Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (26 page)

Camilla had some counseling and was even committed to a psychiatric ward for a while. “I’ve never been to the hospital for more than two weeks. Because they made me feel like I’m crazy. And I’m not crazy. They
made me take off my shoelaces. They made me take off my headband. And I don’t like that.” Her promise in school evaporated. When she wasn’t high, she was belligerent, and sometimes both simultaneously. “I just thought, Fuck school. I didn’t care about it no more. They kicked me out because I’m in a gang and I saw someone in school who was repping for someone else and so I tried to fight them. But I didn’t care. I thought any of these days I could die. One my friends could die. One of my family members could die. Just like Edwin died out of nowhere. That day, I didn’t know that was going to happen. Your friends die every year. I don’t know when it’s my last day with the people I love. I don’t care about the future because it’s not here yet.”

But there were also significant differences between the fallout from Edwin’s death and that following Tyler Dunn’s. First of all, unlike with Tyler’s death, after which two people were punished by the courts, nobody has been held accountable for Edwin’s death. The case was referred to a grand jury, but there’s no evidence that it ever met, and no one was ever charged. Less than two weeks after we spoke, Camilla had been arrested for “retaliation” in what appears to be an unrelated matter. She was later sentenced to two years in prison.

Marlyn’s principal grievance is that more than a year after that fatal day, no charges have been brought and no price has been paid. “They never called me when it happened,” she says, referring to Camilla and her mother. “They had him there, and they didn’t do anything. Perhaps if they’d called me when it happened, I could have done something. By the time I got there, he’d already been there for half an hour. She wasn’t imprisoned. She faced no charges. I called the police to find out why she wasn’t imprisoned. She’s free. She wasn’t even reprimanded. They said there will be justice. There will be a process. But it’s been more than a year. Somebody should be held responsible for this. She sells drugs. They should go to prison. If a pet was killed like that, there would be justice. They showed no remorse or guilt, and in the end nothing happened to them.”

Paradoxically, given that there has been no punishment, there has also been more forgiveness. Camilla went to Edwin’s funeral. Her Facebook cover photo shows her sitting next to Edwin’s grave, all in black,
surrounded by flowers and balloons, smoking what looks like a joint. Her previous photo shows a large crowd standing around the grave. She says she’s still in contact with Sandra and Victor. (Sandra said she wasn’t.) “His sister and brother are cool,” she says. “But every time I’m with them I know what happened. I feel bad because they don’t have a brother no more. The only person I’m not cool with is his mom. And I understand that. Because sometimes I even get mad at myself. He was my best friend.”

There was a moment on Facebook when it looked like tensions might flare, as they did in Marlette. The day after the shooting, Adan Castaneda posted, “Fucked up Knowing Who Killed Him!” At that stage, most didn’t know what happened or who was involved. A rumor that it was suicide was quickly quashed. But Adan’s friends demanded to know what he knew. Yasmine stepped in and said, “Don’t say her name.” Then Camilla joined the fray.

Camilla: “Adan, don’t be saying he got killed nigga. It was an accident.”

Adan: “I know it was an accident.”

Camilla: “I sorry doe nigga.”

Adan: “Is alight.”

Emjay: “we know it was an accident and accidents happens to everybody.”

Camilla: “life’s a bitch I don’t wanted to end like this.”

Within the gang, it was debated whether she should be kicked out, killed for killing one of their own, or given a pass. She talked to her OG (Original Gangster or gang leader) about it. They decided it was an accident and she had suffered enough. “They said we were young and stupid and it was just an accident, and if someone messes with me about that then it’s them who’s gonna die or whatever,” she told me. Even Marlyn, despite their altercations, believes it was a genuine accident—most of the time. “I don’t think she would have killed him on purpose,” she says. “I
think she loved him. But sometimes my pain as a mother makes me feel otherwise.”

The Rajos moved away from Bellaire Gardens. Marlyn couldn’t stand the memories. When I met them they had just settled into a new housing complex ten minutes away. They’d moved in a week earlier and were not yet unpacked. There was no furniture, and though she was heavily pregnant Marlyn insisted that the translator and I sit on two tables. She stood, running her hand over the curve of her extended belly. Shortly before the interview was over I asked if, given everything that had happened, she regretted coming to America. Honduras has a far, far higher rate of homicide in general and gun deaths in particular. But she’d come looking for a better life for a family that did not yet exist, and now her eldest son was dead. “No,” she says. “It’s hard here. It’s very hard. It’s hard work just to stay alive. But I don’t regret leaving. I don’t regret coming. Sometimes I think God must know what happened to my son and why. But I don’t blame the country. It could have happened anywhere. Knowing the situation in Honduras I think my children are better off here.”

A month after I spoke to her, she gave birth to a five-pound twelve-ounce boy. She named him Edwin.

CHAPTER 7

SAMUEL BRIGHTMON (16)

Dallas, Texas

11:15
P
.
M
.
CST

I
N HER BIOGRAPHY OF
H
ARLEM
R
ENAISSANCE WRITER
Z
ORA
N
EALE
Hurston,
Wrapped in Rainbows,
Valerie Boyd explains why it was so difficult to track Hurston’s whereabouts during her early twenties: “In 1911 it was relatively easy for someone, particularly a black woman, to evade history’s recording gaze.” She continues, “If not legally linked to a man, as daughter or wife, black women did not count in some ways—at least to the people who did the official counting.”
¹

The question of who counts and who is counted is not simply an issue of numbers. It’s also about power. Collecting information, particularly about people, demands both the authority to gather data and the capacity to keep and transmit it. Those who have both the authority and the capacity need to feel that those they are keeping tabs on matter. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as the dead floated in the streets of New
Orleans and the living were stranded on highways and rooftops, a huge crowd of mostly black and poor people descended on the city’s convention center. When asked why relief organizations had been caught off guard, Michael Brown, the hapless director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, responded, “We’re seeing people that we didn’t know exist.”
²

In short, not everybody counts, and therefore not everybody is counted. We know, for example, how many American soldiers died during the Iraq invasion, because the US government had to keep record. One can only imagine the outcry if they hadn’t. But we can only guess how many Iraqi civilians or insurgents have died, because there was no Iraqi state to count them and it was not in US interests to keep a tally, let alone learn their names. We know how many US police officers are killed in the line of duty in any given year, but there is no national tally for how many people are killed by police officers.

During the early nineties, when child and teen gun deaths ran at more than twice the rate they do now,
³
many a child’s death went unreported in the media. The deaths were deemed so frequent and predictable, and they occurred in places so foreign to those who had the power to cover them, that they might as well have been in Iraq. So back then, a young life could be extinguished without trace. The police would barely be interested. The circumstances, the names, the ages of the dead were not considered of sufficient public interest to log each one as a matter of course. Dan Kois, who ran the Gun-Death Tally for the online magazine
Slate,
says that would not happen today.

“I think by this stage, pretty much every homicide or accident that takes place is reported,” Kois told me. The development of social media, citizen journalism, and new technology has made it more difficult for the established media to simply ignore gun deaths in certain areas. “In most cities, there are separate blogs recording gun deaths, and this keeps the newspapers and other local media outlets honest. The numbers we got chimed with the statistical projections [for gun homicides and accidents].” Kois, a senior editor for
Slate,
acknowledged that the numbers it collected fell well short (by more than half) of all the gun deaths that
occurred, because, as I pointed out in the Introduction, suicides are generally not reported.

The Gun-Death Tally, set up in the wake of the Newtown shootings, sought to record every gun death in the country.
⁴
The website, which ran for a year, compiled its data through basic Internet searches and crowd-sourcing; anybody could send in news of a gun death, and site managers would add it to the tally. The site represented each death using a stick figure in one of three sizes—large for adults, medium for teens, and small for children—with web links to news reports of what happened.

“The feature was meant to be a provocation of sorts,” Kois wrote when the site was closing. “We knew that those rows of figures, each one attached to a name, piling atop one another every day, made for an arresting visual, one that might trouble even the most ardent gun-rights supporter.”
⁵

Five weeks after the Gun-Death Tally was launched, Joe Nocera wrote a column for the
New York Times
titled “And in Last Week’s Gun News . . . ,” in which he provided brief descriptions of a handful of those who had died from gun violence in the previous week.
⁶

“There were nine or ten items,” Nocera told me. (In fact, there were fourteen.) “There was no editorializing by me whatsoever. Just these clips. I thought it was powerful and very effective. If you live in Lexington, Kentucky, or Providence, Rhode Island, you don’t have a sense of all the gun violence there is out there.” From this emerged “The Gun Report,” a daily digest on the
New York Times’
website relating to all things gun-related, including fatalities. It ran from Monday to Friday; the one on Monday compiled the events of the preceding weekend. “It’s simply a google search every day of gun deaths,” says Nocera. “It’s the only thing I’ve ever done that got reviewed by the
New York Review of Books,”
he adds with some pride.

Both
Slate
’s Gun-Death Tally and the
New York Times’
“Gun Report” were comprehensive and provided useful starting points. Neither were definitive. Four of the young people featured in this book did not appear on one site or the other; one death appeared on neither.

Slate
wound down its efforts after a year and directed followers to the Gun Violence Archive, which conducted a similar but more extensive effort on a website bound to attract less traffic since it was not part of a
general news outlet. The
New York Times
held out for a little longer before a dispute regarding overtime pay for the editorial assistant compiling the data allegedly triggered its demise.
⁷
In the paper, Nocera offered a different explanation. “A few months ago,” he wrote, “I began to feel that we had made the point already. Day after day, week after week, there was a numbing sameness to the shootings.”
⁸

But if the fact of a gun death is now generally reported, it is often done so in the most summary, almost dismissive, fashion. Such was the case for Samuel Brightmon’s shooting, which appeared in the
Dallas Morning News
under the headline “Teen Fatally Shot While Walking Down Street.” “Police are investigating after a teenager was fatally shot Saturday night when walking down the street in Southeast Dallas,” the article read. “Police say Samuel Brightmon, 16, and another 16-year-old were walking in the 7300 block of Schepps Parkway around 11 p.m. when they heard gunshots. As the teens tried to run away, Brightmon was shot and collapsed in the street, according to police. Brightmon was taken to Baylor University Medical Center of Dallas where he was pronounced dead. No suspect has been identified.”
⁹

The following day, the
Dallas Morning News
filed another brief report by Claire Z. Cardona, adding that: “Crime Stoppers is offering a $5,000 reward for information that leads to the arrest and indictment for the felony offense,” and giving readers the number of the tip line to call.