Videotaped gunplay story ‘falls’ into realm of unbelievable
May 7th, 2008, 6:40 am · Post a Comment · posted by dgrubaugh
I’ve had a lot of stories fall on me through the years.
Some “fell” in the sense that they fell apart. A few others fell on my head, the result of not paying proper attention.
But last week, one of the really interesting stories I’ve ever dealt with fell in my lap — twice.
It started on Tuesday, the day after staff writer Linda Weller reported on a shooting incident Sunday in the 1500 block of Mack Street in Alton. Knowing of our interest in the story, Police Chief Chris Sullivan stopped by the office that day to hand me a copy of a DVD. Some time back, we told the chief of our new ability to broadcast video on our Web site. Anytime he had surveillance footage or crime scene footage, we told him, The Telegraph could help get the word and images to the public via a whole new medium.
What Sullivan gave me, however, was far more than I bargained, and it bordered on the unreal. It was a home video of a fistfight-turned-gunfight that was, in the days that followed, the talk of the town — and viewed around the world. The fight was organized to settle a feud, as was the filming, but the gunfight that broke out at the end of the footage, seemed to just happen. Fortunately it was not fatal, but the MAC-10 semiautomatic gun at the center of the event continues to draw attention.
For me, the story wasn’t over, even after we wrote about the video. Last Friday, a 17-year-old man at the center of the events, Bryon Blake, called the newsroom to tell us he wanted to get his side of the story on record prior to turning himself in. Police had been looking for him since that Sunday. I just happened to be the one to take the call.
The half hour that followed was a blur — a series of calls to me from Blake about everything from the shooting to his life growing up to the reason he dropped out of Alton High School. He would talk a while, ask me a lot of questions, hang up, think of something else and call me again. After his last call, he said he would be calling me again. Instead, within the hour he was turning himself in at Madison County Jail.
I wrote a detailed story about the conversation that ran Saturday. Here, I’m leaving out some of the facts just to move the tale along. The police and prosecutor’s office and a judge are now going to have to separate the fact from fiction. More charges are being contemplated so this story is far from over.
We’ll see which way the rest of this story “falls” and whether or not any of it will fall toward me.
Somehow it always seems to.
