OCTOBER 6: THE MEANING OF 3 A.M.
I wrote this, then forgot about it.
He Was Retired. But He Was Still a Hero.
At 8:25 p.m. on September 27 five years ago, a fourteen-year-old girl got into the car of a white male, age twenty-nine, in the parking lot of a Jimmy John’s in suburban Milwaukee. It was caught on security cameras. She’d gone to the restaurant pissed off because she had to babysit her little brother and didn’t want to. The girl already had a history of drug use, of trouble with the law. But her mother didn’t have anywhere else to turn. The girl had to babysit her little brother because her mother had to go to her shift at the hospital. Police found out later, the girl’s anger at being forced to babysit prompted her to get into this car. A little revenge against her mother. The white male offered her a chance to smoke some weed. The white male took the girl away.
The white male’s name was Jeremy Chambers. He had a tattooed M on his neck, apparently an homage to the Big M, a well-known landmark on a hill near Bluffton, Wisconsin. Very identifiable. The police knew what car he was driving at the time, too. A black 2008 Pontiac Grand Am with a cracked back-left panel. What they didn’t know was this: What the hell was he doing on the other side of the state from where he normally operated, moving weed and meth and sometimes heroin across southwest Wisconsin, northeast Iowa, and southeastern Minnesota?
Even though he was in suburban Milwaukee and not in his normal zone of activity, detectives at the Wisconsin Bureau of Criminal Apprehension immediately recognized both him and the car when they looked at the video footage. They were already in the midst of a larger investigation into a web of meth and heroin distribution that connected Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Des Moines and parts in between. Jeremy Chambers was a big player in the parts in between. He was also a well-known asshole.
At 12:30 a.m. on September 28, Isaiah’s grandpa John Bertram, less than a year retired from his long career with the Wisconsin BCA, received a phone call from his good friend Mike Meisel, a BCA detective. Meisel conferenced him in with the Bluffton chief of police and the Grant County sheriff. Jeremy Chambers had been spotted pumping gas into his Pontiac at a Bluffton Kwik Trip gas station. He had exited the scene before police arrived. No girl was seen in the car, however.
There was credible camera evidence that Chambers had headed east of town, likely to his girlfriend’s trailer, near where the larger County Road G turned into the one-lane Jericho Road. Grandpa Bertram knew the area well, knew the little dirt drives that pierced fields of corn and followed the jagged creek line of Mounds Branch. In the early 2000s he’d busted an isolated but large-scale meth production house in the same vicinity. He’d done so after months of surveillance, oftentimes on foot.
They asked him to meet them off Jericho Road. To direct them into some of these drives and dirt roads that might help them surround Chambers’s location without tipping him or his girlfriend off. There was possibly a fourteen-year-old’s life at stake. Grandpa Bertram didn’t think twice about going, even though Grandma Gin had said, “I got a bad feeling.”
She was right to have that bad feeling.
Grandpa John rolled up slowly, his headlights off, stopped his GMC Yukon behind tall grasses and a stand of burr oak close enough to the trailer where Chambers was purported to be. He could see the black Pontiac parked in the light that the trailer shed. Grandpa John stayed there, watching, waiting for his friend Meisel, BCA staff, and the local police to join him. Unfortunately, the situation turned fast. Grandpa John saw a figure leave the trailer and enter the Pontiac. The Pontiac came to life. Reversed, turned, and began exiting the property via a nearby drive. Grandpa John pulled out his cell and called Meisel.
“We’re five minutes from your location, John,” he was told.
“Aw shit,” Grandpa John said. “Just got here, but he’s leaving.”
“Don’t do anything,” Meisel said. “We’re close.”
Grandpa John hung up. The Pontiac rolled down the drive. What could he do? Let Chambers leave? What about the girl? Grandpa turned the ignition, pulled the Yukon forward, drove it across the drive’s exit.
Jeremy Chambers’s girlfriend—because she was the one driving, not Chambers—stopped the Pontiac. Grandpa John climbed from the Yukon’s cab, stayed hidden on the driver side, shouted over the car, “You just stay where you are, now. There are cops crawling all around the premises and we need to talk to you.”
What Grandpa John didn’t know was that Jeremy Chambers had spotted him a moment earlier. He’d seen the Yukon pull up. Not good. Chambers needed to get out on the road to make it to Prairie du Chien before sunrise. Chambers figured he had to do something about whoever was in that truck. He told his girlfriend to pull the car up the drive to draw attention. He’d surprise whoever it was in that GMC Yukon, have a chat.
Later Chambers told a detective, “I crept around the side of the trees over there. Figured it was a couple of teens, making out or something. Wanted to scare them off, so I could roll. . . .”
Bullshit. The moment Chambers saw Grandpa John, he raised a Glock 9mm and fired twice. My grandpa . . . Isaiah’s Grandpa fell to the ground, dead. He never saw what was coming. The best dude in the world was gone just like that.
But it wasn’t for nothing. Jeremy Chambers’s girlfriend lost her mind when shots were fired. Got out of the car and ran back in the trailer screaming. Jeremy chased her down instead of leaving in the Pontiac. That was all the time the cops needed. They arrived in mass a few moments later.
When they got there, Chambers exited the back of the house and ran into the cornfields but was caught in minutes. His girlfriend was taken into custody without incident.
They searched the house and the Pontiac. A terrified, tied-up fourteen-year-old girl was found in the trunk. Based on information gained from Chambers’s girlfriend on the scene, the fourteen-year-old was about to be driven to a farm near Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. The cops went to the farm instead. Wisconsin BCA broke up a Minnesota-based sex-trafficking ring using the information the girlfriend gave them.
Grandpa John died for that fourteen-year-old girl and maybe lots of others like her.
Grandpa John’s BCA friend Mike Meisel left the crime scene. He rang Grandma Gin’s doorbell at 3 a.m. He wanted Grandma Gin to see how her husband, John Bertram, died. Blocking a driveway. Protecting the life of a child. Meisel knew Gin well enough to know she’d want to see exactly what happened.
She went out there to Jericho Road. She saw Grandpa John’s body lying by the Yukon.
“That’s a dream I had a lot. Seeing him like that,” she told Isaiah later. “I always figured it would come to that. Was surprised he got to retirement in one piece, but he couldn’t really retire.”
I couldn’t go over to Grandma’s house at 3 a.m. Knock on the door like some bearer of biblically bad news . . .
Grandma Gin knew that Grace was there, though, right?
Was Grace staying there overnight?
She had to be.
I wanted to know. I wanted to see Grace.
My thoughts turned and turned and turned on the same item. Grace.
The sun was up before I fell asleep.