David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

known by you and I as Protestant people. Well today is no different from 1795. There is a Pope on the throne, a Polish Pope who was around in the days of Hitler and the concentration camps of Auschwitz when they stood back and watched thousands go out to death without one word of condemnation.
    4  There are many versions of this children’s rhyme, of course. A slightly less offensive version is sung by fans of Manchester United about their archrival Liverpool. (A “scouser,” incidentally, refers to someone from Liverpool or who speaks with the Liverpudlian accent. The Beatles were scousers.)
    Build a bonfire, build a bonfire,
    Put the scousers on the top,
    Put the city in the middle,
    And we’ll burn the fuckin’ lot.
    As you might expect, numerous highly enthusiastic renditions of this rhyme are available on YouTube.
    5  The next day, a Loyalist mob burned the Catholic neighborhood along Bombay Street to the ground. The Loyalists, who are fond of their verse, had a ditty for that attack as well:
    On the 15th of August, we took a little trip
    Up along Bombay Street and burned out all the shit.
    We took a little petrol, and we took a little gun
    And we fought the bloody Fenians till we had them on the run.
    6  As Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams would say years later, the curfew’s result was that “thousands of people…who had never had any time for physical force now accepted it as a practical necessity.”
    7  By the way, things didn’t get much better in 1973. The British cracked down even harder that year, and there were 171 civilians killed, 5,018 shootings, 1,007 explosions, 1,317 armed robberies, and 17.2 tons of explosives seized by the army.
    8  Six years later, Drumm was shot to death in her bed by Protestant extremists while she was being treated at Mater Hospital in Belfast.
    9  One of the many legends of the Lower Falls curfew is that the prams pushed by marchers had two purposes. The first was to bring milk and bread into the Lower Falls. The second was to take guns and explosives out—past the unsuspecting eyes of the British Army.

1.
    One weekend in June of 1992, Mike Reynolds’s daughter came home from college to go to a wedding. She was eighteen, with long honey-blond hair. Her name was Kimber. She was a student at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles. Home was Fresno, several hours to the north, in California’s Central Valley. After the wedding, she stayed on to have dinner with an old friend, Greg Calderon. She was wearing shorts and boots and her father’s red-and-black-checked sports coat.
    Reynolds and Calderon ate at the Daily Planet restaurant, in Fresno’s Tower District. They had coffee and then wandered back to her Isuzu. It was 10:41 p.m. Reynolds opened the passenger door for Calderon, then walked around the car to the driver’s side. As she did, two young men on a stolen Kawasaki motorcycle moved slowly out of a parking lot just down the street. They were wearing helmets with shaded visors. The driver, Joe Davis, had a long list of drug and gun convictions. He had just been paroled from Wasco State Prison after serving time for auto theft. On the back of the motorcycle was Douglas Walker. Walker had been in and out of jail seven times. Both men were crystal-meth addicts. Earlier in the evening, they had attempted a carjacking on Shaw Avenue, Fresno’s main thoroughfare. “I wasn’t really thinking much a nothing, you know,” Walker would say months later when asked about his state of mind that night. “When it happens, it happens, you know. It just happened suddenly. We were just out doing what we do. I mean, that’s all I can tell you.”
    Walker and Davis pulled up alongside the Isuzu, using the weight of the motorcycle to pin Reynolds against her car. Calderon jumped out of the passenger’s seat, running around the back of the car. Walker blocked his way. Davis grabbed at Reynolds’s purse. He pulled out a .357 magnum handgun and placed it against her right ear. She resisted. He fired. Davis and Walker jumped back on the motorcycle and sped through a red light. People came running out of the Daily Planet. Someone tried to stanch the bleeding. Calderon drove back to Reynolds’s parents’ house but couldn’t wake them. He called and got their answering machine. Finally, at two-thirty in the morning, he got through. Mike Reynolds heard his wife cry out, “In the head! She’s been shot in the head!” Kimber died a day