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The shooting was in 1995. Michael Westerman was a resident of Todd County, KY, just north of the Tennessee line, and a graduate of a high school located a few miles from Jefferson Davis' birthplace. The Confederate battle flag was a school symbol and he was proud to be the first in his family to complete high school. He and his wife were parents of 5-week-old twins and were going out for the first time since the babies were born when the four young black men in another car saw the rebel flag and chased them for several miles before managing to kill Michael.

The pickup had tinted windows and the black guys didn't know who was inside. Later they claimed he had called them the N-word but Michael's wife said that he never spoke to them.

It got some national attention at the time--Tony Horwitz had a snarky piece in the New Yorker about the incident (his attitude seemed to be that the white people of Todd Co. were just a bunch of racist losers and that Michael's death was no loss to society)---later expanded into a book called Confederates in the Attic.