EUGENE, Ore. – Micah Harris closes his eyes and he is transported to the University of Oregon's Hayward Field.
He is in the starting blocks for the 110-meter hurdles. He can hear the rhythmic claps for the field events. He can see the bronze statue of legendary Oregon track coach and Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman, holding a stopwatch in his left hand. He can see the orange polyurethane track with white lane lines, the cantilevered roofs above the seating areas on both sides, the emerald pine trees on the hills rimming the historic stadium.
He can smell the fresh Oregon air.
The starting gun sounds, and Harris surges toward the first of 10 hurdles.
“You run by the first part of the stands, that's where the crowd carries you,” Harris says. “That's when you accelerate. It's so electrifying.”
He gallops over one 42-inch hurdle, then another and another.
Then he opens his eyes. He's in Ione, a dusty town 40 miles southeast of Sacramento. He's at Mule Creek State Prison, staring at the ceiling of a cement cell.
* * *
“He's gonna kill me,” the 911 caller kept screaming. “He's gonna kill me.”
Six times, she said it.
Police officer Bryon Barmer arrived at the Mission Valley apartment at 3:30 a.m. on March 10, 2006, and found a San Diego State student described in court documents only as “Jacqueline T.”
“Her face was swollen, and her left eye was swollen almost shut,” the court documents say. “Her upper lip was split and bleeding profusely. When asked to compare Jacqueline's injuries to those he had seen after other beatings, Barmer testified this was the second-worst beating he had seen in his 20 years in law enforcement.”
Harris was apprehended that morning at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, in Suite 127, where he lived and trained as a 110-meter hurdler.
He and Jacqueline had met the night before at the Sidebar nightclub in downtown San Diego, where Harris worked part time as a security guard. They danced, kissed, flirted, and then Harris offered to drive Jacqueline to her car in Mission Valley. They parked. Jacqueline got in her car.
Jacqueline later testified that Harris appeared irritated while she spoke to a friend on her cell phone and without warning he began punching her through the open car window, then ordered her into the back seat and attempted to pin her down. When she ran toward a nearby apartment complex and started to climb into a patio, court documents say, Harris forced her head against a metal railing, “knocking out a tooth and breaking a bone in her jaw.”
A doctor testified Jacqueline had suffered “two nasal fractures, a cheek bone fracture, a hematoma to her ear, blunt trauma to her eyeball, dental trauma, bruising to her neck, and bruising and swelling throughout her face.”
In July 2006, a jury in San Diego Superior Court convicted Harris of torture, mayhem, assault with intent to commit a specified sex act, and assault by means of force likely to produce great bodily injury. He was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole, the penalty for a torture conviction in California.
Off to Ione he went. Five rings had become two, around his wrists.
The preliminary rounds of the 110-meter hurdles at the U.S. Olympic Trials begin today at Hayward Field. Harris won't be there.
This was supposed to be his grand homecoming, the culmination of a promising career, the convergence of training, experience and familiarity. He had lowered his personal record to a respectable 13.38 seconds. He had been admitted to the resident program at the Olympic Training Center. He'd be 29, when hurdlers are rounding into their prime. And he'd be in the comfortable confines of Hayward Field.
“It's very emotional for me,” Harris was saying last week in a telephone interview from Mule Creek State Prison, a medium-security facility, “because I got a scholarship to the University of Oregon. I got really excited when I heard the Trials were going (there). I'm devastated that I got myself in legal trouble. I let my family down. I let my friends down. I let my coaches down.
“I feel really remorseful about the whole situation. Someone got hurt. That wasn't my intention. It just turned ugly.”
Instead, he'll wake up at 7 a.m. today, eat breakfast and be in the prison yard at 8 for a two-hour workout on the grass, refining his sprint technique, doing 1,000 sit-ups and push-ups because the prison doesn't have weight equipment, jumping over imaginary hurdles because the prison doesn't have hurdles. He writes all his own workouts and tapes them to the wall of his cell. He has other inmates watch him because he doesn't have a coach or video camera.
“They keep me honest,” Harris says. “I use their eyes.”
He'll shower and eat lunch, then return to the yard to play some basketball, then go inside and watch NBC's afternoon telecast of the Trials on TV.
Many inmates want to forget what they don't have. Harris wants to remember.
He has a friend mail him articles about track and field. He knows Dayron Robles of Cuba recently lowered the hurdles world record to 12.87 seconds. He knows Liu Xiang of China, the 2004 Olympic gold medalist and the favorite in Beijing, false-started at the Prefontaine Meet last month and was disqualified.
“You know, it's a passion,” Harris says. “I love this sport. I continue because the Olympic journey, everything is not easy. It's a journey. The road happens to come through prison for me, but it doesn't mean I have to stop dreaming.
“That's what the Olympics are about. It's not what happens when times are good. It's what happens when times go bad. It's how you respond to it, that's what I'm focused on. Anything is possible. Why, because I'm in prison, should it be different for me?”
He pauses, and the phone line from Mule Creek State Prison crackles.
“The dream doesn't die.”
* * *
Harris says he thinks in “four-year increments.” In Olympiads.
He isn't eligible for parole until 2013, a few months after the 2012 Olympics in London. His only chance of being released in time to qualify for 2012 is for the torture conviction to be overturned, the basis of an appeal that went before a three-judge panel in San Diego last month.
Harris' attorney argued there is insufficient evidence to prove he acted, as the penal code on torture states, “with the intent to cause cruel or extreme pain and suffering for the purpose of revenge, extortion, persuasion, or for any sadistic purpose.”
One judge agreed, writing that “while Harris' attack on Jacqueline was unquestionably brutal, his actions do not constitute the type of conduct that the electorate intended to prohibit.”
But two judges didn't, and by a 2-1 margin the original verdict was affirmed. Two weeks ago Harris petitioned the California Supreme Court to hear his case.
It's his last resort, and the statistics are not in his favor. The California Supreme Court receives an estimated 2,000 petitions each year and grants hearings to less than 10 percent.
Minus the torture conviction, Harris could be free as soon as next June. He can do the math. He'd be 33 at the 2012 Olympics. He'd be 37 in 2016.
“I just want people to understand that I'm truly remorseful,” Harris says. “I've been thinking about it since this whole thing went down. People make mistakes. I would love to get a second chance. I was wrong and I have to pay a price for my actions. That I understand.
“Should I be punished? Yes. How long? That's up to the court.”
Deputy District Attorney Kristen Spieler, the prosecutor in the original trial, was read what Harris said.
“I think he's sorry for what he did,” Spieler says, “but I think he's sorry because of what it did to his life. Micah had a chance to maybe compete in the Olympics. Most kids only dream of that, and by his actions he threw it away.
“I think he still blames other people for what happened to him. I don't think he's ever come to grips with what he did. My take is that his focus now, as it was then, is on himself.”
To which Keith Rutman, Harris' attorney, says: “As much as he would like to, he can't do anything to make her better, make her pain go away or console her. He can only focus on himself and make himself a better person and hope that she can see he has truly become a better person and forgive him as a result. That's all he can do.”
Meanwhile, in Ione, Harris lies in his bed and closes his eyes and is transported to Hayward Field. He smells the air, hears the crowd, sees the orange polyurethane track with white lane lines.
“I continue to put myself there, mentally,” Harris says.
The U.S. Track and Field Trials for the 2012 Olympics are at Hayward Field, too.
Mark Zeigler: (619) 293-2205; mark.zeigler@uniontrib.com
