A True Crime
Before the narrative is shaped for your streaming device, earbuds or bookshelf, the facts are gathered by a journalist. What happened? Where and when? Who is the victim? And do the police know who did it?
Any journalist who has covered crime has stories they can’t shake. These tales can be harrowing, bizarre, or even, in rare circumstances, oddly inspirational. We asked our journalists to share the ones they still think about, even decades later.
Eddie Brown began running in a snake infested Florida swamp in 1952. In the 44 years after he escaped from a chain gang while serving a robbery sentence, Mr. Brown worked, raised children and lived quietly in East New York. But he was always shadowed by the gnawing fear that his past would catch up with him. I covered his case as a Metro reporter in 1996, but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the chain-gang fugitive, having recently read about the racial horrors of the Jim Crow South in Colson Whitehead’s “The Nickel Boys.”
Eddie Brown’s past resurfaced after he was in a minor car accident and the police ran a routine check that showed he was wanted in Florida. He was taken away in handcuffs. Florida initially requested his extradition, and New York law enforcement officials began the proceedings. Mr. Brown spent nearly 40 days in the Brooklyn House of Detention before he was released on $1,000 bail. It was an immensely satisfying moment to see him walk out of the courthouse, finally a free man, as a sea of news photographers with flashing cameras and reporters — more than I’ve ever seen — awaited him.