Double Trouble

As he swerved the Blazer back in its lane, Haley says, Smith slipped back through the window into the passenger seat, laughing. Minutes later, they were all sitting at Odyssey's bar, throwing back more beers. The place was packed with people dressed in Halloween costumes and gyrating on the dance floor.

Haley says a woman approached Smith and asked him to dance. Smith joined her, then Medlock followed. The club was built on several tiers, and Haley says he watched his cousin stumble and fall over one of the ledges. A bouncer saw Smith staggering and cut him off from the bar. Haley says Smith protested — earning all of them an order to leave.

As Haley tells it, he asked Medlock to round up the others while he went to get the Blazer. As he pulled up to the front of the club, Haley says, he saw bouncers on both sides of his cousin, who was hunched over in the doorway. "I ran over to the door and was hollering at them," Haley recalls. "When I yanked John out, all these people landed on top of me."

Haley fought for a few seconds, earning a bloody nose and face before bouncers subdued him. The other guys were bleeding, too — Medlock's hands gashed by a broken bottle; Smith with scrapes on his hands, and his cheeks swollen and scratched. Haley yelled at Smith and Medlock to get into the Blazer, then tried to calm down his brother, Jeff, who was still standing up to the bouncers.

Haley says he was walking back to the Blazer when he heard gunshots. He ducked into the driver's side, fearing someone was shooting at them. Then, he says, he glanced over and saw Smith holding his handgun out the window. "I thought he shot the gun in the air," Haley says.

Haley says he punched the Blazer over a concrete parking block and into a field that led to the highway.

While they made their escape, Kenny Grigsby, a bouncer who had helped escort Smith out of the club, was on the ground with two bullets in his chest. Beside Grigsby lay Shawn Mason, who had been shot in the neck.

Both men lived. Mason doesn't know who shot him. But, Mason tells the Pitch, the bullet that's still in his neck could paralyze him if he's jolted a certain way; it's lodged an eighth of an inch from the nerve that allows him to move both arms. The discomfort from the bullet rubbing against the nerve has never gone away. "Every day, I deal with the pain," Mason says. Grigsby did not respond to the Pitch's request for a comment.

About 10 minutes after speeding away from the Odyssey, Haley saw police lights in his rearview mirror. He stopped near Vivion Road; officers ordered the three men out of the Blazer, cuffed them and took them downtown in separate cars for questioning.

On the drive, Smith told Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department officer Shawn Emerson about the shooting. Emerson would later testify that he warned Smith to keep quiet because he had not been charged with any crime. Smith kept talking, though, and Emerson wrote it all down in an incident report.

"Did I kill anyone?" Smith asked Emerson, according to the officer's report. "He pushed my little sister to the ground ... she's smaller than me. That's not right."

Smith asked whether the police had found his .38 (they had), then tried to justify having pulled the gun: "You'd kill for your family, too.... I did what I had to do. You know what I mean? He shouldn't have done that. That's my blood. My family."

The cops had a gun covered in blood and a man with a motive.

Or so it seemed. After his escort downtown, Haley says, a detective at the police station told him that Smith had confessed. "I told him, 'Well, he's told you what he needs to tell you.'"

Detectives released Haley and Medlock the next morning but kept Smith in custody. When Smith woke up in his jail cell 12 hours after the shooting, he consented to give a videotaped confession without an attorney.

In the video, which was later presented in court, Det. Ronald Russell asks Smith to describe the shooting. Smith acts out the scene with his arm extended as if he has a gun. Speaking in a monotone, he explains how he reached for the .38, stepped out of the Blazer and opened fire at the front door of the Odyssey. "I remember shooting, I don't know, maybe a couple of shots. I didn't aim it at nobody, you know? ... It's a mistake, really. I don't know what I was shooting at, really. I mean, I wasn't even all there."

Smith recounts how, over the course of the night, he took three or four Xanaxes and downed a 12-pack of beer. He tells detectives that he frequently kept the pistol under the seat in his Blazer, saying he needed protection for the gold-plated wheels he'd just bought.

Once again, he attempts to justify the shooting: "Basically, I thought maybe that I would just do that to scare 'em, you know? I don't know. Because after we was leaving, they was coming after us, you know, and he had threw my sister on the ground ... what am I supposed to do?"