Six Months After A New Jersey State Trooper Killed A Man in Camden, The Victim's Family Is Still Fighting To See A Videotape Of The Fatal Shooting.

Akeem Herbert couldn’t see much from the back seat of the state police cruiser.

Ten minutes earlier, the 18-year-old was escorted from his cousin’s car and taken into custody on a parole violation after a traffic stop in Camden. Though the glass separating his seat from the front clouded his view, he could make out the dashboard monitor attached to a video camera that was recording everything going on in front of the car. He craned his head toward the side window and noticed that two New Jersey state troopers were still questioning his cousin, Michael Simmons, who remained seated behind the wheel of his station wagon. Briefly, he looked down, mulling the predicament he was in that snowy January morning.

Then, Herbert heard the shots. Six, seven or eight in rapid succession, he's not really sure. But what he does know is this: "When the cop was firing, he knew exactly what he was doing."

By the time Herbert looked back out that side window, Simmons' station wagon was careening away from him, swerving back and forth across the yellow separator lines on Haddon Avenue.

A pair of troopers with guns still drawn were running alongside the vehicle, which quickly disappeared from Herbert's sight.

Fear immediately set in when the lone other witness ran over to him. It didn't take long for the men to realize they were the only other people to see something that could become a major controversy.

"Yo, they shot him! He just crashed!" yelled Giovanni Perez, a local repo man and Simmons' friend, who'd watched the whole thing go down while shoveling snow a matter of feet away at the used-car lot where he works.

"Let me outta here man! They're gonna shoot me too!" exclaimed Herbert, fearing that he was now a sitting duck. "If they shot Mike, what's going to stop them from shooting me?"

"No way, they got cameras on me," responded Perez, who said he wasn't about to go back to jail. Two blocks away, a gravely wounded Simmons had already slammed into a car waiting at a traffic light in front of Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital.

Simmons' eyes were opening and closing as if he were fighting to hang on when, according to witnesses, a trooper pulled him from the car and dropped him onto the street in a pool of blood. His legs spasmed three or four times. According to those witness accounts -- which are now being contradicted by a hospital security official who was also on hand -- there was no ambulance in sight when the movement stopped.

In Perez's account, however, the 28-year-old school custodian's life ended on the snow-coated concrete in front of a growing crowd, and a fresh controversy began for the embattled New Jersey State Police. Now, nearly six months to the day later, it rages on, since three pretty big questions still linger:

Why did a trooper with a history of using lethal force open fire on a man who may have been cleared to drive off without charges that day?

If police were comfortable charging Herbert with cocaine possession after reportedly finding five ounces in the car after it crashed, why were those charges dropped last week?

And why -- if what a state police union representative publicly deems a clean shooting was actually that -- won't they give up the videotape that could make the questions disappear as quickly as they arose?

As could be expected, the Simmons case instantly made headlines. The state police, sent in by the governor last summer to help the local department restore order in Camden, where the city's last police chief remains suspended under a cloud of controversy that includes allegations of buried internal-affairs cases, were forced to answer questions they prefer to avoid.

Nobody, says one trooper assigned to Camden, wants to come to work and kill somebody. But that's precisely what happened to Trooper Sgt. Daniel Ellington, a 16-year veteran.

First came the official version of what happened around 10:30 a.m. on Jan. 28. While they kept most pertinent details to themselves -- their internal investigation still had to be conducted -- initial reports from Camden County Prosecutor Vincent Sarubbi had Simmons making an illegal turn on red while not wearing his seat belt. (Those details didn't come out until days later since, with tensions flaring and uncertainty abounding, investigators wouldn't immediately comment on the reason for the traffic stop.)

After Trooper John Hayes pulled him over two blocks away in front of the New Diamond Auto Sales lot, he and his backup, Ellington, approached the beat-up Taurus station wagon.

Sarubbi, at a press conference covered by several Philadelphia media outlets, announced the troopers said they told Simmons why he was pulled over and asked his passenger, Herbert, his name. When the computer said Herbert gave a fake name, they reapproached and asked who he really was, so he told them. After then finding a warrant for not completing the terms of probation from a juvenile arrest -- Herbert admits he didn't complete a court-ordered G.E.D. program -- they arrested him.

But police, suspicious because of Herbert's lie, say they were trying to arrest Simmons -- a burly man at 6-foot-1 and 230 pounds -- on a yet-to-be-explained charge when he hit the gas, dragging Ellington alongside the car.

When the prosecutor said Ellington was hanging from a roof rack at the time of the shooting, witnesses quickly reported that Hayes grabbed on and ran alongside the car while Ellington's torso was, at one point, inside the open, driver's-side window.

There, Ellington somehow leveled his Sig Sauer 9 mm weapon and fired, reportedly to protect himself from injury or death. Ellington, who fell off the car after firing, suffered cuts and scratches. Simmons died before medics arrived 22 minutes later -- a timeline from the official autopsy report -- to drive him two miles to Cooper Medical Center, the nearest trauma center. Further, officials said after the fact, when Simmons' car crashed two blocks away, they found a cache of cocaine that allegedly popped out from under the seat.

By the books, police officers are allowed to open fire when their lives are in imminent danger, though it's frowned upon to shoot at a moving vehicle, let alone while hanging from one.

So, with the case still under review by the Attorney General's Shooting Response Team, officials haven't said much publicly about the details of the case since. About all they'll confirm is that Ellington was placed on a mandatory 30-day stint behind a desk and remains off the streets working in the office-bound Planning Bureau. State police spokesperson Sgt. Kevin Rehmann says that should there be any further disciplinary action, it won't come until later. A fellow spokesperson added that departmental policy keeps troopers' disciplinary records from the realm of public information.

At the Burlington County, N.J., home listed under Ellington's name, a woman first told a reporter two weeks ago that he didn't live there. Then, she said he wouldn't want to talk and refused to relay a message asking whether he would have somebody contact City Paper to comment on his behalf.

(Their media disdain is understandable considering Ellington's run of bad ink 14 years ago. While visiting his girlfriend at the Massachusetts convenience store where she worked, Ellington killed a man with his service weapon despite being off-duty. He was cleared of any wrongdoing when investigators concluded the victim threatened to rob the store with a toy gun.)

"Since it's still an active investigation, I'm not in a position to comment," says John Hagerty, a former State Police spokesperson who now handles media relations for the State Department of Criminal Justice, a branch of the Attorney General's office. "They're nearing completion of the investigation though, the next couple of weeks."

Hagerty says the internal probe is necessary to determine exactly what happened. Yes, there's a video, he confirms, but they still need to interview witnesses and those involved, some of whom may contradict one another's statements, before writing a final report.

Able to offer insight from a law-enforcement perspective is Ken McClelland, president of the State Troopers Fraternal Association union, who says he's been made "privy to some facts that he can't speak of publicly."

"It's frustrating for those of us who know [the troopers] acted correctly. In this case, they did a tremendous job. [Simmons] put lives in danger. There would have been no problems if he just stayed in park," says McClelland, noting that within a week of Simmons' death, a Virginia state trooper was killed in a similar situation when a car he stopped ran him over when the driver tried to flee. "We want that out there so they can be cleared, but the investigation has to be thorough and fair."

Still, the uncertainty inherent in such a wait for answers has left Simmons' survivors frustrated to the point that they filed a big-dollar lawsuit citing wrongful death and racial profiling. Their aim was to get the state police to release the tape that Hagerty says they've already been told they'll receive as soon as the investigation is complete. (Though Ellington and Simmons are both black, the family maintains that Hayes, a white trooper, had no reason to pull the car over in the first place. The racial-profiling allegations grabbed the FBI's attention as well. Spokesperson Linda Vizi confirms that the bureau's probe to determine whether Simmons' civil rights were violated is ongoing.)

Simmons' family's attorney, Joseph Marrone, openly accuses the state police of "playing the three-shell game" to bury the truth of what happened that morning. "If that tape was any good," says Marrone, the attorney, "they'd have shown it. They know what it is, and they know they can't do what [Ellington] did."

Having heard that the investigation is nearly complete for months now, they've gone to court several times trying to get some help, but the state has remained protected by the open-investigation argument. A conference call on the matter is scheduled for tomorrow morning.

It’s rare for police officials to release much information to the media about ongoing internal investigations. Videos that make their way onto television -- either on the nightly news or on shows like Cops and America’s Most Wanted -- often are released when police hope to elicit information from the public that could help solve an unsolved crime, not bolster the case of a family suing their agency.

Still, accounts of the incident relayed to City Paper by several eyewitnesses -- including Herbert, who hasn't spoken publicly before because he was incarcerated for several months afterward -- contradict officials' initial statements. Taken as a whole, they paint a picture of Simmons' final hours.

They challenge everything from why Simmons was pulled over to how, and where, the shooting actually went down. Also at issue is whether the troopers tried to help Simmons survive as he bled to death from seven wounds, including one that entered his back, exiting through his jaw, and two others that ripped through his lungs.

And those witnesses' versions of what happened that morning, should the official video support them, raise the questions of why Daniel Ellington and John Hayes still have their badges and whether Michael Simmons should be dead today.

Had there been a recording of Simmons' morning, it would've started somewhere around 8 a.m. at the home of his mother, Deborah Johnson.

At a middle-class house in neighboring Pennsauken, a manicured lawn adorned with shade-covered swings and children's toys speaks to a world much different than the one most picture upon hearing a man was killed in Camden.

It was in this neighborhood that a young Simmons rode his Big Wheels, played basketball and cultivated a personality that, even after death, leaves those who mourn him still laughing at the memory of his jocular ways.

They recall how, if his mother hadn't eaten when he arrived at the house, he'd make a beeline for Wawa to grab her some grub. He was a mama's boy, they say, which ultimately turned him into a doting father, even though his mother still did his laundry.

The firstborn of Johnson's four children, Simmons went to Camden's Woodrow Wilson High School and found a niche as a custodian. For extra cash, he cut hair on the side.

Johnson, who had a hairdresser's appointment that morning, recalls her eldest son bounding into the house while she was downstairs getting ready to leave. He was there to drop off one of his two children -- both Bashir and Sahday, whom he raised with girlfriend Michelle Rojas, are preschool-age -- so he could run a few errands.

"I never saw him that morning, but I heard him. ŒYo L'il D,' he yelled. That's what he always called me. ŒYo L'il D, I'll be right back. I'm leaving Bashir here, but I won't be long,'" Johnson recalls of the last words she heard from her son before he headed out the front door.

From there, it was off to Camden, where relatives say Simmons was looking to buy a used car, since the wagon had been giving him trouble. Having bought vehicles from New Diamond before, he returned to one of their two Camden lots, a Broadway business protected by coils of barbed wire in a neighborhood where, on a recent Thursday morning, a prostitute snared a john in 10 minutes flat. There, he would've had his choice of about a dozen cars, none stretching above an $1,899 investment.

When he arrived around 9:30 a.m., he ran into Perez, the repo man from whom he'd bought cars before. The gates were still locked, so Perez told him he could wait there or meet him a couple miles away at the Haddon Avenue lot, where he would head once he got inside to get a shovel.

The two talked for a couple of minutes and Simmons took off to pick up Herbert at his aunt's house about a mile away, between the two lots. Simmons and Herbert then made their way down pothole-shattered roadways, past Bubba's BBQs for sale and under an overpass for I-676, which leads shorebound Pennsylvanians to the beach.

Herbert says there wasn't anything memorable about their milelong drive until they reached Atlantic and Haddon avenues, a wide T-shaped intersection at which there's no "No Turn on Red" sign.

It was there that, after turning right on red, they noticed Hayes' cruiser make a U-turn.

Seconds later, lights were flashing and a block away, the wagon rolled to a stop directly outside the other New Diamond lot.

"The trooper asked for all his information and Mike told him he didn't have an insurance card on him, but if he checked, they'd see the car was insured," Herbert recalled last month at Johnson's house, six days after being released from prison, where he turned 19 while serving 120 days on the violation. "Then he said, ŒBy the way, you don't have your seat belt on,' even though Mike did."

Seconds later, Akeem Herbert would identify himself as Wayne Simmons in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid arrest.

"When I was getting out of the car, Mike just turned to me, shaking his head. He said, ŒYou'll be all right,' and that was it," recalls Herbert. "[Ellington] just had this mean face on. I don't know what it was, but he looked like he was ready to attack."

Shortly after Simmons was taken to the trauma center, Deborah Johnson got an unexpected visitor at the hairdresser: her sister, Linda Benjamin. The look in Benjamin's eyes told her something was wrong.

It's Mike, Mike's been shot, came the response that left Johnson hammering her fists into her sister's van's dashboard. She ran into Cooper, crying, "Where's my son?" and security escorted her to a conference room while troopers gathered in the waiting area. (Ellington was also taken to that hospital.) Five minutes later, Simmons' sister, Shantae, arrived.

"A doctor came out and said there are two men back there. One of them is deceased. The other one is barely making it. I just passed out," recalls Johnson. When a nurse revived her, the doctor escorted Shantae to a back room where she saw a face sticking out from a white body bag. Her dead brother's face.

Meanwhile, more family members started arriving. One, upon seeing the troopers, yelled, "How can y'all just kill someone like that?" Before he was ushered away, he heard a trooper say, "We don't like it just as much as you don't."

A block away at the Camden Police Department, Herbert was fielding droves of questions from investigators who were trying to piece together what happened. Is Mike a bad guy? Does he like guns? What's his mom's name? Where does he live? This came after a drive during which Herbert says he heard a cop ask his partner, "When's the last time you ever heard someone living after getting shot in the head?"

He still didn't know whether Simmons was alive and wouldn't find out until three hours later, about the same time he got another shock: Police were charging him with having more than five ounces of cocaine in the car.

"Coke? What coke?" Herbert recalls. "Man, y'all really trying to stir something up, huh? You call that justice after what you just did?"

Herbert says that not once was the word cocaine mentioned by police, driver or passenger while he remained in the vehicle because, according to Herbert, there wasn't any in there.

In fact, drug charges brought against him were dropped two weeks ago. County Prosecutor's Office spokesperson Bill Shralow says officials felt it would be impossible to tie Herbert to the drugs and get a conviction. Marrone, the family's attorney, suspects that means the state will contend the drugs, which he believes were planted, belonged to Simmons.

While Herbert was away dealing with his own pain -- "When I was in jail, I was thinking about killing myself. I didn't deserve to be here with Mike gone. I was wondering if people would hate me" -- his relatives faced both their grief and anger phases.

"They treated him like he was dog, left him dead in the street and didn't even have the courtesy to come give us condolences," Deborah Johnson says. "If he did something that was worth them taking his life, I could just leave it up to God but he didn't."

When time didn't bring answers, the family set up a website (www.michaelsimmonsfamily.com) and organized an April march to make people remember what happened. Marching from the courthouse to Camden City Hall and back again, family and friends carried signs that said "No Justice, No Peace" and "Show us the Tape." But, as with much of the case, the protest didn't go smoothly.

As the family stood outside the Hall of Justice, a man driving a pickup truck pulled up and said, "You niggers get a life," before declaring himself a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The man, Steven Sheehan, allegedly then made another affiliation public.

"He said, ŒI know what really happened because I'm a fucking state trooper,'" recalls Simmons' sister, Shantae, who filed harassment charges. Fox News aired footage of Sheehan getting out of his car to confront the crowd. His case is scheduled to be heard tomorrow in Camden Municipal Court.

That incident, coupled with several other examples of family members claiming they've been harassed -- from phone calls to police mocking the tribute T-shirts they made -- leaves Simmons' survivors utterly exhausted. But they're not exactly cried out, as Johnson broke down a couple of times while discussing the case.

"I've heard [Simmons' 4-year-old son] Bashir say, ŒI'll be glad when my daddy comes home.' We have to tell him daddy's with the angels," says Simmons' younger brother, Naim. "Now, he doesn't like angels because they took his daddy away."

"They should just put the truth out there," says Johnson. "They keep saying they need more time. What do you mean you need more time? You have a video of it! How do these people feel when they go to bed at night? I can't sleep. I can barely eat. I take doses of nerve pills.

"They thought we'd be some stupid people who'd sit back and let it go. Well, this time, that wasn't the case. The suit goes away if they lose their jobs and go down for murder. I can't even imagine what made that cop do what he did."

Considering tomorrow's scheduled conference call between Marrone and state attorneys, those involved in the case think things are bound to break soon.

Hagerty, the state criminal justice spokesperson, says the final investigative report will be forwarded to his office's director, as well as to the State Attorney General "within the upcoming several weeks."

"Then, the results will be made available to the family of the victim privately before we go public," says Hagerty, maintaining that a six-month lag between incident and the conclusion of a trooper-involved shooting is standard. "The family has been met. We answered all their questions and made ourselves available to them to keep them up to speed."

McClelland, the union president, thinks things will change once the tape is released. It's just not for the same reason that the family wants to hear.

"When people [who think the troopers were wrong] see some of the footage, they'll change their minds," says McClelland, noting the state can't release the tape until the investigation ends because they can't change the rules around one particular incident. And that, he says, is probably more frustrating for the accused troopers than the victim's family.

While the pending litigation hamstrings him from talking about Simmons, Sgt. Don Burton, the lead state police liaison in Camden, says that video cameras have played a major role in protecting both the public and the police.

"We like the tapes because they show everything that happened. If it's there, it's there. If it's not, it's not. Those tapes have saved troopers over and over again," he says, noting that troopers regret what happened to Simmons.

"They want this to go on for 50 years," says Marrone, who hopes tomorrow's call will result in a federal judge giving the state a deadline to release the tape. "We're getting to the point where something has to give."

So, what may result in coming weeks is a credibility battle. For better or worse, the state police will have their tape to speak for them while Marrone will have Perez and Herbert.

Perez, who, short of the video, remains the key to Simmons' family's case, quickly admits that could become a problem. He knows some people out there may not consider him the most impartial witness in the world. But the same goes for Herbert, or the troopers themselves, for that matter.

At 26, Perez already has three years' hard time under his belt for selling heroin. But since he was released in 2001, he says it's all been on the up and up. Buying cars cheap, renovating them and turning a profit.

For $1, he bought the souped-up, bass-pumping, tinted-window sedan he pulls up to New Diamond in before walking a reporter through the shooting. (He says he has a buyer willing to pay $3,000 for the ride.)

Making the case that he knows exactly what transpired, Perez went into the street and pointed his way through the entire incident, showing where Simmons’ car was parked, where the officers stood and where he was when he watched the car swerve away.

"The first thing they're going to say is, ŒWhy should we believe you? You got a history, you did time,'" says Perez. "Well, you know why you should believe me? I was there. I saw it all. I done seen a lot of shit happen around here. This ain't the first time I've seen somebody die. But for a cop to kill someone like that? They're supposed to protect us. Not kill us."

After watching the shooting, Perez ran two blocks to the crash site where he says Simmons was still alive. (That puts him at both scenes, a claim not many can make.)

Perez says he watched troopers pull Simmons from the car and start ripping the interior up like "they were more worried about finding something in that car than the man they shot, the one who was dying in the street. They could've saved him."

Soon, the white trooper -- presumably Hayes -- pointed to him in a crowd and told several Camden police officers who'd arrived to "hold him." Four hours later, Perez was still downtown. ("They didn't want me talking to anybody else. It was Œsit down and shut up.'")

In the months since, Perez says he's been subjected to harassment, both anonymous and blatant. He's gotten tickets for tinted windows. He had to give up his cell phone after getting countless crank calls, most of which started, "You Perez? You better stay outta trouble." And, he says, it's not unusual for a statie to station himself outside New Diamond, waiting for him to pull away, only to hit the lights and conjure up another ticket.

"I'm not doing this for me. I'm doing this so he can rest in peace. I know he's up there, looking down, saying, ŒYou know what you saw, just tell people,'" he says.

So, with the state not yet talking about the incident, the lone account of the crash -- and its aftermath -- that contradicts Perez's comes from Joseph Hergesheimer, security director at Lady of Lourdes.

Calling accusations that Simmons was pulled from the car "bullshit," he says calls for ambulances were made immediately. Hergesheimer claims that the troopers tended to Simmons as soon as they arrived, searching the vehicle only after realizing they couldn't save Simmons. It's a defense the state police could likely echo.

"Did you hear the one about the troopers running up and finishing the job too?" he asked, before saying if Simmons "would've just gotten out of the car when police told him to, he'd still be alive today."

Fine, says Perez. Maybe people will question his account. But there’s one sure-fire way to determine who’s right.

"If they didn't do anything wrong, just release the tape. That's my thing, because I saw what happened."