Sometimes you have to go visiting . . .

It has taken him nearly two years to tell the story. Maybe this is a result of the therapy he is undergoing. Then, too, maybe he is just tired of feeling at once outraged and helpless.

A lot of people in this town know John Davis, who is 60 years old now, and has been selling metro-area real estate since many of us were still in short pants.

Today, he mostly just sits inside his Aurora home, too nervous to go out, the written apology he received from the Aurora Police Department hardly the panacea it thought it would be.

"My life changed completely that day," John Davis says, his rich baritone voice sounding flat. "It taught me - finally, I guess - that I can't go about my business in the same manner as others."

Born and raised in Five Points, he has lived a good life, he said, one born out of hard work and a sheer unwillingness to accept the word "no."

After graduating from college and working several years as a corporate headhunter and as a relocation adviser for companies developing the old Mc Nichols Arena area, he decided real estate would make a good profession, refusing all offers until one from the A firm in Denver was made.

It was the forerunner of what would become RE/MAX and he would become the first African-American hired.

In those days, more than a few sellers and buyers with whom he had just spoken on the telephone would sic their dogs on him when he came up the front walk an hour later.

"I jumped atop more car hoods than I want to think about," he said.

He does not smile at all while recounting how two prospective clients pulled guns on him after they had summoned him. The upshot being the genteel John Davis, renowned for his silky smooth ability to sell ice even to a polar bear, got both listings.

When he got the idea that the real money was in representing professional athletes in real estate matters, each overture to a Denver franchise was greeted with the one word he hates the most.

"It was just not going to happen, and it never did," John Davis said. "So I decided I would hang out at the bars athletes go to. Soon, I became their best friend. I landed more than two dozen of them, and never once through a referral by a team." He will not let me drop names.

And then, Oct. 2, 2006, arrived.

Selling higher-end properties always came with unwelcome societal baggage, John Davis said. There were the strange, sometimes fearful glares, the officer or deputy wanting to know not only why he was in this certain neighborhood, but if the Mercedes-Benz he was driving was his.

He was previewing a house that day for a client, just up the street from his own. He'd gotten the key out of the lock box, let himself in.

"What I didn't know," John Davis said, "was a neighbor had called 911 and reported a black man was burglarizing the house, and that five officers were outside waiting for me."

"Don't kill me!" He remembers saying that over and over when the officers first grabbed him.

"I saw my life flash before my eyes and began thinking I will never again see my children and grandkids. When they shoved me to the ground, I thought it was all over for me."

There is nothing and no one inside the house, one officer reported back.

"I told you," a handcuffed, seething and splayed-on-the-ground John Davis shouted back. Only after they called his RE/MAX office did they let him go.

"I was livid. They told me they were just doing their jobs, but I still do not understand why their job should infringe on my ability to do mine. Maybe the most insulting thing was that they told me it is how they respond to every burglary call, adding, 'You know, this is a nice neighborhood.'

"I told them, I know; that I live here. There's my house!"

It is a nice apology letter, the one the police captain wrote, which John Davis keeps in a file drawer. In many ways, he blames the officers less than he does his own neighbor, who arrived on the block after he did, but never once bothered to speak with or, quite clearly, even see him in more than 30 years there.

"It changed my whole life," John Davis said of Oct. 2, 2006.

For months, he refused to leave his house, the paranoia stopping him from driving or walking outside at certain hours. "I'd simply decided to stay out of everybody's way."

The counseling has helped. He has begun previewing houses again, only now he takes the client with him.

"It's like I want to call the police ahead of time now, just to let them know I'm coming."

It remains a painful thing, sitting and listening to this man tell a story I've heard countless times, stories that never seem to go away, even with the march of supposedly more-enlightened times.

"I've tried to lead a dignified life," John Davis explained. "I always thought racism and other people's issues with race was not mine - me living my life through rose-colored glasses.

"I always thought that if others could have a good experience with me, if I could be a bigger and better man, I could erase people's fears of what they thought as a result of my being a black man, that in that way I could have a positive impact on the rest of the world.

"Yet all they saw was black skin," John Davis said.

"Nothing has changed."

johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2763