At 2:14 in the morning, bikers arrived at a man’s house, and he felt alarmed for his safety and his daughter’s. He first heard the sound of motorcycles—five or six of them—quietly coming down the gravel road with their headlights off. Soon after, he heard a chain rattling. The man had been through a tough month. Three weeks earlier, his daughter Kayla had returned home with her jaw wired shut, having just left her boyfriend, Travis. Before she left, Travis made a threatening remark that she only shared with the police after they asked her twice. He said that if she ever left him, he would come to her father’s house and burn it down with both of them inside. A judge had recently released Travis on $5,000 bail.
When the man heard the chain on his steel gate, he felt fear. He took his 12-gauge shotgun from the closet and told Kayla to lock herself in the bathroom. Looking out the front window, he saw several large men in leather vests at the end of his driveway. One of them was using a heavy logging chain to secure the gate, trapping them inside. The man felt shaky and thought of Travis’s threat as he called 911, only to be told that a deputy would take twenty-five minutes to arrive because they lived far from town. Realizing he couldn’t wait that long, he stepped onto the porch and racked the shotgun to make his presence known, warning them to leave.
Instead of retreating, the bikers turned their bikes around, directing their headlights onto the road. They formed a line in front of the gate, facing away from him. Then, he noticed headlights from a truck a quarter-mile down the road. One biker approached and raised his hands, saying they didn’t chain the gate to keep him in but to protect them from the man in the truck, who reportedly had gas cans and had been parked there for twenty minutes. The biker identified himself as Hollis, also known as Deacon, and mentioned he had been waiting for the truck driver to make a mistake where someone could see it.
The man still held his gun, unsure. He was 61 years old, had years of experience working for an electric company, and had lost a wife. He wasn’t quick to trust someone just because they spoke calmly. However, after looking at the truck’s headlights, he began to believe Deacon. When he asked how Deacon knew about the truck, Deacon explained he had followed the driver after seeing him fill up gas cans earlier that night.
Kayla appeared in the doorway, holding a dry-erase board. Unable to speak much with her jaw wired, she wrote the word “TRAVIS?” on it. The man nodded, and she looked pale. He urged her to go back inside, but she stood frozen, watching the bikers. The truck then slowly moved forward over the gravel. The bikers tensed up, and Deacon crossed his arms, ready for whatever might happen next. The man recognized the truck as it approached.
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Source: bikersbyte.com, by David Hog