Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 2, 1994 TAG: 9410030024
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: FLOYD LENGTH: Long
They took the news hard at Falling Branch Trailer Park.
Gary West, of all people, brandishing a shotgun out on Williamson Road in Roanoke in the middle of the night? Defying a ton of cops? Watched by crowds in his tormented state for two whole hours?
Gary West pointing that gun at police and being shot to death, blasted by nine bullets?
No way, Daphine Sowers thought when she heard it. Gary West was no criminal.
"He was the type of person that anybody would want for a son or a neighbor."
She and her husband, Warren, were his landlords most of the 15 years he lived at the trailer court. His trailer sat in their front yard much of that time, and all they knew was that Gary West was a hard-working guy, 35 years old, who paid his rent on time and helped start their cars on cold mornings.
"I would say he'd never harm nobody," Warren Sowers said. He watched West get married and get divorced while he lived there, and he didn't go to pieces then.
West was a tall, sweet-faced man with dimples, a mustache and perfect teeth. He had a speech impediment. People say he was a little shy around women. He liked old people. He'd never been in trouble, they say.
He grew up in the hills of northern Floyd County, surrounded by his sister and three brothers. He helped his grandfather build log cabins. He helped his cousins bale hay.
"He hauled all my wood in last fall," his mother said.
He drove an elderly fellow to work at the Valley Rich Dairy in Roanoke when the man's poor eyesight forced him to give up driving.
West had stacked milk cases at Valley Rich since three days after he graduated from Floyd County High in 1978. He was so thrifty, he sometimes carried five uncashed Valley Rich paychecks in his pocket.
"They would have to tell him to cash one of his checks so they could balance the books," said the wife of one of his friends.
Right before he died, he was telling people that his new friends in Roanoke had drained him of $40,000 - cash, loans, trucks, cars and credit cards.
\ It's unclear how Gary West fell in with a circle of crack-smoking Roanoke prostitutes. It happened about a year ago.
Lisa Lynette Mullins said she met him when he drove his pickup by her place in Old Southwest Roanoke, an increasingly gentrified part of town that still harbors drugs and hookers.
Country men long have been drawn to Roanoke's hookers. Men of all ages swarm here from the mountains, men in pickup trucks and big rusty cars too ashamed to look for quick sex where they live.
Mullins, 27, is a pretty woman, with hazel eyes and brown hair. She's small, weighing just 115 pounds and standing 5 feet 2 inches.
West gave her a ride, Mullins said. He was back the next day.
Mullins is a convicted prostitute but says that's in her past. She says West was never a customer.
"When I first met him, he presented himself as flaunting money," she said. "He acted as if money was no object, like he was very, very rich. He swept me off my feet. I never asked him for anything, but if he even thought that I wanted something he would get it."
Like the new black Camaro he bought her recently.
"He let me pick out whatever I wanted."
Mullins coached him in the ways of the street.
"Just about people and how deceiving they can be. I taught him a lot [about not] trusting so easily. Gary was not street-smart to begin with."
But he trusted her.
When he was around her, West was like a puppet on a string. He was possessive, protective. When Floyd County officers picked her up for driving his truck without a license, West was so angry that deputies had to haul him out of the sheriff's office.
He was a straight-arrow kind of man, Mullins said. "If the speed limit is 35, he don't go 36."
Friends of West's at Valley Rich say he began acting peculiar a few months ago. One day, E.G. Conner, a co-worker, saw him in the lunchroom.
"Gary, he looked so strange, like he was in another world."
Conner tried to warn West about his new girlfriend.
``I said, `Gary, sounds like that girl's going to get you in trouble.' He said, `A whole lot of people have told me that.'''
By spring, West was showing up at Valley Rich late, sleepy - or not at all, which was highly unusual for him. He was fired.
Once a stickler for paying his bills on time, he quit paying them at all. Insurance, truck payments, utilities, rent - everything was overdue.
For six months, West talked about killing himself, Mullins said.
"So many times, he's held a gun in his mouth. It was depression, I guess. It was something he carried around with him."
She thinks he was like that before he met her.
But not a single other person recalls him as suicidal.
\ For Gary West's mother and father, the last months were like a trip into hell.
The Wests live in a cozy house on a curvy back road of Floyd County. Junior West works at a Salem meat plant. Ruth West is a strong, handsome, gray-haired homemaker of 52, the axis around which her big family moves. They tend their garden. They stay close to home.
The Wests have five children. Gary was their eldest son, always devoted, always reliable, and until recently, happy-go-lucky.
The family won't talk about Lisa Mullins. They are afraid of her.
They say they couldn't believe it when a police officer told them a few months back that Gary was on crack cocaine.
"Gary's never done drugs, was against drugs," his mother said. "If you took an aspirin, he was scared to death you were going to become a drug addict."
They began to believe the police officer was right, because Gary didn't look right.
"He'd lost a lot of weight and he was real white-looking," his mother said. "He just didn't seem like the Gary that we knew."
His parents often did not know where he was. They filed missing-person reports in the hope police would find him and bring him home. Maybe they could keep him there.
Sometimes Ruth and Junior West would leave their bed in Floyd County in the middle of the night and drive an hour into downtown Roanoke to search the streets for Gary. To them, Roanoke is a fearsome place.
They waded into terrifying scenes - tough-looking, tough-talking men and women hanging out at a motel used by prostitutes. They found their dazed son there one night, but he wouldn't even talk with them.
"Me and my husband were so upset, we didn't know what to do," Ruth West said.
A motel worker told them she once had seen a bloody Gary West crawling out of a room where she believed he had been beaten.
Ruth West has been to Gary's bank in the town of Floyd since he died. West, who saved nearly all his money, had nothing left.
"He didn't have a thing in his billfold when the police gave it to me," she said. "Not a dime in that billfold."
The Wests picked up Gary's bullet-torn body after a police autopsy. They buried him in the town of Floyd on Sept. 21.
"Gary doesn't even look like himself in that coffin," Ruth West said the day before his burial. "Looks like they shot his eye out."
"I wouldn't want this to happen to nobody else's child," she said. "Like us, we didn't know too much about people like this. We didn't know it was this bad."
\ Lisa Mullins said Gary West's family resented her.
"They knew I'd been a prostitute. I can understand. I just wish they'd given me a chance."
She ended her relationship with West a couple of months ago. She said it was because she couldn't bear to watch him commit suicide. West's friends figure she left because all his money was gone.
"He was my sweetheart," Mullins insisted in an interview. "We've been broken up for a couple of months, but that hasn't stopped him one day from being where I was."
She said she smokes crack.
"Everybody who knows me knows I use it." But, she added, "I never let Gary become part of any of that."
She refused to say specifically, however, whether West had tried crack. She said he was not drinking before he died, but she would not say if he was using any other drugs.
"I don't want to answer that," she said.
Mike St. Clair, a friend of Mullins' and a former Roanoke police informant, said he saw West smoking crack with Mullins twice in Roanoke, the last time about a week before he died.
It will be more than a week before police get lab results telling them whether Gary West was high on drugs the night he died.
Lisa Mullins is in the Roanoke jail now, held without bond for failure to appear at a Roanoke County trial. She is accused of giving a false name last spring when she was picked up on that charge of driving West's truck without a license.
She has been found guilty at least twice before of using assumed names. During Gary West's showdown with police the morning he died, she told police she was Lisa Loflin, said to be her maiden name. Then police detectives recognized her.
She was found guilty of prostitution and indecent exposure last year and still faces charges that she stole $309 in money orders from a man other than Gary West.
\ Saturday, Sept. 17, Gary West was upset. He told Floyd County friends that people in Roanoke had damaged his pickup truck. He treasured his brown 1993 Ford 4x4.
That night, he hooked up with Mullins in Southeast Roanoke. She says he vowed to shoot himself and make her watch. West was threatening to kill her too, "not because he didn't love me. ... He couldn't bear to be away from me, even in death."
She said he had gone to Floyd County that day to get a 20-gauge shotgun.
"That was one of the best days we had," she said. "He knew he was going to die that day."
That Saturday night, Mullins said she tried to get the gun away from him at a friend's house in Roanoke, but he grabbed it and shot out a window.
Police say West, holding his shotgun, rode in the back seat that night as Mullins and another woman rode around Roanoke. Police say, as Mullins does, that West sometimes held the gun to Mullins' head as she sat in the front passenger seat.
Around 3 that Sunday morning, Mullins' friend, Linda Joyce Overstreet, pulled the car into the parking lot of Gary's Little Chef, an all-night restaurant on Williamson Road. Police were called to the scene. After police talked with West, the two women got out of the car.
A police report says West then got out and yelled for everyone to stand back. For more than an hour, he stood in the middle of Williamson Road with the gun, while police directed traffic away from the area.
A witness said West's moods shifted.
"Sometimes laughing, fearful, hostile ... sometimes arrogant."
The witness said it was hard to understand some of what West said, partly because of his speech impediment. Other witnesses say he was scared. Police were all around.
He didn't know what to do, Mullins says.
``He was saying, `Lisa, what I do? What I do?'''
West's friends in Floyd County cringe when they think of him standing out in the middle of the street that night. Roanoke police didn't know him, didn't know he was a naive country man who had never been in trouble, didn't know he had a lifelong speech problem.
Mullins told police that Gary had no relatives in Roanoke. But one of his brothers lives a few minutes away. The family says Lisa Mullins had been to that house and knew where it was. They believe Gary's brother could have talked the shotgun out of his hands. They don't understand why police took the word of a woman convicted of lying so many times before.
Neither do they understand why one of the many police officers at the scene didn't shoot the gun out of Gary West's hands, or why they didn't get a counselor in to try to calm him down. They don't understand why police couldn't have just wounded him, why they had to kill him.
His mother says West did not want to die. He had called her that weekend.
"Gary called me Saturday night at 8 o'clock and said he'd see me Monday morning. If I'd been there, I would have told him to put that gun down, and that would have been it," she said.
When the blue lights of police cars began flashing, Lisa Mullins said, West began acting more bizarre.
"He started laughing hysterically. That wasn't him anymore."
West walked across Williamson Road and stood against the wall of a cement-block automotive shop. When a police lieutenant tried to douse him with pepper spray, police say, West raised his gun toward the officer. Four others shot him dead. He was hit with nine bullets.
A few hours after his body was removed and all the police had gone away, people who watched Gary West die came back and dug fragments of bullets out of the ground as souvenirs. The cement wall was pocked with bullet holes. The grass was littered with lead and shell casings.
On this, the Wests and Mullins agree: Gary West would not have shot the officer.
"Gary would never have shot anybody," Mullins said.
She said he aimed the gun at police so that they would kill him. She said no one could have saved West at that point.
"When Gary pointed that gun at that officer, he did it to make them do exactly what they did."
Keywords:
FATALITY PROFILE
by CNB