A Montrose Man's Panic Room Wasn't Enough

Goodner, who was around back then, remembers what happened — Brown responding with more wattage, the two neighbors going back and forth, tormenting each other. This went on until, taking a walk, the neighbors encountered each other in the flesh. "Whitt and David got into a fistfight at the dog field," Yost explained. Bruney was a little bloodied later when Yost got him out of jail, so Yost thought "it must have been a good fight for guys in their 50s." Everyone laughed about it, everyone except Bruney and Brown, who seemed afterward to have a new fear for each other. Yost recalls watching Brown install security cameras on his roof, "aimed at our house, so he could see who's coming and going." Goodner recalls a promise by Brown, relevant to nothing in their conversation, that he would shoot Whitt Bruney, if Bruney ever posed him a threat.

Bruney, for his part, moved out after the fight and into his panic room, as Yost called it. Yost doesn't think the two men had any further contact until January of this year. Bruney used to protest when Yost asked him to return to West Pierce to perform maintenance chores. "But like I said," Yost added, "we all thought he was reading more into it than was there."

On January 22, Bruney returned to West Pierce and began trying to clean out a clogged sewer line, using a very loud machine, during the hour when his neighbor was known to nap. Though Bruney was not armed, and was not working near Brown's property but was behind the high fence, on the opposite side of the four-plex, Brown's lawyer, Matt Alford, says what happened then was "a clear-cut case of self-defense."

Police have several witnesses. Eric Mees, the waiter who lived upstairs, had just come inside when he heard what he thought was an explosion, followed by a yelp. Peeping through the blinds, he saw his neighbor, David Brown, with a pistol in his hand, down in the driveway, "and what I heard was, 'don't you fuck with me! Don't you fucking threaten me!'"

"Right after he said that, there were two more shots in rapid succession. It was pretty much point blank."

Brown walked to the end of the driveway and stood there for a while with his smoking gun. Looking quickly left and right, he ran for his house, as Mees, grabbing his waiter shirts from the dryer, went to Bruney. Putting pressure on the wounds, Mees remembers of that encounter mainly Bruney's face, "these possessed, crazy eyes looking right at me."

All the neighbors began coming out, and then the fire truck, the police and lastly, the ambulance that conveyed Bruney to Ben Taub Hospital, where he was declared dead on arrival. The medical examiner later found that Bruney had been shot five times. "What slays me," said Yost, is that the next morning, Brown was back out, walking the dog.

Michael Walker, the police detective, explained that since Brown had no criminal history and had lived in his house for so long (nothing had ever enticed him to move), he wasn't considered either a flight risk or a threat to the community. That at least is how the court probably saw it, said Walker, "though I can understand that if you were a witness who happened to be his neighbor, you might feel uncomfortable." Brown is free on a $50,000 bond, his trial on charges of murder perhaps a year away.

Learning this, Mees and another resident of 1320, an elderly invalid, moved out after the killing. A fourth renter in the four-plex, another artist, stayed where he was along with Goodner, who had decided that Brown was perhaps not such a good friend after all. Determined not to let the rain wash away what Brown had done, Goodner painted in the chalk outline of Bruney's body on the driveway. He was seen marching around West Pierce Avenue in full camouflage, toting his deer rifle, and was also heard shouting at Brown whenever the neighbor rolled out his trash. As all pretense of order threatened to collapse in the neighborhood, the artist, too, decided that he had better move out, and did so just as Mees moved back in. It's a good area, Mees continued to believe, and Randy Yost had been telling him that David Brown probably won't hurt him. Mees was told the same thing when he first signed his lease — "pay no attention to the nut job next door" — and cannot believe that another shooting could ever occur on West Pierce, least of all to him.

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