A Streamer Predicted He Could Kill a Black Person and Get Away With It. Thousands Watched. When He Shot Someone, the Real Story Began.

Joshua Fox put it to me plainly: “I just don’t wanna be known as the Black guy Chud the Builder shot.” His point is easy to empathize with. It’s also hard to honor, considering the nature of my work. The reason I was talking to him was because he’d been shot by Chud the Builder. But, at a time when Fox is the subject of an online demonization campaign by Chud’s defenders, I wanted to hear his side of the story. That, as you’ll learn, was difficult to do. But before I spoke with Fox—the victim and protagonist in this terrifying saga who is just now breaking his silence—I spent months tracking his would-be shooter online: a depraved, attention-seeking opportunist who coveted the infamy of killing a Black man. Over the past two years, Dalton Levi Eatherly, a 29-year-old contractor turned ragebait streamer, concocted a digital persona known as “Chud the Builder,” now notorious in far-right circles for producing N-word outrage-porn rooted in crude free-speech absolutism that contends that if Black people can say the N-word, so can we, because this is America, goddamnit! Chud’s money-making blueprint involved filming himself hunting down Black strangers on the streets of Tennessee towns while yelling racist phrases like “Chimping out” to provoke a reaction he could monetize. Often duded up in a cowboy hat and suspenders, Eatherly had a knack for marketing and proved to be an exceptional conman. Using his handsome hillbilly looks and intimate understanding of Black vernacular, he would often coax his targets with disarming banter before dropping the N-bombs. Once he got a rise out of his subject, Chud would flash his gun, coyly grin, and dare them to cower or physically respond, while filming in a red state with proactive “stand your ground” laws and a blood-soaked history of racial violence and subjugation. This history of lynching and bondage and rape and second-class citizenship has since given rise to a pernicious albeit far more subtle prejudice, a disdain that failed to collapse despite Appomattox and Brown v. Board and the “post-racial” Obama era. Eatherly understood this. His entire charade was a dangerous double-bind ambush, engineered to emasculate or incite violence. And as a source of income, it was also one of the newest iterations of the American dream, reliant on one of our oldest tropes. All of which is disturbing enough, if not surprising. But that is not all Eatherly did. We are here because Eatherly went well beyond brandishing a loaded epithet. We are here because one spring day in May, Joshua Fox, a 31-year-old Black disabled veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder and a checkered past, stood up and stress-tested Eatherly’s business model. Chud’s grievance-fueled “work” was premised on the notion of superiority. But under his facade of online success was a life in disarray: He’d lost his construction job. He’d tarnished his reputation in his hometown. He was living in an overgrown and ramshackle double-wide trailer (from which he’s now allegedly being evicted), and was busy panhandling on GiveSendGo, the Christian-right knockoff of GoFundMe, while out on two separate bonds for harassment and theft in two different jurisdictions. Then, at 9 a.m. on May 13, Eatherly was scheduled to appear before Judge H. Reid Poland III’s General Sessions Court in the Montgomery County courthouse in Clarksville, Tennessee. He was being summoned because he was being sued by Midland Credit Management for $3,466.63 in defaulted credit card debt. But like so many high-born Anglo-Saxons before him, Eatherly chose to no-show to court. Accordingly, Judge Poland entered a default judgment into the record, which gave Midland Credit Management the right to tread on his bank account and garnish his wages. Nevertheless, for reasons still not understood, four hours later Eatherly did make an appearance at the courthouse. Well, outside of the courthouse: At roughly 1:15 p.m., dressed in a blazer and Oxford shirt, with selfie stick in hand and a gun in his jacket pocket, Eatherly strolled into the municipal plaza and pinpointed the lone Black couple sitting on the concrete planters. Shaniqua and Joshua Fox were there for a 1:30 p.m. child custody hearing. Chud was there to instigate trouble. What happened next is already being fought over on the internet and soon will be adjudicated in court. What is clear from the audio-less courthouse CCTV footage that captured the event is that Eatherly approached the couple. Words were exchanged between unarmed Joshua Fox and armed Dalton Eatherly. Eatherly walked away. Then Fox got up, approached Eatherly and made gestures toward him. Eatherly switched the selfie stick to his left hand and put his right hand in his jacket pocket. Fox walked away and then came back again. Then, according to both the lead investigator in the case, Detective Michael Weber, and the text of the arrest warrant, Eatherly “turned his body in a bladed stance” while reaching for his gun. “Thereafter,” the warrant states, “a physical altercation ensued.” Fox punched Eatherly, and the men wrestled to the ground. Seven shots were fired in rapid succession. Eatherly shot himself in the arm and shot Fox five times at point-blank range. Fox was airlifted to Vanderbilt Hospital—and ultimately survived. Two days later, Judge Poland the III and Dalton Eatherly the Chud would get another chance to meet. Eatherly shuffled into Poland’s courtroom on May 15 in a dark-blue jumpsuit “reserved for high-risk inmates,” facing four charges, all far different from failing to pay back a loan: attempted first degree murder, employing a firearm during a dangerous felony, aggravated assault, and reckless endangerment. Due to the gravity of the offenses, the location where they were perpetrated, and the fact that he was already out on two separate bonds, Poland initially set his new bond at $1.25 million. (It would later be reduced to a still-formidable $1 million.) Upon hearing Poland’s order, Eatherly closed his eyes in a look of utter devastation. Just as his digital persona reached its apex, his real-world life was locked in a cage. Once I got word of the shooting, and learned Joshua Fox was alive and Dalton Eatherly was at the mercy of the county jail, I got to work. As a freelance writer based in the South, I immediately realized I needed to become obsessed with the details of this case and start reporting. I’d been following Eatherly’s vile commentary on the cesspool that is X, formerly known as Twitter, for longer than I care to admit, thanks in part to Elon Musk’s warped hard-right algorithms. Chud’s MO was pitiful and enraging—a surefire way to trigger the primordial parts of one’s brain. But from a purely free-market, late-stage-capitalist perspective, it was also wickedly effective. Like many others, I too had clicked. Took the bait. And became a node in Chud’s attention-farming funding scheme. Mainly because I was appalled. After all, the Ku Klux Klan needed to wear hoods to mask their identities a century ago. Now, Eatherly’s ilk gloats about verbally terrorizing American citizens going about their day-to-day lives on American streets and beams this content around the globe for money. Either you rallied behind Chud or you rooted for his demise; either way, he got paid. It was a sick new business model and digital pathogen. As his footprint grew, he became a “cause célèbre” for other white supremacists, and worse yet, he was making these interactions, filled with primitive displays of dominance, in front of impressionable youths suction-cupped to their phones. But Eatherly was so extreme, he made even his idols blush. When speaking about Chud’s tactics about a week before the shooting, Nick Fuentes, the vocal America First white nationalist, said, “to me, it’s not nice.” Not only was it not nice, it was clear to anyone paying attention that it was just a matter of time before Chud got himself—or someone else—killed. All it would take was mouthing off to the wrong person. Evidently. From my outpost in Louisville, Kentucky, a town no stranger to armed xenophobic maniacs, I made four trips to Tennessee to report. At Eatherly’s May 21 bond hearing in Clarksville, I witnessed, firsthand, the spectacle of Chud’s white supremacist circus colliding with the analog Montgomery County court system. More importantly, it was where I’d meet Joshua Fox’s soft-spoken mother, Carolyn Smith, and ultimately gain unique access to Fox, who has been miraculously recovering from his wounds in a secret location and who has become all but an afterthought in this entire tragedy. One reason Fox’s side of the story has gone untold is that like Eatherly, Fox was gagged by Judge Poland from speaking about the case on social media or to the press. Which, as well as posing its own set of unique challenges that curtailed my reporting, is also a bizarre way to treat a victim of a crime. To put a fine point on it, his story and the current moment in our country scare the shit out of me not just because of who we are becoming, but who we have long been. It should scare you too. The digital commodification of the cult of identity—rooted in hate, with all its gradations, and managed by our billionaire tech overlords—has created irrevocable tribal divisions. Instead of challenging the oligarchs eager to turn us against each other, little men like Eatherly do their bidding, often destroying their own lives in the process. The story of Chud’s origin begins with a banal road-rage incident in February of 2024. He called a Black female motorist the N-word and then became infamous in his hometown of Clarksville. Digital archives of the incident, later compiled in an online documentary tracking his multiyear radicalization, tell the tale. Alexis Kayla, the daughter of the driver he smeared, and who was in the car at the time, took a photo of Eatherly holding up a cross and posted it on the local Facebook page “Idiots in cars Clarksville,” writing: “My mom is driving me to school right , this guy almost side swiped us !! so we went in a different lane and he came over and spit on my moms car ans i asked ‘whats your problem’ and he goes ‘n—r!!’ and held this up.” The post took off in the military town that sits on the Cumberland River, where Fort Campbell is based, and where Facebook shaming apparently still holds significant reputational sway. A local chapter of Black Lives Matter is said to have weighed in. Eatherly claimed to Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes on his podcast Get Off My Lawn that the road-rage incident created a backlash in the community that led to him being fired from his construction job. After getting fired, Eatherly pivoted, creating his own remodeling business, named after his initials, DLE Contracting. But it got doxed, too, which hindered his self-employment prospects (its webpage now includes the caption “#White Owned”). Then sometime in 2025, after his baptism at a local Catholic church was allegedly canceled by his priest, and after the mother of his child became fearful for her son’s welfare after the family received death threats, Eatherly took the first major step toward becoming Chud: He filmed a Black woman storming through a Walmart, adding the commentary: “It’s the usual suspects … she’s chimping out!” Once the video went viral, it appears Eatherly realized he was on to something and soon created his alias, Chud the Builder. He began going around Clarksville saying the N-word on camera and creating a blitzkrieg of content. Explaining to the War Room broadcast on the far-right Infowars website, Eatherly whined: “They took my job. They took my son. And then they took my baptism.” Then he added: “This is America. You can’t tell me what I can say, and I can’t tell you what you can say.” It’s worth noting that Eatherly’s origin story comes only from Eatherly’s own lips. I have not been able to confirm why he was fired from his job, nor if his Baptism was canceled as he claims it was. And framing himself as a victim who has lost his job, son, and faith due to his convictions reads as much like branding and mythologizing as it does truth-telling. Nevertheless, as I researched his clips and visited Clarksville on my second reporting trip, it became clear that Eatherly’s online antics had metastasized like a pervasive cancer that spread throughout the physical city limits of his hometown. It makes sense that he ultimately took his racist roadshow to Nashville, an hour away—he could no longer shit where he ate. I encountered Chud’s footprint almost everywhere I went. Clarksville was a veritable Chudapalooza, from the woman at the front desk of my hotel on the outskirts of town to the first stop I made at a coffee shop near the courthouse downtown. The friendly baristas at the coffee shop—talented at pulling a cortado—smiled when I brought his name up in conversation. I explained that I was doing a national story on Eatherly; they tiptoed around the events they had witnessed firsthand, and deferred to the owner, who declined to elaborate and asked to be kept anonymous for fear of the press creating a backlash for their business. But you could tell they had a story: Chud had been banned from their establishment. While filming content around Nashville at the beginning of May, just days before Fox was shot, Chud’s ragebaiting became even more extreme and crossed a dangerous threshold. On May 4, Eatherly posted on his X account: “Keep encouraging your fellow blacks to assault me. When you see a chimp with their brains blown out on the time line just know yall did this to your own people.” On May 7, he tweeted: “Series finale is dead chimp on the pavement and you monkeys rioting when I walk free. Stay tuned.” On May 8, Eatherly posted a clip of himself bear-spraying a Black man who intentionally knocked Chud’s trademark cowboy hat out of his hands and onto the sidewalk along Broadway—the Music City’s renowned strip. As the man walks away after being sprayed, Chud hunts him down, shouting: “Let’s go get his ass. Heil Hitler, n—r!” The following evening, May 9, Eatherly and his cameraman dined at Bob’s Steak & Chop House in the Omni Hotel in downtown Nashville, at 250 Rep. John Lewis Way. Seated at a banquette table in the back of the restaurant, the pair ordered two entrees, drinks, and appetizers, totaling $371.55, and at some point during the meal, Eatherly began livestreaming. Sensing his presence is causing a disturbance—a partial video of his livestream was later uploaded to X—Chud attempts to sweet-talk the middle-aged Black maître d’, trying to convince her he’s not there to cause any “shenanigans” and that in fact he’s the victim of his own infamy. There’s a rapper who put a “$100,000 bounty” on his head, he complains, before adding that he’s “got good money to spend here.” The manager asks Eatherly to stop streaming, and Eatherly fails to comply, so the manager orders him to leave, at which point Eatherly refuses to pay for his meal and begins to heckle the brown-skinned service staff member standing by. (“Hey Pajeet, why don’t you go shit in the street,” he films himself saying.) As he exits, Chud turns to this worker, again, who follows him to the door: “Hey Pajeet, this is America. You’re in my country. You hear me? We’re going to call ICE on that one.” Later that evening on Broadway, Eatherly was arrested, charged with theft of $1,000 or less (for not paying for his meal), disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. He was later released on a $5,000 bond, which paired with the $1,000 bond he was already out on for a harassment charge he incurred in Montgomery County on Nov. 18, 2025. Four days later, he shot Joshua Fox. During a recess at the May 21 bond hearing, just eight days after the shooting that had happened outside the same courthouse, I spoke at length with Carolyn Smith, Joshua Fox’s mother. Smith told me that Fox had called her from the ambulance immediately after the shooting to tell her he loved her, as if he knew he might die at any moment. But he didn’t. Fox had had parts of his spleen, pancreas, and small and large intestine removed, and yet his tubes and catheter were out and he was already walking with a walker. Doctors were amazed he’d survived. On the evening of June 1, she gave me another update, over text: “Josh is slowly recovering physically with some complications to his ribs being fractured from the shooting. Mentally is going to be more challenging.” Minutes later, after giving me her son’s number and him mine, Fox messaged me: “Hey Charlie this is Joshua fox my mom sent your information to me.” We communicated over text—I thanked him for being in touch, asked about his recovery, and tried to gauge his interest in doing a formal interview down the road. He seemed eager to speak. Though I’d offered to create a more secure channel to communicate, via Signal or Proton Mail, he declined. “Lol no I trust you,” he texted. “My mom trust you so you have [to] be a good person. Thank you I’ll be in touch soon.” We messaged one another while he recovered. I also submitted information requests to the county, tracked pending motions, communicated with the criminal clerk at the Montgomery County courthouse, reached out to new sources, texted with his mother, pitched this article to Slate, planned my next trip to central Tennessee, and wrote in spurts. Of course, I was intensely interested in Fox’s version of what happened when Eatherly shot him, but he wasn’t ready to discuss any of that. He also wasn’t legally able: At the tail end of the May 21 bond hearing, and said almost as an afterthought, Judge Poland would surprisingly broaden the scope of the gag order he’d imposed on Eatherly to also include the victim, the lead witness, who was recovering in a hospital. At the time, before commandeering a physical copy of the order, I was uncertain of its authority because of the offhanded way the judge had said it, but nevertheless assumed the likelihood of speaking with Fox was nil—and later, when we began communicating, it curtailed the conversations we had. Instead, I began to get a limited sense of his personality. Fox was thoughtful and easy to talk to. I learned that he’s a proud father of two boys and a girl, and two dogs named Nipsey and Scrap, whom he affectionately calls his “babies.” He’s also something of a mama’s boy: “She’s definitely a rock in my foundation.” I found him quirky, introspective, and slightly nerdy. He has a wry sense of humor. He said the weirdest conspiracy theory he’d heard in the wake of the shooting was that he’s a government plant. When I joked, “I didn’t realize I was communicating with the NSA,” without skipping a beat, he replied: “breaking news the fbi let a spy get shot 5 times!” He says he loves Batman, comics, and anime: “I had a crush on this girl who was into anime in middle school. So I watched it so I could talk to her and ended up liking it.” In high school, he was a choir kid, and though he can “listen to just about anything,” he prefers “west coast rap.” He’s also “a big time gamer,” where he is often subjected to racial slurs, including the N-word, from competitors. But he says he doesn’t think twice about what someone spouts behind a screen. In terms of temperament, what stood out, considering the context of our conversations, was how mild-mannered he seemed. Similar to his mother, who expressed her empathy toward certain members of the Eatherly clan in the weeks following the shooting (both to me and Clarksville Now), one of the initial subjects Fox brought up was Eatherly’s child. He wanted to know if I knew who the child’s mother was, because he’d been “wanting to reach out and send her something.” I told him I didn’t know yet but that I’d do some digging. He replied: “yea I been trying to find her since I was in the hospital but I figured it would be weird to ask publicly lol.” I asked him if he’d seen the post Eatherly had made prior to the shooting about how his child’s mother wants to change her son’s surname because of how Chud had tarnished it. He wrote back: “Yea I heard about it. That’s why I wanted to reach out, make sure she was straight.” Fox grew up a military brat. Born in South Carolina, he lived abroad on a base in Baumholder, Germany, as a child, spent an interregnum in Texas with his mother (and stepfather and multiple brothers and sisters), and then the lion’s share of his formative years in Clarksville, after moving there in 2003. He graduated from West Creek High in 2011. In January 2014, Fox enlisted in the Army. He said he wanted to “show my mom I could make it in the world.” He did his basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, and served for over six years, including a year at Camp Carroll in South Korea. (He liked it there and enjoyed learning about different cultures, and, he said, there was a big Nigerian community.) Just after COVID hit, in June of 2020, he was discharged “under honorable conditions.” His mother told me that when he was released from the service, he suffered from multiple disabilities, including PTSD, depression, and anxiety. It’s worth noting here that Fox never served a day in combat, nor did he step foot in Afghanistan (contrary to what Eatherly’s defense attorney claimed at the bond hearing while trying to paint Fox as a highly trained and experienced killer). He did, however, tell me that if he was called up, he’d go into combat “today.” Also like many vets, he loves guns, and is excited, post-recovery, to “go hog hunting.” He’s realistic about his extensive recovery though—“I got a while before I fire anything that’s not on a video game lol,” he texted me once. Like his mother, he’s religious and grew up “heavy in the church.” It informs why he thinks he survived being shot five times point-blank: “I believe god saved me,” he said. “I mean I still ask why to this day but god definitely had something to do with it.” A few minutes later he added, “He probably gave me the good genes to survive lol … Guided the bullets or something.” His body—which was 160 pounds before the shooting (according to his mother) and has dropped to 130 pounds afterward (according to Fox)—is covered in tattoos, many of which he got while serving. He agreed with the characterization that his ink had become something of an addiction or coping mechanism, not unlike his past drinking. (He said when he drank, he drank Hennessy “straight,” and he often drank alone.) During his service, he experienced some type of severe trauma, which he would not discuss in any greater detail, that led him to get out of the military, and later pick up the bottle. He did explain that his best friend from the military died by suicide (and was not the first friend to do so). After that, he said, his mental health spiraled. Though we did not explore the trauma he experienced that led to his PTSD, he did describe in some detail the level of racism he experienced as an active-duty member. In our conversations, he was open about those experiences. Fox also maintains a Facebook page where he goes by Joshua Luvv and self-identifies as a “digital creator.” He mostly posts humorous memes, some of which explore racial themes, and has made several comments relating to the Eatherly case online on the account and referenced his own criminal history. When the shooting of a Black man becomes national news, an army of online sleuths pops up to uncover blemishes in his record, as if those past misdeeds could somehow justify the actions of the shooter. I’m not here to be a part of that process, but I did promise to tell his story, and this is part of it. Fox certainly knows what the Montgomery County Jail looks like from the inside. He is the first to admit this: “I just been arrested so many times, as my record show, so i been around for while” in their system. This was as deep as I would penetrate into his side of this story. We had a phone call scheduled to discuss the specifics of his history in Montgomery County, but after conferencing with his mother, it became clear I needed to give Fox some space, out of respect for his recovery and in anticipation of the legal ramifications surrounding this case, so we did not hold the call. Fox’s rap sheet—including two DUI-related convictions, two contempt-of-court convictions (guilty pleas before Judge H. Reid Poland III, the same judge who would later impose a gag order on him in the Eatherly case), and two domestic charges for which he was not indicted—dates almost entirely to the years following his 2020 military discharge, a period he described to me as one of significant personal crisis. But they are also serious charges. With that said, I thoroughly enjoyed speaking with Fox. But because of the remote nature of our dialog and the fact we did not meet in person, as we had initially planned, and because there were strict limits on what he could say, he still remains something of a mystery to me. I hope we will get a chance to meet once the trial runs its course. He will almost certainly take the stand if the case goes to trial, and I am eager to hear what he knew about Eatherly before they met and why, when they did, he chose to not back down. One of the more surprising junctures in our text thread came on June 3, the day Dalton Eatherly appeared before Judge William R. Goodman III in his circuit criminal courtroom, after the case was bound over to a grand jury. It was the most eventful preliminary hearing following the initial bond hearing—involving motions by the defense for the reduction of bond (denied), acceptance of bail source (denied), and return of his truck (granted). Unlike the first bond hearing, this was livestreamed. Goodman made his stance on the case clear early on: “Even in its best light” the judge said, “it’s a situation where an individual had a gun in a fistfight.” The big event was Alex Rosen taking the stand—the right-wing vigilante owner-operator of the controversial but incredibly popular Predator Poachers, a subscription and crowdfunded outfit that streams sting ops to entrap child sex predators across the country. Rosen, who is also infatuated with saying the N-word, was attempting to pay a portion of Eatherly’s $1 million bond. He was there to testify to his ability to do so, and he provided yet another spectacle. The heavyset, ginger-bearded, balding 26-year-old Houstonian has a 500,000-follower-strong X account, @iFightForKids, that lists his current city as “Retardville, USA.” He himself is out on probation for a harassment charge he garnered last year in a Steak ’n Shake, a business he is now permanently banned from entering. When the judge asked why he wanted to do this, Rosen answered: “I’m hoping to bond him out; you know, I myself am a free-speech absolutist and I just don’t think he should be in jail right now.” Which was a bit of a dubious reply considering words had not shot Joshua Fox, a gun had. I watched the livestream and read Rosen’s brazen tweets upon leaving the courtroom. Then I texted Fox to see if he’d watched. Of course he had. “Honestly,” Fox wrote, “a little upset because I was actually an Alex Rosen fan.” Lizard intestines! Joshua Fox liked Alex Rosen! Fox later clarified that he was more a fan of his work catching sexual predators and less up to speed on his free-speech absolutism. But still. At the first bond hearing, a $1 million bail seemed impossible for Eatherly to make, particularly because Poland had barred him from using any of the roughly $270,000 in post-shooting crowdfunding he’d digitally cadged on GiveSendGo from a horde of mostly anonymous benefactors. Later, bail looked even more untenable when Goodman added a more onerous condition: The backing had to come from 10 separate bail bondsmen, each of whom would have to agree to be on the hook for $100,000 a pop if Eatherly vanished. But in the times we live in, racists and resources have a way of finding each other: On Thursday, Aug. 6, Chud made bail for his three Nashville misdemeanors. Thanks to several shadowy backers, three days later, according to my source inside the courthouse, on Saturday, Aug. 8, at 12:35 p.m., Chud—still facing charges for attempted murder—walked out of the Montgomery County Jail. Like many of his right-wing predecessors, Dalton Eatherly has followed a common and clichéd path: Say or do something offensive. Get shunned by your community for your actions. Play the victim card. Claim freedom of speech. Ignore how free speech does not entail freedom from consequences. Fail to take responsibility for your actions. Get fired. Get arrested. Make a fool of yourself and act notorious enough on social media to crowdfund off your mistakes, and then do progressively more offensive things for money until you become a pariah and the cycle climaxes to a point of no return. Eatherly is now well past that point of no return. With his attempted murder case bound over, it could be just days before he’s formally arraigned. And yet he remains free. Well, as free as one is while yoked to a GPS monitor and curfew, stripped of his guns and passport, and barred from contacting the Fox family or speaking to the press or on social media about the case itself. But that hasn’t stopped him from using his notoriety to sell merch and pump his $CHUD scamcoin while winking to his online flock. Two days after he was released from jail, on Aug. 10, I watched Eatherly glide into Goodman’s courtroom in a three-piece suit for an unrelated harassment charge, becoming the first journalist in the country to document his freedom. As he exited, he knew he was being filmed, and he preened like a peacock to accentuate his comeuppance gimmick—perversely, I became an active participant in his sick ruse as my own footage gave his supporters new fodder. They would strip my video of its context, fail to cite its source, and spread more Chud propaganda that garnered nearly a million views (and blocked me in the process after I threatened copyright infringement). And still, the gag order remains—for both of them, technically. But while Chud continues to slyly profit off his alias, without saying a word about the shooting—yet—Joshua Fox is silenced almost completely and healing in a location he can’t disclose. Although not everyone is bound to hold their tongue. I met Jacob Fendley, Chud’s attorney, in Nashville at a June bond revocation hearing related to Eatherly’s alleged dine-and-dash at the steakhouse. While chit-chatting as my phone quietly recorded, I asked Fendley about the nature of gagging the person who was shot and who was not a party on trial. Fendley rejoined: “That’s really interesting that they want to gag people who aren’t really before the court. Courts typically have authority over the parties in a case. And so I’m not sure how effective it is to put a gag order on people who aren’t affiliated with the case.” I smiled and left the courthouse bouncing up and down as I contacted my editor in D.C. to let him know I’d commandeered a golden quote. I was so ecstatic at what I’d extracted—an implicit admission from Eatherly’s own attorney that it was borderline absurd to gag Fox—that I almost forgot I was waiting for an Uber ride to take me back to my honky-tonk-themed Best Western. I apologized to the driver for keeping him waiting, and he wanted to know why I was so ecstatic. I gave him a quick summation. Chud’s goofy name didn’t register with the man until I explained exactly who Eatherly was. Then, William Hyde, a middle-aged Black man born and bred in Nashville, looked dumbfounded—he too had been stricken by Chud. Several months earlier, while waiting to pick up a passenger, a man had come up to him, called him the N-word, and flashed his gun. When I asked William what he did in response, he replied, “I could have shot him,” because “I was strapped.” Instead, he told me, he shook his head and left. Fox’s story took a different turn. On June 7, Carolyn Smith texted me to let me know that the family had been in touch with an attorney from Ben Crump’s law firm. Crump is most famous for representing George Floyd’s family, though I came across him in Louisville when he was representing the family of Breonna Taylor. I asked Fox if he was ready for the spotlight, which I had witnessed in full force in Louisville. “Honestly no,” he replied. “Most people who know me personally know I’m more to myself. Goofy! But usually chill and to myself.”