Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [93]
But on the morning of Monday, April 19, 2004, for reasons that his family and friends can only speculate about, Perry Brooks decided to flout the court order, go onto Ames’s property, and bring the bull home himself. He asked his wife, Evelyn, to go along, but she refused. His son-in-law was unavailable. So was Wick Coleman, his son-in-law’s uncle, who, like a number of farmers in Caroline, worked a second job on the railroad.
In the end, Brooks recruited Michael Beasley, a farmhand who lived in a trailer on a far corner of Brooks’s farm, and Paul Orlett, a retired Marine infantryman and fishing buddy of thirty years. Orlett looked after his two-and-a-half-year-old grandson during the week. Having no one to leave the boy with that morning, Orlett brought him along.
The three men and the child drove over to Holly Hill Farm using a path that ran between the two properties alongside the CSX railroad tracks. They arrived at a paddock where the bull had been penned. Brooks and Beasley got out, and Orlett slid into the driver’s seat. He turned the truck around and drove about fifty feet back in the direction from which they’d come.
Brooks was carrying an old, gray stick, about four feet long, that he used to guide his cattle. The plan was that Brooks and Beasley would walk behind the bull and drive it forward, while Orlett would lead the way in the truck.
Brooks and Beasley had just let the bull out of the pen, Beasley testified later, when Ames “pulled up fast in his truck.” He was wearing his gun under his suit. He got out of the truck and confronted the men, Beasley told Orlett later, saying: “Put the bull back in the pen.” Brooks drew his stick back by his ear in reply, Beasley testified. The entire confrontation lasted no more than ten seconds, he said. Brooks never said a word.
“He didn’t get a chance,” Beasley said.
Ames opened fire with a pistol. He shot six times, according to Beasley’s testimony. The first shot, Beasley said, hit Brooks in the face. It entered Brooks’s right cheek, according to the coroner, hitting his palate and exiting left, between his upper and lower jaw. Five more shots followed, hitting Brooks in the torso, piercing his heart and spinal cord. Two bullets hit the back of his upper right arm.
In the moments that followed, according to later court testimony, Ames walked to his truck and put the pistol on the seat beside a Winchester rifle. He picked up his cell phone and made several calls, including one to the sheriff’s department, which in turn notified the state police. When the law arrived, Ames said only this: “I’m not making a statement. He’s over there if you want to try to help him.”
WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE DONE?
That is the question that has rattled around Bowling Green in the year since the shooting. What would you have done, if you’d gone to bed one night master of your domain and awakened the next morning to find a registered letter in the mailbox, informing you that you owed $45,000 to pay for your neighbor’s new fence?
And if you did not pay up, your neighbor was entitled to slap a lien on your property. This, even though your neighbor had three times your acreage and many times your cattle. And one more thing: Your neighbor was a lawyer, which meant that you would be fighting on his battlefield. (During the feud, Ames often served as his own attorney.)
Where was the justice? According to his friends, and his daughter Kim Brooks, that’s what Perry Brooks wanted to know.
Brooks’s instinct was to fight. His opening volley was a handwritten note, formal in tone, dated January 25, 1989. “Dear Sir: In response to your letter of Jan. 3, at the present time my finances do not permit me to participate in the fencing project. However, at some future date, if the need for the fence arises, I will be more than glad to participate. Sincerely yours, O. Perry Brooks.”
By 1993, four years into the feud, Brooks’s stance had hardened. “Dear Sir,” he wrote his neighbor. “I wish