It’s Saturday night near Johnson City, Tennessee. Gordy is standing, blindfolded, at the base of a live oak tree with a noose around his neck. The sound of shots rises above the crowd noise as Gordy is being pelted with something.

No, this is not a lynch party. It’s an initiation ceremony into the Ku Klux Klan and Gordy is tonight’s guest of honor. The impacts he feels against his body are from paint-ball guns. But the sound of gunfire sounds real.

One member of the Klan, a dude named Otis, decides what Gordy needs for his initiation is a bit more realism. So Otis pulls out his pistol and fires a shot into the air — straight up. Now, Otis should have remembered what happened to Sir Isaac Newton when he discovered gravity while resting under an apple tree. If something is up above (like an apple or a bullet) then it’s got to come back down again — somewhere.

Turns out the "somewhere" is smack on the top of Gordy’s head. The odds of such a thing happening are tiny, but in this case that’s what happens. The bullet enters the top of Gordy’s head and exits at the base of his skull, according to newspaper reports.

From the moment Gordy collapses, Otis knows he’s done a bad thing. So he "flees the scene" of the Klan rally and heads for the hills, leaving his white outfit behind.

The sheriff is called to investigate. Gordy is taken to a local hospital with what paramedics call a "critical injury."

Otis’s name is mentioned a time or two during questioning by sheriff’s investigators. Within a few hours deputies round up Otis near his home. He surrenders without a struggle and is charged with aggravated assault and reckless endangerment. No word about Gordy’s condition.

This whole incident is really bad PR for the Klan. Carrying on like this — a noose around a guy’s neck, and shooting him in the head — can give those guys a bad name.