Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [53]
He threatened to kill members of the staff. He told a nurse, “I’m going to bring my gun back when I’m released and blow your goddamn brains out, you bitch.”
Hill answered the remaining questions on form 4473 and passed the form back to Mike Dick, who looked it over and asked Hill to explain what he meant by “other,” in the race box. Hill said his mother was French, his father African American; to Dick, however, Hill was clearly black. Dick asked him to be more specific. Hill changed the answer to “black.”
Still, something about Hill made Dick uncomfortable.
Dick remembered the case well.
“I can tell you that in that particular situation there was something wrong about him,” he told me during our conversation over coffee that June morning. Hill claimed to have been in the Army, but knew nothing about how to field-strip a Colt, “one of the first things you learn in boot camp,” Dick said. “I called ATF while he was in the store; I said I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s just something not right here.”
ATF ran a background check through the National Crime Information Center, Dick said, but found nothing. No one at the agency’s Norfolk office knew of Hill or had any reason to worry about him. So Dick sold Hill the guns.
“Why?” I asked. “Couldn’t you have just said, ‘You worry me, I don’t think you were in the Army, I’m not going to sell you these weapons’?”
“You’re absolutely right, that’s what I could have said. But do I trample on somebody’s individual rights simply because I feel bad and ATF says I have the discretion to do it?”
In addition to the two Colts, Hill bought two extra magazines, some cleaning equipment, and 270 rounds of ammunition. He paid $1,147.87 in cash and left.
He had never signed the federal purchase form, however. And Mike Dick, despite his concerns about Hill, had not noticed the omission—even though the buyer’s signature is an absolute requirement before any handgun purchase can be completed, and ATF insists the dealer witness the signature.
“I don’t really have a good answer as to why I did not further pick up the signature,” Dick said in testimony one year later in a Pennsylvania court. Guns Unlimited later caught the omission, Dick testified, and sent Hill a letter stating “please come in at your earliest convenience and sign this form for us.”
The letter came back, however, bearing a Postal Service notice that the address did not exist.
April 8, 1991, by all counts, was a stunningly beautiful day in Philadelphia, the sun bright and temperatures in the seventies. The banners along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway moved gently in the breeze. At the offices of CIGNA Corp., an insurance company, four executives gathered for a walk to a popular restaurant on the parkway, where they planned to celebrate the forty-ninth birthday of a colleague, Peter Foy, who was married and the father of two children. The lunch lasted only an hour. Everyone had chicken salad. The executives—Peter Foy, Robert Dowe, John Senatore, and Leonard Allen—had to be back at CIGNA for a one P.M. meeting.
They walked back down the parkway, Foy beside Dowe, Sena-tore beside Allen.
Witnesses, including a Philadelphia police officer, saw a blue Chevy Cavalier pull up at the curb. They saw the driver, a short black man, calmly exit the car, walk up behind the four men, and open fire with a large pistol. Moments later, he just as calmly returned to the car, adjusted his side mirror, and drove off. The car had Virginia plates.
Robert Dowe hadn’t seen the car or its driver. He heard an explosion. “I did not see anything happen to Peter,” he later testified. “The only thing I knew was that a round was fired and it was very, very close, and as I was trying to get down, I felt my—I believe I was trying to turn my head because I knew the shot was coming from behind me, and I felt my head pop. I knew I was shot in the head.”
For no reason, purely at random,