Brooks did not appear to regard this new expedition as risky, Orlett recalled."Perry said he was going to go get the bull and then come back and work in his greenhouse."
But the farmhand, Michael Beasley, had misgivings. "I didn't want to go," Beasley testified later. "But I didn't try to talk him out of it, because it wasn't any use."
Ames 's wife may have been more vocal.The weekend before the shooting, when Matthew Coleman phoned Holly Hill Farm to arrange the bull's pickup, Jeanne Ames said, "Don't let [Brooks] come up here with you," according to Ames attorney Benjamin
Dick.
Brooks waited for Orlett under the old farm bell that once belonged to his father. At Holly Hill Farm, meanwhile, Jeanne Ames left for Richmond, but John Ames waited. He went to retrieve his mail, Dick said. And he waited some more. Dick said Ames, seeing an unfamiliar vehicle, went down to the barn area to investigate, and that Brooks, when told to put the bull back,"shook his stick" at Ames.
Frances Hurt was sitting in her small ranch house a few fields over at the time. It was spring; the forsythia bushes were blooming, and the air was so sweet that she'd flung open all the windows and doors. She was puzzled when she heard the shots. Hunting season had been over for months. She counted six shots in all, in a distinct pattern: one shot-pop-followed by a pause, and then five more, in quick succession-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.
"I thought:What in the world? Who is shooting a gun at 10:15 in the morning?"
Beasley testified later that Ames 's first shot had knocked Brooks to the ground. Ames fired five more times.
Orlett was sitting at the wheel of Brooks's truck, his grandson beside him. At the shots, he looked in the rearview mirror and saw Brooks curled in a fetal position on the gravel. "I could tell by the way Perry was laying that he was dead," Orlett said later. "Two tours in the infantry in Vietnam, I've seen a lot of dead people."
When Orlett looked back again, he saw Ames with his gun up beside his ear. "It looked like he was reloading," Orlett testified. Then he saw Ames using a cell phone.
Beasley was walking slowly back toward the truck, his head in his hands, "moaning and groaning something awful," Orlett said. Beasley climbed in and asked, "What are we going to do?" Orlett said.
"We're going to get the hell out of here," Orlett replied.
Beasley later told police that Ames had shot Brooks once in the face, and then, after Brooks was on the ground, stood, firing down "four or five" more times into Brooks's right side.
Within minutes, the Rev. Kevin James, minister at Brooks's church and a volunteer firefighter, got a call from the firehouse about the shooting. He heard the address-Holly Hill Farm, Route 207-and felt only dread. "I just knew. I said, 'One of those two guys is dead.' "
Kim Brooks, who lives in Oakland, California, would get a call from her sister, Jacqueline. Kim had stayed home from work that day, feeling ill and unsettled. "My sister told me John Ames had shot my father and he hadn't made it back," she said.
At Brooks's wake, the crowd of mourners was larger than expected, and the service, scheduled to end at 9:00 p.m., stretched on until well after ten.
Ames was charged with first-degree murder, which carries a maximum life sentence, and a second felony count of using a firearm in commission of a felony. He hired Cooley, whose recent accomplishments include delivering Lee Boyd Malvo, the younger defendant in the Washington sniper case, from the death penalty.
Ames 's lawyers have called the shooting a case of simple self-defense. Ames, said co-counsel Dick, was in mortal fear for his life. After all, Brooks was trespassing in violation of a court order and had once fired a shotgun in Ames 's direction.
The trial date is set for September 12, in Bowling Green. But Cooley has asked the court for a change of venue, saying he believes it will be hard to find an impartial jury in Caroline County, where most people "have taken sides on this one." The court has put off a decision until after jury selection begins.
Dick said his client has not had an easy time of it since the shooting. "John is not going around gloating. He has nightmares and sleepless nights," Dick said, adding that Ames fired reflexively at Brooks when he saw the farmer raise his stick. "All John saw was the anger in [Brooks's] eyes. John was in the Army for four years, you know, and the Army trains you to shoot if you're being attacked."
Evelyn Brooks has been selling off her husband's farm equipment and remaining livestock, in part to help stave off legal action from one of the lawyers who represented Brooks in the fence lawsuits. Ames has a cattle sale scheduled for next month, and he recently told one associate that he is shopping for a calf for his young granddaughter, to get her started in the cattle business.
Matthew and Wick Coleman retrieved the bull a few days after the shooting. A rumor flew around Bowling Green that the bull had been found with a broken penis, that someone at Holly Hill Farm had swung a hammer at it. With its elements of cruelty and violence, the grisly report seemed to resonate in a community stunned that a disagreement over a fence had ended in death. But Wick Coleman said there was no evidence of any such assault. Rather, the bull's penis sheath, which runs under more than half of its belly, was badly bruised, consistent, perhaps, with a leap over a partially downed fence. In any case, the bull was taken directly from Holly Hill Farm to the slaughterhouse in Fredericksburg, where it was sold for meat.
Mary Battiata is a staff writer for the Washington Post Magazine. She was a Pulitzer finalist for her coverage of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, and also has reported from Poland, Romania, and East Africa for the Post. She lives in Arlington, Virginia.
I did not cover the criminal trial ofJohn Ames. I had moved on to another assignment by then, and in any case still felt too close to the story and too drained by it to attend as a spectator. For reasons I still can't quite understand, this story was as grinding, emotionally and physically, as any I've written in my twenty-four years as a reporter at the Washington Post, including years as a war correspondent in East Africa and the former Yugoslavia.
Part of it was simply the usual reporter's lament: none of the parties wanted to have anything to do with me for months on end, well past my first and then second deadline. Part of it was simple sadness at the sorry details of the feud and the pain it had caused all parties. And another giant stressor was my interviews with a long line of John Ames's former business associates, who told me they'd been sued by him and warned that he was likely to do the same to me. That never happened, as it turned out. But the case continues to reverberate in my head, and I still get calls about it from all over the country, from people who've read the story and want to know how it all turned out. Not surprising, really. Nearly everyone has had problems with a neighbor at one time or another, and this story of tragedy in a corner of rural paradise, a landscape where we like to think an older, more courteous way of life survives, seemed to strike a particular chord.
The trial lasted a week, and at the outset, the judge turned down Ames 's lawyer's request to move the proceedings to another county. On Friday, September 16, 2005, almost a year and a half to the day after the feud's bloody conclusion, a jury in Caroline County, Virginia, found John Ames not guilty in the shooting death of his neighbor, Perry Brooks.After the verdict was read, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Ames closed his eyes, then hugged his wife and cried. Some in the courtroom and in the surrounding town of Bowling Green expressed surprise at the verdict, not least Brooks's oldest daughter, Kim, who said it was as if her father had been unable to see the danger that continuing the feud posed to him, despite warnings from family and friends.