Not many combat engineers get to go to the demanding survival, evasion, resistance, escape SERE military training, but one Marine corporal could be a case study on how to win at the evasion part.
A weekslong manhunt that landed the corporal on the FBI’s Most Wanted List may have ended sooner had police done a more thorough job in searching a demolished recreational vehicle where they first suspected the Marine charged with desertion and murder was hiding.
Police had searched the RV for hours.
The only problem, according to Brown’s lawyer Deborah Caldwell-Bono, was that Brown was hiding behind a cabinet in the RV the entire time.
U.S. Marshal Brad Sellers told media that he was aware of the rumor that Brown had been hiding in the RV but did not confirm if it was true.
Local, state and federal authorities had been searching for Cpl. Michael Alexander Brown in the days after police say that he shot and killed his mother’s boyfriend, killed Rodney Wilfred Brown, 54, at the victim’s Hardy, Virginia, home.
Four days later, on Nov. 13, a resident called police, saying they had seen Brown tapping on the windows of his grandmother’s home nearby.
Police canvassed the area and locked down schools as the manhunt for Brown deepened.
His mother, who told police she witnessed the shooting, also said he’d fled the scene in a black Lincoln Town Car. But information surfaced that he was also using an RV with a trailer to tow the car.
Police found the RV in the area in the early hours of Nov. 14 and approached it with an armored vehicle should the Marine be armed or have planted explosives, local TV outlet 10 News reported. Officers used a loudspeaker to compel Brown to get out of the vehicle, but when he didn’t respond they rammed it until it burst open, shearing off an entire side.
Officers searched the vehicle on the scene for hours, news cameras captured some of that search in the neighborhood.
Once finished, they towed it to a lot five miles away and went on looking for Brown in the back roads and byways of Franklin County, Virginia.
Brown had simply snuck out of the demolished RV and jumped a chain link fence to continue his run, his attorney said.
Brown’s next attempt at hide-and-seek wasn’t so fruitful.
Police later went back to the Woodthrush Circle home where the shooting originally occurred to again search the house. As they were about to enter the attic, Brown emerged and surrendered to police without incident.
He was taken into custody and a court date has been scheduled for March 19, 2020, at the Franklin County General District Court on charges of second-degree murder and using a firearm in the commission of a felony.
Brown did not report for duty on Oct. 24 at 8th Engineer Support Battalion at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, Capt. Robert Vachon, 2nd Marine Logistics Group spokesman, previously told Marine Corps Times.
Within days of not reporting, witnesses told officials that Brown was staying in an RV at Elliott’s Landing campground near Lake Marion in Clarendon County, South Carolina, an estimated 250 miles south of Camp Lejeune.
Authorities believe he fled Franklin County after the Nov. 9 shooting and returned to South Carolina, where police found the Town Car but not the RV before returning to Virginia.
Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.
