THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, November 21, 1994 TAG: 9411210055
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JUNE ARNEY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Long : 172 lines
His oversized clothes hang loose on his small but muscular frame, the gray jail-issue pants bunching up over his black sneakers. He could easily be a youthful pitchman for the Scared Straight program.
When he talks about skipping school, not heeding his mother's advice and getting in trouble with the law, young City Jail inmates, some of them his cousins and friends, listen up.
Craig Dickens, 16, will have plenty of time to retell his story, with a 108-year prison sentence for murder and robbery ahead of him. He'll be eligible for parole in 12 years.
Dickens thinks other youngsters are getting the message.
``Kids are looking at me like, `He got that many years for that, I'm not going to mess with that,' '' he said during a recent interview at the jail.
Dickens admits to brushes with the law during a troubled childhood, but claims he is innocent of the crimes that resulted in the lengthy sentence. He believes that if he had listened to his mother, he wouldn't be in jail, convicted of robbing and murdering Torrance Parker, 19, and of robbing or trying to rob three others.
``That night that it happened, I was home, but I left home,'' he said. ``If I stayed home I wouldn't be here.''
Parker was his friend, for about four years, he said. As his trial approached, Dickens refused even to consider a plea agreement.
``I didn't do it, so I'm not going to take responsibility for it,'' Dickens said. ``I never in my life wanted to put a gun to nobody's head because I never wanted it to happen to me. I wasn't raised to rob nobody or kill nobody.''
Dickens' appeals lawyer, Michael F. Fasanaro Jr., plans to file an appeal in January. In the meantime, Dickens has time to think, time to worry. He is troubled by his younger cousins who come to jail charged with robbery and malicious wounding.
``I just wish the world would slow down for these little kids growing up,'' he said. ``Mothers are always going to worry when they're locked up. They worry more if they're on the streets. Every time you turn around, you're hearing gunshots and police cars.''
Dickens is polite and soft-spoken. He doesn't want to see other youths make the same mistakes he's made along the way.
``I think back to when my mother used to tell me things,'' he said. ``I wouldn't come in the house. I was out there in that environment where people get hurt and where a lot of things happen.''
His advice to the young is to stay in school and abide by their mother's rules.
``Your mother ain't going to tell you nothing wrong,'' he said.
But he knows the mentality he has to counter: ``When I was out there, I was around a whole bunch of people who never thought we could get caught for nothing. But you will get caught sooner or later.''
Dickens' mother and father never married. His mother raised him as a single parent. Dickens said he's seen his birth father only twice but considers a close friend of his mother's to be his father. Dickens grew up in Norview, attended public schools and went to church. Recordsf show he was sexually abused by a neighbor from 1982 to 1987 - something his mother didn't know until he was about 10. He suffered from headaches that caused him to fly into a rage.
Dickens remembers being 8 and longing for fashionable clothes, video games and other items his mother couldn't afford.
``When I was little, I used to do a lot of things to get attention,'' he said. ``I thought no one was listening.''
A psychological evaluation at Eastern State Hospital concluded that Dickens was homicidal and suicidal.
``I'd play with knives and dangerous things,'' he said. ``My mom knew I was faking all along.''
By the time he was 11, Dickens' troubles at school led to suspensions. Court papers show that he started counseling in 1989, and that he went to court for having a concealed weapon in school, disorderly conduct on a school bus and failure to appear.
He started drinking beer when he was about 13. He smoked marijuana.
Dickens got tired of school when he was in ninth grade, preferring to spend time with his friends instead of studying.
Those were the days when he'd sleep until noon because he'd stayed out late the night before. First thing in the morning he'd get up and go to the store to get something to eat and drink. He'd meet with friends and they'd sit around and talk, then pile into someone's car and drive around for hours.
Eventually, he was put on probation and given community service for reckless driving and driving without a license and without insurance. In April 1993, he was placed on indeterminate probation and given a suspended commitment to the Department of Youth and Family Services after he didn't show up for court in Hampton. Then he spent four months on the run from authorities.
That's when Dickens said he got serious about straightening out his life.
``I already had made up my mind that I wasn't going to get in any trouble,'' he said. ``I felt like this: I'm growing up. It's time to stop playing games. I had a six-month suspended commitment hanging over my back. I was chilling out.''
Dickens left his mother's house sometime between 3 and 4 a.m. on June 11, 1993, to go to a friend's house.
That was about the same time a group of men approached Timothy Brown, Marcus Sykes, Torrance Parker and Eric Skinner in the 3500 block of Newport Ave. The suspects ordered the victims to the ground at gunpoint, searched them and removed clothing. They took $50 and a gold ring from Brown, $47 from Sykes, and an undetermined amount of cash from Parker. Skinner was searched, but had nothing of value. Shots were fired by one or more robbers. Parker was killed; Skinner was slightly injured.
Hours after Dickens went to his friend's house, he said he heard about the murder. Five days later, police charged him. Prosecutors ended up not pursuing charges against a co-defendant after no witnesses could place him at the scene.
A jury found Dickens guilty of first-degree murder, robbery and attempted robbery after a two-day trial and sentenced him to 108 years in prison. The case still troubles his trial attorney, Joseph C. Lindsey. Only one witness, who said she'd been drinking beer, placed Dickens at the scene. There was little other evidence.
``It was a case that very easily could have been dismissed because you had six or seven people, all victims, saying `I can't say this person was there,' '' Lindsey said. ``Most of them even knew him.''
The witness, who the prosecutor and Lindsey described as unshakeable, demonstrated the gunman's actions that night as if he were right-handed - yet Dickens is left-handed.
There was no gunpowder on Dickens' hand, no identification of clothing by people at the scene. The clothes the gunman wore did not match those Dickens was supposed to have been wearing. Also, there had been no bad blood between Dickens and Parker.
Lindsey also was troubled by the quantum leap Dickens would have had to make from a life of minor crimes to murder - if he indeed was the murderer. Lindsey is doubtful.
``I have never been comfortable trying to look into someone else's heart,'' Lindsey said. ``You have a 16-year-old who gets 108 years? It bothers you. Yeah, that makes it a tougher case to let go of.''
Dickens spends his days in the Norfolk jail working on his GED and hoping one day to be an architect. If he could change one thing about his life, he says, he would change his home environment.
His world was a place where it was easy to lose friends to murder. So far, he says, there have been about a dozen.
``Every time one of my friends dies, I'd slow down, then I'd speed right back up with whatever I was doing,'' he says softly. ``I thought about it, but I thought it could never happen to me. It gets me down sometimes. Some of them was innocent. They wasn't doing anything. But anyone can get killed.''
At night, his mother, Clairneise Dickens, rereads the letter the victim's family sent to court and cries over their loss.
In the letter, dated Aug. 12, 1994, the family wrote: ``When Torrance was killed, a piece of us died with him. . . . It is hard trying to explain to a 4-year-old boy that stands outside his late uncle's bedroom door crying and wanting to know when uncle is coming back, that he is not.''
The family asked that the maximum prison term be imposed.
``The only thing we want is for the killer to be punished,'' wrote Torrance's father, John A. Parker. ``Torrance was waiting on his high school diploma to start a job with a welding company as an apprentice. A job that he will never start.
``The family had to use Torrance's prom picture for his obituary. Torrance never married or fathered a child so our family name died with him. Torrance's life was just beginning. Torrance no longer has a life so why should the killer?''
Clairneise Dickens said she has started to answer the Parker family letter several times, but can't figure out what to say.
``What gets me is that she's a parent,'' Dickens said. ``But I'm about to lose a son, too. In my heart, I know he didn't do it and I'll go to my grave with that. I still get angry because I want him home. And when that man said 108 years, it was like he snatched my heart right out of my body.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color staff photo by JIM WALKER/
Craig Dickens, 16, was sentenced to 108 years for robbing and
killing Torrance Parker, 19. He won't be eligible for parole for 12
years and says he hopes others will learn from his mistakes.
Photo by Jim Walker
Craig Dickens, 16, left his house one morning between 3 and 4 a.m.
to meet a friend. The decision led him to a long jail term.
KEYWORDS: MURDER SHOOTING JUVENILE by CNB