The night Derrick-Carlton Jackson/Bey helped guide police to a homicide scene next door, he didn’t think he’d wind up in handcuffs in the back of a patrol car.

But as 16-year-old shooting victim Brandi Williams lay in the neighbor’s yard taking her final breaths, that is what happened, he said.

“From kneeling down with the young lady, I stood up (and) the police arrested me,” Jackson/Bey said.

Although he repeatedly tried to explain that he had slept through the shooting but was awakened by the screams of one of the victims and had rushed outside to render whatever help he could, he said, he still found himself in police custody.

He said he gave dispatchers directions to the scene when a second shooting victim, an 18-year-old woman whom police have not identified, had difficulty articulating where they were.

And when police pulled up a block away, he flagged them down with his flashlight to guide them to where Williams lay dying, he said.

After he was released — he estimated about 2 1/2 hours later — he had to go back to police at the scene and inform the same officers who had held him that his house had been hit by bullets during the shooting. One shattered a bedroom window, punctured an interior wall and lodged in the linen closet in the hallway.

Jackson/Bey said he believes race was a factor in his treatment by police.

He’s a middle-aged Black man with graying dreadlocks. The “Bey” attached to his name indicates his roots as a Moorish Muslim, he said.

“Seems like it’s part of racism or something and I did voice that that night of how they handled it,” Jackson/Bey said. “I’m not looking for concessions, you know what I’m saying? I’m just looking to make sure that it’s corrected among the department. This is still some kind of form of white supremacy, (when) you’re not listening to nothing I’m saying.”

Wichita police declined to respond to The Wichita Eagle’s requests for an explanation, citing the ongoing investigation, in which Jackson/Bey is not a suspect. The department also denied an open-records request to view police body-camera footage of their interaction with Jackson/Bey.

Sedgwick County dispatch confirmed they received a 911 call from a woman and a man, as described by Jackson/Bey, but said they did not obtain the male caller’s name.

Police have since arrested two juveniles suspected of committing the shooting. Their names have not been released, and the case is in prosecutors’ hands.

Jeffrey Jackson, a professor of law at Washburn University and no relation to Jackson/Bey, said it’s difficult to tell whether police were justified in holding Jackson/Bey as long as they did.

“It just depends on if there was something there that might have made them think he could have possibly been the perpetrator coming back to finish the job,” Jackson said. “There’s just a bunch of things there we just don’t know. I don’t know what they were thinking, and that’s going to be the crux of the matter.”

State Sen. Oletha Faust-Goudeau, a member of the Wichita Racial Profiling Advisory Board, said she thinks the situation merits further investigation by police and/or the board into why Jackson/Bey was held and why for so long.

Faust-Goudeau said she’d like to see a comparison of how Wichita police have handled similar cases involving white 911 callers.

“If they were Caucasian, did they get handcuffed?” she said. “They don’t need to handcuff him (Jackson/Bey) and take him down. But that happens quite often, or similar situations, and especially in the northeast community. It’s got to change. We’ve got to do something different.”

Faust-Goudeau contrasted it with the Georgia case of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black jogger killed by three white men who chased him down, suspecting he was a burglar. The trio, who were later convicted of murder, were not immediately arrested and were charged only after one of the three released his own video of the crime.

“They (the killers) got to go home and were asked if they were all right,” she said. “That kind of injustice, it just occurs over and over, those type of situations where the African-American person is usually looked at more aggressively as the perpetrator.”

Faust-Goudeau said she’s not opposed to police at a crime scene being cautious of the person who called them there.

“Of course they do that, and I understand that part of it,” she said. But “it’s usually more aggressive when it’s a Black male, particularly. That breaks a person’s spirit.”

It wasn’t the first time Jackson/Bey has had complaints about Wichita police. In 2012, officers shot his wife to death after he called them for help during a domestic dispute.

Jackson/Bey’s wife, Karen Jackson, 45, had mental illness and the couple were estranged, according to reports from family members and law-enforcement records.

At the time of the July 10 shooting, Karen Jackson had a protection-from-abuse order against Jackson/Bey, requiring him to stay away from her.

On the day she was shot, she showed up at their home and told Jackson/Bey that she wanted to tear up that order. He called police to ask whether she could do that, and he was advised that only the court could lift it, court records said.

Later, he left to avoid violating the order and again called police. In a 911 call from outside, Jackson/Bey told dispatchers that Karen Jackson was inside the home and refusing to leave, court documents said.

He informed dispatch and one of the officers at the scene that Karen Jackson had mental issues.

When police arrived, Karen Jackson emerged in an agitated state, carrying a whiskey bottle, a beer can and a butcher knife.

She dropped the alcohol and began stabbing herself with the knife and yelling for police to shoot her.

The two officers said she advanced on them with the knife and they fired two shots each, all of which struck Karen Jackson.

The district attorney ruled that the 2012 shooting was justified, and no charges were brought against the officers.

Jackson/Bey’s repeated pleas to the City Council for some kind of settlement were never acted upon. A federal lawsuit filed by relatives of Karen Jackson against the city and its officers was dismissed in 2017 based mostly on the doctrine of qualified immunity, which gives police officers broad protection from litigation in their performance of official duties.

Jackson/Bey said the 2012 shooting soured him on police, and that spilled over on Nov. 2 when he was cuffed in the squad car.

“I was basically pleading,” he said. “I wanted to be free. I didn’t want to be around the police officers. I feel very unnerved around them. They killed my wife and, you know, that was a long time ago and I don’t want to rekindle old emotions and feelings of when there was no justice and nothing done.”

Jackson/Bey lives near the corner of Eighth and Volutsia, next door to the corner house where the Nov. 2 shooting of the two teenagers occurred.

He said he was asleep in bed when the shooting happened. He didn’t hear the gunshots.

“I woke up to somebody screaming, ‘Help me! Help me! Somebody help us!’” he said.

“As I came out of my house, I grabbed my light and I went down (the driveway). I looked to the west and I seen the person that was shot, a young lady, she was tall and said, ‘I’m shot in the leg, can you please help my friend?’”

He said he went to look for the other victim and found her lying face down behind a fence in a neighbor’s yard.

“I ran around there to kind of offer some assistance and kind of, you know, gauge what was going on,” he said. “I checked her to make sure she was still breathing. I went to the middle of the street, looked both ways to see if I could signal the ambulance or police or whoever just to kind of ‘Come down here a little faster if you can.’”

After police arrived, Jackson/Bey was handcuffed. The cuffs stayed on from shortly after the shooting at about 10:30 p.m. that night until after 1 a.m. the following morning.

He said police told him he wasn’t under arrest. But it felt that way, and they made it clear he couldn’t leave.

The Wichita Police Department’s arrest policy says that “without making an arrest, a law enforcement officer may stop any person in a public place who the officer reasonably suspects is committing, has committed, or is about to commit a crime. ... Such a person may be detained for a reasonable length of time while the officer determines whether a crime has been committed.” It goes on to say that if an officer determines a crime has been committed, the person may be arrested. If there is no crime, the person must be released.

It’s unclear whether police ever considered Jackson/Bey to be anything other than a witness in the teens’ shooting case.

“If they follow their protocol, I have no problem with that,” Jackson/Bey said. “But to put me in the police car and tell me that I’m not being detained and I’m not being arrested, anything like that, but yet there’s handcuffs on me and there’s this excessive amount of time going by, I’m being falsely incarcerated, I’m being falsely detained. And I begin to say these things to the officer, and you know, kind of pleading, ‘Can I at least go check on my property?’”

He said one officer did check the cuffs and loosened them. And he was allowed to get out of the car once, when he expressed concern that he might have left a space heater running unattended.

The officer walked him to the house while he was still wearing the handcuffs, they checked the heater, and then it was back into the squad car.

“I was asked, ‘Would you like to go downtown and give a statement to detectives?’ to which my reply was ‘No,’” he said. “Because I did not know anything other from when I came out after I heard the yelling.”

Instead of taking Jackson/Bey downtown, police called a detective to the scene.

“They released me to him and after that, I kind of was released with no handcuffs, after I made my statement to detectives,” he said.

It was after 1 a.m. when he got back to his house, he said. There, he got another surprise.

“I seen glass all over my bed, realizing that my house had been hit — three on the exterior of the house and then one that penetrated the window,” he said. “So I had to turn around and inform the police that had sectioned off a little bit in front of my house that they were going to have to back their crime scene up a little bit.”

Jackson/Bey said he retired to another bedroom while police collected evidence and pried bullets out of his walls. Of the three bullets that hit the exterior walls, two bounced off and were lying in the driveway and one buried itself in the siding, he said.

Police finally left about 4 a.m., he said.

Sheila Officer, chairwoman of the Racial Profiling Advisory Board, recommended that Jackson/Bey obtain the police report and file a formal complaint to determine what police policy is and whether his treatment was a violation of it

Otherwise, the city wouldn’t know he has a complaint, she said.

“We have that complaint form available on our website,” she said. “We’d be more than willing to assist him with that.”

Jeffrey Jackson, the Washburn law professor, said Jackson/Bey could sue if he believes his rights were violated, though he acknowledged that it would be an uphill battle because of qualified immunity, as it was in the Karen Jackson shooting case.

“Whether it (police conduct) was reasonable or unreasonable depends on a lot of different facts,” Jackson said. “It kind of depends on what exactly was said on the 911 call and things like that. I don’t know the circumstances that would have caused them to act that way. That’s what the issue is.”

Sharon Brett, legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, said in a statement that “race often plays a role — directly or indirectly — in how law enforcement interacts with community members, regardless of whether those community members are suspects or merely witnesses. All too often, systemic racism within law enforcement turns Black people who report crimes into suspects merely because of the color of their skin.”

Jackson/Bey said the experience has left him shaken and frustrated.

“There was nothing ever done about my wife’s situation, and then we have nine years later — they didn’t know who I was at all,” he said. “And then to be treated like that, it seems like there’s changes need to be made. It was an excessive amount of time being incarcerated under those circumstances.”

He said police had access to other witnesses, including the second shooting victim, who could have cleared him — but they didn’t seem to be trying to do so.

“It’s a scary situation to immediately be suspect, even after there’s been plenty of time that, you know, it seems like things could have been cleared up and I’m still being victimized by the police,” he said. “From nine years ago (when Karen Jackson was shot), is it changing or getting worse? I guess that’s what I’m saying. And it’s my experience that it’s getting worse.”

Contributing: Amy Renee Leiker of The Eagle