Sun Gone Down

On New Year’s Day 2006, Bryan Harvey and his family were brutally murdered in their home in Richmond, VA, during what police now call the 2006 Richmond Spree Murders. Harvey, you may recall, was the dark, brooding front man for the indie 1980s-90s band House of Freaks, a singer-songwriter with a voice like a cracker John Lennon and a flair for writing Flannery O’Connoresque lyrics. Harvey and percussionist Johnny Hott enjoyed nominal success with the MTV generation, but by the mid-90s Harvey and Hott had grown disillusioned with a changing, bottom-line obsessed music industry. Bryan Harvey opted to settle down with his story-book family (his “Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife”), leaving behind his professional music career. The killers, Ricky “Coolie” Gray and his nephew Ray “Lucky” Dandridge, both 29, were dropouts, drug addicts, ex-cons, small time thieves, as well as childhood victims of sexual abuse. The men drove into Richmond’s peaceful, middle class enclave of Woodland Heights looking for a house to rob. Finding the Harvey’s front door ajar, the two men entered and committed the unthinkable: a random, brutal, senseless murder of the Harveys and their two young daughters (one of many committed that week by Gray and Dandridge). To this day, Richmonders find the senseless brutality of the crime hard to fathom and impossible to forget.