Word: farleys
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Afterward, Farley, Sims and friends stopped at the offices of the National States Rights Party, a Klan-associated group. Farley bought a mini Confederate flag for 40¢, and they heard reports of retaliatory rock throwing by angry black youths. A white teenager, Dennis Robertson, while returning from his job, was struck in the head with a brick hurled by a black teen; he would spend days in critical condition before recovering. Upset by the news, Farley headed out. Sims, caught up in the day's emotions, says he "went along for the ride" on Farley's motorbike...
...Farley's friends saw Farley and Sims about to head west on the Docena-Sandusky Road. The friends claimed that they'd seen Virgil and James throwing rocks, which James vehemently denied then and today. "We'll take care of them," said Farley, according to police documents. But instead he gave the revolver to a stunned Sims, who had never fired a gun. Farley still insists that the Ware brothers had rocks in their hands, but Sims says, "I guess we were just expecting rocks to be coming at us." Sims is righthanded; the gun was in his left hand...
...next day Detectives E. Dan Jordan and J.A. McAlpine tracked down Farley, who initially denied involvement. They later found Sims at his home in suburban Forestdale. Sobbing, he confessed in front of his parents. Jordan, now 74 and retired, says Farley fumed, as if he considered Sims and the detectives traitors. But Jordan says he was unmoved. He had felt "demeaned--you know, having to obey Bull Connor, jailing up black children in cages. The civil rights movement was changing the way we thought about things...
...Farley and Sims were charged with first-degree murder, but an all-white jury convicted Sims on a lesser charge of second-degree manslaughter (to which Farley then pleaded guilty). A white judge, Wallace Gibson, suspended the boys' sentences and gave them two years' probation--scolding them for their "lapse"--which made Lorene Ware "break down in the courtroom crying and hollering," recalls Melvin. Says James: "You could get more time back then for killing a good hunting...
...example, Virgil's brothers say their rage might not have worn off. Melvin was the angriest, and although he thought for years about revenge, he eventually immersed himself in his Christian faith, encouraging whites and blacks to attend each other's church services. James too has long forgiven Farley and Sims, but he says he found real meaning in Virgil's death one night years later, in the '60s, when his car got stuck in a ditch on the same dark Docena-Sandusky Road. Two young white men pulled up and approached him, "and I thought...