Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (12 page)

“High-homicide environments are alike,” writes Jill Leovy in
Ghettoside: Investigating a Homicide Epidemic.
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“The setting is usually a minority enclave or disputed territory where people distrust legal authority. . . . The killings typically arise from arguments. A large share of them can be described in two words: Men fighting. The fights might be spontaneous, part of some long-running feud, or the culmination of ‘some drama.’” Here was some spontaneous drama, and given the volatile temperaments of the two men involved, it was never going to end well.

Stanley, says his friend Trey Duncan, had a quick temper. “Once you bumped him, it’s over.” On the Facebook page set up in his memory—a space generally reserved for tender reflections and Biblical citations—Quan Jones posted, “Was up cuz remember that time we was in middle school in you hit that nigga with a lock in the class room. That was good time in middle school r.i.p. Lil stan aka madmix we love u cuz.” Demontre, twenty-seven, was no paragon of self-control either. His criminal record includes, among other things—and there are many other things—arrests for domestic violence, reckless driving, and aggravated unlawful use of a weapon.

Precise details of what happened next are sketchy. The two men exchanged words. As Stanley and his crew made their way into the gas station, Rice pulled out his gun and started shooting. According to the autopsy, Stanley was shot four times. One bullet penetrated his right leg, another grazed his right leg, and one hit his left leg. But it was what the coroner labeled “Gunshot Wound #1” that killed him. “A penetrating gunshot wound to the back,” reads the autopsy, tracing the trajectory of the bullet. “Upon entering the body the projectile passes through the skin and soft tissue of the back fracturing left ribs #9 and #10. The bullet fragments perforating the upper and lower lobe of the left lung. There is extensive residual blood present within the chest cavity. Bullet fragments are recovered from the left lung and chest wall. Multiple gray bullet fragments are retained as evidence.”

The 911 call reporting the shooting came in at 4:17 a.m., with all the formality and restraint of someone trying to sell car insurance. “Yes ma’am, somebody got shot down here,” says the muffled voice of a man with a South Asian accent who sounds like he sees people getting shot all the time. “Where?” “Lasalle Street.” “Is the person that did it still there?” “He’s gone with his car and the other ones followed him in the other car.” “Okay. Is the person that’s shot still there?” “No, he’s gone. Somebody’s taken him.” “But it happened there?” “Yes ma’am.” “Okay the person that was shot, what kind of car did he leave in?” “I didn’t get it.” “What color was it, do you know?” “Brown car. Nice car. Brown car. I know him. I know him personal,” says the caller, exhaling in what is the only remotely
emotional moment in the call. “The dude, he shoot him.” “Okay we’ll get officers out there.” “Thank you.” “You’re welcome.”

As the caller had warned, by the time the police arrived everybody had gone. Stanley’s friends had bundled him into a car and driven him the mile between Interstates 77 and 85. Mario thinks they were trying to get him to University Hospital. Whatever their plan, en route they saw an ambulance, flagged it down, and helped Stanley into it. When he got to the hospital he was pronounced dead.

By Sunday, police issued an arrest warrant for Rice, warning the public that he was “armed and dangerous.” The following Friday he turned himself in at the Mecklenburg County Jail, where he was charged with murder. Almost a year later, he pled guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to between 285 and 354 months in prison.
²

S
TANLEY WAS TALL
,
LEAN
, and dark. He had a high-top fade crowned with small dreads that earned him the nickname MadMaxx. Photographs on social media of him bearing a strong smile of straight, white teeth looking directly into the camera are outnumbered by more self-conscious poses in which his mouth is only half open and his head at a tilt. “He had a beautiful sense of humor,” his mother, Toshiba, told me. “He was a good kid. He was always joking around. He wanted to see you smile. Always joking. Being silly.”

“He was goofy,” recalls Trey, shaking his head and smiling. “Sometimes he was so goofy it could get aggravating.” Stanley, it seems, could aggravate folks quite a lot. “He didn’t get along with too many people, to be honest,” says Toshiba, whose recognition of her son’s many positive qualities did not blind her to his faults. “He was very outspoken,” says Shimona, Toshiba’s friend, who’s known Stanley since he was an infant. “He was a good kid, too. Smart, silly, loving, giving. He loved his friends. He
loved
his friends.” If Facebook postings are anything to go by, his girlfriend, whom he would visit after school most days, was besotted with him. For more than a year after his death, friends kept
posting messages for him—not just at New Year, Christmas, and his birthday, but on random days when they just wanted to testify in his memory. Within a couple of months of his death, someone had scrawled graffiti on the wall of the Marathon gas station where he was shot, declaring, “R.i.P $tan #FordBound.” It referred to Beatties Ford Road, a long, nondescript street in West Charlotte where he and his friends spent much of their time. The only hobby anybody mentions is basketball. “But what he really liked doing,” says Toshiba, “is hanging on the corner with his friends.”

Trey was one of those friends. Although Toshiba intimated that Stanley “hadn’t recently had any trouble with the law,” it was Trey who pointed out, quite matter-of-factly, even if the precise facts were elusive, that Stanley went to jail for “three or maybe six months” when he was “sixteen or seventeen” for “something.” Stanley attended Turning Point Academy, a charter school with a mission to “‘redirect student behavior through positive programs that provide rigor, relevance and relationships.”
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But when Stanley came out of jail, says Trey, he struggled to get back on track. “After that, he went downhill. He got into the wrong crowd, and when he got into the wrong crowd he didn’t even care about school after that.”

Trey can barely remember a time when he didn’t know who Stanley was from the neighborhood. But it wasn’t until they were in their teens that they became friendly. Trey, a slender, unassuming young man, met me in a Burger King. He wore a picture of Stanley pinned to his shirt, under which appeared two Bible verses, Proverbs 3:1, 2. “My son, forget not my law; but let thine heart keep my commandments; for length of days, and long life, and peace, shall they add to thee.” He organized a balloon release for the anniversary of Stanley’s death, which drew a good crowd.

He arrived carrying a pair of drumsticks and told me he used to play cymbals in the school marching band. Stanley decided to try out for the band and ended up playing bass drum. Trey says he was pretty good at it, but though Stanley lasted only a few months in the band before he gave it up, the two of them remained close. “We used to chill on Beatties Ford
Road,” says Trey. When I ask what “chilling” consisted of, things get vague. “Just chill, you know,” he said. But I really didn’t. It is a pursuit that, though it consumed hours of their time, apparently defies description and needs no qualification or further explanation. It seems to primarily involve standing around, talking about girls and thinking of ways to get money. Most of the time, they hung out at L.C. Coleman Park, a bucolic spot just behind Beatties Ford Road with a playground, picnic tables, grills, and basketball courts. “We’d go to the park, go to my homeboy’s house, play a game . . . chill,” Trey explained.

Those closest to Stanley had only a faint idea of what he wanted to do or be. He’d never mentioned anything to Trey about a future profession. At his funeral, a high school teacher read one of his last assignments, in which he’d written that he knew he was not living the right lifestyle and wanted to make some changes so he could graduate and go to college. “He was basically making little changes in the right direction,” says Mario. “He was talking about going to community college,” says Toshiba. “He wanted to take adult high school class and start his own business.”

But when they were chilling on Beatties Ford Road, Stanley and Trey’s big dream was to go to Miami one day to “chill” and “sleep with some white girls.” Trey couldn’t say what it was that attracted them to Miami. But the dream lived on in Stanley’s absence. “That was my main goal,” says Trey. “If I got to Miami that’s gonna be some shit.” He paused. “I might cry.”

Trey doesn’t know quite how to describe the group he and Stanley used to hang out with on Beatties Ford—like “chilling,” it defies definition. It was not so formal as to have a name but not so casual that it did not have a code. “I ain’t gonna say it was a gang,” says Trey. “But it was a neighborhood thing. Beatties Ford. We got our own little clique. We on the West Side. North Side is a whole different neighborhood you don’t even fool with. Everybody was together. This my brother, this my brother. We all in the same clique. We got each other’s back. I’m not going to let nobody else touch you. If you hit him I’m gonna hit you. ’Cos I’m his brother.” At times, that made Stanley a liability. His recklessness became the responsibility of the group. “You try to restrain him. But once
I know it’s past that and he swinging, I’m right beside him,” explains Trey. “If he going out we’re going out together. That’s why I really wish I was there when it happened,” he says referring to the night Stanley died. But would his presence have really helped, given that Rice had a gun? I asked. “You’re right,” Trey admits. “There’s not a lot I could have done.”

M
ARIO NOT ONLY TAUGHT
Stanley in elementary school; he also went to elementary school with Toshiba. He saw Stanley grow up, occasionally running into him around town. The last time he saw him was about a year before the shooting. “It was always a pleasure to catch up with him,” says Mario. “He wasn’t an angel. But he wasn’t the worst either. Not by a long way. He was just a typical teen. Just running around. Out with his peers. Out in the street. Even in his teenage years he had a little more energy than some of the teachers could handle. Once he left elementary school, I would run into him. He would always show me the utmost respect. ‘Hey, Mr. Mario. Hey, Mr. Black.’”

By daybreak on Saturday, November 23, Black was vaguely aware that another youth in town had fallen. “On Facebook I saw a lot of ‘RIP Stan,’ but it wasn’t until Sunday morning when I saw it on the news that I realized just who it was. I’d started the Million Youth March for that particular reason, so it actually hit home hard. As educators, we get attached to these students. We’re like their parents away from home. So that was like one of mine getting gunned down as well. I cried like a baby.”

He called Toshiba and helped her organize the funeral. A couple of weeks later was MYMOC’s Community Give Back Day. They’d organized to collect toys for the needy and for barbers to give free haircuts to children. It had been planned long in advance, but given Stanley’s recent passing they dedicated the event to him. The day was a success, with over one hundred in attendance and Toshiba there to receive a candle lit in her son’s memory. But precious few of Stanley’s friends came. Mario was deeply disappointed. That evening, he wrote on Stanley’s memorial Facebook page, “To all that claimed they loved Stanley, or his Mom and
family I find it sad that you did not come out and support Million Youth March of Charlotte today during our day of giving back as we honored Stanley’s life.”

“It surprised me that so few showed up,” Mario told me a few months later. “Everyone claimed they were crazy about Stanley, and they showed up at the candlelight vigil. But when it was taking a stand for him, they weren’t there. It was discouraging, because these were the same friends who said they would be there for him and would be there for his mom. And his family was there and they weren’t.”

In his behavior classes, Mario used Stanley’s death as a cautionary tale. A picture of him hangs on the wall. “I want them to see it when I break it down to them. I say, ‘His mom got a phone call on the Saturday before Thanksgiving and had to go through Thanksgiving planning a funeral. Imagine your mom getting a phone call. That their baby had been gunned down and killed, or their baby’s in jail for hanging out with the wrong crowd or being in the wrong place at the wrong time.’”