Cop Out

It won't be his first time in the Army. He dropped out of high school as a junior in 1979, deciding that the Army had more to offer than a diploma. Hill eventually got his GED, left Army active duty in 1982 and became a roofer. That was when he met his wife, then a junior in high school working as a carhop at Sonic in White Settlement. As petite as her husband is burly, Linda Hill still remembers 23 years later what he ordered: a double No. 1 burger. She does not want to see him go to war, but she says she knows why he feels he must.

"I had to watch as he tried to get a job at another police department," says Linda, her mouth taut, "and was turned down, time and time again." Her tone is pained, as if she has felt everything right along with her husband.

Allen then applied to work security with government contractors DynCorp International. He would be in the Middle East, and it was dangerous, sure. But the money was great. After coming just one late payment from foreclosure on their home in the years after the shooting, neither Linda nor Allen wanted to risk that again. Public safety was all Allen had ever trained for, so DynCorp it was. The day he came in to fill out his final paperwork, Linda says, there was a newspaper article about the Davis lawsuit being appealed in federal court. Allen didn't get the job.

Linda has compiled 26 volumes of documents about the Davis lawsuit. She spent two straight weeks getting just a couple of hours of sleep a night reading every deposition and poring over every piece of testimony. The varying claims seem endless: contradicting forensics on whether Davis was shot in his hallway or his living room and whether Davis was even armed when the team burst in; conflicting evaluations of her husband's psychological fitness for a job in public safety. (One former employer, the Tarrant County Sheriff's Department, said Hill was "cowboyish," and his former boss in Watauga said he was "a supervisor's nightmare.") The sexual harassment complaint filed against Allen in 1999 came back to haunt them. Was a guy disciplined for taking photos of his private parts fit to lead SWAT raids?

Truth be told, she says, she's probably more angry about the ordeal than Allen. But to a family for whom so much was black and white for so long, the fact that an institution they trusted could abandon them is almost unbelievable. Until the shooting, the Hills believed in a stark difference between right and wrong. You're either with us or against us. Now, everything was blurred.

On paper, North Richland Hills argues in the wrongful death suit that the raid happened just the way Hill says it did, with Troy Davis waiting for the SWAT team with a loaded gun. Wallace had every right to obtain the warrant, the city argues. And, they say, supervisors such as Chief Shockley weren't responsible for making sure Wallace got proper warrants, anyway. Everybody was just doing his or her job. But Wallace and Shockley were allowed to retire from the department years after the incident. Hill says he was forced to quit, though he manages to look back without much bitterness.

"It means a whole lot to me that none of my brothers were injured," Hill says. He gets a little weepy, thinking back, his eyes glassy with unshed tears.

It should have been clear to Hill much earlier that the department wasn't behind his story, but he refused to see it. It would be five months after the shooting, days filled with mopping floors, organizing boxes and picking up cigarette butts outside the building, before Allen would finally get the hint. After the shooting, he says, he was shunned. His superiors were reluctant to have Hill resume his normal duties. They discouraged officers from speaking to him, lest he say something about the raid that might affect their case.

"I was persona non grata," Hill says. He says he wasn't allowed to participate in SWAT training. He says he was given no explanation, merely encouraged to resign from SWAT and "go out on top." But Hill couldn't see why he should leave. "That makes the guys think that I've done something wrong," he says.

Eventually, he was kicked off the team. "'It's just something that we have chosen to do,'" he says he was told. Linda couldn't take it anymore. She asked her husband to resign from the department. After being a policeman's wife for years, she began to feel her first pangs of real fear. "If something were to happen to you," she told him, "I don't trust [North Richland Hills officers] to do the right thing."