Media Justice

by Dennis Carstens

  A minute later, Brittany Riley was led into the courtroom. She was wearing the slacks, shoes and blouse Barbara had brought for her. Her hair was brushed out and she had enough make-up to look healthy and fresh. Brittany and Maddy exchanged a warm hug and she took the chair between Maddy and Marc.

  Marc looked up at the clock and noted it was already 1:15 and no judge and no Tony Carvelli with Brittany’s bail check. Simultaneously, the door to the judge’s chambers and the door to the hallway both opened. Judge Connors came out, the bailiff said, “All rise” and Vivian Donahue with Tony Carvelli at her side strolled up the aisle as the audience stood. A surprised Marc looked at Vivian and Tony as the two of them reached the front row and waited for Butch, Andy and the Rileys to make room for them. Marc turned to them and with his eyes indicated it was okay for the newcomers to sit with them.

  The media knew who Vivian was and a noticeable buzz was going through their side of the gallery over her presence. Judge Connors also knew her and, although a little puzzled himself, rapped his gavel and called for quiet. Vivian, ignoring it all, simply adjusted her skirt after she sat down, smiled and nodded at Marc and Maddy and quietly waited for court to begin.

  The judge called the lawyers forward along with Brittany and the four of them stood before the bench. Connors looked at Maddy and gestured Marc to come to him. Hart went up front also while Vanderbeck stayed back.

  “Is she a lawyer?” Connors quietly asked indicating Madeline.

  “No, your Honor. She’s an associate working with me. I hope its okay for her to sit at the table,” Marc replied.

  “She can sit wherever she wants,” Connors said.

  “Am I detecting a little bias?” Hart playfully asked.

  “Step back,” Connors said trying not to smile.

  The judge went through the preliminaries of reading the case and having the lawyers identify themselves for the record. He asked Marc if he had received a copy of the indictment and would he waive reading it for the record to which Marc answered in the affirmative.

  Connors again read Brittany her rights and made her verbally answer for the record that he had done so and she understood them. He then listed the charges against her which were two counts of first degree murder, one count of second degree, one of third degree and the child neglect charge and asked her to enter a plea.

  The judge then ordered that the two million in bail be continued and asked Marc if bail would be posted. He turned and looked at Tony who nodded his head.

  “Yes, your Honor. We will be posting bail right away,” Marc said which sent a current of electricity through the crowd.

  “You will, huh?” a surprised Connors said. “Okay, then…”

  “Your Honor,” Vanderbeck interrupted. “Clearly bail is not warranted in this case.”

  “She’s hardly a flight risk. Where is she going to go where she won’t be recognized and she is certainly no threat to the community?” Marc replied.

  “I’ve already ruled, Mr. Vanderbeck. But, I’ll tell you what,” he continued turning back to Marc. “Does your client have a passport?”

  Marc looked at Brittany who shook her head to indicate she did not.

  “No, your Honor.”

  “I’m going to put her on home monitoring. She can wear an ankle bracelet monitoring device. Have probation services set it up,” he said to his clerk. “Anything else? Good. We’re adjourned.”

  With that there was a mad rush for the doors.

  The deputy who had brought Brittany in to court came over to collect her and told Marc that he would take her to probation to set up the monitoring. The deputy and Brittany left and Marc introduced Vivian and Tony to the Rileys. Butch and Andy led them all through the mob of reporters but Vivian stopped to address several of them.

  “I’m here,” she began answering the obvious question they were all wondering, “because I think this young woman deserves to be treated like anyone else. The media, that’s you people,” she said with a disdainful glare while looking over the crowd standing in front of her with lights blazing, cameras whirring and microphones in her face, “have already convicted her. And that’s something you should all be ashamed of. It would be refreshing if just once you showed a glimmer of professionalism. Finally, you will probably find out anyway so I may as well tell you. I was the one who put up her bail. I believe in the presumption of innocence and her lawyer, whom I know, assures me that she is in fact innocent. Because of that and the way she has been hounded by you and the public, I decided this young woman deserves to at least get out of jail. That’s all I have.” With that she turned and followed Butch and Andy through the building and out to her car with the chauffer waiting illegally parked in the fire lane in front of the building.

  Within an hour there was a crowd of at least three hundred people in front of the government center. Marc, Maddy, Butch and Andy were in the jail’s entryway looking over the sea of angry faces trying to figure out how to get Brittany to a car. Having assured the Rileys that they could get their daughter home, Marc had them leave right after court.

  “Look at that man!” Maddy said pointing to a man holding up what looked to be a two year old boy. The child had a sign hanging around his neck which read, “Would you kill me too?”

  “And that one,” Butch said pointing to a woman holding a young girl about Becky’s age with a sign that read “Please don’t kill me”. There were dozens of signs of a similar nature throughout the crowd.

  “You’d think she was Charles Manson,” Maddy added.

  “I don’t think Manson is hated as much as she is. You should read some of the death threat letters she gets and some of the stuff I get,” Marc quietly said.

  “I can imagine,” she answered him. “What do you do with it?”

  “Turn it over to the cops. There isn’t much they can do except make a file and monitor it. Most of it is from the aluminum foil helmet crowd and probably harmless.”

  “Probably?” Maddy asked.

  “Hopefully,” Marc smiled.

  The interior door behind them opened and Sheriff Cale appeared. He had two good sized male deputies with him, both wearing vests.

  “Your client’s on her way,” Cale brusquely said.

  “We can’t take her out this way,” Marc told Cale. “We need to go out the back.”

  “No way,” Cale said. “These guys will run interference. They can keep the crowd back. She’s not getting any special treatment. Your car is right there,” he continued, indicating Andy’s large Suburban parked about a hundred yards from the door.

  At that moment, one of the three news helicopters that were circling overhead went roaring by barely twenty feet above the building. The noise was so loud, Marc had to pause.

  “If anything happens out there, it’s on you,” Marc snarled.

  “Fuck off, lawyer,” Cale whispered so only Marc could hear him. The sheriff turned and abruptly walked back into the jail area.

  Another guard brought Brittany to them and Marc was somewhat relieved to see Brittany and the deputy both wore vests.

  “Are they all here because of me?” the terrified young woman asked.

  Maddy put an arm around her shoulders and assured her she would be all right. Marc, Butch and Andy huddled with the three guards whose names were Tom, Dick and Harry.

  “Seriously?” Marc smiled when they told him their names.

  It was decided that Andy and Butch would go first and Marc and the deputies would be on the sides surrounding Brittany and Madeline in the middle. All three deputies offered Maddy their vests which she politely declined.

  “I think they are more noise makers than anything else,” she said.

  When they were ready, Butch pushed the doors open and out they went. As soon as the crowd saw them, pandemonium ensued. The mass of people, most of whom were yelling obscenities, began to push their way toward the phalanx surrounding Brittany.

  With Butch and his large friend easily knocking people aside, the group was
actually making pretty good progress. Most of the protestors were to their left and Andy’s SUV was over to the right. They kept pushing and even knocked a few of the protestors down as they gradually made their way to the big SUV.

  The man sitting in the back of the pickup truck with the matching topper was no more than a hundred yards from the crowd. The back window of the topper was open, the truck parked, engine running, pointed away from the building with his wife behind the wheel.

  He had watched the small group surrounding Brittany as they made their way toward the big SUV. As they broke into the clear, the circle of the 8 power scope framed her face and the crosshairs were dead center on Brittany’s nose. Pretty girl, he thought as he waited for the right moment. He had seen the vest she was wearing so he moved the scope for a head shot. At this range, with his expertise, he couldn’t miss.

  The deputy named Dick was on Brittany’s left so close that her head brushed his shoulder three or four times. Marc was moving with her on Brittany’s right. A member of the crowd, a man about Marc’s size squeezed past Butch and Marc stepped forward to stop him from grabbing Brittany. As he did this, a large woman on Marc’s right reached behind Marc and tried to grab Brittany. Seeing this, Dick stepped in front of Brittany and reached over with his left hand to stop the woman. At that exact moment, a loud CRRRAAACK! echoed between the buildings.

  At first, everyone in the crowd and those surrounding Brittany went absolutely still and silent. No one was quite sure what that was except it was loud, out of place and somehow familiar. Before anyone knew what happened, Dick collapsed on top of Brittany taking them both to the ground.

  Blood began to spurt out from Dick’s underarm, a spot not protected by the vest. Madeline, who had been behind Brittany calmly but loudly yelled, “He’s been shot! Everybody down!”

  In a wild panic, three hundred people began to scatter. Maddy and Marc went for Brittany and pulled her out from under the wounded deputy. She was covered with the man’s blood and seriously shaken but they believed she had not been hit and the two of them with Butch leading the way, hustled her to the SUV. The unhurt deputies went into action to save their friend. Tom put pressure on the wound while Harry called for a car to get him to a hospital.

  It was Andy who had seen the pickup. He heard the shot and looked right at it as it took off to get out of the parking area. Andy ran to an open space, looked up and began waving at one of the helicopters. The pilot noticed him, waved back and when Andy pointed at the pickup, the pilot gave Andy a thumbs up and took off after the fleeing suspects.

  A couple of minutes later, a calm Bob Olson stood on the sidewalk of the government center and watched the SUV taking Brittany away. He was wearing a wig with brown hair down over his ears, a black baseball cap, aviator sunglasses and the mustache and goatee were gone. Had Brittany looked right at him from ten feet away, she would not have recognized him. There were a couple of dozen other protestors who had not panicked still milling about so he didn’t stand out in the crowd. Some of them were helping the thirty or forty people who had been trampled and injured during the mad scramble after the shooting. The rest, like Bob, seemed to be enjoying the show. And, of course, there was still several cameras filming the aftermath of the melee.

  When he could no longer see the truck, he turned to watch the deputies who were working on the wounded man. Gauging from the amount of blood and how pale the man’s face was, Bob believed the deputy’s chances were not good. Hearing sirens close by, he turned his attention toward the sound and saw four sheriff’s cars screaming away from the government center. He shrugged his shoulders, carefully stepped around several of the injured protestors and headed toward his car. “That was pretty exciting. Glad they missed her. Would have ended the fun,” he quietly said to himself.

  THIRTY SEVEN

  October in Minnesota, in fact the entire Upper Midwest, like New England, can be and normally is, a month that makes life worth living. Comfortable, sunny, pleasant days and cool nights perfect for sleeping are the norm. The only drawback that the natives never completely forget is what lies ahead. Summer is over and Old Man Winter is not far off.

  East Coast winter is a source of amusement for the people in “flyover” country. If New York gets eight inches of snow and the temperature drops below thirty, the national TV networks act as if Armageddon is descending upon them. Minnesota, the Dakotas and Wisconsin get Real Winter. What the easterners call “brutally cold” temps, Midwesterners call “get out and enjoy”, which is why October and normally November are months to appreciate.

  The October of our story was, if anything, even better than normal. Dry and as pleasant as any month in memory during most of the month and the meteorologists were predicting it to continue and even be a mild winter. A forecast everyone wanted to believe but no one really did. On Halloween, of course the last day of the month, the kids had mid-fifties temps, dry and calm. It would be the last such day for months.

  In the early morning hours of November 1st, a cold front was moving down from Canada into and across the Dakotas. At the same time, warmer, extremely wet air dropping rains across Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska moved north into South Dakota. The TV weather forecasts, usually bordering on hysteria over something like this, were predicting as much as a foot of snow for South Dakota, North Dakota and Minnesota. Later, after the storm passed, they tried to claim they downplayed the actual amount of snow so as not to upset people.

  The storm roared across South Dakota, through Western Minnesota during that first day of November, fortunately a Saturday. After dumping as much as thirty inches in some places, the storm then moved into the Twin Cities mid-afternoon and early evening on Saturday leaving twenty two inches of wet, heavy snow before moving on into Wisconsin on Sunday. Normally, a storm this early would melt off within a few days. Unfortunately, the upper atmospheric jet stream had shifted southward bringing arctic air and biting winds with it. Winter had abruptly dropped out of the sky and would stay until April.

  By the Monday morning after the storm went through the streets were plowed and the morning rush hour, while moving a little slower than normal, was barely affected. The freeways were clear, businesses and schools were open and except for the enormous mounds of snow piled up, the Cities were pretty much back to normal.

  Marc Kadella, having been stuck at home most of the weekend watching football, set his briefcase on his desk. He slipped out of his overcoat and suit coat, hung both on the coat tree in the corner of his office and sat down in his desk chair. He swiveled around to look out the window at the bundled up people scurrying along the sidewalks fighting the northwest wind that whipped between the buildings. He was happy to see that the weather had chased off the protestors that had been making fools of themselves along the side of his building. While watching the traffic below, his mind wandered back to the events of the shooting.

  The people responsible for the death of the sheriff’s deputy, Richard ‘Dick’ Leakey, a twelve year veteran who left a widow and two young children, were Lester and Clara Young. They were a childless couple, in their mid-thirties from Albert Lea, a small city in southern Minnesota. Neighbors would describe them as a bit of an odd pair. Pleasant enough to say hello to but, they were hard-core, anti-abortion, right-to-life advocates. They erected a large sign in their yard that they fought the city over because of its size and gruesome pictures of aborted fetuses on it. Clara’s sister would tell investigators that she believed it was because Clara was unable to conceive.

  The attempted murder of Brittany Riley by these two surprised no one that knew them. Clara, and to a lesser degree Lester, had both made comments to friends, relatives and co-workers that Brittany should rot in hell for killing her baby.

  The police surmised that they had seen the news reports about Brittany’s court appearance. They then drove to Hastings to watch it and were unable to get a seat in the courtroom. After finding out Brittany had made bail, the pair apparently became so incensed they decided to take the law
into their own hands.

  With a TV helicopter, the sheriff’s departments of several counties and half of the state highway patrol chasing them, the couple headed south attempting to flee. With Clara driving, they led their pursuers across two large counties on county highways, small town streets and even dirt roads for over fifty miles. Unable to shake the helicopter, they finally came to a halt on a dirt road in a Goodhue county farm area with a police roadblock dead ahead. Instead of surrendering and with several firearms in the back of the pickup truck, Clara drove them through a ditch, across an open field to an old, abandon farmhouse a couple hundred yards off of the road.

  For the next two hours, law enforcement from all across southern Minnesota poured into the scene. At first, nothing much happened. The back of the dilapidated weather beaten structure was barely fifty feet from a large cornfield that bordered the empty field where the house stood. A dozen officers in camo gear had slipped into the cornfield behind the house and were watching from the rear.

  One of the deputies could see their truck and read off the license plate number from which the suspect’s names, address and cell phone numbers were obtained. A captain with the highway patrol, Don Bellows, the senior on-scene officer tried calling the cell phones but received no response. Next he tried a bullhorn and again no response. By now, there were a total of four news choppers circling overhead, filming the entire episode.

  Bellows, the Goodhue County Sheriff and Sheriff Cale discussed their options which were obviously limited. They all agreed that when night came, the fugitives could easily slip out of the house and, if they got into the cornfield, it would be hell finding them in the dark. Bellows volunteered to try to walk up to the house to see if he could talk them out. To make everyone just a little more edgy, they had all received the news that Deputy Leakey had been DOA at the hospital in Hastings.