His work accomplice and pal Kerry Spencer, 23, had adopted an identical path. He, too, had left college, had labored on the Piggly Wiggly warehouse and had younger kids. However he was additionally snorting $350 value of cocaine a day, and was normally armed.
This wasn’t warehouse work, in any case. Simply two months earlier, in April 2004, their boss, Mr. Cooper, had helped set a Birmingham nook aglow with gunfire throughout a dispute that left two individuals wounded. He was arrested a short time later in his bullet-riddled white Buick.
For all of the medication and bullets, life on the 18th Avenue house handed with out police interruption, Mr. Spencer would later testify. “Everybody round us was getting busted, however we by no means obtained touched,” he would say.
Besides the police have been now on the again door.
Curly and RoboCop
Officer Carlos Owen, 58, was a Birmingham Police Division fixture assigned to patrol the Ensley streets he knew so effectively. Although he was a graying grandfather with plans to retire in two years, everybody referred to as him by a nickname based mostly on an previous coiffure: Curly.
In his 26 years on the job, he had been shot at 3 times, bitten by a canine as soon as and concerned in too many chases to recollect. He had led the police union and been repeatedly honored for his police work, together with as Officer of the Yr in 2002.
“He epitomized the group policing concept,” Invoice Lowe, an Ensley enterprise proprietor, would later inform The Birmingham Information. He added: “He knew the place the great guys have been and the place the unhealthy guys have been.”
Others praised Officer Owen as strict however honest.
“He was good to me,” mentioned Lou Lou Chatman, 60, a self-described former drug vendor. “A few instances he may have took me to jail. And even when he needed to take you to jail, he would pull over and allow you to do away with all the pieces on you.”
