On November 23, 2014, Searcy police received a call that there was a missing child. Allegedly he wandered out of the house while poorly supervised. Neighbors started searching immediately, and soon his little face was popping up on gas pumps that are subscribed to the Amber Alert system as part of their “watch your paycheck drain away while we pretend to entertain you” ad programming.
At first Jeffery Clifton, the boy's father, and his girlfriend stuck to their stories. The FBI posted a $20,000 reward shortly before the anniversary of his disappearance, saying they had new information. After a year and a breakup (evident by her new residence in Springdale) police re-interviewed the girlfriend, Lesley Marcotte, and she pinned it all on him. Malik’s remains were finally located in Jackson County. He pled not guilty to capital murder and abuse of a corpse, she to hindering prosecution. Pretrial motions begin February 22.
Now, not sure if you have clicked any of the links yet to see the races of the parties. Jeffrey Clifton is black. Tanya Drummond, mother to Malik and his twin sister (present but too young to speak about anything in court, and traumatized obviously after the two-week stay in their father’s house), is white, as is Lesley Marcotte.
There's a book I have to get, “Post Traumatic Slavery Syndrome” by Dr. Joy DeGruy, but here is a video of her explaining a little about it. In that video she talks about a lot of harsh realities. One being that the reason the original “Casual Killing Act” was modified to say instead of it being illogical to destroy your own property (bad enough), that the "accident” should legally considered never to have happened at all, was that after 35 years, a single generation, it was black children being beaten to death by white women “correcting” them.
Added to the arrest affidavit for Jeffery Clifton was the following “incriminating” statement on an in-person wire to his girlfriend Lesley:
“They can't come at you with nothin'. The only person that [would] know is me. All you got to remember is to keep saying you don't know. I don't care what they say whatever they is saying, they don't have anything. I don't care what they say, they don't have s*%$. You know this. So I don't care what they tell you they say it is. 'No I didn't. No I didn't. That's why I don't want to say nothin' about it. Got me spooked."
I have to question the official story.
Does that sound like a guy who is angry and threatening, or maybe, just maybe, a man trying to reassure a woman he once loved (and might have still, given she was about eight months pregnant with potentially his child, we don't know) who did something awful to his own child and who he tried to cover for out of misguided love? Or could it have been something like a bathtub drowning (the girlfriend originally said she was in the bathtub with Malik's twin sister when he disappeared, so maybe s/he left Malik alone in it) and a lack of trust in the legal system caused him to fear the law?
Did Lesley go to the police, or did they go to her? Given the reward money and probably deliberately hinted things about them having evidence (which it doesn't seem they had) earlier in November, was she trying to save her own skin, as well as eliminate her baby's father from her life and maybe even cash in too?
Jeffery turned himself in, likely after a call from his brother about police asking about his pickup truck. The full arrest affidavits are here. The timeline of discovering Malik's remains suggests Jeffrey told them where to look.
Either way, two adults, by the official story, were in the house. If she knew he was abusing his kids, the fact they weren't hers doesn't negate the responsibility of any decent human being to say something before it gets to murder. If Lesley could have pointed out a bruise on Malik's photos being distributed, she remembered him getting it. She could have went to Tanya Drummond and her mother, she could have went to CPS — she could have went straight to the police, she had no reason to fear the law. She should be charged with hell of a lot more than hindering prosecution.
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But that didn't happen, and from news reports, isn't likely to. Jeffery Clifton, guilty or innocent of the charges he is facing, is looking at a fast track to death row, though.
Why? Many reasons.
Because the prosecutor is asking for the death penalty, and people like me aren't always qualified to sit on juries for capital cases. If I were asked in voir dire if I could consider the death penalty and told the truth — that after seeing so many people freed from prison with DNA and seeing prosecutors ask for it to bolster a poor case because I'm getting asked that very question and if I say no then I can’t serve, when it's proven that jurors supporting the death penalty vote guilty more often, I have severe reservations about the death penalty in the US… well, I probably wouldn't end up on his jury.
Because voir dire for prior knowledge of the case and prejudice is wholly inadequate. People who want the dude to fry can lie and the verdict not be overturned, but people who aren't going to lie in voir dire get excluded. Or, you are dealing with a jury of people who don't pay attention to any news, because this has been huge news here.
Because police in the same city that “investigated” Josh Duggar after Oprah contacted them with information may have fallen for Lesley's story. Sympathy for a pregnant white woman probably also alleging that the mean black man beat on her along with the kids would be pretty easy.
Because there is no county in Arkansas outside of Pulaski and the Delta regions where he has any chance of getting more than maybe one black person on his jury, if that. Prairie County is still nearly 85% white, and that's IF they change venue away from (lilly) White County. Those white people will have the same sympathy for a crying white woman saying she was being abused by the big scary black man.
Because racism is real, and more prevalent in the South. According to Dr. DeGruy's work, it is at least partially caused by the cognitive dissonance and lack of empathy white Americans developed for black people as a result of witnessing the traumas our ancestors inflicted, over many generations, on black people. Only now are other parts of the country distant enough from the ancestors who did terrible things to start to look them in the eye without any more encouragement than the news lately. Southerners are closer generationally to ancestors who, even if they didn't own slaves or get active in the KKK or yell at their fellow students to get out of their schools themselves, stood by and did little.
Because the case feeds on many other ugly realities of racism. White people, as a part of coping with the cognitive dissonance, seem to project their guilty knowledge of themselves onto blacks. Like stereotyping blacks as lazy when we know our ancestors were the lazy ones, the fear of black men hurting white women (when the 600,000 mixed race children born by the mid 1800s when miscegenation was illegal shows who was raping who) is a projection of what we know our ancestors did. The simple fact that Jeffery seems to have dated several white women is likely to contribute to bias against him — not that long ago that by itself got black men lynched. Now the jury is the lynch mob.
Malik deserves justice.
Not having his father railroaded and the woman who is as far as I am concerned at least equally culpable (even IF she is telling the truth) being given a slap on the wrist.