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Although a police report reprinted in this article says he's 5'9", which isn't that short. Also, I'm going to copy a hilarious block of text from that article, which had me shaking with laughter.
I'd been shuffling around a surprisingly pretty, sunny, newly renovated downtown Lafayette for a couple of days, scraping at whatever I could find. I saw the house where he grew up. I looked at his old yearbook pictures in the public library. Everyone had his or her Axl story. He stole a TV from that house there. Here's where he tried to ride his skateboard on the back of a car and fell and got road rash all up his arm. He came out of this motel with a half-naked woman and some older guys were looking at her and one of 'em threw down a cigarette, not meaning anything by it, but Axl freaked out and flipped 'em off and they beat the crap out of him. Hard to document any of this stuff. Still, enough Wanted On Warrant reports exist for Axl's Indiana years to lend credence to the claim that the city cops and county troopers pretty much felt justified, and technically speaking were justified, in picking him up and hassling him whenever they spotted him out. One doubts he left the house much that they didn't spot him, what with the long, fine, flowing red hair. Must have been sweet to be Axl.
I went to the city cops. They've mellowed along with the town. In fact, they were friendly. They found and processed the negatives of some heretofore unknown mug shots for me, from '80 and '82, the latter of which (the one where he's shirtless) is an anonymous American masterpiece. Then the ladies in the records department rummaged some and came back with this report, which I've never seen mentioned in any of the bios or online or anything. It's written by an officer signing himself "1—4." I took it back to the Holiday Inn and spent the rest of the afternoon reading. Let's call it The Sheidler Incident. It begins:
FULL NAME: BAILEY, WILLIAM BRUCE…
ALIASES: BILL BAILEY…
CURRENT PLACE OF EMPLOYMENT: SELF EMPLOYED—BAND
CHARGE: W[ANTED]O[N]W[ARRANT]BATTERY…
AGE: 18; HEIGHT: 5'9"; WEIGHT: 149
HAIR: RED; EYES: GRN; BUILD: SLENDER; COMPLEXION: FAIR…
Here's how it all went down that day—allegedly. I'm about to cherry-pick the pivotal bits. A little kid named Scott Sheidler was riding his bike in front of an older kid named Dana Gregory's house. He made skid marks on the sidewalk. Dana Gregory ran out, picked Scott up under the armpits, kicked over his bike, and ordered the boy To get on his hands and knees and scrub the skid marks off the sidewalk. The kid went squealing to his old man, Tom Sheidler. Tom Sheidler went to Gregory and asked if it was true, what Scotty had said. Dana Gregory said, "Yes and I'm going to beat the fuck out of you." The mom, Marleen, ran up to the scene and began to shout. Around the same time, Bill Bailey appeared, red, green, slender, and fair. And here I need to let the report take over, if only temporarily, as I can't begin to simulate its succinctness or authority:
M. Sheidler stated that Bailey was also arguing with Sheidler and that he was using the "F" word in front of her kids. M. Sheidler stated that she went up to Bailey and pointed her finger at Bailey and told him not to use the "F" word in front of her kids. M. Sheidler stated that Bailey, who has a splint on his arm, then struck her on the arm and neck with the splint. I looked at M. Sheidler and could see some red marks on her arm and neck which could have been made by being struck.
This matter of which hand it was subsumes the narrative for a stretch. Marleen Sheidler says "with the splint," and little Scott says "with a splint," but Dana Gregory's younger brother Chris 15 says "with the opposite hand that his splint is on" (adding that Bailey struck Sheidler in response to "Sheidler Strikeing [sic]" him). Bill Bailey himself then goes on to say that he "struck M. SHEIDLER in the FACE with his LEFT HAND the hand with out the SPLINT." Once again, this only after "MARLEEN SHEIDLER struck him in the face" (though seconds earlier, by his own admission, he'd told her "to keep her fucking brats at home"). The story ends with a strangely affecting suddenness: "BAILEY stated SHEIDLER then jumped at him and fell on his face, he then left and went home…"
The thing I couldn't stop wondering as I read it over was: Why were they so freaked out about the skid marks? Is making skid marks on the sidewalk a bad thing to do? It makes me think I spent half my childhood inadvertently infuriating my entire neighborhood.
― Poliopolice, Thursday, 25 October 2012 17:38 (eleven years ago) link
one month passes...