A VOICE IN THE NIGHT, LOCAL DEEJAY WAS AN ENIGMA
By Conley Hawkins
For fans like Winnie Churchwell, Silver Bay disc jockey Buddy Bright was a welcome guest in the kitchen, relaying the local news and weather reports and playing favorite rock music from the ’60s and ’70s during his popular Up All Night with Buddy Bright late-night shift. In high school football and baseball press boxes, he was the Man in Black, the familiar voice providing play-by-play commentary for the past six seasons.
Melissa Padgett-Holland, a night-shift waitress at the Waffle House on State Route 28, knew him only as a regular customer. As soon as she saw his vintage white Corvette with the distinctive WORKING PRESS license plate pull up to the front of the restaurant in the early-morning hours, she’d put in his order for eggs over easy, crisp bacon, and grits. “Nice guy,” Joyner said. “Real easy to talk to; although he never said much about himself, he’d always ask about my kids. He’d talk to some of the other regulars here too. And he never left less than a ten-dollar tip.”
Neal Evancho, station manager / owner of WSVR, said Bright showed up “outta nowhere” six years ago, asking for a job at the exact moment Evancho’s previous nighttime deejay departed without notice. Bright had no audition tapes or résumé, but Evancho said his new employee was obviously a seasoned pro. “I hired him on the spot.”
Like most of Silver Bay, Evancho was shocked to learn of Bright’s murder on a quiet, leafy block of Felicity Street on Sunday morning.
That shock was compounded when he learned that the amiable Buddy Bright was really a fugitive named Robert Breitweis, a disgraced Detroit deejay convicted of killing a Michigan teenager in an alcohol-fueled hit-and-run accident. Authorities there say Breitweis was working on a prisoner highway detail in 2008 when he simply walked away into obscurity.
Over his years on the run, Breitweis bounced around small-market radio stations in the Midwest and the South, working under several assumed names, including Buddy Bright.
The sixty-eight-year-old disc jockey was killed by a single gunshot fired by a disgruntled former Bronson County sheriff’s deputy as he rescued a local woman the deputy was attempting to abduct.
I am that local woman. My name is Sarah Conley Hawkins. I was born and raised in Silver Bay, and I grew up in that house on Felicity Street. My great-grandfather founded The Silver Bay Beacon, and I am the fourth generation of my family to work in our family enterprise.
Until Sunday morning, in the moment before he saved my life, I had never come face-to-face with the man we thought we knew as Buddy Bright.
Brittany Michelle Pakowsky only met the man she knew as Robbie Breitweis once. At seventeen, the suburban Detroit teenager and some friends snuck into a hotel bar in Bloomfield Hills, where they encountered Breitweis, who’d earlier worked a live remote broadcast from a nearby auto dealership. It was December 1998, the week before Christmas.
According to witnesses, Breitweis, who’d been drinking steadily most of the day, plied the girls with frozen daiquiris and invited them to accompany him to a private party. The teens declined his offer and were walking to their car when Breitweis, driving a white Corvette at a high rate of speed, struck Brittany Pakowsky in the hotel parking lot before driving away. The teenager died two days later.
Marlene Pakowsky, Brittany’s mother, said she will never stop grieving the loss of her youngest daughter. She still lives in the home where Brittany grew up and keeps a small artificial Christmas tree in Brittany’s room, which she lights up every night, year-round.
“I’m not glad he’s dead, because he got it easy,” Mrs. Pakowsky told me. “I prayed for years that he’d get caught so he’d have to rot in jail. You tell me he’s been out there, living, enjoying life, while my baby is cold in the grave all this time? I don’t know what to say.”
Conley wrote the story in an adrenaline-fueled burst of creative energy, melding her harrowing first-person experience with facts and quotes and observations of an experience she couldn’t afford to forget.
At four, she typed the last paragraph, and as she sat back in her chair, overcome with mental and physical exhaustion, she heard a faint mewling coming from the vicinity of her backpack.
Michael whirled around on his chair. “What was that?”
“Oh Lord, I completely forgot she was in there,” Conley said guiltily. “She’s been traumatized. I couldn’t leave her alone in that cat-carrier.” She picked up the backpack and brought out the squirming cat. “This is Hi-Fi.”
Michael’s freckled face lit up as he reached for her. “A stowaway!”
“She’s, uh, a rescue,” Conley said. “And I guess you could say she’s an orphan now.”
She confessed the breaking-and-entering episode at Buddy Bright’s apartment and repeated her concern that the police, when they finally searched the apartment, would turn the cat over to an animal shelter.
“What will you do with her?” Michael asked.
“I’m not sure. I can’t take her home because of Opie, my grandmother’s dog. And my boyfriend claims to be cat phobic.”
“You’ve got a boyfriend? Cool.”
Conley felt herself blush as she realized she’d just referred to Skelly, out loud, as something other than a platonic friend.
Michael placed the cat on his desktop, and she promptly curled up in a ball and fell back asleep. “Can I have her?”
“You like cats?” She didn’t know a lot of millennial guys who were cat fanciers, but Michael continued to challenge her opinions about that generation.
“Love ’em. We always had cats growing up. The place where I live now doesn’t allow pets, but I’m moving in with my girlfriend next weekend, and we’ve been talking about adopting a cat, so this would be perfect. I even like her name. Hi-Fi. Kind of retro, right?”
“Very retro,” she assured him. “I’m glad you like the name, because if you didn’t, I’m afraid that would be a deal-breaker.”
He picked the cat up and nuzzled her under his chin. “Awesome!”
“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” Winnie said when Conley finally made it back to the Dunes. “Glad you made it before the storm came through.”
The housekeeper and G’mama were sitting on the screened porch, looking out at the Gulf, where dark clouds hovered just at eye level.
“You don’t know how true that is,” Conley said.
“We saved you some supper,” G’mama said. “There’s fried chicken and butter beans on a plate on the stove, and Winnie’s potato salad in the icebox.”
Conley shook her head. “Thanks, but I’m really not hungry.” She sat down on a wicker armchair beside her grandmother. “I’m sorry,” she started, but Lorraine shook her head.
“Enough of that,” she said briskly. “Your sister sent me pictures. It’s an awful-looking mess, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“I called my insurance agent, and he’s already sent an adjuster over there to take a look,” Lorraine said. “Tomorrow, we’ll get a contractor to give us some estimates for repairs.”
“The whole front porch roof collapsed,” Conley said. “That car was going full speed when it hit. I’m afraid it probably damaged the foundation too.”
G’mama waved away her concerns.”The only thing of real value in that house is standing right here in front of me. A little worse for wear, but alive. I don’t care about anything else, Sarah Conley. It’s just things. And things can be replaced.”
She pointed out toward the horizon at the breeze blowing the sea oats. “We’re lucky to have a roof over our heads and beds to sleep in. And speaking of that,” she said, giving her granddaughter an appraising look, “your sister said that as soon as you got home, I should feed you and send you to bed.”
“Who died and left her boss?” Conley joked. “Are you putting me in time-out for wrecking your house and beautiful yard?”
“I’m putting you in time-out for working too hard. I’ll bet you haven’t even eaten today.”
“Not true. Skelly fixed me this huge breakfast tortilla with eggs and bacon and potatoes. And he forced me to eat almost all of it.”
“I tell you, Sarah, if you don’t snap that man up soon, I’m gonna steal him right out from under you,” Lorraine said.