It’s 2:09 a.m. on Saturday night, technically Sunday morning, and Front Street in downtown Wilmington is packed with people, many heavily intoxicated, as bars empty out after last call. People are carousing, laughing and joking. They hang on each other, backslapping and hugging, headed towards home or to catch a ride share (or, hopefully, only if they're the designated driver, to find their own vehicle).
But the air has a volatile charge, and all that merriment can shift in a second. A mischosen word, a glancing shoulder check, or just a genuine belligerent with enough chemical courage to pick an unwise fight — blink and you miss the change.
Take a freeze frame of the instant: it’s a yawn, or a laugh, or a scream. You’d only really know in retrospect what’s about to happen.
Sometimes, most times, it's just a scuffle, a burst of bravado that's quickly exhausted. Other times it's something worse. Cops and deputies, bouncers and bartenders, they know the signs better than most. Sometimes you spot an obvious culprit — ‘they’re gonna be trouble’ — but sometimes it’s more of a feeling. Maybe it’s been unseasonably hot and dry, maybe there are too many day drinkers still hanging around late into the evening, maybe something just seems off.
Sometimes it comes out of nowhere.
*
It’s 2:10 a.m., and there are now three or four people fighting in Front Street, a scrum of kicking, punching, and shouting in the middle of the road. Some passerbys are stopping, some are still pushing through indifferently; cars are trying to make their way past the ruckus.
Cops, who are less than a block away, get there in seconds. One unloads a burst of pepper spray (another is exposed to it, hampering their ability to help), as people disperse, taking off in several directions. Someone shouts, “Oh my god,” someone else taunts, “What’s up, what’s up, you want more of that?”
A young man stands on the sidewalk to the side, his face shockingly pale, blood pouring from his neck, splattering on his white sneakers and the pavement. He rasps what sounds like, “I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m dead.” It becomes clear that this wasn’t just a brawl; at least two people have been stabbed.
“Oh my god,” someone says, over and over again.
The cops seem torn between chasing after people — who might be suspects or victims — controlling the scene, calling in medics, and helping the gravely wounded young man. While they scramble to find protective gloves and get them on, another young man shows up, takes off his t-shirt, lays the injured man down on the ground, and presses his shirt to the wound. The cops continue to struggle with their gloves. Blood pools on the sidewalk. Eventually, they get the gloves on, trying their best to keep the man alive while EMS rushes to the scene.
It’s been thirty seconds, more or less, captured on frantic, unsteady video that will go viral in the coming hours and days.
At 2:12 a.m., just a block away, a young woman is stabbed. Some cops stay with the young man, waiting for medics to arrive. Others run through the throng of people to a brand new crime scene.
“It was fucking pandemonium,” a source would tell me later.
*
The young woman suffers life-threatening injuries but survives. Another man is seriously injured. Both are reportedly recovering in the hospital.
Hospital staff work for hours to save the life of the man who had been stabbed in the neck, but eventually he succumbs to his injuries. It’s not clear if he ever had a chance, given the severity of his wounds.
Lance Corporal Daniel Montano, a U.S. Marine with the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines Regiment who had been stationed at Camp LeJeune, was 21 years old. Described as a devoted son and brother, he graduated from Sultana High School in Hesperia, California, just a few years ago. His family tells a local news station his death has left them “devastated and unprepared” for the emotional and financial burden of his passing.
*
By Sunday afternoon, WECT had a brief report on the stabbings, with the limited amount of information that the Wilmington Police Department said it could release at that point. Monday, around noon, the police released a little more.
At that point, 36 hours after the stabbings, rumors were running rampant: people claiming it was a coordinated attack, with more victims than were being reported, that it was being ‘covered up’ to protect the Azalea Festival, that local news was in cahoots with the police department, and was suppressing vital information. People were making sweeping and unfounded claims on political and racial bases, and conflating these incidents with wildly different other situations.
It was almost all bullshit, but with limited comment from the police, it traveled across Wilmington like wildfire.
By Tuesday, I got the sense that local news outlets, especially TV news, which often bear the brunt of the public’s frustration when there’s an information vacuum, were getting frustrated. They wanted Wilmington Police Chief Ryan Zuidema to get on camera and tell the public whatever he could but, depending on whom you ask, he either didn’t want to or didn’t have anything he could say. I’ve heard that some went over his head to the city, even to Mayor Bill Saffo, demanding an interview. Tensions ran very high.
Tuesday evening, WPD released information on a person of interest and asked for the public’s help — and told local news outlets that the chief would make himself available for 15-minute one-on-one interviews with any interested news outlet the next day. (I signed up for a slot right away.)
Pressed for time, we skipped the softball questions and went right to the tougher ones: why did it take so long to put out information, was there an interest in protecting the Azlaea Festival, why didn’t the cops on the scene provide first aid faster, and – more generally – was there anything that could have been done differently?
To his credit, Chief Zuidema didn’t blanch at any of these; he didn’t take them personally, refuse to respond to them, or accuse the reporters of doing a ‘gotcha’ story. He just answered the questions, telling me that he stood behind his officers’ actions completely, and that given the resources he had, he didn’t see anything they should have done differently.
That was a refreshing change from the past chief, who would call up reporters’ bosses and threaten them if he didn’t like a story.
That doesn’t mean everyone was happy with his responses. Some, including me, felt like WPD could have done more to get out in front of the conspiracy theorists and the influencers who were either doing their ‘just asking questions’ routine or actively spreading misinformation. A few sentences in a WPD press release weren’t cutting it. I understood it was an active investigation, and that their top priorities were finding a killer and contacting victims’ family members, but it was hard to watch the rumor mill churn, largely unimpeded.
But even more so, I think people struggled with Zuidema’s explanation for the delay in rendering first aid, which was that WPD protocol is to put on personal protective equipment when there’s blood or other bodily fluids involved. While he painted a compelling picture of the chaotic scene — the uncertainty about other victims or suspects, the need to coordinate with EMS and control the scene, the officer disabled by pepper spray – and offered a logical explanation about the risk of blood-borne pathogens, some people just couldn’t unsee the video: a man bleeding to death while four cops, at one point, stood just feet away. It didn’t matter that, according to Zuidema, just moments after the video ended, they did render aid — people had their hearts broken by that video, and there was no fixing that.
I'm struggling with it myself, if I’m honest. I know better than to armchair quarterback – as Zuidema put it — a scenario like this, especially one that I’ve only seen partially on video. There was a lot I didn’t see. I also know that, in our litigious age, many government leaders — city managers, police chiefs, elected officials — are very hesitant to express doubt or publicly criticize employees, because all of that can be used in lawsuits.
Put it this way, I want to take Zuidema at his word, and I was grateful for the opportunity to sit down with him this week. But I understand why not everyone was won over.
*
On Thursday, I talked to a few Marines who had gathered at a memorial that had been set up on North Front Street at the spot where Montano had been seen, in perhaps his last conscious moments, during that haunting video.
As we talked, they expressed mixed feelings about the news coverage, the police response, and public reaction (which I thought was fair). But most of all, they were mourning Montano. One of them told me that while they’d been hit hard because Montano was a fellow Marine, the deeper tragedy was how young he was, how promising, and how catastrophically and randomly an evening out to blow off steam had turned fatal. They'd been him, on leave with friends, sometimes right here in Wilmington; they'd done it countless times — some of the best times. This seemed inscrutable.
One of them told me that, as a Marine, he always tried to find something to be upbeat about, even in really dire situations. He said that, as terrible as it was to watch the video, he’d managed to find one positive thing: the final moments where that second young man, who he said was a fellow Marine, took off his t-shirt, laid Montano on the ground, pressed the shirt against his neck, and held his head against Montano's.
"I'm glad someone was there with him," he told me. "That's the Marines. No race, no color, no creed — that doesn't matter."
After days of reading people’s attempts to turn this tragedy into one political argument or another, that was a breath of fresh air, grim as it may sound.
*
Violence downtown always gets a different reaction than it does when it takes place in other parts of the city — for good reasons and bad.
To be blunt, I’ve heard that much of affluent White Wilmington seems largely indifferent when someone shoots into a home in Creekwood or overdoses on a lethal fentanyl-spiked dose in Houston Moore, compared to when it happens in front of their favorite restaurant downtown. The socio-economic and racial differences between the victims of those crimes and the majority of the city’s viewing and reading public is, well, pretty conspicuous.
And it’s possible to see the extra attention that downtown crime gets through that lens. In short: this affects the establishment class – people who dine at Wilmington’s excellent downtown restaurants and then maybe go to the theatre, elected officials who sometimes seem to hear downtown concerns louder than others, and those who are preeminently concerned with Wilmington’s public image as it affects tourism income.
I think some of that is fair.
But I also think there are good reasons to pay attention to downtown crime. For one, the crowds make it likely that more people will be injured if there’s a shooting or other violent incident.
For another, like it or not, Wilmington is a service-industry town, and there are a lot of jobs — and a lot of revenue — that depend on downtown. Bad PR for downtown doesn’t just hurt the mucky mucks; it hurts servers, cooks, bartenders, etc. I’ve seen some rough times for downtown restaurants through the eyes of waiters and waitresses, restless scanning their empty section and glancing anxiously at the clock.
Lastly, when it comes to downtown and crime, there’s at least some predictability.
To be clear, downtown Wilmington isn't a war zone; it's not the East Village in the 1970s. But bad things do happen sometimes. Put that many bars in one half square mile, and there will be some statistical percentage of the population that causes trouble. Things will hit critical mass. That’s the whole reason we have a downtown task force between WPD and the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office – a violent crime could happen on any block, in any zip code, but the likelihood of something happening downtown is higher. To some extent, we hope that predicability means preventability — that visible law enforcement acts as a deterrent.
But that is obviously not enough. As Chief Zuidema told me, there were multiple officers visible on the block where Daniel Montano was stabbed — and his killer was clearly undeterred.
Early Saturday morning, WPD announced it had arrested 47-year-old Davy Spencer for Montano’s killing. Spencer has a long criminal record, going back three decades. He's being held without bond and is due in court on Monday afternoon. (It's not yet officially confirmed if Spencer is the taunting figure seen and heard in the video that captured part of the incident.)
We may get some answers about what happened at his first appearance, but it may take a long time to find out why. We may never really find out.
*
Taking a cue from the Marines I talked to on Thursday, I wanted to find something positive that could come out of last weekend’s tragedy. And maybe that is another attempt to talk about violence in our community, and what we can do about it.
But I don’t think that be based solely on Montano’s death, the unrelated stabbing that took place minutes later, the police shooting of Edilberto Espinoza-Sierra last month, or the shooting death of Demetria Ingram the same night — because while all of these have been collated into an image of ‘violence in Wilmington,’ they’re all unique stories. Some people pull the camera back further and include issues with unhoused and mentally ill, painting a picture of ‘decadence and chaos’ in Wilmington, an image that is emotionally powerful, sweeping, but lacking detail or nuance.
These things all feel related because they’re happening in our community, and we turn to the same news outlets for information, and the same police forces for answers, and the same elected officials for accountability — and that makes it feel like more than the sum of its parts. But that doesn’t mean there will be one answer, one solution to it all.
I’ve heard people call for more officers, stricter laws, tougher prosecutors, and more federal prosecution (where judges have far more discretion than those under the state’s structured sentencing). I’ve seen suggestions of curfews, reduced bar hours, and crackdowns on establishments that overserve or draw 'repeat offenders.' I’ve heard people suggest cops have more body armor, heavier firepower, drones, and other autonomous robots — some of that gets pretty dystopian.
I’ve also heard requests for better de-escalation, mental health, and first aid training and resources for cops, for more social workers (WPD is working on that), outreach programs, and shelters. I’ve heard people say it starts in the home with more discipline, more accountability — and I’ve heard people say there are too many families broken by poverty, drugs (and the war on drugs), and crime.
Each of these might be the key to addressing or at least understanding one particular incident; some suggested fixes might make certain situations worse, or have no effect. It depends on the what and why. It depends on how we answer questions like, 'what makes a man stab another man, or a woman stab another woman?'
Is it too much alcohol or drugs, a bad upbringing, a lack of personal responsibility, the peer pressure of gang life, a creeping black-pilled nihilism in young adults, financial desperation, or unchecked mental illness?
There’s a different answer every time.
In the aggregate, it’s Hieronymus Bosch, with dozens of horrors on one canvas. It’s everything that plagues us, all our flaws, all our demons.
As John Milton gave us the word in Paradise Lost, it’s pandemonium.
*
Again, there are no easy answers, no panacea for pandemonium, as it were.
Thus, I hope people will be wary of the simple arguments. For example, if only the right people had been elected, things would be better. It will take more than that. It will take more than money, too. We have coffers too deep to reach the bottom of in New Hanover County, but that has not insulated us from violence and crime. It will certainly take more than thoughts and prayers, more than Jeremiads on Substack and memes on Facebook, and, yes, certainly more than columns from this local journalist.
It will take conversation, and compromise, and a willingness to try new things. That, at least, is my hope. After all, hope is also a requirement, necessary though insufficient on its own.
