phone with the doctor. He told me the test results came back and he thinks the cancer has spread to the lungs. I just got off the phone with him."

I said nothing.

"I’m trying to keep myself together by washing the windows," he said.

When he was in high school, his family moved down from Philadelphia onto a farm a mile outside of this town in southern Georgia, right there by the Alabama line, a town with the old Southern Railway tracks still running through the middle, with the town square and its pre-Civil War courthouse and all the decent folks on the east side of the tracks, the blacks and the white trash on the other. Most everybody not on a farm worked at West Point-Pepperell, making sheets and towels in a nonunion plant. His father liked the town’s values. No public drinking, although he took a drink himself, and a whole lot of churches.

On those free nights on the farm, he remained awake for hours listening to the tree frogs and crickets. One of his two sisters jumped into the town life, and was on the football cheering squad in high school. When the others called out, “Spy-rit” and she said, “Spear-rit!” everybody got mad at her because she couldn’t do the cheers raht. He and his other sisters decided they wouldn’t even go to the games because of this. On game nights, they rode around town in a van and got drunk and high.

When he went to the University of Georgia, the big yell in the stands at the football games was, “Go get ‘em, Dawgs!”

His interest in books instead of admiration for the football team irritated the father, who wanted to hear about get-‘em-Dawgs! and not about poetry festivals, and so his son remembers being told by his father, “You’re an overeducated, philosophical ass. You got no common sense,” and he told his father, “You mean like you, sense real common?” The back of his father’s neck turned into a steam iron.

He took out girls, which was just all right, he remembers, and then this girl Debbie told him that the best disco up in Atlanta was a gay place and they went there, drinking and dancing, and while there was no moment when the body suddenly understands, he felt more than comfortable that night. “I went into the grey area right after that,” he said. Soon, Debbie, who thought she was going to marry him, realized that the best they were going to have together was friendship.

“Every good family has a gay, and I guess I’m the one in mine,” he said. He stayed in Atlanta, with other young people who had left small Georgia towns because they didn’t want folks to know they were gay. Then he went to New York.

“There was never any one time when I said anything to my family or they said anything to me,” he recalls. “I lived without words.”

He got a public relations job in Manhattan, took an apartment on Seventh Avenue in Greenwich Village and went into the gay bar called Uncle Charlie’s Downtown, where the customers appear to be out of prep schools. “I never went to bathhouses,” he says. “But I had more than one partner in the last five years, so I guess I have been exposed to AIDS.”

Last spring, he went back to Georgia for the first time in five years. He stopped in Atlanta and saw his friend Debbie, who is now a schoolteacher and still single. “I’m mad at you,” Debbie said. “I was counting on you.” He told her that he couldn’t help. Then he went home to the family farm in the small town which, at this time, was talking about the murders of two transvestites, one in March, the second only two weeks before he arrived. This second gay had been shot three times in the head and thrown in a dumpster. The county sheriff told the Atlanta Constitution newspaper that the murders were being investigated.

As he read the story, he told himself, “This isn’t the place for you.” He went back to Manhattan early.

Last summer, he had a $500-a-week job in a public relations place, but was not covered by hospitalization insurance. He worked at night as a play reader and through this he was able to join a group health insurance plan on the first of August, the policy to be effective on the 13th of the month.

On August 6th, he met friends and had a vodka in a bar on 43rd Street, went to a screening of a film called "Summer Rental," and afterwards went to a restaurant near Lincoln Center. As he stepped inside the door, he felt dizzy. He never had fainted in his life, but he was certain he was going. He stepped outside and took a breath. The dizziness increased. He got in a cab and went home. He went to the toilet and blood poured out of him. He called a friend, who wasn’t home, and got the lover, who has AIDS and was having a tough night, but came to the apartment at 10:30 p.m. and helped him to St. Vincent’s Hospital. Doctors first thought it was an ulcer. He told himself that it had to be something like that, for there had been none of the usual announcements of AIDS; night sweats, sudden weight loss, swollen glands, lesions on the extremities. They decided to operate the next day.

When he looked up in the recovery room, he saw his mother and one of his sisters. A nun came and took them for a cup of coffee. He was in intensive care when a doctor walked in and started poking at his glands. He remembers saying to himself, “Is he giving me an AIDS exam?” His mother was there the next time the doctor came in.

“You have Karposi’s sarcoma,” the doctor said. “One of them was on an artery. That caused you trouble. There are 10 to 12 more in there.”

“What does that mean?” his mother said.

He remembers mumbling to his mother, “That is the cancer you get when you have AIDS.”

He and his mother looked at each other. Now the life he never talked about was part of the family album.

He remembers hearing a noise and looking up. Debbie was standing in the room.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” he said.

“Hey, where did you expect me to be?” she said.

His father arrived by car the next day. The father was nervous and left the room every couple of minutes and went for something to eat.

On the second day, he was in bed with tubes down his throat and in his nose and he was thinking that maybe he wouldn’t heal from the operation because of his weak immunity system, and then his father walked into the room and right away, he could sense what was coming.

He remembers his father saying, “I’m sorry, son but I can’t help but believe that your living this deviate lifestyle is why you’re sick. I can’t help but believe that God is punishing you for your life style.”

The father got up and started pacing. The mother whispered, “I’m so sorry.”

On the next day, he remembers his father coming in and saying, “Have you learned your lesson? Maybe if you give up your lifestyle, God will forgive you and you’ll get well.”

He remembers whispering to his father, “Do you want grandchildren with AIDS?”

Later, when Debbie came in, she became angry. The mother and sister, with an ally, stood up and told the father to go back home, that he was of no use here.

Debbie and the mother stayed in New York until he was out of the hospital. On Aug. 21, the day he was released, he received a letter at home from Blue Cross-Blue Shield. It said that his contract did not cover an admission to the hospital before the effective date of his membership. The effective date was Aug. 13. He was admitted to St. Vincent’s on Aug. 6. The letter also said, “Nor does it provide benefits for any condition, disease or ailment which existed on that date (Aug. 13) until your enrollment has been in force for eleven months.” He had a hospital bill from St. Vincent’s for $18,076.60, nothing to pay it with and no medical insurance for whatever comes next in a disease that lurks outside the limits of science and imagination.

He returned to work at the start of fall. He looks good and says he feels fine. The other day, the owner of his public relations firm announced, “I have to be ‘up’ all the time to do my job right. He is making me depressed. I don’t know if I can have him here any more. I don’t have the head for this.”

Nor, of course, the heart.

The owner now told him that he could only work half days, and his salary was cut to $325 a week, which barely covers his rent and leaves him still owing a back medical bill and facing more each week. If his life becomes tougher, if he can’t make it in New York, he always can go home to his father and the farm in the small town in Georgia.