Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [45]
Asked if anything blocked the clerk’s view of the transfer, Williams replied no, only the center display table, on which the store had placed a stuffed bobcat. “But that wasn’t obstructing any view. If the gun dealer was looking, he could clearly see Nicholas hand me the money.”
(Raymond Rowley, an ATF special agent assigned to the agency’s Norfolk office, testified that Williams had told him a somewhat different story during a late-night interrogation at Williams’s home following the shootings. Williams had told Rowley that when Nicholas handed over the money, both he and Nicholas had their backs to the glass counter so that, as Rowley put it, “the salesclerk could not see that in fact the money … had come from Nicholas.”)
Nicholas and Williams returned to the counter that contained the Cobray pistol and told Massengill they wanted to buy it.
Massengill passed Williams a copy of federal form 4473.
Everyone who buys a gun from a federally licensed firearms dealer must fill out this two-page form, which among other things asks the would-be purchaser if he is a drug addict, a convicted felon, mentally ill, or an illegal alien; if he has renounced his U.S. citizenship; and whether he has been dishonorably discharged from the armed forces. The form goes nowhere. It is kept in the dealer’s files (provided the dealer in fact keeps such files and keeps them accurately) for later reference should the gun be used in a crime and subsequently traced by ATF. By federal law, the buyer need present only enough identification to prove that he is twenty-one or older and resides in the state in which the dealer is located. (State and local laws may add requirements.)
Williams testified that as he began filling out the form, Massengill told him, “The only thing that will keep you from buying this gun here in this store is you put a yes answer to these questions. Everything should be marked no. If you put a yes up there, that will stop you from getting the gun.”
Nicholas, meanwhile, had taken the gun from the counter and begun inspecting it. He looked at Massengill. “Doesn’t a clip come with this?”
Massengill found the clip and gave it to Nicholas. Nicholas walked out with the gun.
Taliaferro, Williams’s attorney, asked, “Did the salesman ever say anything to you that it was against the law to purchase that gun for Nicholas?”
“No, he didn’t,” Williams said. “Only thing he was interested in was making that sale.”
Massengill, in a deposition during the later civil trial against Guns Unlimited, testified, “I would never sell a gun to an adult that I understood was going to give that gun to a minor.” In an interview late in 1992, he told me, “It would be suicide to do business like that. On a gun like that there’s a profit margin of forty or fifty dollars. Is it worth taking a chance of losing your license to make fifty dollars?”
Once outside the store, Nicholas asked Williams to buy him some bullets. Williams refused. “I told him I wouldn’t buy any bullets because we didn’t need any bullets. I was going back home … to strip my floors, and we didn’t need no bullets until we got actually to the shooting range, and we could buy bullets in the shooting range.”
Acquiring the bullets, however, proved no great challenge for Nicholas. His mother bought them. Nicholas had told her that a friend and his father had invited him to go target shooting at a local shooting range, according to Detective Adams. They would pay all the range fees and supply the guns; all Nicholas had to do was provide the cartridges. The cartridges, Nicholas specified, had to be nine-millimeter. Mrs. Elliot was so concerned that he make friends and have a little fun in his life that she obliged. She had no idea he owned his own gun, or that he had other plans for the bullets.
Immediately after the shootings ATF agents arrested Williams