APRIL 26, 2000; Pg. A01

A Search for Answers in a Death at Temple

Chris Patton's 1998 Death was Ruled a Suicide. His Father does not Agree.

By Shankar Vedantam

Ever since his son was found hanging in a closet in a Temple University dorm 16 months ago, a Bucks County policeman has waged an unrelenting battle to prove that the freshman did not commit suicide.

Charlie Patton has clashed with university officials, saying that they did not properly investigate the case.

Using his police training, he has reconstructed how his son spent his final hours. He has minutely examined the autopsy to buttress his suspicions: He says the time of death, the undigested food in his son's stomach, and the furrow on his neck are all evidence of potential foul play. Patton has referred his detailed case notes to police, pathologists and psychiatrists all over the country. He has blanketed the university with flyers, offering rewards for information.

Temple University's Police Department, Philadelphia police, and the city medical examiner all say that Patton's 22-year-old son Chris - in trouble with university officials and the law, depressed and drunk - took his own life.

University officials say Patton, a Newtown Township sergeant, cannot accept what really happened: The cop who sees clues, cover-ups and conspiracy everywhere is a father who cannot believe his son could have turned his back on life, they say. Suicide, incomprehensible to the living, has been too difficult for Charlie Patton to bear.

"I feel sorry for him, I really do," said Bill Bergman, Temple's vice president for security and a former Philadelphia deputy police commissioner. "This is how he acts out his grief." Sitting in his living room with the afternoon sun glinting on his dark-rimmed glasses, Charlie Patton laughed humorlessly at the suggestion. He cannot believe that the things that troubled Chris would have led the youth to kill himself. Everyone, Patton said, has troubles.

"If I took my life tomorrow, they could say, 'Here's why,' " Patton said. "It's a script."

In addition to juggling school and work, Chris had fathered a son and took the responsibility seriously, his parents said.

"I'd like to think this was a suicide and just move on," said Patton's wife, Dolores. "But I can't."

She said she was initially slow to endorse her husband's investigations. Now, although she is weary of their crusade, she has been convinced by his suspicions.

"Did someone smother him, drag him to a closet, and hang him with a shoelace?" she asked. "I will forever wonder."

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It was a little after 11 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 6, 1998, when Chris Patton's roommate, Sean Bell, returned to their dorm room, 302 East Temple Towers on Cecil B. Moore Avenue.

According to a statement Bell later gave police, when he unlocked the door it would only open a crack. Loud music was playing. Bell guessed his roommate was holding the door shut. Chris liked to play pranks. Bell kicked and heaved at the door. It gave way, and he stepped inside. Chris was kneeling into a closet at the entranceway, his lower legs blocking the door.

The ends of a shoelace had been tied to the closet rod. Chris's neck was hanging in the U-shaped loop.

Bell thought Chris was fooling around. The music was deafening; he walked past Chris to shut it off.

In his statement, Bell said he returned to the closet and told his roommate to quit joking. Chris didn't move. Bell touched him. He was cold and stiff. This wasn't a prank. Bell thought about getting a knife to cut the body down, but thought better of it. He ran outside, locking the door behind him, and sprinted downstairs to tell a security guard.

According to Temple officials, the security guard notified university police, who then contacted Philadelphia police. Bergman and Robert Lowell, chief investigator for the university police, said it was standard procedure to bring in Philadelphia police for an incident as serious as a student death.

A Temple sergeant was the first to arrive.

"He felt the neck," Bergman said. "He immediately shut and locked the door. A crime scene was started."

Bergman said that the first Philadelphia officer arrived between 11:20 and 11:25 p.m. Detectives showed up five minutes after midnight. Bergman and Lowell were also present.

No ambulance was called. Bergman said: "He was obviously dead."

Lowell said that Chris Patton's tongue was swollen but that he saw no other signs of injury. An official from the Medical Examiner's Office arrived at 1:15 a.m. and later placed the time of death at 11 p.m.

"The coroner's report indicated no trauma," Lowell added.

Dorm security videotapes showed nothing suspicious, Bergman said.

In the months to come, Charlie Patton would question everything that Temple had done and reinterpret all the conclusions, from Sean Bell's testimony to the medical examiner's report.

But when the parents arrived at Temple the next morning, they were too numb to question anything.

Temple officials told them that Chris had been drinking - his blood-alcohol content was 0.2 percent, twice the legal limit.

In addition, the stunned parents learned that Chris had apparently been depressed and in trouble: A few weeks earlier, Chris and a non-Temple friend had left a message on the answering machine of Bettye Collier-Thomas, director of Temple's Center for African-American History and Culture. According to the Pattons, the young men joked about a sick anaconda - and then made threatening remarks.

The call was traced. The university's department of student affairs put Chris on probation until graduation, ordered that he get counseling, and barred him from contacting anyone in Collier-Thomas' department.

Believing that the university had accused him of racial harassment, Chris wrote in an appeal: "It was a prank call, nothing more nothing less, and should be dealt with as a minor violation of disorderly conduct." Temple officials said that a hearing was planned.

Meanwhile, the professor contacted the District Attorney's Office, which instructed Chris to appear at a hearing to face charges of harassment by communication, terroristic threats, and criminal conspiracy. The hearing was to have been Friday, Dec. 11 - five days after Chris was found dead.

The Pattons would also learn, later, about two essays that their son had written for his Marital and Family Communication class.

The essays showed that he was unhappy during the recent Thanksgiving holiday and was troubled about his relationship with his father.

He began his "Thanksgiving assignment" writing: "Although many people feel that they should be with their families on Thanksgiving, and this is a time for them to 'bond,' 'reunite' and 'enjoy' each other's company over a nice meal, I happen to disagree."

In the essay dated Dec. 1, he wrote: " . . . my father was the head of the household, the disciplinarian, the 'breadwinner,' which he reminded each member of constantly. In essence, the family revolved around this man, and no one else seemed to count."

Toward the end, he wrote: "I pretend that this whole situation doesn't bother me, being in a sense strategic and protective when deep down it does bother me and causes tension, but I don't want to subject myself to becoming vulnerable by telling this to anyone, especially my parents."

Dolores Patton was anguished by the essays. Her first reaction was to blame herself for her son's death. Maybe, she said, "I didn't say 'thank you' enough. . . . I didn't say 'I love you' enough."

The university sent the Pattons flowers and cards. Temple sent a bus loaded with Chris' friends and coworkers to the funeral, conducted at a little church down the road from the Pattons' home. Dolores Patton remembered that the university was wonderfully kind. She was moved and touched.

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In late January, Charlie Patton decided to talk to university officials - something was bothering him.

"I was trying to make sense of it," he said. "Not a police sense, but a fatherly sense."

Dolores thought it was a bad idea.

"I thought it would open wounds we were trying to heal," she said. "For two weeks, I tried to dissuade him. I said, 'Let's leave it go.' "

Patton was adamant. He took a friend and visited the university. He poked around Chris' dorm. He met Jill Beatty, a student who lived next door to Chris.

Beatty told Patton that on the night of the death, she had heard music blare from Chris' room. Surprised, she went to the door and looked out the peephole. She saw a man in the corridor calling out to turn the music down.

Patton said Beatty and a friend had suggested to him that the man had emerged from Chris' room and that Beatty had opened the door and made eye contact with him.

Patton also heard an off-campus rumor that there were many suicides at Temple in 1998. In a conversation with a Catholic priest on campus, Patton said, he believed he got that confirmed.

His policeman's instincts aroused, Patton tested a shoelace and found that it gave way at 145 pounds - Chris weighed 191. Besides, said Patton, the shoelace should have caused more than a furrow - it should have sliced into Chris' neck. After seeing his son at the funeral, Patton also said that Chris' lip was cut and his fingers bruised.

Had Chris been injured as he fought off an attacker?

Patton found that his son had been in a fight the day before his death and that police had found a note in his room, apparently with a lyric from a rap song that concluded: "I'll make your face soft."

From Chris' roommate, Patton learned his son had been startled the day before he died: A door appeared as if it had been moved, and Chris thought someone had broken into the dorm room.

As for the theory that he was depressed, Patton found from the medical examiner that his son had eaten shortly before he had died. It wasn't the mark of a suicidal man, the father thought.

From his son's colleagues and teachers, he learned that Chris had regularly attended classes and worked diligently at his cafeteria job.

The night before his death, a bartender told him, Chris had been having fun partying.

Patton said Chris' essays didn't mean much. "Any 19-, 20-, 21-year-old, you think they are not troubled?"

With all this information, he set to work convincing his wife and investigators that Chris had died under suspicious circumstances.

At a confrontational meeting with Bergman and Lowell at Temple last spring, he told the investigators that an elementary rule in police work was that just because something looked like a duck and walked like a duck, it was not necessarily a duck. He said he called the officials incompetent and lectured them on how they should have conducted a proper investigation.

"What I can't handle is they are being paid to interview, authenticate and find out," he said in one of his mildest assessments of Temple and Philadelphia police. "They did nothing."

Dolores Patton slowly grew convinced.

"I understand Temple wants to say Chris hung himself by his shoelace, was drunk - those depressing essays, paying child support - I can see them saying that," she said. "We accepted it. But when you hear how Chris was startled . . . a man leaving his room, and he had eaten half an hour before, it doesn't fit."

Patton sought advice from Henry Lee, a criminalist and Connecticut's commissioner of public safety. Lee wrote back, referring Patton to some expert pathologists.

"Unfortunately, as you know because of your own professional experiences, it is very difficult to accept the sudden unexpected death of a beloved family member," he wrote.

The more the Pattons thought about the man Jill Beatty had seen in the corridor, the more they became convinced that he was central to their son's death. They thought of all the men who matched his description. The list began with some of Chris' friends and went all the way to a Temple University detective.

Last fall, Charlie and Dolores Patton decided to sell a motorcycle to raise a $10,000 reward for information "leading up to the arrest and conviction of the subject believed to be involved in the death of our son, Christopher J. Patton."

The policeman printed 1,800 flyers showing his son's smiling face. He distributed them all over campus.

Temple officials shake their heads in disbelief at almost everything Patton says. They say there were two suicides on campus in 1998 - roughly along the lines of national statistics.

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Father Gregory Fairbanks, the Catholic priest at the university's Newman Center, recalled his conversation with Charlie Patton but denied confirming that there were an unusual number of suicides.

Bergman and Lowell said that the university conducted a thorough investigation - and that the presence of Philadelphia police ensured there was no conflict of interest.

The officials point out that at Patton's request, both Temple and Philadelphia police reexamined the case - and returned the same conclusion: Chris Patton committed suicide.

In an interview, Jill Beatty confirmed that she heard loud music, looked through the peephole of her door, and saw a man who called out something about turning down the music.

She denied opening her door or making eye contact. She said she could not identify the man because his face was turned away from her.

Bergman and Lowell said that the man Beatty saw in the corridor was most likely passing by just as Chris' roommate was groping to turn off the blaring music.

Not just Temple, but "everyone who has looked at it says these are the facts, and the father keeps saying there are some loose ends," Bergman said.

"I find this frustrating," he said. "I understand people's grief, but somebody's got to stand up and say it to this guy."

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