Four to six chicken breasts, skinned and boned… flour, salt, lemon-pepper seasoning. Combine seasonings in a bowl…set the oven…bake for 30 minutes.
Bryan Miller was cooking lemon-pepper chicken, one of his old favorites, in the apartment he rented above a doctor’s office in Haddonfield, New Jersey. Some of the chicken would make the trip to Maryland with him when he went to join his brother Mike and his sister Lisa at their parents’ house. The drive wouldn’t seem as long as it really was with a Windham Hill Christmas compilation in the tape deck. And at the end of the road was Thanksgiving, his favorite holiday.
The phone on the kitchen wall rang. It was Lisa.
“Brace yourself. I have some really bad news. There was a gun battle at the D.C. police headquarters. Mike’s been shot and killed.”
It began there, a long out-of-body experience that would last days. His mind wasn’t part of the same body he could see hang ing up the phone, taking the chicken out of the oven, or turning the key in the ignition the next morning.
He pulled out one of those Windham Hill tapes and listened to it over and over again the whole drive, the hands on the wheel steering on their own while his mind was in another place. “Winter Wonderland” had never seemed so twisted.
But, as Bryan Miller can tell you, life has a very dark sense of humor.
In the fall of 1994, Special Agent Mike Miller was re-assigned from field work to the cold case squad, a unit comprised of FBI agents and D.C. police that evaluates and reopens unsolved homicide cases. “Where should the safest place in the world be?” Miller asks. “At a police station, sitting behind a desk.” Two days before Thanksgiving, however, the unthinkable happened at the D.C. police station.
Bennie Lee Lawson, a low-level drug dealer, had been questioned a few days earlier by police about his role in a triple homicide. Word on the street was that he was a snitch, which sealed his fate among fellow gang members in the First and Kennedy Crew. In order to save his reputation, and his life, he decided to take revenge on the detectives involved in the investigation. He asked where the homicide squad was located. Despite the directions, Lawson got lost in the building and ended up in the offices of the cold case squad.
Once inside the office, he pulled a MAC-11 submachine gun from underneath his jacket and opened fire on the three FBI agents and one police officer working at their desks. Over the next few minutes, more than forty shots were exchanged between Lawson and the four officers. Police Sergeant Henry Joseph “Hank” Daly and FBI agents Martha Martinez and Mike Miller were killed in the firefight. The third FBI agent, John D. Kutcha, and a civilian were injured. Lawson, the last man standing, took Martinez’s gun, put it to his head and pulled the trigger.
“One thing you hear a lot of people talk with about death is the myth of ‘closure’. But that’s total bullshit,” says Miller. “Sadness and grief you can learn to live with, it becomes background noise. The shock will never stop hitting you, though. Thirteen years later I’m still shocked.”
Part of the shock came from the fact that Lawson, a convicted felon barred from purchasing a handgun, had casually walked, while armed, into the police station in a city where handguns are banned.
As much as his mustache might twitch when he hears Lawson’s name, Miller says his anger and frustration are not aimed entirely at his brother’s killer. On a page dedicated to Mike on linkingwithvictims.org, a virtual memorial wall for victims of gun violence, Miller wrote: “In my opinion, Bennie Lawson did something crazy. I don’t get angry with someone who is not responsible for his actions. But I am angry at the gun lobby and the cowardly politicians who allow the lobby to get away with lax gun laws, and who oppose such reasonable measures as the Assault Weapons Ban. These are weapons of mass destruction; they are not for sport or hunting.”
Two months after his brother’s death, Miller decided to get involved in gun violence prevention. “You don’t stop loving your sibling when he dies, and I still love and miss my brother a lot and think about him a lot,” he says. “He was like my shadow. You know, right there, just a little behind me and to the side. So it’s very helpful to me in terms of getting up in the morning and going forward to do what I do. It’s critical. I didn’t know all this at the time, but I felt an emotional pull to get involved.”