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He Walked Unarmed Into Darkness - They Had A Machete · True Nightmare Stories

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: A man left his house unarmed on the night of
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: April sixteenth, two thousand ten. He walked into a park
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: in northwest Glasgow that had no security cameras. He believed
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: he was going to settle a dispute. He never came home.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: That one fact, unarmed, no cameras, believed it was peaceful
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: is what makes this case so hard to let go of.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: There is something in it that feels like a story
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: we already know the ending to, except the people living
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: it had no idea. His name was Andrew Kerran Senior.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: He was forty one years old. He lived close enough
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: to Marry Hill Park that he could walk there in minutes,
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: and on that April night, that is exactly what he did.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: The reason he went was not complicated. His son had
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: been caught up in a fight with another family. Some
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: one had been hurt. Andrew Curran Senior did what fathers do.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: He picked up the phone, made a call and arranged
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: to meet the other side face to face, settle it,
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: talk it through, move on. He brought a friend, James McGregor,
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: fifty years old, a man who had known Andrew for years.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: MacGregor came along because that is what you do. When
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: a friend asks for support, neither of them brought weapons.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: That detail would matter enormously before the night was over.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: To understand what happened in mary Hill Park, you have
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: to understand what mary Hill is. It sits in the
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: northwest of Glasgow, a neighborhood that has carried the weight
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: of high unemployment in concentrated poverty for generations. More than
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: one hundred gangs operate in the surrounding streets. Not be
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: kind with hierarchies and chains of command. These are hyper local,
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: organized street by street, built out of proximity and shared
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: grievance rather than leadership or ideology. There is no one
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: person to negotiate with. There is no structure that can
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: be pressured from the outside. In a place like that,
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: Conflict does not travel through formal channels. It travels through families,
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: through streets, through the unspoken arithmetic of who owes what
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: to whom, And it accelerates fast. What accelerated this way?
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: One started with something almost absurdly small. A teenager named
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: Zack Malavin, seventeen years old, was drinking Buckfast, a cheap
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: fortified wine that has become practically synonymous with street violence
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: in Glasgow. When someone contaminated his drink. That someone was
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: Paul Brown, a friend of Andrew Kerr's son. Brown urinated
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: into the bottle. Zack Malavin responded by stabbing Paul Brown.
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: Someone from the current site then tried to run Zach
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: over with a car. In the space of hours, a
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: juvenile prank had escalated into a stabbing and an attempted
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: vehicle assault. Andrew Kerrn Senior was not involved in any
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: of those incidents. He was the father, the adult in
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: the room, and he made the decision that adults often
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: make in situations like this. He reached out to the
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: Malavin family directly. He asked to meet. He wanted to
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: de escalate before anyone else got hurt. The Malavins agreed.
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: The location they chose was mary Hill Park. That specific
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: detail appeared later at the High Court of Glasgow. The
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: park was selected, according to reporting on the trial, because
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: it had no CCTV coverage, no cameras, no record, just
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: darkness and open ground and whatever each side brought with them.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: Andrew Currn Senior brought nothing. What the Malvern's side brought
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: to that meeting would not be confirmed publicly until the trial,
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: but the confirmation when it came reframed everything Andrew kerr
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: And Senior had believed about that night. He had thought
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: he was walking into a conversation. He was walking into
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: something else entirely, and he had no way of knowing
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: that until it was too late. What happened next in
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: that park is the reason this case still sits in
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: the memory of every one who was connected to marry
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: Hill in two thousand and ten, not just because of
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: what was done, but because of who was there to
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: see it. The night of April sixteenth, two thousand ten
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: was called the way Glasgow Knights always are, not dramatically,
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: just persistently, the kind of cold that settles into your
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: coat before you notice it. Andrew Kerr And Senior walked
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: into merry Hill Park some time after dark. No camera
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: recorded his entry, No camera recorded anything that happened inside
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: those gates that night. That absence was not an accident.
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: The conflict that brought him there had started small, insulting
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: the almost absurdly small. A few days earlier, a young
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: man named Paul Brown, a friend of Andrew Kerr And Junior,
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: had urinated into Zach Malavin's drink. Zach was seventeen years old.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: His drink was buck Fast, a cheap, fortified wine that
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: runs through certain parts of Glasgow the way tap water
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: runs through everywhere else. The act was degrading and deliberate.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: Zach's response was immediate. He pulled out a knife and
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: stabbed Paul Brown. Then someone on the current side tried
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: to run Zach over the car. Two acts of violence
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: back to back in the compressed geography of mary Hill,
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: and now the situation had a wait that neither side
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: could simply walk away from. That is when Andrew kerr
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: And Senior made the call. He reached out to the
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: Malavin family. His intention, according to journalists who later covered
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: the case, was straightforward. He wanted to resolve the dispute
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: before it escalated further. He was forty one years old,
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: he was a father. He had watched two young men
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: heard each other over something that should have ended with
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: an apology. He believed that adults talking could stop where
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: teenagers had started. The Malavins agreed to meet. The location
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: they settled on was mary Hill Park, a park close
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: to where the Kurrns lived, A park with no closed
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: circuit television cameras at detail that at the time may
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: have seemed like nothing more than a neutral, quiet place
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: to talk. The rational explanation for choosing that park stops
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: working right there, because mary Hill Park's lack of cameras
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: was not accidental. Geography. That neighborhood had been surveyed. People
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: who lived there knew exactly which corners were watched and
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: which ones weren't. The park was chosen. Remember that Andrew
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: Kerns Senior arrived unarmed. James McGregor, his friend fifty years old,
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: came with him, Two men who came to talk, Two
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: men who brought nothing that could be used as a weapon.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: The evidence presented later at the High Court in Glasgow
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: confirmed this. No weapon was recovered from either man. No
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: testimony placed a weapon in their hands. They walked into
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: that park with nothing but the belief that the other
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: side was coming to do the same. They were not.
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: What the Malavin's side brought to that park was confirmed
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: piece by piece during the trial. A shotgun, machetes, a sword,
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: a crossbow, four distinct categories of weapon carried to a
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: meeting that had been framed as a mediation. Let that
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: land for a moment. This was not a group of
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: men who arrived and things escalated into violence. They came
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: prepared for every range of engagement, a firearm for distance,
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: blades for close quarters, a crossbow somewhere in between. Whatever
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: Andrew curR and Senior believed that meeting was, the people
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: on the other side of it had decided days or
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: hours in advance what it was going to become. The
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: attack happened in the dark, inside a park, with no cameras,
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: with no neutral witnesses who would later speak publicly. What
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: is known from a trial testimony is this, Andrew Curran
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: Senior was attacked with a machete. The wounds were to
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: his neck and stomach. He put his hands to his throat.
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: His son, Andrew Curran Junior, was there. He saw it.
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: A boy watched his father press both hands against his
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: own neck while blood came through his fingers, And there
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: was nothing in that park that could have stopped it.
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: Andrew Curran Senior died at the scene. James MacGregor survived,
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: but the word survived does not carry its full weight
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: here without the specifics. MacGregor was stabbed with a sword.
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: He was also shot with the crossbow. The injuries he
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: sustained produced permanent disfigurement. A physical record of that night
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: that he carries forward into every day. What has come
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: since the court confirmed this? It was not disputed. A
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: man who came to support his friend in a peaceful
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: conversation left that park changed in a way that no
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: amount of time will reverse. The son who witnessed all
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: of this walked out of marry Hill Park carrying something
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: that also will not reverse. He was a teenager whose
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: father had gone to that meeting specifically because of a
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: conflict that started with him, because of Paul Brown, because
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: of Buckfast, and a stupid, humiliating act that cost a
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: forty one year old man his life. There is no
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: version of this story where everything makes sense. In the
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: weeks after Andrew Current's Senior's death, the question that investigators
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: and journalists returned to was the same one that the
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: community had already answered among themselves. Who did this and why?
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: And what did they know before it happened. The answer
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: to the first part was not hidden. According to journalists
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: who covered the case, the entire community knew within two
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: phone calls who had been in that park. Mary Hill
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: is not a large place. The families were known, the
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: grievance was known, The weapons that had been brought were
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: the kind of detail that spreads through a neighborhood before
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: a police report is even filed. But knowing and testifying
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: our two entirely different things. In mary Hill, the rational
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: explanation for the silence that witnesses feared retaliation is not
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: a failure of logic. It is accurate, and it became
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: even more accurate in real time. The trial of Angus
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: Malavin twenty six, Zach Malavin seventeen at the time of
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: the crime, and Stephen Sooley twenty one concluded with guilty
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: verdicts at the High Court in Glasgow. Angus received seventeen
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: years from murder, Zach received eighteen. Suley was convicted of
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: culpable homicide and received seven years. All three were also
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: convicted for the attack on James McGregor. The verdicts were delivered,
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: the family left the court house. Within four hours, a
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: shot gun was fired through a window on Marry Hill Road,
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: one hundred fifty ballots. The ballistic analysis recovered them from
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: walls and furniture in a home where children had been sleeping.
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: In those same four hours, another man was stabbed on
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: Maryhill Road. A separate individual was threatened inside their car
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: four hours before the current family had time to return
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: from the court house to the neighborhood where Andrew senor
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: had lived. The streets had already delivered their responds to
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: the verdict. The rational explanation that these were unrelated incidents
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: collapses when you look at the timing, the same street,
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: the same night, the same four hour window after a
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: murder conviction. Nothing about that sequence is coincidental, and yet
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: no confirmed link was publicly established between the perpetrators of
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: those post verdict attacks and a Malavin case. The violence
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: simply happened as it had always happened in mary Hill,
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: in the spaces between what can be proven and what
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: everyone already knows. That is the pattern, that has always
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: been the pattern. And Andrew Kerran Junior, the son who
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: was in that park, the son whose friendship with Paul
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: Brown had set the entire chain in motion, was still
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: living inside it. The verdicts came down in the High
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: Court of Glasgow. Zach Malavin, seventeen years old at the
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: time of the killing, received eighteen years. His brother Angus
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: received seventeen. Stephen Sooley, convicted of culpable homicide rather than murder,
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: received seven. All three were all so convicted for what
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: they did to James McGregor that night in marry Hill Park.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: The stabbing, the cross bow bolt, the permanent disfigurement that
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: no sentence would reverse. The court room delivered its judgment.
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: The street delivered its own answer. Within four hours, before
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: the Currant family had even left a court building, a
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: shot gun was fired through a window on Marry Hill
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: Road one hundred fifty Pellets. Children were sleeping in that house.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: A man was stabbed on the same road the same night.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: Another person was threatened at knife point while sitting in
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: their car. None of it was random. All of it
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: arrived in the hours between the verdict and nightfall, as
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: if timed to a clock the community had been reading
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: for years. That is what justice looked like from inside
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: Mary Hill. A gavel in one room, a shotgun through
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: a window in another. James MacGregor survived. He carried the
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: evidence of that night on his face for the rest
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: of his life. The disfigurement confirmed in court was not
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: something a sentence erased or a verdict reversed. He went
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: to that park to support a friend. He came out
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: permanently altered. His name appeared in the trial, then disappeared
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: in the trial, then disappeared from public record. What happened
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: to him after is not documented. That absence is its
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: own kind of weight. When I first read through the
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: full sequence of what followed the verdicts, I had to
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: stop at the detail about the children sleeping, Not because
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: it was the most violent element. It wasn't, but because
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: it made clear that the message wasn't aimed at the court.
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: It was aimed at anyone who had been near the
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: court room that day, anyone who might have spoken, anyone
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: who was watching. The community had already understood this calculus
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: long before the shooting. Journalists who covered the case noted
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: that within two phone calls of the attack on the
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: night of April sixteenth, two thousand ten, the entire mary
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: Hillariyan knew who had killed Andrew Kerr and Sor. The
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: names were not a mystery, The silence was not a mystery.
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: The silence was not confusion. It was a calculation that
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: every person in that neighborhood ran privately speak, and the
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: window with children sleeping behind it might be yours. That
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: is the architecture of violence in places like mary Hill,
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: not chaos, not randomness, a system informal and unwritten that
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: enforces itself through proximity and speed. Then came the detail
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: that doesn't release. Approximately one month after the convictions, Andrew
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: Kerran Junior was attacked on brother's drive in Somerston. He
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: was stabbed multiple times in the head with a machete,
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: the same category of weapon that had killed his father.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: The attack happened meters from where Andrew kerr And Senior
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: had died. The identity of the person who attacked him
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: was not confirmed in the available record. He survived. That
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: is the only certainty the record provides. A son who
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: watched his father press his hands to his throat at
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: marry Hill Park was attacked with a machete on the
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: street beside that park, one month after the men convicted
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: of his father's murder was sentenced. The geography did not change,
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: the weapon did not change. The family name did not change.
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: The only thing that changed was the date. There is
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: a version of this story where the convictions are the ending.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: Three men sent tinst two for murder, one for culpable homicide,
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: the court record closes, the case moves into archive. That
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: version does not hold the Malavin brothers and Stephen Sooley
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: will serve their sentences. The High Court rendered its verdict
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: on what happened in Maryhill Park on the night of
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: April sixteenth, two thousand ten. That verdict is real and
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: it is documented, but a verdict is not the same
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: thing as a conclusion. The shotgun fired through a window
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: four hours after sentencing was not a conclusion. The man
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: stabbed on marry Hill Road that same night was not
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: a conclusion. Andrew Kerran Junior attacked with a machete on
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: Rother's Drive approximately one month later was not a conclusion.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: The machete connects the beginning to the end in a
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: way the court could not address. It was the weapon
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: used to kill Andrew senor in the park. It was
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: the weapon used against Andrew Junior on the street beside
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: that park. No one has publicly confirmed who ordered or
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: carried out that second attack. The record holds the fact
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: of it and leaves the authorship blank. Andrew Kerran Senior
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: walked into marry Hill Park on the night of April sixteenth,
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: believing he was going to settle a dispute with words.
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: He was forty one years old, he was unarmed. He
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: did not come back. What remains is this a father
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: tried to protect his son from the consequences of a
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: single stupid act at a party, and that attempt cost
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: him his life. His son survived the night his father died.
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: His son survived the attack. One month after the convictions.
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: The record confirms both survivals and explains neither the attack
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: nor its origin. Marry Hill Park has no cameras. It
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: never recorded the moment Andrew Current Senior arrived. It never
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: recorded what happened to him. There. Somewhere in that darkness
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: under the trees that the court testimony placed him beneath,
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: a man of forty one held his own throat and fell.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: His son was standing close enough to see it. A
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: month later, on a street a few meters away, that
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: same son was found with machette wounds to his head.
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: No camera recorded that either. This show is made by
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: Obamedia