With one short, straight-to-the-point pronouncement, Judge John O. Craig did the entire community a favor Thursday by stripping a John Wayne wannabe of his right to carry a concealed weapon around town.
Craig has just presided over the state v. Daniel Ray Brown, a two-day trial last week made necessary by Brown’s ill-advised decision to poke his nose — and a semi-automatic handgun — in a “fight” at Hanes Mall that wasn’t his.
He’d listened to sworn testimony from the victim, a pair of Winston-Salem police officers and Brown’s mother. Like the jury that ultimately decided Brown’s fate, Craig also had heard racially charged testimony from Brown himself.
Two of the men involved in the “fight” — actually group home workers trying to get control of a mentally ill client who’d run away — were black. Brown had to pull his gun, point it at them and fire a round, right?
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Not quite.
“I’m going to order that his gun be confiscated and turned over to the police department for proper disposal,” Craig said when handing down a sentence. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for this gentleman to have a concealed carry permit, so I’m going to revoke that. This is just not the kind of thing we like to see from people with concealed carry permits.”
Kmart concealed carry?
This exercise, a sort of Mr. Magoo meets Buford Pusser at the OK Corral, started with Brown having breakfast with his mother at the McDonald’s at Hanes Mall last March 22.
Two men who worked for Independent Living, a group home whose residents include people living with behavioral and intellectual challenges, were at Hanes Mall just before 10 a.m. with a client in tow. One of the workers, Frederick Morgan, testified that he’d stopped at the mall to pay a bill during a planned outing with the client, whom he described as mentally ill.
The other worker, Morgan testified, said something the client didn’t like and that prompted the client to get out of the vehicle and run toward Hanes Mall Boulevard. Morgan and his co-worker — they’re both black — chased the client, who is white, past the McDonald’s and started to struggle with him.
Morgan testified that the client was yelling “Help me. They’re trying to kill me. Somebody help me.”
That’s when Brown decided to intervene. Brown believed a fight had broken out and decided he had to act. He told his mother to call 911, and pulled his semi-automatic handgun. Morgan also testified that Brown pointed his gun at the group and ordered them to produce identification.
“I’m like ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. You need to put that gun up,’” Morgan testified.
When Brown’s instructions went unheeded, he decided to fire a bullet into the ground 3-4 feet in front of him. That got everyone’s attention — including police officers racing to the scene. Instead of a fight in progress — the initial 911 call — officers now knew that a firearm was involved.
The problems with that are as many as they are obvious. Or at least they should be.
Gunfire ratchets up tension. Brown’s not a cop. Far from it. And he violated some of the most basic tenets of the “training” he so proudly cited in giving his testimony.
In case you’ve never been to a reputable concealed carry class, here they are: Never point a weapon at a human being unless you intend to kill him/her. There’s no such thing as a “warning” shot. Never get involved in someone else’s fight; you can’t possibly know the circumstances. Pull a weapon, live with the consequences.
Officer J.R. Huffman, a 17-year veteran of the Winston-Salem Police Department, knows all that and more. Huffman was one of the first officers on the scene, and testified that hearing dispatch caution that shots had been fired “amped it up another level.”
Footage from his body camera played for the jury illustrated just how much. Huffman, his own weapon drawn, charged into the scene barking, “Where’s the gun? Who’s got the gun?”
Brown, who was smart enough to sit his pistol on the ground and move away from it, answered that the gun was his and that he had a concealed carry permit.
Huffman’s response, uttered in the heat of the moment, was priceless. “Where’d you get a concealed carry license from? Kmart? … Warning shots? We don’t fire warning shots.”
Not just going to stand there
The scene secured, Huffman and other officers started asking questions. Officer S.A. Strange testified that Brown told him that “he saw two black guys ganging up on the white dude’” and that “I’ve been told if I saw anything going on, I could use lethal force.”
Brown also told police that he wasn’t just going to stand there and watch somebody get beat up.
Nevertheless, police seized Brown’s gun, the “three or four” knives he had on him, too, and charged him with a pair of misdemeanors — assault by pointing a gun and discharging a firearm within city limits. He was found guilty in District Court, but appealed his conviction. Hence, last week’s jury trial in Forsyth Superior Court.
Testifying in his own defense, Brown said that the men he saw struggling were not wearing uniforms of any sort and that he had heard Morgan reply, “This is my client, leave it alone” when he demanded that the “fight” stop.
“‘Client’ could mean anything, 1,000 things,” he responded when Kerri Sigler, his attorney, asked about the word. “It could have been a drug dealer, a drug deal gone bad, or a loan shark wanting their money.”
What else could it be when two black men are struggling with a white guy?
“That’s exactly why I think he pulled that gun,” Morgan told me in the hallway after the trial’s first day.
Prosecutor Stuart Brooks tip-toed around the elephant in the room (the race angle) and asked whether Brown had seen Morgan or the other man with any weapons of their own. “No knife? No club? No gun? No brass knuckles, baseball bat or police club?”
“That is a weapon right there that’s killed people,” Brown answered, waving his fist in the air.
In the end, Sigler argued that charging Brown was a “real life story of no good deed going unpunished.” Brooks countered by arguing that pointing his gun at people (and firing it) that close to Hanes Mall Boulevard was unreasonable.
“That’s not in defense of anything,” Brooks said. “That’s trying to intimidate, trying to assert his authority when he has no business asserting anything.”
The jury ultimately convicted Brown of discharging a firearm within the city limits but not on the assault charge. Brown left the courthouse via a back staircase and declined to answer questions after the trial.
The verdict limited the punishment Judge Craig could mete out. Because it was only a misdemeanor conviction, Craig could not ban Brown from owning firearms. He fined Brown $100 but did have the foresight to revoke Brown’s concealed carry permit.
Because he did, because he revoked a serious privilege from an apparent trigger happy guy, we’re all safer.
