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Two of Farley's friends saw Farley and Sims about to head west on the Docena-Sandusky Road. The friends claimed that they'd seen Virgil and James throwing rocks, which James vehemently denied then and today. "We'll take care of them," said Farley, according to police documents. But instead he gave the revolver to a stunned Sims, who had never fired a gun. Farley still insists that the Ware brothers had rocks in their hands, but Sims says, "I guess we were just expecting rocks to be coming at us." Sims is righthanded; the gun was in his left hand. "I thought I was shooting at the ground," he says. "I remember pop-pop and then thinking, Oh no, I might have hit [Virgil] in the leg." He and Farley went to a friend's house and asked him to hide the gun under his mattress.
The next day Detectives E. Dan Jordan and J.A. McAlpine tracked down Farley, who initially denied involvement. They later found Sims at his home in suburban Forestdale. Sobbing, he confessed in front of his parents. Jordan, now 74 and retired, says Farley fumed, as if he considered Sims and the detectives traitors. But Jordan says he was unmoved. He had felt "demeaned--you know, having to obey Bull Connor, jailing up black children in cages. The civil rights movement was changing the way we thought about things."
Farley and Sims were charged with first-degree murder, but an all-white jury convicted Sims on a lesser charge of second-degree manslaughter (to which Farley then pleaded guilty). A white judge, Wallace Gibson, suspended the boys' sentences and gave them two years' probation--scolding them for their "lapse"--which made Lorene Ware "break down in the courtroom crying and hollering," recalls Melvin. Says James: "You could get more time back then for killing a good hunting dog."
But, James adds, the ordeal "made our family realize there was a civil rights movement going on and we could make Virgil's death be a part of that." It didn't exactly work out that way. The movement wanted Lorene Ware to hit the stump, but because speaking publicly about Virgil's killing was too painful for her, his story faded away, an obscure, salt-in-the-wound footnote to the Sixteenth Street Church bombing.
Civil rights and racial reconciliation instead became a personal journey for the Wares. If not for the movement's nonviolent tenets, for example, Virgil's brothers say their rage might not have worn off. Melvin was the angriest, and although he thought for years about revenge, he eventually immersed himself in his Christian faith, encouraging whites and blacks to attend each other's church services. James too has long forgiven Farley and Sims, but he says he found real meaning in Virgil's death one night years later, in the '60s, when his car got stuck in a ditch on the same dark Docena-Sandusky Road. Two young white men pulled up and approached him, "and I thought, Oh, no, it's all gonna happen again." But the men helped him pull his car out. "I asked them if I owed 'em anything," James says. "They said, 'Just help the next guy.'"