Walking the Line

"We have two solid alibi witnesses for him," the PI argues.

Police and prosecutors, Vender says, "talked shit, talked shit, talked, and in the end they couldn't prove anything. There was no evidence in the carjack case and there was no evidence in the murder case. You need evidence to convict somebody."

In January 2007 the police department and district attorney's office reluctantly abandoned their efforts to send Dennard to the state penitentiary for a lengthy, perhaps permanent, stay. He'd spent the previous 15 months in county jail, 12 of them in solitary confinement.

Police officers familiar with the cases, however, still believe Dennard's culpable of the crimes. "He beats cases because the judges don't live down there in Oakdale," says one officer who asked to remain anonymous.

Over at the Gang Task Force, officer Broberg says he's undeterred and is continuing to investigate the crimes — "there's no statute of limitations on homicide," he notes — as well as other cases in which Dennard is a suspect. The officer says he can't say much about the ongoing investigations, but tells SF Weekly he's looking at other suspects who may have played a role in the carjacking case.

Told that Dennard feels he's been wrongly targeted by law enforcement, Broberg retorts, Dennard "can say whatever he wants. ... He said he didn't commit a murder, and you had a witness who said he did."

Dennard insists that the cops are looking for the wrong guy. He says he didn't even harbor any antipathy towards Collins. "He probably didn't like me, but I never tripped off him. Nobody likes me. ... My name's fucked off. I get blamed for things I didn't even do."

These days Dennard says he has no desire to hang out around Oakdale. "It's boring," he says in a soft half-mumble. "It's a wrap. There's nothing there."

It's a good thing he feels that way, since last week San Francisco Superior Court Commissioner Sue Kaplan awarded a permanent injunction against Dennard and other suspected members of the Oakdale Mob. The ruling effectively bans them from hanging out at the Hunters Point projects.

For the time being Dennard is living with his grandmother and aunt in Oakland in a comfortable, well-appointed apartment beneath one of the white concrete tendrils of the MacArthur maze. At night he sleeps, wrapped in blankets, on the living room floor in front of a hulking television.

On a rainy and miserable winter afternoon, Dennard sits on the couch, staring at hip-hop videos playing on the TV. Lying on a glass coffee table is a training manual for would-be road construction workers; Dennard recently paid $771 to join Local 261 of the Laborers' International Union, and he hopes the union will get him some work flagging traffic on roadway projects, although at this point he has no solid source of income.

At this juncture Dennard is angling to get some work through the Laborers' Union, and save some money — in the next five years he'd like to move to Atlanta. "I got family out there, my dad's side," Dennard explains, adding that he likes the shopping malls and "the quietness."

Dennard's been dwelling here in Oakland since he walked out from his 15-month stint in San Francisco County Jail in January. The time confined, he says, "left a scar" on him; he missed his daughter's birth and the first year of her life while locked up. When talking about his months in jail, he speaks matter-of-factly, betraying little emotion.

At least out here in the free world he doesn't have to wear orange every day. Today he's got on his red-and-white Jordans and a T-shirt emblazoned with a picture of Al Pacino from the movie Scarface.

It seems like gang bangers all love Scarface. Then again, so do a lot of law-abiding movie fans. So which one is Dennard? Is he a poor kid who's been wrongly labeled and jailed? Or is he really a coldblooded gangster capable of terminating another human being's existence, of loosing a lethal barrage of metal on another young man?

Asked if he's ever killed anyone, Dennard pauses for a moment and swivels his head from side to side. "Nope," he says in a low voice.