Some of us have seen bikes "to die for." When I was a teenager, almost anything with a frame made from Reynolds 531 tubing and Campagnolo components would have been, if not Nirvana, then a ticket to it.
Speaking of which: A year before he offed himself, Kurt Cobain expressed shock at ticket prices for his band's concerts: $17-18. In today's dollars, those prices would be double that amount. At the time, other acts charged anywhere from 50 to 75 dollars for the privilege of attending one of their shows.
Anyway, what I said in the first paragraph might, for some of you, beg the question of whether any bike is worth dying for. Or, to follow this line of thinking, worth killing for.
That is what Bobby Peters asked Tellious Savalas Brown. Peters, however, was not merely posing a rhetorical question during a casual conversation. Rather, he was determining the course of 19-year-old Brown's life.
Three years ago, at a Columbus, Georgia bus stop, Brown fatally shot 60-year-old Roy Wilborn to steal his bicycle. Turns out, he'd committed an armed robbery of a restaurant and shot at said restaurant's employees. Oh, and the car he used to get to the crime scene, and wrecked in fleeing from it, was stolen--hijacked at gunpoint, to be exact.
The hijacking charge and more than a dozen others were dropped in a plea deal. But, as a penalty for killing a man for his bike, robbing the restaurant and shooting at employees, Judge Peters sentenced Brown to life with the possibility of parole--after 30 years.
"Why do all this?," the judge asked. "All over a bicycle? This just doesn't make sense."
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