Among Murderers. Sabine Heinlein
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to me, he told me that people said he could get rid of it now that he was out. But he opted to keep it. He opted to hold on to his past.
Bruce’s trial transcript is far more comprehensive than I had imagined. It didn’t only open the door to his particular story; it revealed in detail an experience that for the most part remains in the dark.
The transcript entailed a loaded drama: two eyewitnesses, two opposing arguments, and a leading actor without any lines. Yet no newspaper even took note of the case. On the surface Bruce’s case was so commonplace that hardly anyone cared. It blended into the anonymity of daily statistics: men kill men; blacks kill blacks. Men kill with guns. Men kill under the influence of alcohol, heroin, and cocaine. Drunk and high black men kill one another. Bruce was no exception.2
Bruce was charged with possession of a loaded pistol with the intent to use it unlawfully and with murder in the second degree for causing the death of Tyrone Davis. The judge offered Bruce a plea bargain if he pled guilty to manslaughter. This was Bruce’s first felony. Bruce said the most he could have gotten was 8⅓ to 25 years. He might have been out after 16 years. But his public defense attorney, Michael Torres, suggested Bruce go to trial. He was convinced he could get him off with less time. After all, no murder weapon was ever found, no physical evidence was recovered, and Bruce didn’t admit to the crime. And the only two witnesses, unreliable boozehounds, changed their stories with the wind.
Torres thought it might be better if Bruce didn’t testify. So Bruce just sat there and listened. He was effectively absent when the second-most important decision of his life was made.
April 22, 1983. The day the shot was fired, thirty-seven-year-old Vietnam veteran Slover Bouknight, an acquaintance of Bruce’s who would later witness the shooting, bought his first bottle of Thunderbird wine as soon as the Monte Carlo Liquor Store opened. It must have been around eight o’clock in the morning. He went to his mother’s house, hung out there for a while, and, around eleven o’clock that same morning, returned to the store to buy another bottle. Over the course of the day he continued drinking, alternating among wine, rum, and maybe some vodka. He didn’t quite remember. He hung out with friends at the corner of Creston Street by the liquor store when he saw Bruce approach that night. “Gave me five,” Bouknight said. He followed Bruce inside the store to borrow some money.
Bouknight’s memory of his previous criminal record seemed as hazy as his recollection of the night of the crime. When Johnson, the prosecutor, asked him what he was convicted of, Bouknight answered, “Misconduct or something like that, mischief.” Johnson continued his questioning:
JOHNSON: If I mentioned the name, would that refresh your recollection?
BOUKNIGHT: Yeah.
JOHNSON: Reckless endangerment?
BOUKNIGHT: Yeah.
JOHNSON: What was that about?
BOUKNIGHT: Me and my wife had an argument.
JOHNSON: As a result of that argument, what happened?
BOUKNIGHT: I went and got some gas.
JOHNSON: Some what?
BOUKNIGHT: Some gas.
JOHNSON: What did you do with the gas?
BOUKNIGHT: Poured it on the floor.
Perhaps aware that the reckless endangerment conviction would take him in the wrong direction, Johnson finished his direct examination rather abruptly. For Johnson, Bouknight was there to reaffirm that he saw Bruce pull a gun, a claim he had made to the police and the grand jury earlier. He wasn’t there to demonstrate that he was an unpredictable, violent, lying sponge—someone who saw a pistol and smoke coming out of Bruce’s jacket one moment but later recanted, saying he heard a shot but that it was too dark and he was too far away to see anything, and that the street was filled with people.
Johnson handed Bouknight over to Torres for cross-examination. Torres extracted, in an equally labored fashion, testimony that Bouknight intended to burn his wife and children out of their apartment; that before he went to Vietnam he tried to sell drugs to an undercover agent; that he hadn’t had a single job since he got back from the war; and that he still occasionally used heroin and cocaine.
On the evening of Bruce’s crime Joseph Vega, a heroin user who had been fired from Center Fence for stealing chain-link fencing, was hanging out with Tyrone Davis. The two men visited Vega’s fiancée, who was Tyrone’s sister, at North Central Hospital. After leaving the hospital at around eight o’clock, they went to a liquor store at Bedford Park and bought a bottle of wine, which they drank on their way to the subway station. Vega said Davis was “kind of tipsy. . . . You know, he was kind of loud, you know, but he was in control of himself.” (The toxicology lab found Davis’s blood alcohol level to be 0.27, which according to the medical examiner’s testimony leads to “loss of muscular coordination, staggering gait, thickened speech and some disorientation.” The lab also found traces of heroin in Davis’s blood.) Vega and Davis got off at 183rd Street and walked to Davis’s house at 182nd Street and Creston so Davis could use the bathroom. Davis then agreed to walk Vega to the bus stop. On their way they apparently decided to get a bottle of White Rose at the Monte Carlo Liquor Store. At the store Tyrone Davis “complimented the girl” Bruce was with, according to Vega. “Dirty looks” were exchanged, and Tyrone Davis followed Bruce outside.
VEGA (CONTINUING): I didn’t hear what they were saying. The next thing you know they were like face to face and the tall guy, named Bruce Jones, he went to hit Tyrone and Tyrone went to hit him back and the next thing you know Tyrone ran into the street from the sidewalk, around the car, back up onto the sidewalk, running down toward Jerome Avenue and as he was running down toward Jerome Avenue and as he was running, he turned around a little to see if he was still being chased—
MR. TORRES: Objection. It calls for an operation of the mind, Judge.
THE COURT: Just object, please, without a speech. He turned around?
THE WITNESS: Yes.
THE COURT: He just turned around.
VEGA (CONTINUING): When he turned around, the man that was chasing him pulled out a gun and shot him.
Later on in the direct examination Vega mentioned that Bouknight, who’d been wearing a trench coat that night, pulled out a carpenter’s knife.
“I told him it was unnecessary to pull out a carpenter’s knife,” Vega said, “because if there was going to be [a] fight, it was between the two.” After firing the shot, Vega said, Bruce didn’t bat an eye. He turned around and ran toward Grand Concourse.
Vega looked at his friend Tyrone Davis, who just stood there, his hands grabbing his chest, before collapsing. Blood streamed out of his mouth and nose.
Vega forced Bouknight, who seemed eager to get away, to return with him to the liquor store and wait for the police. From Bouknight’s perspective Vega became quite violent. “The Spanish guy”—as Bouknight, Torres, and Johnson repeatedly called Vega— “hit me in the back of the head, ripped my shirt off,” Bouknight said. “Then he drug [sic] me back down to the corner ‘cause I had turned the corner and he drugged [sic] me back down and that’s when the police put handcuffs on me.”
The bullet had perforated Davis’s chest four and a half inches above the left nipple, entered the left chest cavity through the second rib, and pierced the upper lobe of the left lung and the sac that surrounds the heart. It went on to penetrate the main bronchus and the upper lobe of the right lung and exited into a muscle through the fifth rib in his back. Dr. Mella Leiderman, the testifying medical examiner, could not say for certain from which direction the bullet was shot or from what distance. At first it appeared the shot was fired from below and not from short range, facts that might have worked in Bruce’s favor. A man of his height would be more likely to shoot a shorter victim from above, and a shot from far away could have established a decreased likelihood that Vega or Bouknight were capable of accurately identifying the shooter. But Leiderman explained that any small change in posture (a slight turn or bend or even a deep inhalation) could change the course