More “crumbs” of crack cocaine found at the scene. Another Black man busted. The police had arrested her son for crack possession once before, but Claudette Thomas says what happened to him in 2003 with Seattle Officer Gregory Neubert wasn’t right.

Last week, Thomas stood with members of the Seattle-King County NAACP as they called for the badges of Neubert and another downtown Seattle police officer, Michael Tietjen, whose facts have been called into question in the Jan. 2 drug arrest of Troy Patterson [“Officers, video tell different stories,” May 9].

Like Patterson, James Pulliam, 33, has insisted that Neubert planted the drugs he was charged with possessing – one reason, Thomas says, that her son demanded to go to trial. Despite a prior drug conviction and two incidents of bail jumping, she says, he believed he could prove his innocence and refused to take a plea.

Claudette Williams says James Pulliam didn’t do what landed him a felony conviction. Seattle officer Greg Neubert says he did.

But it was his word against the officer’s, and the jury sided with Neubert. For three-tenths of a gram of crack cocaine, Thomas says, her son got three years and is now serving six. The lighter sentence was revoked, she says, after he complained about conditions in his prison rehab class and was pulled from the program.

Neubert arrested Pulliam in Belltown late in the evening of Nov. 18, 2003. In his incident report, the officer says he had observed him dealing drugs on Third Ave., then followed him down the street, where he says he saw Pulliam drop the three-tenths of a gram on the ground.

Neubert says he collected the crack and ordered Pulliam to stop. When he didn’t, the officer got in his squad car and went after him, reporting that, when apprehended, Pulliam stated, “Do me for obstruction, just don’t put nothing on me.”

The remark and one other -— “don’t do me for dope” — would later serve as a basis for the prosecutor to argue that Pulliam had admitted guilt at the scene prior to being arrested. But Thomas says her son is adamant he dropped no drugs and that, when the officer confronted him with crack, he essentially pleaded for mercy.

“Certain things [Neubert] said on the stand didn’t make sense,” she says. For example, “It was dark where he said he dropped the drugs. But how can you see in the dark?”

Before her son was arrested, Thomas says, she had become active with the October 22 Coalition, a group that fights police brutality and had already singled out Neubert for his behavior. In 1995, the officer shot a suspected drug dealer downtown, nearly killing him, and in 2001 he was involved in a Central District traffic stop that led to the shooting death of Aaron Roberts.

Neubert was cleared in both incidents. But Thomas and the NAACP have little faith in the police’s internal findings. With the discrepancies that public defenders have unearthed in Neubert’s arrest of Troy Patterson, Thomas is hoping to connect with others he has arrested.

“We’re trying to get not only [Pulliam’s] case reopened, but anybody that Neubert came into contact with,” she says. “We need to get together and find out who Neubert has put in jail over the years.”