The Detroit News: Lessons from a former Detroit reporter’s murder reemerge as killer gets released

By Francis X. Donnelly

The Detroit News

July 4, 2025

Oakland, Calif. police work at the scene where Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey was shot dead at the corner of 14th and Alice streets in Oakland, Calif., Thursday, August 2, 2007. (D. Ross Cameron/The Oakland Tribune)

The family of Chauncey Bailey has long made peace with the prison sentence of the man who killed him.

Dre Broussard was released last month after serving 17 years. He received a shorter sentence after agreeing to testify against two other men involved in the 2007 shooting of Bailey, a former Detroit resident.

Bailey’s family supported the plea deal, saying the other men were more culpable in the crime.

Bailey’s family members weren’t the only ones affected by the murder. The numbers of the other group are legion, stretching from one end of the country to the other.

Bailey, 57, was a newspaper reporter who was killed to prevent him from telling a story.

The public’s right to hear such stories is one of the cornerstones of our country, said Jesse Holcomb, an associate professor of journalism at Calvin University in Grand Rapids. Freedom of the press, enshrined in the First Amendment, allows democracy to flourish by preserving the flow of information.

The fatal shooting wasn’t just an attack on Bailey; it was an assault on what America stands for, Holcomb said.

“A free and independent press is just as vital to American life and governance as it was at the time of our nation’s founding,” he said.

Broussard’s release also comes at a precipitous time for reporters. They’ve been buffeted by economic pressures, political polarization and physical threats spurred by verbal attacks by public officials.

“We’re living in a moment of increased political violence. The temperature is running high,” Holcomb said.

Bailey brings intensity

Bailey liked to tell a story about his days as a newspaper boy in Hayward, Calif.

The Baileys were one of the first Black families in the Oakland suburb in the early 1960s, according to “Killing the Messenger: A Story of Radical Faith, Racism’s Backlash and the Assassination of a Journalist,” a 2012 book about Bailey’s murder.

One of Bailey’s customers called the newspaper to ask why “some little (N-word)” was delivering his paper. When Bailey later became a reporter, he wondered how the subscriber would feel about “some little (N-word)” writing for a newspaper.

The story captured Bailey’s personality, former colleagues told The Detroit News. He worked for the Detroit newspaper from 1979 to 1992.

They described him as self-assured, brusque, prickly. He walked around with a chip on his shoulder and didn’t care what anyone thought about it.

Jill Day, who was associate executive editor of the Michigan Chronicle, said Bailey was passionate, even mercurial, about the things he wrote about.

“His intensity could go from zero to 60,” Day said. “The switch could flip. You might find yourself in the middle of a situation. You wonder, ‘How did we get here?’”

Maidstone Mulenga was a resident of the African nation of Zambia who came to Detroit in 1989 to study journalism at Wayne State University.

Mulenga spent his first night in the U.S. at Bailey’s home, listening to him compare the press in the two countries. Bailey’s face lit up as he rhapsodized about how U.S. reporters could write what they wanted without fear of reprisal.

“Chauncey Bailey was my introduction to American journalism,” said Mulenga, who is communications director for the United Methodist Council of Bishops in Washington.

Bailey wasn’t afraid to confront people in power, whether it was his bosses at The News or a certain Detroit political leader whose fiery temperament matched the reporter’s lightning bolt for lightning bolt.

During a press conference at Detroit City Airport in 1988, Detroit Mayor Coleman Young accused Bailey of being a Black gun for hire, a hatchet man hired by the paper to attack the politician, said Ken Coleman, a longtime Detroit journalist.

“Don’t give me that bull—- or we’ll get it on,” Young said. “They brought you in here from San Francisco as the resident Black to do a chop on the city.”

Bailey responded in kind.

“You don’t like Black reporters who ask tough questions,” he said.

Reporter returns to Oakland

Bailey returned to California in 1993 and worked for the Oakland Tribune for a dozen years before being fired after several incidents involving conflicts of interest, according to “Killing the Messenger.”

He wrote a glowing story about a small business owned by a woman he was dating without telling his editors about the relationship, the book said.

Another time, he threatened to write a negative story about the California Department of Motor Vehicles unless it interceded in a dispute he was having with a person who bought his car.

Needing a job, he became editor of the free Oakland Post in 2007. After 33 years in journalism, he was back where he started, working for a small California weekly that focused on Black community news.

He was at the Post for several weeks when he received a tip about Your Black Muslim Bakery in Oakland.

The business was much more than a confectionery. Founded by a Black Muslim who broke away from the Nation of Islam, it grew to seven bakeries and expanded into property management and security guard services.

With a mosque and community center, it became a political force as leaders preached Black empowerment and helped the poor, especially former convicts.

But there was another side to the bakery, and that’s what Saleem Bey wanted to talk to the newspaper about. He was involved in a power struggle for control of the business after the death of its founder in 2003.

Bey told Bailey the business was on the verge of bankruptcy after three years of alleged embezzlement, according to “Killing the Messenger.”

Bey said the bakery’s 21-year-old chief executive, Yusuf Bey IV, had accumulated a lengthy list of criminal charges in five counties that included assault, false imprisonment, burglary, car theft and forgery.

Saleem Bey was a son-in-law of company founder Yusuf Bey, while Yusuf IV was one of his sons. Many members of the group changed their last names to Bey.

The irony of Bailey’s death

One of the ironies of Bailey’s death is that he was killed for a story that likely wasn’t going to run.

He jotted down Saleem Bey’s allegations and submitted the story for publication, but publisher Paul Cobb was concerned.

The story described serious crimes, including a murder, but had only one source, who didn’t want to be identified, according to “Killing the Messenger.” It also failed to get a response from Yusuf Bey IV. Cobb spiked the story.

Cobb, who is now the paper’s owner, didn’t respond to a question by The News about whether the story was salvageable.

When Saleem Bey was interviewed by Bailey at the Post, he was spotted by one of the paper’s advertising workers, according to the book. Bey became alarmed because he wanted to be anonymous and the salesperson was an ex-wife of Yusuf Bey and still had connections with the bakery.

Sure enough, when Bey returned home, his wife told him people at the bakery already knew he had visited the paper. Bey then received a call from Yusuf IV telling him to keep his name out of his mouth.

Yusuf Bey IV told two of his workers, Dre Broussard and Antoine Mackey, that they needed to prevent the story from running, said the book. The way to do that, he instructed the men, was by killing Bailey.

“We got to take him out before he write that story,” Yusuf IV said, according to the book.

On the following day, a city bus driver saw a man lurking outside a downtown Oakland apartment building wearing a ski mask and clutching a 12-gauge shotgun. The terrified worker called her dispatcher, but when police responded, they couldn’t find the man.

As Bailey walked to work that morning, a battered minivan with no license plate drove past him and a shotgun-holding man suddenly jumped out and ran toward him.

Broussard shot the reporter in the shoulder and stomach and began to run to the van, according to a police report. He paused, returned to Bailey and, while standing over him, fired the shotgun a third time into his face.

Project digs into murder

During a subsequent raid of the bakery compound by police, Broussard was discovered with the murder weapon and confessed to the killing. But he said he acted alone.

Police didn’t press the matter. They had charged Yusuf Bey IV with kidnapping and torture in an unrelated case, which was punishable by up to life in prison.

And that’s how things would have remained if it hadn’t been for the Chauncey Bailey Project.

The project was a group of northern California reporters who joined together to investigate the murder. It was modeled after a similar effort in 1976 when Don Bolles, a reporter for the Arizona Republic, died in a car bombing orchestrated by organized crime.

Thomas Peele, an investigative reporter for the Contra Costa Times, became the lead reporter of the project and later wrote “Killing the Messenger.”

He told The Detroit News the murder of Bailey led to far deeper scrutiny of Bey, which was one of the points of the whole enterprise. The death of a journalist doesn’t end the journalism.

“It was our duty to carry on, to do our work,” Peele said. “There was no way around that. Anything else, anything less than that would have been a dereliction of duty.”

A bigger conspiracy gets uncovered

The project looked into the bakery bankruptcy and other issues mentioned in Bailey’s story, but soon shifted its focus. The reporters kept uncovering facts that suggested the murder went beyond Broussard.

Bey denied he ever went near Bailey’s apartment, but a tracking device that police placed on his car showed it was parked outside the home seven hours before the murder, the project reported.

Also, a woman romantically involved with Bey told police Bey met Broussard and Mackey in the wee hours of the day Bailey was killed and boasted about the murder afterward, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Even more telling was a secretly recorded video at the Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, Calif., the project reported.

It showed Bey bragging and laughing as he spoke to two inmates about his role in the killing. Among other things, he said he temporarily stored the murder weapon before returning it to Broussard just before the police raid.

The police and prosecutors knew all these things early in their investigation, but, for some reason, failed to move against Bey.

That changed when the project and other reporters began bringing the information into the light.

Josh Richman, a friend of Bailey’s and one of the major reporters in the project, said their work was just an extension of what the reporter did before he was killed.

“Chauncey believed deeply in local journalism, reporting all of a community’s joys and flaws. To me, that’s a kind of community service,” Richman said.

Ursula Jones Dickson, the Alameda County district attorney, whose office handled the investigation, was contacted by The News but declined to comment.

Suspects go on trial

Bey and Mackey, the driver of the van in Bailey’s shooting, were tried for the murder in 2011.

The star witness was Broussard, who was no longer taking sole credit for the crime. He testified Bey and Mackey were involved in Bailey’s death and several others.

Mackey was convicted of two murders and Bey three. They were sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Mackey’s attorney, Philip Brooks, declined to comment about Broussard’s release. Bey’s lawyer, Evan Williams, couldn’t be reached for comment.

In exchange for his testimony, Broussard was sentenced to 25 years in prison. He shaved time off through good behavior and working as a prison firefighter.

Bailey’s sister, Lorelei Waqia of Atlanta, grudgingly went along with the plea bargain in 2009. She said, in a perfect world, Broussard would have served a longer sentence, but authorities needed his help in securing the conviction of Bey, whom she considered a far bigger pariah.

Waqia said she still feels that way today.

She told The News she hopes Broussard, who’s 37, becomes a productive member of society.

“The justice department has its own timetable,” Waqia said. “We understand time is shortened for things like good behavior. Only time will tell if he is truly reformed.”

A spokesman for Dickson, the county prosecutor, said she shared a sentiment Waqia expressed earlier to the project.

“We hope he has reformed and becomes an asset to the community,” said the spokesman, Casey Bates.

Broussard couldn’t be reached for comment. His stepfather, Marcus Calloway of San Francisco, declined to talk at length with The News.

“He served his time, so everybody moved on. We just moved on,” Calloway said.

Asked what Broussard was doing, he said his stepson “is trying to live his life” and then hung up.

Searching for an apology

Chauncey Bailey wasn’t a star reporter, and the story he was working on wasn’t Watergate. It was just a tale about the tawdry behavior of a hoodlum.

But none of that takes away from the importance of what happened, said Holcomb, the Calvin University professor. A reporter was prevented from telling a story.

Society’s right to be informed is one of the most cherished and fiercely defended principles in the country’s history, Holcomb said.

“A society becomes less democratic when journalists, or citizens for that matter, self-censor for fear of retaliation,” he said.

In Bailey’s stead was a group of reporters whose work presented a troubling panorama of Oakland in 2007.

It provided a fulsome account of Bailey’s death, leading to the conviction of two more people. It exposed the workings of a politically powerful bakery that was the front of a criminal cult, which was later dismantled.

And it showed the deficiencies of a police department whose chief subsequently resigned under pressure.

All the reporting in the world, however, couldn’t answer a question Broussard posed during a hearing last year before the California Parole Board.

He said Bailey never should have been killed, that he was a person who was simply doing his job, the project reported. He wanted to apologize to the reporter’s family but struggled to find the right words.

“What words is enough?” Broussard asked. “What words make sense?”

fdonnelly@detroitnews.com