*Commentary
Andrews – I was walking down the hill to visit my horses and was about to cross the road Wednesday, Jan. 22, when a white Volkswagen came around the bend and into the short straightaway, going so fast it was wagging back and forth across the asphalt, passing by me completely in the wrong lane.
I just had time to raise my hackles when I heard sirens and two Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office Chargers revved into the bend, lights blazing.
Going into the next curve, a sign at the end of my driveway warns of the 20 mph speed limit. It is not an idle warning. My truck tires squeal if I take that curve at 25. Even if the Volkswagen made that turn, it would not make the next one.
Belvie’s Curve would get ‘em.
Belvie was the original inhabitant of my house and the grandmother of my neighbor, Michael Neal. Belvie Morgan Mosteller lived in the house from the time it was built in the 1930s until the early 1980s. The two rocking chairs on the porch were hers.
“Grandma would sit in her rocker and spit snuff off the porch,” Neal said.
Neal, who grew next door in the house where he still lives, remembers a lifetime of wrecks on Belvie’s Curve.
“It’s always been this way,” she said. “There have been so many I couldn’t begin to describe. There have been fatalities and there will be more. You can bet on it.”
I have lived on Junaluska Road for six months. In that time, I have seen three vehicles in the creek, two of them just past my house.
While checking on the livestock, Michael’s son, John, and I watched car after car screech by, lights and sirens blaring. Even the horses watched. It seemed like every peace officer in the county was speeding down our little strip of road. When we saw the ambulance go by, we knew the score.
“Uh-oh,” John said. “Somebody’s in big trouble.”
That somebody was Jason Burrell of Marble, the suspect in the armed robbery of a convenience store the previous night.
I walked up to the top of my property where it looks over the creek and around the corner. The cavalry was down below, everything from an ambulance to fire and rescue. When I came around the bend, just past the cross that marks where an officer lost his life in a motorcycle accident, there was the car, upside down in Junaluska Creek.
Here it was, finally, after 10 months of being a journalist: news breaking right in front of me.
Sheriff Derrick Palmer shook my hand when he heard I worked for the newspaper and lived up the hill. He gave me the rundown, although the situation was pretty easy to dissect.
“The suspect’s in the ambulance,” Palmer said. “He’s just a little banged up.”
I managed to snap one photo before my 6-year-old iPhone battery died.
Burrell would later be charged with 11 counts ranging from possession of methamphetamine to assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill. All of the charges dated within a five-day span, though it was the convenience store robbery that got the most attention.
Roberto Johnson Garcia was manning the cash register when the accused allegedly robbed the Marble gas station.
“When I looked down and noticed the revolver pointed at me, at first I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “I see people carrying guns around and showing them off all the time.”
“That’s when he told me, ‘I want the (expletive) money. I’m not playing.’ I just popped the cash register open and gave it to him. The main thing for me was just to try to keep my cool, give him what he wanted and get him to leave.
“I don’t want to get shot.”
Garcia, a lifelong resident of Marble, added that incidents like this “never used to happen.”
“We have an epidemic of crime and it always points back to meth or opium-related drugs,” he added.
This particular flare in that epidemic ended in the icy water at Belvie’s Curve, where always-been-this-way and never-used-to-happen collide, sending the incautious straight into the creek.