Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (20 page)

Erica Bartz posted the following on the page a week after the shooting:

I do not wish or pray for blood in return for the death of my cousins son. I pray for comfort for their loss, healing for their broken hearts, and strength to carry on. I do not wish bad upon anyone, especially a 12 year old boy. I do expect there be justice, yes justice for Tyler Dunn who’s life has been ended way to suddenly because of irresponsible parents who have no concern or safety for children. As for the kid who was at the other end, I pray for him to tell the truth. So anyone offended by “Justice for Tyler Dunn.” Its none of your concern an your two sense is not needed unless it’s words to remember Tyler or to be sympathetic for the family. If this was your son, grandson, brother, your family member, or close friend you would want to know the truth and have justice put on those responsible for their short life that could have and should have been prevented from ending so horribly.

But the tension inherent in that posting—compassion for Brandon alongside a preemptive swipe at those who equated seeking justice for Tyler with retribution against Brandon—gave a hint of a bitter divide. Five days after the shooting, Tyler’s own Facebook page was still up. On it, Rikki Mangone posted, “Yes what happened to Tyler was a horrible thing. But blaming the friend is not right! Brandon did not do it on purpose! It was an accident when two young boys were messing with a gun. Tyler AND Brandon need to be in your prayers! Tyler lost a life and now Brandon will have a shitty one. So for everyone saying shit about Brandon needs to stop.”

Twenty-six people liked the post. At least one did not. Janet, Tyler’s grandmother, responded shortly after four in the morning, sparking the following exchange:

Janet:
HOW DARE YOU RIKKI, YOU NEED REMOVE THIS POST OFF OF TYLER’S WALL, WE HAVE NO SORROW FOR BRANDON.

Theresa Conquest-Willis:
Wow no sorrow for a boy that made a mistake. No sorrow for a child that now has to go through the rest of his life with the guilt of what has happened. How dare you ma’am.

Zack Palladeno:
Word.^

Janet:
HOW DARE I!!!!! NO I HAVE NO SORRROW FOR HIM, NOW, HOW WOULD U FEEL If IT WAS THE OTHER-WAY AROUND, I’M TYLER’S GRANDMOTHER, AND YES I DARE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Theresa:
Ma’am the tragedy is on both sides.

Janet:
THAT’S YOUR, OPINION, NOT MINE, SOMEBODY COCKED THAT GUN, SOMEBODY PULLED THAT TRIGGER, AND IT SURE WASN’T TYLER CAUSE HE’S NOT HERE TO TELL HIS SIDE

Janet:
AND IF YOU THINK I’M GOING TO HAVE SORROW FOR HIM, YOUR OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND

Theresa
: Wow that’s all I have. . . .

Tina Fuhr
: All I have to say to Rikki. . . . This was not an appropriate place to post this message. If you’ve haven’t noticed, nobody on Tyler’s wall has ever mentioned Brandon’s name. Nor has anyone on here saying shit about him. This is not the place to discuss Brandon and what he did. This is a place for family and friends to find comfort with each other in the loss of my dear nephew. Also, in my opinion (whether you agree or not, I don’t care) he was old enough to know not to touch/ play with guns, yet he did. It has caused a ripple in our family that will never be forgotten, nor forgiven. Friendly reminder: When it comes to your life and life of others, there are no accidents, only choices.

Rikki
: I am very sorry to the people who will be living with this angry towards a 12 year old boy. I pray that one day both sides will be seen. Are the people saying bad things willing to have another innocent child’s life taken by suicide because he hears and sees other people with the negativity? This was a tragedy for both sides and I am very sorry for everyone involved.

(Lora joins the fray.)

Lora
: I think Rikki and anyone needs to remove them selfs from Tyler Dunn wall . . . and u too don’t know so butt ur nose and ur opinions out of it and I don’t really care what Brandon does with his life now

Theresa
: Ma’am I’m not on his wall I’m on Rikkis and the last I checked it was a free country if you don’t like what’s being said then take yourself out of the conversation there are two families suffering in this tragedy and the last thing anyone needs is someone’s bullshit.

Janet:
SHE DON’T HAVE TO, SHE’S TYLER’S MOTHER SO YOU CAN SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!!!!!!

And so it went on.

G
UNS WERE MORE READILY
available and accepted in Brandon’s world than in that of pretty much any of the day’s other victims. In much of rural America, guns are an everyday part of life, for both recreational and practical reasons. “Being a rural community, we have problems with everything from skunks to critters,” explains Sheriff Biniecki. “We even have coyotes that will chase newborn calves. And it’s not uncommon for a farmer to have a firearm handy to dispose of them. They’re always ready for action.”

In Marlette, gun ownership was, if not normal, then certainly not deviant. “My mom has guns in her house,” says Lora after a moment’s reflection. “They’re her husband’s. He don’t hunt too often. So he just has ’em. And Tyler used to go over there. They weren’t visible where you can see ’em. But they’re there.”

With so many guns around, the potential for calamity is ever present. A few weeks earlier, two men in an airboat in Saginaw Bay, an hour from Marlette, said they were shot at by a duck hunter.
⁸
Only five days after Tyler was shot, a sixteen-year-old shot himself in the foot while hunting; the incident took place twenty minutes away, in Snover.
⁹
Six months later, a twelve-year-old was shot in the hand after a fourteen-year-old removed a gun from a gun safe and dropped it.
¹⁰

Although Sheriff Biniecki treats each gun death as its own discrete tragedy, one nonetheless detects in his voice a weary, if compassionate, familiarity about cases like Tyler’s. He has been in law enforcement in Sanilac County for almost forty years, starting as a deputy and working his way up. He has creases in his shirt so sharp you could cut your finger on them. The star on his shoulder and the model ship in his window give the impression more of a military man than of a rural sheriff.

“Unfortunately, every few years history starts to repeat itself,” he says. “We’ve had other shootings. Not always fatal. But these things do happen. We’ve had other adults, who, while hunting, shoot other adults. It’s still personal. It’s still human error. And you have to take some personal responsibility for what happened. Part of my being sheriff is sometimes I try to comment on things in such a way that maybe it’ll have a lasting effect. It might keep a tragedy like this from ever happening again.”

Biniecki didn’t grow up around guns. He was raised in Detroit and came to the area when he was ten. When his dad won a gun in a raffle, not long after they’d arrived, he gave it to one of his friends. “He wasn’t against them. He just wasn’t ever really exposed to them, so he thought, ‘Why have ’em around?’” Among the first questions one of Biniecki’s friends asked him when he arrived in the area was whether he had a gun. When he was twelve he worked all summer to buy his first gun—a single-barrel shotgun for hunting pheasant.

Immediately following Tyler’s death, Biniecki sounded sympathetic. “It’s just a tragedy,” he told the local press. “We believe it was an accident, unintentional. It’s tragic. Two lives were affected. One boy won’t be with us, and one will have to deal with this for the rest of his life. Everyone needs to remember that every gun is loaded. Even if it’s unloaded, point it in a safe direction, and no one will ever be shot unless it’s intentional. The weapon didn’t go off by itself.”
¹¹

The key to preventing accidents like this, he insists during our interview, is education and parental responsibility. “I think that we as community leaders need to make sure that we use the opportunity to further educate parents that if you do have a gun, unload it and put it away. Teach your kids how to make sure it’s unloaded, and put it away. Teach your kids the safety rules. And then over time don’t get lax with it, because sometimes,” he says, “parents get lax, and children are always curious. Put those two things together and bad things can happen. I believe in this day and age with the Internet and everything that’s in these smartphones and all the things that’s connected to it, all the information’s there. You can even take classes online.”

Shortly after the shooting, Biniecki gave the local newspaper a basic course in how gun safety protocols were not followed in this case. Trigger locks and similar devices can disable weapons from firing, he said, and gun owners should keep safety locks on guns and keep them in a locked safe. Either way, they should be in a different place from the ammo box. “They do not have an updated safety feature,” he pointed out. “It’s a ratchet lever-action, when the hammer comes back, it’s cocked and ready to fire.”
¹²

“All of us know human nature,” he told me. “Children are curious. They’re at an age in their life where they’re like a sponge from the time they’re old enough to talk to start thinking and acting for themselves. And if they don’t know and they’re not taught at that young age that that’s a weapon and it’s dangerous, then bad things can happen. We tell ’em the knife is sharp. We tell ’em the stove is hot. We need to tell them at a young age what a firearm is and what can occur with it.”

This makes sense. And it is worth noting that neither Brandon nor Tyler had been to safety classes, though Brittany says she was looking into them for Tyler. And Sheriff Biniecki walks the walk. The weekend before we met, he told me, he’d helped run a youth day for the Wild Turkey Federation, a conservation organization, which provided safety instruction (among other things) for youngsters. His two daughters grew up around his handgun. He occasionally took them to the shooting range and was always insistent that they observe safety protocols.

The trouble, say researchers, is that the emphasis on safety education alone doesn’t really work. Even when children—especially boys—have been taught the risks, the lure of an actual firearm trumps the warnings about its potential danger.

In one study, pairs of boys aged eight to twelve were left alone in an examination room at an Atlanta clinic, where they were observed by researchers through a one-way mirror. Researchers didn’t tell them there was a .38-caliber handgun concealed in a cabinet drawer. But within fifteen minutes, three-quarters of the children found it, two-thirds handled it, and one-third pulled the trigger. Only one, out of almost ninety, told an adult about the gun, and for that he was teased by the others. More than 90 percent of the boys had received some gun safety instruction.
¹³

A 2013
New York Times
article on “accidental” shootings cited the case of eleven-year-old Joshua Skorczewski in western Minnesota. The boy was so excited about attending a gun safety class that night that he took an unloaded 20-gauge shotgun from the family gun cabinet, loaded it, and pulled the hammer back. While putting it back in the closet, his finger slipped, and he shot his twelve-year-old sister, Natasha, dead.
¹⁴

A
NY MORAL PANIC ABOUT
“accidental” child shootings must be kept in perspective—not because there are so few but because, relative to other accidental deaths, there are greater dangers to children that spark less anxiety. A
New York Times
investigation in 2013 predicted that because of misclassification, the number of gun-related deaths of children classified as “accidental” is double the official number.
¹⁵
However, even accepting the
Times’
greater number, accidental gun deaths would still rank fifth among fatal injuries for children, after car crashes, drowning, fire, suffocation, and accidents to pedestrians.