Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (3 page)

Around the time of my departure, those odds seemed particularly bad. The children and teens in this book were killed four months after George Zimmerman was acquitted for shooting Trayvon Martin dead in Sanford, Florida (which was when the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was coined) and nine months before Michael Brown was shot dead in Ferguson, Missouri (which was when #BlackLivesMatter really took off). In other words, they occurred during an intense period of heightening racial consciousness, activism, and polarization. The deaths covered in this book don’t fit neatly into the established #BlackLivesMatter narrative. None of the victims were killed by law enforcement, and where the assailants are known they are always the same race as the victim. The characters in this book cannot be shoehorned into crude morality plays of black and white, state and citizen.

But that doesn’t mean race is not a factor. For in the manner in which these fatalities are reported (or not reported), investigated (or not investigated), and understood (or misunderstood), it is clear that whatever
American society makes of black lives, in many if not most instances black deaths such as these don’t count for an awful lot. On a typical day, of the seven children and teens who die from guns, one would be female, three would be black, three white, and one Hispanic. And every five days, one of those seven deaths will be a child of another race (Asian, Pacific Islander, Native America, Native Alaskan).
⁷
But precisely because the day was random, it was not typical. Of the ten who died during the time frame of this book, all were male, seven were black, two Hispanic, and one white. In other words, black men and boys comprise roughly 6 percent of their cohort but 70 percent of the dead on the day in question.

You won’t find another Western country with a murder rate on a par with that in black America; for comparable rates, you have to look to Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, or Rwanda.
⁸

This is not a book about race, though a disproportionate number of those who fell that day were black, and certain racial themes are unavoidable. It is not a book that sets out to compare the United States unfavorably with Britain, though it is written by a Briton to whom gun culture is alien. Finally, it is not a book about gun control; it is a book made possible by the absence of gun control.

This is a book about America and its kids viewed through a particular lens in a particular moment. “Whether they’re used in war or for keeping the peace guns are just tools,” wrote the late former Navy Seal Chris Kyle in
American Gun: A History of the U.S. in Ten Firearms.
“And like any tool, the way they’re used reflects the society they’re part of.”
⁹
This book takes a snapshot of a society in which these deaths are uniquely possible and that has a political culture apparently uniquely incapable of creating a world in which they might be prevented.

F
OR A RELATIVELY BRIEF
moment, there was considerable national interest in the fact that large numbers of Americans of all ages were being fatally shot on a regular basis.

It followed the shootings in the small Connecticut village of Newtown. Less than a year before the day on which this book is set, a troubled twenty-year-old, Adam Lanza, shot his mother then drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School and shot twenty small children and six adult staff members dead before turning the gun on himself. Even though mass shootings comprise a small proportion of gun violence in any year, they disturb America’s self-image and provoke its conscience in a way that the daily torrent of gun deaths does not.

“Individual deaths don’t have the same impact and ability to galvanize people because mass shootings are public spectacles,”
New York Times
journalist Joe Nocera told me. “They create a community of grief. So it stands to reason that Newtown would be the thing that wakes people up. . . . I was galvanized by Sandy Hook.”

Sandy Hook’s political impact was not solely about the numbers. It was also about the victims’ ages. Most of the victims were first graders—aged six and seven. It was the pathos of hearing how Lanza picked them off one by one, how they cowered in bathrooms and teachers hid them in closets. These facts forced a reckoning with what could and should be done to challenge this ever happening again. “Seeing the massacre of so many innocent children . . . it’s changed America,” said West Virginia’s Democratic senator, Joe Manchin, who championed a tepid gun control bill that would not even come to a vote in the Senate. “We’ve never seen this happen.”
¹⁰

The truth is it’s happening every day. Only most do not see it. November 23, 2013, was one of those days.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

T
O SAVE US ALL FROM STRAW MEN AND CONFUSION
,
A PROJECT
such as this must be as transparent and clearly defined as possible. To that end, I want to make explicit three basic parameters on which this book is based.

First, although the time frame spans twenty-four hours, it is not a calendar date. This allows for more flexibility but not more time. A US calendar day, spanning from the East Coast to Hawaii, is longer, stretching twenty-nine hours. This book covers the gun deaths that occurred between 3:57 a.m. EST on November 23, 2013, and 3:30 a.m. EST on November 24.

Second, the book covers the gun deaths that occurred within that twenty-four-hour period—which is not quite the same as including those who were shot on that day and then died on a later date. Jaiden Dixon was shot on Friday, November 22, but not pronounced dead until Saturday, November 23. He’s in the book because he died within the time frame in question. Quindell Lee, who was shot in the head on November 23 in Dallas by his thirteen-year-old brother while his stepfather “stepped out for 15 minutes,”
¹
is not in the book, because Quindell wasn’t pronounced dead until Monday, November 25.

Finally, the book includes children and teens. That is not the same as minors. Some are legally adults; more than half are over 16. The median
age is 17.5; the average age 14.3. You can slice and dice the data and definitions any way you want. But once you’ve seen their pictures, encountered the braggadocio on their Facebook pages, and seen the peach fuzz referred to in autopsy reports, the arguments become moot. It’s not complicated. They’re kids.

But perhaps the most important thing for you, the reader, to know is that these were not necessarily all the gun deaths of young people that day. They are all the gun deaths I found. I found them through Internet searches and on news websites that tracked gun deaths on a daily basis. There was no other way.

Each of the more than three thousand counties in the country collects data in its own way and has different rules for how the information can be disseminated. Some will tell a reporter if there have been any gun-related fatalities in the last week; others refuse. Meanwhile, it takes more than a year for the numbers to be aggregated nationally by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. So a project like this, which seeks to report on the cases in a more timely manner, is necessarily reliant primarily on local media. These are the gun deaths that I found that got reported.

As such, one important and sensitive category is absent: suicides. On average, around two of the seven gun deaths that occur in the United States each day involve young people taking their own lives.
²
(They tend to be disproportionately male, white, Native American, or Native Alaskan.) Unless these tragedies are emblematic of some broader issue—online bullying, academic pressure, or a mass shooting—they are generally not reported. It is, apparently, in no one’s interest for suicides of any age group to become public knowledge. For the family the pain is compounded by stigma. For the media it is considered too intrusive and inherently unappealing to ask; mental health professionals fear publicity will encourage the vulnerable to follow suit. “They don’t like to report them on the television because it’s bad for advertising,” a representative of C.A.R.E.S. Prevention, a suicide-prevention organization based in Florida, told me. “They’re too much of a downer.” So more children and teens were almost certainly shot that day. These are just the ones we know about.

CHAPTER 1

JAIDEN DIXON (9)

Grove City, Ohio

N
OVEMBER
22, 7:36
A
.
M
.
EST

S
CHOOL MORNINGS IN
N
ICOLE
F
ITZPATRICK
’
S HOME FOLLOWED A
predictable routine. As soon as her three boys—Jarid Fitzpatrick, age seventeen, Jordin Brown, age sixteen, and Jaiden Dixon, age nine—heard her footsteps they would pull the covers over their heads because they knew what was coming next: the lights. The older two would take this as a cue for the inevitable and get up. But Jaiden, who had a loft bunk bed in the same room as Jarid, would try to string out his slumber for as long as possible. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he would first migrate to his mother’s room, where his clothes hung, and climb into her bed. Then came the cajoling. “I’d tickle him to try and get him to get up,” says Nicole. “And goof him around. I’d pull him by his ankle to try to get him to get dressed.” They had a deal. If he could get himself ready—“all the way ready. Socks, shoes, shirt, everything”—the rest of the morning was his.
“He could play on the computer, play Minecraft, watch
Duck Dynasty
or a DVR from the night before,” she explains. “You get all the way ready to go, [ready to] walk out the door, and you can do what you want for that time frame.”

It was Friday, November 22, 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The morning papers were full of nostalgia for the nation’s lost innocence. They might have found it on Nicole’s street in Grove City, a dependably humdrum suburb of Columbus that had been crowned “Best Hometown” in central Ohio for that year. It was precisely its dependability that convinced people to stay. Nicole went to school with the parents of the children her kids go to school with. Amy Baker, whose son Quentin hung out with Jaiden, was one of Nicole’s good school friends, and they remain close. Baker was the third generation of her family to go to Grove City High School; her daughter is the fourth. When Nicole and Amy were growing up, Grove City had a reputation as a hick farming town. Some disparagingly and others affectionately nicknamed it “Grovetucky”—a midwestern suburb that owed more to the rural ways of Kentucky than to its status as a suburb of Ohio’s biggest city. Back then the town’s border, appropriately enough, was marked by a White Castle restaurant. There was no movie theater. The Taco Bell parking lot was the main hangout for youngsters. “You had to leave Grove City to get a decent pair of shoes,” says Baker. “Otherwise you were shopping at Kmart.”