Friday, March 28, 2008
A Fallen Parrothead Brother?
Top: The infamous screen shot from The First 48.
Bottom: A copy of Songs You Know By Heart on the seat of my car.
I'm an avid fan of the TV program The First 48. If you haven't seen it, it's basically a camera crew shadowing homicide squads in several cities as they go about the oftentimes tedious task of working murder cases. I Tivo the show late at night, then watch while I read the paper and have my morning java jolt.
The episode I was watching today involved Miami PD working a case in which a poor guy from Illinois, Ronald Gentile, apparently made a wrong turn in the wrong place at the wrong time, and was shot to death in his rental car for this horrible indiscretion. Welcome to Paradise. A couple of scenes showed the bloodstained interior of the vehicle. A music CD could be seen lying on the seat, its MCA label easily visible.
It looked familiar. Where had I seen that before? I froze the frame, looked more closely. Too blurry, but I do maybe recognize it... Nah, can't be. Couldn't happen.
A few minutes later, a second shot of the vehicle's interior, this time showing the CD a bit more closely. I froze it again.
Can't be sure....but it looks like it might say "Jimmy Buffett" at the top....still too blurry....
The investigator in me came out:
Let's see....13 tracks....the label information on the right side is unusually long....three lines of bold print in the artist and album title....pay attention to how the letters line up over and under one another.....
As you might expect, I have a few (read: ALL) of Jimmy's CDs, displayed prominently in my family room. I started flipping through the old MCA productions.
There it was: Songs You Know By Heart. Yeah, I know them all by heart, and my heart had just sunk to the pit of my stomach.
Man goes to Miami to visit family, hang out on the beach, have a little fun, listen to some Buffett tunes to set the mood, but then he makes a wrong turn and ends up dead for it.
Sail on, Ronald Gentile.
