Half brother unaware inmate was mentally ill

CHAMPAIGN – Willie Williams last saw his younger half brother, Donnell Clemons, about a month before Clemons got into a shooting spree with Champaign police in June 2007 that ultimately landed him in a mental institution for the indefinite future.

Clemons stopped by Williams' Champaign home to say that a mutual friend had died.

"He was well-groomed. He had good personal hygiene. He always had his hair cut and clean clothes. By looking at him and seeing him with his own auto – he had car insurance – you couldn't tell he was homeless by appearance," Williams said.

Clemons was also severely mentally ill. But Williams said he didn't know his 47-year-old half brother well enough to realize it at the time.

Williams, 62, was the third of 14 children born to the same woman who had the children by four different men. Clemons was her 13th child. For the most part, the children were raised in Chicago.

Clemons moved to Champaign in the late 1980s and lived with Williams a couple of months. He was here about four years before taking off for Oklahoma. He returned to the community around 1995, Williams believes.

"He was pretty much a loner. Whenever I did see him, I would invite him over. He would never come over. I felt like he was intentionally avoiding socializing with me," Williams said.

On June 7, Williams said, he turned off the TV just before the 10 p.m. news came on. His son called about 20 minutes later to ask if he had seen the news. He felt sure the car he saw that was involved in a shootout with police near West Side Park belonged to Clemons.

"I didn't want to believe it," Williams said.

The next day, Williams and his youngest daughter went to Carle Foundation Hospital to see Clemons.

"They said his condition was severe. We wanted to know if we should find a lawyer, a funeral director or a preacher."

A different person

Williams said he didn't consider his younger brother different in actions but said he spun some tall tales.

"Donnell never had a fight in his life. But in his storytelling, he would glamorize. You didn't know if what he was telling you was true or false. He had some bizarre stories," Williams said.

To Williams, his brother was different in that he never had sport teams that he liked to root for. Everyone in the family thought Donnell would marry his high school sweetheart. But Donnell never asked her. And when she asked him, he severed the relationship.

After high school, Clemons went in the military but came home after about six months, Williams said. Clemons said he had gotten out because some "white girl was liking him and they were talking and communicating and he was being harassed. He told them he didn't want to continue. That's what he told me. Whether it was true, I don't know."

He then got a job as a security guard, which Williams said Clemons held for about 12 or 13 years.

Donnell was not the only one in the family with mental problems.

At least two brothers served in Vietnam. One got a psychiatric discharge and was later involved, along with another brother, in the murder of an off-duty police officer in an armed robbery.

One of their sisters also was diagnosed as being bipolar and paranoid schizophrenic, the same diagnosis a psychiatrist would later offer for Clemons.

"Rosemary could see (Donnell's) mood swings. Real far to the right and real far to the left. She takes 21 pills a day, and if she took 20, she would not be normal," Williams said of his 54-year-old sister.

Williams, a retired union laborer, admitted he had little to no experience with mental illness when he stepped forward to support his brother after his June 7 arrest.

He described a jail visit with him in January, about a week before a judge found him not guilty by reason of insanity of the attempted murders of the police officers.

"He started talking about a Christmas card he had gotten from Eugene (another brother) and how the wording was beautiful. He went on for four to five minutes about it. Then he asked me, what did I think would happen in court.

"I told him, 'Listen. If you believe in God, pray. God will forgive you, but man will not.' I saw the change take place. The other person came out of him, not just his voice but his whole facial structure. This fear kicked him. This is when I really realized that he had a couple personalities he was dealing with and what these doctors are saying was true," Williams said.

Williams said in an earlier hospital visit with his brother, Clemons told him – with police officers in the room – that the officers had tried to kill him. Clemons was hit with several bullets.

"He said he didn't shoot first. He didn't understand why Champaign police tried to kill him. He said he wouldn't be alive if he didn't have the pistol. I didn't even nod. I think I was just dumbfounded. I didn't know what to say. I was lost. I didn't even want to be involved," he said.

Williams said his children persuaded him otherwise.

"If not for Isaac and Alicia, I would have probably copped out. They said, 'Dad. That's your brother. You got to be there for him. It doesn't reflect on you,'" he said.

Avoidable situation?

While Williams said he doesn't believe the police were out to get his brother, he wonders if the situation couldn't have been handled differently.

He said authorities were aware of the April 1997 incident in which Clemons took a gun to the Champaign County Courthouse just days after it had been firebombed by another mentally ill man.

"The excuse he gave for doing that is that he was a private detective. I felt like that was a flag right there," Williams said.

And on the morning of the shooting, Williams reminded, the Champaign Police Department sent the SWAT team to an apartment on State Street where a man had fired a paint ball from a house at a woman riding her bicycle by.

Why, then, weren't they more cautious in approaching a man threatening someone with a gun, he wondered.

Champaign Police Chief R.T. Finney said the two situations were completely different. Police had information that there were other guns in the home on State Street. And Clemons wasn't being approached as a suspect when he began firing on the officers.

"It would have been a very different approach had the officers known he was armed," Finney said.

Williams knows that when it comes to the mentally ill, it's easy to look the other way.

"As long as they are not bothering anybody, they just go unseen. We'll walk by them and say, 'Why don't they get a job?' When they do something stupid or crazy, we look at it," he said.

"It's all our problem. I've paid taxes over half my life. Much of that goes to stuff I don't agree to. Champaign's got a big building program. They're pouring millions into concrete monuments, but the weak and the sick among us, that's somebody else's problem," he said.

AP Video

Also on this date

• 'They're out of sight, out of mind'
• Local breeder's herd of hedgehogs is in high demand
• Paxton's Pacey kids graduating four at a time
• Champaign County Nursing Home at Medicaid's mercy
• Urbana increasing social services budget; Champaign reducing
• Lifelong learners finish another odyssey
• It's your business: Shop for babies, moms-to-be opens soon
• Obituaries