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Campsite Media.
Investigating what Really happened in the West End on the nine of March sixteenth, two thousand.
The whole scene frame I frame.
It's been exhausting, but as a deadline approach to finish reporting and to put this story out into the world, I was starting to have a good sense of things, of a man Jamil as someone who could have very well shot those deputies, and of a West End community that was far from peaceful.
As I was turning over.
Various scenarios in my head, two questions kept popping up. Was there really only one person shooting at the deputies? And did the FBI have someone there at the scene when everything went down. These were hard questions to answer because so few eyewitnesses came forward after the shootout, and none of the ones who talked had to clear unobstructed view.
We spoke to one Abdusamat Jahad, the kid being tutored inside the mashed when the shooting started, but Abdusamat was on the floor and in a closet during most of the shootout. I was starting to think I'd gotten all I could get, stopped imagining there could be anything new around the corner. You've heard me say it a lot, that there was more to the story than the official account. I thought I'd reached the limits of more. But there
was another eyewitness, a man named Damien Gordon. In the late nineties, Damien, a young entrepreneur, discovered there was money to be made and renting on apartments to students attending the historically black colleges near the West End. Late one night, he was driving near the park when he saw brothers from the Mashjit out on the corners. The security patrol of Maam Jamil's mas jed.
Like he would have them out there keep the drug dealers away from the park because they knew it don't come to the park, So when I saw that, I was like, all right, I can't save a spot for girls to come stay.
Damien ended up buying a house next to the mass jed and renting it out to students. With deadlines and the demands of making this podcast, we wavered a bit on whether it was worth speaking to Damien. We had read his story multiple times and all the documents were gathered, So what else do we really need to know? So we could we could jump to two thousand. What happened that on that night you were doing some modeling?
Yeah, all right, So me and Stacy are coming to the house.
Stacy is Damien's younger cousin, and he was with Demien to help him move a bathtub into the house, but the truck they were using got stuck in the mud. When the gunfire started. Demian jumped from the truck to see what was going on, but there were box trailers parked in the fields next to the mastet, partially blocking Damien's view. He couldn't see what was going on except the deputy English was lying on the ground.
And then as I'm walking further out, it just goes off tumbling, tumbling, So I run grab I mean, I know scared. I run grab my cousin, throw him on my shoulder, and I run up into the house.
Then I run to the back of the house.
Demien looked out a window, but he was still far away and he couldn't see everything. When the shootings, Damien heard two car door slam and then he heard a car speed away. The two door slams we had seen Damien describe that in one of his statements to prosecutors. It could mean a lot of things that not one, but two people were shooting back at Deputy English and Deputy Kenchin. Or it could just mean that one person threw something in the back seat of their car before
they drove away. The two door slams were notable but seemed pretty inconclusive. But when we finally interviewed Damien at a club he owned in Atlanta, he told us something else. He said he actually saw two people get into the car before it drove away. That would put two people in the black Mercedes fleeing the scene.
That wasn't in the documents.
That was new.
Two people getting into the car. He was certain about it. There were other inconsistencies in Damien's different tellings of what happened that night, But this new information was too big of a deal. We had to take it seriously. Damien said he couldn't ide the people from the window where he was watching, but he did seem to know something else about who might have been there during the shootout, something that he wasn't keen to share, so some other people were there.
It gets a little it gets a little deeper than that. You know, we can't have that conversation. But you know what I'm saying, But.
But what do you mean, Well, if you don't want to have the conversation, then let's have it off off.
Yeah, we had to have that off books.
You know it is there.
Yeah, you need to turn it off, like you need to.
Turn that off.
What Damian told us was off the record, and we'll stay off the record. But Johnny and I left that meeting kind of pumped. We were feeling hopeful that we might actually get to the bottom of what happened the night.
Of the shootout.
From Campside Media, Tenderfoot TV, and iHeart Podcasts. This is Radical, I'm Mostly Secret. Episode eight, The Legend of a Man Jimmil Consider a black boy who came into this world with a fiery nature in the nineteen forties Jim Crow South racial oppression at every turn. Humiliations didn't put out his light, They only made his fire burn hotter gave him something he felt he should burn.
Consider that the child grew up to.
Be a trap Brown whose nickname made clear that he had away with rhymes and words he could rouse the brothers on the corner to follow him to the front lines of the Black struggle, rifles in hand, firebombs in hand, because the real way to defeat American violence, he told them, was to harness violence yourself. Consider that this man was viewed as such a threat by the US government, a messiah to the oppressed at the height of the Black Power movement, that federal agents scheme to take him down,
maybe even tried to kill him. But that in prison he found religion. Islam changed his name to Jamil a Lamin and started amaster it when he got out a whole community, creating his own domain in the middle of what he'd once sought to destroy, doing what he thought had to be done to keep his community alive. Does that have the ring of destiny? The feel of God's guiding hand. It's easy to get tied up and not philosophizing about how much power we really have over our lives.
But a man Jamil talked often about the will of a law, a sense he had that his life was maybe predetermined or out of his control, whether it was destiny or something else. In the late nineties, the pressure on a Mam Jamil from the world surrounding him was building. The FBI appeared to intensify its surveillance, and periodic gun violence, perpetrated often by members of his own community, was practically
at his doorstep. It was near the beginning of this period the spring of nineteen ninety eight when a Maam Jamil spoken in the event in Washington, d c.
All praise is due to a Law who has created man and has not left him, but indeed has given him guidance as to that which is liked by the creator, and he has commanded upon man struggle with consciousness and awareness in his behalf.
It was a fundraiser held in a big hotel ballroom to honor Quame Toure formerly Stokely Carmichael, the chairman of Snick before h Rap Brown took over. Listening to a Mam Jamil speak, you can still hear some rap. Maybe a Mam Jimil's voice was lower and his pace slower, but the rhythm and determination behind his words that was
the same. There must have been some ember still inside of Ma'am Jamil, and I wonder was it being stoked building into a flame, a fire by all the challenges and pressure swirling around him at the time.
Oppression is worse than the grave, he said. It is better to live and fight for a noble cause than to live and die slaves.
Muslims, he said, are commanded to remind themselves and those around them that struggle is ongoing. But there is a higher form of struggle, an internal struggle to raise one's level of consciousness and awareness. Deal with yourself, Struggle with yourself, and that will emanate to the world.
If you can't beat yourself, you can't beat nobody else. Everybody can fight, but everybody can't win.
We know so much more about him Man Jamil struggle with the world with America's ills, that we know about his struggle with himself. I wish I had been able to learn more about his inner life. Was he fulfilled? What brought him joy, what put him on edge. That's why I've often wondered out loud what he was thinking, how he was feeling during certain moments in the story.
Struggle has not stopped. It didn't begin in the fifties and end in the seventies. The movement sense of struggle which has always visited struggle. It says at the anti slavery movement, Marcus god Is movement, the Black power movement, civil rights movement. They come and they go, but the struggle is continuous until a loss from the law has righted the wrong that has come about.
Even though a Maam Jamil had given so much, risked so much, and his external struggle to improve the lives of black people, I don't think he believed that Allah had righted America's wrongs, And as the twentieth century came to an end, he seemed to be struggling with what he had wrought.
In the West End.
I spoke to a man Pleman Elemine about this period in a Maam Jamial's life. You might remember a man Pleman from much earlier in the story. He's one of the most prominent elders in Atlanta's African American Muslim community in the late nineties. A man Pleman was a leader of a massed across the city from the West End, and he saw what he thought to be informant in AmAm Jamil's mastered.
I think even he would have been surprised or he was surprised to see that people were close to him were working for the government.
Grappling with suspicions about informants must have been exhausting for a Mam Jamial. He was trying to create a welcoming community where anyone could join the mass jed all while law enforcement was working to get people close to him. That kind of pressure takes a serious toll. History had already shown that when a Ma'am Jamil's mother and sister Karama's parents succumbed amid FBI harassment in the early seventies, and there wasn't just surveillance coming down on a ma'am Jamil.
Remember Lowndes County in the Black belt of Alabama, where a Maam Jamil went after the shootout. He had worked there back in the sixties and then in the nineties he helped establish a small Muslim community in the area. By nineteen ninety nine, a Maam Jamil had decided he wanted the Western mass Jed and the Muslim community around it to leave Atlanta and move to Lowndes County.
He presented it to his community, Hey, we're going to move to Alabama, and they said no.
So he was.
Upset about that as well. Yeah, because they had never said no to.
Anything for it.
But they say, hey, man, we're not going to the country. Man, we established here and we got the family, got business, got this whatever. And they had had several meetings and discussions about that, and he's not telling me that. I'm getting it from some of his members and everything. Hey we can't go to the country. We're at lanterns, you know. And so he was. He was upset about that.
I wondered if he wanted to go there and start over because the West End had become so infiltrated.
Well, it could be, but.
I really think that, you know, the whole idea is based in the Nation of Islam, that's based in Sunni Islam. Is let's go back and if we're not going back to Africa, let's go back somewhere. You know, in Nati Islam. They lied to Bahama give US six six southern states, and we'll do our own things.
That was part of that.
So all that's still in all of this African American Islam, it's still there somewhere.
Let us get our separate land.
And we'll do our own thing, you know. So I'm thinking he's just saying, hey, we're gonna try it again.
Start off new, start off fresh, with.
Just us on acres of land. But nobody wanted to go.
And then also in nineteen ninety nine, and Ma'am Jamil was arrested in copp County, a suburban county north of Atlanta. This was the arrest that ultimately led to the warrant the Deputy Kenchin and Deputy English had with them when they came to arrest to ma'am Jamil.
In March of two thousand, a.
Ma'am Jamil was driving a Ford Explorer with a dealer license plate. A local police officer pulled him over. The officers had and when he asked for license and registration, a Maam Jamil's hands were shaking. The paperwork didn't check out. The SUV had been reported stolen, according to the officer's testimony in court, he ordered a Maam Jamil get out of the vehicle and as he patted him down, he
found his wallet. Inside there was a police badge. The officer asked to ma'am Jamil if he was a police officer, and he said yes. It was an honorary bad from
the mayor of Whitehall in Lowndes County. Years later, these charges would be thrown out as unconstitutional, but the officer arrested to Mamajamil for operating a stolen vehicle and impersonating a police officer, and man Pleman said that the second charge for impersonating a police officer, that was the one that really bothered at Maam Jamil.
That's the last thing he would want to be doing is playing like he's a policeman. And so I could see him try to let this police officer know that he's not just anybody, not just a African American who you stopped and giving a ticket, that he's somebody.
You know, it was out there that a man Jamil was pretending to be something he despised, and even with all his authority in the West End, he was powerless to do anything about it, powerless to shift the narrative, restore his reputation. I'm pretty powerless before any judge he would face in a court of law. He's somebody, a man, Pleman said, but only to a small number of people who don't have much political power in the first place.
A couple occasions that I saw him in the midst of those things, he was very irritable and upset about what was going on. And I had never seen him like that before. You know, it was always hey, what can I do for you? What do you need anything? You know, there's always his demeanor that he was ready
to ass issue whatever you needed or whatever. But in the bits of that, it was like, yeah, just complaining about these people, these people, man, And you know, how can anybody think that I want to be a police be a policeman? You know, that's that's the last thing, my man. I'm trying to show somebody I'm a police officer, impersonate a police office.
I heard from other people that a Man Jamil's demeanor changed during this time. People from the West End who I trust but who didn't want to say it on the record. They told me that they believe that man Jamil shot those deputies, that something in him seemed to have caught fire and then the Friday jun my services at the mask. Yet he kept saying I'm gonna.
Get me one.
I'm gonna get me one, and no one knew what he.
Was talking about.
After Damien Gordon, the man who owned the house next to the mash Jed in the West End, told Johnny and me that he saw two people get into the car and drive off. After the shootout, we went to speak with Abdusa mat Jahad, the seventeen year old who was inside the mass Jed that night. Abdusa Matt told me that a lawyer came and questioned him in the months after the shootout, but that since then I was the first person in all these years to really ask.
Him about it.
So, yeah, what we want to do is go over that night, just kind of slow it down from the beginning, figure out.
What you remember, what you really remember, so.
You are in the mask shit, Yeah, in the mass hit.
After they had to been not the because no other prayer.
Was going on after that.
After the Easterer prayer, the last prayer of the day about remembers being tutored by a math.
Teacher who lived in the community.
When they heard gunfire outside the tutor jumped on top of a Dusamat. They laid motionless on the floor. I tried to reach that tutor, but I didn't hear back from him. When the gunfire stopped, a different man, not the tutor, he dragged Abdussimat into a closet and told him to stay there. That man his Muslim name was Nigell, and Abdusamat told us that Nigell was carrying a gun.
And it wasn't like a comer right, It was a Stifer type rifle. It was a rifle that who were used to kill a deer or snipe some kind of hot power, hot collar of a rifle.
While Abdusamat was still in the closet, he heard what he thought was Nigeal leaving the mast Git. Then there was more gunfire outside, and when it stopped, Abdusamat left the closet and looked out the window. He saw Nigel standing near Deputy English, who was lying in the field next to the mass Jit bleeding. Abdusamat heard Nigel yell out, hey, there's one over here, like he was.
Letting someone know. The English was lying there.
Abduso Ount isn't clear who Nigel was speaking to. It could have been a man Jimial or other people from the mass Jed, or it could have been someone in law enforcement who was not one of the deputies but had already arrived at the scene. But if Nigel was yelling out to some cops, that would seemed to be a death wish.
He's standing there holding a high powered rifle. They didn't even shoot him. Les stick them up.
That is very silly, you get saying if you ran if a shooting that happened, you ran out with a rifle, you would be shot. That's his way.
It was black. Yeah.
After Abdusamat heard Nigell call out, he saw him come back into the mass Jed and Nigel put his gun away somewhere in the closet. Abdusamat thinks then Nigell was gone.
That was it. He disappeared. He never came back in the mask ged he but before that he was a regular.
Before that, he was a regular. He had just came to the mean. Nobody really know much about him.
Nigel had shown up in the Western community about three years earlier. He took care of the mass Jed grounds didn't have another job at the time, and he was living in the masjed.
That wasn't so unusual.
Men would sometimes stay there when they were passing through or temporarily homeless. Abdusamat never got any weird vibe from Nigell, but he said there was speculation in the community that he was an informant. Abdusamat's dad, who's now deceased, he was among those skeptical of Nigell.
Assuming Nigell was.
There and he had a rifle with him, what did he do after he put Abdusamat in the closet and exited the masjed. It's possible, maybe even likely, that he fired at day deputies. The kind of rifle that Abdusamat described Nigel as carrying. It could have shot two two three caliber rounds like the dozens found at the scene. If Nigel did fire at the deputies, it could mean that a maam Jimial wasn't responsible for the injury to English or the death of Kenchin. A ma'am Jimil's lawyers
called Nigel to testify at the trial. He said he was inside the mast jed with abdusamat At the time of the shooting, and they laid on the floor until all the shooting stopped. Then Nigil said he looked out the window and saw English lying in the grass. While Abdusamat was still inside. Nigil walked out and he ran into two officers who had already arrived at the scene. The officers asked if anybody was inside. During his testimony, Nigel admitted he'd lie to the officers and said no
because he was trying to protect Abdusamat. The officers turned around and didn't enter the mass jed. The story seems odd to me. If Nigel was indeed an FBI informant, the defense in the prosecution might not know. I read through a congressional report about the FBI's use of murderers as informants, which came out around the time of a
mam Jamil's trial. It said that federal agents had allowed informants to perjure themselves, and that they kept evidence from defendants and prosecutors and what the committee called to quote ends justify the means approach. What if Nigel was both a shooter and an informant, If in the dark of night he came out firing before he could make out
what was really happening. How totally crazy would that be that an informant was potentially involved in the murder of a local law enforcement officer, that the end justify the means. Pursuit of a mamm Jamil was so intense that law enforcement ended up hurting itself in its efforts to get him. These are the things we were thinking about when we started looking for Nigeal. I felt excited, to be honest about the prospect of getting to the bottom of the
West End and the FBI secrets. Going under an underpass here it looks like a decent neighborhood, at.
Least from where we were coming from. There is a little bit of a transition happening.
Nigell is still alive, and my producer Johnny and I found an address for his wife in Augusta, Georgia, a few hours outside Atlanta. And Gill doesn't appear to be practicing the slam anymore. And he's going by his giving name again, George Wilson. I'll call him that from here on out. Our plan was to knock on the door and ask George Wilson what he remembers from the night of the shootout.
This was not the safest door.
Knock I've ever done. If this guy had shot a cop and kept it secret for twenty years, I didn't exactly expect him to invite me in for coffee, but I hoped he was old, settled into domestic life, a changed man. That's how he looted his Facebook photo, happy and fat. I thought maybe we'd get an eruption of self.
Pity or shame, but not rage.
When Johnny and I pulled up to the address, it looked like army barracks at first, but it was actually part of a public housing complex. The apartments were spread out over a couple of blocks, one story side by side, duplexes, red brick with black shingles. We parked in a lot on the backside of the apartment we thought belonged to Wilson's wife. There was laundry out on the line, a good sign someone was home.
I'm going to approach with my friendliest face.
We got out and walked around to the front, but after getting a good look at the place, decided it was too risky to even knock.
So we're back in the car now. There was a sign on the door.
Handwritten on a piece of notebook paper that said this means you don't knock, don't approach, no exceptions.
Smile your own camera, which is pretty clear, a pretty clear sign that they don't want to see any strangers. It makes me.
Wonder, I mean, who puts the signlight that on the door.
We'd driven too far to turn right back around. Someone had to come out sooner or later to get that laundry drying on the line, So a stakeout seemed like the best move. But we needed to grab a bite to eat if we were going to sit in the car for hours. After a quick lunch, When we pulled back up on the complex, a woman was standing in the front yard. I whipped the car around like iced tea in a Law and Order episode or something. We jumped out. Johnny kept his microphone in his bag, definitely
didn't want to freak anybody out. He recorded what happened next on his phone, so the quality is barely good enough to play for you. Oh, I'm so sorry, I've met I don't know how to have. The woman was George Wilson's wife. Her name is Darlene goes By d. I told her rather nervously that we were looking for George Wilson, who might know some things about a murder that happened in Atlanta twenty years ago. She asked me
to repeat myself, and I got the words out again. Then, without hearing anything more, she said, he's probably the one who did it. Turn turned out Wilson wasn't happy in fat and enjoying old age.
She said he was in jail. He had been charged with murder.
One day in the winter of twenty twenty one, Dee and her daughter, Wilson's stepdaughter, were watching television in their home in Augusta. Wilson got upset with his wife or for something he'd accused her of, and one of the stepdaughters to leave the apartment, but Dee's daughters stuck around to protect her.
Mom got between the two.
Actually, things got heeded, and he stabbed her in the chest, killed her right there, a few feet from where we were standing. She died in Dee's arms. D told us that Wilson first lived in New York. He was sent to Atlanta for prison, and he stuck around when he got out. That must have been when he joined the Master d d didn't know anything about Wilson being an informant, but she said he did have aliases and other addresses
and that he was paranoid. Asked because she was talking to and if she was working for someone and woke up in the middle of the night saying, I didn't do it. I didn't bother that lady. I didn't touch her.
Okay, okay, what we're going to let you go?
Okay, thank you anything. D spoke to us for about twenty minutes before we got back into the car. I'm happy that we didn't knock on the door and he was there, Like this dude seems kind of scary.
Like clearly there's clearly clearly he's being haunted by things. But if he was.
Talking to the FBI, what a volatile person for them to be involved with. I mean, it's the same as it's the same as Shahid, What a volatile person for them.
To be involved with?
How are you feeling? I feel bad for that woman, you know, Like that seemed awful. Like if we just keep going on this, are we just going to get to darker and darker shit.
Or what I mean?
This is dark, This is a dark place. This is the darkest that it's found like, I don't think that was in our list of things that are possibly going on no place. I mean, she was really sweet given everything.
Yeah wow.
I wrote to George Wilson of the jail where he's being held in Augusta, but I never heard anything back since we met his wife that day. Wilson has been convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Here's what I believe happened. The night of the shootout in the West End. The deputies pulled up in front of Ma'am Jimiale's black Mercedes, and after a brief exchange of works, he pulled a semi automatic rifle from under his throb
and letter rip. I know y'all going to get me sooner or later, but I'm going to get me one. You can believe that. That's what a Mam Jamil used to say to cops in his days.
Is rat Brown.
He wrote it in his autobiography, and those were the words folks in the Weston mass she had heard him saying in the days before the shootout, I'm going to get me one. I believe that's how Mam Jamil thought he was going to go out defending himself in his community in a blaze of martyrdom, that he'd rather die than go back to prison, that he'd given this messed up world everything he had. I believe when Mam Jamil shot those deputies, but by some miracle he survived. The
whole neighborhood could hear the gunfire. All the brothers who went to the mass died, who ran toward action, not away from it. Someone who wanted to protect the AmAm appeared and started shooting two. This was the man that witnessed. Damian Gordon saw from across the way the second person to get in the black Mercedes.
Whoever it was loved.
The Ymam and the AmAm loved him. They drove off together, keeping what happened secret until this day. Meanwhile, before or after they left, George Wilson Nigel at the time he came out of the mass yard and started shooting two. In the months I've been working on this podcast, I've been in touch with AmAm Jamil's wife Karima, his son Kyrie, and his leapellate lawyer. None of them agreed to an interview. We sent each of them a list of questions, but they didn't send us answers. When I wrote to a
Mam Jamil in prison, I never heard back. As far as we know, the Fulton County Conviction Integrity Unit is still reviewing the prosecution of a Mam Jamil, at least technically. But the DA's office didn't respond to our questions either, and its silence would seem to suggest that it hasn't
found enough evidence to overturn the conviction. I know a lot of AmAm Jamil supporters will never believe he did it, and I hear their arguments that Mam Jamil didn't have gray eyes and a Mama Jamil hadn't been shot like Deputy English said he had. There's not a reliable scientific link between the bullets that killed Deputy Kenchin and the guns found near Maam Jamil in the woods in Alabama.
There are circumstantial evidence that points to a potential conspiracy to plant the weapons in the woods, including the lack of fingerprints. Do I think I Maam Jamil got a fair trial. I don't know, Probably not, but I can't accept the innocent's arguments. We couldn't corroborate Otis Jackson's story. He confessed under oath, but he's also recancet his confession multiple times, and he's apparently told a version of events
that's implausible. Then there's the fact that a Maam Jamil's Mercedes was shot up and found close to where he was hiding out in Alabama, and the stuff that folks heard him saying in the mass It it echoed an old willingness to confront cops with violence. Some people in the West End, people who were in the neighborhood that night, they know what happened, but for lots of reasons, they've kept quiet. I say all this with a prayer in mind that a Maam Jamil used to recite when he
addressed the public. I ask a lot to guide my heart and guide my tongue. I seek refuge in a law from misleading and being misled, from betraying and being betrayed into ignorance by others. To me, it's a prayer that says I reached these conclusions humbly, and I'll add for Muslims in Atlanta especially, they're my conclusions, not my family. One of the reasons I don't feel comfortable keeping all of this inside is that this story has shown me
how things tend to ripple. The violence of the shootout didn't stop that night. George Wilson, the guy whose house we staked out in Augusta, it apparently stuck with him for the last twenty years, along with the other shit like Rodham I bet, and a few years ago he exploded, hurting people miles away from the mast did in the
West End. After investigating all the death and destruction, I was starting to feel ripples from the violence myself, just thinking about this stuff all the time, feeling it in a way that people around me could feel.
I had had enough.
And I needed to find a way to make it all stop. During the long stretch it took to finish this story, I became a father. A baby came into this world, fell right into my hands. But amid all the joy and learning and growth, dark thoughts would knock around my head, images of people at their worst. I was trying to get to know this new human being, trying to make him smile or to just be attentive, and George Wilson or the serial killer Shahid ab du Ahman would pop into my head.
It was not a good feeling.
A new life, in contrast to some of the lives that have come across in this story, you can't help but wonder where did people go so wrong?
And how do you steer a kid clear of that?
We know a man Jimil believed in fate, that maybe his death to me was to be sacrificed in the face of deep social problems. Some would have us believe that a man Jamial is simply evil. Others, maybe the most nihilist of all, would say, we simply live in an ugly world without meaning, deal with it. But none of those views are acceptable to me. When I was younger, after I followed my family into the faith of Islam, I realized that I'm totally free to reimagine what I
believe in to find my own path. Ever since then, journalism has been one of the main ways I've explored the world how I figured out what's what. But after going as far as I could with journalism in this story, with investigative reporting, I began to look for deeper meaning. I went back to a wise man, a man Pleman Elmine, the peer of a Man Jamil, Islamic elder in Atlanta. I asked him a question that I could hardly articulate.
It felt so abstract do we really have control over our own destiny in the face of what can seem like insurmountable forces operating in the world around us. I was thinking about to what extent racial oppression in America was responsible for the creation of a man Jamil and of h Rap Brown, Like, does a person coming into this world who to test those things? Can they really thrive?
Majority of Muslims, you know, understand or believe that. And it's it's correct in the sense that the will of a law overrides everything.
Yeah.
I mean, the thing that comes off of Muslim's tongue more than anything.
Else is in shadlah.
And in the verse in Christ said, don't say you will do anything without saying and inshall lah, because you know the only way you're gonna be able to do anything a lit has permitted.
Okay, But what.
They overlook is that Allah has willed that we have choice, and Allah has wield that we get the benefits or the punishments for our choices. That's that's the will of a law.
A man pleman was saying that life is a series of choices, and every choice changes our character, or is a man cleman put it, Every choice moves our soul closer to good or evil. We're in a constant state of becoming and our destiny is not fixed, he said, like some Muslims would have us believe, But it's tied to our character, to our soul. The choices we make determine what happens to us in this life. Me you
a man jamil anyone. A man Pleaman didn't want to talk about the details of the shootout in the West End. We agreed to that before our interview, but he did talk about justice.
Our deeds catch up with us. And sometimes people are pretty miserable, but they are good people and they've done good. Pretty soon the good deeds will catch up with them and they'll be all right. But the same things. Sometimes people have corrupt deeds and it might be might look like everything's going good with him, but sooner or later those deeds will track them down.
I could agree with a lot of what a Man Pleman said, like I could relate on an instinctual level, independent of theology or doctrine.
We have power over our.
Lives, and in essence, what goes around comes around. Lots of different life philosophies will tell you that, But that still left me wanting. I didn't come all this way to say that a man who went through things that I never have, who was already being punished for his actions, that he should have made better choices. I don't think I was called to this story to leave it there. I was still stuck on whether human beings could ever
break these cycles of violence, of American violence. How are we supposed to stop these downward spirals, especially oppressed people who are under attack. I believe that beneath everything else, a man Jamil Hrap Brown. The man's intention was to look out for his people, for his family and community. Now that I'm a father, I can relate to that
more than ever. So I kept searching. I found a clue in an unexpected place, Rodney Brown's book, Rodney the former drug dealer in the Way, who knew Shahid ab du Rahman and many of the people Shahid killed. I went back to Rodney to talk to him. You have this line in your book that you say a lot of times, thoughts become things.
Thoughts become things.
What do you mean by that?
Your thoughts control everything around you. You're gonna get what you're looking for, That's what you're thinking.
About Rodney, over the course of his life, became aware of power he has to control the world around him with stories. If a man, Jermiale was ultimately battered and knocked by the stories people told. Rodney learned something different. But like when he was young, Rodney used to admire this drug dealer named Willie, how cool he looked the cars he drove.
I just used to imagine myself doing the same thing, and one day it came true, you know what I mean. So I used to just picture it and dream about it, picture it and dream about it, and bam, when I should have been pitched myself. Being a lawyer or a doctor, A kind of got a scroll power with bringing stuff to life.
I do.
I'm gifted like that.
But it took Rodney a long time to realize what all that dreaming was doing. In prison, he started writing his book about his life, about the violence he had experienced and the people close to him who he had lost. A psychologist had recommended it, said it would help him to get everything out. It did help, and he's planning to write another one. He's also working on a documentary about the West End murders. Rodney doesn't have a perfect life.
He doesn't have it easy, nor has he been able to totally set aside the shit that used to haunt him like he still wonders whether he should have killed Shahid ab du Rahman in the nineties, whether that would have saved the lives of many of us friends in the life of Deputy Kinchen too. But then he rains that in tries to imagine something different. What's what's Rodney doing in five years?
Maybe I can help some kids and tell them some of the stuff that you know to keep them going the same road. And I done went man, because a lot of them an' gonna end up like this. Look, look I'm into my homeboys. Ain't gonna be sitting behind on this. They said it's old with they already did, and but a few people gonna make it out.
And then Rodney turned things around on me. Maybe he could tell that I had come to him for help trying to get an answer.
I want to know, what's what's your purpose?
Y'all?
Ever found what's your purpose gonna be?
About this?
You've heard me say often in the Mythology surrounding a Man Jamil that when people believe in something, whether fact or fiction. It has a way of becoming real. I think there's a broader truth there too. It's a scary one,
but there's also a freedom, a freedom to imagine. I imagine that Deputy Ricky Kenchin and all the folks who lost their lives in the West End, that they're still with us, quite present, but just off to the side, watching the rest of our lives unfold like some kind of drama, a passion play, and we're involved in a much larger production as writers, actors, and directors about the consequences, the merits, the usefulness of violence and Hubert Gerald Brown
rap and ma'am gimil He drew a tough role in this show, a countercultural hero the likes of which we seldom see, who reveals American violent for what it really is, and through his own life, shows how wrong you can go.
The Legend of a Man Jamil is a decade long drama.
While the closing curtain, every character, me and you too, realizes we are way bigger than we think we are. We have more power than we think to change history.
The folks who lost.
Their lives are waiting for us in the wings, waiting for us to solve this problem. Just like a man Jamil when he leaves this earth, We'll be rooting for us from the audience.
What's a stronger.
Weapon than an fourteen semi automatic rifle or a firebomb?
Storytelling the legend of a Maam Jamil.
Because shared stories change what we care about, what we're willing to tolerate. Rodney said, it thoughts become things. There are stories other than this one coming. I'm told AmAm Jamil's son, Kyrie, is working on a documentary. A scholar has said he's working on a biography about the man. Rodney has this stuff and the works too investigative reporters, true crime podcasters. There's way more to learn about the
FBI's role in all of this. But this story that I've just told, I'm holding on to it, and if my son ever asks me about violence in America, it's the story I'm going to share with him. Radical is a production of Campside Media, Tenderfoot TV, and iHeart Podcasts.
Radical was reported.
And written by Johnny Coaffman and me Mossy Secret. Johnny Coffin is our senior producer. Sheba Joseph is our associate producer. Editing by Eric Benson, Johnny Coffin, Emily Martinez and Matt Cher. Fact checking by Sophie Hurwitz, Kaylin Lynch and Layla Dos. Original music by Kyle Murdoch and by Ray Murray of Organized Noise. Sound design and mixing by Kevin Seaman. Recording
by Ewan Leed Tremwen and Sheba Joseph. Campside Media's operations team is Doug Slaywan, Ashley Warren, Elijah Papes, Destiny Dingle, and Sabina Merra. The executive producers at Campside Media are Josh Dean Vanessa, Gregoriatis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Cher. For Tenderfoot TV, executive producers.
Are Donald all Right and Payne Lindsay. The executive producers at.
iHeart Podcasts are Matt Frederick and Alex Williams, with additional support from Trevor Young. Special thanks to the Georgia First Amendment Foundation. Emily Roberts, Christy Schwartz, Wendell Paris, Charles Rambo, Deb Golden, Mark Picard, Aquille Secret, Cina Nicholson and Michael Jerman.