Shots were also fired at the Village Shalom Retirement Center in Leawood. Both buildings are on lockdown. KC Star tweeted that there was one death on the scene, and at least one wounded. The two locations are about a 1.3 miles from each other.

Update: Overland Park Police Chief not releasing name of suspect, only says he is a white male, in his 70s, has a beard, and is not from Kansas. “Suspect in back of car made several statements, he says. “Too early to tell you what he may or may not have said.

Update: The suspect has been identified as Glenn Miller, former leader of the White Nationalist Party.

Update: CNN reporting a 14-year-old by is one of the victims.

Update: CNN Reports the FBI are investigating.

Update: Three people reported dead in Overland Park, Kansas Jewish Community Center Shooting.  

Update: KSHB is reporting that one person is in custody. 

Update: KC Star reported that “The gunfire at the west side of the campus came as hundreds of high school singers from across the metro area were expected to audition for the KC SuperStar contest and actors were rehearsing for a production of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

• This is an essay I wrote 7 years ago, which was published in an American newspaper. Yes, things have changed (most notably, the bank account of City), but the meat, marrow and meaning remains the same.

  

  Rivalry.

   

  No matter what the sport, I will hand over three hours if the two teams on the field are rivals, the fans in the stands sporting chewed-up knuckles, relishing all the barbarism and carnage to come, along with the hope of bragging rights for at least one night. And when the rivalry is provincial—two teams, home bases only miles apart, supporters born into the faith, house by house, street by street—the game is that much more grand, meaty and rare, tapping into the primal instinct every human is instilled with: the instinct to protect your turf.

   

  It was this type of rivalry that had me drinking a pint of Guinness in an East Village bar at 8 in the morning a few Sundays ago. The thing about a rivalry like this is you can’t simply pick a side. You’re born onto a side. When my daughter came home from school and asked me why we have to like the New York Mets baseball club, I could have placed blame on my grandparents for escaping the Lower East Side and downtown Brooklyn for the pastoral landscape of the Hempstead Plains. That pilgrimage, which ended (at least for me) with two teenagers meeting in the East Meadow High School cafeteria, cast me down the wobbly road to that triumvirate of Long Island’s new kids on the block, the Mets (baseball), the Jets (American football) and the Islanders (ice hockey). 

   

  I have always been keenly aware of the second-class citizenship that such loyalty has bestowed upon me and my family. And for close to 20 years, I have been keenly aware of losing. The New York Rangers finally winning the Stanley Cup (and their fans subsequently shoving it down the Islanders fans’ throats). The Yankees destroying the Mets time and time again, culminating with the heart breaking Subway Series in 2000. And of course, the Jets, while not having a rival as sharp as the others, still rip out my heart and show it to me on a season-by-season basis, coming up with new and creative uses for the well-worn phrase “same old Jets,” a motto that might as well be on the team’s crest. In those three sports, these are my teams till I die.

   

  In 2001, I was flipping through Saturday morning cartoons when I stumbled upon an English Premier League soccer game. I had heard stories of English football, the hooligans, the chants, the blood dribbling down the chins of haggard-toothed fans. Rivalry. So even though it was soccer, I watched. The next week, I watched again. Then again. I actually began to enjoy it: the rude-boy chants spilling out from the stands, the eruption when the odd goal was finally netted. But sport is unlike art or music. You can enjoy it–lose yourself in the rhythms and the textures and melodies, but at some point, you must pick a side. I spent hours watching matches and reading soccer-mad websites. I was about two weeks into my search when it hit me: Here was my chance to choose a winner.

   

  I was not born into any of these regions, let alone ever been to them. I knew Leeds from the side streets Morrissey spoke of slipping down; Blackburn, Lancashire from the 4,000 holes Lennon read about in the news. 

   

  After a month, I came up with some prime choices and called Colin, the only British fellow I know. “I think I’ve got a team,” I said. “Arsenal.”

   

  “Not very rock star, Arsenal,” Colin said. I didn’t quite know what he meant.

   

  “I don’t quite know what you mean,” I said.

   

  “C’mon,” said Colin. “They won it all last year.”

   

  “Okay,” I said.

   

  He was right. What’s the fun jumping in bed with someone who just won? I want to be part of the build-up.

   

  “How ‘bout Liverpool?”

   

  “What are you doing?” Colin said.

   

  “Why don’t you just give in and support United.”

   

  Manchester United. The most visible squad in the football universe. The world’s richest sports franchise. Fifteen league championships. Their exhibition games have sold out Giants Stadium. You could call them the New York Yankees of the football world.

   

  But where there is a Yankee, there has to be, in the shadows, a Met. A runt. A second-class citizen. I bit my tongue and asked Colin the inevitable.

   

  “Isn’t there another team in Manchester?”

   

  “Yes,” he replied. “Manchester City.”

   

  Years of pain and torment. Forty-seven million pounds in debt. Blowing it at all the wrong times. Last major trophy, 1976. I have never been to Manchester, knowing it only from Smiths lyrics and the Gallagher brothers. “I would rather kick my daughter out of the house than let her support Manchester United,” Noel Gallagher once said.

   

  A few days later, I saw Colin. “Manchester City,” I declared.

   

  He raised an eyebrow. “Well, if that’s the way you want to go…But be prepared for heartache.”

  

  About 10 people are standing outside Nevada Smith’s in the East Village on a cold February morning, shivering under a sign that reads, “Where Football is Religion.” In the vernacular of the natives, it is called a Derby. The Manchester Derby, United vs. City. Most of the crowd is wearing the red of Manchester United. I spot one older guy with a light-blue ski cap of City.

   

  At 7:45, the door opens. The bar is a typical New York railroad number, long and narrow. I follow the man with the ski cap to the back of the bar, pull up a stool next to him and pull off my sweater to reveal the City jersey I picked up on eBay. An older gentleman comes in with his two young sons. I get but one sentence out of my mouth about the upcoming match, something about how good keeper David James played the previous week against Chelsea, when he interrupts me.

   

  “You American?” he says with a bewildered look.

   

  “Yes,” I say.

   

  “Why do you support City?”

   

  “Well, because I’m a Mets fan and a Jets fan,” I say.

   

  He smiles. “The underdogs, huh?”

   

  More City fans enter, giving each other the same sad looks I used to see at Shea Stadium before Jet games in the late ‘70s. United fans, staked out in the front of the bar, outnumber us 4-1. The game, beamed by satellite from City’s home pitch, begins and City is playing hard. A beautiful cross by Shaun Wright-Phillips is headed wide by Steve McManaman. Should have been a goal. City fans hold their heads. Won’t get many chances like that. Then the chants start. They are mostly nursery rhymes, sung in English accents, with naughty words. “Build a bonfire, build a bonfire, put the Scousers right on top/Put the city in the middle and burn the fuckin’ lot.” It goes on like this for the rest of the game. Our chants are a happy “City Till I Die” number and “Blue Moon,” as in “Blue moon, you saw me standing alone.”When 48,000 sing it at City of Manchester Stadium, it sounds quite majestic. When 10 sing it at a bar in the East Village at 8 on a Sunday morning, it sounds like crap.

   

  In the second half, United’s teenage prodigy Wayne Rooney breaks through and rolls the ball under the Man City keeper. One-nil, which is a tantamount to death at this stage. A United fan jumps on top of the bar and the chants get more severe. “City’s going down like a Russian Submarine,” sung to “Yellow Submarine,” along with, “Twenty nine years… F**k all,” which I quickly understand is United’s version of the Yankee fan’s once reliable “1918” (sung to Red Sox fans in reference to their last World Series win).

  

  City’s heart is out of it. One of their defenders tries to stop a cross and inadvertently kicks it into his own net. The red side of the bar erupts with a part cheer/part laugh that is difficult to describe, other than to say that I have been on the receiving end of its torment before at Shea Stadium.

   

  The game ends quickly after that, and most of the City fans exit. I stick around with the last men standing, listening to the chants still being pelted our way. I actually get angry. We need better organization. Better chants. C’mon guys.

   

  After a fourth Guinness, I sidle next to a doughy-faced City supporter at the urinal.

   

  “Ah,” he says, shaking his head in disappointment.

   

  “I know,” I reply. “So many chances early on.”

   

  “Yeah,” he says “Typical City.”

   

  I settle my tab and walk into the chilly mid-morning of the East Village with a smile on my face.

   

  I never had a choice at all. I may have never been to Manchester.

   

  But I was born there.

My feature which chronicles the citizen detectives who tracked down a kitten killer turned accused murderer was just posted on Rolling Stone.

First let me preface by saying nothing will take the blame off of the suspect in SXSW Red River vehicular murder which has claimed two lives, has eight still in the hospital, and injured 15 others. Nothing. But I wanted to clear up something that is being widely reported.

The morning after the incident, I went down to the site and spoke to the men in orange who work the barricades. One of them was just leaving the scene when the crash occurred, but the other was quite possibly the first person to dodge the car as it turned onto Red River.

The way many of the street blockades are set up during SXSW is that there are two or three wooden barricades spanning 2/3rds of the road, and then an orange traffic cone in the final third. That way, workers only have to move the cone when authorized vehicles need to go in or out. An individual is there if anyone tries to turn into the area to tell them to stop. But if someone is coming at a high rate of speed, being chased by police and legally drunk, that’s a tough assignment for a $10-an-hour job.

So as the driver was going the wrong way on 9th evading the police cruiser, he had four options as he approached the intersection at Red River. The first was to stop. Saving everyone–including himself. The second was to keep going straight. We will learn once the cruiser dash cam becomes public if there were vehicle facing his way. The third was to turn right, which as a driver is an easier turn, and when you are being chased, there is a natural instinct to turn the closest corner to get out of sight of the predator chasing you. The final choice would have been to turn left, which is a tougher turn, and he might have seen more activity to the left.

The suspect chose right, made a tight turn, squeezed in between the wooden barricade and the curb and rolled over the pylon, according to the worker. The worker says he dove behind the pole to the right of the picture above. He saw the first pedestrian who was struck fly at least ten feet in the air, before landing on his back. Witnesses say the car accelerated as it went straight down the road hitting people, many who were waiting in line to get into the Mohawk. It then went through the 10th street intersection. The two fatalities occurred in between 10th and 11th, say police.

On Friday, the barricades were tighter to the curb. You can see a line to get into the Mohawk in the background.

The suspect told police he was scared to pull over because he had a warrants for his arrest. Would the suspect have made the turn had he seen a wooden barricade there instead of a pylon? Was the police officer too overzealous in his pursuit? Should clubs not organize lines in the middle of the street even if that street is supposed to be closed off to vehicle traffic? These are the questions that will attempt to be answered more in the sure-to-come wrongful death suits rather than during any criminal trial. Would a wooden barrier have slowed him down? Police say the driver accelerated after hitting people, and there is no evidence that he applied his brakes.

Discarded EMS worker gloves the morning after the SXSW crash on Red River. James Shamard of Austin-Travis EMS said that the five “very critical” victims were headed to hospitals within 15 minutes of the crash.

Bill Jensen and Michelle McNamara at the SXSW panel: Citizen Dicks: Solving Murders with Social Media.

Le Monde wrote it up in their daily round up. Scroll down, we are in between Oculus and Grumpy Cat.

The slides will be up shortly.

There was not a single law enforcement representative in the crowd of 125. Something to work on for next year’s panel.

Thank you to the longreaders at Longreads for putting my LA Magazine feature The Secret Life of Johnny Lewis alongside bad-ass stories by Sonia Smith and Adam Penenberg (and Garrison Keeler’s ode to his hometown). I particularly like the fact that they tell you how long it will take to read the story–21 minutes. Please take at least 22 minutes, adding an extra minute to reflect.

You can view the list here.

On Feb. 9, 2004, Maura Murray sent her professors at UMASS Amherst an email explaining that there was a death in her family and she would be gone for a few days. The 21-year old nursing student then walked out of her dorm room, purchased $35 worth of alcohol and drove her black Saturn into the White Mountains of New Hampshire. She took a shaky turn on Rt. 112 in Haverhill and crashed her car into a snow bank. A passing motorist pulled up to the disabled car, and asked Maura if she needed help. She refused. Around fifteen minutes later, a police officer arrived at the scene and found the car locked, its windshield cracked, the airbags deployed—and not a soul in sight. In those fifteen minutes, Maura Murray had disappeared into the New Hampshire night.

Every day for the last ten years, each detail of the Maura Murray tale is analyzed, dissected and reconstructed with a Warren Commission-like attention to detail on blogs and online forums. The car accident two days earlier in Amherst. The father visiting with $4,000 cash in his pocket. The crying episode. The box of wine. The serial killer. The MapQuest print out. The school bus. The rag in the tailpipe. The sobbing voice mail. The clues are moved around the internet in a parlor game by armchair detectives, debated as either viable clues or vicious red herrings, along with the idea—the hope—that this may not be a crime at all, but rather an elaborate ruse by a young woman wanting to start a new life.

Read:

My feature in Boston Magazine on Maura Murray and the internet sleuths determined to find her.

My feature on Johnny Lewis, the Sons of Anarchy actor who killed his landlady and then either fell or jumped from her home last September, was just posted on the Los Angeles Magazine website. You can read the story here.

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the murder of RJ Lockwood, who was killed in his Miami apartment just after midnight on January 1, 2003. The murder is still unsolved.

I wrote a feature story about the murder in May of 2004 for Miami New Times. It is part internet love story, part murder mystery. The only thing it needed was an ending.

It went on to win Best in Show Best In Print at the Green Eyeshade Awards, the nation’s oldest regional journalism contest which covers Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia.

Read the story here.

On Christmas Day 2002, Brian Boothe was found dead in his apartment in Stuyvesant Town, in Manhattan, victim of a knife wound to the neck. “Police sources” tagged it a suicide in several newspapers.

Boothe’s brother Tommy had died by suicide. New York newspapers, and perhaps the police, connected those dots: A gay male spending Christmas Eve alone, whose brother had recently taken their own life…it had to be suicide. But Brian had not spoken to his brother in years. None of the Boothe family had.

“We kept saying ‘It’s got nothing to do with it,'” says Boothe’s mother, Kay, from her home in Patchogue. “Brian was the least affected by [Tommy’s] death.

And Brian Boothe, by all accounts, was happier than ever. He would be heading to Long Island for Christmas dinner the next day, relishing in giving his 3-year-old nephew and godson Owen another toy with plenty of loose pieces, a practice that annoyed his sister-in-law. When his friends talked about foregoing their beloved annual ski trip to Aspen, he fiercely objected, charging the $4,000 for the January 19 vacation to his credit card. His friend Lisa Steinbring, who had lunch with him the day before his death, recalls how Boothe was “gleeful [while] describing the soon-to-be arrival of [his brother’s baby girl] Cassidy.” Christmas cards he wrote to his family were full of hope for the new year. To everyone who knew him, Brian Boothe was loving life.

But that didn’t stop the New York tabloids from positing suicide. And it took the medical examiner four months to officially declare Brian’s death—the result of a vicious slice to the throat—a homicide. Still, the police are sharing none of the details of the investigation with the family. “They won’t tell me much about the crime scene,” says Boothe’s sister, Donna Kukura of Shirley, “because I’m a family member, and they think it was someone he knew, he trusted.”

Friends and family will converge on St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan this Saturday, wearing “JUSTICE for Brian” pins on their lapels, for a memorial. Maybe afterward they will caravan out to the Island, to the Ground Round on Montauk Highway in Bay Shore, where Booth #287 is dedicated to Boothe, who was a server there for five years. The family will look warily at the faces in the crowd, as they did at the funeral in December, to spot any odd people or odd behavior. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with,” says Kukura. “Everyone’s a suspect.” The police put that thought in the family’s heads. Regardless, people will be there to remember a Long Island boy who moved to the city and made good, only to be struck down in the prime of life.

A BAKER AND BEEKEEPER
Kay Boothe remembers her son putting on song-and-dance shows in the backyard of their house on Valley Road in Patchogue. She remembers his beekeeping phase, along with the day the bees got loose and flew away (Brian cried). She remembers Brian and his brothers Jimmy, Tommy and Sean going down to River Avenue Park to move turtles from the perimeter of the park back into the marshes, safe from encroaching civilization. She remembers him staying home on Thanksgiving while his family went to the parade—because he wanted to stay in the kitchen and help cook, and the time he waited anxiously as the family tried his fresh-baked cookies, only to see everyone spit them out, realizing too late that he had substituted baking soda for baking powder. Those are the kinds of stories Kay Boothe remembers.

“Anyone he touched remembered him,” Kay Boothe says through tears. “It’s a shame whoever did this, to snuff out his life. Because he loved life. And he loved the city. I used to live in the city [and] I kept telling him, times are different and he would say ‘Oh ma, people are out at all hours.'”

Boothe wasn’t out at all hours on Christmas Eve. A creature of habit, Boothe was always in by 2 a.m.

On Christmas Eve, he left 1 Penn Plaza, where he worked at Seabrook Consultants as a human resources strategist, and went to the Gap to buy presents for his two nieces. “I don’t know [what they are] yet. I haven’t opened the Christmas gifts,” says Kukura.

He stopped at a Rite-Aid drug store, then the dollar store to get wrapping paper, before returning to his apartment, where he presumably wrapped the presents. He called his mother to finalize plans for Christmas dinner, and then went out for a drink.