Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [95]
The feud reached a new intensity in March 1989, when Brooks drove down to the fence and found himself face-to-face with a six-foot-three security guard. The guard, a former Army Ranger, was carrying a .357 magnum. The two men scuffled, and Brooks’s face was bruised. The guard testified later that his gun had hit Brooks while the guard was trying to kick Brooks’s shotgun out of reach. Brooks said the guard had pistol-whipped him. The guard handcuffed Brooks and took him up to the main house, where Ames was in view. On seeing him, according to Ames’s subsequent complaint, Brooks began to bellow, shouting that he was going to come back and “kill everyone on the place.”
(Both Brooks’s widow, Evelyn, and John Ames declined to comment on any aspect of the feud. Evelyn Brooks has filed a $10.3 million wrongful death suit against Ames, which is scheduled to be heard in civil court after the murder trial in September. In turn, Ames filed an $11.3 million countersuit, accusing Evelyn Brooks, her daughter Jacqueline Coleman, son-in-law Matthew Coleman, and three John Does of a series of crimes including trespass, infliction of emotional distress, assault and battery, conspiracy, fraud, obstruction of justice, breaking court orders, and “terrorism.” Ames later dropped the terrorism count after questioning by a judge and then dropped Evelyn Brooks from the suit entirely.)
Brooks was detained for a while, then uncuffed when he complained of chest pains, according to court records and Kim Brooks. He was arrested by sheriff’s deputies and charged with trespassing. At the county jail, he was taken to the medical ward, then transferred to a hospital in Richmond, where he stayed for a week.
After that, Brooks told daughter Kim and others that he “wanted the war to be over.” Kim Brooks, a nurse, remembers talking with her father at the time.
“I scolded him,” she said. “I told him: ‘What’s this I’m hearing about shotguns? I don’t ever want to hear about you murdering someone. You made us go to church all our lives, and then you act like this?’” Kim Brooks remembers that her father was contrite and made no further assaults on the fence.
The ground war at the fence line was subsiding, but the bull’s wanderlust was not.
THE FENCE THAT SEPARATES Holly Hill Farm from the Brooks farm is a door through time. On one side is John Ames’s Farm Corporation, with its spreadsheets and cold-storage tanks for bull semen and calf embryos. On the other is Perry Brooks’s 246 acres, which, by choice and temperament, he husbanded with methods and tools that in some cases harked back to Colonial times.
Like many farmers in Caroline County, Brooks was cash poor and land rich. Caroline is the last truly rural redoubt on the booming Interstate 95 corridor between Washington and Richmond, but, in recent years, housing subdivisions have begun to appear. The paper value of Brooks’s land soared, but he rarely had more than $1,000 cash to his name. He lived on $400 a month in Social Security income, rent from a small second house on the property, and what he raised selling his vegetables at the farmers’ markets in Northern Virginia. Most of his farm equipment was rattletrap and bore the marks of his welder’s torch. He spruced up for church on Sunday but otherwise often dressed in tattered clothes.
“Perry was a little rough around the edges, but he had a heart of gold. He’d do anything for you,” said McGann Saphir, a Virginia farm extension agent for Caroline County.
Brooks may have been a character, but he was nobody’s fool. He could be fierce, and he was notably stubborn. “With Perry, it was, ‘I may not always be right, but I’m never wrong,’” said friend Orlett.
Except for two years in Korea during that war, Brooks had lived in Caroline his whole life, as had his father before him. He was the youngest of several children. His mother suffered bouts of severe depression and was hospitalized for it several times. She once