Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (42 page)

O
F THE TEN GUN
deaths that took place in the twenty-four hours profiled in this book, Gustin’s was the fifth in which the police have not yet definitively identified the shooter. (At the time of this writing, the killers of Kenneth, Samuel, Tyshon, and Gary have not been called to account.) Of the rest, two of the alleged shooters—Demontre Rice, who shot Stanley, and Balam Gonzalez, who is believed to have shot Pedro—are in prison. Brandon spent ten days in a junior detention facility for accidentally shooting Tyler, and his father, Jerry, spent a year in jail for felony violations and corruption of a minor. Camilla, who accidentally shot Edwin, was not charged with his death. Danny Thornton, who shot Jaiden, was killed in a shoot-out.

According to an analysis by Scripps Howard News Service, of the more than half million homicides committed between 1980 and 2008, a killer was identified 67 percent of the time when the victim was black or Hispanic and 78 percent of the time when the victim was white.
¹²
The discrepancy, say detectives, is based on the circumstances of the death. When the assailant and the victim are strangers, homicides are much
more difficult to solve. That is most likely to be the case in killings relating to gangs or drugs, and African Americans and Latinos are more likely to be killed in circumstances relating to those things, they say.

Whether the police would have solved these shootings if everything else had been equal but the victims had been white is unknowable. Everything else isn’t equal. And because the myriad inequalities are known and felt, the families of many of the black victims do not feel that justice has been done precisely because they are black. (It’s worth noting that both families whose relatives were killed in “accidental shootings,” the Dunns and the Rajos, don’t feel justice has been done either. Those cases had very different outcomes and involved a white and a Latino family.)

They feel their children do not make the news like other children, and therefore little political pressure is brought to bear on the police to step up their investigations. If their child’s life was anything less than stellar—preferably an A student, still in school, or on his way to college with no previous convictions or gang associations—then it’s almost as if the child was asking for it.

In short, so long as black kids are killing other black kids, it feels to some as though nobody really cares. This is not new. During her ethnographic study of Indianola, Mississippi, in the 1930s, anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker concluded, “The mildness of the courts where offences of Negroes against Negroes are concerned is only part of the whole situation which places the Negro outside the law.”
¹³

In many minority neighborhoods the dial has not shifted greatly. The police treat them as inherently lawless areas, and a significant proportion who live in those neighborhoods feel like they are living under occupation.
¹⁴

So the desire for better policing is complicated by the fact that African Americans hold in relatively low regard the very people who have the power to protect them more effectively. Combined data from between 2011 and 2014 showed that whereas 59 percent of white Americans had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the police, the figure for African Americans was 37 percent. At 25 percent, African Americans
were twice as likely to have little or no confidence in the police.
¹⁵
“I fear the police more than the gangs,” one grandmother on the South Side of Chicago told me. “I don’t like the gangs, but the gangbangers still have to live here. The police don’t, and they’re not here to protect and serve. They think we’re beneath them.”

This experience of police harassment—compounded by extensively reported accounts of police shooting or otherwise killing black men—leads many to fear that rather than finding criminals they will just criminalize an entire community. So although a disproportionate number of murders go unsolved, a disproportionate number of innocent young people are also harassed, and those guilty of petty crimes are more likely to be caught and get longer sentences.

“Like the schoolyard bully,” writes Leovy, “our criminal justice system harasses people on small pretexts but is exposed as a coward before murder. It hauls masses of black men through its machinery but fails to protect them from bodily injury and death. It is at once oppressive and inadequate.”
¹⁶

Daina, too, is disappointed by the police response, but she also feels the black community has to come to grips with the scale and finality of the crisis it is faced with. “A lot of the men I deal with coming out of the prison system say they won’t call the police,” she says. “They say, ‘We’re not rats.’ I understand that. I didn’t want to be a snitch either. But today it’s different because now they’re playing with guns for keeps. When I was a kid, the crowd drew in, and whoever had the best set of this [she put her fists up] won the fight and it was over. Today, we’re going to funerals. And I think every parent whose son was murdered at the hands of another kid would prefer to visit their child in jail than to go to the graveyard.” It’s an awful set of options, I say.

“Well, he’s alive, rather than he’s dead,” she says both insistently and matter-of-factly. “If he’s out there doing these things, it’s up to you in the community to call the police. Have him locked up. Save his life. So if you leave him out there and he continues to behave that way, the streets are going to take his life. I have told my grandchildren, I have told those
who I love dearly, I have told those I know in the community: I don’t care about the weed. But if I see you with a gun. You don’t have to be pointing it at anybody or shooting anybody. If I see you with a gun, I’m calling the police on you. It’s that simple. Because this shouldn’t happen. You can’t change them, but you can save them. You have to be dedicated enough to recognize that this is one of the hard choices. Labor wasn’t easy either.”

AFTERWORD

A
T
11:15
A
.
M
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ON
S
UNDAY
N
OVEMBER
24, C
LEVELAND POLICE
rushed to the 5500 block of Linton Avenue, where they found sixteen-year-old Darnell Jones shot in the neck. Paramedics took him to the MetroHealth Medical Center, where he later died. There was no profile of who he was or wanted to be; no interviews with his parents. Beyond official records there is no further evidence that he was ever on the planet. And so it goes on. Another twenty-four hours and the first of yet another slew of slain children whose stories will not be told and whose passing will provoke no outrage.

Researching and writing this book has made me want to scream. I’ve wanted to scream at Edwin and Brandon that guns are not toys, at Jerry to either take the kids on his trucking run or stay home, at Stanley to quit hanging on the corner, at Gustin to watch who he hangs out with, and at Tyshon’s mother to move. I’ve wanted to scream at journalists and police to treat these deaths as though the lives mattered.

But more than its making me want to scream at anyone in particular, it has mostly made me want to just howl at the moon. A long, doleful, piercing cry for a wealthy country that could and should do better for its youth and children—for my children—but that appears to have settled, legislatively at least, on a pain threshold that is morally unacceptable.

I want to bay toward the heavens, because while kids like those featured in this book keep dying, the political class refuses to do not only everything in its power but anything at all to minimize the risks for the kids who will be shot dead today or tomorrow.

As I explained at the outset, this is not a book about gun control. The challenges facing the people profiled in this book are more thorny and knotted than that. Poverty and inequality foster desperation; segregation is a serious barrier to empathy. The more likely you are to be wealthy or white, the less likely you are to believe that these children could be your children. Statistically that is true, but the fact remains that they are somebody’s children, and those parents grieve like everybody else.

Better education, youth services, jobs that pay a living wage, mental health services, trauma counseling, a fair criminal justice system—in short, more opportunity, less despair—would contribute to the climate where such deaths were less likely.

You can’t legislate for common sense and human decency. Neither poverty nor racism puts a gun in anyone’s hand, let alone tells them to fire it. But they are a starting point for the conditions of alienation, anomie, and ambivalence in which a gun might be used and some gun deaths ignored. People have to take personal responsibility for what they do and live with the consequences. But societies have to take collective responsibility for what they do and live with the consequences, too.
¹

As I argued in the introduction, this is a book about what happens when you don’t have gun control. Americans are no more inherently violent than anybody else. What makes its society more deadly is the widespread availability of firearms. Every country has its problems, unique to its own history and culture. But in no other Western society would this book be possible.

To defend this reality by way of the Second Amendment to the Constitution has about the same relevance as seeking to understand the roots of modern terrorism—either to condemn or to condone it—through readings of the Koran. To base an argument on ancient texts is to effectively abdicate your responsibility to understand the present by offloading
it onto those who are now dead. It denies not only the possibility of new interpretations and solutions but the necessity for them.

None of the family members I spoke to raised the Second Amendment one way or the other. Almost all believed guns were too readily available; none believed there was anything that could be done about it. Brilliant community groups, often operating on a shoestring, like Mario’s in Charlotte, exist across the country and campaign tirelessly against gun violence or for commonsense gun legislation, or both. But those who concentrate on protecting “babes” and “angels” from felons and gangsters stand little chance of finding roots in the very communities where the problems are most acute. It would appear that, of all the parents who lost children that day, only Nicole, judging by her later Facebook postings (including a spoof children’s book called
The Gun That Went Around Killing Children All By Itself),
seems to be engaged in some kind of advocacy around the issue. But even she clearly finds the broader conversation about gun control too toxic to engage with. Alongside portraits of hundreds of children shot dead since Sandy Hook, which included a photo of Jaiden, she wrote:

Jaiden was one of the hundreds of children under the age of 12 killed by gun violence in the one year after the Sandy Hook massacre. . . .

As the 3rd anniversary approaches for Sandy Hook, there is going to be news coverage, memorials and articles about gun control etc—I don’t want to get into a debate about gun control or violence or mental health problems but what I would like is to ask each of you to take a moment and look at these beautiful gorgeous children and remember them and their families during this holiday season in addition to all those killed at Sandy Hook Elementary.
²

Otherwise, it’s as though each death took place in helpless, hopeless isolation: a private, discrete tragedy complete unto itself. The broader context of race and poverty was clear to many. But when I told them of other families that had lost children that day, all seemed genuinely shocked that their grief overlapped in real time with that of others. It’s
as though they had lost a loved one in a war without any clear purpose, end, or enemy—a war they could do nothing about; a war they long knew existed but hoped by luck, judgment, discipline, and foresight that they might be able to protect their kids from; a war that is generally acknowledged in the abstract but rarely specifically addressed in the concrete. A war that took their children but offered them no allies or community in their grief. A war they knew was taking place elsewhere but experienced alone, as though it were happening only to them—when in fact it was happening to America. Every day.