Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [101]
Frances Hurt was sitting in her small ranch house a few fields over at the time. It was spring; the forsythia bushes were blooming, and the air was so sweet that she’d flung open all the windows and doors. She was puzzled when she heard the shots. Hunting season had been over for months. She counted six shots in all, in a distinct pattern: one shot—pop—followed by a pause, and then five more, in quick succession—pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.
“I thought: What in the world? Who is shooting a gun at 10:15 in the morning?”
Beasley testified later that Ames’s first shot had knocked Brooks to the ground. Ames fired five more times.
Orlett was sitting at the wheel of Brooks’s truck, his grandson beside him. At the shots, he looked in the rearview mirror and saw Brooks curled in a fetal position on the gravel. “I could tell by the way Perry was laying that he was dead,” Orlett said later. “Two tours in the infantry in Vietnam, I’ve seen a lot of dead people.”
When Orlett looked back again, he saw Ames with his gun up beside his ear. “It looked like he was reloading,” Orlett testified. Then he saw Ames using a cell phone.
Beasley was walking slowly back toward the truck, his head in his hands, “moaning and groaning something awful,” Orlett said. Beasley climbed in and asked, “What are we going to do?” Orlett said.
“We’re going to get the hell out of here,” Orlett replied.
Beasley later told police that Ames had shot Brooks once in the face, and then, after Brooks was on the ground, stood, firing down “four or five” more times into Brooks’s right side.
Within minutes, the Rev. Kevin James, minister at Brooks’s church and a volunteer firefighter, got a call from the firehouse about the shooting. He heard the address—Holly Hill Farm, Route 207—and felt only dread. “I just knew. I said, ‘One of those two guys is dead.’”
Kim Brooks, who lives in Oakland, California, would get a call from her sister, Jacqueline. Kim had stayed home from work that day, feeling ill and unsettled. “My sister told me John Ames had shot my father and he hadn’t made it back,” she said.
At Brooks’s wake, the crowd of mourners was larger than expected, and the service, scheduled to end at 9:00 P.M., stretched on until well after ten.
Ames was charged with first-degree murder, which carries a maximum life sentence, and a second felony count of using a firearm in commission of a felony. He hired Cooley, whose recent accomplishments include delivering Lee Boyd Malvo, the younger defendant in the Washington sniper case, from the death penalty.
Ames’s lawyers have called the shooting a case of simple self-defense. Ames, said co-counsel Dick, was in mortal fear for his life. After all, Brooks was trespassing in violation of a court order and had once fired a shotgun in Ames’s direction.
The trial date is set for September 12, in Bowling Green. But Cooley has asked the court for a change of venue, saying he believes it will be hard to find an impartial jury in Caroline County, where most people “have taken sides on this one.” The court has put off a decision until after jury selection begins.
Dick said his client has not had an easy time of it since the shooting. “John is not going around gloating. He has nightmares and sleepless nights,” Dick said, adding that Ames fired reflexively at Brooks when he saw the farmer raise his stick. “All John saw was the anger in [Brooks’s] eyes. John was in the Army for four years, you know, and the Army trains you to shoot if you’re being attacked.”
Evelyn Brooks has been selling off her husband’s farm equipment and remaining livestock, in part to help stave off legal action from one of the lawyers who represented Brooks in the fence lawsuits. Ames has a cattle sale