A Final Farewell to a Son and Friend
Those Who Knew Teen Killed by Off-Duty Officer Wrestle with Grief, Questions as They Bid Goodbye

By Brigid Schulte
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 4, 2006

It was a Friday night, and Aaron Brown, as usual, was in high spirits. A bunch of friends sat in his Springfield living room, watching cartoons. Brown hung out in his room, listening to music and playing his electric guitar along to Matisyahu, a Hasidic reggae singer, and then switching into a perfect country twang for Hank Williams's "Your Cheatin' Heart."

"Hey man, Hank Williams. So stylish," teased John Grant, a fellow student at Northern Virginia Community College and his friend since second grade.

"Oh, you want stylish?" Grant remembers Brown saying with a laugh. Brown lit into a snippet of fast-paced Bach before flipping into the theme song of "SpongeBob SquarePants," then a perfect imitation of the jingle that was playing on TV.

"I'm a musical genius!" the 18-year-old Brown joked, his long, square-jawed face breaking into a familiar wide grin that his friends called "the jack-o'-lantern smile."

It was a Friday like so many others -- so normal, so ordinary that when the group headed out about 11 p.m. to go to a party in Dumfries, Brown's father, Jeff, who was feeling ill and was sequestered in his room, didn't say goodbye. "Don't be out too late," his mother, Cheri, a worrier, called out after them.

The next time the Browns saw their son was five days later, cold and waxlike, lying in a casket at Demaine Funeral Home.

Four hours and 40 minutes after he walked out of his house that night, Aaron Brown was shot and killed by an off-duty Alexandria police officer in the parking lot of the International House of Pancakes off Duke Street as he rode in the back seat of his parents' Jeep Grand Cherokee.

What exactly happened that night is under investigation.

Police have said that about 3:40 a.m., Brown and five friends walked out of the IHOP without paying. Alexandria police officer Carl Stowe, who was moonlighting as an IHOP security guard, went after them, police say, and shot at the Jeep. Stowe told investigators that as the Jeep headed toward him, he feared for his safety and fired. At least one passenger has disputed his account.

When police officers went to explain to the Browns what had happened, Jeff Brown said, he was told that one of Stowe's shots hit the Jeep's grill, another the hood, one the side door -- "that's the one they thought killed Aaron" -- and one the rear quarter panel. Aaron Brown, who was sitting in the back seat behind the driver, was hit in the side under the arm.

By the time paramedics arrived minutes later, he was dead.

A Friend to Everyone

Brown wore his hair long, his jeans ripped, an old camouflage jacket, a band T-shirt and his trademark Chuck Taylor Converse sneakers, just because he wanted to. A free spirit, he walked the halls at school with the mandolin his parents gave him for Christmas. He was an Eagle Scout, a guy who laughed easily and often, friends say, and a big-hearted soul. Some of his closest friends had known him since elementary school.

None can make sense of what happened.

Matt Fuller, a close friend since third grade, recalled a time when the two went out to eat and ran out of dollar bills for the tip. "We had to leave our tip in coins," Fuller said. "Aaron felt bad about that for days afterwards. He didn't want the waitress to have to carry such heavy coins around. [Walking out on a bill] just struck me as something innately that he wouldn't do."

Brown, he said, was the kind of guy who defied easy stereotyping.

"In high school, obviously, some people would look at him and write him off as a hippie or a rocker or a head banger. But anybody that talked to him for about a minute would make friends with him," Fuller said. "He had friends in every group in that school -- and we were pretty balkanized -- the preps, the rockers, the wannabe gangstas. He had conservative friends, liberal friends, friends of all different ethnicities and nationalities. He was the most personable cat I ever knew."

Brown took big groups of friends camping to the family's land on Mine Mountain. They'd climb the steel steps of a fire tower and watch the sun set over seven bends in the Shenandoah River.

And the Browns' Springfield home became a second home to them all.

They called Brown's mother "Mama." They played "roof tag" -- whoever fell off was it. And they jammed for hours in Brown's small bedroom, crammed with eight guitars, one bass, a drum set and a stack of amps his parents bought him. "We were there so much, the family had extra dinner plates for all of us," said Danny Baldwin, a friend and fellow Eagle Scout.

Brown had his own goofy, arm-flailing dance style and his own "Aaronspeak" -- words such as "yestertime" for yesterday and "redunculous" for really ridiculous.

But for all the boyish exuberance, Brown was very serious about his music. He was studying music theory at the community college and wanted to be a rock star. His parents wanted him to have a backup plan. "He didn't want to hear it," his father said. "He was so convinced he was gonna make it."

For his 16th birthday, he made fliers and invited everyone he knew, as well as any stranger he ran into, to his "Crazy-Go-Nuts" party. His parents built a stage in the back yard and his band, The Last Word, entertained for hours with its eclectic mix of heavy metal and rock.

"We never had names for the songs," said bass player and close friend Elias Chamoun. "We named them, like, 'Harry.' "

Brown's latest band, Death is Certain, was slated to open for Slayer, a heavy metal group, in Japan.

If Brown had any weakness, his friends say, it's that he couldn't say no.

In recent weeks, Brown had begun hanging out more with a different group of kids, ones who had gotten into trouble before, weren't going to school and didn't have jobs. When four said they'd been kicked out of their homes, Brown welcomed them into his.

Twins Adam and Aaron Daughtrey, Aaron Daughtrey's girlfriend, Breklyn Paulitzky, and Chris Walters began sleeping in the Browns' small living room, one on the couch, one in the black leather chair and two on the floor.

Aaron Daughtrey and Paulitzky had been arrested Feb. 11, both on charges of unlawful entry and he on a charge of possession of marijuana, when they were found squatting in a house under construction.

It was Brown who raided his parents' change jars and called around to scrape up enough money to bail them out of jail.

Jeff Brown said he and his wife had heard of the kids' trouble. "But these were kids Aaron befriended. So any friend of Aaron's was a friend of ours."

On Friday, Feb. 24, Brown, the Daughtrey twins, Paulitzky and Walters left Brown's house to go pick up Stephen Smith and head to a party in Dumfries.

They got to the party between 12:30 and 1 a.m., said Baldwin, right as he was leaving. About 2:50 a.m., they decided they were hungry and drove to IHOP, a usual hangout, Walters said.

At 3 a.m., Cheri Brown woke up and noticed the lights were still on and the kids weren't back yet. She called her son's cell phone.

"All right Aaron, where are ya?" she remembers asking.

"I'm at IHOP. I'll be home in an hour."

The friends ate. Whether they paid, meant to pay or ditched the bill is unclear. On Paultizky's Internet blog, she writes that they left money on the table, though not enough to cover the bill.

Walters said Smith left the restaurant first to warm up Brown's car. Walters left and climbed into the front passenger seat. Then came Brown, who sat behind Smith, and Adam Daughtrey. Smith pulled around to the front of the restaurant to pick up Paulitzky and Aaron Daughtrey. "They came out walking pretty fast, so at that time, me and Steve-o figured out that they probably ditched the bill," Walters said in an e-mail.

Alexandria police say Stowe attempted to stop the SUV, then, fearing for his life, began to shoot. But at a news conference, Aaron Daughtrey said Stowe fired "first to the side, then head-on."

Regardless, Smith crashed into a parked car and the airbags inflated, Walters said. He heard Adam Daughtrey yell that Brown had been hit. Daughtrey pulled Brown out of the car and tried to perform CPR, as the others were told to sit on the curb, but it was too late.

At 5 a.m., Brown's parents got a call from Chris Daughtrey, the twins' father, telling them to come to the IHOP. When they arrived, knowing nothing, a police officer spoke into a walkie-talkie: "The victim's parents are here." Their hearts stopped.

"All of this," Walters wrote in an e-mail, "was over 26 dollars worth of food."

His Parents' Miracle

At the tidy Brown home, hard by a sound wall along Interstate 495, the doorbell constantly rings as a friend or neighbor arrives with a basket of food or a loaf of home-baked bread.

"I've never felt so crummy in my life," Cheri Brown says, her wounded eyes puffy from lack of sleep. The baskets of food remain untouched. She can't eat. In Aaron's room, the bed remains unmade, his big, brown teddy bear in the corner, his dirty socks on his drum-kit cymbal.

Aaron was her miracle baby. He was the only one she could ever have. They did everything together. Jeff and Cheri began taking him to rock concerts from the time he could walk. He saw the Grateful Dead when he was 8. And his parents later went to a Metallica concert with him because his enthusiasm was contagious.

On Wednesday, the Browns went to the funeral home to see their son. The medical examiner had trimmed his hair. Still, they cut a lock. Then they each took locks of their own hair and placed them in their son's hand.

Aaron Brown would not be Colin Agnew's best man, as they'd planned. He would not be godfather to Tony Sanchez's children. He would not sit on the porch as an old man next to Danny Baldwin, squirting kids with a hose.

Cheri Brown wept. Jeff Brown finally said goodbye.

"Goodnight, son."

Staff writer Jamie Stockwell contributed to this report.