Barber, Marion A00002
Buckner, Oris A00001
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Marion Barber III, Bruising Running Back for Cowboys, Dies at 38
Nicknamed “Marion the Barbarian,” he had a nose for the end zone, leading the N.F.C. in touchdowns in 2006. But his post-playing years were troubled.
Marion Barber III, a bruising running back for the Dallas Cowboys who regularly busted into the end zone but whose life took a downward turn after his playing days were over, was found dead on Wednesday in his home in Frisco, Texas, north of Dallas. He was 38.
A Frisco police spokesman said that officers responded to an unspecified “welfare concern” at Barber’s rented apartment and found him dead. In recent years he had run-ins with the police and was once hospitalized for a mental health evaluation.
Barber, whose father, Marion Jr., was a running back for the Jets in the 1980s, had a seven-year career in which he was known for bulling his way through defenders and squeezing out yardage in small spaces. A teammate, the Cowboys wide receiver Terrell Owens, told The Associated Press in 2007: “He kind of challenges people and dares not to be stopped. It’s sort of barbaric.”
Owens said he gave him the nickname “Marion the Barbarian,” and it stuck.
Bill Parcells, who coached the Cowboys from 2003 to ’06, told The Dallas Morning News on Thursday that Barber “was almost like a perfect player,” adding, “He could run, block, he could catch, he was tough and he was always there.”
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Barber rarely started in his first three seasons but soon made himself an integral part of the Cowboys’ offense. In 2006, his second season, he gained 654 yards and led the National Football Conference in touchdowns with 14, nine of them from three yards or less.
In 2007, he ran for 975 yards and 10 touchdowns and was chosen for the Pro Bowl after a season in which he never started a game but outgained the Cowboys’ starting running back Julius Jones by nearly 400 yards. In the postseason, Barber started in the Cowboys’ 21-17 playoff loss to the Giants, running 27 times for 129 yards.
“When Marion Barber III runs,” Greg Bishop wrote in The New York Times in 2008, “dreadlocks flap past his shoulders from behind his helmet. His legs churn at a frightening speed, twin jackhammers working in tandem to punish and propel.”
Barber had solid seasons in 2008 and ’09 but with Felix Jones the primary running back the next season, Barber gained only 374 yards. He was released before the 2011 season and signed with the Chicago Bears, for whom he played his final season as a reserve.
Overall, he gained 4,780 yards on 1,156 rushes. His 47 rushing touchdowns with the Cowboys place him fourth on the team’s career list.
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His post-playing years were troubled. In 2014, Barber was detained by the police in Mansfield, Texas, also outside Dallas, and hospitalized for a mental health evaluation.
And according to police reports, he was arrested in 2019 on two misdemeanor counts of criminal mischief for incidents that occurred the year before in which, while he was out jogging, Barber approached two different cars and struck and damaged them. He pleaded no contest, and his sentence included 12 months of probation.
Last year, the former Dallas wide receiver Dez Bryant posted a highlight reel of Barber’s plays on Twitter and wrote that “he’s down and out bad … we are just a stat and moments to most people.”
On Monday, Bryant wrote on Twitter: “Too much to digest, so much too say … This is real life, it can be any of us. We need each other, we need unity.”
Marion Sylvester Barber III was born on June 10, 1983, in Plymouth, Minn., west of Minneapolis. Like his father, Barber played at the University of Minnesota, where he was part of a powerful backfield with Laurence Maroney. Barber rushed for 1,196 yards and 1,269 yards in 2003 and 2004.
The Cowboys selected him in the fourth round of the 2005 N.F.L. draft.
Football was a family business for the Barbers. In addition to his father, Barber’s brothers Thomas and Dominique also played for the University of Minnesota Gophers. Dominique was a defensive back with the N.F.L.’s Houston Texans.
In a statement on Thursday, P.J. Fleck, the Gophers’ head coach, said, “Marion was one of the best to ever play at Minnesota, and he is a big reason many people are Gopher fans today.”
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Oris Buckner, Detective Who Blew Whistle on Police Abuse, Dies at 70
The only Black man on the New Orleans homicide squad, he provided key testimony in one of the city’s most notorious civil rights cases.
Oris Buckner, who as New Orleans’s only Black homicide detective in the early 1980s exposed one of the worst cases of police violence in the city’s history, leading to the conviction of three officers on civil rights charges, died on June 1 in Houston. He was 70.
His sister, Adrienne Jopes, confirmed his death, in a hospital. She said the cause was complications of leukemia and diabetes.
By the late 1970s, police officers in New Orleans were killing more civilians per capita than in any other city in America, even those with comparable crime rates — 7.7 people per 1,000 officers, or 9.5 times higher than it was in New York City, according to a study by the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
The homicide division was especially notorious, not only for its violent record but also for its strict code of silence. Every killing by a police officer was labeled a “justifiable homicide,” with no questions asked.
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Mr. Buckner joined the division in April 1980. A rising star in the department with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, he sought the assignment even though his father had died in New Orleans police custody decades before.
That November, the body of a young officer named Gregory Neupert was found in a ditch in Algiers, a predominantly Black neighborhood across the Mississippi River from downtown New Orleans. Even though witnesses said that two white men had been seen running from the scene of Officer Neupert’s murder, the police flooded the Black sections of Algiers, kicking down doors and hauling in witnesses, including two young Black men, Robert Davis and Johnny Brownlee.
The police wanted them to identify a pair of Black men, James Billy Jr. and Reginald Miles, as the suspects, but they refused. Mr. Buckner, who was on duty that night, watched as police officers tied Mr. Davis to a chair with cloth bandages and beat him. They then placed a plastic bag over his head and held it tight so that he couldn’t breathe.
Before the interrogation started, another officer had taken Mr. Buckner aside and told him that the other detectives didn’t trust him. Not only was he Black, the officer said, but he had only yelled at witnesses; he never beat them. Now, the implication went, was his chance to prove himself.
And so, during the questioning, Mr. Buckner approached Mr. Davis, still seated, and slapped him hard across the face.
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Mr. Buckner immediately felt remorse, even disgust, he later said, and when the other officers resumed beating Mr. Davis, he tried to stop them. They kicked him out of the room.
Leaving Mr. Buckner behind, the rest of the officers took Mr. Davis and Mr. Brownlee separately to a swampy area outside the city. They hung them over a bridge and fired shotgun blasts around their heads until both men agreed to identify Mr. Billy and Mr. Miles.
A few hours later, dozens of police officers descended on the homes of Mr. Billy and Mr. Miles. Mr. Buckner was assigned to stand in the back of Mr. Miles’s house, in case Mr. Miles or his pregnant girlfriend, Sherry Singleton, tried to run.
Mr. Buckner later testified that he heard officers burst into the home and immediately start shooting. He also heard Ms. Singleton running; she was naked and had gone to the bathroom to hide. One officer followed and shot her with a shotgun blast to the stomach and a pistol shot to the head, killing her.
The police also killed Mr. Miles, while the other squad killed Mr. Billy. Another Black man, Raymond Ferdinand, had been killed by police officers earlier that evening. Mr. Buckner never drew his weapon.
A few days later Morris Reed, an assistant district attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana and the head of its civil rights unit, got a call from a friend of his on the police force. Mr. Buckner wanted to testify.
In exchange for immunity, he broke the homicide division’s code of silence, telling prosecutors about everything — the interrogations, the beatings, the killings.
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But despite Mr. Buckner’s testimony, a majority-white grand jury in Orleans Parish twice refused to hand up homicide indictments in the case, which was brought by District Attorney Harry Connick Sr., the father of the musician Harry Connick Jr.
It was, Mr. Reed said, simply unthinkable at the time for a white jury to indict white officers for killing Black people.
“In any other scenario they would have easily been indicted for murder,” he said in a phone interview. “But you’re talking about 1980 in the South.”
The city erupted in protest. The police chief, James Parsons, whom Mayor Ernest Morial had brought in to reform the department, resigned. Demonstrators occupied Mayor Morial’s office at City Hall.
In July 1981, a federal grand jury handed down indictments against seven officers for conspiring to violate the civil rights of Mr. Davis and Mr. Brownlee. Concern about a fair trial ran high: It was moved to Dallas, and a judge tried to block “60 Minutes” from airing a segment about the case before the proceedings began. (He failed.)
Mr. Buckner’s lengthy testimony was damning. Defense lawyers tried to paint him as unreliable, given his own participation in the beating, but jurors were sufficiently persuaded to convict three of the seven officers. Each received a five-year sentence, and each was fired from the department.
As a result of Mr. Buckner’s testimony, lawyers also brought a series of civil suits against 55 defendants, resulting in a $2.8 million settlement by the city in 1986, the largest in New Orleans at the time.
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Mr. Buckner suffered for his decision to come forward. He was ostracized by his colleagues. He received death threats. He was demoted from homicide detective to traffic cop. Though he was finally promoted to sergeant in 1995, his career was effectively over.
On Monday, the Louisiana State Senate unanimously passed a resolution honoring his decision to testify.
“Despite an awareness of what it would mean for him personally,” it read, “in one of the most pivotal moments of his life, he honored his oath as a law enforcement officer to uphold the Constitution and as a witness to testify honestly, and for his actions, he and his family paid a heavy price.”
Oris Benny Buckner III was born on July 16, 1951, in New Orleans. His parents, Oris Buckner Jr. and Marguerite (Bush) Buckner, had divergent experiences with the law — his father died in police custody when Oris III was young, while his mother was the first Black woman on the New Orleans police force.
He received a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Loyola University in New Orleans in 1978, and in 1991 he was ordained as a Baptist minister.
Along with his sister, he is survived by his wife, Stephanie Buckner; his son, Oris Buckner IV; his daughter, Amiya Lewis; his stepson, Ronnie Gilmore; his stepdaughters, Stephanie Powell and Tonette Vasquez; and several grandchildren. Another sister, the actress Carol Sutton, died in 2020. His daughter Angel Buckner died in 2010.
After Mr. Buckner and his wife lost their home in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina, they moved to Houston. He retired from the New Orleans Police Department and later taught criminal justice at Lee College, a community college in nearby Baytown, Texas.
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Mr. Buckner’s decision to come forward may have derailed his career, but it exposed the widespread corruption and abuse within the New Orleans police force, which helped pave the way for later civil rights cases and reforms, Mary Howell, a longtime civil rights lawyer in New Orleans, said in a phone interview.
“Oris had deep regret that he succumbed to hitting Robert Davis,” she said, “but didn’t regret telling the truth.”
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