The Fence - Dick Lehr [137]
“I feel that in his mind, if someone had been identified, if there was someone who would take responsibility, you know, for their actions for what was done to him, he could at least have some of—well, there’s closure to this.”
The lawyer finally asked, “Do you and Michael have any plans to separate.”
Kimberly had hung in there, answering the relentless questioning seeking intimate, painful details about the more than three years since Mike’s beating. It was like picking at a wound over and over; she’d admitted the marriage had become tense, strained, and, at times, seemed “unbearable.” But it was as if this question by the lawyer had gone too far, and her back went up.
Firmly, she replied, “No. We haven’t made any plans to separate.”
The lawyer and deponent then had their most curt exchange.
“You still love Michael?”
“Yes, I do.”
“He loves you?”
“Yes.”
The next month, during the early evening of September 14, Smut Brown had some urgent business to take care of, so he asked some pals to drive him over to Sutton Street in Mattapan. Sutton was a mostly barren one-way street about a block long. It was lined with worn triple-deckers, unkempt yards, and drug dealers. Smut knew full well about the drug activity; following his acquittal the year before in the Lyle Jackson murder trial, he’d resumed his own illicit activities, associated with the outfit known as KOZ.
But this was not about business; it was a family matter. His mother, Mattie, was staying in a third-floor unit at 5 Sutton Street. She was with one of his big sisters and her young daughter. The previous night, his mother had awakened in the middle of the night to partying and loud music in the unit below. She had gone down and complained. One man followed her back upstairs. “He was drunk,” Mattie said later. “He came into the apartment cussin’, rude and disrespecting me.”
When Smut learned what had happened, he got angry. When he arrived at the house, he climbed the six cement steps and confronted the man on the front porch. His mother was not there; she’d gone out shopping in Mattapan Square. Smut saw the encounter as a teaching moment—about respect—but it wasn’t long before the street talk turned into a street fight. Smut was getting the better of the fistfight when he noticed the guy was carrying. They began struggling over the weapon, and it fell to the ground. “Then this guy’s friend picks up the gun,” Smut said. The man was pointing the gun at Smut and his friends, and “I’m freakin’ out, thinking, man, now I’ve gotten my friends shot when this was my beef.” He pushed the man he was fighting into the gunman. Then Smut ran off the porch around to the side yard littered with trash. The gunfire began.
“I got a call on my cell phone,” Mattie said, “that Robert got shot.”
Smut was hit once in the back but kept running. Police and emergency medical workers found him lying in blood in the middle of Sutton Street at 7:19 P.M. He was taken to the emergency room at Boston City Hospital, where his mother joined him.
The shooting made the newspapers. “Robert Brown is the only person, other than Michael Cox himself, willing to come forward to testify about what happened that night and who can help us identify specific Boston police officers,” Roach told a reporter from the Boston Globe. The attorney was openly worried about Smut’s availability for the upcoming civil rights trial.
Smut was lucky, though. He quickly stabilized and, after five days, was released. “The only time I wasn’t there,” his mother said, “was when Indira was with him. I went home and changed clothes and came back. I never left him alone.” Smut left the hospital with a souvenir—the bullet in his back. Doctors decided not to remove it. He left with something else too—a fondness for painkillers. He was soon a heavy user of Percocet.
The next month, Smut was shooting pool in a hall in Dorchester when he ran into Craig Jones and Mike Cox. The