As his client sits behind bars charged with murdering Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey, “LeRue Grim, attorney for Your Black Muslim Bakery handyman Devaughndre Broussard is making a public case that the real culprit is bakery leader Yusuf Bey IV,” Paul T. Rosynsky reported Tuesday in the Oakland Tribune.

“‘You would think he is the main guy responsible for all of this,’ Grim said Monday during a telephone interview. ‘That is just logical, he is in charge of the whole place.’

“Grim’s comments come as he revealed new details about what was going on at the bakery weeks before the Aug. 2 slaying of Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey and what Bey IV told Broussard while both were placed in the same interview room during a police interrogation.

“Grim said the details were told to him by Broussard during a jail house interview Sunday night.

“‘My client tells me that Yusuf IV came in and said, “Everything is on the line for us and the bakery and we’re in survival mode,”‘ Grim said of the conversation he had with Broussard. ‘He tells him, “If you take this, you’re young, we will get you an attorney, we will get you manslaughter, we will get you probation and a year in county jail.”‘

“Broussard is facing the possibility of life behind bars for allegedly killing Bailey. Oakland police said the 19-year-old handyman confessed to the killing, saying he did the shooting because he was ‘a good soldier.’

“He also told police that he was angry at Bailey for stories he was working on regarding the bakery’s troubled finances and the Bey family feud, police said.

“But ever since police said his confession was taken, Broussard has said he is not the person who pumped three shotgun blasts into Bailey.”

• Madeleine Brand, “Day to Day,” National Public Radio: Hitchens says Oakland is soft on crime
• Henry K. Lee, San Francisco Chronicle: No bail for kidnap suspect linked to Black Muslim Bakery in Oakland

Killing Bailey Put Bakery Under More Scrutiny

Oakland Tribune Chauncey Bailey

“Killing a reporter is akin to killing a judge or a police officer. You’re not just murdering the person, you’re attacking the role: the robe, the badge, the notebook, the camera,” columnist Patt Morrison wrote Thursday in the Los Angeles Times. She noted that reporters groups — which are the National Association of Black Journalists, Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, and now the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley — are planning how to keep slain Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey’s work alive.

“So although you didn’t hear a lot about Bailey’s murder, you may, in the end, hear a lot more about his story. In death, Bailey might expose more corruption and malfeasance than he ever could have as just one guy with a notebook,” Matthew Felling added Thursday on CBS’s Public Eye blog.

“This isn’t inside baseball or journalistic delusions of grandeur here. Killing a journalist — a symbol of justice and freedom — ends up attracting more attention to the story and raising the stakes. Now the bakery is under far more scrutiny than it ever would have been otherwise.

“. . . this is the risk that many journalists accept as part of their vocation: that the story is bigger than them; that wrongdoing must be exposed and that digging deeper, while dangerous, is their way of contributing to society. And that’s the aspect of journalism that gets lost in the cable shoutfests and reality TV shows.”