By Peter T. Kilborn, New York Times
FRIARS POINT, Miss., — Patrick Hopper did not like being accosted for the cash from his Social Security disability check, and like many other young black men in this little Mississippi Delta town, he is said to have believed that the police would not help.
“People were bullying him,” said Clarence Henderson, 25. “People would take his money. And they wouldn’t do anything about it.”
Whatever the motive, the police say Mr. Hopper, 19, shot five law enforcement officers on Saturday and early Sunday after one tried to arrest him after the shooting of another man.
The Coahoma County sheriff’s department said today that Mr. Hopper, initially identified as Patrick Harper, had been charged with aggravated assault of a police officer and with shooting into an occupied dwelling. The five wounded officers were were hospitalized in satisfactory to good condition.
The shootings are under investigation, and the sheriff, Andrew Thompson, would not say whether the police believed all the officers had been shot by Mr. Hopper or whether some had been injured in their own cross-fire.
But it was apparent today that in Friars Point, the incident follows years of strained relations between the police and some young residents. The department was expanded from three officers to five early this month. The tensions are not racial, people here say. Four of the five officers are black.
Friars Point, population 1,480, is 150 years old this year. While bordered by drought-scorched corn, it sits in the flat, hot thick of cotton country. The town is predominantly black and poor.
“Of those who work,” said Belinda Marshall, the town clerk, “a majority have jobs at the casinos in Tunica,” about 30 miles north of town. Many homes have security doors with iron grills.
The weekend’s events here began Saturday afternoon when the acting police chief, Anthony Smith, tried to arrest Mr. Hopper in connection with the shooting of Doyle Hunter, 24, on Friday. Mr. Hunter was hospitalized in stable condition. After midnight Saturday, local police and county sheriff’s deputies discovered Mr. Hopper in a house near the site where the acting chief was shot.
Two officers tried to arrest him. Both were shot. One of the officers was taken hostage, and the other escaped. With that, 75 officers of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies converged on the house. At about 4 a.m., a SWAT team entered. Another Coahoma deputy and a state prison guard were shot. Bullets struck neighboring homes.
“A bullet flew right past my ear,” said Tanya Williams, who was sitting in the living room of a new garden apartment across the street.
Sheriff Andrew Thompson said the bullet came from Mr. Hopper’s gun, because the officers’ guns were of different calibers.
Officers shot out the streetlights so the gunman would not see them. But they said that gave Mr. Hopper the cover to slip out of the house and scale a six-foot-high chain link fence. He was found about 6 a.m. at his great-grandmother’s house three blocks away and taken into custody.
Men here attribute the assailant’s behavior in part to anger with the local police. The acting police chief, Mr. Smith, who was shot first, is filling in for a chief who has been suspended for failing to respond to a call. Sheriff Thompson said local “leadership was lacking” in the weekend gunfights.
Mr. Hopper was reared by his grandmother and great-grandmother in the small white clapboard house where he was arrested. His mother, Barbara Hopper, lives in Clarksdale, Miss., where Mr. Hopper has been jailed with a bullet wound in a shoulder.
When he was about 12, Mr. Hopper was struck by a car and broke both legs, said Clara Anderson, his great-grandmother. One leg was so severely torn, she said, that “they took muscle from his stomach and put it on the leg.”
He was disabled enough to receive a Social Security disability check. Ms. Anderson said he stopped school after the eighth grade.
Even before his injury, children would taunt Mr. Hopper. “They might take the bread he bought for his grandmother and smush it in the ground,” a grocery worker said.
At 14, about the time he was dropping out of school, Mr. Hopper shot another youth who he said had tried to take his coat, neighbors said. There is no record of his having gone to jail in that case.
Once he was carrying cash from his disability check, some townspeople said, the harassment worsened. He would be mugged for his money, and still, they said, he felt the police would not respond.
“He’s got a stack of letters of complaints he made to the police,” Mr. Henderson said. “They never did anything about taking this man’s money. If you can’t go to the police, who can you go to?”