Mancy Pendergrass is a petite, 17-year-old junior at Brentwood High School. She makes straight A’s while working part-time, singing and recording Christian folk music. On Saturday, Feb. 17, Mancy says she and a friend were driving on lower Broadway, looking for a place to park in the bumper-to-bumper, mid-afternoon traffic. Navigating through a crosswalk, Mancy passed in front of a large man carrying a small child.
“You bitch,” the man allegedly yelled, moving forward and leveling a powerful, full-footed kick into the side of Mancy’s Plymouth Colt, about four inches below the left rear window. The kick left a 12-inch crease—about $460 worth of damage.
Mancy kept driving until her passenger, Chad Baus, told her to stop, jumped out of the car, and searched Second Avenue until he found the kicker and his friends at Mulligan’s Pub. Baus, 23, called the police. Baus didn’t recognize the kicker, but the cops apparently did. The large man had a private chat with the police, who filled out a report but erroneously told Mancy that, because she is 17 and because the car belongs to her mother, she could not prosecute the kicker unless her mother came with her to sign the warrant.
Connie Pendergrass of Franklin is a single mother and interior decorator who works part-time at Clearview Baptist Church. On Tuesday, she drove to Nashville to get a copy of the police report. No one could find it. The next day she returned, now armed with a complaint number, and obtained a copy of the report.
A police officer provided Connie Pendergrass with the kicker’s name and business address—an address on Murfreesboro Road. A judge explained that Mancy would have to be present to swear out a warrant. On Friday, Connie Pendergrass drove to Nashville a third time, this time accompanied by both her daughter and Chad Baus. The night magistrate looked at the name on the complaint and refused to issue a warrant, explaining that, under similar circumstances, he too might have kicked Mancy’s car. Mancy and her mother still didn’t know who the large man was.
“After that, I was ready to give up,” said Connie Pendergrass. But she told her friends at church about the incident, and they decided something should be done.
“There were a lot of issues here that needed to be addressed,” said Bob Norman, known to the Clearview Baptist congregation as “Brother Bob.” “I can’t imagine a grown man doing what he did to Mancy.”
Brother Bob himself telephoned the kicker and told him that the Pendergrass family had no desire to cause any trouble. Instead, he said, they just wanted to have the car fixed. The minister sent two estimates of the cost to repair the damage.
The next day, Connie Pendergrass got a telephone call from a Metro detective, who said he was investigating a complaint that Pendergrass had tried to extort money from the kicker. After a lengthy conversation, the detective became friendlier and told Pendergrass she had nothing to worry about.
On Monday, an anonymous source provided the Scene with a copy of the police report. Late Monday afternoon, the kicker asked a colleague, a friend of Scene editor Bruce Dobie, to call Dobie and ask him to make sure the paper would print the kicker’s version of the incident. Here it is:
“I was crossing Broadway with the light when a car turned through the crosswalk,” said Mike Turko, WKRN-Channel 2’s aggressive, high-decibel reporter, who regularly appears in station promotions kicking his way into an abandoned house. “My stepmother grabbed me and said, ‘Look out.’ The car passed inches in front of me and my child.”
“I jumped back and reflexively kicked the car.”
“My daughter could have been killed. I could have been seriously injured,” said Turko, who added that he doesn’t remember whether or not he said anything to Mancy. He said he has cooperated fully with the police and that he never heard from the Pendergrass family again until Brother Bob called asking for money.
On the air, Turko typically broadcasts only the victim’s side of the story and then gives the unnamed evildoer a week to correct the problem or face public humiliation on Turko’s “Wall of Shame.” In this case, he says, Mancy and her mother are trying to embarrass and cheat him.
“[Brother Bob] told me that we can take care of this quietly or we can go to the other media in town,” Turko charged. “I think it’s extortion, pure and simple.”
Bob Norman says Turko’s description of their conversation and his extortion charges are “utterly fantastic.”
Turko says he has turned the matter over to his insurance company, which will decide whether or not to pay Connie Pendergrass.
“Obviously,” he told the Scene, “I wish this had never happened.”
Odd and ends
Last month, both the Banner and The Tennessean reported that state Attorney General Charles Burson had issued an opinion affirming the public’s right to know the names of everyone who bought a luxury suite in the Oilers’ stadium.
Burson made no such ruling. Now available in law libraries, the attorney general’s opinion holds that the suite contracts may remain secret as long as the contracts are not held or reviewed by Metro officials.
“This office does not have sufficient facts,” the opinion concludes, “to determine whether any such review or receipt has taken place and therefore cannot conclusively resolve the status of these [suite] documents.”
Delayed darts to Toni Dew and Trebor Branstetter of the Banner, and Jeff Legwold and Larry Daughtrey of The Tennessean, all of whom rushed to trumpet an apparent First Amendment victory without bothering to read the fine print.
To comment or complain about the media, leave a message for Henry at the Scene (244-7989, ext. 445), or call him directly at 252-2363. Henry’s e-mail address is: hwalker@bccb.com.
