Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
Before we begin, I want to say something important. Donald Trump is in the Epstein files. I know this. You know this. The Justice Department knows this.
And someone, somewhere, in a room with very good lighting and very bad intentions, looked at that information and said: we are going to need a bigger distraction.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Dayton James Webber.
The Setup: America’s Feel-Good Story of 2023
In 2023, ESPN did what ESPN does. They found Dayton Webber, 27, a professional cornhole player from Maryland, and they pointed a camera at him and turned on the swelling music. Webber lost all four limbs at ten months old when a blood infection led to sepsis and doctors amputated everything to save his life.
This is genuinely awful. The kind of thing that makes you question the architecture of a universe managed by a God who keeps insisting he has a plan. I say this not to mock Dayton Webber, who by all accounts decided to live his life with considerable gusto, but to establish the baseline of national sympathy America extended to him when ESPN put him on camera and the internet collectively wept and said: look at this man. No arms. No legs. Playing professional cornhole.
What an inspiration. What a testament.
And a distraction.
Cornhole, for the uninitiated, is a game in which players throw bean bags through a hole in a slanted wooden board. It was designed, as near as historians can tell, specifically to be played in a parking lot while holding a beer. It is America in game form: maximum leisure, minimum athleticism, large bean bag. We gave it a professional league. We put it on ESPN. All of us will apparently do anything except look into the Epstein files.
The Incident, Described With the Clinical Detachment It Does Not Deserve
On this past Sunday evening in La Plata, Maryland, Dayton Webber allegedly shot Bradrick Michael Wells, 27, in the front passenger seat of a car.
A car that Webber was driving.
I need you to sit with that sentence for a moment. Not the shooting part. Not yet. The driving part. Webber has no arms and no legs. He was, according to authorities, operating a motor vehicle on a public road with other human beings inside it. Someone looked at this situation and said yes, I will get in this car. Multiple someones. There were passengers in the backseat, plural, which means at least two adults looked at a man with no limbs behind the wheel and performed whatever internal calculus led them to climb in and buckle up.
Who taught him to drive? Where does one even get a license for this? Is there a DMV roadtest for this situation? Is there adaptive equipment involved that I lack the engineering vocabulary to understand? These are not rhetorical questions. I genuinely want to know how the steering wheel works.
But fine. He drives. America finds a way. We once landed on the moon with less computing power than your microwave, so let us simply accept that Dayton Webber drives a car and move forward.
The Gun. Let Us Talk About the Gun.
He also, allegedly, had a gun. Which he fired.
I do not know how Dayton Webber held the firearm. I do not know how he purchased it, though I note that the background check form requires a pen, a surface, and hands, none of which he possesses. I do not know how he aimed it, stored it, or deployed it during what was apparently an argument with the man sitting twelve inches to his right while he was actively driving a car.
What I do know is that he technically never took his hands off the wheel. Because there were no hands. By the strict letter of every driver’s education course ever taught in America, Dayton Webber maintained perfect form throughout the entire incident. Ten and two. Eyes forward. Allegedly murdering someone.
Jesus, Take the Wheel is a song Carrie Underwood wrote about this exact situation, and at this point in the story I believe every word of it, because there is no other explanation for how any of this is physically possible.
There were two people in the backseat who watched all of this happen and neither of them attempted to intervene. Which raises the question I cannot stop turning over: at what point in the argument did you look at the man with no limbs driving the car and think, you know what, I’m going to let this play out. I am not saying they should have done anything differently. I am saying that the human threat assessment system apparently has a gap in it that no one anticipated and the gun lobby certainly isn’t going to address.
The backseat passengers then asked to exit the vehicle, got out, and flagged down police. This is the single most reasonable decision anyone makes in this entire story and they made it without hesitation. Give them a medal. Give them several.
Psst. Trump. Still there. Still in the Epstein files. Just checking.
The Two-Hour Drive Nobody Asked For
After the shooting, Webber asked the backseat passengers to help remove Wells from the car. They declined with what I can only imagine was extraordinary composure given the circumstances. And Webber drove away.
With the body.
For two hours.
Ten miles.
Until a resident of Charlotte Hall, Maryland looked out their window and found Bradrick Michael Wells in their yard. Not their driveway. Their yard. Someone looked out a window on a Sunday night and there was a dead man where the yard used to be, and that sentence is going to live in my brain until I die, which given the general trajectory of American civic life may be sooner than I’d planned.
How did Wells end up in the yard? No arms. The physics of this are staggering. The commitment to the project is, in a completely horrifying way, impressive. America does not half-ass things. America sees a problem, identifies the available tools, notes that some of those tools are missing entirely, and improvises anyway.
We really should be more upset about the Epstein files…but, cornhole.
The American Cornhole League Responds
The American Cornhole League, a sentence I will never stop writing because it makes me feel something I cannot name, released a formal statement.
The American Cornhole League has a crisis communications protocol.
There is a person, possibly several people, whose entire professional identity involves managing public relations for competitive bean bag throwing. On Monday morning that person’s phone lit up and they earned every cent they have ever made in their life and possibly several future lives. They wrote:
“This is an extremely serious matter and our thoughts are with all those impacted, including the family and loved ones of Bradrick Michael Wells.”
The League declined further comment pending the investigation.
I have spent the better part of my career in communications. Television promos for networks whose names I will protect to preserve what remains of my dignity. Web content for other companies. The occasional team process memo. I have workshopped sensitive language at nine in the morning with a coffee going cold on my desk. I have stared at blank documents trying to find words adequate to situations that resisted them.
I have never had to write a statement about a quadruple amputee professional athlete who allegedly shot someone in a moving vehicle he was driving with no limbs, drove two hours with the body, deposited it in a stranger’s yard, fled across a state line, and checked himself into an emergency room for what turned out to be something other than seasonal allergies.
The American Cornhole League did that on a Monday. Before most people finished breakfast.
Respect. Genuine, unironic, stunned respect.
Albemarle County Gets Involved, Which Is Where I Live, and Which Has Seen Some Things
Dayton Webber drove south.
He crossed into Virginia. He pulled into a gas station in Albemarle County at 1:27 in the morning.
My county. Where I live on a farm with my wife Karie, a pig named Trouble McFussbucket, and Mr. Pickles, a five-pound Scandinavian Lintbøøl who has thus far confined his criminal activity to terrorizing the Amazon delivery people.
Albemarle County is no stranger to American darkness arriving uninvited. In August 2017, neo-Nazis and white nationalists marched through Charlottesville with tiki torches (in fairness there really were no mosquitoes that weekend), and the next day a man deliberately drove a car into a crowd of counter-protesters and killed Heather Heyer on a public street. That happened here. In Jefferson’s county. Where Thomas Jefferson wrote about the self-evident equality of all men while personally owning 600 of them, and where we have been working through that particular contradiction ever since.
And now, nine years later, a different man allegedly drove a different car through the night and ended up at our gas station at 1:27 a.m.
Albemarle County just keeps answering the phone. America keeps calling.
An Albemarle County Police Department officer spotted the car. Reviewed the security footage. Tracked the suspect to Sentara Martha Jefferson Hospital, where Webber had checked himself in for a medical issue.
What was the medical issue?
Authorities did not specify. I will say only that if you have just allegedly committed a murder, driven ten miles with a corpse, deposited that corpse in a stranger’s yard, crossed a state line, and rolled into a gas station in Charlottesville at 1:27 a.m., whatever brought you to the emergency room is probably not seasonal allergies. Probably. The pollen count in central Virginia is genuinely alarming in March. I am not ruling anything out.
The ACPD waited. Webber was treated. He was released. He was arrested on his way out the door.
“This case,” said the ACPD, “is a strong example of interagency cooperation and the role that information-sharing plays in safely resolving serious incidents.”
Martha Jefferson Hospital. Named for Jefferson’s wife. On the soil Jefferson farmed with human beings he legally owned. In the county where Heather Heyer died on a Saturday in August because America contains a specific and recurring kind of evil that keeps finding its way back to the same zip code.
And now this.
America, Explained, Finally, at Great Personal Cost
Here is what I have come to understand after nearly six decades of watching this country operate.
We do not need a conspiracy to distract ourselves. We are self-distracting. We are a perpetual motion machine of spectacle, a content factory running twenty-four hours with no foreman and no off switch, producing new headlines before anyone has finished processing the last batch. The algorithm does not plant these stories. It simply amplifies what we generate naturally, on our own, every single day, because we are America and this is what we do.
A man with no arms and no legs was driving a car. People got in. Nobody moved when the argument started. He allegedly shot the man beside him, drove two hours with the body, deposited it in a yard, checked into my local emergency room, and was arrested on the way out. The American Cornhole League issued a formal statement. ESPN has a 2023 profile aging in its archives like milk left in a warm car.
Nobody planned this. Nobody had to.
And somewhere, in a case file that certain powerful people would very much prefer you never open, is a name you already know.
I almost forgot it again just now.
His name was Bradrick Michael Wells. He was 27 years old. He was from Waldorf, Maryland.
He got into a car.
Rats. Distracted again.
I mean Trump.
See my Amazon author page and buy my books.
His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his wellbeing). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos.
He has two new, offbeat novels waiting foran agent or a publisher: "Truth Tastes Like Pennies" and "Elliot Nessie."
He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
More biographic lies...err...info.
- Packing for Marrakech, Distracted by Fried Chicken Fashion - April 20, 2026
- I Am Not a Carwash Guy Either - April 17, 2026
- Scientists Confirm Sperm Whales Have Language. Gary is pleased. - April 16, 2026
