Slain Sheriff Vowed Dept. Clean-Up

Thursday, December 21st 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

DECATUR, Ga. (AP) â€” During his campaign for sheriff, Derwin Brown made one promise over and over: He would clean up the DeKalb County Sheriff's Department, an office with a 30-year history of corruption.

Investigators say that promise got him killed two days before he was to be sworn in.

Brown, 46, was gunned down in his front yard last Friday as he returned from a party celebrating his graduation from a sheriff's training course. He was shot 11 times in what prosecutors called a ``professional hit.''

Investigators have a long list of suspects, including companies with department contracts and 38 employees who had been told they would be fired Jan. 1.

``Derwin was a reform candidate, and he ruffled a lot of feathers,'' said county prosecutor J. Tom Morgan. ``He made a lot of people mad with the changes he was going to make.''

With 600,000 residents, the county is the second-largest in Georgia. It includes the extreme eastern part of Atlanta, is 42 percent black and has seen an influx of middle-class blacks during the past 15 years. Decatur, the county seat, has drawn many frustrated commuters because it has many neighborhoods within a few miles of downtown Atlanta and access to public transportation.

Many residents had hoped Brown would put an end to the scandals that have plagued the sheriff's office since the 1960s. Brown, a longtime county police officer, had criticized the department on his local cable access show and once called the jail a ``monument to failure.''

Brown won a bitter election 2-to-1 against Sheriff Sidney Dorsey in August.

Dorsey became the county's first black sheriff four years ago despite publicity about his arrests for domestic abuse and a manslaughter charge he once faced.

Reports also surfaced that Dorsey assigned inmates to work on houses of supporters of his wife, an Atlanta city councilwoman. Other reports accused him of allowing deputies to work for his security company while on the clock. And a female deputy filed a lawsuit saying that she was denied a promotion because she ended an affair with Dorsey.

Dorsey said he did nothing wrong and accused the media and Brown, who is also black, of waging a racist campaign against him. He said he is upset about speculation that he was involved in Brown's killing and denied any role in it.

Dorsey is only the latest DeKalb sheriff to face scandal.

Former Sheriff Pat Jarvis last year was sentenced to 15 months in prison and fined $40,000 for fraud. Ray Bonner, a sheriff in the mid-1970s, pleaded self-defense and was acquitted in the fatal shooting of a 16-year-old boy in his front yard. And Lamar Martin, the sheriff in the late 1960s and early '70s, was convicted of bribery.

DeKalb's assistant chief of police, Eddie Moody, said he had no doubt Brown was killed because of his proposed reforms: ``One thing we understand in life is that those who stand up for the truth suffer, and he paid a dear price for it.''

When Brown was killed, his wife and five children heard the shots and found him lying in the driveway. Phyllis Brown ran to her husband's side and urged him to ``hang on,'' but she said she knew from his eyes that he was not going to make it.

``They weren't closed and they weren't open, they were just staring,'' she told CNN.

More than 4,000 people attended Brown's funeral Thursday, with hundreds of officers passing by his flag-draped coffin.

``I would consider Derwin an innovator â€” a man who really had a vision of correcting things he perceived were not right in DeKalb,'' said police Capt. Ray Flemister, who worked with Brown for 22 years.

Speakers at the funeral angrily warned those responsible for the killing, saying it would not stop reform efforts.

``My father was a soldier,'' said Michael Brown. ``He was not afraid to let the truth be known. And the truth is known.''