Chapter One Release- THERE!
Greetings to all my subscribers, friends, colleagues and well-wishers!
Thank you to those of you who sent very kind messages of support regarding the release of my first book, “THERE!” 18 chapters of my best on-scene reports from around the world.
I was particularly pleased to bump into a very nice review of, “THERE!” on the excellent news site The Unz Review written by Kevin Barrett the publisher and inspiration behind Revolution Radio and Truth Jihad.
As a thank you to my subscribers, in addition to Kevin’s review (below) I am releasing Chapter One of “THERE!” for your reading pleasure.
This chapter regards the police killing of Evan Quik which I witnessed and documented while hiding in bushes, under cars, and behind block walls for many hours.
Those same cops, as you will read, while preparing to murder Evan Quik were also looking for me!
Please enjoy Keven Barrett’s review as well as Chapter One, “A View to a Kill.”
Until next week…. Stand-up!
It… is…time!
Brett Redmayne-Titley.
PS: Next Article UP: “A Hurricane of Stupidity…and a New Corona Rising.”
REVIEW BY KEVIN BARRETT
“Brett Redmayne-Titley‘s new book THERE! On-Scene Reporting from a World Gone Mad incriminates the author in “real journalism in the first degree”—a crime for which he is lucky not to have been executed.
Brett repeatedly shows up at confrontations between US imperial authority and its victims, sometimes getting uncomfortably close to the lethal violence…and occasionally finding a chance to verbally push back at its perpetrators.
Too craftily elusive to have suffered Gonzolo Lira’s fate, and luckier than Serena Shim and Shireen Abu Akleh, Brett Redmayne-Titley offers an alternately righteous-anger-inducing and heartbreaking succession of scenes from the moral, spiritual, and material decline of empire.
Tied together by the narrative of Brett’s close-up-and-personal view of the police execution of Evan Quik for the crime of briefly borrowing, then returning his mother’s car, the book takes us from the birth of Occupy to Zionist-afflicted Lebanon, NATO-besieged Transnistria, methane-poisoned Los Angeles, Erdogan-addled Turkey, a Wells Fargo branch that won’t let you withdraw your money, and perhaps most horrifically, the pedo-gang scene around Child Protective Services (CPS) that appears to have murdered Fox reporter Martin Burns, Georgia State Sen. Nancy Schaefer and her husband, and God knows how many others.
Closer to home, Brett introduces us to various San Diego debacles including a toxic Trumpfest, a rapper jailed for gangbanger lyrics (if bad lyrics were a crime most of the pop music world would have to be executed) and a nuclear disaster waiting to happen.
“There!” is a great read, if you can handle emotions like righteous anger and utter and complete disgust. I read it in one sitting.”
(Available on Amazon Kindle and Amazon Books)
“THERE!” (Chapter One)- “A View to a Kill.”
One… Two… Three… Four black-uniformed police just passed outside my window…not twenty feet away… moving silently, even paced, side-by-side. The four: black from head to toe, locked and loaded, black-gloved fingers on full-auto triggers, staring keenly down the lenses of their black high-powered scopes through dark-grey tinted face shields beneath black helmets, their black rifle stocks pulled tightly into the shoulder pads of their matching black flack-jackets.
America’s authoritarian machine in full force. Moving fast. And growing.
On my street?!
In mere moments our quaint four-block area of coastal north San Diego County would be sealed off.
All witnesses removed.
Except one.
In our troubled times, cops in America do as they please. Period. When violating constitutional protections, they don’t like being seen. This scene before my eyes? It must be fiction. A bad dream?
No. This is my street. An ordinary American street. Filling-up very quickly… with cops.
As this night would turn out, these cops would not be taking prisoners.
*
Many possible reactions come to mind in those longest of two seconds when one decides what to do with unfathomable facts at hand. I grab my camera. Cell phone? The first few pens and pencils my frantic fingers can grab... stuffing notepads into back pockets while slinging the camera over my shoulder and heading for the front door. Fast.
Press credentials remain behind, swinging wildly on my office doorknob. We would not be welcome tonight. My two dogs, sensing that something is very much wrong, stare at me quizzically, ears tilted far back with concern.
It would be fifteen long hours before I would see them again.
Heading left out the door at a trot while still stuffing gear further into pockets, I zag left and gain ground on the shallow hill of our quiet, old San Diego dead end street. One hundred feet straight ahead…: a very obvious, bright red Encinitas paramedic vehicle. Good luck! The paramedic: an old teammate.
“Kid’s shot two cops,” says John with a look that says, “Oh, shit!”
“You sure?” I fire back, still heading uphill while talking backwards.
“Got one inside,” he nods at his vehicle. “The other’s enroute,” he adds, meaning the hospital.
Neither cop in serious condition. Single shotgun pellet to the leg for one. The second cop had been grazed. Small gauge weapon. The wound small. “Birdshot”, concluded the paramedic who’d seen the wound.
I turn, advancing uphill. There. A woman…a woman standing at the front end of the truck, sobbing horribly into her sleeve. No one helping her. A neighbour?
The Mother.
“It’s Evan,” she cries “He took the car. I told him, no! I called the cops”, she stammers. “Now he’s in our attic. He’s got the shotgun!”
A well-meaning neighbor arrives from across the street to help her. I'm off. Senses overloaded.
Thirty more feet further uphill: Two black and white San Diego County Sheriff’s Dept. cop cars cross my path. Fifty feet more and then left around the corner of Del Rio St. there are more cops, busy.
Only five other residents stand watching. Ashen faced. Looking... intently...from behind the white wooden police barricade now draped with yellow and black striped police ribbons to keep us all away from the developing scene downhill.
Further around this corner… a woman cop, hunched over, cell phone pressed tightly to her ear, trying not to be heard.
“Evan? Evan! Stay on the line,” I hear her saying as I approach from behind.
Down the shallow hill of Del Rio, two hundred feet away I can see those four menacing all black-on-black cops from before. Crouching. Locked and loaded across a single black and white police cruiser, aiming at a single-story house on the left.
Further down Soto St. two more phalanxes of cops four abreast are marching uphill towards me as another four march down Del Rio towards the house. Two all-black unmarked police Suburban cruisers screech to a halt at the end of both streets and un-uniformed white shirted men with large bellies jump out of each, gabbing seriously into cell phones and waddling up the hill to the scene.
Now a helicopter. Circling. Circling. Circling. Making noise.
“Don’t hang up! Don’t hang up!” I hear the woman cop plead, “Evan? Evan… Shit!” and she flips the phone shut.
Evan?
Well, Evan… is in deep shit.
*
Evan Kwik, a troubled twenty-two-year-old. He had caused trouble before in our neighborhood. Mostly for his parents. In our four-block cul-de-sac, he was pretty much-unnoticed growing up…until he moved on to drugs. Hard drugs. Heroin. The neighbors all said, “He had a good heart." But Mr. Jones is a tough fucker and makes a bitch of all his friends. Problems always follow him to the junkie’s door.
Parents Michelle and Steven split years ago. Mother and son at constant odds. Arguments. Fights.
Police called multiple times. The SWAT team had been called once before. No arrest record, though.
Not yet. Just a kid growing up, making poor choices. With his whole life ahead?
Maybe.
Kicked out of his home- the one we are all watching from a distance- and under a court order to stay away, this day Evan Kwik has returned home to, "steal" his mom’s car. Mom calls the cops, they arrive quickly. Then, so does Evan Kwik; so intent on stealing the family car that he has now returned from borrowing it.
And so, it goes. Troubled youth. Broken home. Parental problems. Arguments. Fights. Cops. Life sucks when you’re a kid. Same old story. Same as a million other kids trying to grow up before they can’t.
Now, reportedly, Evan Kwik was in a dark cramped attic…clutching a shotgun and a cell phone and surrounded by a very keen, very agitated and rapidly growing militia heading full speed right to his door.
With my big lens, I get a close-up view of the Kwik house. The crime scene. Looking beyond it, two hundred yards down Del Rio Street to the four-lane Leucadia Blvd, the cops are erecting yet another barricade. In between, four more identical all-black-clad militants press themselves across the hood and trunk of two more black-and-whites. Rifles ready.
Two hundred feet closer, almost in front of the crime scene house, four other cops in standard light brown County Sheriff’s Department uniforms are staying undercover behind one more black-and white. Side arms drawn. Pointing. What they are all aiming at was not within sight, however. Evan was in the attic.
Now, looking back to my left beyond my house, down the shallow hill of Soto St., two more waves of four cops each, clothed all in black but with yellow “Police” marquee front and back, methodically march uphill towards me and my five neighbors as we all stare wide-eyed at the unfolding Kafkaesque drama unfolding all around us.
Common sense, a healthy respect for Darwinism and the need to get this crazy story, indicate I should not be the standing here for long. The old days of allowing citizens to bear witness are these days, at the whim of the cops. These cops. The ones pointing eight automatics in my general direction. The ones coming uphill straight at me.
I’m as trapped as Evan Kwik.
“Damn! I’d give anything to get closer”, I say out loud in exasperation, and in the general direction of a neighbor lady I barely know. “They’re gonna lock this place down any minute. And us out.”
I have to make a move, and I have to do it now. No place to go. What to do? “Damn. Damn!... Damn it!”
"My house is across the street", my neighbor offers, without looking away from the unfolding crime scene before us.
“Your House? Across the street?” I ask in disbelief.
Getting substantially closer, however, by somehow by-passing sixteen trigger-happy special-forces ,with eight more about to join in, seems like a good idea at this juncture. But, I indicate the problem,pointing at the cops marching at us up Del Rio Street.
“No worries. I know a back way.”
Bingo!
With no time for further discussion, and whispering thanks to the divine, we are off. As we hurry away from our vantage point, four more all-black full-sized Suburbans- never Fords I notice- all sporting menacing black tinted windows, screech to a stop at the growing parking lot at the far end of Soto St. More cops in plain clothes jump out, primed for action and heading uphill right at us.
There is a certain flavor in deliberately flaunting authority to get the story. Add a growing police presence and the heart rate will increase proportionally.
So, adrenalized we both are.
Meanwhile, just one hundred and fifty yards away one very scared young junkie remains in a dark three-foot-high attic, holding a twenty-gauge shotgun. Having a very bad day.
*
Mobile news teams now rush to the scene as every news channel in San Diego goes live in-studio with news of the shooting. Limited info. News coming in. Heroin Addict. Troubled kid. Previous problems. Mother called the police. Two cops wounded. Going "live" from the crime scene… "after this commercial break."
So why did Evan Kwik go up in that attic with that shotgun? The answer, so far, was missing. That, of course, was the real story.
It was San Diego Sheriff's officers Colin Snodgrass and James Steinmeyer who had responded to the call about a stolen car. After talking to the Mom who owned the car, they failed to see this matter as a domestic dispute. So, when Evan Kwik returned home and went into his mom’s house after returning the "stolen" car, Snodgrass and Steinmeyer, well, they knew just what to do.
Well trained they were, and showing the kind of patience and restraint cops are renowned for in today’s America, they wisely followed their own made-up- for- the -moment police protocol in dealing with problem kids the likes of Evan Kwik.
So… they lobed three tear gas canisters through the windows into the Kwik family living room.
Up to the attic went Evan Kwik grabbing an old shotgun from the closet on the way up.
The kid’s not stupid. Under these circumstances, instinct and self-preservation made perfect sense.
More sense than Officers Snodgrass and Steinmeyer.
-END OF PART ONE-
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