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MIAMI -- In the cotton fields of Georgia and the jungles of Vietnam, he was known as Prentice Edwards. After the war, when he became a Muslim, he exchanged the Bible for the Koran and his family name for Rasheed, an Arab word that means "one who follows intelligent guidance."
Late last month, after burglary number seven -- or eight, he's lost count -- Prentice Rasheed decided to follow someone's advice. Just who gave it he won't say now; that's his lawyer's advice.
But the idea was to rig a contraption to keep thieves from breaking in through the roof of his discount store in Liberty City, the Miami neighborhood that erupted in violence after a jury acquitted the policemen accused of killing a black insurance salesman named Arthur McDuffie.
Inside the front door of his shop, about 10 feet up, Prentice Rasheed mounted two metal grates. He nailed one against the wall and propped the other at a 45-degree angle against the ceiling. The final touch was an extension cord, one end plugged into an electrical outlet, the other rigged to the grates. Under the hole in the ceiling that burglars had been using as their private entrance to Rasheed's AMCOP Station and Trading Post, there was now a primitive barrier that also happened to have 110 volts of current running through it.
Four or five days passed. No break-ins.
Shortly after 9 a.m. on Sept. 30, Rasheed's partner opened the store for business. As he unlocked the black metal grate that shielded the front plate-glass door, John El-Amin could see the chunks of plaster on the floor. "Broke in again," he said. Stepping inside, Amin looked up. His heart began to race.
Above him, caught inside the grate was a young man clutching a portable radio, his pockets stuffed with jewelry.
"I thought he was trying to get out and I called to him," Amin said last week, standing below the grates, which have been removed for good.
"The wire was supposed to give a little jolt," Rasheed says now. Burglars, he figured, "would see something was hot there and they would go back. Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way."
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On Tuesday, a Dade County grand jury will begin deliberating whether Prentice Rasheed, 42, should stand trial for the death of Odell A. Hicks, the 26-year-old man found electrocuted in his store three weeks ago.
Ellis Rubin, Rasheed's lawyer, says the electrified gates were a "protective device" never designed to kill anybody. Detective Jon Spear of the Miami Police gave a different description when he listed the city's 121st killing this year on a Homicide Division rosterboard: "Man trap." Hours after Hicks' body was brought down from the ceiling, Prentice Rasheed was in the county jail, charged with manslaughter and use of an electrical device during the commission of a felony. Later that day, he was released on bail, but conviction could put him in prison for 15 years. If the grand jury indicts Rasheed, he will plead innocent and won't accept any deals from the state, his lawyer says. "We'll go to trial," Rubin says.
In the meantime, what some Miamians have called "the fried burglar case" has brought the modest, soft-spoken Rasheed a familiar brand of contemporary fame. The Today Show flew him to New York for an appearance, where he began by expressing his sympathy for Hicks' family. Nightline came to town last week. Hollywood has already picked up the scent. "He's a celebrity now," says Serch Crapp, who runs a television repair shop a block from Rasheed's store on NW Seventh Avenue.
Vigilantism has become the order of the day in Miami of late. Homeowners, merchants and security guards have been striking back at criminals with bullets and even an ax handle, killing six and wounding three since August. Rasheed, dubbed another Bernard Goetz, Miami's version of the Manhattan subway rider who shot four would-be robbers, is undoubtedly the most celebrated.
"I think he represents what everybody would like to do in a similar situation but couldn't," says Rubin, the Miami defense lawyer who volunteered to defend Rasheed. Rubin, who is no stranger to controversial cases, says it was an offer inspired by personal experiences as a crime victim. Burglars have hit his law office five times. His wife was mugged, a gunman held up his son on the Interstate, muggers fractured his father-in-law's hip.
Rasheed, says Rubin, is a man in the tradition of Charles Bronson, who sought revenge against urban lowlife in a string of "Death Wish" movies.
"He represents a fighting-back spirit," Rubin says. "The way he puts it, 'The bully on the block got beat up and everybody applauds the guy who beat up the bully.' "
"People are very desperate for safety, Dade County being the center of the drug traffic with a very high homicide rate, muggings and beatings commonplace. People carried out their death wish, if you will, through Rasheed."
In Liberty City, merchants raised money to bail Rasheed out of jail and have organized a defense fund.
"I hope he gets off," says Phyllis Benjamin, who says neighbors saw Odell Hicks running from her store after triggering a burglar alarm the week before he was killed.
But not everyone is applauding. "If my brother broke in there, he was wrong, dead wrong, but the man was wrong, too," says Aretha Hicks, Odell's younger sister, sitting in her stark project apartment alongside her 8-year-old daughter, Lucretia, a shy, polite child who remembers the uncle who took her to the library after he got out of prison four years ago.
"If he gets away with it, a lot of people are gonna figure they could set up booby traps to kill people," Miss Hicks says.
"That's what you do with animals; you set a trap for them," says Ronnie Blow, 34, a mason who lived in the apartment next door to Odell Hicks and says he wouldn't let his wife or children set foot in Rasheed's shop now. "You can't justify breaking in, but they can't justify that either. They should fry him."
"I'm sure he didn't mean to hurt anybody," says Detective Spear. "But what happens if he has a small fire in that business and a fireman has to come through the roof and gets electrocuted? If people did this and took the law into their own hands, we'd probably have a lot of accidental deaths."
Florida law, prosecutors say, is clear: You cannot defend property with deadly force, only yourself.
Even so, Detective Spear isn't confident of getting a conviction. The chances, he says, "are very very slim. Public sentiment right now is our biggest hindrance, the sentiment being that he was justified in doing what he did because he had been burglarized so many times." His observation was borne out in a Miami Herald poll Sunday which found that most Dade Countians -- 73 per cent of those surveyed -- don't think Prentice Rasheed should even be prosecuted, and even among those who do, don't think he should be sentenced to prison.
The debate goes on, traveling from editorial pages and talk show sets to the littered shade of a lush ficus tree in Liberty City where Odell Hicks sometimes passed the time of day, sipping malt liquor from a paper bag, and some say, bragging about his skills as a burglar. Here, men sit back on battered kitchen chairs, making circles in the dust with their shoes, and arguing the morality of Hicks' sudden death.
"He did wrong for going in the man's place," says Frank Jones, 69, taking a break from his job as a driver one afternoon last week to sit under the tree behind Uncle Arthur's Seventh Avenue Grocery. "I can't see the man did wrong for putting a hot wire up there."
A man half Jones' age shook his head. "Both of 'em did wrong."
Behind the debate is another story, one obscured by the rhetoric of "The Prentice Rasheed Affair," as the Miami Times, a black weekly newspaper, calls it. At the center are two black men, a shopkeeper and a thief, strangers to each other but both struggling to make it in a ghetto neighborhood along different paths that converged late one night in the ceiling of a darkened store.
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The son of a Georgia sharecropper, Prentice Rasheed came home from Vietnam and learned the craft of watch repair. He married, had two daughters. Nine years ago, he opened his own shop in North Miami where a fading pictures of a skinny young soldier manning a 50-caliber machine gun share space with a color poster of Malcolm X.
Last fall, Rasheed rented a storefront on NW Seventh Avenue in Liberty City, sandwiched between the shuttered Carver cinema and Scott's World of Music and Electronics. He opened the AMCOP Station and Trading Space, a cooperative venture already launched in 20 cities by the American Muslin Committee to Purchase 100,000 Commodities Plus. Rasheed is the commmittee's Miami chairman.
The idea is simple: "Buy in bulk and sell," as the sign out front puts it, "at low low prices to the striving poor." Ultrasheer pantyhose sell for 50 cents, shoes from $2.25, silk sports jackets for $25, women's' dresses for $10. Or you can buy a piece of the action, as John El-Amin did, by renting booth space where he sells purses and Michael Jackson gloves.
"We're trying to give these people jobs," says Rasheed, who shuttles between the co-op and his jewelry store in a battered white station wagon. "Those guys not working. I tell them, you don't have to steal, don't sell drugs. Make an honest living."
On Friday afternoons, the shop would close for prayer sessions. Rasheed and the other faithful would kneel on the carpeted floor and face Mecca, pointing in the direction of a Winn Dixie on Dr. Martin Luther Boulevard.
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In 1975, Odell Aaron Hicks was 15, a trumpet player in the Miami Edison High Senior High band, one of nine children. His mother worked in a casket factory, his stepfather was a janitor. Odell never knew his own father. That spring, two women, one of them 68 years old, identified him as the youth who had attacked and raped them. His sister, Aretha, says police beat Odell's confession out of him "with club," but her brother made the same admission to doctors who examined him after his arrest when the state decided to try him as an adult. Uncontrollable urges led him to rape 10 women, he said, usually late at night as they walked home from bars.
The doctors said Odell was a borderline schizophrenic, a psychotic who didn't know right from wrong and needed treatment. Two juries disagreed and a judge gave him life and 30 years.
Public defenders appealed. Higher courts set aside the convictions because of errors by the trial judge and gave Hicks a second chance. The deal his lawyers cut changed life and 30 years to eight years minus the six he had been shuttling from Sumter prison north of Tampa to court in Miami.
He was 22 when he returned to Liberty City in July 1982. While he was in prison, his mother died and his older brother was sentenced to life for killing a man. He was quieter, a short, slight man with a love of books, says his sister, who let him move in with her after a brief stay at a halfway house.
"He was studying welding. That's what he wanted to do," Aretha says. Odell had the goggles and the gloves, but no welding job. "I told him, 'Take any job,' so he took a job roofing.
Seven years in prison had changed Hicks in other ways. He paired off with a man known as "Twiggy," whom Aretha and others describe as a female impersonator.
Several months ago, Hicks and Twiggy rented an apartment around the corner from the AMCOP Station and Trading Post. Neighbors remember Twiggy in the white uniform of a nurse's aid and Hicks coming home from work covered with tar. They lived on the third floor. From their back window, they could see the Carver cinema shaded by a huge banyan tree whose limbs reached the roof.
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Like much of Miami, Liberty City is a neighborhood that seems to live behind bars, a place where barbed wire coils like razor-sharp Slinky toys and where even a fast-food restaurant sports a metal barrier to keep robbers from vaulting over the counter.
Rasheed's store is no exception. Bars cover the front window and the doors, back and front. Last February, when the store was burglarized for the first time, the thief had to smash an unprotected window over the front door and climb through. Rasheed sealed it up. "The roof break-ins began around July," he says. Someone punched a hole in the roof and crawled through the false ceiling, making off with jewelry and clothing. Rasheed had the roof patched. "In mid-August, we had two within two weeks, then we had about four."
Rasheed wasn't the only victim.
"I've had about seven burglaries," says David Scott, who opened his record shop next door to Rasheed's store 18 months ago.
"We're the easiest prey," says Serch Crapp, part owner of the commercial block where he operates his TV repair shop. "We go to bed at night. They come through and take care of us. A month ago, someone cut a hole in the roof of the barbershop up the street. "It cost $250 a month to fix, and the ceiling is going to cost the same."
Prentice Rasheed reported most of his burglaries to the police and asked for protection. "They said, no, we don't have the manpower," his lawyer, Ellis Rubin says.
By mid-September, Rasheed was desperate. The break-ins had cost him about $4,000 in stolen merchandise.
On Sept. 18, Rasheed stood up at a Dade County budget hearing and begged commissioners to spend more on police protection in his neighborhood. "I've been broke into several times in 10 days," Rasheed told them. "I'm not a criminal, but, I mean, eventually, a man's got to survive, a man's got to do what he's got to do."
"What he meant by that was that he would be forced to go out and steal to support his family," says Rubin, Rasheed's lawyer. "He didn't mean that he was going to kill the burglar."
Rasheed says he couldn't afford a burglar alarm or a guard. Someone suggested a dog. "You can't put a dog in a clothing department," he says. He paid a roofer to plug the roof hole with a "double enforced 2 by 4 section". He climbed up into the ceiling and strung loose wire around the rafters, hoping to entangle the burglars. It didn't. He spent hours hammering nails through the posts, studding the ceiling with mini-daggers. "He would check them after every break. No blood on them," says Rubin.
But there was tar, picked up by the burglar as he broke thorough the fresh patch laid to repair the hole in Rasheeds's roof. "We had tar all over the place," he said, picking up a child's dress with a black smear on it and pointing to smudges on the carpeting where the thief had wiped his hands.
"When somebody breaks in three, four times, in a row within two to three weeks, you expect every day to come into find somebody done broke in," Rasheed says. "It's got to be like, 'How do we stop these people from breaking into the damn place every night?' "
Finally, he decided to put up the grates and plug them into an outlet. "It wasn't a trap," he insists. "We just intended to give a jolt .... I hoped the person would get the message."
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The last time Aretha Hicks saw her brother, lounging in front of a neighborhood grocery store on the Sunday before his death, his clothes were covered with tar, "just like he had come from work."
After Odell's death, Aretha Hicks says, she found out her brother hadn't been to work for the roofing company for quite awhile. Around the neighborhood, people say Odell had become another "victim of the rock," addicted to crack, the addictive and deadly form of crystallized cocaine, and stole to support his habit. "The crack situation is very bad," says merchant Serch Crapp. "You can't deliver a TV set in the project without two or three guys running up to you with something in their hand." Hicks would show up under the tree behind Uncle Arthur's Grocery, regulars say, but never stayed long. "Just coming and going, ripping and running. One day with a pocketful of money, the next day he wouldn't have a dime," says Derrick West.
Police never charged Hicks with any of the breaks plaguing Liberty City before his death, but Prentice Rasheed says one of his victims meted out a street sentence. The Jamaican owners of a 62nd Street grocery said Hicks was spotted running from their store after he broke through the roof and tripped the alarm. "They told me they had beat his butt about two days before he came in here for going into their place."
Hicks was bruised and battered the last time his sister saw him that Sunday. "Like he'd been tortured," Aretha Hicks says. He told her a bunch of Jamaicans had jumped him.
"He was telling me he was going to get himself together. I said, 'Well, you better straighten yourself out or you'll get killed or something.' "
On the last night of his life, Hicks made his way through the roof of the AMCOP Station and trading Post, probably by climbing the banyan tree behind the adjacent Carver cinema. He broke through the roof and crawled through the ceiling to the front of the store. The rubber-soled shoes he was wearing saved him on the way down, Detective Spear believes.
The back door was unlocked, but the metal gate behind it was not. Hicks pushed articles of clothing through the bars into the alley behind the store. They were still sitting in the weeds the next morning. But the portable radio he coveted wouldn't fit through the bars. He had to carry it with him as he began to climb back up towards the hole in the ceiling that was guarded by the metal grates. He never made it. "You could clearly see that his left leg was hitting the metal grates, making the connection. That's what caused him to be electrocuted," Spear says.
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Few people mourn Odell Hicks in Liberty City. "Support Builds for Merchant in Killing of Burglary Suspect," reads a front-age headline in last week's issue of Miami Times, the black weekly, just below a story reporting community outrage over the shooting death of a young black motorist by a white police officer in nearby Opa-locka.
"Our people's businesses in our community are not fair game for any and every thief who does not want to go out and try, like the next person, for an honest living," the paper editorialized. "The Rasheed affair had a harsh climax, but in it is salutary lesson for all those who want to live off the sweat of others.
"I don't think there's a great deal of sympathy because he was caught in the act," says Dorrin Rolle, director of ex-offender services at the halfway house where Odell Hicks lived after his release from prison. "There's a lot of black-on-black crime and a lot of blacks are fed up with it."
"If he hadn't been there, he never would have hit that wire," says Derrick West, 32, sitting under the tree behind Uncle Arthur's Grocery. He was wearing gray slacks and a striped shirt and cap bearing the Exxon logo. His schoolbooks -- on air conditioning and refrigeration -- sat on the vinyl couch under the tree. "I work at night and go to school during the day. In March, I leave the $5-an-hour syndrome." Once, he was in the same life as Odell Hicks. "Everything he did, I done .... stealing. I have been to prison. I chose one way, he chose another. If you live by the sword, you die by the sword."
Three out of five Dade County residents apparently wouldn't argue with that sentiment. That was the margin who said they want the right to kill intruders in their homes and business, according to a Miami Herald poll published Sunday.
"In California, they've said that if an intruder is on the premises it is presumed he is there committing a forcible felony," says Rubin, whose office is writing legislation patterned after California law. "Once you have that presumption going in, once somebody breaks in, they're marked for death if you want to kill them. I think it's going to keep burglars out."
Adds Rubin's son and law partner Mark: "I bet you nobody breaks into Rasheed's place again.
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Dade County's welfare department paid for Odell Hicks burial, a flat $175 fee that covers pickup of the remains, dressing and embalming of the corpse and burial.
He was dressed in a cast-off gray suit donated by the funeral director.
There was no funeral. William C. Jackson, funeral director at Richardson Mortuary, said he notified Hicks' aunt, but only two people showed up to view the body, a man and "Twiggy," Hicks's former roommate. "That's more than most in these kinds of cases," Jackson said. "Most time they don't even bother to come when they know they're going that route.
Four days after Odell Hicks's death, a Cadillac hearse from Richardson Mortuary delivered his body from Liberty City to a county cemetery southwest of the city, 15 well-tended acres shaded by virgin live oak trees. County prisoners lowered his coffin -- a "pauper's casket" fashioned from particle board -- into a grave they dug with a backhoe. Nothing marks the spot.
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Tonight, Ellis Rubin will be dining at the Jockey Club with a producer from MGM. They will be talking about making a movie of the Prentice Rasheed case.
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© 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College