When LeBron Gaither was 17, he got into an altercation with a staff member at his school that resulted in assault charges. As Gaither faced the possibility of a criminal record, a Kentucky State Police detective offered him a deal: Charges would go away if Gaither agreed to become a drug informant. At the time, such an agreement was illegal without consent from Gaither’s parents or guardian. But Gaither agreed. In 1996, Gaither’s body was found in the woods. Gaither had helped police build a case against a local drug dealer, and a grand jury member had tipped off the dealer that Gaither had testified against him. An autopsy revealed Gaither had been tortured before he was murdered. This episode revisits Gaither’s case and others in which police were reckless and careless with the lives of those they pressured to become informants.

Transcript

Radley Balko: On a Monday morning in July 1996, police officers escorted LeBron Gaither through the courthouse in Marion County, Kentucky. It was an odd place for the 18-year-old to be. LeBron wasn’t in court to answer for some crime he had committed. Instead, he’d come to court to tell a grand jury about a cocaine purchase he had helped arrange.

The following day, July 16, LeBron was back in court, this time in neighboring Taylor County. Again, he told a grand jury about a drug sale that he had helped arrange.

LeBron, it turns out, had been working as a confidential informant for the Kentucky State Police. But even for an informant, his appearance in court was unusual.

Informants almost never testify in front of grand juries. Their identities are supposed to be kept secret. Until that week, no one other than a few police officers knew LeBron was working with the cops —not even his own family.

Shawn Gaither: We were never even told that he was going to even attempt to be an informant, or they were going to use him as an informant.

Radley Balko: That’s Shawn Gaither, LeBron’s older brother.

Shawn Gaither: We as a family would have absolutely told him, no, you’re not doing this.

Radley Balko: In fact, LeBron Gaither had been working with the police for almost a year. And it was a lopsided arrangement.

It all began when he had an altercation with an administrator that resulted in the school calling the police. In exchange for declining to charge him with assault, the cops asked if he’d become an informant instead. It would be dangerous work.

LeBron hadn’t yet turned 18, and no one in law enforcement talked to his parents before recruiting him.

Shawn Gaither: I think he just wasn’t educated enough to know the danger that he was truly putting himself in, nor do I think that those dangers were explained to him.

Radley Balko: The single most important responsibility police have when dealing with informants is to make sure their cover isn’t blown. It’s why courts defer to police when they rely on an informant’s word to obtain search and arrest warrants without ever identifying the informant by name.

Yet that week in July, the police marched LeBron through two courthouses and had him testify in front of two separate grand juries, with no effort to conceal his face or his identity. One of the Taylor County jurors recognized LeBron. She tipped off her friend Jason Noel, a drug dealer who was already facing charges. Noel knew LeBron, and, as you might imagine, he was angry.

The very next day, LeBron Gaither’s police contacts picked him up, outfitted him with a recorder and a transmitter, and set him up to make yet another drug purchase. It was Wednesday, July 17, 1996. The target this time: Jason Noel.

Shawn Gaither: They were going to set up one more drug buy that was going to end in a bust. He was supposed to walk up to Jason’s car. Apparently, law enforcement was around the area, but in undercover vehicles. And the minute that he had the drugs in hand, his words were supposed to be “This looks good.” And law enforcement was going to swarm in, arrest him, arrest Jason and anybody else that was in the car.

When my brother leaned into the car, there was a gentleman in the back seat that he didn’t know was in the back seat. Jason told him to come around to the passenger side, get in, so that they could do the transaction. My brother did. And then the car drove off.

Radley Balko: The police tried to follow the car but eventually lost track of it. They never saw LeBron Gaither alive again.

Sarah Stillman: To be an informant is a very, very dangerous thing to do.

Alexandra Natapoff: Exposing the identity of an informant in a public courtroom — colloquially known as “burning an informant” — in other words, revealing their identity and then using them again, was such an obvious breach of care, was such an obvious part of informant use rules.

Radley Balko: From The Intercept, this is Collateral Damage.

I’m Radley Balko. I’m an investigative journalist who has been covering the drug war and the criminal justice system for more than 20 years. In this series we’ve been telling the stories of people who needlessly died in the war on drugs. LeBron Gaither is one of them. LeBron didn’t sell, buy or use drugs before he became an informant. He just wanted a way to stay out of legal trouble. He trusted the police to protect him. And he’s not the only one.

Sarah Stillman: Kids are being used as informants. People with serious addictions are being used as informants. People with mental health and disability issues are being used in ways that strike me as grossly and patently dangerous and often results in injury or death.

Alexandra Natapoff: Sometimes people are shocked at how cavalier our criminal system is about the lives and the well-being of informants, and they say, “How can this be? How do we permit this?” One of the answers to that question is that the law permits it.

Radley Balko: The modern war on drugs dates back to the Nixon administration, half a century ago. In that time, the United States has produced laws and policies ensuring that collateral damage isn’t just tolerated, it’s inevitable.

Confidential informants like LeBron Gaither are seen by our criminal justice system as expendable. The police are permitted to use vague, unenforceable promises to lure them into dangerous situations they aren’t prepared to handle, sometimes with money, but often with the assurance of clearing their records.

They rarely end up better off than they were before when they started working with police. They’re asked to interact with dangerous people, but without weapons or training. And with no real oversight, police can dangle promises of a clean record in exchange for cooperation, then repeatedly renege on their word until the informant agrees to help with additional cases. And because this work is all done in secret, their stories are rarely told.

This is Episode Three, “Blown Cover: The Preventable Murder of LeBron Gaither.”

Shawn Gaither: So I am Shawn Gaither. My relationship to LeBron is, I’m his oldest brother. Wherever I went, he was with me. We loved to play basketball as kids. We had a lot of good friends. We pretty much spent most of our childhood together. Where there was one, there was the other.

Radley Balko: The Gaither brothers were big sports fans, especially football. They went to church together and leaned on one another during a childhood that at times could be difficult.

Shawn Gaither: We lived in New York for several years and then we moved to Kentucky when I was 7. And so when we moved to Kentucky, my mom decided that she didn’t really want to come to Kentucky. So my grandmother took custody of us, and she raised us as if we were her own kids.

So our grandmother had us until we were 15 and 14. And when mom came back, she got custody of us.

Radley Balko: The Gaithers’ mother arrived in Kentucky during a challenging time for any kid: their adolescence.

She settled one county over from where they lived with their grandmother. But Shawn Gaither didn’t want to move. It would have meant leaving his friends and his school. So he decided to stay behind and live with his aunt.

He and LeBron remained close, and in the years that followed, he saw his brother struggle with the challenges of living with an addicted parent. When LeBron was in high school, he had an altercation with a faculty member that would put him in the hands of the cops — and ultimately lead to his death.

Shawn Gaither: So the story we got was that one day, the assistant principal, [Charles] Lampley, was going around talking to all the classes about students disrespecting teachers and how the school was going to handle that going forward.

My understanding through his teacher and his classmates — when the assistant principal was talking, my brother raised his hand and said, “I got a question.” And based on what I know is that, his question was, “Well, what happens when teachers are disrespectful towards students, and the student’s not being disrespectful?”

There’s a couple of stories that happened after that. Allegedly, he got up and was told to go to the office by the assistant principal and that he would talk to him about it later.

The first story was that when he walked past the assistant principal, he shoved him. The assistant principal fell and ended up breaking his hip.

And then the second story we got was that when he went to leave the classroom, he said something. The assistant principal stepped in front of him, but tripped over my brother’s feet and fell.

So to know exactly what happened, it would be listening to third and fourth parties to try to figure out what exactly happened. Ultimately, the assistant principal did break his hip. There’s no denying that.

Radley Balko: As Shawn Gaither notes, accounts of the incident differ. The Louisville Courier Journal reported LeBron Gaither punched the assistant principal in the jaw, causing him to fall and break his hip.

Shawn Gaither: They apparently took him to the police station that day. And whatever conversations happened at the police station happened. To this day, I still don’t know what those conversations were. Obviously, it led to what he ultimately started doing for the law enforcement.

Radley Balko: LeBron was expelled from school following the alleged assault. He was later arrested for brandishing a gun during a dispute.

Sarah Stillman: Kids can be caught up in something that happened on the spur of the moment, and they’re facing a drug charge. And then on the spot, they suddenly have this way out of it.

Radley Balko: That’s Sarah Stillman, a staff writer at the New Yorker who’s written at length about how young people are baited into working as informants in the war on drugs.

Sarah Stillman: And so I could imagine, to anyone, that would be very appealing. But especially if you’re a young person who doesn’t fully understand the legal system and you think that there’s a way out for you, the cops are providing you a way out, and so you take it.

Radley Balko: For her award-winning 2012 investigation in the New Yorker, Stillman interviewed more than 70 people, many of whom had once worked as informants themselves.

Sarah Stillman: In many of the interviews I did, people had very good reasons that they felt vulnerable and that they were willing to take dangerous deals, which included a young transgender woman who feared all the really scary things that could happen to her if she was incarcerated and put in a male facility where she did not identify as a male.

I think about kids who feared that they weren’t going to graduate high school and their whole life was going to be derailed by what could have been a minor drug charge, but they were told that if they didn’t do this, that they could face really serious repercussions.

Radley Balko: LeBron Gaither was facing assault charges.

Shawn Gaither: They told him he was going to do 20 years in prison for assaulting a principal. Now, being that he was, I’m assuming 16 at the time, 16, maybe getting ready to turn 17. I don’t know how you could tell a kid that they’re going to do that amount of time when there’s conflicting stories of what actually took place.

Radley Balko: Just a quick aside here: Not all of the details that Shawn Gaither recalls from his brother’s case match up with police, court, and media records. That’s entirely understandable. The events in this case happened nearly 30 years ago, and human memory is fallible.

We also know that police can........

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