Max & His Mom

Journalism takes its practitioners to some strange places. It took me to Willits one gray winter morning almost 30 years ago in response to a call from “Mrs. Roberts, Darlene Roberts, and you can call me Darlene.” Mrs. Roberts said her son, Max, had been beaten up by three members of the Willits Police Department. 

“You aren’t afraid to write a story about a child molester who has been mistreated by the police, are you?” 

I said I was interested in hearing what she had to say. I told her I didn’t think the police should mistreat anybody, including child molesters.

Mrs. Roberts said her son, Max, “is developmentally disabled, you know, retarded.” She went on to tell me about how her son, although he’s retarded, is required to register as a sex offender.

I assured Mrs. Roberts I knew what developmentally disabled meant but didn’t know that retarded people could also qualify for molester status. I’d assumed mental retardation was the kind of disability which exempted a person from responsibility for his acts. 

Apparently not. 

We made an appointment for me to visit her and Max. In the meantime she would send me some paperwork on the civil rights case she was trying to bring against the Willits Police Department and the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Department for “beating up my son, Max.”

Mrs. Roberts was offended when I asked, “Are you sure Max was beaten by the police?”

“We have pictures,” she snapped. “They did it because they’re mean and they hate child molesters.”

We agreed to meet.

On that gray day early in December I turned off Highway 101 south of Willits and drove a short distance to a doublewide trailer where Mrs. Roberts and her son Max lived. The trailer was set in the middle of a field. No effort had been made at aesthetic enhancement of the homestead. Not so much as an ab shell or a Safeway primrose adorned the trailer’s perimeter. The shades were drawn and the place was eerily silent. The doublewide was as stark and as forlorn as a home can be. 

Given the tomb-like silence of the place, the overcast day, the absence of all signs of life, I felt like restraining my knock so it wouldn’t alarm the people I hoped were inside. Just as I cocked my arm for knock number two, Mrs. Roberts appeared. 

She was wiry-small and friendly and nicely dressed in a blouse and skirt. Intelligent, wary eyes looked out of a careworn face. She spoke in a gravelly, smoker’s baritone. There was steel in this woman's dough. She said she doesn’t trust the police or the courts and thinks the entire apparatus has singled her and her son out for special attention.

”I feel under siege,” she said, which seemed to account for the uninhabited look of her doublewide. “People have been coming on to the property and doing things.”

Mrs. Roberts said that the local attorneys she’d talked to wanted “a lot of money up front” to take on Max’s civil rights case, adding, “most of them are wimps.”

She’d warned me that Max, who still hadn’t appeared, “was very nervous around strangers.” Mrs. Roberts cautioned me that “if Max acts scared it might be because he thinks you are a police officer.”

In previous telephone conversations, and from the documents she had loaned me, I knew Mrs. Roberts was trying to sue Willits and Mendocino County because, she was alleging, they’d beaten and casually tortured her retarded son. She told me that Max had, until recently, been living in Arkansas with relatives. Mrs. Roberts suspected that a cop there “had it in for Max because he’s a sex offender” and had called Willits PD to continue his persecution.

After the don’t-be-alarmed-if-he-seems-afraid-of-you-because-of-the-trauma-he’s-recently-endured preliminaries, Mrs. Roberts said, “Maxie, you can come in now.”

Instantly, a door off the trailer’s immaculate living room flew open and in walked Max, right on cue as if he were the opening act in a play.

Max was visibly “on the spectrum,” as the therapists say. He had an oversized, semi-Downs head and propelled himself forward in lurch-like thrusts and started talking immediately after shaking hands, looking over the top of my head as he spoke. 

The man was about 5’7” and stocky. His wrists were huge and he was big through the chest. I would not have wanted to attempt to restrain him. If he’d resisted them, the cops would have had to work to subdue Max even before they could think about getting handcuffs around his wrists, which were thicker than an ordinary man’s forearms, and his arms so short he would be unable to cross his wrists for the cops to cuff him.

Max was not afraid of me. He didn't seem to be afraid of anything,

He spoke at an unnecessarily high decibel level in a rush. But he had his story down and its narrative line wasn't hard to follow even with the rhetorical detours about his recently signed mutual non-aggression pact with God.

Mrs. Roberts’ relationship with her son seemed Gothic, lion tamer to a large tabby who loves and fears his keeper.

Max cried throughout his recitation. An unsympathetic person would describe his overwrought presentation as “blubbering.” I was sympathetic — well, interested at least — but Max’s bullhorn blubbering was quickly tiresome. 

I was also unmoved because Max’s story, given his obvious limitations, seemed a little too well-rehearsed, with the tears loaded on as emotional punctuation. His version of his Willits arrest for failing to register as a sex offender may have been mostly true or it may be another case of odd blundering by Max, his “caregiver,” a “double cousin” named Tina; and the cops, who got into some hand-to-hand combat with a retarded guy when the retarded guy got scared because he didn’t quite understand why he was being arrested, and the cops couldn’t get Max’s penguin-short arms all the way behind his back, let alone fasten the cuffs around his NFL wrists.

What record there is of this unique incident suggests that Tina the caregiver stood around shrieking as the odd dance of mutual incomprehension was danced between Max and the cops, torquing up the hysteria out of all proportion to events.

Max had a prior, an ugly prior. He got eight years for molesting a 9-year-old girl in Santa Rosa. He did five years in state prison in a special unit for the retarded at the San Luis Obispo Men’s Colony. Max had been around cops enough to know the drill. Later, in his accounting of his Willits adventure, Max said he asked the cops if they had a warrant, a pretty savvy question coming from a social security-eligible developmentally disabled 40-year-old man.

“I was 27,” Max blared. “I was an idiot. I didn’t know anything. I didn’t even know God. I didn’t think God was real. I drank a lot. I drank a lot when I needed to stop the pain in my heart for my family being torn to pieces in the world, it hurt so bad. I just wish people could realize now how hard I am trying to be a human being.”

Mrs. Roberts said of her son's state prison tour: “They said he never should have been sent to Tracy or San Luis Obispo because of his mental condition. He was railroaded … ineffective counsel, that sort of thing. Max had been beaten and drugged in the Sonoma County Jail before he ever appeared in court on that charge.”

Max was the victim, not the child.

Max and his caregiver, the double cousin Tina, were in a downtown Willits Motel one night in 1996 when the Willits PD arrived to arrest Max for having not registered as a sex offender when he got to town after hurriedly leaving Arkansas. He and Tina had been in town long enough for officer Demarco of the Willits Police Department to have visited their motel room a couple of weeks earlier. On that visit, Demarco had found a small quantity of pot, which allegedly belonged to one of Tina’s friends. The Willits PD had met Max and Tina before this memorable evening of civil rights violations. The cops knew that Max had left Arkansas for unclear reasons having to do with children and guns.

Arkansas, guns, double cousins, registered sex offenders, five years in prison. 

Back in Willits, the story continued.

“There was a big loud knock on the door,” Max recalled, telling his story top volume and crying, occasionally drawing breath in a combined sob and gasping inhale. “I was asleep. Someone stole my guitar out of the car and I was upset. But I got out of bed and grabbed my shirt. I started walking into where the door was and heard my cousin say, ‘Everything’s ok. I got him calmed down,’ but the police said, ‘Well, we’re coming in anyway,’ and they threw open the door and came busting in. I put up my hands and said, ‘You got a warrant?’”

It was three officers from the Willits Police Department. Max was told he was under arrest. Max demanded to see the warrant.

Wrestlemania commenced.

“Because his arms are so short and stocky, his hands do not cross behind him like you and I can do,” mom says.

It’s true; there’s no way to cuff Max behind his back. His arms don’t make it all the way south and don’t come anywhere near being long enough to cross to his rear.

“I can barely touch my hands together,” Max clarifies through fog horn-quality sobs.

But the police apparently managed to get the cuffs on Max’s hands behind his back. How they did it, if they did, defies Max’s physiognomy.

As the cops struggled to accomplish what would appear to be physically impossible, one of the cops called for “back-up,” cancelling the call a few minutes later after the three of them had their bellowing prey hogtied.

According to double cuz caregiver Tina, the hollering that caused the motel managers to call the police was Max lamenting the loss of his guitar, not him thumping on her. Max, as should be plain by now, is not your basic phlegmatic, docile retarded guy. You can hear him from Willits to the Covelo Road when he’s upset. 

“There is not a violent bone in Max’s body,” mom said.

“I hate violence,” Max echoed. 

 Tina finally convinced the cops that she was not a victim of domestic abuse, but Max was hauled off anyway and charged with resisting arrest and failing to register as a sex offender. If the cops have to break a sweat arresting you, you can count on a resisting count being added to your arraignment bill.

Max and his mother said Max was held at the Willits Police Station for an hour before his cuffs were loosened.

“I watched this one cop take three folders out and shift papers around for about an hour,” Max recalled. “Then officer King came over and asked me my name. I said it should be on the warrant, and if it’s not, you should let me go or the judge is gonna be mad at you. I was begging them to loosen the handcuffs ‘cause of the pain. I was scared to death and I was in tears. He said they were checking me for warrants.” 

Max is clearly not as disabled as he looks. He's got traffic warrants. He drives. He had been known to drive off without paying for gasoline at local service stations. Max plays the guitar. Max has done five years in state prison. Max used to like a drink. Max has found God.

“He’s a good driver,” Mom said. “At one time he had a valid California Driver’s License.” 

Having reviewed Max’s record and concluded that Max was not to be confused with Forrest Gump, the cops decided to take Max to the County Jail in Ukiah.

“I guess [Willits Police] Chief Brown heard me crying,” Max remembers, “so he told one of the cops to ‘loosen these things on this guy a little.’ So they took one handcuff off and put another set on between the two and handcuffed the handcuffs together. they were still on hard. They only gave me about an inch. My shoulders had already been tore out. They put me back in the car. ‘Ain’t you going to read me my rights?’ I asked ‘em. The cop said to me, ‘You ain’t going to need them, man; you ain’t never getting out’.”

Max said that on the half-hour drive south to Ukiah he begged the police to loosen the cuffs. He said he was told by the transporting officer, “If I have to pull over here, I’m gonna take you down a road you ain’t ever gonna come back on’.”

Not that this alleged death threat caused Max to turn his sound down. “I was screaming and praying to Lord Jesus the whole way,” he said.

“They were calling him names on the way, too,” Mom chipped in.

Max claimed that the cops left him handcuffed in the police car in the admissions garage for 20 minutes.

“Finally, a big giant guy comes out. I’m telling you he’s huge! Came and opened the door, unfastened my safety belt and told me to get out. I said, ‘Please help me; I’m so hurt. Please, I’m a human being’.”

The big giant guy, Max insists, called him a “sissy” and a “punk,” advising Max, “If you can’t take the pain you shouldn’t ought to be arrested with kids.”

In Max's memory several officers, led by the big giant guy, proceeded to “Yank on my throat, kick me in my butt and in my back, pound me on the top of my head,” and, for the grand finale, “they all picked me up by my hands and dropped me on the cee-ment floor.”

Max, with mom right there in his amen corner each excruciating step of her son's ordeal, said he was placed in a holding cell where “they took my pants off. I didn’t fight them. I could tell they were trying to take the handcuffs off me. Somebody got on top of me from behind. I felt the big giant guy’s hand reach right down the crack of my butt and grab hold of my testicles and crush them. About that time, not very much longer, they got the handcuffs off me. They tore my shirt off and left me lying there. I couldn’t move for hours.”

Max stopped crying for the brief moments he talked about what amounted to a sexual assault. He seemed fond of the memory.

But Max’s booking photo showed him with a great big smile on his face. He didn’t look like a man who had just been dry-humped and had had his nuts crunched.

Max was in jail for three days, in what is called the “A-Unit” where vulnerable people, particularly sex offenders, crazies and retarded guys, are held. He said when “a lady probation officer saw the bruises on my back, she burst into tears.”

Mrs. Roberts said her son got the Mendo Courthouse Shuffle. 

Max was urged to plead guilty to resisting arrest by both the prosecution and the defense. Mom told Max not to plead out, only to have both the DA and the Public Defender tell Max, “Your mother’s going to cause you to go to prison for the rest of your life.”

Mrs. Roberts, who’s got to be 70, brought her son home to Willits from the Ukiah jail. Max is 40 now. Both of them got life with no parole a long time ago.

Mom is a retired waitress. She dismisses mention of her former husband with a wave of her hand. She says her sons and other members of her family help support her and Max. It’s them against the world.

“I just sit here and hope nobody gets hurt,” Max says. “I am scared to death. These people are big. They hate me.”

Nobody would talk for the record, but the consensus is that Max is not as handicapped as he may seem and, unless supervised, can be a danger to others, but he had been treated with unthinking if not intentional brutality by the Willits Police Department.

“You can rest now, Maxie honey,” Mom said, the suggestion no sooner out of his mouth than Max did a brisk about-face and exited the room.

”He really liked you a lot,” Mrs. Roberts told me.

Months later, as I was still mulling over the material, I picked up the phone one afternoon to a gravelly voiced, “I know who you’re working for, you son of a bitch.” Click.

I’d become part of the conspiracy.