Police Didn’t Fan Race Bias Sketch Of Suspect Withheld When Deputy, Now Charged In Wife’s Murder, Blamed Black Male

Like Susan Smith and Charles Stuart before him, police say Spokane County Sheriff’s Deputy Tom DiBartolo killed someone close to him, then blamed the crime on a black man, police say.

Unlike authorities who investigated the Smith and Stuart cases, Spokane police kept the race of the alleged assailant to themselves.

It was the right decision, police and local black leaders said this week.

“That was a wise move on the part of the Spokane Police Department,” said the Rev. Percy “Happy” Watkins, a leader in Spokane’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “I’m kind of glad they didn’t publish that. It would have spurred a lot of anger.”

DiBartolo, 42, is charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death of his wife of 19 years, Patty.

Police said the 18-year veteran of the Sheriff’s Department lured his wife to the South Hill’s Lincoln Park the night of Nov. 2 and shot her in the back of the head with her own gun.

DiBartolo, who is white, told police he and his wife were attacked by two men in the park. One of them - a black man in his late teens or early 20s - grabbed Patty DiBartolo’s gun from the couple’s car and fired two shots during an attempted robbery, he said.

Immediately after the shooting, police acting on DiBartolo’s description detained two black men riding in a car near the park. After questioning they were released.

Patty DiBartolo, a 39-year-old mother of five, was hit in the head and died. The deputy suffered a superficial flesh wound, which detectives now say was self-inflicted.

DiBartolo, who is being held in the county jail without bond, has declined requests for interviews since his arrest.

DiBartolo gave a description of the gunman to a police sketch artist and provided details about the man’s appearance to investigators.

The sketch was never made public. Police Chief Terry Mangan withheld the race of the alleged assailant until after the deputy was arrested last week.

Mangan said this week he and his staff thought long and hard about the sketch before deciding not to release it.

“First of all, the artist said it was probably too inconclusive to be of much help in identifying a person. It was too generic,” Mangan said. “We didn’t want to confuse people and bog down the investigation.”

Then there was the race issue.

“It was a concern that we talked about,” the chief said. “This is a sketch of an African-American male. There was the possibility of unfairly focusing negative attention on a minority person, of creating an unnecessary polarization of a racial nature in the community.”

That’s what happened in the Smith and Stuart cases, where authorities immediately announced they were searching for black men in the crimes.

In the fall of 1994, Smith’s account of a black man stealing her car with her two young sons inside made headlines across the nation.

The Union, S.C., woman, who is white, went on national television to plead for her boys’ return. People everywhere expressed shock and outrage.

Investigators rounded up and questioned a half-dozen black men who fit Smith’s description of the carjacker.

Racial tensions in South Carolina and elsewhere began to mount.

Ultimately, Smith confessed to murdering her sons by rolling her car into a lake with them inside it.

That announcement further strained race relations in Union, where both blacks and whites had helped search for the missing boys.

Boston police spent two weeks in 1989 sweeping through black neighborhoods looking for an African-American man Stuart said shot his pregnant wife in the head before shooting him in the stomach.

Investigators even identified an innocent man as a suspect before they began looking at Stuart, who killed himself when he learned he was under suspicion.

Boston’s black community erupted in outrage after the suicide, and race relations in the city still suffer from the handling of the investigation.

In both cases, black leaders around the country asked why people were so willing to believe the incredible, inconsistent tales told by Smith and Stuart. Was it because the alleged assailant was black and the alleged victim white?

“It’s always been too easy, too comfortable in our society to blame a black man,” Watkins said. “There’s never (an) apology, even if they arrest someone else. They just say, ‘Oh well, be glad it wasn’t you.’ That hurts.”

Mangan said local authorities took the Smith and Stuart cases into account as they debated releasing the description given to them by DiBartolo.

The deputy said his attacker was in his late teens to early 20s, wearing a black jacket with the word “Sox” emblazoned on it in white.

In the end, copies of the sketch were passed around to police and sheriff’s deputies only.

“They did a good job on this one,” Watkins said.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo