Path to tragedy
His brother died in his arms. Then he was charged in the case while the shooter went free.
As Curtis Fisher slowed his car near a busy intersection on Milwaukee’s north side, his brother jumped out with a gun and ran toward a gas station.
❚ “Let me show you how to move around,” he heard his brother say.
❚ As gunfire erupted, Curtis shifted the gear into park. He didn’t see who shot first.
❚ He hopped out of the driver’s seat and popped open the trunk, tossing a gun inside.
❚ His brother ran toward him across the parking lot.
❚ “Are you hit?” Curtis shouted.
He didn’t see any bullet wounds. His brother moved toward him smoothly.
He looks good, Curtis thought.
As Curtis slammed the trunk closed, his brother hit the door jamb on the driver’s side and collapsed to his knees. so. Curtis wrapped his arms around his brother’s tor
Only then did he feel the wet blood under his brother’s arm.
***
“The case at hand is obviously a very tragic case in a lot of ways.”
— Milwaukee County Prosecutor Francesco Mineo
***
The shooting at the Citgo gas station killed Curtis’ 41-year-old brother and wounded two other men in their 40s.
The homicide was one of seven in four days, the start of a violent August 2018.
The shooting involved an all-too-common set of circumstances: A simmering disagreement and fear mixed with guns and people who legally can’t have them. A chance meeting leads to an eruption of violence.
But this homicide fell into a category often left out of public discussion — self-defense — meaning it was not officially counted in the Milwaukee Police Department’s statistics.
Curtis, 48, knows who killed his brother and why, unlike many other homicide victims’ families. Fewer than half of all homicides in Milwaukee end with someone convicted of a crime, a Journal Sentinel analysis found.
And he knows the shooter will never be held responsible for his brother’s death.
He understands why the man wasn’t charged with homicide. His brother shot first and surveillance video showed him firing, police and prosecutors said.
The man and his associates returned gunfire in self-defense. Still, that man, a felon, had shot at his brother earlier in the day and threatened him, Curtis said.
Instead, Curtis became the one facing charges.
Two weeks after his brother died in his arms, the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office filed one felony charge of being a felon in possession of a gun against him. Prosecutors used his statement to police — that he moved a gun to the trunk — as the basis of the charge.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has followed his journey through the court system since last September, as the Army veteran’s life ground to a standstill until the court case against him was resolved.
A year later, Curtis still cannot understand why no one but him faced any criminal charges, not even for disorderly conduct.
“I was the MVP witness,” he said. “I told them everything that happened and I told them why it happened. They didn’t care.”
***
“Mentoring kids, trying to keep them away from a cycle of violence and bad decision-making that plagues many and unfortunately has, despite his best efforts, enmeshed him as well.”
— Defense attorney Colin McGinn
***
It was always just the two of them. Their mother called for them in the same breath so it sounded like their names were combined, CurtisandQuan.
Curtis and his brother, Robert DaQuan “Quan” Taylor, grew up on Milwaukee’s north side, near North 13th Street and West Atkinson Avenue. Curtis spent more than an hour each day taking the bus to Hamilton High School, on the city’s far southwest side.
As soon as he graduated, Curtis wanted out of Milwaukee. He enlisted in the U.S. Army and served as a mechanic in Desert Storm.
He remembers the calls from his mother while he was in boot camp. She had divorced Quan’s father and struggled to control her younger son as he entered his teen years.
He doesn’t want to listen, she told Curtis. I had to get the broomstick out again.
Quan began an in-and-out cycle of arrest and incarceration, starting with juvenile detention.
Curtis, meanwhile, was serving overseas and experiencing more combat than he expected. A unit going into Saudi Arabia needed a mechanic on the trip. The group arrived to find rubble.
Everyone jumped in to rescue and recover the injured, and that’s how Curtis found himself carrying a stretcher in a war zone.
He came home changed. His brother was different, too. Years later, during an otherwise forgettable night of drinking, Quan opened up to his older brother. You left me, he told Curtis. Curtis, feeling defensive, told his brother he went to the Army to try to find himself, to make better for himself, to fight for their country. But then he thought about those calls from his mom and how his brother grew up without him and had friends Curtis didn’t know.
“He felt totally abandoned,” Curtis said in an interview.
He made a silent promise not to leave his brother again.
***
“I think this is all too often a tale that we see in Milwaukee that ends tragically for everyone involved.”
— Milwaukee County Prosecutor Francesco Mineo
***
After his active-duty service, Curtis served another four years in the Army Reserve, then worked as a bus driver before returning to the military as a weapons instructor.
In 1995, a family dispute got him in trouble.
He was driving a school bus in Milwaukee when he saw his mom’s former boyfriend going into a Shoney’s restaurant. The man owed her money for rent from when they lived together.
Curtis stopped at a pay phone and called his uncle’s pager. His uncle, mother and brother arrived. The four of them went into the restaurant and confronted the man, who grabbed a coffee pot. Curtis, nervous, picked up a ketchup bottle.
The man scooted his chair out, knocking the wind out of Curtis who was standing behind him. Curtis brought the bottle down, hitting him. Curtis and his brother took the man outside and struggled with him, eventually taking cash from his pockets.
Curtis was charged with robbery as a party to the crime and was sentenced to 75 days in the House of Correction, with 26 days credit for time served.
A prosecutor recently remarked it was an unusual case with an unusual sentence, considering the judge who handed it down was not known as a “light sentencer.”
The incident left Curtis with a felony record, meaning he could never legally handle or own a gun. It was his only criminal conviction.
His brother continued to tangle with the law. In late 1995, Quan was caught with nearly a gram of crack cocaine. He told police he had a “bad cocaine problem” and smoked “primos every day.” But his most significant stint behind bars came in 2002 after he was pulled over for speeding on West Mill Road.
He stopped, told the officer he didn’t have a driver’s license with him and then took off. Police chased him, reaching speeds of about 60 mph on residential streets.
Quan ditched the car and ran on foot. Two officers chased after him.
When they caught up to him, Quan struggled, punching one officer and trying to take his gun, according to court records. A jury convicted him of four charges and he was sentenced to five years in prison.
At the time, Quan was 25 and living with his mother. He had earned his diploma from Custer High School and had three children, with a fourth on the way. He told his attorney he was speeding to make a scheduled visit with two of his children who were in foster care.
“I really do think I made a bad decision at the time I got pulled over,” he told the judge at sentencing, according to a transcript.
“I wish I could, like, go back and change it, you know. I wouldn’t have left.”
***
“I don’t know who shot first. All I know is it put me back in a war zone.”
— Curtis Fisher
***
Everything started on North 25th Street.
Curtis’ children and their mother, his longtime partner, lived in a two-story house on the block. Curtis moved in with them in early 2018.
His brother visited frequently and started a relationship with a woman across the street. He broke it off before the woman’s former boyfriend got out of prison, Curtis said.
The boyfriend learned about that history. He didn’t care that it had ended or that Quan had moved on to a new relationship, Curtis said.
“I think (he) was feeling insecure and some jealousy,” said Curtis, who described the boyfriend as a bully.
Quan tried to stay out of the man’s way. He got a landscaping job in West Bend.
“He sat in front of our house,” Curtis said of his brother. “He played his music or smoked a cigarette and every blue moon, he’d have a blunt. He went to work. That’s it.”
On Aug. 8, 2018, Curtis went to Oshkosh to fish, a hobby he took up to cope with post-traumatic stress. He came home and learned Quan and the man had been in an argument.
The next evening, about 8 p.m., Curtis heard a gunshot. He walked onto the porch and asked his brother what happened. His brother pointed across the street to the boyfriend, who had a gun.
I’m his brother and I live here, Curtis told the man. He can come here. This is his family.
The man got in his truck. As he drove off, Curtis heard him say: I’m going to cave in his chest tonight.
Quan decided to leave and go to his father’s house on West Appleton Avenue, near North 66th Street. Curtis offered to take him.
As soon as they arrived at the house on Appleton, Curtis’s phone rang. It was the mother of his children. The man with the gun had returned to their house with four other men. She told him they were on their porch, ringing the doorbell, pounding on the door and yelling for his brother.
She opened the door and told the men Quan wasn’t there. He went to the store, she said, lying to try to confuse them.
Curtis turned the car around and drove back east.
The brothers quickly decided they couldn’t go home without protection.
Curtis’ brother told him to turn off of Capitol Drive and had him stop the car. He ran around the corner and came back with two pistols from someone he knew. He put one in the center console for Curtis.
Curtis later guessed at his brother’s thought process: “Being on the victim side, I’m not going to give you a second chance to point a gun at me. I’m not going to let you kill me.”
They got home. The block was quiet. Curtis’ girlfriend told him the man had gone to the gas station. Quan wanted Curtis to drive him there. Curtis said no, at first, but he realized Quan was going there with or without him.
Curtis later said he wasn’t sure if the men actually were at the gas station. He hoped he could take his brother straight back to return the guns.
Regardless, he wasn’t going to abandon his brother again.
As soon as his brother saw the man in the parking lot on North 27th Street and West Capitol Drive, he jumped out of the car.
Curtis heard gunshot after gunshot.
***
“It’s a fight over a woman and two men who decide that this is the way that they’re going to handle it, but whoever that is, it’s someone’s little brother or someone’s son or someone’s father.”
— Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Michelle Havas ***
The rash of shootings last August prompted Mayor Tom Barrett, Milwaukee Police Chief Alfonso Morales and other city officials to urge people to put down their guns.
Barrett, in particular, urged parents, grandparents and others to talk to their relatives about guns.
“If you think that you have to take a gun somewhere for your personal safety, maybe you should not be going there,” Barrett said.
Curtis watched a clip of the news conference and let out a sigh.
“He’s telling them to educate your children about guns no matter how old they are,” Curtis said in an interview as he thought about the man who feuded with his brother.
“‘Don’t carry’ — you could say that 50 million times to that boy or man, if he feels because he’s selling drugs or whatever — he’s gonna carry that gun, because of the lifestyle,” he said. “If he’s in the street life, that’s what they are going to do for their protection.”
Research has proven that to be true. A study released last fall based on a survey of 345 young men and women in high-crime Chicago neighborhoods found a third of all respondents, and half of all men who responded, had carried a gun.
Nearly all the men who self-reported having carried said they did so to protect themselves, the study found. Of those who carry guns, more than onethird reported having recently been shot or shot at.
Curtis does not have confidence in the mayor or police chief or other officials to resolve gun violence.
After the shooting, Curtis spent six days in custody. Detectives pressed Curtis on why he or his longtime girlfriend did not call police that night. Why, they asked, did she call you instead?
“All I can tell you is we were not afraid of him,” Curtis recalled telling the detectives. “He wanted my brother.”
But there was another reason Curtis didn’t say.
At the time, no one was physically hurt. None of the men on the porch had openly shown a gun, even though Curtis was sure they were armed. Given that, Curtis simply did not believe the police would show up quickly.
“I don’t knock them, but they haven’t found a way to make the people that they protect and serve feel comfortable that they’re going to do it,” he said.
“This is someone who cares; he cares not just about this community but the global, larger community.”
— Defense attorney Colin McGinn
Two years before the shooting, Curtis was preparing to take over a Culver’s franchise.
Then, a lingering spinal injury from his Army days flared up and he had to drop those plans. He started seeing a chiropractor through the Zablocki Veterans Affairs Medical Center and began to manage his back condition. Always an active person, he shifted his workouts to make sure he was strengthening, but not stressing, his back.
He continued with counseling appointments to treat his PTSD at the VA center and organizing training camps for local high school athletes.
When Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in August 2017, he worked with Milwaukee radio personality Homer Blow to collect bottled water, toiletries, clothes, toys and other supplies. Curtis drove three loads of donations to Houston from Milwaukee.
“It was on my heart that I would go,” he said.
Everything came to a standstill Aug. 9, 2018. He lost his brother and then he was charged with illegal gun possession.
Most days, he felt numb.
“I lost my brother,” he said. “People talk, say stuff and I’m like ‘It’s alright.’ There’s nothing you can do if I tell you I’m good or bad or happy or sad. I just smile and say ‘I’m OK.’ ”
Once prosecutors determined the homicide was self-defense, Curtis’ brother became one of the uncounted.
In the past five years in Milwaukee, at least 38 killings — roughly 6% of all deaths investigated as homicides — have been found not to be criminal homicide.
That’s because they don’t meet the definition set by the federal government, which excludes homicides involving self-defense, or negligent manslaughter, such as an accidental shooting.
So, Quan’s death, even though it was the result of a shootout, was not included in the city’s murder statistics for 2018.
After the homicide, Curtis dreamed about his brother and the shooter, envisioning the shooter confessing to everything that happened that day.
“I don’t want to kill the man,” Curtis said last winter. “I want to grab him and confront the police and the district attorney with his statement.”
“Mr. Fisher probably … thinks of how he could have stopped his brother from going there every single day and honestly that’s probably a worse punishment than anything that we can take care of at this point.”
— Milwaukee County Prosecutor Francesco Mineo
Every two or three months, Curtis parked in the garage of the Milwaukee County Courthouse and made his way to the sixth floor.
He kept hope that his attorney, Colin McGinn, a public defender, would be able to convince the prosecutor to drop the charge.
As the months slipped by, Curtis felt helpless. He tried to get a job selling insurance, but the pending case popped up on his background check. His family took him to a seafood restaurant in Chicago to celebrate his birthday, but all he could do was think about his brother, who was always the life of the party.
He woke up anxious or in a cold sweat from nightmares. One night, he heard a truck idling outside and crept from window to window to get a better look. Convinced someone had broken into the garage, he grabbed a flashlight and sledgehammer from the basement.
He woke up his oldest son. Together, they slowly walked around the house, then flung open the garage door. Nothing was there.
Curtis later moved out of the house. “Everyone else got to move on with their lives,” he said.
Finally, he decided he needed to move on with his. McGinn, his attorney, said they could argue self-defense. Curtis said he did not see how a jury would acquit him when his own statement said he touched a gun.
“It was like a chess match,” he said of the decision.
In late July, nearly one year since his brother’s death, Curtis stood before Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Michelle Havas for sentencing after pleading guilty to being a felon in possession of a firearm.
The prosecutor, Francesco Mineo, recommended a postponed one-year prison sentence and placing him on probation for 18 months instead. Curtis’ attorney argued for time served — six days — and a fine.
After listening to both sides, Havas thanked Curtis for his military service and said she was sorry about his brother’s death. She said she found it “surprising” that the shooter was not charged with something as well. An official at the District Attorney’s Office later said self-defense also applied to the shooter’s possession of the gun, not just the homicide.
The judge said she did not think time served and a fine was appropriate for Curtis.
“Your brother gave you a gun and you continued driving him, you didn’t drop it like it was hot, you didn’t do anything like that,” she said.
Instead, she sentenced him to six months in the House of Correction but postponed that sentence. She placed him on probation for a year and if he successfully completes his probation, he will not have to serve the time.
“I don’t expect you’re going to do anything, but based on what I’ve heard, it sounds like you know who shot your brother,” Havas said.
“What I want to make sure is that we don’t end up with any more gunfire, anybody else’s brother, son or father gets hurt or killed or have had their lives taken off track the way yours has been.”
A week before he was sentenced, Curtis made the 90-minute drive to Oshkosh to the Fox River. He had always like to fish and as he spent more time at home and online awaiting his case outcome, he gravitated to a Facebook group for black outdoorsmen and women.
Curtis set up three poles on the river bank. He attached a bell to each one so if he got a bite, he would hear it.
He crossed the street and sat down in his lawn chair, his phone on a tripod and ready to stream video of any catch he made to the Facebook group.
He listened to the trains and boats rushing by and watched birds circling the nearby bridge.
He waited patiently for what would come next.