'Murder suspect' label off, at last
Youth minister who was also a camp counselor is relieved charges dropped two years after teen's death
By JANE HANSEN
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 06/17/07
Each morning when he brushes his teeth, the tattoo stares back at him in the mirror. "Fear not, for I am with you," the words on Paul Binford's chest read.
He had the Bible verse put there as a reminder. Binford's faith has been tested these last two years. There have been times he's felt abandoned by God. How could this have happened?
Phil McCarten/Associated Press
(ENLARGE)
Paul Binford walks with girlfriend Staci Holt and her dog Muppet in Los Angeles. Binford, a former counselor at Appalachian Wilderness Camp for troubled youths, was charged with murder in the 2005 death of 13-year-old Travis Parker. Charges have been dropped.
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
(ENLARGE)
Episcopalian youth minister Paul Binford and several members of his youth group show off cans they collected in a food drive that benefited a local food bank in Newnan.
An Episcopalian youth minister, he'd volunteered in community food banks, helped build Habitat for Humanity homes and taken inner-city youths backpacking on the Appalachian Trail.
His philosophy as a youth minister was to steer kids toward success by making them proud of themselves and supportive of each other, rather than slapping them with orders and rules.
That's one thing that had attracted him away from the safety of his church in Newnan to the state-run Appalachian Wilderness Camp in North Georgia, where troubled boys learned consequences for their behavior and how to work in teams.
It had been the ideal ministry for Binford, who loved the outdoors and felt called to serve disadvantaged kids. But then one horrible spring night in 2005 changed his life, and last month as Binford, now 30, looked in the mirror, he asked himself, "How could I be on trial for murder?"
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Like the Duke University lacrosse players accused of rape and later cleared of the charges, last week Paul Binford and five other camp employees were exonerated when White County District Attorney Stan Gunter announced he was giving up his two-year prosecution of the six for the 2005 death of 13-year-old Travis Parker. Only days before, White County Superior Court Judge Lynn Akeley-Alderman had dismissed murder and child abuse charges against the young men, based on evidence they had restrained the boy just as the state had trained them to do. There was no crime in that.
And just like that, the very month Binford was to go on trial for murder, his innocence was proclaimed. Justice was his. Or was it?
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On April 20, 2005, before the day began to unravel, Binford sat with one of his campers talking about choices. "You make good choices, you wind up happy in life," he told the boy, one of 11 children ages 10-to-12 in his group, called the Navajos. "I've made good choices, I have a girlfriend, my life is good."
But he'd had a bad feeling that day about the Apaches, another group of 12- to 14-year-olds. It only took a couple of kids to shift the dynamics and destabilize a group, and this day, Travis Parker was at the center. Now it was dinnertime, and some of the youths refused to line up to trek through the forest to the dining hall.
The outdoor therapeutic camp is a place of last resort for kids like Travis, who was born positive for crack cocaine and had a history of violence. When he was 8, he threatened to kill his elementary school teacher; when he was 11, he punched his teacher in the face. By the time his grandmother brought him to the camp, he'd been on probation for hitting her and threatening her with a knife.
But counselors were trained to deal with children like Travis. The goal was to talk a kid down and help him regain self-control. If a child threatened himself or others, the counselors were trained in several restraints including a "full basket" hold, in which they crossed the child's arms in front of him and forced him face-down in a prone position, until he calmed down.
As part of the admissions process, Travis's grandmother had received a demonstration of the technique and she'd consented to their use of it. In his 11 years at the camp, there had never been serious injury to a camper caused by the restraint, the program's director John Timothy McMahan would later testify.
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On the evening of April 20, Travis attacked a counselor.
Binford, the senior counselor in charge that night, got the call a half-hour after they put Travis into a full basket hold. "Paul, we're in a restraint with Travis Parker," the counselor said. "He's still fighting."
At 5-foot-6, 160 pounds, Travis was strong and he was kicking, cursing and biting — what Binford called "psycho fighting." Binford did not participate in the restraint. But as senior counselor, he checked to make sure the others were following protocol during the hold. Whenever they restrained a child, they had been trained to check his breathing, blood flow and overall health, according to court testimony.
Travis was "crazy strong," "fighting like hell," Binford said, but after an hour and a half, he finally stopped struggling, and they rolled him up to a seated basket hold. But something was wrong. They stood him up. He went limp. His eyes were fixed, his pupils dilated. Binford and the other two counselors, including one who was a trained emergency medical technician, knew this was a medical emergency. They called 911 and began cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The ambulance arrived about 15 minutes later.
After the ambulance left, Binford and the other counselors were in shock. Only a few minutes ago, they'd been talking about getting Mexican food once they were done.
Binford began to pray for Travis. But 24 hours later, the child was dead.
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In the ensuing days, there were interviews and written statements to Department of Human Resources investigators, GBI investigators. Binford told the same story five or six times. He agreed to take a lie detector test, and passed. He was confident they would realize this was a tragedy but they had done nothing wrong.
But several weeks later, the DHR fired Binford and the others. State officials said face-down restraints violated state policy. They said the young men were fired for a variety of reasons, including their refusal to be polygraphed. Were they lying? Binford wondered. On July 18, three months after Travis's death, Binford was in the car with his mother when his cellphone rang. It was an agent with the GBI.
"You've been indicted for felony murder, cruelty to a child and manslaughter," Binford remembers the agent saying. "You have to turn yourself in tomorrow at the White County Jail."
The next day he was handcuffed, fingerprinted and asked if he were in a gang. Binford, a quiet, unassuming young man who stands 5-foot-9 and sports a sandy-colored beard and moustache, replied, "No, I don't belong to a gang."
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For two years he has been haunted by the image of his own picture in the newspaper staring back at him as a man who abused and murdered a child. He has lived with the public shame, the letters to the editor under banners that shouted, "Former youth minister should know better."
At night, he obsesses about making sure the doors are locked, something he never did before. For two years, he hasn't been able to sleep at night.
He has lived in fear of going to prison for a crime he didn't commit. Just sitting in court for motions hearings has made him nervous, but the idea of a jury trial has terrified him.
As a man of faith, he finds himself struggling mightily with forgiveness. Right now he has none for the Department of Human Resources. "They created a system that was dangerous, and when the system failed, they didn't support their people, and then they lied about it," he says. Or for District Attorney Gunter, who knew the state medical examiner said it wasn't the restraint that killed Travis, but the effects of fighting so long, like an overexerted athlete. "If he had any sense of justice," he says of Gunter, "or any backbone, this wouldn't have gone on so long."
Even the comparison to the Duke case makes him angry. There are similarities, he concedes.
"It has people accused of a horrible crime by an overzealous prosecutor," he says. "But those were drunk people at a party. We were people working our butts off, working at very little pay to try to make the world a better place by helping kids."
Saddest is he really liked working with kids. "Except for how it turned out, I loved the job," Binford says. "And I was really good at it."
But that's over. "The fact I was charged with cruelty to a child, murder of a child, I would be a liability."
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He was in Los Angeles a week ago Friday, helping his girlfriend move into her new apartment when he got the news. She's there for a year doing an internship.
They were in the car out front, getting ready to go to Target for blinds, when he realized he'd left his cellphone behind.
It was ringing as he went back upstairs. When he went back outside, Staci was in the passenger seat, plugging in the address to Target on their GPS. Binford walked over to her. "You're not going to believe this," he said. "But the judge just quashed the indictment."
She jumped out of the car and tackled him. For a while, they lay on the grass, laughing. He wondered how he should respond to this burden suddenly being lifted after living with it so long. When your football team wins, there's a standard response. But how should you feel when murder charges are dropped against you?
"I always knew this day was going to happen," he now says. "You just don't expect it to be on your way to Target to get blinds."
Binford is relieved that it turned out this way. But he understands why Travis' grandmother wants someone to pay for her grandson's death. She and Travis were victims. So, Binford feels, were he and his colleagues. Had they known the restraint carried risk, they never would have agreed to use it.
"We were trained wrong, and then the state lied to cover it up," he says. "My story hasn't changed at all, but the state's has."
He wishes he could sit down with her and explain they were doing everything with her grandson's best interest in mind.
"If I had a chance to speak to her, I'd tell her that every night when I pray for myself and those who've gone through this horrible ordeal, I say a prayer for her. She has suffered a more tragic loss. She lost her grandson. All I've lost is two years of my life."
But he wants her to know what he wants the world to know. "It was the system that was flawed, and we didn't know it," he says. "That's the other thing that's so painful. The reason we took this job was not about money, it was to help people. It sure didn't pay well, and the hours sucked. I took this job because I believe it was what God wanted."
Now he hopes to move on. He's already begun the application process to law school. His lack of faith in the justice system has inspired him to become a criminal defense lawyer.
He dreams of marrying Staci and having children, knowing that one day he'll have to tell them their father was once an accused child murderer. "I would never be interested in denying the past," he says.
But he's not yet sure what he'll say.
"How do you explain that to a kid?"
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