RIP Angelo B. Henderson

Angelo B. Henderson, a Detroit journalist and radio talk show host, died Saturday. He won a Pulitzer in 1999, when he was at the Wall Street Journal, in the feature writing category for his portrait of a druggist driven to violence by encounters with armed robbers.

Read it here (thanks, Mark): DETROIT — “Get on the ground,” a man holding a gun screamed. “I’ll blow your heads off if you move.”

Dennis Grehl and a co-worker complied. Dreamlike, he found himself lying face down on a cold, gritty black-tile floor, a pistol against the back of his head.

“Please, mister, don’t make me shoot you,” a second gunman threatened. A crazy memory: tiny specks of light floating in the tile; that, and the paralyzing weight of helplessness.

Mr. Grehl is a pharmacist, unassuming, mild mannered. A family man with a wife and a daughter. He was being robbed. He works in the Redford Pharmacy, a small neighborhood place in northwest Detroit. It’s been around forever; the kind of place that delivers.

He had gone into his chosen profession in part because his mother had advised him to. “Nice and clean,” she had said. Plus, he liked to help people.


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