Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (41 page)

“Once you’re labeled a felon,” writes Michelle Alexander in
The New Jim Crow,
“The old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”
⁹

The law is the law, and those who use cocaine or smash up property know it is illegal. But when the stakes are that high and the odds that skewed, poor people don’t have the luxury to learn from their mistakes. For working class youth, the great American myth of personal reinvention is elusive.
¹⁰
For that, you need not only a good lawyer, but the resources for rehab, a new home in a new place away from the entanglements of your past, the chance of a new job, and the chance for new training and education. In the absence of those opportunities, you are less likely to recover from your mistakes than to repeat them.

“You all keep sending me to jail,” said twenty-four-year-old Baltimore gang leader Steven Loney at his sentencing hearing. He’d been convicted of racketeering after bribing prison guards to smuggle marijuana, tobacco, and prescription pills into the prison where he was serving time. Loney had a prolific criminal record, including conviction for an assault that involved a shooting. “Jail is making me worse. You all can’t tell that? I ain’t been on the streets. I been locked up my whole life. . . . They say I’ve been a substance abuser since I was seventeen. I’ve been locked up since I was nineteen years old, Your Honor. From nineteen to now, I’ve been home for a hundred and twenty days. The government never offer me no treatment. They never did nothing. They wonder why
I still do stuff. You send me to the same problem. You sent me to Baltimore City Detention Center, where all that’s going on. And, obviously, I need help. Ain’t nobody can give me a chance to help me.”
¹¹
Loney was sentenced to nine years.

This book is the story of young people most of whom made bad decisions—some were killed, others did the killing. Some did nothing worse than make a poor choice in friends. One needn’t excuse a single thing they have done to understand that what distinguishes them from other, more fortunate youth isn’t an innate pathology but a brutalizing, unforgiving environment. Gustin’s friend Hardy is still in school, has a part-time job, and keeps his head down. But although he didn’t see Gustin’s death coming, he’s been surrounded by the possibility of it for what seems like most of his short life. “I know a couple people who been shot,” he tells me when I meet him at his home one evening after he finished work. “How many?” I ask. A long heavy pause. “All my life. Everywhere I go somebody got shot. I know a lot of people who got shot. A lot of people got killed. . . . I seen people get shot.” Hardy insists on this with a mixture of resignation and resentment—he knows it’s not right, and he knows there’s nothing he can do about it. It’s his life. He’s used to it. It seems as though it’s only when he has someone asking questions and has to articulate it that he recognizes the weight he’s been carrying so silently for so long.

O
N THE EVENING OF
November 23, Greg woke up from his nap in preparation for his night shift to find one of Gustin’s friends, one of those “Slocumb Street boys,” “Lord Henry” (not his real nickname), in the living room. Already Gustin was reneging on the bargain he’d struck on his return to his dad’s house and was using the place as a flophouse for unapproved company.

Before Greg could even get himself ready, Gustin and Lord Henry had left. Only this time Gustin didn’t need to sneak out and run through the fields in the back. He had the Cadillac that he’d been working on all
day. The posse of two soon grew as they picked up a young woman and two other men. Gustin told his brother he was going to “hang with these dudes one last time” before leaving for Raleigh. What they did for most of the rest of the night is not clear. At some point they went to the Lighthouse, a convenience store and fried chicken outlet that had become a notorious flash point for violent confrontations in the area.

Greg called him around midnight from work. “Yo, what you doing?” he asked, knowing full well Gustin was already out of the house and, in all likelihood, up to no good. He could hear “a whole lot of confusion” in the background. Greg tried to talk him straight. “I thought you was going to Raleigh tomorrow. I didn’t give you that car to be riding these niggas around,” he said.

“Ah, Dad, you don’t understand, man,” said Gustin. “It’s cool, man.” He was supposed to pick up Hardy that night after their mutual friend TJ got off work. They were going to record a song. But he never called TJ. Just after eight the next morning, as Greg was driving home, he saw police cars on every corner of Ash Street, not too far from his house, but thought nothing of it. He’d tried to call Gustin a few more times in the early hours just to check on him but kept getting his voicemail. He thought little of that either. He went to his baby mama’s house to fix some breakfast. When he got home he found a note on the door telling him to dial a number and stay put.

“I thought, ‘Oh this boy got himself in some trouble.’” He called the number. Not long after, he saw two police cars drive up to the house, and at that moment he knew it was one of two things. “I knew right then, because they don’t send two police cars for something small, that either he killed somebody or he get killed.”

They had traced the green Cadillac on the corner of South Audubon and Walnut to Greg. They told him they thought his son had been shot and took him to the hospital. He called Daina from there. He was so distraught that for a little while she couldn’t understand what he was saying, and when she did finally figure it out she couldn’t believe it. “Finally he was able to get to a point where I could understand him say, ‘They killed my son.’”

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

“I’m with the detectives,” he said.

“No, they probably loaned the car to somebody else,” she said. “Not Gustin.”

“I’m at the hospital. They killed my son,” Greg repeated. He was screaming and crying.

“Who’s with you?” she asked. When Greg said he was there by himself, she jumped in the car and raced to the hospital. As she came through the door, the detectives were taking him to identify the body. “Then I just heard him scream from behind the door, and at that point I couldn’t deny it. His father’s scream confirmed everything.”

The autopsy (which mistakenly categorizes Gustin as Native American) describes in detailed technical language what happened when the bullet entered the back of his skull. “The wound track enters the left occipital tip of the brain and travels medially and upwards, causing extensive damage of the brain, leading to separation into three large pieces: the right hemisphere, the left hemisphere, and the cerebellum, separated at the midbrain.”

In short, a single bullet shattered his skull and split his brain in three. A diagram at the end makes it clearer, showing a jagged line running vertically through the center of his skull before fanning out horizontally at the top and the bottom—like a capital
I.

Four days after Greg had gifted Gustin the Cadillac, it was not headed for Raleigh, as he’d hoped, but being towed back to the house. “If he’d made it to Monday, he’d a been out of here,” says Greg, wistfully. The car now sits in his garage. He let the air out of the tires and just left it there—his dream car now inseparable from his worst nightmare. Friends cleaned out the pool of blood on the passenger side but could not erase the memory. A year later, the various veins from the spider’s web of shattered glass still spread across the rear window, all coming back to the single bullet hole, the size of an adult thumb, in the top left corner. Greg walks around the vehicle, rubbing the dust off the top with his finger.

Gustin’s family and friends knew what had happened to him. But they didn’t know why. As Daina helped Greg plan the funeral, they struggled
to understand what could have prompted the shooting. “We were racking our brains to think what the hell would Gustin do to somebody that they would want to take his life,” she says. “I know some kids who are really wild, that were given over to the street. With them I wasn’t surprised. But with Gustin everyone was shocked, to be honest.”

“Who did he hurt? We thought maybe it was girls. Somebody’s girlfriend. Or maybe he took something or stole something or mouthed off to the wrong person. We knew there was no way he was hated to that degree.”

Then one of Daina’s employees approached her with some inside information. The shooters weren’t after Gustin. They were after the employee’s nephew—Lord Henry, who was found at Wayne Memorial Hospital later the same night Gustin was shot, seeking treatment for minor injuries to his leg. “They’d been trying to shoot him all week,” explains Greg. “He get with Gustin, but he don’t tell Gustin they been trying to get him. So they see him at the Lighthouse. They see Lord Henry get in the car. So they follow the car. They try to shoot Lord Henry, and they miss him and hit Gustin in the back of the head and killed him.”

Had Gustin been a more seasoned hand at the wheel, the assailants wouldn’t have stood a chance, insists Greg, shaking his head at one of the many might-have-beens. “That car got a Northstar engine. I told his ma, ‘If he knew how to drive this Cadillac, all he had to do is punch it, and whoever was following him would have been way down the street somewhere. And the policeman would have seen that car flying.’ But he weren’t no experienced driver.”

Lord Henry was a Blood. Gustin’s shooter, they think, was a Crip. As small and “behind” as Goldsboro may be, it had grafted the big-city gang affiliations from Los Angeles onto its reputation as a small Southern outpost. Over the past few decades there has been a proliferation of gang activity in small towns prompted more by popular media, social media, and local tensions than by the actual expansion of big-city gangs. Instead of roaming South Central, gang members prowl the less forbidding but nonetheless potentially deadly avenues of Goldsboro, showcasing
hardcore urban identities around tree-lined streets named Mulberry, Pineview, and Evergreen. Greg insists Gustin was unaffiliated. “The guys Gustin was hanging around with were Blood dudes. I said, ‘Dude, why would you hang out with them? You ain’t even in a gang. And you hangin’ out with them gang niggas.’ ’Cos I knew Lord Henry was a Blood. But Gustin wasn’t in the gang. That’s what I tried to tell the police. I told ’em, ‘He ain’t no gangbanger.’” The police weren’t convinced. They insisted that Gustin was known by other Bloods as Jersey.

When it comes to how Gustin’s memory might be maligned and distorted, this is where Greg draws the line. It’s a thin line. But for him it’s clearly an important one. “He may have hung out with those boys. But he weren’t no gangbanger. They kept trying to give him a gang name. I told ’em, ‘You can go in his room, and you can’t find nothing that says he ain’t no gangbanger.’ I’d go to court on that,” he says, before clapping his hands to each of the following words. “He. Wasn’t. In. No. Gang.”

Hardy didn’t see it coming. “That came out of nowhere,” he says. “He weren’t in no trouble like that.” He thinks Gustin’s vulnerability stemmed not so much from the fact that he identified with one gang as opposed to another but that he identified with people in different “cliques.” Hardy had warned him that because he was known to go to Eastern Wayne High School, he should stay away from the Slocumb Street boys because they drew from different gang territories. “I ain’t saying this caused him dying,” he points out. “But once you start hanging with them, it’s like you’re playing both sides.”

Daina had a similar sense, which may be why she thought he wasn’t “street material.” Smart as he was, he hadn’t figured out how the allegiances worked. “He was friends with the Bloods and the Crips. He was friends with everybody. At the funeral there were black people there, white people there, Hispanic people there. And they were weeping. And that’s not the norm in a city funeral. I’ve been to a lot of funerals of children who have died in the city, and you don’t see that.”

Greg insists the police know who did it, but they say they can’t do anything because nobody will testify against him. The shooter’s been heard bragging about it around town. And one night, while Greg was
working at Walmart, the alleged shooter stood right next to him and was selling somebody a cell phone. “This dude called his name,” he said. “I looked at him. But I kept working. I’m from the city. I know how to look at somebody and turn my head. So I looked at him and turned my head and kept on working.”

Greg believes—just as Willie Brightmon did about his son Samuel in Dallas—that because Gustin is black, the police aren’t taking his death seriously. “I haven’t heard nothing from them,” Greg says. “I haven’t heard nothing from the police since two months after the funeral. Nobody contact me. Nobody said nothing. They just say it’s under investigation. We can’t get nobody to testify. They just think it’s another black kid. This is the dirty South right here. This is Goldsboro. Like I said, these people round here twenty years behind time.”