SCRIPT: Lockheed Martin Shooting
May 12, 2005 — -- We're about to take you inside what a group of terrified people witnessed. A gunman with a grudge. A massacre at a defense plant. Was it a worker who'd snapped and "gone postal," as the saying goes, or a one-man race war? It's a shocking "Primetime" investigation with a warning to viewers. You're about to hear some harsh language and see some graphic pictures. Here's ABC's Chief Investigative Correspondent, Brian Ross.
BRIAN ROSS, ABC NEWS
Within minutes of this phone call, six people inside a Lockheed Martin aircraft plant in Meridian, Mississippi would be dead.
911 CALLER
911, send somebody to Lockheed.
BRIAN ROSS
Many had feared this day was coming.
911 CALLER
We've got a shooting at Lockheed, in the industrial part, northeast. Please hurry. Hurry.
911 OPERATOR
Okay, ma'am, they're on the way.
BRIAN ROSS
A police videotape retraced the killer's steps through the plant. Horrified workers had begged to be saved.
911 OPERATOR
Tell me where the man is that's doing it.
911 CALLER
We don't know. He was on the production floor. We understand. That is the last thing I know.
BRIAN ROSS
As he moved along the plant floor, where workers build US military jet aircraft, the killer seemed to know who he was looking for.
BOBBY MCCALL, HUSBAND OF VICTIM
He had a list, and he called his list the "good niggers and the bad niggers."
911 OPERATOR
What was he wearing?
911 CALLER
I don't know.
911 OPERATOR
Do you know who it is?
911 CALLER
Yes. His name is Doug Williams.
BRIAN ROSS
The name was no surprise to many at the plant. Doug Williams, a long-time Lockheed employee, who for more than a year made no secret that he was preparing for a race war.
INVESTIGATOR
Did Mr. Williams ever say to you that he was going to kill, and excuse me, I've got to say it this way, some Black mother (censored)?
EMPLOYEE
Yes.
INVESTIGATOR
And did you report that to anybody at management?
EMPLOYEE
Yes, I did.
BRIAN ROSS
At the age of 48, Williams was outraged when Black workers at the plant complained about his racial slurs or got better-paying jobs. Williams' computer log-in was "white power."
AARON HOPSON, LOCKHEED MARTIN EMPLOYEE
He said, "You know, one of these days I'm gonna come in here and kill a bunch of niggers, and then I'm gonna kill myself."
BRIAN ROSS
What happened that day at the Lockheed plant was soon forgotten by the rest of the country. Quickly described by the Lockheed company as just another tragic, senseless workplace shooting.
But an investigation by "Primetime Live" along with documents the Lockheed company tried to keep secret reveals there is much more to it than that. It is a story of open racism, ugly slurs, violent threats and a plant owned by the country's largest defense contractor.
BILL BLAIR, LAWYER
I can't imagine a hate crime that had more forewarning than this one did.
BRIAN ROSS
Bill Blair is a lawyer for the family of one of Williams' victims now suing Lockheed.
BILL BLAIR
Lockheed is responsible for maintaining a workplace where people aren't threatened with death and called nigger.
BRIAN ROSS
The final straw for Williams was in this room, where he had been called to a diversity and ethics training class and was seated next to certain Black workers. He stormed out. Some white employees say a supervisor then warned them to beware of Williams.
LOCKHEED MARTIN EMPLOYEE
He said, "If Doug leaves at lunch," he said, "I want you to go home." And I said, I said, "Why?" He says, "Well, I'm afraid of what he might do."
BRIAN ROSS
But Williams didn't wait for lunch. He only had to go as far as his pickup truck in the parking lot to get his guns, which were already loaded and ready. Williams then headed straight back to the classroom.
CHARLES SCOTT, LOCKHEED MARTIN EMPLOYEE
He came in the door and he was saying something to the effect, "I got you all right here."
BRIAN ROSS
Charles Scott and Al Collier were at the same table with Williams and saw him return fully armed.
AL COLLIER, LOCKHEED MARTIN EMPLOYEE
He had a shotgun in his hand, rifle on his back, bullets draped down both sides of him.
BRIAN ROSS
The first shot was fired at Nikki Fitzgerald, who in an act of courage, stood up to calm Williams and was the first to be killed.
AL COLLIER
Just point blank shot him in the head.
BRIAN ROSS
Collier, Scott and the others then hit the floor.
AL COLLIER
He was coming around. He looked and he said, he said, that fool right there. He said, that fool right there, like he was shooting some kind of animal or something.
BRIAN ROSS
Four Black workers, including Lockheed veteran Sam Cockrell, who Williams believed had turned him in for wearing what looked like a Ku Klux Klan hood at the plant.
CHARLES SCOTT
Something kind of like this, you know.
BRIAN ROSS
Scott says Williams used the booty of a protective suit as a white hood, what Williams called a joke.
CHARLES SCOTT
I'm from the South, and everybody that I know, knows what that signify.
BRIAN ROSS
It wasn't funny to you?
CHARLES SCOTT
It wasn't funny.
BRIAN ROSS
Williams wore his white hood most of that day until a manager told him to take it off or go home. He went home, apparently furious at Cockrell.
BILL BLAIR
It's obvious that Mr. Williams hated Blacks who wouldn't, quote, "stay in their place." And he perceived that Sam was one of those Blacks.
911 CALLER
Please hurry. We've got people, I think they're dead.
BRIAN ROSS
Back in the classroom, after killing Sam Cockrell, Williams moved to the other Black workers cowering on the floor, including Charles Scott.
BRIAN ROSS
He came, and he aimed at you?
CHARLES SCOTT
I was laying on the floor. He came over to me and shot me while I was on the floor.
BRIAN ROSS
The next victim DeLois Bailey, a long-time Lockheed employee, active in trying to get more Blacks hired at the plant, which was 70 percent White. She was shot by Williams as she tried to run from the room.
AL COLLIER
He didn't just turn and shoot her. He poked the gun into her stomach, and he pulled the trigger. That's how he did that.
BRIAN ROSS
Al Collier took a shotgun blast in the back but still tried to do something to stop Williams.
AL COLLIER
He was about as close as from me to you.
BRIAN ROSS
He blew off ...
AL COLLIER
He blew off both of my fingers.
BRIAN ROSS
Williams was far from through.
911 CALLER
He's still in the building as far as we know right now.
911 OPERATOR
How many people been shot?
EYEWITNESS
I don't know.
BRIAN ROSS
He skipped the management offices and headed for the production floor. Lynette McCall, a grandmother and 20-year veteran of Lockheed, was next. Williams knew she too had complained about him. And her husband Bobby says she knew this day would come. She had even increased her life insurance policy.
BOBBY MCCALL
It got to the point where she started preparing me for her death. Telling me what she wanted me to do, and "If this man kills me, don't forget that we got an account here, and we got an account there."
BRIAN ROSS
And it's clear Lockheed knew it had a problem with Williams. The Lockheed documents we obtained which were left out of the sheriff's public investigation report until we asked about them show Lynette McCall was one of several employees who had detailed Williams' death threats. "You're on my list too," he had told her. All described to a Lockheed executive from regional headquarters a year and a half before the shooting.
BOBBY MCCALL
And she'd say, "They just don't care, they just don't care."
BRIAN ROSS
Williams found Lynette McCall at her work station.
BOBBY MCCALL
She's standing there, and he taunted her with this gun. He's not just shooting her like he did other people. He got to talk to her. He got to call her different names.
BRIAN ROSS
What did he say? Do you know?
BOBBY MCCALL
I was told that he, "Didn't I tell y'all I was going to kill you, bitch?" and things like that. And I was told that she was begging him not to do it. And, and then finally he just did it. You know, but he wanted her to suffer before he did it. And that's something that's very difficult for me to live with. Very difficult.
BRIAN ROSS
Finally, there were two more people, two more Black workers who would be killed. C.J. Charlie Miller, a part-time pastor at the Baptist church. And Thomas Willis, another of the employees who stood up to Williams.
BILL BLAIR
He wouldn't stay in his place to suit some racist's ranting and raving. He just wouldn't do it.
BRIAN ROSS
According to the Lockheed documents, Willis also detailed Williams' slurs and threats and demanded Lockheed enforce its zero tolerance policy, which calls for dismissal for serious violations. But Williams kept his job, required only to attend two after-work sessions for anger management. The union steward, Pete Threat, says he tried to use Williams' own twisted reasoning to get him to drop his plan.
PETE THREAT, UNION STEWARD
They're going to put you in the pen with all those men, and you'll wind up being the sex slave of a big Black man by the name of Jerome. And he made the statement, "No, they won't ever catch me because if I kill a bunch of these folks, I'm going to kill myself."
BRIAN ROSS
And that's just what he did. After killing the last of the six victims, Doug Williams then killed himself on the plant floor of a company that says it does not tolerate racial hostility.
CHARLES SCOTT
He didn't just shoot, randomly shoot. He went around and shot us how he wanted to shoot us, where he wanted to shoot us.
BRIAN ROSS
In movies and books and throughout the country's history, Mississippi has long been associated with some of the worst of racial intolerance and violence.
ACTOR
The defendant is not guilty.
BRIAN ROSS
From the failed efforts of Atticus Finch to protect the innocent Tom in "To Kill a Mockingbird" to the ugliness of the 1960s portrayed in "Mississippi Burning."
BILL BLAIR
Mississippi has changed a lot, but this is the county that the Klan ruled. The Klan was just an awful force here, and people grew up with that legacy.
BRIAN ROSS
Now in this new century, that legacy has been carried on. Not at the end of some dark dirt road but at this Lockheed Martin aircraft plant in Meridian, Mississippi.
911 CALLER
Could you send someone to Lockheed?
911 OPERATOR
Okay, ma'am, they're on the way.
BRIAN ROSS
The Lockheed murders are being described by civil rights leaders as the worst hate crime against African-Americans since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
BRIAN ROSS
Yet from the Mississippi county sheriff to the Lockheed company to Washington, DC, our "Primetime" investigation found a lot of people prepared to overlook or to object to any racial implication in the murders.
SHERIFF BILLY SOLLIE, LAUDERDALE COUNTY, MS
I myself cannot say it was racially motivated.
BRIAN ROSS
You cannot?
SHERIFF BILLY SOLLIE
I myself cannot.
BRIAN ROSS
Within hours of the murders, Sheriff Billy Sollie with top Lockheed executives at his side described it as simply another tragic workplace shooting, eager to dispel any idea it was connected to race.
SHERIFF BILLY SOLLIE
My thoughts on racially motivated shooting is you hate a race.
BRIAN ROSS
The sheriff says William was not a racist because he killed Mickey Fitzgerald, the man who tried to stop him, and several Whites received minor injuries. And because Williams spared one Black woman in the classroom where the murders began.
SHERIFF BILLY SOLLIE
She's part of the Black race.
BRIAN ROSS
So unless he had killed all Blacks you wouldn't think it would be racially motivated?
SHERIFF BILLY SOLLIE
That's my interpretation, yes, sir.
BRIAN ROSS
As for the Lockheed company documents detailing Williams' racial slurs and death threats, the sheriff at first denied knowing anything about them.
BRIAN ROSS
Did Black employees complain to Lockheed to the best of your knowledge?
SHERIFF BILLY SOLLIE
I've not seen any documents from Lockheed Martin that Black employees had complained about a racially hostile environment.
BRIAN ROSS
When pressed, the sheriff then remembered seeing the documents but could not recall what was in them.
BRIAN ROSS
And in those notes were there not comments from Black employees that Williams had threatened to kill?
SHERIFF BILLY SOLLIE
Again, sir, I can't remember.
BRIAN ROSS
You can't remember that?
SHERIFF BILLY SOLLIE
No, sir.
BRIAN ROSS
For the Lockheed company, there's more at stake as the country's largest defense contractor, the manufacturer of jet fighters and other military equipment. Its $25 billion in government contracts could be jeopardized if Lockheed was found to have tolerated racial discrimination.
MARY FRANCIS BERRY, FORMER CHAIRMAN US CIVIL RIGHTS COMMISSION
If the federal government wanted to, the federal government could review their contracts.
BRIAN ROSS
But Mary Francis Berry, the former chairman of the US Civil Rights Commission, says no one in the Bush Administration seems to be eager to go after Lockheed.
MARY FRANCIS BERRY
I have seen absolutely no indication, and in talking to people in the Federal government who are still there and are political officials, there's no movement to do anything about any of this.
BRIAN ROSS
To get answers from Lockheed's CEO and Chairman Robert Stevens, we had to go to the company's annual shareholders meeting in Albuquerque after officials refused repeated requests to talk with us.
BRIAN ROSS
This is Brian Ross with ABC News, "Primetime Live." How are you? Nice to see you. We're doing a story about what happened at your Meridian plant, and I want to ask you, do you find the word nigger offensive?
ROBERT STEVENS, CEO, LOCKHEED MARTIN
Brian, I'm surprised that you would even ask me a question such as that.
BRIAN ROSS
Why was it tolerated so long at your plant if you find it offensive?
BRIAN ROSS
Stevens called the shootings an unspeakable tragedy but unconnected to racial discrimination at the plant.
ROBERT STEVENS
The shooting in Meridian, Mississippi was the act of a single person. And relative to ...
BRIAN ROSS
Who had threatened to kill Blacks for more than a year and a half. He used the term nigger on a regular basis on the floor of your plant. Your people were aware of it at the plant management level. We've seen the notes from your own people. He even had this hat. He had it like this as a Ku Klux Klan kind of cap he wore. What about your zero tolerance policy? Why was that permitted?
ROBERT STEVENS
Lockheed Martin has a zero tolerance policy ...
BRIAN ROSS
So, why was that permitted?
ROBERT STEVENS
Actions like that are not permitted in Lockheed Martin.
BRIAN ROSS
Yet Lockheed's own documents from December 2001 show Williams was permitted to stay on the job long after the company became aware of death threats against Black co-workers.
CHARLES SCOTT
Came in, had an issue with us, with the Blacks. Management knew that. They need to own up to that.
ROBERT STEVENS
There is zero tolerance in Lockheed Martin.
BRIAN ROSS
So why was Doug Williams still employed there after he threatened Blacks, he called them niggers all the time?
ROBERT STEVENS
I'm not going to elaborate any further discussion with you today on the situation at Meridian.
CHARLES SCOTT
How could they let that happen? How could it be? How could they say that they didn't know anything about it? How could they take a chance like that? I don't understand that.
BRIAN ROSS
And now a final insult. Doug Williams, the man who murdered six people at Lockheed, is being hailed by some as a victim and a martyr. The Mississippi-based Nationalist Movement, a White power group, portrays Williams on its website as a man who tried to fight back against the oppression of racial mixing and Blacks taking over.
RICHARD BARRETT, FOUNDER, NATIONALIST MOVEMENT
He was pushed over the edge.
BRIAN ROSS
Doug Williams?
RICHARD BARRETT
Yes.
BRIAN ROSS
By what?
RICHARD BARRETT
By the oppression in the workplace.
BRIAN ROSS
Richard Barrett runs the Nationalist Movement and sees the Lockheed Martin brochures as evidence of the kind of thing that bothered Williams.
RICHARD BARRETT
It's all the minorities lording over the majority. If you notice here, here's a colored man, a Jewish man, a butch, a mannish-looking woman.
BRIAN ROSS
Those are your terms.
RICHARD BARRETT
Well, that's, just look at the picture. And you might call nigger, we would say Negro. That's what I would like to say. It's kind of a contraction. It's respectful. It's like saying "darkie."
BRIAN ROSS
You think that's respectful?
RICHARD BARRETT
I do.
BRIAN ROSS
Barrett has been meeting with some of Williams' co-workers and friends, including the parents of Williams' common-law wife, Curtis and Frances Rossun. The Rossuns agree Williams was pushed too far for a White man and explain why certain racial slurs are acceptable.
CURTIS ROSSUN, FATHER-IN-LAW
Some of them are niggers. Now, there's some better folk, them real kind of dudes, full blood nigger. There's some good, they Blacks, they ain't niggers.
BRIAN ROSS
That's the kind of language and attitude that Black employees say they heard from Williams all the time, unchecked at this Lockheed plant until the morning of July 8th, 2003.
AL COLLIER
He did what he said he was going to do. He said he did not mind killing a bunch of Blacks. He killed a bunch of Blacks.