Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (7 page)

W
HEN
N
ICOLE WAS PREGNANT
with Jaiden, she was convinced he would be a girl. She was going to call him Olivia, and then he could lyrically double up with Amy’s youngest, Khiviana: Livvy and Kivvy. But she was relieved he was a boy. “God gave me boys for a reason,” she says. At school she had been an avid and, by all accounts, excellent softball player, pitching for the Grove City High School team, which won the league every year and the state championship in 1983.

Tall and hefty, she was often teased about her weight during her youth. “I’ve never been a girly girl. I was a tomboy. My hair’s thrown up in a bun. I’m out there watching football games and yelling. I’m that mom in the basketball stands yelling at the ref because he made a bad call. So I’m glad I had boys.”

Jaiden’s home life sounded quite familiar to me. Like him, I was by far the youngest of three boys with a single mom at the helm. Jaiden
was indulged; Jarid, the eldest, took on a lot of responsibility for him; Jordin, the middle child, was caught between the two; and Nicole ran from pillar to post trying to keep it all together. Like mine, theirs was a loving household full of camaraderie, tough love, rough and tumble, and considerable autonomy—
Lord of the Flies
meets
The Brady Bunch
with a touch of
Roseanne.
“They would fight. They would torture him. They’d torment him. They’d call me all the time at work. ‘Mom, they won’t let me play on the Xbox.’ ‘They won’t let me do this or that.’ And I’d just say, ‘Well, figure it out, boys.’” Jaiden was mixed-race—Nicole is white, Rosell is black—but much lighter-skinned than his brothers, whose fathers were also black. His skin was the color of straw. If Nicole was out with him alone he could pass as white, though he was often mistaken for being Middle Eastern.

The baseball coaches collectively called him Smiley. “Every kid has a bad day,” says Brady, his coach. “But he was always smiling. It just never seemed like the kid was in a bad mood.” In most pictures he wears a grin so wide it can barely fit on his face. At the after-school club at the YMCA, not far from his house, he was into pretty much everything. “He was the kind of kid I would love to coach,” said Justin Allen, who spent the most time with Jaiden of anyone there. “I would love to have him on my team. He was like a leader. Not in a vocal way. But just in the way he’d play the game. He was real enthusiastic and would get all the other players involved.”

Although Jaiden clearly enjoyed baseball, says Brady, he wasn’t a standout player. “He had the best attitude. But I don’t think he’d ever really been coached a lot. You could tell he was really interested and wanted to learn. But he hadn’t been exposed to it that much so he just wasn’t as familiar with the game as some kids his age might be. He was at that age where kids just start to catch fly balls. And Jaiden was one of those where it took a little longer to judge the fly ball.”

But the time he made the game-winning catch still sticks in everyone’s mind. “At the very last second he stuck his glove out,” recalls Brady, whom I met at Nicole’s house. “It reminded me of
Sandlot.
That movie. ‘Just hold your glove up and I’ll take care of the rest.’ He’s just standing
there. And we’re thinking, ‘It’s over his head. It’s over his head. It’s over his head.’ And just at the very last second he stuck his glove out and caught it. It was third out so it ended the game and everybody just lost it. It was like they just won the lottery. They lost their mind.”

“He had the biggest grin on his face,” says Nicole. In the car on the way back he kept saying, “Did you see me catch the ball?” “Yes,” she repeated as her eyes welled up.

As well as most sports, Jaiden liked playing Battleship, hide and seek, and cops and robbers at the YMCA. He played Transformers with Ethan—he was Optimus Prime, leader of the autobots, and Ethan was Bumblebee, with the altmode of a compact car. They also acted out wrestling moves they’d seen on WWE.

His best friend there was Sidney, who was one year older. Sidney bears a slight resemblance to Olive in
Little Miss Sunshine,
the affectionate granddaughter who enters the pageant. There was no play fighting when Jaiden hung out with Sidney—though he did teach her to play “glide,” which involved jumping off a raised platform in her backyard with an open umbrella and “floating” to the ground. Most of the time, at the Y, they would sit on the bleachers in the gym, do their homework, and chat. She was his first valentine and he hers. They weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend, Sidney explained, but they were nonetheless betrothed. “This might sound silly,” she confessed. “But we said we would marry each other when we got older.” In the life they planned together he was going to be in the army and she was going to be a singer.

Jaiden was a giving soul. When he saw beggars he wanted to give them money. When it was hot he was always the last off the bus at the after-school program because he went up and down the aisle closing all the windows that other kids had left open. A day after his school book fair he came home with just one book and asked Nicole for a few more dollars. When she asked him what he’d done with the money she’d given him, he told her he’d given it to a girl who wanted a bookmark but couldn’t afford it.

He was also a big animal lover. Dogs, kittens, turtles—you name it. With his brothers preparing to leave home in a few years Nicole had
promised they would get a dog once it was just the two of them. “He was super stoked and ready for them to be gone,” she says. “And when the boys would tease him he’d taunt them back: ‘When you move we’re getting a dog.’”

At home, when he wasn’t playing computer games, particularly Minecraft, he’d be out creating his own adventures. The back of the house led to a small wooded area that ran down to Marsh Run Creek, where he would join his friends to play “soldier army” with their Nerf guns. He once made a survivor video on his phone, narrating his abandonment in enemy territory. “Here we are out in the woods,” he said, like Captain Kirk dictating the ship’s log. “We don’t have many supplies. I have a cell phone but the battery’s low and I don’t have much service.” Then there was TV—Cartoon Network was his default channel. He knew the movie
Cars
by heart, and Jordin would often come downstairs to find him mouthing the words to nobody in particular. Finally, there were bikes. “Riding bikes, fixing bikes, swapping out tires,” recalls Nicole. “They’d just be at it all day—little boys working on bikes.”

His transgressions, like his passions, were very much those of a nine-year-old boy. “Not listening. Ignoring me. Staring into the computer world,” says Nicole, listing the things he’d get in trouble for. “Nothing serious. Nothing bad. Normal little boy stuff. He went to his friend’s house without asking once. Another time he didn’t tell me or Jarid that he wanted to go out and play.” She went out, looked left and right and couldn’t see him. It turned out he was down by the creek. “That was as bad as it ever got.” That was why it was particularly hard to make sense of his shooting, explains Kayaan. “I think I put myself in more danger every day than Jaiden did in his whole life.”

When I asked Ethan, his nine-year-old friend at the Y with whom he played Transformers, how he heard about Jaiden’s death, he said his mom told him in the car on the way home. He knew a child had died that day but he didn’t know it was Jaiden. “That’s why he wasn’t at the Y,” he told his mom and then he threw his head back on the seat and cried. “But one thing I do know,” he says. “Is that he will come back alive. My mom told me if you die you come back alive.”

When I asked Sidney, his valentine, how she found out what happened, she started to cry. “You think about him a lot still,” I said. I put my notepad down and suggested we stop for a moment.

She nodded and sniffed the tears away. “I write songs about him,” she said reaching in her bag for her cell phone, on which she’d written one. “It’s called ‘Stars.’ It’s about how I see him at night. It’s kind of like a poem but it doesn’t rhyme.”

I saw you in a shadow by the woods

I saw your face in all my dreams when I go to the meadow

I see you by the flowers and when I go to bed

I can’t think at all, but then I thought you were there holding my hand

And now I see you in the ssssttttaaaarrrs

They made me think of you when you shine bright

When you bow down on my window

I see you everywhere ya in the stars

I saw you by my house throwing pebbles

Then I went down to the meadow and then I saw you

And then I saw you in the sssstttaaaarrrs ya the sssstaaarrrs

Don’t know if I’m crazy, don’t know anything

Think I’m losing my mind

But then I see you in the stars ya the ssssttttaaarrrssss

Oh sssstaaaarrrsss yaaaaaa ya

N
ICOLE
’
S HOMECOMING
,
FOLLOWING HER
postfuneral trip, was no easy process. She moved to another part of Grove City so she wouldn’t have to live in the same house where it all happened or even pass that side of town. Now she had to pick up the pieces and carry on. The trouble was that when she got back from Texas in the new year, there were far fewer pieces of her previous life waiting for her than she’d expected. The friends—“Well, I thought they were friends”—who’d offered to take her
things from the old house to the new one got tired of moving them, she says. Three-quarters of her belongings were left in the house and then thrown out by the landlord. Much of what was discarded had great emotional value. There were heirlooms, including a handmade stool her great-grandfather had made for her grandmother. And then there were the boys’ “boxes.” Whatever the boys had created, gathered, or produced in a given year she would put in a box and write their school year on it: “Jarid 7th grade,” “Jordin 6th grade,” “Jaiden kindergarten.” She stored them under the hutch in the basement. They had all been thrown out. “I felt like the last ten years of my life were erased. I had to start all over again.”

For Nicole, “all over again” meant starting from scratch. She had never been rich. She grew up in a solid blue-collar family. Her father, who’d moved to Arizona and died in 1999, had been a truck driver. Her mom, who looked after the house and the kids and volunteered at school, has been severely disabled since suffering a stroke in 1993 and is cared for by her brother. Growing up, Nicole never had everything she wanted, but she had pretty much everything she needed—everything except self-esteem. Her dad was a verbally abusive alcoholic who used to reinforce the taunting she received in school about her weight and boyish ways. “She went from one extreme to another looking for acceptance,” says Amy. “And she found it in the wrong places with these guys who were real jerks to her. They would say horrible things, take her money, basically take what they wanted, and leave without ever committing to her. That’s how she came by Danny.”

By Nicole’s early twenties, she was in a tight spot, with two infants and nowhere to stay. “Sixteen years ago, when Jarid was seventeen months and Jordin was four weeks old, I was homeless,” she says. “We were legit homeless in a homeless shelter. We had nothing but the clothes on our backs. It wasn’t like I wasn’t intelligent or didn’t have the education like a lot of the other people in the homeless shelters. It was because I simply didn’t have anywhere to go. I had two kids. I had no family. Nobody could take us in. No money. I didn’t have a job. I couldn’t get a job because I was pregnant. It was a circumstantial homeless situation versus
being an uneducated crackhead situation. We had nothing. And I busted my ass to get out of there and move up. Jordin’s first Thanksgiving and first Christmas were in a homeless shelter back in 1997, and I swore to myself it would never be like that again. They were so little they had no clue. But it still bothers me. And I built what I had. And everything was for them. And I got to the point where I was starting to be a mom.”

She became a paralegal at a small law firm and gradually pulled her life together. Coming back from nothing gave everything she did have greater value. “Once you’ve been homeless you hold on to too much because when you have nothing you try to keep every single thing you can.”

When she came back to Grove City to find most of her things gone, she felt as though she was back at square one. “It was like moving back into the shelter. It seems like everyday something is gone.” Her grief counselor said that given her personal history and the circumstances of her return, she was probably suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.