He had memorized their names. His main tormentor, the big blond cop, was Baird. This was the one now holding the gun.
"If you don't tell us what we want to know," he said, "I'm going to blow your head away."
Colbert stared down the gun barrel. He believed Baird would do it.
"You have three seconds," said Baird.
Colbert heard the gun's hammer click.
Baird began to count.
"Three."
Officer John David Baird Jr. didn't know it, but he was counting down his own future in the Philadelphia Police Department, and as a free man. This bullying of an innocent, stubborn college student on Feb. 24, 1991, was going to backfire in a way Baird and his partner, Officer Thomas Ryan, could never have imagined. It was going to pry open a massive police corruption scandal.
In a sequence of events set in motion by the videotaped beating of a black man a continent away, Arthur Colbert's outrage has led to the indictment of Baird, Ryan and four other Philadelphia police officers, and prompted a federal investigation that has grown citywide.
The investigation has overturned dozens of criminal convictions, forced a re-examination of hundreds of cases, and prompted lawsuits that could cost the city millions of dollars.
Most important, it has exposed a surly, racist, criminal police presence in poor black neighborhoods of Philadelphia - the kind of presence that is mirrored in the explosive tapes of former Los Angeles Police Department Detective Mark Fuhrman at the O.J. Simpson trial and in police corruption scandals in New Orleans, Atlanta and New York.
Finally, the revelations that followed this winter night raised serious questions about the Police Department's ability to police itself.
But none of this entered Colbert's head as he stared down the barrel of Baird's service revolver.
