Thursday, September 07, 2006
By all accounts, Jim Daulton was the kind of guy you would want as a friend, co-worker or a neighbor - hard-working, honest, dependable and loyal.
He died Friday and was buried Monday. Several hundred people turned up at the Poplar Springs Church of Christ near King to mourn his passing and celebrate his life.
Daulton was 61.
He worked for the Winston-Salem Police Department for 36 years, and if not for one ill-fated assignment, Daulton most likely would have enjoyed a long, productive career in relative anonymity.
It was his professional misfortune to be assigned the Deborah Sykes murder case as a relatively new detective in 1984. And that assignment, for better or worse, propelled him into a degree of public recognition that he neither sought nor shunned as the arrest and convictions of Darryl Hunt became a symbol, first of our city's racial divisions, and then of all that can go wrong in the criminal-justice system.
When the Sykes case exploded, Daulton was made the fall guy and unceremoniously demoted in 1985. Through all that, he never lashed out, never turned bitter. He soldiered on.
"That's just the type of guy he was," said Conrad Clark, a longtime friend through Poplar Springs. "He didn't rebel, raise Cain or cause trouble. That's the difference in people with character versus those who don't have character."
Impossible task
Daulton's character and his devotion to his church helped sustain him after he was assigned to the police radio room and again when the police department cut him loose earlier this year after he talked to an advisory committee charged with re-examining the Sykes case.
"I don't think you can pull through something like that unless you have a strong faith and a strong witness in the Lord," Clark said.
Lawyers from both sides of the aisle admired that quality in Daulton and universally expressed their admiration for a stand-up guy who never tried to shirk an impossible assignment that might have ruined a lesser man.
"He only knew one way to deal and that was very frank," said Don Tisdale, the district attorney who prosecuted Hunt the first time. "It was quite unfair that (police) put that assignment on him. They were asking one guy with limited prior experience as a detective to do something that was later assigned to a whole squad ... but he never grumbled about it. When it got intense, he buckled down and did what he was asked to do."
Mark Rabil, the defense attorney who doggedly defended Hunt until he was exonerated in 2004, agreed with Tisdale's assessment of the man who came to be at the center of the Sykes case.
"He really took the brunt of the situation when there were a lot more people who should have suffered a lot more consequences for their negligence," Rabil said. "It's not that different from Abu Ghraib. They went after the guys on the front lines and ignored the higher ups who gave the orders."
More to the man
Daulton loved his church and served it with unpretentious dignity as an elder. If someone in the church was sick or needed a hand, Daulton was usually among the first in line to help.
That part of his life got lost, and we here at the Winston-Salem Journal helped make it that way this weekend. Daulton's death was noted in a short news item Sunday that inadvertently only focused on his role in the Sykes case.
The brief didn't mention that Daulton didn't seek the assignment or that he was hung out to dry when things got rough. Nor did we note that Daulton's career involved a whole lot more than one murder investigation. He was a patrol officer and worked as a detective handling juvenile crime.
"You're not a juvenile cop if you're a bad person," Rabil said. "You do that because you're interested in reform and helping kids find their way."
According to those who knew Daulton, a good man died Friday. And we ought to remember him for that, and not just the one chapter in his life that brought him to our attention.
© 2006 Winston-Salem Journal. The Winston-Salem Journal is a Media General newspaper.