Harold Mitchell has been riding motorcycles longer than Officer Kowalski has been alive. Two tours in Vietnam, three kids raised, one son buried – all marked by the steady rhythm of two wheels on pavement. Until that Tuesday when four squad cars decided his inspected, legal exhaust was suddenly “too loud.”
What the police didn’t count on was the network of veterans and bikers who’d ridden beside Harold for decades. Or his wife’s determination to fight back not with anger, but with truth. At the city council meeting, we came armed with medical studies about riding’s therapeutic value for PTSD, with civil rights violation documentation, with the quiet dignity of men who’d served their country only to be treated like criminals in their hometown.
When 85-year-old Tank Morrison stood on his prosthetic legs and asked, “You want to tell me I can’t ride?” even the mayor knew this fight was over. Some freedoms are too hard-won to surrender to bureaucratic bullying.
