‘Best Christmas gift’
Former Norcom High standout reunites with his father, who was granted parole after nearly 29 years in prison
Shortly before 2 p.m. on Tuesday, 52-year-old Elbert Smith was escorted from his cell in Virginia’s Greensville Correctional Center to, at last, freedom. Awaiting were Elbert’s ex-wife, Desiree, adult daughter Monnazjea and 30-year-old NBA player son, Dorian Finney-Smith. Father and son opened their arms and, for the first time since Dorian was a toddler, touched flesh to flesh, half-crying, half-laughing, saying little. “We just hugged,” Finney-Smith said. “A long, long hug. So many questions and stuff that we have. It was very emotional.”
Finney-Smith, a former star for Norcom High in Portsmouth, now plays for the Brooklyn Nets, who readily granted him this one-day leave. But part of him remains a Dallas Maverick, the team for which he played seven seasons.
It’s the franchise that largely made Tuesday’s emotional reunion possible.
The efforts of Mark Cuban Companies chief of staff Jason Lutin and former Virginia Attorney General Jerry Kilgore to get the Virginia Parole Board to consider Elbert Smith’s case were not publicly known until July 27, when The Dallas Morning News reported that the board voted 3-0 to grant parole to Smith.
That it took an additional five months for Elbert to complete Virginia’s pre-release program can at least partly be blamed on the state’s overcrowded, understaffed correctional system, but on Tuesday the extra wait seemed immaterial to Elbert Smith’s jubilant family.
“He’s here for Christmas; that’s what matters,” Finney-Smith said. “This is the best Christmas gift I’ve ever gotten. Besides the births of my kids, this is up there with the best days I’ve ever had.
“Thank you to the Mavs family for this. This is past basketball. You can’t even try to put words into what they did in this situation.”
As Finney-Smith spoke to The
Dallas Morning News by phone, happy shouts in the background at times muffled his words. The family had taken Elbert to the Chesapeake home that FinneySmith bought for Desiree after he landed his first big Mavericks contract.
As part of the family’s plan to assimilate Elbert into society, a plan Kilgore laid out to the board during the Jan. 25 parole hearing, Elbert will live in one of the home’s spare bedrooms.
Greeting Elbert there Tuesday were his mother, Dora Smith, from whom Finney-Smith got his nickname, “Doe-Doe;” and five grandchildren meeting Elbert for the first time.
“It’s exciting,” Finney-Smith said amid the laughter. “The grandkids are saying how much I look like him.”
It was 37 degrees and sunny when Elbert Smith stepped outside the Greensville Correctional Center for the first day of the rest of his life. He’d been incarcerated in various Virginia prisons for 28 years, 9 months and 10 days.
After his honorable discharge from the Navy in the early 1990s, he was arrested and convicted of distribution of cocaine but had no record of violent crime until Jan. 25, 1995.
That was the day Smith and Diefen McGann went to a Virginia Beach auto repair shop to collect a debt from 31-year-old Willie Anderson II.
According to court records and testimony, McGann and Elbert Smith each had a handgun. During a skirmish Anderson attempted to wrest McGann’s gun. Smith told police he lunged at Anderson with a knife, causing Anderson to let go
“Thank you to the Mavs family for this. This is past basketball. You can’t even try to put words into what they did in this situation.”
— Dorian Finney-Smith, Nets forward, on efforts by his former team to get his father paroled
of McGann’s gun.
McGann told police that after regaining control of the gun, he fired three shots at Anderson, who staggered outside, collapsed into a ditch and died.
McGann and Smith were charged with first-degree murder. McGann on April 10, 1996, accepted a plea deal for voluntary manslaughter and a five-year prison sentence.
Smith was offered the same deal, but his court-appointed attorney advised him to turn it down and go to trial, reasoning that McGann fired the fatal shots.
On March 29, 1996, a jury convicted Smith of second-degree murder, malicious wounding and use in commission of a firearm. He was sentenced to 44 years in prison.
More than a quarter-century later Dorian Finney-Smith told Lutin, a law school graduate and
fellow University of Florida alumnus, about his father’s plight.
Within minutes of Elbert’s release Tuesday, after the hugs and before the family’s tears dried, FinneySmith texted to Lutin a heartfelt thank you along with photos that Finney-Smith later shared to The Dallas Morning News.
Lutin declined to comment Tuesday, but Smith emotionally said of Lutin, “That’s my dog.”
Kilgore is a career tough-oncrime attorney and politician, as a federal and state prosecutor and Virginia’s attorney general from 2002-05, yet he took Elbert Smith’s case pro bono.
On Tuesday Kilgore deflected credit for Smith’s release, instead praising the Smith family, Lutin and the Mavericks for getting behind Elbert’s son.
“I think it was a just result all around,” Kilgore said. “I know a life was lost in the mid-’90s. His co-defendant, however, felt like the case was such that he could agree to serve five years. Elbert went to
trial, and the jury and judge gave him lots of years to serve.
“I just felt like at the end of the day, after reviewing the file and reviewing the facts with Mr. Smith and his family, this was one that was worthy of parole and worthy of release. Today, Elbert has served his sentence for society, and I believe he’s going to be a model citizen.”
Kilgore said the nearly fivemonth delay between Smith gaining parole and his release was largely due to unforeseen issues at Greensville Correctional Center. During a three-month stretch at least six inmates died due to drug overdoses. There was a riot in August and multiple lockdowns.
“That slowed down even the ability for anybody to go through any type of programs, much less a pre-release program,” Kilgore said.
“It just pushed the process a little longer than we thought it was going to be,” Finney-Smith said. “But my pops was in good spirits the whole time. He wasn’t mad.”
The past few days were nerve-racking, though, for FinneySmith. Brooklyn was on an eightday, five-game West Coast trip that ended late Monday night with a loss at Utah, in which Dorian, nursing a sore knee, had six points and three assists.
Finney-Smith said he scarcely slept the two nights leading to Tuesday. He thanked the Nets’ organization for being supportive and allowing him to travel to Virginia.
When the 6-foot-2 Elbert, his hair and beard heavily tinged with gray, embraced his 6-7 son, nearly three decades of angst and heartbreak and hopelessness suddenly melted.
“I had never felt his physique,” Finney-Smith said. “I had to size him up real quick. He’s a big dude. He’s wide.
“We smiled and laughed, my sister and my mom hugged him as well. There wasn’t much for me to say. We all just laughed about the fact that it was so unbelievable.”