Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (11 page)

To a sympathetic eye, it wouldn’t take much imagination to cast Kenneth as a success story. In a city where 38 percent of black kids did not graduate from high school in 2012,
¹⁵
he was, according to his obituary, a graduate of Arsenal Technical High School.
¹⁶
In a city where 74 percent of black youth between ages sixteen and nineteen were not working (many, of course, were still in school),
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Kenneth had a job at U-Haul. But, most significantly, he was loved. “K.J. was like a Son to us all,” wrote one family friend on his online obituary page. “I always enjoyed watching him in church. . . . You always had them dressed so well, and they were so well mannered, and I enjoyed looking into his bright eyes.”

But had Kenneth’s death been an issue of public concern, all of this would likely have counted for nothing. No media account could or would include the phrase “never been in trouble with the law”; most would be sure to mention his “recent drug-related conviction.” No longer innocent, no longer worthy. On some level it would be framed as though he had it coming.

As it happens, the handful of stories about the incident said nothing about Kenneth beyond his age and name. The circumstances surrounding his death earned a couple of hundred words; the fact of his death earned scarcely more than a sentence; to his life was devoted nary a word. But had anyone considered it worth denigrating him, they wouldn’t have needed to trawl through his police records. They could just go through his Twitter feed and let him condemn himself. For although dead men tell no tales, many younger ones (including all the teens who died that day) do now have a voice beyond the grave—on social media.

One should be cautious when drawing conclusions about people’s characters from social media. On Facebook, nobody’s children cry, nobody’s marriage is imperiled, and everybody has beautiful holidays under the bluest of skies. These are performance platforms where we present versions of ourselves that are curated for public consumption.

Such performances are ripe for misinterpretation. After policeman Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown, an unarmed eighteen-year-old, in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, news organizations initially used a picture of Brown from his Facebook page holding his hands in a manner that some claimed was a gang sign and others said was a peace sign. Within days, hundreds of young African Americans tweeted contrasting pictures of themselves—one in which they could be perceived as threatening and another in which they would be deemed “respectable”—with the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown. They wanted to show how easily a picture of black youth, taken out of context, could be distorted in order to fit a stereotype.

Tyler Atkins, for example, displayed one picture of himself in a black tux and white bow tie, holding a saxophone, and another of himself wearing a blue bandanna with his finger pointed to the camera in what could be the shape of a gun. The first was taken following a jazz concert in which he performed; the second was for a rap video he’d made for a school math project. “Had the media gained ahold of this picture, I feel it would be used to portray that I was in a gang, which is not true at all,” Atkins, seventeen, told the
New York Times
.
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That sentiment was clearly felt by many; within two days the hashtag had been used 168,000 times.
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But even if it would be a mistake to read too much into someone’s social media output, it would be no less of a mistake to ignore it altogether, for it does, at the very least, tell a story of the image a person wants to project, and that itself can be revealing. And in the absence of any contact from the family, social media was the only way to find out more about Kenneth.

Kenneth was a prolific but sporadic tweeter: in September he sent only one, the week before he died he sent one hundred. His Twitter feed largely reads like a mixture of the banalities for which social media has
become infamous—“Man I hate cold toilet seats”; “I hope they make a strong ass phone to the point when u drop it the screen dnt crack”—and the online swagger characteristic of young men with too much time on their hands. There are quite a few references to smoking marijuana—“The kush I’m smoking got me sneezing”; “I hate going to sleep high. I feel like its a waist [sic] of weed”—and a considerable amount of misogynistic cock-strutting: “if good pussy dnt make a nigga stay then nothin will”; “I dnt trust NO bitch PERIOD.” At times, his adolescence comes through. He’s clearly excited about his upcoming birthday, mentioning it three times in just a few days. And he publicly splits up and reconciles with his girlfriend in the same night—as only an adolescent could. Within four hours, he goes from “Love dnt live here nomore fuck the bullshit” to “If I’m single ima b single for a couple of years shit stressful” to “even doe we mad at each other buuuuuut [heartshape emoticon]” and finally to “Tough Love.”

But what emerges most markedly (and what distinguishes his timeline from that of his peer group in almost any other Western country) is that his bragging goes beyond women and weed to weapons and death. In the seven months before he died, Kenneth lost three friends. A posting on October 2 reads, “4/5/13 R.I.P ReggieMac 7/21/13 R.I.P Frank 10/2/13 R.I.P Rockhead.” Frank, a seventeen-year-old who appears to have been killed in an accidental shooting in a Marriott parking lot during a Black Expo celebration, was apparently someone Kenneth was particularly close to.
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Frank’s picture was the backdrop to his Twitter home page. “I miss Frank man y u take my nigga away from us,” he tweeted. And then a few weeks before he died, Kenneth tweeted, “Man it’s been 71 days since u left bro we miss u not a second go by u not on our mind but we gone keep the dream alive R.I.P
@ImFrank_GMG
.”

That such a young person would be in the vicinity of so much death is shocking, but once you’ve read their tweets it’s not that surprising. Frank tweeted, just an hour before he was shot, “im one of da only yung niggas out here dats really thuggin and i could careless about catchin a murder charge.” A couple of days before Kenneth died he wrote, “Most niggas carry guns n act scared to use them.” A couple of days before that
he asked, “Am I wrong for popping him when he wanna take my life that shit ain’t right.” And a week earlier he’d quoted rapper Chief Keef: “I get gwop [money] now that bitch remember me I send shots now them niggas hearing me.”

More than two years after Kenneth was shot, police arrested nine suspected gang members belonging to the “Get Money Gang,” who they claimed had “terrorized” Butler-Tarkington, a north-side neighborhood, while trafficking drugs and guns through the city. They seized 17 guns, almost 6 grams of cocaine, 26 pounds of marijuana, and more than $32,000 in cash. Police believe the group was connected to four homicides in the neighborhood and beyond, dating back to 2012, as well the fatal shooting of a 10-year-old boy, courtesy of a stray bullet.

Two people they had arrest warrants for in relation to the gang, but failed to catch in the raids, were Jaylen Grice and Tarell Davis—two of the three passengers riding in the car with Kenneth the night he died. The neighborhood they are accused of terrorizing is just fifteen minutes from where Kenneth was shot. His Twitter feed is peppered with references to GMG—Get Money Gang.
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Whether it’s guns, death, or themselves Kenneth doesn’t take seriously is not clear—it’s only Twitter. We don’t know if he had anything to do with GMG, if his friends were guilty, if he ever touched a gun, if he was carrying a gun the night he died, or if he ever did anything more criminal than failing to come to a full stop at a stop sign with marijuana residue allegedly in his pipe. Young men like to strut, preen, and bluster, and a platform such as Twitter makes that easy. But one can’t simply dismiss it all as venting on social media. Because both Kenneth and those he mentioned really are dead. The day he was buried
@QueenofPetty
apologized on Twitter for not attending his funeral. She’d had enough: “srry I couldnt see you get buried today. I can’t go to anymore funerals its heartbreaking. See you in Heaven soon R.I.P.”

A few days shy of his twentieth birthday, Kenneth was no more an adult than the average college sophomore, but no one was going to describe him as an “innocent,” “angelic,” or “babe.” The elevation and canonization
of the “worthy victim” has a significant bearing on why so many of those most affected by gun violence—the black, brown, and poor—do not align themselves with the gun control movement. “Sometimes, in the past, that has held organizations back,” Julia Browder Eichorn, who has been a gun control campaigner since the nineties, told me. Julia, who is African American and lives in Columbus, Ohio, was in Indianapolis to protest the NRA. I’d met her at Ohio State University by chance a few weeks earlier when I’d been in Columbus to deliver a talk. “To put someone out there who has had less than a stellar lifestyle—the opposition is going to tear that apart. They’re already calling our children, who’ve done nothing, thugs. That’s a huge piece of why you don’t see more moms of color in this movement. Maybe they knew their kids were doing these things, and they didn’t stop them. Maybe they just prayed nothing would happen to them. We have to stand with that mom who maybe didn’t make the best choice, or maybe she made the best choice that she could, but sadly her kid’s not here anymore.”

Many of the kids who would die in the next twenty-four hours were raised in tough circumstances and had messy lives. But so long as the gun narrative stops at protecting “innocents” and “babes,” it’s difficult to see who will ever speak out for them. “The children who are dying are real kids,” said Clementine Barfield, who set up Save Our Sons and Daughters after her two sons were shot (one survived, one died) in Detroit in the same incident. She was speaking with Deborah Prothrow-Stith, former Commissioner of Public Health for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. “They are real kids from real families. Some were doing foolish things. And some were just caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. But all kids have the right to make mistakes. All kids have the right to live. My child is dead. Your child could be next.”
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CHAPTER 3

STANLEY TAYLOR (17)

Charlotte, North Carolina

N
OVEMBER
23, 4:30
A
.
M
.
EST

A
S A BEHAVIOR SPECIALIST IN THE
C
HARLOTTE SCHOOL SYSTEM
, Mario Black spent an awful lot of his time trying to persuade his young, mostly black students that there’s more to life—or could be—than hanging out in the streets and getting in trouble. “Three or four times a day I have to break it down for the kids that this is what’s out there for them if they don’t change their ways—prison or death. . . . It’s hard work at times. I hope I’m getting through. You gotta hope that they’re going to carry these nuggets with them for years to come and use them when they need them.”

After Mario’s younger cousin, Davion Funderburk, was shot down in July 2013, he felt compelled to take action beyond the classroom. “Me and one of my classmates were talking about how nothing’s being done. So we said we need to do something.” And so a fledgling youth movement
was born: the Million Youth March of Charlotte (MYMOC). It aimed to mobilize Charlotte’s teenagers and youth, as well as its civic leaders, to prevent the violence taking so many young lives in the city. Mario planned to mix community outreach with educational events like youth panels.

“I’m trying to light a fire in them,” he told me. “That the streets are not your life. There’s life beyond the streets. We want to bring positive things to the community as it relates to people who are thirteen to twenty-five years old. Because we always hear the negative. There’s always someone in that age group who’s getting gunned down here.”

I met Mario, age thirty-two, in an Olive Garden in a mall the size of a village. He was casually dressed in combat trousers and a hoodie and wore a head full of long dreads, most tied together and hanging in a clump down the middle of his back while the rest dangled around his face and torso.

Four months after Mario’s cousin was shot, one of his former elementary school pupils, Stanley Taylor, seventeen, drove up to a Marathon gas station with some friends. Located just off exit 38 on Interstate 77, the Marathon stands as the most viable venture in what is little more than a small collection of commercial units that includes a barbershop and a derelict building. Going beyond the offerings of a regular gas station—snacks, drinks, lottery tickets, and basic toiletries—it sells T-shirts and hats bearing the logos of most major basketball teams and has a small fast food outlet in the back called Hot Stuff Pizza. Just a few minutes after Kenneth Mills-Tucker’s body had been pronounced “nonviable” 585 miles away in Indianapolis, Stanley was walking into the Marathon with his friends when Demontre Rice pulled up in his car so close to them they thought he was going to hit them.