Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (37 page)

Newark’s political leadership effectively conceded its failures. “Our job is to pick up the garbage, sweep the streets, and provide some measure of police and fire protection, and we can barely do that,” said Kenneth Gibson, the one mayor in that half century who did not leave office in disgrace (though even he was later indicted for bribery and pleaded guilty to tax evasion).
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The problems start with the young. In 1992, more than half the thieves in the city who were caught were under seventeen. And the sense of hopelessness was pervasive: at one stage, Tuttle points out, the city bought 1,750 anti–car theft devices and raffled them off to residents. That seemed like a better bet than trying to police the city so the cars wouldn’t get stolen in the first place.
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In 2006, 60 percent of the city’s police officers worked only during the daytime. Its gang unit worked eight a.m. to four p.m. Monday through Friday—hardly rush hour for gang activity but a stark improvement on the narcotics unit which, despite the huge drug problem connected to the gang problem, simply did not exist.
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The court system, meanwhile, was a complete calamity. “Countless people showed up for court dates to discover their names were not listed in the computer,” writes Tuttle. “Police officers often never received messages requesting them to testify. Prosecutors were always pleasantly surprised when an officer actually appeared in court on the proper day. Well aware that the system was a mess, citizens accused of violations knew that their cases would likely be dismissed so long as they were willing to line
up and wait all day to be called by the court.”
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Newark was the only jurisdiction covered in this book that failed to provide me with an autopsy or incident report for the victim, without a reason for withholding one. Despite my countless attempts to contact the appropriate city staff, they simply did not get back to me.

It was in this system that Gary Sr. placed his faith for finding his son’s killers. At the time of this writing, no one had been brought to justice.

Beyond mistaken identity, there was nothing Junior ever did that would explain his being attacked in such a manner, Gary Sr. said. “He was never in no trouble. He never got locked up. He never got in no trouble. He got in trouble at school for fighting and things. But that was it. Never had no stolen cars. Never had no guns. Nothing like that. Nothing. Never been in trouble with the police. Never.”

It is a tragic reflection of the state of affairs for low-income black parents that they have to explain why their children did not deserve to be shot, preempting the assumption that they are “unworthy” unless proved otherwise. Taylor, his mother’s neighbor, said Gary wasn’t like so many of the other kids who caused so much trouble around the complex. He was “a real nice cat, real respectful,” Taylor told the Newark
Star-Ledger
.
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“Some days, he would see me struggling and say, ‘What do you need? I’ll go get it for you,’” said Taylor, a former night supermarket manager who moved into Anderson’s building two years before Gary’s death after one of his legs was amputated.

Gary’s two greatest loves were fixing things and dogs. “He had his little friends around here. They ride bikes, played basketball, and hang out all the time. He played Xbox. First it was PlayStation. And then it was Xbox,” says his dad. “He had four friends he’d usually play with. That’s it. But mostly it was the bikes. They’d ride all the way up to the mountains. That’s what he did. He was good with his hands: fixing bikes, fixing computers. He fixed bikes all day. Eight, nine bikes a day and then go through the neighborhood, riding them around. . . . And he loved dogs. That was his thing. Actually he had an application that he filled out for the Humane Society to work there. So they were scheduling him for a blood test. Bikes and dogs, that was his favorite thing.”

But his father says just to live in Newark as a young black man is to tempt fate. “In Newark you have no choice but to worry about guns. That’s the biggest thing. It’s crazy. There are kids in the streets just walking around with guns just to have guns.” That’s why, he says, he was so strict with Gary. “He knows there’s no way in heck that he’s living in my house and is going to walk out the door after ten o’clock without me. I don’t even want to walk out my door. Sometime I get off work late and I have to come down at eleven o’clock. I’m walking down the street like this,” and he looks around himself warily. “Because people will just drive up on you and shoot you for no reason. So you have to be mindful of every place and thing that you do.”

The vulnerability such an atmosphere induces among the young was summed up in a poem a freshman student at Central High School wrote a few years before Gary was killed. The teacher wrote
hope
on the blackboard and gave the all-boy class a little while to think about the topic before each student penned a verse on it. A student named Tyler wrote:

We hope to live,

Live long enough to have kids

We hope to make it home every day

We hope we’re not the next target to get sprayed . . .

We hope never to end up in Newark’s dead pool

I hope, you hope, we all hope.
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I found Gary’s address on
whitepages.com
by matching the names in his online obituary to a group of names associated with a particular property. It was just around the corner from the church that had performed his funeral service. It seemed like that would be too great a coincidence for it not to be his home, although there was a good chance that, like so many other families who lost children that day, they had since moved. When I got to the address, the house looked derelict from the outside. It sat adjacent to another house, on a desolate block between a bricked-up factory and an empty lot. The curtains were drawn. It seemed as though it had been empty for some time.

The area was run down but it wasn’t menacing. While visiting, I struck up a conversation with a woman opposite Gary’s house who sat on her front stoop in the sun while studying for her nurse’s exam and babysitting her granddaughter. I didn’t knock at the house—I’d learned my lesson from Kenneth Mills-Tucker’s father that you should not cold call the bereaved. I left an envelope in the mailbox and moved on to the funeral parlor to see if they could help me find a family member.

I was sitting with the funeral director when a big fight broke out outside—a family feud caffeinated by grief. While the director went to sort it out, I got a call from Gary Sr. The home I’d seen a few minutes earlier wasn’t vacant at all. He’d been in it the whole time. He told me to come straight over.

This was the house Gary Jr. had grown up in—a cozy home with a huge flat-screen TV dominating the small living room. Next door was the house in which Gary Sr. had grown up and where his mother still lived. His mother—Gary Jr.’s grandmother—was a regular churchgoer at the St. Paul Sounds of Praise church around the corner, where I’d also left a note.

The dilapidated factory building adjacent used to be the grandmother’s place of work. It made cosmetics. “This used to be an okay area,” says Gary Sr. “You was able to afford different things. Kids were able to do different things. We had some of everything. All kinds of nationalities were in this neighborhood. White, Chinese, black, Hispanic. There was a factory, so everybody was working around here. So it wasn’t so bad. This was the quietest neighborhood. It was quiet. There was nothing going on.”

Why was he still there? “I think about moving all the time. I say to my mom, ‘Let’s pack up and move down south.’ But it’s hard because right now I’m working at the Prudential Center [an indoor multipurpose arena that is home to the New Jersey Devils ice hockey team], and the income doesn’t come in where I can just pack up and leave. And then there’s my mom. She’s still next door, and I’m not going to leave her in this crazy neighborhood by herself.”

That’s not to say everything was easy before. There have long been no-go areas around here. “From here there were only two places you
couldn’t go,” he explains. “Avon Avenue and 16th Avenue. Those were the two worst areas. But everything in between was quiet. So you knew that so long as you stayed in this neighborhood, you were fine. But if you leave to go to Avon there’s nothing but gangs. You go to 16th there’s nothing but gangs. So you knew not to go into them areas. But stay right here. Go to the park right here, you were fine.”

Gary Sr. was just three years old in July 1967 when Newark erupted into a blazing inferno of popular insurrection. Rioting, which extended over several days, pitted the city’s black population against its mostly white law enforcement and the National Guard. Police ran amok. “If you have a gun,” Police Director Dominick Spina announced over the police radio at one stage, “Whether it’s a shoulder weapon or whether it is a handgun, use it.”
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National Guardsmen came out of tanks to showers of bottles and other missiles thrown by local people.

For six days, the city was ablaze. When the week was out, twenty-six people (twenty-four blacks and two whites) were killed, more than eleven hundred were injured, and fourteen hundred were arrested. There were 350 acts of arson, there was roughly $10 million worth of damage, and the police used 13,326 rounds of ammunition.
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In response to the riots in Newark and elsewhere, Lyndon Johnson’s federal government produced the Kerner Report. “Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans,” it concluded. “What white Americans have never fully understood but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”
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The report sold two million copies and was reportedly the best-selling federal report in American history. Gary Sr. thinks things have deteriorated since then. Today, he says, the space around his home where a parent might consider their child truly safe has shrunk to the house they live in. “It’s certainly not middle class no more,” he says.

I
T SEEMS LIKE AN
obvious but all too rarely acknowledged fact that gun violence, like most crimes, is intricately related to poverty. Since most poor people never shoot anybody and some rich people do, there is nothing automatic about this connection. But if you have a future to invest in, if you can afford lawyers to settle disputes, extracurricular programs to entertain your children, an expensive private education (or a house in a school zone that ensures a good public education), a private security system, a car to ferry your teenage children through their social lives, money to donate to political campaigns, a community that politicians believe is worth courting, a tax base that can pay for good parks, policing, and cultural events—if, in short, you can draw on the full pool of resources available to an American of means, then both the temptation and the threat of gun violence are severely diminished. That does not make you a better person; it simply makes you better equipped to be safe in a country where guns are in plentiful supply.

But unless you are a trust-fund baby, you don’t get any of that without work. And for a particular stratum of American society, the kind of stable work that pays a living wage is hard to find. New technology, free-trade agreements, deregulation, and laissez-faire economic orthodoxy have accelerated and deepened the trend toward less skilled work and more low-paid, low-skilled jobs in ways that couldn’t have been imagined back when Gary’s grandmother had her job in the factory. Since the 1970s, American wages have been stagnant,
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leaving median male earnings on a par with those of 1964 in real terms.
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In the 1970s, close to two-thirds of prime-age male workers with less than a high school education worked full-time, year-round, in eight of the ten years. During the 1980s, that share was down to half.
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In that decade, William Julius Wilson points out in
When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor,
the jobs that were lost were in production, transportation, and laboring, while the new jobs created were in the clerical, sales, and service sectors.
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This reality has affected most areas of the country and most racial groups. You can see it in the depressed former mining towns of Ohio,
Pennsylvania, and Kentucky, former mill towns like Buffalo, and the autoparts manufacturers all around the Midwest. But it has affected African Americans more overwhelmingly than others for the simple reason that this dramatic shift coincided with their gaining civil rights and moving in ever greater numbers to the very cities and sectors that went on to decline.