Head Shot by Burl Barer

guys).” An example that Paul St. Pierre shared with anyone who’d listen was the time he almost, or perhaps did, beat a squid to death with a primer chain belt made from the primer chain of a Harley, which he doubled over into a club.
    According to Ben Webb, Paul said he took to beating this guy, and was even hitting him with the edge of the chain in the direction it didn’t bend. He got so engrossed with “kicking the shit out of this guy” that he forgot to ask for the guy’s wallet. The guy threw it at him out of desperation to get him to stop beating him. He even yelled, “What do you want?” Paul was seeing red, and if his friends didn’t come pull him off, he would have beaten this poor guy to death. Paul said he didn’t know “if the guy made it or not.”
    The essential difference between Paul and Christopher St. Pierre was that Paul St. Pierre enjoyed violence, and actually sought out physical confrontations. He admitted relishing the sensation of hitting people, of causing them pain.
    Paul St. Pierre soon exercised a strong destructive influence over his younger brother. One significant incident involved Christopher St. Pierre being encouraged to gun down total strangers as some sort of rite of manhood. According to Andrew Webb, he and Paul St. Pierre were driving up Fifty-sixth from Portland Avenue. St. Pierre suddenly handed Webb his .45 automatic. “He told me to shoot these four black guys that were walking up toward McKinley,” Webb later recalled. “He said they were up to no good with their canes and purple hats. I gave him his gun back and said, ‘No, you’re crazy,’ and he just laughed and kept carrying on all the way to the house about how we should waste them.”
    Arriving home, Paul St. Pierre told his brother Chris and Donald Marshall that there were four black guys he wanted to waste, and Chris agreed to do it with him. The St. Pierres retrieved a .38 revolver stashed under the upstairs floorboards of Ericson’s Body Shop so they wouldn’t have to use Paul’s .45, and they took off “to get those four black guys.”
    Webb and Marshall waited, wondering if the St. Pierres were really going gunning for the black strangers. “About a half hour or forty-five minutes later,” said Webb, “they came running in, saying that they shot them.” Paul St. Pierre supposedly sighted the men on the opposite side of the street, and immediately pulled a U-turn so his little brother would be facing the human targets. “Chris unloaded the five-shot thirty-eight on them and said that he got two of them, but that they all went down to the ground,” Webb said. “Paul and Chris were bouncing all around and Paul was slapping Chris on the shoulder saying, ‘Good job, bro.’ Donald and I just looked at each other in amazement. We couldn’t believe our ears.”
    Paul St. Pierre, so the story goes, wanted to celebrate his little brother’s becoming a man. They all went to the store, bought some beer, and took off to share the good news. Their first celebrator y destination was the home of Wesley and Marty Webb. “We woke them up,” Andrew Webb later said, “and Paul told them what they had done. Wesley didn’t seem very happy about it and didn’t know what to say.”
    Marty was no more favorably impressed than her husband. “My God,” said Marty Webb when recounting the incident, “can you imagine someone coming to your house, and waking you up, so they can brag about shooting people? I was furious, and I didn’t trust those guys one bit.” According to Andrew Webb, his older brother took him aside as he was leaving. “Wesley told me that if what Paul said was true, he’s crazy and I had better watch out for him.”
    This incident of racial violence was not atypical of either the St. Pierres or Andrew Webb. Paul and Chris were violently