A lot of people in that part of town knew Darryl Butts, police and street folk alike. His death didn't really come as a shock to anyone A the violent demise of a young, crack-addicted black man in urban Dade has become something of a commonplace tragedy. And the 29-year-old Butts, who was one of the subjects of the December 1993 New Times cover story "Where the Girls Are," about the transvestite denizens of "TV Park" in Little Haiti, had been living closer than most to annihilation.
Tall and skinny, slightly hunched when shuffling down the sidewalk, he earned the street name Lurch. But when he dressed like a woman and turned tricks along 79th Street, he was Tracy. Makeup and a ponytail hairpiece made his doe-eyed, wide-nostriled face glamorous. In the last months of his life, he was in and out of jail on drug and prostitution charges, and plagued by infirmities caused by the AIDS virus. During some of his jail stays, Butts had attended drug-rehabilitation programs, and he'd sometimes vow to stay clean and get a job upon his release. While incarcerated he'd make plans to save up his disability money so that when he got out he could get his hair done in braids, buy some new clothes, and go down to the county office that helps people with criminal records to find jobs. But invariably, once he was free, he would admit that he really just wanted to get high, and that meant going back to prostitution and living in a dingy room or homeless encampment such as TV Park (the street name for Commerce Park). Most recently he resided amid a jumble of decaying pillows, mattresses, and garbage under an olive tree in a clearing near NE 79th Street and Second Avenue.
"Darryl was into that rock, and that's what happens," says Saul Hewitt, who used to live that life but is now clean, housed, and employed. Hewitt nevertheless remains in touch with "the girls," and mourns for the gentle Lurch. "If you don't give it up," he says, "it's either jail or death."
There has been talk among his street acquaintances that Butts was shot in retaliation for taking some dope that didn't belong to him. Everyone knows that most prostitutes steal what they can, if they can, from their dates.
But a long-time friend of Butts (whose street name is also Tracy) was with him the night he died, and he insists Butts was the least avaricious queen among them. "Lurch wouldn't do that. Lurch never hurt nobody," says Tracy, slowly shaking his bowed head.
Butts and two other transvestites were on 79th Street on the night of Monday, March 4. They usually didn't work early in the week like that unless they really needed money. Tracy wasn't dressed up or working, he says, but he was there for a while too. Near midnight, Butts apparently got a date. Tracy and one of the other transvestites, Pecan, went for a soda and cigarettes. They remember hearing a gunshot, a sound that isn't terribly remarkable in that neighborhood. They didn't think anything of it. About fifteen minutes later, standing on 79th Street and thinking to drum up some business, Pecan peered into the passenger-side window of a Cadillac that was stopped in traffic. The driver, a heavyset man in dreadlocks or a hat, wasn't interested and drove quickly away.
Another quarter of an hour later, a police officer stopped his squad car near the three and asked if they knew a tall skinny queen with a ponytail. "'That's Lurch,'" Tracy remembers saying. "'What happened?' He just said, 'He's dead.' Like -- it just hit me. Like, uh-uh. Then he said, 'Oh, you guys don't mind riding over there with me? Because the investigators might want to talk to you.' We stayed there for an hour and 45 minutes, and they would cover [the body] up and then uncover it and take pictures, and we got tired of just sitting there and knowing he was gone."
Miami police say murder charges are pending against Vernon Archie, who already has been charged with at least four robberies of transvestites who work along NW 79th Street. Archie was seen driving a black Fleetwood shortly after the shooting. Robbery is the official motive; a little brown purse Butts carried was missing.
Butts's funeral was held the following Saturday at Saint Luke Cousin A.M.E. Church. His divorced parents, Marian and Ernest Butts, were there, as was his older sister Melinda, younger brother Nadrian, grandparents, and other relatives. Not many street people showed up. "They wouldn't let the girls in," complains Henrietta, a friend.
Marian Butts denies that. She says she doesn't know who Darryl's friends are. And she doesn't know any more just who Darryl was, she adds. Before he left their Carol City home at about age eighteen, he was a talented singer and musician, a "free-hearted" boy who loved to cook and "never bothered nobody." He played the tuba ("We rented him one") as a student at Parkway Middle School, and he sang with a tuxedoed gospel group that once traveled to Tennessee for a gospel festival. It was at Norland Senior High that he started with drugs and eventually dropped out. The most recent photograph Marian Butts has of her son, the photo that appeared on the funeral program, was taken at a high school prom. His date, the girl who lived across the street, has been cropped out.
"Basically Darryl was a good kid," his mother says. "He got out there, and I don't know what happened to him.
