McKay got back in his car, caught up to Kenney, forced his car from the road, pinning it against a tractor, and then pepper sprayed him and Macauley through the window.
What happened next was captured on McKay's patrol car camera. Kenney leaned out of his window and shot seven times, hitting McKay four times in the torso. He then drove his car over McKay's body twice. At some point after the car went over McKay, a passing motorist,
an ex-Marine named Gregory Floyd picked up McKay's gun and shot Liko Kenney dead. The second killing was ruled justified by law officials in spite of the fact that Floyd has a record of domestic assault, threatening police, and carrying unlicensed fire arms.
The two killings rocked the small community of Franconia, New Hampshire, dividing its residents along a fault line that exists in the northern half of Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire, places where back-to-the-land hippies live side by side with families who originally settled the rural mountain valleys and the ones who came to work logging or oil or propane or whatever the small regional economy provided in the way of opportunity.
There are two sides to every story. Was Liko Kenney a nice hippie kid who was terrorized into desperation by a local police bully? Was Bruce McKay a tough-minded cop who enforced the law uniformly and fairly no matter who happened to be across from him?
This story of the double-killing has gotten national attention because, it seems, ski-racing rebel Bode Miller was involved in the Kenney family feud with Bruce McKay. Miller is first-cousin to Liko Kenney, and both men grew up spending their summers on the side of Mt. Kinsman at the tennis camp that Miller's grandfather, Jack Kenney, owned and operated. The only real evidence of Miller's involvement with McKay was that he showed up in person to contest a speeding ticket issued by the officer and said later he had done it to
"antagonize McKay."
I think, generally, it's unfair and sensationalist to link Bode to this killing, but having myself been around the Kenney's, I think it's fair to assume that Bode knows more about this situation than he is willing to say right now.
Tamarack Camp is a summer sleep over tennis camp for northeastern prep school kids, but it was also, until Bode's massive success, the financial life-blood of the Kenney clan, many of whom, including Bode, grew up in cabins in the woods on the same property and worked for the camp in some capacity.
Liko Kenney actually grew up living between two worlds. In the winters
he lived in Hawaii with his parents who run a coffee plantation there, and in the summers he returned to the Kenney camp in the White Mountains.
I spent two summers at
Tamarack Camp , when I was 11 and 12 years old and Bode was 8 and 9, and since then I have spent time at my aunt's house just off Rt. 116 where the killings took place. That valley is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. I remember Bode and his sister Kyla as young copper-headed look-alikes with wild eyes and wild hair. Bode was already an amazing athlete, and older campers would amuse themselves by egging him on to do flips on the trampolines outside the camp building. In later years, when I drove by, I'd see that the front corner of the property had been flooded and logs placed in the makeshift pond, presumably so that Bode and his girlfriend could practice log rolling.
The Kenney property actually straddles Rt. 116. On the east side of the road sits the camp building and behind it the hill stretches up towards Bald Knob and Mt. Kinsman, housing sleeping cabins and the Kenney homes. There are red clay tennis courts on both sides of the highway. On the west side of the highway, beyond the tennis courts and the barn, is a large field in fertile bottomland, then the river, and then the soccer field where the campers cross trained after dinner. Cannon Mountain, a steep, cold, and icy rock of a ski hill, is just ten minutes up the road. There are swimming holes everywhere. In short, the Kenney compound is a hippy athletic paradise.
If you have ever been to a Swiss or Austrian alpine village, then you probably understand why their ski racers are so dominant. Living at altitude on a hill with a 60 degree pitch does something to the way you move. It strengthens your legs, opens your lungs, and familiarizes you, from the day you can walk, with the power of gravity. Americans have rarely been successful as international skiers because most of them, even the ones produced by local mountains, lived in the valleys and still can't quite let go on the steeps the way the Europeans can.
Bode changed all that. Before him the best ski racer in American history was Phil Mahre, who won the majority of his events on flat slalom courses that wouldn't kill him. Whatever people think about Bode's results at the last Olympics, no one can contest that he is by far the greatest skier our country has ever produced and possibly one of its greatest all around athletes. European fans understand this, because they understand what he has done, winning World Cup events in all four disciplines and in nearly every country the World Cup runs on every kind of course, including the most difficult ones like Kittzbuhel and Wengen.
Bode also changed the way people ski. He is almost single-handedly responsible for the moment that tour racers switched to shorter parabolic skis. And he has changed the entire geometry of ski racing, so long dominated by the Swiss and Austrian notions of holding the cleanest most aggressive line on the mountain through determination, leg strength, and vision. Herman Maier was perhaps the greatest racer in history to utilize this style and Bode emerged onto the scene in his period of great dominance and beat him the way McEnroe beet Borg, by playing a whole other kind of game.
Bode essentially stays "over his skis" in a way that no one else has, forsaking the rail-like control that Maier creates with his powerful thighs, for a method that is more akin to a rock tumbling down the mountain. Bode lets his skis run all the time, edges less in turns than most skiers, and carries unheard of amounts of speed into the bottom of race courses when he runs clean. If you have ever watched him, you also know he runs clean about half the time.
He misses gates a lot, even in big races, and this was the first great point of contention between him and his U.S. Ski Team bosses after his emergence as a world's number one contender. The team officials urged him to play safer, to place high in events that he lost. But Bode always just wanted to win, and to win by smashing the course record. Bode didn't ever race against the other racers, he raced against the mountain and against himself.
That story isn't new in itself. Skiing greats are often aloof, mystical athletes, and Bode seemed to step out of the White Mountains into the mold created by in the 1969
Robert Redford film
Downhill Racer. From the beginning of his career, Bode insisted his sport was an individual sport, and that while he appreciated the role of the U.S. Ski Team in the development and support of its athletes, he didn't need their help determining how to win.
Bode was refreshing about it at first, letting his results speak for themselves and keeping his distance from officials.
As his star ascended, the conflict became more serious. Bode accrued more power that the team officials by making the most money anyone in this country ever had as a ski racer. He realized, before any of the team officials did, that to beat European racers on European courses, you had to train in Europe, so Bode got a house and trained over there. His most talented U.S. contemporaries followed suit.
If you look at his success story, you can see why Bode doesn't want to listen to U.S. Ski Team officials. It was Bode's decision to strap on the shaped skis. It was his style of skiing that made him fast. It was his idea to train in Europe and it was his skiing that won in Europe. It has been his example that has turned U.S. ski racing from a joke into a viable threat, even on downhill courses.
So why couldn't the U.S. Ski Team figure all that out? The answer is that while Bode is part skiing bhodisattva, he is also part ski-town party boy. He has never been good at keeping his mouth shut, an essential skill for all types of pro athletes, because he has never wanted to keep his mouth shut. And, while the U.S. Ski Team may have been willing, at least privately, to let Bode exist outside its boundaries, it was not willing, given his poor performance at the Olympics, to continue to let him say that they're rules, philosophy, and tactical approach were useless. So they pushed him on the rules and he quit. Everyone in the ski world saw that coming.
Bode Miller, and here I will come back to the place where he grew up, created a clash in ideologies that the U.S. Ski Team could not back down from and survive intact. Imagine for a moment that
Allen Iverson had won that NBA Championship back in 2000-2001 and now imagine that he was white. How do you think Commissioner David Stern would have reacted to his off-court antics?
What do Bode Miller and Allen Iverson have in common? They are both self-taught, self-motivated athletes who possess great courage, and see the lines of the games they play differently from their contemporaries. They both use their athletic success to support large extended family units. And they both smoke weed.
The knowledge that Bode likes to drink and smoke coupled with his saying he has no regrets about his performance in Turin because he got to "party at an Olympic level" will be enough for some people to laugh off his influence as one of the most intelligent athletes of his day. Bode may not be an intelligent speaker, but he is an intelligent skier. He has become what he has become by testing out methods, often times with extreme consequences, and then using the information to get faster. His role as a public figure, the face of U.S. skiing, has, sadly, re-channeled much of his energy into running a massive business enterprise focused on his personality.
Bode used to ask why people wouldn't just let him ski. And now I think most of his fans agree. Just let Bode ski. He is beautiful as a skier. He is fast. He is brave. He is the best American racer there has ever been. And he is sooooo American. That's why European fans love him. He says whatever he is thinking. He thinks athletic success affords him status as a philosopher. And he's a randy mountain man sex symbol. Bode is an old-fashioned warrior king from a small mountain canton in New Hampshire. A small mountain canton where Bruce McKay was the patrolman.
The only thing more infuriating, if you were a square highway patrolman in a small New Hampshire town making $30,000 a year to break up domestic squabbles and jail drunks, than watching a local kid become a millionaire by ski racing, would be watching his family buy up the entire town and treat it like their little hippy playground. If you happened to run across a particularly youthful, misdirected, and wild member of the clan who seemed to break the law without compunction, it might throw you into the same sort of crisis U.S. Ski Team officials faced.
I am speculating now, about Bruce McKay's psychology, and that kind of speculation doesn't stand up in court or even in newspapers, but I think to understand what happened on Rt. 116 at all, you have to try to see the two men, McKay and Kenney, in light of a broader conflict that was home to life and death before they arrived in it.
The other choice is just to say that Liko was a wild and angry kid, who, possessed by the fear of the moment, shot a cop in the back and then ran over him with his car. I don't think anyone, Bode included, would have much to say in defense of that. But the quiet defiance displayed by the Kenney's in the media in the aftermath of the shootings leads me to believe that while they might not condone Liko's actions that day, they take his part in the broader conflict and believe that a grown man with a badge should not be harassing a confused twenty-something to the point that the young man starts carrying a gun.
The
history of conflict between Liko Kenney and Bruce McKay seems to begin with an arrest two winters ago. McKay followed vehicle tracks in the snow to a remote parking area and found what he thought was an empty parked vehicle. He approached the vehicle and found Liko lying down in the driver's seat. McKay asked for Liko's license. Liko gave it to him and then followed him to his car and began protesting. McKay called for backup and it turned into a scene. Who knows exactly what happened. Three officers tried to subdue Liko to arrest him, at which point he grabbed McKay by the balls. McKay smashed him in the face. Liko claims the cops kicked him. He ended up being thrown in jail but his behavior was extremely erratic. What it sounds like was that Liko was on an acid trip when McKay found him in that car. Who knows?
New Hampshire's license plates say
"Live Free or Die." Next to the "Show Me State" or the "Sunshine State" or "Big Sky Country", the moniker might seem a little dire. The words come from Maj. Gen John Stark [correction from:
Patrick Henry ] from his famous libertarian rant against English oppression, and believe it or not, most northern New Hampshire natives take the statement pretty literally.
The problem with people taking things literally is that they often contextualize things differently. So while for some New Hampshire natives, "Live Free or Die" is a call to serve the U.S. military to preserve freedom the world over, or to serve as a cop and protect freedom at home, a whole other set believes the words tell them to live in harmony with the laws of the land, and by land I mean earth and not county, state, or country.
Marijuana is the great symbol of this conflict. Its origins in this country seem to be linked to the migrant Mexican farm workers who smoked the native mild strains as a way to relax their muscles at the end of back-breaking work days. The weed became illegal as a way to legally control the migrant Mexicans. If you know that a whole set of people is smoking weed every night, and you make weed illegal, then you basically have a permanent search warrant, a permanent cause for arrest, and permanent means to control them with the coercive power of the law.
In the late 60s and throughout the 1970s, marijuana became publicly acceptable in a lot of places. Mainly because a lot of the Vietnam vets were smoking it and nobody felt good about throwing guys who had gone through that war in the clink for self-medicating. During this same time period, the back-to-the-land movement gained its force. The media often portrays the back-to-the-land movement like the hippie communal movements described by T.C. Boyle in
Drop City , hilarious and poorly planned experiments driven by high ideals.
But the real fruits of the back-to-the-land movement were that smart and enterprising people who had grown up in cities, purchased cheap rural land all over the country and traded their ability to make money for the ability to live a freer existence on their own land. The values of this movement were love, land, and family. A little different than "for God and country."
The Kenney clan is one product of this movement. Bode Miller is also a product of this movement. Parenting techniques were changing. Instead of "do what you're told" it became "try it out and see what happens." Bode Miller was encouraged to try himself out physically against rocks, mountains, streams. Learn how a stream moves downhill. Learn how rocks slide. Learn how to stand on a log. And you can learn to ski fast.
Bode grew up in a rural tribe. Instead of friends he had cousins. Country people have always grown this way. His tribe happened to smoke marijuana recreationally. And then he happened to become one of the world's greatest athletes. While it might be too much to suggest that Bode became the kind of skier that he became because he skied high, it is certainly fair to assume that smoking weed did not prevent him from becoming the athlete he became.
And I think if you look at Bode now, in light of history, you have to see him as the winter mountain athlete who happened just before the non-traditional sports-snowboarding, bumps, extreme-became mainstream.
It's difficult to write about the marijuana culture in our country's athletic system, because no one in their right mind would go on record that smoking weed helps their performance. It would be more acceptable to say that pain killers enhanced their performance. And now with all the doping stories, it makes you look bad to say anything other than blood, sweat, and tears made you what you are. If there is a marijuana culture in sports in this country it exists in the NBA. We've all seen the arrests, players with stashed and guns in black BMW's being pulled over the 3 am. But for everyone of those guys there is a veteran with an ailing back and broken feet who smokes in the mornings, stretches, and whirlpools before going to the court and shooting 300 jump shots listening to the Isley Brothers in his headphones. Poor Robert Parish, so mysteriously nicknamed the Chief for all that time, almost got villainized after leading one of the most respected NBA careers of his generation because he got caught with a pound of the stuff.
I think, and I know, Jah bless, that
the I and I would agree, marijuana works best in conjunction with nature. The green plants, the sun, the rain, and the birds. Weed's gift to mankind is to let us become, for some discreet period of time, plant like. Symmetrically growing up towards the sun, rooted into the earth. That may sound like jibber-jabber to you if you've never had the EXP but the results in athletics can be profound. Ask Tall Bill Walton. Ask Pistol Pete. Ask Bode. Ask me.
I had a knee surgery on the patella tendon of my right knee when I was 19 and I felt like I had a peg leg, no working joints on that leg from ankle to hip, until at age 25 I started smoking weed and taking tai chi. What if I had learned when I was 15 that my body was balanced and that its weight was meant to sink into the earth on a perpendicular axis that ran through my tan tien, somewhere between my navel and my anus?
Bode has a particular athletic style in his sport. He is reckless, inventive, athletically prodigious, and totally self-focused. He is not technical, habitual, consistent, competitive, or proud. I think his mentality is as much the product of his mountainside upbringing as it is the product of weed. In fact, I don't even know for sure that Bode smokes weed. I've never seen it reported. But his style, and this is a point I want to make, is not unique anymore.
In mountain sports, the mountain is your competitor. If you are racing up a mountain, the twenty other people alongside you are also racing the mountain. If you have climbed the mountain fifty times before, then you know what your limits are and you push them as far as you can. If you have won that way before, you become less concerned, when, at the beginning of the race, a competitor jumps out to an early lead. The mountain will either bring him back or he's better than you.
I have two images in my head right now, two faces really. One is Bode Miller at age eight, his fat cheeks streaked with a mixture of food grime and mud, his auburn page-boy cut hanging ragged, his brown eyes burning, bright and fearless. He is about to jump on the trampoline for the fiftieth time that day and do flips, one after another without a bounce in the middle, until he is too tired to do more.
Now I see another face, a kid named
Bo Randolph . Bo is shirtless and pantless in diapers on a mountainside outside of Steamboat Springs, CO, wearing diapers. He is three years old. He looks up at me with his red cherubic cheeks and a maniacal glint in his eye and then he looks back at the half-tamed fox that lives under his porch and is stalking him from the tall grass. And Bo turns back takes four or five steps and dives on that fox, scaring it so badly that it freezes and he rolls it up in his arms laughing. I have been an athlete all my life but I don't think I have ever had the physical confidence to do either of the things I just described.
Bo Randolph, son of
John Randolph , one of Steamboat's most famous back-to-the-land athletes, is now aged 19, has an FIS ranking for freestyle bump skiing, is a U.S. Junior National criterion road bike champion, and a pro downhill mountain bike racer. He may not be the next Bode Miller, but there is a whole generation of athletes like him, cross-disciplinary athletes in sports about pushing the limits, who have grown up with the hippie body-centric values of the back-to-the-land movement.
Now back to Bode, and Liko. And weed. Because marijuana is illegal in this country and because, since the 1980s advent of the war on drugs, its possession in fairly small quantities carries extremely heavy maximum penalties, people who smoke weed and live public lives have to be secretive. They also have to choose how comfortable they are knowing that the coercive power of law enforcement has them by the balls. If a cop in a town had it in for you, and he knew you smoked weed, it would only be a matter of time before he busted you. The Kenney clan has lived with this tension for two generations now and they have the arrests to show for it.
I have known politicians, businessmen, pro athletes, and soldiers who smoke weed on a daily basis. Not one of them would tell me so on record. Because they would stand to lose their career for it. If they were willing to go on record, they would tell me how weed has helped them and how it hasn't. For instance, and Biggie Smalls might disagree with me on this, marijuana does not help you negotiate high-stress interpersonal relationships. It does not help you negotiate violent situations. It does not help you negotiate love.
Marijuana divorces you from your externalized ego and it roots you in your body. For better or for worse. It can, when coupled with music or video games or a forest, also allow you to trip out and exist in alternate planes of reality. For better or for worse.
Was Liko Kenney high when Bruce McKay stopped him? Does that have anything to do with what happened that day?
I think to really get to the bottom of those killings you have to get to the bottom of who Liko Kenney was as a person, and I haven't done the reporting to know. But I think, also, that the silent partner in the conflict between Bruce McKay and Liko Kenney was marijuana, and how its usage was once a unifier in the Kenney clan, but now with their rising fortunes, is a liability.
Bode just bought his sister, Kyla Miller-White,
a huge organic farm on Sugar Hill for $750,000. If the feds found one weed plant on that land they could take the property. Bode Miller is an industry unto himself, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I can imagine no other situation in which one local cop would have the power to disturb Bode' local empire except that he and
his family have been linked to marijuana useage.
If you read all the different reports on-line about McKay and Liko you get a sense for who they were, at least to the people in their public lives. Liko was a free-spirited partying member of the Kenney clan who flaunted his individuality and had an angry but loving heart. Even
his own aunts and uncles had called the police on him before . But he didn't deserve to be scared into a corner by a local cop because he was a little bit wild and smoked weed.
On Friday, May 11th, 2007, a 22 year-old motorist named Liko Kenney shot a cop to death on a small highway in the shadow of Mt. Kinsman near the Franconia Notch in New Hampshire. The circumstances of the killing were bizarre. Kenney, traveling with friend Caleb Macauley, was pulled over by patrolman Bruce McKay, a local officer with whom Kenney had 