By 10:30 on that summer night in 1972, the party at the remote woodland campsite had run out of steam. Beer cans littered the ground. Garbage bins overflowed with discarded food, greasy paper plates, plastic cups, and other refuse. Every now and then, the faint stench of overused pit toilets drifted across the clearing. About half of the twenty-five men and women staying there had gone to bed, but those awake were in good spirits. They were young, ranging in age from sixteen to twenty-six, and all but one came from central Florida, around Clearwater.
Two days of hard driving had brought them here, to Yancey County, deep in the North Carolina mountains, a place so different from their hometown that it seemed like another planet. Surrounded by some the highest peaks in eastern America, their seven vehicles (six cars and a Volkswagen van) sat parked in a grassy field, flanked on all sides by tall hemlocks, yellow birches, large leafy oaks, and giant poplars. The South Toe River, a clear, cold, boulder-strewn stream, flowed right past their campsite. Local people called the place Briar Bottom.
It was the week of July 4, pinnacle of the tourist season, and it had been tough to find a place to stay. Fortunately, they made a new friend at a local store who told them about Briar Bottom and agreed to meet them there.
The Florida kids had to drive their vehicles across a shallow ford in the river, unload in the field, and carry their gear into the woods to make camp. Even then, they were not alone. Several families, a couple of college students, and three men from Orlando, Florida, had already parked vans in the meadow or set up tents among the trees along the river. But the place was beautiful, everything they had hoped for when they left Clearwater, and they settled in for the night.
That afternoon, three of the guys drove to Asheville and returned with seventeen six-packs of Budweiser and two bottles of Jack Daniels. They already had a stash of marijuana and some mild hallucinogens, all brought from home in anticipation of the week’s activities. Once the alcohol arrived, someone set a couple of speakers atop the van and cranked up a tape player.
Out in the open field, kids danced and flirted, shouting or singing along when a favorite tune came up on the tape deck. In a group that large, people tended to hang around those they knew best, congregating in small clusters, talking, laughing, smoking, drinking—just getting off on the beer, the dope, the mountains, and each other.
Stanley Altland, the twenty-year-old who had organized the trip, enjoyed a good outdoor party as much as anyone, but he took it easy that night. He drank a couple of beers and had a hit or two off the joints his friends passed around, but mostly he just wandered about, chatting with the others. He ate supper with David Satterwhite, the boy from North Carolina who had guided them to Briar Bottom. An experienced camper, Satterwhite had his own van, a motorcycle, and a big white dog. Stan also spent time with Kim Burns, a tall, attractive eighteen-year-old woman from Clearwater he had begun dating a few weeks earlier. Altland had shoulder-length blonde hair, a scruffy beard, and wore round, wire-rimmed glasses to correct severe astigmatism. He frequently dressed in bib overalls and old work boots purchased from secondhand stores. Most of the Clearwater kids thought he was the walking definition of “cool,” a much-coveted youth descriptor in 1972. For Stan, being cool was more than a matter of style. He believed that young people like him—those others derisively labeled “hippies”—were pointing the way to a better world. Back home, he and his business partners had recently opened Clearwater’s first health-food store. Stan hoped it would one day become a “true community center” and a vehicle for “cultural, economic, and political change.” He invited local artists, craftspeople, and filmmakers to display their work there. His friends loved the place.
An hour or so after dark, Altland walked over to the VW van to talk with his pal Phil Lokey. Phil also wore wire-rimmed “hippie” glasses and had a beard and long dark hair that he often pulled back behind his ears. He and Stan had once been roommates, but several months earlier, Phil had moved to the Bungalows, a string of rundown, two-bedroom dwellings on the outskirts of Clearwater. The Bungalows had a well-deserved reputation as a hippie hangout, where the tenants threw raucous weekend parties. Several other residents had joined the outing to North Carolina, including Kevin Shea, Max Johnson, Ron Olson, and Gary Graham, four more twenty-year olds with well-worn clothes and shoulder-length locks. Eighteen-year-old Sue Cello, who described herself as “a Catholic school girl with a mouth to match,” had also come along.
Over the course of the evening, Kevin Shea partook liberally of the beer and pot, found a stick, and announced that he was off to the woods to hunt rattlesnakes. Max Johnson and several women left for a night hike up a nearby hillside, carrying a bottle of Jack Daniels. Sue Cello joined a few others around a small campfire at the edge of the woods. Ron Olson and Gary Graham headed for their tents.
It was that kind of mellow, do-your-own-thing night. Most of those present thought it better to get too stoned than too drunk, much cooler to toke up with friends around the fire than end up puking in the bushes or sitting alone in a car sorting out the kaleidoscopic images brought on by heavier drugs.
But if hard drinking or stoned snake-hunting happened to be your trip, no one would stand in your way. On July 3, 1972, the prevailing party ethic—to the extent that one existed—might well be summed up by that famous line from Bob Dylan, “Either be groovy or leave, man.”
By 11:00, temperatures dipped into the low sixties at Briar Bottom, sending more campers to their tents and sleeping bags. Heavy dew covered the ground, and anyone who strayed from the fire could see their breath in the thick, humid air. Filmy clouds drifted across a half moon. Stan Altland left the van and found a place to stretch out under a small tree. Kim Burns decided to join him, at least for a while if the bugs were not too bad. Phil Lokey walked out to his car to retrieve his bedroll.
Eight or nine others lingered around the campfire. They had turned off the music and were talking quietly, sipping beer and smoking cigarettes. Sue Cello was still there, along with David Satterwhite and his dog. Donald Porter, whom everyone called “Poonie,” was at the firepit, too. A twenty-six-year-old Vietnam veteran recently turned beach hippie, he was a regular at Bungalow parties. With his long hair pulled into a ponytail that stretched well down his back, Poonie was the likeable “old man” of the group.
Just as a few of those at the fire began to doze, two of the girls glimpsed some flickering lights on the other side of the river, near the ford. Headlights from vehicles on the access road? Maybe some late-arriving campers looking for a site. They would have fun negotiating that rocky streambed in the dark. Max Johnson was too sleepy to care. Returning from the night hike, he spread a sleeping bag on the ground and crawled inside. Somewhere nearby, Kevin Shea, still in search of venomous reptiles, howled like a wolf.
As Phil Lokey walked back from his car, he saw two pickup trucks with their headlights off drive quickly across the river and pull into the parking area. Seven men jumped out. Even in the dark, Phil could tell they were heavily armed. They moved through the trees “like a SWAT team,” and he heard them racking shotguns as they advanced on the Clearwater campsite. “What the hell . . . ?” For a second, Lokey thought maybe he should make a break for it, just run as fast as he could into the forest. But he could not make himself move.
At the campfire, Satterwhite’s dog growled, waking its sleeping owner. Without warning, five of the armed men came out of the woods and surrounded the group at the firepit. Caught completely off guard, the half-inebriated, half-stoned, drowsy campers tried to make sense of the abrupt turn of events. It seemed crazy, dreamlike, surreal. The men looked to be in their thirties or forties, with short hair, dressed mostly in civilian clothes. One, who wore yellowish-brown attire, appeared to be in charge. He mumbled something like “What’s the problem?” or “Do you have a problem?” or “What’s the trouble here?” No one could be sure exactly what he said. But one thing was certain. The men all had pistols and three of them wielded short-barreled, 12-gauge shotguns.
Without identifying themselves, the armed visitors fanned out around the camp, turning on flashlights, beating on tents, kicking at those asleep on the ground, and poking them with nightsticks. The good vibes from earlier in the evening instantly evaporated. Max Johnson and several others crawled from their sleeping bags, weak-kneed, shaking uncontrollably from the latenight chill and sudden anxiety. As one of the group later recalled, “We were scared to death. We didn’t know what was happening, but we figured some kind of bad shit was about to go down.”
Thirty yards away, the other two men, both carrying sawed-off shotguns, confronted Phil Lokey. They said nothing, but as Phil noted, “you didn’t have to be a genius to tell they were cops of some sort, and we were about to get busted.” He asked the man closest to him, “Sir, could you please tell me what’s going on?” He grabbed Lokey, slapped handcuffs on him, and said, “I’ll tell you exactly what’s going on.” Then he stuck his shotgun in Phil’s back and marched him toward the campfire.
Unbeknownst to the campers, the men rousting them were—at least for that night—duly sworn agents of the Yancey County Sheriff’s Department. Sheriff Kermit Banks, the man in buff-colored clothing, led the raiding party. The posse included his brother Robert, four deputies, and a town cop from Burnsville, the Yancey County seat. On the sheriff’s orders, the lawmen began rounding up all the campers so that they could be searched. Robert Banks shoved Poonie Porter against a big tree. Two deputies found Kevin Shea at the edge of the woods. They took his snake stick and made him stand next to Porter.
A moment later, someone kicked Kim Burns “in the back of the neck.” She and Stan Altland scrambled to their feet to see what was going on. Stan put his hands in the air and urged everyone else to do likewise, imploring his friends to “just be cool” and “do what they say.” Then he appealed to the cops, “Hey, man, we’re harmless. We don’t want to hassle with you.” It made no difference. Using nightsticks to keep the campers in line, the lawmen began frisking both men and women, collecting pocketknives, key chains, even hairpins. They asked repeatedly about drugs but found nothing except a bottle of prescription medicine one of the women had in her pocket. They took it.
Waiting to be searched, Phil Lokey glanced back toward the fire and saw Sheriff Banks in a heated argument with David Satterwhite. From twenty feet away, Lokey could not hear what either man said, but he could tell that “Banks was really pissed off, mad as hell.” Apparently when the sheriff asked Satterwhite to get up so he could be searched, the young man did not move. Instead, he insisted that he had done nothing wrong and added, “My dad and I camp here all the time.” According to Satterwhite, Banks told him to “put that God damned dog up” or he would shoot it. The young man tethered the canine to a tree and pointedly asked, “Don’t I have any rights?” Banks allegedly responded “No, you don’t” and turned his shotgun on the youth. Satterwhite then asked the sheriff “to please put that gun away” and twice pushed the weapon aside.
Phil Lokey strained to get a better view. He could not believe that this skinny North Carolina teenager would argue with an angry sheriff holding a loaded 12-gauge. At that point a deputy struck Phil with a shotgun and told him to “stand up straight.” The same officer frisked Stan Altland and Kim Burns and sent them over to stand near Poonie Porter and Kevin Shea.
What happened next would be disputed for years, but according to the eyewitnesses from Clearwater, Sheriff Banks stuck his shotgun in Satterwhite’s stomach and told him to get up against the big tree. Perhaps thinking the young man did not move fast enough, the sheriff reportedly raised the gun and, with a slashing motion, struck Satterwhite on his left arm with the butt of the weapon. The 12-gauge went off with a deafening roar, echoing across the quiet campground like a thunderclap.
As the campers tell it, Stan Altland was standing eighteen feet away when nine pellets of double-aught buckshot, each as large as a .32 caliber bullet and capable of penetrating a car door, slammed into the left side of his chest and neck. The impact lifted him off his feet and sent him flying backward. Unable to regain his footing, he gasped and stammered “Oh my God! Somebody help me!” as he slumped to the ground. Two women near Stan felt his blood splatter onto their clothes. Others screamed, “Jesus! No! No! No!” as Poonie Porter and Max Johnson rushed to Altland’s side. Porter tore off Stan’s shirt, wadded it into a ball, and held it tightly on the wound, trying to stanch the blood now streaming onto the ground.
Poonie had seen plenty of gunshot victims in Vietnam, and he could tell Stan was badly hurt. About “a third of his neck and chest had been blown away.” Stan tried to speak, but only gurgled and coughed up blood. Kim Burns dropped to one knee and held his hand. Sue Cello stood nearby, screaming and crying. Poonie put his head to Altland’s chest and listened for a heartbeat. He heard nothing. Stan’s eyes flickered briefly and became fixed in his head. Three bystanders saw smoke rising from the sheriff’s gun as he pulled another shell from his pocket and reloaded his weapon.
Apparently in shock, the deputies all stared in silence as Altland’s blood pooled on a patch of dark-green moss beneath the tree. As Lokey described it, “The cops just flipped out. They had no idea what to do.” After what seemed like three minutes, the sheriff told Poonie, Max, and the others to get away from Stan. Banks instructed all the campers to sit down, telling them that Altland would get no help until they did. Still handcuffed, Phil thought, “They were going to shoot us all and bury us in the woods. I thought I was dead.” He fought off a wave of nausea and felt faint, but as he started to pass out, he fell against another camper and never lost consciousness. Instead, he watched helplessly as Stan lay on the ground for what seemed like another fifteen minutes, blood seeping ever more slowly from what was left of his chest and neck.
Finally, a Forest Service ranger who had been waiting near the river ford drove up in one of the pickup trucks. Banks and three of his men wrapped Altland in a blanket, dragged him across the ground, and dumped him into the truck bed. The remaining campers, who just minutes earlier had been asleep or relaxing around the fire, looked on in horror as the vehicle rolled away with their friend. Sue Cello could no longer contain herself. Red-faced, wiping away tears, she screamed at the lawmen, “You shot him! Fuck you, you bastards!” Kim Burns and several others just wailed in utter despair. Poonie Porter later called it “the sickest scene I’ve seen since Vietnam.” No one who witnessed it would ever be the same.
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