Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (19 page)

Evidently, the prospect of Jerry’s leaving the boys unattended had been a concern to Lora. Usually, when she dropped Tyler off at Brandon’s, she would check to see that Jerry was home. But this time, unbeknownst to her, when she dropped the bike off, Jerry was already on his way to Ohio. “Tyler knew he wasn’t allowed there unless there was supervision,” says Lora. But Tyler didn’t call. Nor did Jerry. And Lora went out with Thomas to celebrate a girlfriend’s birthday ninety minutes away in Union Lake.

Jerry checked in with the boys a few times throughout the afternoon while they played Xbox. The last time Brandon called Jerry was around 6:30 p.m., when Brandon asked if he could order pizza from Treve’s in town.

Almost two hours later, Brandon walked out of the house with his hands up, wearing red shorts with no shirt or socks, the police telling him to keep his hands where they could see them. He had just called 911 and told them he had shot Tyler. “Do you have any weapons?” the policeman yelled. “No,” said Brandon. “It’s on the kitchen floor.” Another police car arrived. According to the police report, an officer walked Brandon to the patrol car as Brandon pleaded, “It was an accident. I didn’t know the gun was loaded.”

According to the report, a police officer went inside the house, where he found a lever-action rifle on the kitchen floor and Tyler lying on the dining room floor, in a Mountain Dew T-shirt and sweatpants, with a large pool of blood surrounding his head. He wasn’t breathing or moving. There was a huge wound on the left side of his head. The policeman checked for a pulse but found none, called dispatch, and told them Tyler was dead. As he got up to leave the house, he saw a shotgun lying on the living room couch and four holes in the dining room window.

Nobody but Brandon will ever know for sure what happened that night, says Sheriff Biniecki. Brandon claims they were playing Xbox when he got a rifle out of Jerry’s closet to show to Tyler in the dining room. He didn’t know it was loaded when he asked Tyler to take hold of it while he went to get his milkshake from his bedroom. He came back with the milkshake, put it on the table, and took the rifle from Tyler, who passed it to him butt first with the muzzle pointing in Tyler’s direction. They had finished looking at it, and Brandon was resting it against the wall when the gun got caught on his shorts pocket and went off. He called 911. “[I called them] to bring an ambulance because my friend was hurt,” he later told the detective in Sandusky. “All they sent were cops, and when the cops showed up they put me in a car, and now I am here.”

Biniecki considers Brandon’s account, which he reenacted several times at the police station with a broomstick for a gun, as basically credible. “But we believe either the gun was getting passed back to the boy, or the boy took the gun and was standing it up in a corner, and as he was doing so it went off. Obviously there had to have been one in the chamber, and obviously, with that kind of weapon, it had to have the hammer back and ready to fire.”

Back at the scene, Brandon sat in the car, apparently in shock and distress, while police combed the house. He’d been crying and was visibly shaken. When they searched him, they found in his shorts pocket two 12-gauge Remington buckshot shells and a cell phone. There was blood on his hands and on the phone. As he was placed in the back of the car, he repeated, “We were just messing around. I didn’t know the gun was
loaded.” In an indication of quite how feral the day had been, when asked how he’d come by the shells in his pocket, Brandon explained that he’d found them in his bedroom earlier that day when looking for sparklers and had stuck them in his pocket for safekeeping.

Outside the house, tape went up and more cars arrived, bringing officers, detectives, and crime scene investigators. The officer who’d arrived first checked on Brandon occasionally to find him either distressed or bored: you get the impression of a frightened boy struggling to make a connection between the irreversible tragedy he has just caused, the horror he has just witnessed, and the enormity of the trouble he is now in. Asked how he was doing, he replied, “Not good. I just shot my best friend.” Throughout the night he kept asking for his phone so he could at least play games on it while he waited, worrying about where he would be sleeping that night, and saying he wished he’d stayed in Colorado with his mom. He eventually fell asleep for about half an hour before being woken by an officer and told he was being taken to Sandusky for questioning.

Inside, officers searched the property to discover a veritable arsenal. In Brandon’s room was a Remington 1100 shotgun, loaded and perched against the dresser with one round in the chamber and four in the pipe. Brandon says his father had originally left the gun in the kitchen but then moved it to his room when he had company over. There were also two other single-shot shotguns (a New England Firearms and a Winchester 370) near the closet. In the top dresser drawer were some marijuana in tinfoil and two rolled joints.

When asked later how many guns he had in the house, Jerry couldn’t quite remember. First he said seven or eight, only to recant, broaden the margin of error, and up the potential number, correcting himself to admit to between five and ten.

Brandon didn’t know Tyler’s address, but he could describe where his house was. The police went there to find only Tiffany and Ashley at home, who told them if they wanted an adult they should call their grandmother, Janet, who lived nearby. Janet came over shortly after midnight and was told the news. She called Lora. There was no reply. She
kept calling for well over an hour and took Ashley and Tiffany back to her place for the night. Lora’s cell phone was dead. She’d left it in the car to charge. When she came out, she saw several missed calls from her mother and knew something was up. She dialed Janet. “Are you on your way home?” her mom asked. “No. Why?” said Lora. “I think you need to come home,” said Janet.

Lora’s mother wouldn’t give an explanation over the phone, but that didn’t unduly concern Lora. She assumed Ashley and Tiffany had thrown a party and been caught by their grandmother. She cut the night short and headed back to Marlette. Night falls heavy here, cloaking the land in uncluttered darkness. On dirt roads in the middle of fields with no street lamps for miles, the flashing lights of stationary police vehicles announce themselves with the force of a lighthouse.

Because Brandon’s street was en route to her mother’s house, Lora saw the lights flashing where she had last seen her son and drove toward them.

“I turned down there and called my mom. I got right in front of Brandon’s house when she picked up.”

“Mom, do you have Tyler?” she asked.

“I think you’d better just come here,” said Janet.

“And then she put the sheriff-lady on the phone,” recalls Lora.

“Don’t go there. Just come here,” said the “sheriff-lady,” and Lora obliged.

“There’s been an accident,” the policewoman said.

“Okay,” said Lora, matter-of-factly.

“Your son’s in Lapeer County Hospital.”

“Okay,” said Lora. “Why didn’t you tell me that, because I just came through Lapeer.”

“No, Lora,” said the policewoman. “Lora, he’s been shot and killed.”

A year later, Lora is still upset at how the news was broken to her. “So she made me think one thing, like that he was injured, and then turned around and changed it to another story, like he was dead.”

When Lora was halfway home from Union Lake, Jerry was in the lobby of the Sanilac County sheriff’s office in Sandusky. It was two a.m.;
he had been called on his way back from his truck run. It had been a long day. He’d been asked to come and pick up Brandon, but he had no idea why. They asked him whether there were any custody issues between him and Connie, whether he often left his son alone, his opinion about Tyler, and whether he thought the two of them were responsible. Asked if any of his weapons were loaded, he said they might have been. Finally they asked if Brandon had taken hunter-safety classes. According to the police report, Jerry said he hadn’t because he was doing the apprenticeship program, in which a child age ten or older can hunt for two years without the safety certificate if he or she is in the company of an adult. Beyond that, he’d given Brandon only basic instructions. “I told him to hold the gun with the barrel pointing in the air. Never to point the gun at anyone, and never put any shells in the gun unless you are outside.”

How that gun had got into Brandon’s bedroom was a mystery to Jerry. He thought it had originally been in the living room, and he didn’t remember moving it. All the guns in the house were his, he said, apart from the 20 gauge, which he’d bought Brandon for hunting. He said the .30–30 rifle that killed Tyler had been in his closet the whole time, and that he’d put three rounds in the tube roughly a year earlier and had not touched it since then.

Only then, when these preliminary questions were over, was Jerry told why Brandon was at the sheriff’s office. On hearing the news, according to the police report, “Jerry became quite emotional and acted normally for a person receiving the information that was provided to him.”

Jerry and Brandon were reunited so Brandon could be read his Miranda rights in Jerry’s presence. Before the interview, the detective “went over the truth/lie scenario” with Brandon to make sure he knew the difference. He also impressed on Brandon that if he didn’t know the answer to any question the police asked him, he shouldn’t guess, and it was okay to change his mind. Connie later told the police she’d never caught Brandon in a lie, though when he got in trouble in school he would occasionally offer only partial truths.

It was 2:30 a.m. when Brandon repeated his story. “The gun fired when it was being lowered in a diagonal manner. It caught on a piece of
my shorts by the pocket. I was lowering the gun to set it against the wall because me and Tyler were done looking at it.” He didn’t rack the lever, he said. He didn’t know it was loaded. He was unfamiliar with the rifle.

It is relatively easy, with hindsight, to establish a pattern that would otherwise not have been obvious. Had Brandon not shot Tyler, a handful of minor episodes, nagging doubts, and odd moments relating to his behavior would probably never have amounted to anything. But he did shoot Tyler, and over the next few days police interviews with a range of people connected to one or both of them provided hints that, even if this was not an expected or even likely turn of events, it was always a possibility.

In her police interview, Connie said that the entire time she was with Jerry, she had always been nervous about the number of guns he had in the house and always assumed they were loaded. Once, Tyler had come back from Brandon’s house with knives. Lora had taken them away from him but had never thought to raise the matter with Jerry.

And then there were the incidents at school, which emerged in the wake of the shooting, when the children were receiving grief counseling. According to the police report, on Wednesday, the day before hunting season began, Brandon had boasted during math class that he had pointed a 20 gauge at a boy’s stomach while it was cocked and loaded without the safety on. Brandon also joked that because he hadn’t seen any deer yet, he’d told the boy that he should put antlers on his head and run around the garden like a big buck so Brandon could shoot at him. The child who’d overheard them couldn’t say for sure but thought they were “goofing around” about the antler story; he also thought that “they were serious” about aiming the 20 gauge at the boy’s stomach. Brandon first denied any knowledge of this exchange and then said he couldn’t remember.

I
N EARLY
S
EPTEMBER
1881, wrote Kate McGill in her account as an early settler in Marlette, “A cyclone of fire swept across the county and in four hours’ time had laid the entire Thumb of Michigan a desolate
waste. . . . A change in wind saved the village but the next day, not a farm building or a fence was left between the village and Cass River except the house of James Keys. Cattle, horses, sheep, hogs and chickens lay in the fields roasted to death. Apples hung, baked to a turn.”
⁷

The emotional fallout from Tyler’s shooting wrought an analogous toll on Marlette. “We’re a small rural county,” says Biniecki. “When you have a tragic accident like this, it does affect everybody. Right from the families involved at the epicenter of this all the way out. Everybody knew the victim’s family. Everybody knew the shooter’s family. As you’ll find out weaving through this, both sides were devastated.”

The question of how to weigh those two experiences—grief for the dead and sympathy for those who must live with their mistakes—is not easy. In Marlette it tore at the very fabric of this tight-knit community.

Within four days of the shooting, Brittany put up a “community” page on Facebook called “Justice for Tyler Dunn.” The words “your amazing” [
sic
] were emblazoned in bright green over three pictures of Tyler: one of him on the go-cart, one close-up, and one of him with his shirt off wearing nothing but a big smile and that coconut bra of Ashley’s. Another photo shows Tyler sitting in a rocking chair in a T-shirt, appearing to be holding court. In the “About” section it simply states, “March 5th 2002–November 23rd 2013. Tyler Dunn was only 11 years old when his life was cut short. Please Help support his family and friends.” The last posting from the family was less than two months after Tyler’s death; they were selling T-shirts and hoodies for twenty-five dollars and thirty dollars respectively. Both say “Justice for Tyler” on the front; the T-shirts have a picture of Tyler on the back. A year after Tyler’s death, the page had 792 likes.