A Dragon Comes As Well, (Part I)

"Forsooth a dragon cometh too; a kind of wisdom to tally true," two teenage boys in Wisconsin wrote onto a page of song lyrics in 1992, unaware the words sounded like several verses of Book of Isaiah, Chapter 34 in the King James Version. Eighteen years later, Rolling 30's Harlem Crips gang member Darius Gant, with a dragon tattoo on his arm, shot 8 bullets into an innocent bystander near downtown Los Angeles to exact a vendetta as part of a gang war with neighboring gang "the fruit town brims." One of those two Wisconsin kids, David Bilskemper, later (and right before his name change to last name Black) became a jury member on Mr. Gant's attempted murder case- a trial involving an epic, malicious showdown of language between two startlingly different female attorneys and witness testimony from a shooting victim who almost certainly should have died. This is Mr. Black's story, a true crime personal memoir book rivaling "Blood Will Out" by Walter Kirn and in a similar stylistic genre as "My Story" by Elizabeth Smart with Chris Stewart. Part 1 of this memoir series documents the time up to the end of Gant's trial. and a few weeks thereafter. Part 2, which is to come, will document a whole other case that resulted from the Gant case. Chapter titles are phrases and lines borrowed from Mr. Black's poems prior to the case, such as Chapter Four "As Explained by Leprechaun Bob" and Chapter Six "Blast-Flattened Monsters Even the Score." Chapter Five concerns the extensive theological concerns, analogies, and implications surrounding the case replete with the writer's reflections on what had happened.