The Story Behind ‘Reap the Whirlwind,’ a True Crime History Set in 1985 San Diego

True crime author Peter Houlahan has written a comprehensive history taking readers back to the 1985 case of a young Black man in San Diego who went on trial for the murder of one San Diego police officer, shooting and running over another officer, and shooting and wounding a civilian during a police ride-along.

It’s called Reap the Whirlwind: Violence, Race, Justice, and the True Story of Sagon Penn. The book is described by Publishers Weekly as “a colorful narrative populated with well-drawn characters” in which “Houlahan explains how the case laid bare the city’s long-simmering tensions” while providing “deep insight into Southern California policing history.”

The trial of Sagon Penn would be a defining moment in San Diego’s history. Its battle lines were drawn early as typified by this quote from an editorial by Edward Fike of the San Diego Union on April 10, 1985, four days after the shooting: “The horror of that recent Sunday evening began with the accused killer’s arrogant disregard for authority.”

This is Houlahan’s second major work. His first was Norco ’80: The True Story of the Most Spectacular Bank Robbery in American History. This was an account of a violent bank robbery that would change how U.S. law enforcement armed itself. It has been praised by critics for its accuracy and authenticity.

Besides writing true crime, Houlahan is a professional emergency medical technician and also volunteers for his fire department in Connecticut where he lives. “It keeps you close to the human condition, and it’s a great way to contribute,” he said.

Houlihan has a strong San Diego connection, having graduated from UC San Diego in 1983 after which he headed north to Los Angeles. In the mid 1980s there were few cable news networks and no online sites, so he didn’t hear much about the Sagon Penn case at the time.

“News coverage was so regional in those days,” he said. While the murder trial was “covered heavily in the San Diego media, I wasn’t aware of it.”

His interest began years later after reading of Penn’s death in 2002. That would lead him to a multi-year reporting and writing journey to tell the story of how a Black man was found innocent despite early predictions that he would be executed as a cop killer.

“It was a very large story for San Diego, and remains very relevant to today,” said Houlahan. “And along the way it passed every test of something I would be interested in spending 4 1/2 years of my life writing.”

What follows is a conversation with Houlihan. It’s been edited in parts for brevity and clarity.

Q. You say the city played a major role in your book. How so?

A. “San Diego, the city itself, is an important character in the story,” said Houlahan. “I don’t think it would have unfolded the same way in Philadelphia, or Detroit, or Atlanta. Somebody said San Diego still thinks of itself as a military base, turned into a fun beach town.”

“The tension between the police and the Black community had been simmering for a long time. Only six percent of the city was black, the smallest of any big city in the United States. So it was a community that was easy for the rest of the city to ignore.”

“But, San Diego’s police force and black community had worked hard to improve relations. It was a progressive police force for the times. They’d taken significant tangible action to address racism within their ranks and the mistreatment of minority communities. But you’ve got the inherent tension between minority communities and the mostly white law enforcement agencies who police them that have been building forever. And, you know, things between the two just continue to blow up, and they keep blowing up today.”

“That’s why I call this book ‘Reap the Whirlwind.’ It’s a biblical reference. ‘They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.’ Many of the elements that led to the Sagon Penn incident have been sown historically, like the nature of these relationships.”

“Sagon Penn’s defense attorney, Milt Silverman, said he felt that after the verdict there were people in the black community who felt San Diego was a place where a young black man could find justice.”

Houlahan said the San Diego Police Department leaders at that time, Norm Stamper and Bob Burgreen, felt the experience made a difference when riots broke out in Los Angeles, Oakland, Las Vegas, and other western cities in 1992 after police officers were acquitted of beating Rodney King. San Diego remained relatively calm; there were some incidents but nowhere near the level of other cities.

Q. Researching this story presented some hurdles. How did you overcome them?

A. Houlahan said the challenge with researching the 39-year-old case was that no organization in the criminal justice system is required to hang onto the records when the defendant is acquitted, so they didn’t. The author did find thousands of pages of records on courthouse microfilm, but it was mostly appeals and motions by the attorneys.

“It was not the trial transcripts. It was not the police reports. It was not the real meat and potatoes. So yeah, that was a problem.”

Houlahan was able to locate over 1,400 newspaper articles written about the Penn incident. After combing through the papers, Houlahan took the next step to writing his book. He began searching out and then interviewing the people who lived this story.

“That is when I came upon the defense attorney Milt Silverman. I think at this point in his life, Milt was very interested in having a legacy. He had had an astonishing career, and he was someone who always believed in his cases.”

“A half dozen writers had approached him over the years about writing screenplays or books, but none of them ever did. I think he may have been having a little fatigue from people knocking on his door. But I think he sensed that I clearly meant business. I mean, it had been 35 years when I came upon this story, and no one had ever actually written it. He knew I had already been working on the project for over a year and had a publisher in place.”

“His law office was in an old grand Victorian in Golden Hill,” Houlahan recalled, describing walking down to the office’s basement, which was whitewashed and at one time had been the lab for noted forensic scientist Richard Whalley who worked with Silverman on the Penn Case. The large, well-lit space was filled with stacks of boxes from Silverman’s cases.

“There’s famous cases there, boxes of documents from the Michael Crowe case, Dale Akiki case, his civil suit against the Hare Krishnas. You could write a book about every single one of them.”

“There was an incredible amount of documentation, including about 80% of the trial transcripts in the Penn boxes. Every witness interview, all the incident reports by the police officers involved documenting where they were, what they did, and what they saw — ‘I was here, I was there, I saw this, I did this’— and the investigation and criminology reports. In an incident like this, everything’s documented.”

Also in the thirty to forty boxes the author would pore through “there’s some astonishing things in there like the recordings of the police radio traffic and 911 calls, which are really heartbreaking, because you can hear what’s going on, the fear, the panic in the voices, the responding police units trying to locate these officers who have been shot.”

When Houlahan first met Silverman at the attorney’s Point Loma home, “he began describing and acting out the defense version of what happened during the incident. He was swinging imaginary police batons, lying on his back, playing the role of Penn or the police officer. He started doing that right in his living room at age 75. Pretty soon he’s got me sitting on top of him, playing the role of officer Donovan Jacobs, and he’s saying ‘no, no, no, that’s not how he did it. He grabbed the gun this way.’ And two hours later, we were out at the crime scene. He was an incredible source of information.”

Q. What role did the media play in the Penn trial and all that surrounded it?

A. “There was a great article done in San Diego Magazine by Maribeth Mellin, who attended every day of both trials, and it was an unbelievably good source,” Houlahan recalled.

“But the person that’s most central, and I think compelling to the story, is Michael Tuck, a very good looking, photogenic and fiercely intelligent, young news anchor. Also reporter Doug Curley who was probably the on-air reporter with the most constant presence. You know, he had been a police officer who had been shot. So he had a different perspective.”

“I think the overall news coverage at the time was very fair, But there were clear divisions among the news media. You had the ‘old San Diego’ establishment that was represented by the San Diego Union newspaper, and then you had the brash young Tuck who was more representative of the younger ‘new San Diego.'”

“The Union reporters as a whole were fair, however there was the senior editorial writer, one of their most powerful journalists, Ed Fike, who wrote a damning opinion piece placing blame for the incident on Sagon Penn. Tuck went right after him in that same night in one of the ‘Perspective’ segments he did for 10News at that time. He accused Fike of convicting Penn in the newspaper just four days after the incident. He said, ‘Give Edward Fike a rope and a tree limb and he’d be dangerous.'”

“Tuck argued, ‘Hold on, hold on. Maybe there’s more to this than just a young black man pulling a gun and shooting three people.’ In 1985, media figures like Fike and Tuck carried a lot more weight working for newspaper and television stations in San Diego than they would today with all the social media, and 24-hour news channels.”

“The people in San Diego got their news about the Penn story from mostly the same sources, so they were working from the same set of facts. There was a sense of journalistic responsibility back then. Even if people had strong opinions those were voices of reason and moderation compared to the frequently partisan media and information echo chambers today.”

Q. What did you mean saying the trial provided a showdown between accomplished attorneys with “incredible contrasts in personality and style?”

A. “I believe both of those attorneys, prosecutor Mike Carpenter and Milt Silverman on defense, absolutely believed in their cases. Each were perfectly cast for their respective role in the trial,” Houlahan said.

“Carpenter is ex-military, a real law-and-order guy. He believes in fairness, but he also believes in accountability, and has rigid ideas of right and wrong. He believes a prosecutor should present his case plainly and without any adornment, just lay it out and let a jury decide. He felt strongly that Penn bore the most responsibility for what happened and that he should pay for it.”

“Silverman sees mostly gray areas in this world, that most events are complicated and there is usually more to the story than meets the eye. In the courtroom, Silverman is a master communicator, very animated and theatrical when leading witnesses through their version of events. Carpenter spent most of the time standing at a podium while questioning witnesses. They were both effective in their own way, just an unbelievable contrast.”

Q. How did you handle the sensitive subject of language from 1985?

A. “I just quoted what the people said and used accepted terminology of 1985, but always being sensitive to the issue. To inject contemporary terminology into a story set in 1985 would be ineffective and jarring to the reader. Accusations of racism and racial slurs were a big part of the trial, so there were a lot of them spoken at the trial and written in the newspaper accounts,” said Houlahan.

“I tried to limit the amount of times I used certain slurs and I never wrote them in my narrative, only in direct quotes when made by people involved. It did not make any sense to hint at it, write in modern day euphemisms, or write my way around them. The only person I would be protecting would be the one who said it. “

“When people say those things you just gotta lay it on the line and trust that the reader can handle it, as long as it’s not done gratuitously. You write what happened, make your points, and move on. But I did warn the reader in my author’s notes that there was some strong language in here, so beware.”

Q. How did you balance the story while including the views and experiences of so many people involved, such as SDPD, the dead officer’s widow, and members of the black community?

A. “Most who I interviewed were very compelling, very intelligent, very thoughtful people when it came to reflecting on the story and their involvement,” said Houlahan. “But even almost forty years later, many preferred not to be included in the books acknowledgments, even though they spoke to me very candidly. The wounds from the Penn trial still remain.”

“I tried to stay out of the way of their story and tell it through their eyes. I’m old school, so I keep myself out of stories as best I know how. I didn’t say this is a great example of police brutality, and then wrote a book about it. Nobody wants somebody to look at an incident like this and be told how they should think, what they should believe, or how they should feel. I tried to write this story as accurately, completely, and fairly as I could. Let the reader come to their own conclusions.”

“This is a complicated story that consistently refused to fit neatly into anybody’s preferred narrative. There were mistakes made on both sides when the incident started. One person misinterprets the actions of the other and within seconds it’s escalating out of control. A lot of things went wrong. There was good and bad behavior on all sides.”

“I think there is tremendous value in taking an incident like this, breaking it down, and taking a hard look at what happened and why. That rarely happens these days. People choose sides, pick the information that supports their preferred narrative and disregard the rest. And so we learn nothing and move on until the next time it happens.”

“In taking a close look at the Sagon Penn story, I think one gets a better understanding of how these things happen and perhaps find better ways to minimize them in the future.”

“Reap the Whirlwind” will go on sale July 23. The author will be talking about the crime novel at the Neil Morgan Auditorium in the downtown library on August 6 at 7 p.m.