It’s a short drive from campus, a couple minutes down South Columbia, past Highway 54, over to Smith Level Road.
On Friday, the lights in Brian Minton’s house were still on, his mom’s shiny Toyota Sequoia still in the driveway. A basketball hoop sat behind the house. I knocked and stepped back some. No one answered.
Minton was arrested last Monday, one of the six young men charged in the kidnapping and murder of Joshua McCabe Bailey. His parents were charged with helping him and the other suspects move the body.
Minton is 18, a 1990 baby. In his mugshot, he still looks young, with dirty blond hair combed over a smooth round face. The other suspects are just a few years older. Bailey was 20.
These kids are college-aged. They live in our town, some just a mile or so from campus. The Mintons own the BP gas station down at Glenn Lennox. But their lives and ours are separated, so much so that even after the front-page coverage of the bizarre crime story, many on campus still don’t know about it. And we still don’t understand it.
I’ve shared what I knew of the puzzle with anyone who would listen. How Bailey was last seen alive on Weaver Street in July. How authorities say Minton’s dad advised the suspects to burn the body with hydrochloric acid and how his mom helped them pick some up at the store. How the guy charged with pulling the trigger, Matt Johnson, told police this month that he, too, had been kidnapped and beaten by Minton and the other suspects weeks after Bailey’s abduction.
The response: “This happened in Chapel Hill?”
And there was that other question that seems to haunt us these days in Chapel Hill — first with the case of 17-year-old Lawrence Lovette Jr. in March. Now with Minton.
Wasn’t this guy on probation? Why didn’t we see this coming?
A neighbor and friend of the Mintons told me it was sad, but she wasn’t surprised. The first time she knew of Minton shooting a gun was age 12. He’d found his father’s pistol in the glove compartment and fired a hole through the floorboard of his family’s car.
At 16, he was one of five charged with the Sept. 2, 2006, rape of a 16-year-old girl in Southern Village. The charges brought in May 2007 were dropped because the time between the incident and the arrests had led to inconsistencies in the evidence.
After being released on bond in May, he was jailed again a week later for possessing and firing a 20-gauge sawed-off shotgun in his neighborhood.
Earlier that year he’d been caught with cocaine and charged with intent to sell. He was also arrested for having a knife at school.
As Johnson described to police Minton threatening his life with a .38-caliber revolver, he recollected prior occasions in which the two had shot AK-47s together.
In the second day of his abduction, Johnson was taken to his mom’s house to retrieve a PlayStation 2 as collateral. He escaped attempting to secure birthday money for the suspects.
It’s eerie when video games and assault rifles make it into the same police report.
These kids are college-aged.
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