The blame game began as soon as New Orleans’
levees succumbed to Hurricane Katrina. First in the crosshairs: federal
officials, who embarrassed themselves with their pitiful response to the
unfolding tragedy. Soon after, city and state officials turned their ire on
the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which they accused of failing to maintain
the system of levees that were supposed to protect the Crescent City. Hurricane Katrina was a major natural disaster with
little precedent, but that hasn’t tempered political rhetoric and the
desire to hold people accountable: The levees failed, so someone must be
held responsible. It’s a mindset that echoes the reaction to a
similar disaster that unfolded 800 miles upriver from New Orleans, 12 years
earlier. This time, though, it’s unlikely that anybody
will go to prison. In the summer of 1993, heavy rains raised the
Mississippi River to historic levels, creating a vicious current that blew
out levees from Iowa to Missouri and southern Illinois and causing an
estimated $12 billion in damage and inundating more than 500 counties in
the Midwest. Since then, roads and bridges have been repaired or replaced;
whole towns have been rebuilt or relocated; new levees have been
constructed and old ones have been strengthened. Life along the river has
returned to normal. But there is one man who has not been able to get
past the calamity, one man who has not been able to get on with his life. Meet James Scott, inmate No. 1001364 of the Missouri
Department of Corrections in Jefferson City. Back in 1993, when people were
looking for someone to blame for the collapse of Mississippi River levees,
Scott was served up on a silver platter. He was accused of singlehandedly
causing a major levee to fail. Jimmy Scott, as he was known in his hometown of
Quincy, Ill., is serving a life sentence. He became the first — and
only — person in Missouri history to be arrested, charged, tried,
convicted, and sentenced for “intentionally causing a
catastrophe.” Scott is serving the kind of sentence handed down to
murderers, but some people believe that he got exactly what he deserves.
Many others, especially those familiar with river and the events that
unfolded in ’93, are convinced that Scott was convicted unjustly. Jimmy Scott, they say, was an easy scapegoat for
people needing somebody to blame.
Picture it: rural western Illinois. Dateline:
Tuesday, July 13, 1993. The atmosphere: fear. For weeks, residents living on and around the
floodplain had sandbagged the West Quincy, Mo., levee, originally designed
to withstand a crest of 30 feet. Bulldozers were brought in to shore up the
levee, making it possible to sustain 31 feet of water — 32, tops. On
July 13, the water level was 31.9 feet. Scott had been sandbagging the levee for the
preceding two days. He was initially persuaded to help with the effort by a
friend’s mother. At one point, Scott and his wife, Suzie, went to
sandbag together, but the efforts had shut down for the evening. “We
got there and they told us that they was through for the night, so we went
to the Castle [a local after-dark hangout] and just rode around and
talked,” he recounts in a prison interview. This was July 15.
Afterward, Scott says, he went to home of his half-brother and partied like
a rock star. Scott is an alcoholic, and most days concluded with a drunken
free-for-all at a friend or family member’s house. On July 16, Scott and Suzie woke up at daybreak. She
went on her way to work at 18 Wheeler, a truck stop in Taylor, Mo., and
Scott went to help out with the sandbagging. The truck stop and the
levee-relief effort in Illinois were right across the Bayview Bridge from
each other, and the couple made plans to meet later that afternoon for
lunch. They also had plans that night to hang out together,
either at a party or down by the river. Scott says that he worked on the
levee throughout the morning with other volunteers. In the midst of the
tedious work of driving his spade into wet sand and unloading its contents
in a burlap sack, Scott learned from a Corps worker that some guys were
needed to ride in boats along the river side of the levee and duct-tape
holes in the plastic tarp that had been thrown over the sandbags. When the
motor on the boat wouldn’t start, Scott and a couple of other
volunteers were given waders, and they walked north along the levee, toward
the Bayview Bridge. Scott says that he and a stranger named Rudy were
patrolling the levee when they ran into a man named Duke Kelly, of the
Illinois National Guard. Scott told Kelly that he had noticed water seeping
from beneath the plastic tarp, just upriver. Kelly walked a short distance with the two men on the
north side of the levee, then told Scott that his concern lay with his
unit, on the south side of the Bayview Bridge. Kelly said if he decided
that the leak was a major problem, he’d contact someone. Rudy, although never located, shows up with Scott in
a photograph taken by a passerby. That evening of July 16, the levee broke. Scott says
that he was at his car, getting ready to leave the site, when he ran into
two men who gave him the bad news. Scott started walking the levee and
telling people what he’d heard. A Quincy newscaster, Michelle
McCormack of station WGEM (Channel 10), grabbed Scott and asked him to
comment on the levee’s condition and his efforts to help save the
community by sandbagging. Though nervous about being in the spotlight,
Scott talked about his volunteer work on the levee and his discovery of
trouble spots. After this first encounter with the news, Scott went
with the Coast Guard to load boats into the floodwaters. WGEM news grabbed
him again, this time for a live feed for the 10 p.m. broadcast. Jimmy Scott should have stayed away from the evening
news.
Sgt. Neal Baker was at home in Quincy, watching
flood coverage on the 10 p.m. news, when he saw a familiar face. Baker, a police officer in Quincy since 1980, had
known Scott for years. He had arrested Scott for arson when he burned down
a garage in 1988, an offense that landed him in prison. Baker was also
around when Scott and his brother, Jeff, burned down their elementary
school in 1982. To Baker, Scott was the kind of guy a cop keeps an eye on:
a local bad boy. The sergeant sat in his recliner and watched as Scott
stood on the levee and spoke of his heroic efforts. Right away, Baker
shifted into detective mode: This wasn’t the Jimmy Scott he knew. Baker thought that the reporter wasn’t asking
probing questions; on the contrary, she was sympathizing with Scott, at one
point putting her hand on his shoulder. To the seasoned police
officer’s eye, it appeared that Scott was having difficulty answering
the reporter’s softball questions. Scott couldn’t recall names, couldn’t
recall times, couldn’t describe the simplest routines that Baker
figured anyone who actually worked on the levee could do. “My antennae were raised as I listened to
him,” Baker says. “He can’t answer these simple
questions, and the fact that he’s over there to begin with made me
scratch my head.” Baker also thought that Scott looked far too clean
to have been working on a levee all day. Soon enough, Baker had the full cooperation of the
Quincy Police Department. Scott had gone from being a good Samaritan
helping his community to being a suspect in the breaking of the West Quincy
levee. Because this was a matter that concerned the Corps of Engineers,
Quincy police helped form a task force along with county, state and federal
law-enforcement agencies, including the FBI. On Oct. 1, 1993, Baker and his
younger brother, Detective Bruce Baker, went looking for Scott and found
him at the local Burger King, where he had just punched out for the night
from his job. The Baker brothers arrested Scott as a suspect in a recent
local burglary. The arrest was bogus: The cops already knew that Scott had
been at work on the night of the burglary. Neal Baker took Scott down to the station and
good-copped the suspect. On three occasions, he and Scott left the
interrogation room and went outside for a cigarette. The two talked about the burglary and four other
crimes in which police considered Scott a suspect. Scott denied everything
— he hadn’t committed a crime, he said, in five years. Then
Baker asked about the destruction of the levee. Scott was dumbfounded, then
told the detective the same story he’d told Kelly — that he saw
a trouble spot and pulled four sandbags from one area and threw them on
another. According to Baker, Scott also said that he didn’t mean to
make it worse. He was simply trying to help. “My town was in trouble,” Scott says he
told police. “The folks in Quincy and in West Quincy were about to
lose everything. That’s why I went down to that levee. I had no plans
to hurt anything. They needed help, so I helped.” Scott was released from jail early the next morning.
He went back to his daily routine: working at Burger King by day, drinking
like Keith Richards by night. Meanwhile, the Quincy Police Department was
feverishly working with state and federal authorities to get an indictment.
The law Scott was charged with violating — “intentionally
causing a catastrophe” — had been on the books since 1979,
though no one ever had been convicted of the crime. Police struggled to
build a solid case around Scott’s brief appearance on the news and
his interrogation — and the fact that he had a record as an arsonist.
What they had would never hold up in court: It all was circumstantial.
Someone or something else was needed to move the case forward — and
that’s when Neal Baker found Joe Flachs. Flachs, a man who, like Scott, had a troubled youth
and was, at the time, under house arrest, would tell police and, later, a
jury that Scott had had a plan to wreck the levee. According to
Flachs’ testimony, Scott said that he wanted to strand his wife in
Missouri so that he could party in Illinois without her. Scott admits
talking to Flachs but said that the two men were just shooting the breeze
at a party and that nothing was said about sabotaging the levee. Scott says
that he has no idea where Flachs’ story came from, other than a
suspicion that Flachs was offered some kind of deal in exchange for
testifying. Flachs would not return phone calls. Flachs’ testimony provided a motive and, for
the media, a sexy story: Here was a man who caused a flood because he
wanted to strand his wife. The Associated Press moved the story on its news
wire, the New York Times ran a piece, and CBS and ABC led their nightly newscasts
with the story. CNN News and Court TV descended on sleepy Quincy in 1994
for the trial. And when Scott won a retrial in July 1998 (he was granted a
retrial because prosecutors failed to notify the defense about two
witnesses), Court TV offered gavel-to-gavel coverage. None of the coverage gave Scott’s version of
events. “My car was in the shop getting a new starter,
and, as soon as it was ready, on July 17 [the day after the levee broke], I
went and picked Suzie up,” Scott says. “I drove way south and
used a bridge that was still working. I brought her home less than 24 hours
after the levee failed. She was home with me in Illinois.” Scott says that he never went partying that night.
Two soil-science experts — Dr. R. David Hammer,
of the University of Missouri-Columbia, and Dr. Charles Morris, from the
University of Missouri-Rolla — were called as defense witnesses in
both trials. They didn’t know Scott; they didn’t know each
other before 1994; they both remain convinced of Scott’s innocence. Hammer, a soil and atmospheric-sciences expert who
has worked with river systems for more than 25 years, says that six
scenarios can cause a levee to fail. The West Quincy levee met all six, he
says, and its collapse was imminent on July 16, 1993. “One of the things the prosecutor said that was
absolutely dumbfounding, his opening statement was, ‘We were fighting
the river and we were winning,’” Hammer says.
“[That’s] B.S. There had been something like 11 or 12 levee
failures, almost one a day, upriver from them.” Similarly, Morris, a civil engineer, testified that
the West Quincy levee was failing. The Corps, Morris says, did an excellent
job despite the heavy rains, but the last-ditch attempt to bulldoze the
levee was a tacit admission that the levee was about to break. The
bulldozing, he says, weakened its structural integrity. “The reason I testified is I thought the jury
should know that no one had to do anything to cause the levee to
fail,” he says. But the experts, who focused on science and
statistics, were no match for Flachs, who was an effective, if dubious,
witness. Scott’s court-appointed defense attorney, Raymond Legg, had
a hard time keeping the jury focused on the weakness of the
prosecution’s case. Morris says he believes that the jury decided that
the levee had failed, “so someone had to do something to it.”
That someone was Jimmy Scott.
Deemed a dangerous repeated offender because of
his prior arson convictions, Scott was sentenced to life in prison by
Marion County Circuit Judge Robert Clayton II. He’ll be eligible for
parole in 2023, when he’s 53. If he’s still insisting that
he’s innocent, he may not qualify. He’s also out of appeal options, save for a
possible Hail Mary pass to the U.S. Supreme Court — a long shot, at
best. He has no lawyer. There is no Innocence Project, no college class of
investigative journalists, working on his case. He saves his money from his meager paychecks in the
prison panel factory and uses the cash to pay off an inmate who is the
purported jailhouse legal mind. “There’s the truth, but people
don’t want that in this case,” he says. “I messed up in the past, and God knows I wish
I could turn back time. I’m sorry for the hurt and pain I caused
people with the stupid fires, and I’m sorry for what the people lost
during the flood, but I won’t apologize for something I didn’t
do. I just wish someone would believe in me.” All Jimmy Scott has left, it seems, is time.
This article appears in Jan 19-25, 2006.
