Dallas Carter High School players Gary Edwards (left) and LeShai Maston celebrated their team's victory over Odessa Permian during the State UIL semi-final game in Austin on December 10, 1988. (Lisa Davis/Associated Press)

In real life, Carter High robberies

‘set the whole city on fire’

The 1988 Carter High School football team seemed invincible.

Nothing could deter the Cowboys on their way to winning the state championship that year. Not an investigation into their leading scorer’s algebra grade. Not the ensuing legal battle that nearly kept them out of the playoffs. Not the racial tensions of the time.

Talented and bold, the Oak Cliff team ruled high school football in Texas. One player famously signed his letter of intent to play college ball while lounging in a hot tub, adorned in gold jewelry.

But the record books don’t tell the story of their success.

Five days after winning state, three football players robbed a Jack in the Box at 2:30 a.m., pantyhose pulled over their heads. It would be the first of 21 robberies that police connected to 15 Carter neighborhood teenagers, including six from the football team.

Teenage boys were sent to prison. Carter was stripped of its championship after a court found that it had indeed violated the no-pass, no-play law. Everything changed.

Now, a new movie chronicles the team’s against-all-odds rise — and its steep fall. Carter High hits theaters here Oct. 30.

The movie has several Dallas ties. Former Dallas Cowboy Greg Ellis worked as executive producer, and former Carter High football player Arthur Muhammad wrote the script. Actors will portray well-known local figures, including former state District Judge Joe Kendall and now-state Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas.

West, who represented the school in its legal battle to make the playoffs, remembers the “politically charged” atmosphere at the time.

Urban and suburban schools had just begun to play each other, he said, which brought out racial tensions. When the University Interscholastic League investigated a tip that Carter player Gary Edwards had not passed algebra, West said, “the political atmosphere was one where this team was being done wrong because it was African-American.”

The team initially had to forfeit the games Edwards played in, but its playoff eligibility was reinstated for the first postseason game. As the legal wrangling continued through the playoffs, the Carter Cowboys stayed focused and pushed forward to win the state championship.

Their glory ended there.

Beginning days after the championship and continuing into the summer, several players, along with other Carter students and graduates, committed a string of armed robberies that would cut their futures short. In one instance, two star players used a .22 revolver to take $256 and a movie rental that cost $3.24 from a Video Exchange. In another, the boys robbed a Mexican restaurant for $11,000.

“It set the whole city on fire," said defense attorney John Creuzot, who represented one of the players.

The players included: Edwards, who had the disputed algebra grade; Derric Evans, who announced his college commitment in the hot tub; Keith Campbell, who got the longest sentence; Patrick “P.K.” Williams; Aric Andrews; and Carlos Allen.

The case went before Kendall, who rejected pleas for leniency and ordered most of the defendants to prison for sentences that ranged from two to 25 years. As he issued each sentence, screams rang out from the courtroom.

“Frankly, I was shocked,” recalled West, who also represented Edwards in his criminal case.

He believed the judge would have alerted the attorneys if he planned to give prison time so that they could consider a jury trial. Though West said he and Kendall are friends today, he said he did not speak to Kendall for two years after that

“I was still feeling the sting of that decision,” he said.