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On a chilly afternoon Timothy Jacobs, a Tuscarora Indian and a fugitive from justice, stood outside a log meetinghouse on a 6,000-acre Indian reservation near Syracuse and discussed the bizarre series of events that led him here.
"I felt I'd be safe here," said Jacobs, 20, a soft-spoken, slender young man who looks more like a college student than the center of a political controversy that has reverberated from North Carolina to the statehouse in Albany.
In December, Jacobs fled to the reservation from his home in Robeson County, N.C., where he and Eddie Hatcher, another Tuscarora Indian, face kidnaping charges growing out of the Feb. 1, 1988, takeover of The Robesonian, a local newspaper. The two men admitted holding the 20-member staff hostage for 10 hours, demanding that Gov. James Martin order an investigation into drug-trafficking and corruption among local law enforcement officials and the suspicious deaths of a number of blacks and Indians.
"We felt like if we called national attention to the corruption, the drug-trafficking, the murders, then something would be done," Jacobs said.
Jacobs was arrested in New York Dec. 13 after being stopped for a traffic violation, when a routine police check revealed that he was wanted in North Carolina. He was let out of jail on $25,000 bail and released into the custody of Onondaga Chief Leon Shenandoah. He is allowed to leave the reservation, however, and currently lives with an Indian family in Ithaca.
Last month Gov. Mario Cuomo ordered Jacobs extradited to North Carolina, but Jacobs is fighting extradition and will plead his case in a hearing to be held in Madison County today.
In an interview last month, Jacobs compared Robeson County to "a Third World country where somebody with a badge can kill an Indian or black and get away with it. They [law enforcement officials! blackmail people. If drug dealers don't pay up, they get busted."
The story of how Timothy Jacobs got to New York is the story of how a rural community, already beset with age-old problems of poverty, lack of education, and racial divisiveness, is now struggling with a modern problem: a cocaine epidemic. Add to that charges that local law officials are involved in the drug-trafficking and that the...