Photography by Whitney Curtis
Frank Bowlin had started calling his grandson Dusty when the boy was 4 and rode a sheep at the Little Britches rodeo, rode him hard but finally fell and lay there happy in the dust, spread-eagle, making angels. So in February 2012, when his grandson came out to help put siding on an old barn, Frank had to remind himself that Dusty—Matthew Pellegrini—was 18 and headed fast toward manhood. One evening, he held out his phone to his grandma, sliding through photos of two girls, asking what she thought.
“Well, they kind of look like hoochie mamas,” Fay Bowlin said tentatively.
“That’s what I like,” he told her, and burst out laughing.
Now, as they nailed the last strips of siding in place, Frank teased the boy: “You got girlfriends? Nah, Dusty, you don’t have no game.”
“I’ve got game!”
Frank turned serious. “You can bring a girl out here anytime, Matty,” he said, switching to the family nickname. “Your friends are always welc—” Matty’s cellphone rang again. Maybe not those friends, Frank grumbled to himself. Matty’s mother was worried—she said one of them was in his twenties. What did he want hanging around with an 18-year-old kid? Frank had finally asked the boy straight out if he was gay—which wouldn’t be a problem, mind, they’d love him no matter what—but he’d said no, definitely not. He’d told his mother they liked him because he knew lots of teenage girls to invite to parties.
Frank sighed. Matty was growing up in a lot of ways at once. At least he was talking about community college again, and instead of teen wisecracks and monosyllables, he was carrying on real conversations. “He’s getting to where he sounds sensible when you’re talking to him,” Fay had told their daughter just that morning. “We’re really enjoying him.”
Matty hung up. “Pop, I’m gonna go into St. Louis for Mardi Gras.” It was Thursday, February 16, and the celebration would start the next night.
Frank cocked his head: “How’re you gonna get there?” Matty only had a learner’s permit, not a driver’s license; he had ADD, and he’d told his mom he was afraid he’d hurt somebody if he weren’t paying attention.
“Jerry’s gonna come get me tonight.”
“All the way out here?” The farm was in Rosebud, more than an hour west of the city limits.
“Yeah.” Matty’s blue eyes were bright—even though he’d announced when he arrived, “Pop, I’m not going back to St. Louis again.” He’d said he was “tired of that city life.”
Matty lived with his mother and little sister in Ballwin, but since August, he’d been spending long stretches in south St. Louis, trying to get to know his biological father. When Matty was 9, Carter Inkley, the stepfather he’d loved like a father, died of lung cancer. Frank’s heart nearly broke for his daughter, she grieved so hard. But Tami Inkley walled out pity, drew her kids close, and made their brick four-bedroom home on Pleasant Grove Avenue as warm and safe and happy as she could.
In July 2011, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Matty was blind-angry—scared, really. He blew off college and sought out the parent he’d never known, Angelo Pellegrini. And that’s when fate twisted the knife.
Angelo was struggling with Stage IV prostate cancer.
Matty kept going to South City all that fall and winter. He made friends, among them Jerry Brindel, an affable 26-year-old who partied like a frat boy, called him “Lil’ Fella” and let him stay over when Angelo was going through treatment.
The cellphone rang again. Jerry couldn’t find the house. “I’m going to walk to the end of the road,” Matty said. “I’ve got my flashlight.”
*****
Mardi Gras fell on Tuesday, February 21.
At 11:30 p.m., Tami Inkley stood at her front door in a long sleep shirt, her right arm shielding her chest from the police officers’ sight. She was braless, and cancer surgery had left a slight indentation she was self-conscious about. “I’ll just go get dressed,” she said hurriedly.
They told her not to bother, and their weary impatience carried an unspoken warning: Their message was about to dwarf any other concern. She folded her arms tight.
“The hospital’s been trying to reach you,” one officer said.
“My phone hasn’t even rung!” she told him. “What is it?”
Her son Matthew Pellegrini had been in an accident. Was there someone who could drive her down to Saint Louis University Hospital?
Tami just said no, not wanting to waste time calling somebody. She threw on jeans and a hoodie and sneakers, no socks, and zoomed out of the driveway. At the first stoplight, she called her ex-husband, told him what she knew, and said she didn’t have time to come get him; he’d have to get there on his own. She merged onto Highway 40, praying, “An arm or a leg—let it be an arm or a leg.”
When she pulled up to the emergency entrance, a man was standing outside, broad shoulders stretching his suit jacket. He introduced himself as a police detective and told her Matthew had been shot.
“How bad is it?”
“Let me get the doctors.”
Inside the emergency department, Tami went cold with fear, then felt the brief warmth of urine soaking her jeans. She didn’t even care. Detective Wallace Leopold guided her toward a physician, whose sentences slipped away before Tami’s mind could fasten onto them. “I don’t know what you’re saying,” she blurted.
It’s bad, he told her.
“Call my family bad?”
Yes.
Tami’s sister and brother-in-law picked up Matty’s younger sister, Alyssa, and met the Bowlins at the hospital. Angelo Pellegrini came with a clutch of people from his church. Resentment burned Tami’s throat—this was private. But when she saw how hard they were praying for her son, gratitude washed away the anger.
Another doctor came up and squatted in front of her. “Mrs. Inkley,” she said, her voice gentle but her eyes holding Tami’s steadily, “Your little boy is gone.”
A bullet had entered his temple and ripped through his brain, destroying function. If they kept him on life support, it would only prolong his death.
“I don’t want him to suffer,” Tami choked out. The doctor told her that Matty had signed his learner’s permit, donating his organs. Tami nodded, eyes unfocused. That was just like Matty, tenderhearted.
Go home and get some sleep, the doctor urged, and come back at 10 a.m. tomorrow.
A coordinator from Mid-America Transplant Services was in the operating room with Tami, Alyssa, and Angelo the next morning. They asked for Matty’s favorite music—’50s and ’60s rock—and somebody supplied a playlist. They kissed Matty’s bandaged face over and over and begged him not to be afraid, not to try to hang on. Tami kept thinking of all the stories she’d heard about sudden deaths and people unable to leave their bodies. “Go on, baby,” she whispered between sobs. “Go toward
the light. Go.”
A minute later, the transplant coordinator touched her arm and whispered, “Are you listening?”
It was the original recording of “Last Kiss”:
“Oh where, oh where, can my baby be? The Lord took her away from me…”
*****
Matty could tease relentlessly—blasting “Ohk-la-homa” at the top of his lungs after his mother dragged him to The Muny—but he was always gentle with anyone who was vulnerable. “The mother of one of my best friends had Alzheimer’s,” Tami says, “and she would tell Matty the same story 10 times in an hour, and every time, he would laugh and giggle with her.”
If Matty could be an angel, he could also be annoying as hell. “School didn’t have a label for it,” Tami says, just a blurry “social disorder” that went along with his ADD and left him impulsive, goofy, and tactless. It made growing up harder—he always seemed younger than his years, and his mother stayed strict to protect him.
“He trusted too easily,” she says. “He thought if you extended your hand to him, you were his friend. I kept telling him, ‘It’s a big, ugly world out there.’ I’d call his dad—‘Where is he?’ ‘Oh, he took off with somebody.’ ‘Well, did you meet them?’ And of course he didn’t, so then we would fight. He thought I was overprotective.” Her grin’s shaky. “I know I was like that”—she presses her thumb down on the table and turns it back and forth. “So what? That was my job. Matty knew that.”
He did, but he brushed off her warnings. He wanted friends desperately. The grid of school, with its cliques and teams and compartments, made it easy to shut him out, especially when he got pulled out of classes for special education. Small for his age, he got teased, with the usual lack of mercy, whenever he played sports—but he kept trying. He could be scrappy, quick to provoke and quick to defend. He longed for a girlfriend, but all Tami ever heard were long, one-sided phone conversations: “The teenage girls would call him with all their drama, and he’d be on the phone
all night.”
At 18, he craved the kind of freedom he found in the city. He’d just gotten his braces off, Tami says, and her eyes well up. A minute later, a smile tugs at cheeks stiff with dried tears: “He would drive me and Alyssa crazy, holding his arms up and saying, ‘Do you see it?’ We were so sick of looking at his underarms! But that kind of happened for him. This”—she gestures to her chest, where chest hair would be—“never did. And he still had this smooth little baby face. He never got to shave.”
He died one month before his 19th birthday.
She had to understand why.
*****
When Tami looked back at her cellphone log, she saw that she’d texted Matty at 10:35 p.m. on February 21, and he’d texted right back. He’d been fine. She was trying to start a business cleaning apartments, and he asked how the first day went and offered to help. “I love you,” he texted. She sent back her usual: “I love you more.”
Five minutes later, he was in Clifton Heights, about six blocks from his father’s house, with a young man named Kevin Beindorff and Beindorff’s friend Alphonso Brazier. An open can of Milwaukee’s Best Ice dripped in the console of Brazier’s black Nissan Maxima; a partial 12-pack sat on the floorboard. Beindorff was driving. He parked in front of his parents’ house and went inside to get the Smith & Wesson .38 Special revolver he’d bought a month before.
Beindorff would later tell police that when he showed off the gun, Pellegrini said, “Shoot me”—which sounded, Tami thought, like one of Matty’s typical wisecracks.
Beindorff fired the revolver, point-blank, into Pellegrini’s temple.
Fifteen minutes later, the Nissan pulled up to the emergency entrance of SLU Hospital. Several police officers happened to be there on another case. When they saw Pellegrini’s unconscious body in the front passenger seat, blood and bits of flesh spattered across the car’s interior, they called for homicide detectives and held Beindorff and Brazier for questioning.
Beindorff, 21, was slight and nondescript, with reddish-blond hair and a quiet demeanor; Brazier, 25, was sturdier looking and more expressive. But he wasn’t talking—except to say he hadn’t shot anyone.
Beindorff told police Pellegrini had shot himself outside Rally Point bar and grill, on Papin Street near Theresa Avenue, so after he and Brazier were taken to police headquarters, homicide detectives Leopold and Clinton Bertke drove to Rally Point. The co-owner, Rafael Hernandez, remembered the three young men and said they’d made him uneasy, because they kept going outside. He said he heard one of them yell into his cellphone, “Tell him to leave me alone.”
What Hernandez didn’t hear was gunfire. The detectives saw no traces of blood outside the bar. They went back to headquarters and questioned Brazier and Beindorff separately.
“Brazier said that Kevin B. shot Pellegrini by accident,” the police report notes. “He told the Detectives that Kevin B. was outside the car when he shot Pellegrini. He also said Kevin B. was sitting in the backseat when he shot Pellegrini… Brazier said if he thought Kevin B. had shot Pellegrini on purpose, he would not have taken him to the hospital.”
The detectives moved on to Beindorff. He maintained that Pellegrini had been shot outside Rally Point, but now said Pellegrini had been inside Brazier’s car—and no, it wasn’t suicide, and it wasn’t murder. He refused to tell the detectives anything more until he knew what was going to happen to him.
Leopold said that would depend on Beindorff’s truthfulness. Beindorff asked for a cigarette, and they gave him one (they’d later collect his DNA from the butt). Beindorff eventually admitted that the car had been in front of his parents’ house—he’d lied about Rally Point to avoid drawing attention to his family. He told the detectives that Pellegrini had asked to be shot, but that he’d only pulled the trigger because he thought the hammer would fall on one of the two spent casings in the five-cylinder revolver.
Leopold asked whether Beindorff knew which direction the cylinder rotated.
He said he did not.
*****
Beindorff was initially charged with armed criminal action and first-degree assault. After Pellegrini died, the charge of armed criminal action was raised to second-degree murder.
The story, incomprehensible, was picked up by news outlets all the way to the United Kingdom, but Tami didn’t even know it had made the local TV news. For two days, she’d moved like a sleepwalker through fluorescent-lit hospital halls, rubber-wheeled gurneys gliding past her, families standing in tight knots, the outside world spinning on without them.
She was at her brother’s house, fashioning a cross of yellow and white roses for Matty’s memorial service, when he said, “Look, we need to tell you something. The Riverfront Times wrote this article…”
She skimmed the lead of the February 23 blog post, tagged “Criminally Stupid”: “Note to self: Never ask friends for anything. Just kidding, I don’t have any friends. And now Kevin Beindorff, 21, most likely is down one himself.” Her stomach clenched, and she felt like throwing up. Was this supposed to be funny?
The RFT later edited the post and prefaced it with a note: “For what it’s worth, the post below was not intended to poke fun at Pellegrini but rather point out the extremely peculiar account of how he was shot.”
Accounts, plural, Tami thought. She was still gathering scraps of information, trying to piece together what happened that evening. At the hospital, she says, detectives told her there were three versions: that Beindorff was shooting off his gun in his front yard and accidentally shot Matty; that Beindorff and Brazier went into a bar and Matty was waiting outside and got shot; and finally, that Beindorff showed Matty his gun, and Matty said, “Shoot me.”
At that point, the gun still held three live rounds. He’d risked firing one of them into Matty’s temple just to make a point? And why had he bought the gun in the first place? Brazier told police he’d never seen Beindorff with a gun before and hadn’t believed it was real. But Beindorff said the two of them had fired the gun the week before in Clifton Heights Park, each sending one round into a park building near the pond. He said he’d bought the revolver from Bulls Eye gun shop about two months earlier. (It was actually one month earlier, on January 24.) He claimed he carried the revolver for protection. So why hadn’t he had it with him earlier that evening?
Beindorff told police that when they reached SLU Hospital, he removed the gun’s three empty cartridge casings and threw them over a fence. Officers searched and found nothing. He later said he’d actually thrown the casings down a storm sewer. But why throw out the spent casings and not the gun? Police found it resting on the driver’s-seat cushion, Beindorff’s fingerprints on its matte black surface. The ballistics were a perfect match for the bullet the city medical examiner had prised from Pellegrini’s skull.
A neighbor showed Tami how to look up Beindorff and Brazier on the Missouri Case.net website. Beindorff was on probation for driving while intoxicated and unlawful use of drug paraphernalia. He’d been ordered not to drink, and he’d violated probation at least once. The detectives had told her that his gun was not registered. Brazier was on parole after being sentenced to 10 years’ incarceration for statutory rape. (In August 2013, he would plead guilty to domestic assault.)
She called Brazier’s parole officer, Lynn Hansen, and said, “I didn’t think he was supposed to be around someone who was carrying a gun!” Tami says she was told Brazier didn’t know about the gun. After hearing Beindorff’s statement that they’d been target shooting together, Tami called back. She says she was told the most they could do was write him up. “Well then, write him up!” Tami exclaimed. She says the officer (who declined to comment for this story, explaining that she is not allowed to speak with the media) told her Brazier had been too intoxicated to remember anything.
“Well, isn’t that supposed to be a violation of parole?” Tami snapped.
*****
The St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office presented the Pellegrini case to a grand jury in April 2012. Tami later learned that the grand-jury indictment reduced the original charge of second-degree murder to involuntary manslaughter.
“Involuntary?” she repeated, unable to fathom how pulling a loaded gun’s trigger could be involuntary. “What’s the accident? That it killed him?”
The legal distinction is subtler: Someone commits involuntary manslaughter if he recklessly causes the death of another person, consciously disregarding a substantial risk that his actions will kill. (The charge also extends to criminal negligence—for example, if a drunk driver causes a fatal accident.) To be guilty of second-degree murder, the defendant must have knowingly caused another person’s death or intended to do serious physical injury and inadvertently caused death.
In May, the assistant circuit attorney handling the case left the office, and Assistant Circuit Attorney Melissa Gilliam took over.
“She handed me Matty’s toxicology report and said, ‘Here, Mom’—like it was something I should put on the refrigerator, I should be so proud that he had no substances, no prescription drugs,” Tami says. “I said, ‘I’m not surprised by that. I knew he messed with alcohol; I knew he didn’t do drugs. I’m his mother. I’ll tell his sins.’”
Tami kept waiting for news from the homicide detectives; she says she gave them contact information for her son’s friends right after the shooting. When months passed without word, she started talking to Matty’s friends herself, looking for any reason Beindorff might have wanted to kill him. She heard rumors of a girl they’d fought over, suggestions of jealousy. In November, she called Gilliam and told her what she’d learned.
When Tami hung up, she went straight to Facebook. On the “R.I. P Matt Pellegrini” group, she posted: “The new prosecutor, Melissa Gilliam, claims none of the information given to the detectives, nor to her predecessor, were given to her. She claims there is nothing in Matt’s case that says Matty nor Beindorff ever had any previous conflict.” Tami begged Matty’s friends to email Gilliam directly with any information. Then she dug up the original contact information she’d provided.
A spokesperson for the Circuit Attorney’s Office, Geri Dreiling, says Tami told Gilliam in mid-November that she had “information and additional names of individuals she thought should be interviewed,” and that Gilliam “reached out to Tami again” on November 30, received the names on December 1, and promptly forwarded them to the police.
In December 2012—10 months after the shooting—detectives Leopold and Bertke interviewed three of Matty’s friends for the first time. The police records contain no other interviews except those with Beindorff, Brazier, and the tavern owner on the night of the shooting.
Joshua Tidwell “described Pellegrini as a good person but ‘naïve’ and Kevin B. as being ‘weird’ and ‘passive,’” the report notes. Tidwell said that a little after 10 p.m. on the night of the shooting, Matt had called him asking for a ride to Jerry Brindel’s house in Clifton Heights. Beindorff then took the phone from Pellegrini and suggested Tidwell meet them at a bar. Tidwell said that when he refused, Beindorff got “mouthy” with him. “Tidwell speculated that Kevin B. was jealous of the friendship that existed between Brindel and Pellegrini,” the report concludes.
Jerry Brindel told police that on the night of the shooting, he slept through a 10:30 p.m. voice message from Pellegrini: “Kevin’s freaking out. Can you come get me?” Five minutes later, Beindorff left a message asking if Brindel was coming. But the message that woke Brindel came about an hour later—it was Beindorff, sounding frantic, saying that Pellegrini had been shot near Chouteau Avenue and South Grand Boulevard.
Brindel told police that “Pellegrini and Kevin B. were friends; however, they would argue and fight sometimes.” He described Pellegrini as “outgoing, funny, and goofy,” and said Pellegrini was usually the one to instigate problems with Beindorff, who was quiet and showed little emotion.
Brindel remembered the two fighting in December 2011, after Pellegrini accused Beindorff of damaging Brindel’s car with a rock. He also remembered a fight over a young woman. And on January 29, Brindel said, there was a big fight in his own back yard that left both Pellegrini and a mutual friend, Adam Hamid, in need of medical attention.
Hamid, the third friend police interviewed, said he reported the incident at the time but no longer had any desire to prosecute those who assaulted them.
It was after that fight that Pellegrini went to stay with his grandparents in Rosebud.
Then he came back for Mardi Gras.
*****
In November 2012, Beindorff’s public defender offered a guilty plea in exchange for a sentence of three years. The Circuit Attorney’s Office rejected that offer but agreed to a different plea bargain: seven years for involuntary manslaughter and three years for armed criminal action, served concurrently.
Tami couldn’t see why they were bargaining at all. “I’ve never expected life, eye for an eye—I’ve never been of that mind-set,” she says. “But seven years is a joke. He’ll be out on probation in a few years.” She begged Gilliam to take the case to trial.
Tami says Gilliam told her they’d never win—and Beindorff might walk—because one of the detectives had continued questioning him after he requested a lawyer.
The detectives were not available for comment. Dreiling, the Circuit Attorney’s Office spokesperson, says, “There was a potential evidentiary issue with the defendant’s statement, and the potential that the defendant’s attorney would have moved to suppress the evidence. However, we would have vigorously opposed any type of motion to suppress.”
That’s if the case had gone to trial. Instead, in March 2013, Tami found herself sitting on a hard courtroom bench downtown, listening to Gilliam present the seven-year plea agreement to Circuit Judge Edward Sweeney. Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce issued a public statement afterward, acknowledging the distress of the victim’s family and expressing her office’s determination to win justice for Matthew Pellegrini. She explained that plea agreements are based upon objective consideration of “available evidence, witness and defendant statements, legal opportunities and challenges and wishes of the family.”
When Tami first learned of the plea agreement, she’d put out her own press release, with a list of key points: “Is it an ‘involuntary action’ to kill someone at point-blank range? … Should there be a question of whether or not an 18-year-old victim ‘asked’ to be shot? … Prosecuting Attorney’s office informed victim’s family that the witness and perpetrator disposed of the shell casings, and openly debated ‘throwing his body in the river’ instead of taking him to the ER.”
Dreiling says “there was no evidence that a conversation like this occurred.” But all Tami had were scraps of hearsay and a varied jumble of accounts, and nothing had settled into a narrative that made sense to her. For a year, she’d told herself, “You have got to let the prosecutors do their job. You have to have faith in them.”
Now she wasn’t sure if anybody was representing her son.
*****
On April 11 in the nation’s capital, U.S. senators spoke with high emotion about the children killed in Newtown, Conn., then voted to begin a controversial debate on gun-safety measures.
Back in St. Louis, Tami’s sister entered the Carnahan Courthouse carrying a poster-size photo of her nephew standing by a creek, wearing a dark suit, a boutonniere, and a wide grin. A Victim Services Unit caseworker steered Matthew’s family into Judge Sweeney’s courtroom and “to the left, that will be better, the other family’s on the right.” Beindorff came in, holding a manila envelope in hands cuffed behind his back. His family filled the front benches, but he barely glanced at them. (They chose not to comment for this article.)
Sweeney read aloud part of Beindorff’s statement, in which he offered details not in the police report. “An associate of Matt’s was calling and making threats,” he said. “We decided to go to my house and get my gun… Matt said he wanted to die. He told me to shoot him.” Beindorff again insisted that he hadn’t meant to kill Pellegrini. Tami listened, her face stony.
Gilliam told Sweeney that the victim’s family would like to address the court. Tami rose, poised, her hair pulled on top of her head, her white blazer crisp. But the minute she started to speak, tears flooded her voice. She raised her volume and pushed through the emotion: “He did not ask for this. Matthew did nothing to deserve this. If being in the wrong place at the wrong time is enough to justify murder, we are—all of us—surely, irreparably lost.” She gulped air. “I wholeheartedly refute your absurd claim that my son asked for his death.”
Angelo spoke next. “Anger and vengeance are not my motivation,” he assured the judge. “I am asking for justice for my son.”
Alyssa followed, and she was angry. She said she felt cheated by the loss of her brother. She glanced toward Beindorff and said, “If you truly believed it was going to land on an empty chamber, then I think you should have tried it on yourself to find out.”
Sweeney explained to Matty’s family that it was not in his power to restore the charge of second-degree murder: “The charge is ultimately up to the prosecutor’s office.”
“That was done by the grand jury,” Gilliam interrupted.
He thanked her for the clarification. “The facts were presented by the prosecutor to the grand jury,” he said, “and the 12 citizens on the grand jury determined what the charge should be.” He promised to issue a written order the following Friday.
Asked about the grand jury lowering the charge, a veteran lawyer says dryly, “You’ve heard the expression, ‘A prosecutor can get the grand jury to indict a ham sandwich?’ The only people in that room are the prosecutor and the grand jury, and the prosecutor brings in whatever witnesses the prosecutor chooses to call. The prosecutor is in control of those proceedings. The grand jury has the legal power to make that decision, but it’s hard to believe they would do so without prompting from the prosecutor.”
*****
On Friday, April 19, Sweeney stunned the courtroom by rejecting the plea agreement. Gilliam scanned the order and reportedly shook her head and blurted, “No way!” (She later denied this, telling the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that she had not reacted to the judge’s order.)
After the hearing, Gilliam came over to Tami and Angelo. “So do you guys understand what’s going on now?” she asked.
But they didn’t, not really. Tami was elated; she felt Sweeney had a conscience, a soul. Beindorff had withdrawn his guilty plea. Surely they could just start over, go back to the original charges and let the case go to trial?
That didn’t happen.
“Without new evidence to present after the plea agreement was rejected, there was no basis to take the case back to the grand jury for a superseding indictment,” says Dreiling. “In addition, without new evidence in this case, there was no factual basis to dismiss the case and reissue a second-degree murder charge.”
The lawyers took their plea agreement to Circuit Judge Bryan Hettenbach, the Division 16 criminal-assignment judge. Hettenbach transferred the case to Circuit Judge Rex Burlison. The defense motioned for a change of judge.
(Burlison says that had he heard the case, he might have considered the plea negotiation, “but the victim’s family was requesting a trial, and I felt that’s what they were deserving of.”)
The case was transferred to Circuit Judge Jack Garvey. Tami keyed his name into her computer—she’d gotten pretty good at researching judges by now. She saw that he’d been outspoken about gun violence in the city and had led an initiative that set strict bails for gun crimes.
She let herself hope, just a little.
On the morning of August 21, Tami got to court early. She looked calm and determined. “I need to tweak up my letter,” she said. “I’ve been working on it since 2 this morning.” She and Angelo sat on the bench in the hall, and he read her new letter. “I haven’t rewritten mine,” he said. He fumbled an explanation of work and cancer treatment, but the truth was, he didn’t know what he could say differently. How was he supposed to keep bending and twisting his grief, looking for new ways to convince strangers that his dead son had not found justice? The raw outrage had scarred over, leaving a stubborn litany nobody wanted to hear.
Garvey began by questioning Beindorff about his life before the shooting. He gave brief, polite answers, like a kid who wished the teacher hadn’t called on him. He’d graduated from high school, taken a course at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, worked first at the Saint Louis Bread Co. on Forest Park Parkway, then at Imo’s on Oakland Avenue.
Gilliam explained that the “reckless” part of the involuntary manslaughter charge was “his statement that he was under the impression that the revolver went a different way than it did.” She repeated the plea agreement: seven years for involuntary manslaughter and three for armed criminal action, to run concurrently.
Theoretically, Tami knew, Beindorff could be eligible for probation in as little as three years—and he’d served half that time already.
She was already crying when she rose to give her statement.
After she finished, Beindorff spoke, looking not at Tami but at the judge. “I’d just like to really apologize again for the pain I caused to Matty’s mom and dad… I will always regret it,” he said. He spoke with a flat, quiet formality that could just as easily have been shame or indifference, and Tami couldn’t know which.
Garvey cleared his throat. “This is one of the dumbest crimes, the most senseless things I’ve ever seen in my life, on or off the bench,” he said.
He accepted the plea bargain.
*****
At Matty’s memorial service, in March 2012, Tami had to hide a small smile as first one, then a second, then a third girl introduced herself as Matty’s girlfriend. Others wrote bereft Facebook posts: “You were the person I could tell everything too.” “He knew just what to say to lift you spirits up.” “I need you alive Matt Pellegrini. I do.”
For months after Matty’s death, Tami kept finding wet pillows and blankets. His dog, Marcie, a rescued mutt with imploring brown eyes (“Give Momma your Humane Society look,” Matty would tease) was long weaned, but had started nursing on any fabric she could bunch up. “I don’t know what to do for her,” Tami told Alyssa, close to tears. Finally, she gave the dog a pair of Matty’s boxer shorts. Marcie carried them to her bed and slept with them.
Tami tries to tell herself that Beindorff must feel more remorse than he showed. After all, he pleaded guilty; had the case gone to court, his lawyer might have been able to keep his confession out of evidence. And he and Brazier couldn’t have deliberated long, because they had Matty at the hospital in 15 minutes.
Still, she can’t grasp what happened. Beer, a gun, a reckless moment—was that really all it took? What had Matty meant earlier that evening, when he said “Kevin’s freaking out”? Her mind runs wild with possible motives: jealousy, showing off, revenge for some slight… The authorities maintained there was no evidence of motive—but how hard did anybody look?
“I cannot imagine the pain and grief Matthew Pellegrini’s family has endured,” Gilliam says by email. “They have my sympathy—and I am sorry that they do not feel that justice was done for Matthew. I gave this case the very best I have. As a prosecutor, my role is to objectively apply the factual evidence gathered in a case to the laws as they exist in the state of Missouri. I must then make a decision based on that objective review that will achieve the greatest accountability for the defendant and justice for the victim.”
Given what she had to work with, that decision was the plea bargain.
And to Tami, it didn’t feel like justice.
The usual complaint about our courts is that they grind too slowly, bog down too easily. This one was relatively quick and clean. A long investigation could easily have proved fruitless; a trial could have brought the same sentence the plea bargain did. But from a mother’s perspective, a death this senseless demanded the fullest investigation, exhausting every possibility. Tami’s grief isn’t clean; it’s tangled in doubts and loose ends.
On March 29, 2012, which would have been Matty’s 19th birthday, she and Alyssa donated a memorial bench to Vlasis Park, where he had his senior-year homecoming pictures taken. Tami goes there often. One day, she sees yellow ribbons cordoning off all the other benches, which are freshly painted. The park’s not going to maintain Matty’s bench, too? She decides she’d better bring it to somebody’s attention. “We’re never promised tomorrow,” she tells Alyssa briskly, “and you’re going to be busy with your own life.”
It’s been two years now, since the shooting. Once Alyssa goes away to college, Tami thinks she just might pack a bag and leave town, find out where she’s going when she gets there. Her only real plan is to go to Boonville Correctional Center and talk to Kevin Beindorff. She’s decided to wait a year. What she wants to say to him keeps changing. Mainly, she wants to know if Matty was scared. And she wants to remind Beindorff of double jeopardy—he can’t be retried—and beg him to tell her anything more that will explain that night.
For now, she buys a can of lacquer and weatherproofs the bench herself.
