It would turn out that Hadrian Johnson had spent the evening at his grandmother’s house on Amsterdam Street a mile away. Sometimes when Hadrian spent time with his grandmother who suffered from diabetes he stayed the night but this night, he did not. Bicycling home to Howard Street along a stretch of Delahunt where if there was traffic it was likely to be fast but there was relatively little traffic at that hour of the night, he’d been ten minutes from his mother’s house when a vehicle had come up swiftly behind him swamping him with its bright lights, deafening horn, derisive shouts, curses.

Thud of the front right fender striking the bicycle, a high-pitched scream, the fallen boy amid the twisted bicycle trying to free himself and crawl away . . .

What happened next was confused.

Hard to remember. Like something smashed and broken, you are trying to reassemble.

Still it was an accident. The boys would claim. Had to be, for what happened hadn’t been premeditated.

Striking the bicyclist, could see by this time that it was a kid, (maybe) a black kid, but (still, yet) no one they recognized, so Jerr braked the car to a stop, had to check the bicyclist to see if he was all right . . .

True Jerr did stop the car. True they did exit the car.

True they did approach the (injured?) boy who was trying to crawl away from them at the side of the road . . .

(Was it true, all four boys had exited the Chevrolet? Or had Walt remained inside, as Walt would never cease to claim?)

Here is a fact: nothing of what happened was what Jerome, Lionel, Walt, Don had meant to happen. Which wasn’t to say that they remembered clearly what had happened.

Just that they’d been drinking. The older guys had gotten the beer for the younger guys. Saturday night. Deserving more from fucking Saturday night. Not ready to go fucking home just yet.

But only seconds, they’d stopped on Delahunt. Not even a minute—they were sure. Vaguely aware of traffic on the road, a vehicle passing. Someone slowing to call out the window What’s going on? and Jerr yelling back We called 911, it’s OK.

And then panicked and back in the Chevrolet. Driving away with squealing tires like a TV cop show. And even then they would (afterward) claim they’d scarcely been aware that the badly injured bicyclist was dark-skinned, still less his identity: seventeen-year-old Hadrian Johnson from their own school.

SHORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT OF NOVEMBER 2, 1991, AN ANONYMOUS call was placed to 911 reporting a badly beaten young man lying unconscious and unresponsive at the side of Delahunt Road, South Niagara, a bicycle twisted beside him. An emergency medical team from South Niagara General Hospital was immediately dispatched and the stricken young man brought back, by ambulance, still unconscious and unresponsive, to the ER.