Blood Crimes

by Fred Rosen

  Racial invective would follow, and in the worse case scenario, a fight between the racist brothers and their victims of color.

  “Otherwise, they wouldn’t say anything to a black or Puerto Rican person unless something was said to them first.”

  The brothers Freeman got as good as they gave.

  “I’ve seen them in racial street fights. Either they got beat up,” Sally says, “or they beat up black people because of what they were.”

  They might taunt their victim by calling him “nigger,” and then the punches would fly. Sometimes it would just be a push and a shove and sometimes a full-fledged fight.

  Sally also recalls her relationship with Ben Birdwell, who would sometimes fight with his cousins, and Ben’s relationship with his cousins.

  “I hung out with him a couple of times. When we worked at Wendy’s, sometimes he’d drive up and pick them up if Bryan didn’t have his car. He was around a little bit because he turned into a skinhead eventually himself.

  “Ben was so sweet to everybody. I knew he got along with their parents because he is related in some sort of way. He never said anything about wanting to hurt them at all because it wasn’t his place to because he didn’t live there, know what I mean?

  “Out of all of them, Ben was the nicest to me, and then Bryan. David was always really quiet and kept to himself. David just seemed like he was always angry inside. He wasn’t mean,” she hastens to add, “just angry. There was just a lot of hate building up (in both brothers) over the years from childhood because they missed out on a lot of things they should have had when they were little, like Christmas presents.”

  When their birthdays came around, they downplayed the occasion.

  “‘Well, I’m seven today, or eighteen,’ they’d say, like it meant nothing. They (Brenda and Dennis) cared a lot about Erik. And the brothers, they got mad and were always picking on him. ‘You think you’re so special stuff like that.’”

  Sally’s friend Deborah Miles told her that Bryan and David had gotten so angry at Erik on one occasion that they had gone after him with a hatchet.

  Another time, Sally heard that David and Bryan used to choke him. If it was true, the razzing of their little brother had gone into the realm of overt violence. Sally, though, had sympathy for David and Bryan.

  “No one was there to love and care about them,” Sally says.

  Away from the job and school, the Freemans and Birdwell liked to party and drink. Fred Simon was a friend of theirs. They knew each other from school, talked frequently on the phone, and shared more than a few brews together.

  “I want my mother dead,” Bryan said on more than one occasion while they were drinking.

  “I’d like to kick the fucking whore down the stairs,” David chimed in.

  They wanted to get away from “those assholes,” but despite the threats toward Brenda, they never made any threats toward their father or brother, at least within earshot of Fred.

  Fred, Bryan, David, and Ben used to get together and drink at a bar called the Wooden Keg off Tilghman Street in Allentown. It was a working-class bar, and the boys and their cousin liked to have their beer there. From what Fred remembers, they drank heavily.

  At about this time, Fred also recalls that both Freeman brothers traveled to Detroit to concerts at the Westside Clubhouse. Living up to their confrontational nature, the skins’ clubhouse was situated on Joy Road, in a black neighborhood in northwest Detroit.

  At the clubhouse, the skins reveled in being the shock troops fighting for a new order based on the supremacy of whites. As the bands blared out their racist lyrics, the Freemans took it all in and slugged back their beers, smoked their cigarettes, looked through the smoky haze of the Clubhouse at each other, and knew that finally, they were truly home.

  When they returned from their trips to Detroit—trips Brenda felt powerless to stop—the boys were primed with hate. Their emotions had been aroused. They became more vocal with their friends about their antagonism toward their parents.

  Bryan attended Lehigh County VoTech, where he took technical classes with other students, including Dan Hawthorne. Bryan, who could be personable and soft-spoken when he wanted to be, became friends with Dan. To Dan, Bryan seemed, despite the skinhead get-up, like a decent, intelligent guy, until Bryan let loose with his real feelings.

  “I hate my parents,” Bryan told Dan many times. “I’m gonna kill them,” Bryan said, as Dan listened, astounded. “One day, people’ll see me on America’s Most Wanted, after I kill ’em,” Bryan bragged.

  Another time, Bryan told Dan, “I beat up my dad because he wouldn’t let me smoke.”

  There appears to have been some truth in that brag.

  The Freeman family had gone to counseling sessions in an effort to try and resolve their problems. Far from doing that, one such session turned into a brawl when Bryan attacked Dennis. Dennis ended up with a dislocated shoulder. As for Benny and David, Dan knew of them, but he had seen them only a couple of times at the Whitehall Mall.

  Bobby Jordan also had classes with Bryan and had known him for two years. Bryan often talked to him about how he hated his parents and how he was going to kill them.

  “My mom’s a fat slob, and one day, I’m gonna kill her,” Bryan said.

  When Bryan wanted to make fun of other kids, he would do so by saying, “You slept with my mother, that big fat asshole, didn’t you?

  To friend Barry Arthur he said, “My mom and dad, they’re both fat blobs. I hate them. I would like to kill them someday.”

  Barry was friends with Bryan for two years. Despite his threats, to the outside world, he was always nice. To Barry’s knowledge, he never hurt anyone. But outside of school, Bryan and David really began acting out.

  They told Fred Simon about an incident in which Bryan threw a Molotov cocktail at a house across the street from St. Mark’s Church on Susquehanna Street. The throw was bad and did not hit the house, but Bryan’s hooded sweatshirt caught fire. They pointed out to Fred the house where this happened.

  Another time, Fred, the Freemans, Benny, and some others were at Heath Barkley’s apartment and the Freemans wanted to do some heavy drinking. Heath wouldn’t allow it in his apartment. Fred said that he broke into a house under construction behind the apartments in the hills of the Devonshire development. Fred did not stay with them, Bryan, David, and Benny, but he was told that they trashed the place.

  Back in the Freeman home, Brenda and Dennis were convinced that they were under attack from Satan himself. Satan, the angel thrown to the lower depths by Jehovah, was attacking them through their sons Bryan and David. Persecution by Satan. But it was not something to feel badly about. On the contrary, Jehovah would not let their children become skinheads unless the Freeman family was loved by Him. What better way for the devil to get them than through their sons?

  Brenda accepted this rationale because it was part of her religion to do so. But that didn’t change the reality of what she felt. She was scared for her sons, scared for herself, scared for her family.

  The boys had already had a strained relationship with their Aunt Valerie. Now, it just got worse with arguments and threats. There were violent arguments that Brenda had with the boys, where they threatened her physical being, while she set down rules they had to live by. The more she tried to discipline them, the more they rebelled.

  They began spending more and more nights out with their skinhead friends, coming home from their debauchery in miserable shape. Brenda turned for help to Robert Goodwin, the student assistance program director for the Salisbury Township Schools. Brenda had her sons go see him.

  During their sessions with Goodwin, the Freeman brothers expressed a “severe hatred of their parents.” After consulting with Brenda, Goodwin assisted Brenda in placing the boys in various treatment facilities.

  In addition to the Paradise School, over the next few years, Bryan and David Freeman found themselves interrupting their studies for stays at various Pennsylvania drug
rehabilitation and behavior modification facilities, including Eastern States Hospital Renewal Center, the Richard J. Caron Foundation, and First Hospital in Wyoming. They were re-evaluated every six months.

  “They knew how to play the game and did whatever was necessary to stay out of placement,” Goodwin later recalled.

  Apparently, though, their play-acting was not all that effective, as the record of their continued placement shows.

  With all that traveling, the boys’ social lives suffered. They had long ago left behind the Witnesses’ edict not to become friends with non-Witnesses. But they had not been social butterflies, either, and they always felt like outsiders. But their skins friends, contacts they maintained throughout their placements, understood. Their fellow skins could see the manipulation that was going on.

  As the years passed, the brothers had trouble even within the Allentown skinhead community. They wound up feeling alienated from it to the point that they discussed with Benny forming their own skinhead crew.

  Conformity was clearly something they did not like, yet something that everyone, family and school, required of them. Unlike other kids, though, the price of their nonconformity was their freedom. When they did not conform to what their parents—in particular, their mother—wanted, she sent them off. Placement was just another form of prison for them. There were no bars, but they didn’t have a choice about being there. If they tried to run away, it got worse. They had no place to go, nowhere to run, but they were learning what to say to Goodwin so they stayed out of placement.

  And if they could do that, then maybe, well, who knew?

  THIRTEEN

  The cars began arriving after daylight, a few at first, but then, as morning wore on and the bright autumn sunshine cast down its golden rays on the farm, carload after carload of young men, with, a few middle-agers along for the ride.

  They had come from all over Pennsylvania, in cars loaded up with beer and guns. Some favored the smaller revolvers that could easily be concealed and pulled at a moment’s notice to strike at a state trooper or other state representative impinging on their constitutional rights. Others sported rifles held in place in their pickups and vans by gun racks; rifles that were primarily used to hunt game in the woods, but under the right circumstances, could be pressed into service to defend them against the encroaching “mud” people, who surrounded them now wherever they went.

  The farm they entered was ringed with barbed wire, which provided an unwelcome appearance at first. Those who knew what was beyond the wire knew that they would be welcomed into the bosom of the Christian Posse Comitatus, to Mark Thomas’s Oktoberfest, an annual gathering that white supremacists from all over Pennsylvania put on their calendars as a date not to be missed.

  Some of those who arrived had been there before to spend weekends with Mark Thomas and hear him preach his gospel, while others had come for a bit more activity. Reportedly, Thomas gave classes on his property in survival training, which he termed “firearms safety training.” During these sessions, his followers reportedly participated in target practice with automatic and semi-automatic weapons.

  State police at the nearby Reading barracks said that they had been called to Thomas’s twelve-acre property numerous times over the past fifteen years to investigate neighbors’ complaints of gunfire at the rear of the property. Despite this, no one had ever been charged with carrying illegal weapons or illegally discharging a weapon there, according to police.

  Thomas had been concerned with police and other law enforcement officials getting the wrong impression of the activities on his farm, primarily the fear that they might force a confrontation like the firefight at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, that ended with a blazing conflagration that burned the whole place down.

  Thomas maintained publicly that he didn’t have a heavily armed compound, that he stockpiled no illegal weapons, that he was not involved with a fortification of any kind. “The police have no reason to come in and shoot up the place,” he told a local newspaper. But, he added, “It wouldn’t be a real good idea to come in here and bother me. I have children, and I’m not going to put up with any kind of nonsense.”

  The weapons he does have, primarily hunting rifles, he claimed were protected by the Constitution’s Second Amendment and are necessary to protect against the encroaching federal government controlled by Zionists.

  Thomas claimed that a federal agent of some kind exploded a pipe bomb on his property, blowing out the windows in his kitchen. Luckily, no one was harmed, but he did post armed guards on subsequent nights. No further incident occurred.

  When state police were told of Thomas’s bombing claim, they responded that had a bomb of the magnitude Thomas described gone off, “there would have been more extensive damage to his quarters.” To Thomas, though the bombing incident brought home his need for weapons.

  “If the police aren’t going to protect me, naturally, I’m going to keep a gun around,” he was quoted in print.

  Food was stockpiled in the basement of Thomas’s, house in preparation for a racial holy war. The Christian Posse Comitatus had also built a bomb shelter out of a bus that he buried on his land.

  For those familiar with Thomas’s gospel, it was as inspired as it was complex. Thomas’s religion is based on the first chapter of the Bible.

  Thomas claims that Jews are descended from the fratricidal Cain, who, in turn, was descended from the devil snake and Eve. White people, on the other hand, God’s chosen people, are descended from Abel, the good brother, who was the progeny of Adam and Eve. That leaves the world with two main races: white people and Jews. Everyone else falls into the classification “beasts of the field.”

  Three of the visitors that October day had been there numerous times before and had heard the gospel according to Thomas: Bryan and David Freeman and their cousin, Benny Birdwell. Once again they saw Thomas’s chapel, actually a trailer that had been turned into a chapel. A Nazi flag hung in the chapel, its stark brick red and black colors a vivid reminder that Hitler’s genocidal dream was alive and well and being nourished in the state where Washington fortified his troops to fight the British.

  Because the chapel was too small to accommodate his guests, Thomas had raised a tent for the event. Scattered throughout the tent were Nazi flags. The crowd heard the racist speeches and the heavy metal music of skinhead hate rock bands. But that was all a prelude, a warmup, to the charismatic speaker, who now took center stage.

  Mark Thomas stood in front of a giant cross, its surface covered in gasoline-soaked burlap. His craggy, weathered face looked more taut with emotion than usual. His hair parted to the side, his mustache clipped short, just like Hitler’s, he stood up ready to address the crowd that had gathered at his Pennsylvania farm for Oktoberfest ’94.

  Thomas’s intense eyes scanned the three hundred faithful before him. Scattered in the crowd were Nazis and Klansmen of all denominations—the Kew Castle Kounty Night Riders, the White Aryan Revolution, the Bechtelsville White Knights—and the young racist skinheads who belonged to no group in particular. But regardless of age and allegiance, their common bond was an intense hate for those who were different than they were, and a common solution—violent death for the “mud” people, an Armageddon of free-flowing blood for all those who were different than they were.

  Reportedly, Thomas preached:

  “There is no possible hope for political reform or compromise. My Bible says that the Jews are the people of Satan, and our God has commanded us to exterminate them!”

  A roar of approval swelled up from the crowd; the most vocal were the skinheads. Their elders, the aging homegrown Nazis and Klansmen, whose hearts and minds and bodies have corroded from too much hate, looked on with pride and envy.

  The young skinheads are the SS troops of the New Order. When the Apocalypse comes, which Thomas believes will happen in our lifetime, the Posse Comitatus warriors will be called to arms to actively overcome evil and create a kingdom of Christ on eart
h that will last a millennium. This kingdom will be ruled by white Anglo-Saxons, the true people of Israel and of God.

  “I think the Jews and whites are going to struggle until one has subjugated the other. Right now, I think the Jews are head and shoulders ahead,” Thomas preached.

  The crowd roared.

  David and Bryan Freeman and Ben Birdwell took in all that Thomas preached. Overhead, state police helicopters swooped down, photographing the participants for their files. The sounds of Thomas’s speech drifted off into the peaceful Pennsylvania countryside. Protesters outside Thomas’s compound heard the shouts of “Sieg Heil” coming from inside, and state police cars patrolled the perimeter of Thomas’s farm, tense with anticipation.

  Then, a shocking sight: flames leaping from the ground, almost forty feet in the air, resolving themselves in bright orange and blue into the shape of a cross. White-hooded Klansmen carrying torches circled the blazing cross. With effort born from old ritual, they closed in on it, like their ancestors had since the Klan was formed after the Civil War. Only now, the chant was distinctly twentieth century, circa 1930s Germany.

  “Sieg heil! Sieg heil! Sieg heil!”

  Along to the southwest, not ten miles away, Allentown slept through the night, untouched by Thomas’s anger and hate.

  Sometime after the Oktoberfest, Bryan Freeman was talking to his friend Harry Liste. Harry later related how he and David were driving through Allentown one night when he hit a black kid walking down the street with an eight-ball in a sock.

  In late December, Bryan showed up at home with a tattoo on his neck of a swastika made from human bones. On December 31, 1994, without his parents’ permission, Bryan traveled to Detroit to a New Year’s Eve concert of skinhead bands.

  Brenda called Goodwin and told the school guidance counselor, “I’ve lost control of my boys. I want to get Bryan and David placed somewhere. Anywhere.”

  He asked, was this short-term placement she was after, or long-term? Brenda thought for a moment.