Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (4 page)

The population has more than doubled in Nicole’s lifetime and now stands at 38,500.
¹
Nicole and Amy remember much of the development, including the building of the large strip mall where I met Nicole for dinner one night. At just thirty-nine, she can sound like an old-timer. “There was nothing there,” she told Jordin, trying in vain to evoke the limitations of the world she grew up in. “It was all farmland. Corn. Farmland. Soy.” Nicole, Jarid, Jordin, and Jaiden lived on Independence Way, off Independence Street and past Independence Court, three thermometer-shaped streets—cul-de-sacs, each with a circular bulb at one end—without picket fences but with a hoop in almost every yard and a flag flying from many a porch. A yellow traffic sign stood by the house, warning,
“Slow—Children at play.” On a breezy weekday morning it’s so quiet you can hear the wind chimes toll.

They’d been there for three years, and Nicole had recently signed another two-year lease. “I knew the people next door, the people at the end of the street. Everybody knew everybody. There wasn’t any crime. I had no problems with Jaiden being outside playing. The rule was I had to be able to walk out of the front yard and be able to see him. I never really needed to worry in that regard.” Jaiden was ready that morning with time to spare for high jinks. When Nicole threw him his socks, Jaiden wound his arm around and threw them back before telling her he wanted to try out as a pitcher for his Little League baseball team. He was playing on his Xbox and Nicole was packing his bag when, shortly after 7:30, the doorbell rang. This was not part of the routine. But nor was it out of the ordinary. At the end of the street lived a woman Nicole had gone to high school with. Every now and then one of her two teenage girls, Jasmin or Hunter, might pop around if their mom was short of sugar or coffee or they needed a ride to school. Usually, they would text Jarid or Jordin first. But occasionally they just showed up.

So when the bell rang, Nicole called for someone to answer it and Jaiden leapt up. He opened the door gingerly, hiding behind it as though poised to jump out and shout “Boo” when Jasmin or Hunter showed her face. But nobody stepped forward. Time was suspended for a moment as the minor commotion of an unexpected visitor’s crossing the hearth failed to materialize. Nicole craned her neck into the cleft of silence to find out who it was but could see nothing. She looked to Jarid; Jarid shrugged. Jordin was upstairs getting ready. Slowly, cautiously, curiously, Jaiden walked around the door to see who it was. That’s when Nicole heard the “pop.” Her first thought was, “Why are these girls popping a balloon at the door? What are they trying to do, scare me to death?”

But then she saw Jaiden’s head snap back, first once, then twice before he hit the floor. “It was just real quiet. Jarid was standing there in the living room and it was like everything stopped. And I remember staring at Jarid.” And in that moment, though she had seen neither the gun nor the gunman, she knew what had happened. It was Danny. “I didn’t need
to see him. I knew it was him.” Jarid didn’t see his face or the gun either. But he saw the hoodied figure making its escape to the car. He, too, knew immediately who it was.

Danny Thornton was Jarid’s father. Nicole had met him years before at Sears, where he made keys. She was nineteen; he was twenty-eight. “We were never really together,” she says. “It was really a back-and-forth kind of thing. And that has just been our relationship ever since.” Amy Sanders, Nicole’s best friend, never liked Danny. The first time she met him Jarid couldn’t have been more than three. Danny knew she was Nicole’s best friend, and he hit on her anyway. “He was gross and he was mean,” Amy says.

Nicole hadn’t seen him since July. He’d found her over a year earlier, in January 2012, when he was in need of help. “He didn’t have anywhere to stay,” she recalls. “He was getting ready to be evicted, and we kind of decided to let him stay with us with the intention that we could help each other out. He could spend time with Jarid and keep him under control, and I could help him get a job and get him back on his feet so he could give us some money.” She gave him Jarid’s room, and the boys all shared a room. She put together his resume and e-mailed places where he might work. He got one job for a month and was fired. He didn’t find another one.

While he was staying with the family, he got to know Jaiden. He took him bowling. He once told Nicole he liked Jaiden because Jaiden made him laugh. He even said he preferred him to his own son, Jarid. The arrangement didn’t work out. Money and space were tight, and so long as he was jobless Danny had little to offer. Nicole needed the room. She tried to let him down gently. But anyway you cut it she was kicking him out. That made Danny angry. And Danny didn’t deal with anger well. According to court records, his criminal history dating back eighteen years included charges of felonious assault, domestic violence, aggravated menacing, disorderly conduct, assault, attempted possession of drugs, having a weapon under disability, and carrying a concealed weapon. He was also a semipro, super-middleweight boxer—five feet eleven and around 160 pounds—who favored the southpaw stance: right hand and
right foot forward, leading with right jabs, and following up with a left cross, right hook. He’d fought as far afield as Canada and Florida and had acquitted himself respectably—in fifteen wins and fifteen losses, he’d delivered eleven knockouts and been knocked out fourteen times himself.
²

“He was pissed,” says Nicole. “He moved all his stuff out. I don’t know where. I didn’t care.”

What she didn’t know for some time was that as he was packing up he told Jarid, “I have no problem making you an orphan. I’m not going to be living out of my car at forty-seven years old. I have no problem shooting your mom and shooting your brothers.” When he’d done with his shooting spree, he told his son, he’d end his life in a shoot-out with the cops.

Although he’d never directly threatened to shoot Nicole’s family, Danny had talked to her about shooting others. “We’d had this discussion before. He had twins. I don’t even know how old they are. He was pissed off with the mom for filing child support on him. He already had two other child support orders on him, and he didn’t work, didn’t have a job, already had a couple felonies on his record, so he couldn’t get a job. And he talked about if he knew where she lived he’d go over there and shoot her and shoot the babies. And I remember telling him, ‘Don’t shoot the babies. Why are you going to shoot the babies? They didn’t do nothing to you.’ And he said, ‘No. They don’t love me. I don’t love nothing that don’t love me back.’”

He’d once come close to shooting another ex-partner, Vicki Vertin. He’d told Nicole he had been on his way to shoot Vicki, their daughter, and her family when he got a phone call from a friend he hadn’t spoken to in years. “He took that as a sign not to do it that day.”

“He had a list,” says Amy Sanders. “An actual, physical list of people he wanted to kill. . . . He would talk about it whenever he met up with Nicole. Nicole was afraid of him. She always thought if she was nice to him she wouldn’t be on his list. And unfortunately she was the first one.”

Jarid was shielded from much of this. “They never said anything bad about him in front of us,” says Kayaan Sanders, Amy’s son, who effectively grew up with Jarid. “I never saw Danny get angry and aggressive in front of us. He’d always be the cool dad, that would be funny, said
inappropriate things sometimes that would make you laugh. Jarid never said anything bad about his dad in front of me.” So when Danny talked about making him an orphan, Jarid thought he was just running at the mouth. He didn’t tell his mom about it until September. Danny had been absent for much of Jarid’s life; he didn’t know what Danny was capable of. “When Jarid told me [what Danny said], I stopped dead in my tracks,” says Nicole. “I said, ‘Jarid, he’s going to kill me. He’s going to kill me.’ And Jarid said, ‘No he’s not, Mom. He’s just blowing off steam.’ I was petrified. Petrified. I told my friends if something happens to me go after Danny, make sure my kids are taken care of. I was preparing for it to be me.” But time passed. They didn’t hear from Danny, and she began to wonder if Jarid was right. Maybe he was sounding off.

Then Danny’s cell phone subscription expired. He’d been on her plan. She’d continued paying for his phone after he’d left in order to placate him. But Christmas was approaching and she could no longer afford to. She hesitated, mindful of what Jarid had told her and fearful of Danny’s response. On November 20 she sent him a text telling him his contract would end on Monday the twenty-fifth. “I can’t pay it anymore,” she wrote. “But the phone’s yours. You can go and turn it on at any provider.” The message sat on her phone for a while unsent. “I knew what he was capable of,” she says. “But I had to look out for my kids. I had to look out for me.” She pressed send. He replied within an hour: “What fucking took you so long?”

Nicole forwarded the message to Amy Sanders. “I swear he’s gonna kill me one day,” Nicole texted. “In two years, when nobody suspects him, I know he’s gonna kill me.”

“We were serious,” says Amy. “But somehow it was still more like a joke. Who can wrap their minds around a reality like that until it really happens? It’s not really real until it happens.”

And then it happened. Two days after the exchange, this was the man who sped away from Independence Way in a blue Toyota, leaving Jaiden with a bullet in his skull as Danny’s biological son desperately tried to revive his brother. “And I struggle to try and understand,” says Nicole. “Did he shoot whoever answered the door, or was Jaiden his target?
Because honestly he could have stepped one foot in that house and shot me, shot Jarid, shot Jordin. We were defenseless. We opened the door and let him in. There was nothing to stop him taking us all out.”

D
ANNY LEFT A GRAY
, circular hole on Jaiden’s temple and chaos all around. Jarid fled out of the house, screaming and crying, and asked a neighbor, Brad Allmon, to call 911. “He just shot my brother in the face. He shot my brother in the face,” he told Allmon.
³
Once he got the emergency services on the phone he could barely make himself understood through the pandemonium.

“Sir, please calm down so I can understand what you’re saying,” says the operator. “We’ve got to learn what’s going on.”

“My dad just shot my baby brother,” says Jarid.

“What happened? What happened?” Trying to make out the pattern of events over the mayhem in the house, the dispatcher says, “Calm down, sir. Please tell me what happened.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“Who shot him?”

“Danny Thornton. D-A-N-N-Y T-H-O-R-N-T-O-N.” Jarid alternates between trying to communicate with the dispatcher and trying to revive Jaiden. Desperation and the occasional expletive interspersed with formal niceties—“sir,” “ma’am,” “fuck,” “please God”—in an exchange between a public servant and a fraught teenager whose baby brother is dying in his arms.

“C’mon, Jaiden. C’mon, baby. C’mon, Jaiden. C’mon. C’mon.”

“Where are you now?”

“Oh my God. I’m going to fucking kill him. I’m going to fucking kill him. I’m going to fucking kill him.”

“Sir, that’s not going to help your brother.”

“Listen, he said he wants suicide by cop.”

“Where is he?”

“Oh God, please come. Please.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“Oh please stay with me. Please. Please.”

“I need you to tell me where the guy is with the gun. Where did he go?”

“I don’t know. He walked up to the fucking door. Shot him and then took off.”

“Walking or driving?”

“He was driving a blue Toyota Camera, uh, Camry. C’mon, Jaiden, please stay with me.”

“Sir, you’ve got to talk to me, okay?”

“Yes,” said Jarid and then turned to someone in the house and said, “Hold his head. Hold his head. Hold his head.”

“Sir, listen to me. You need to answer my questions.”

Jordin also calls 911 and is on the other line.

“1916 Independence Way. My brother got hurt, I need somebody now, please.”

“Was he hurt from somebody or in a fall?”

“I don’t know. Just please get somebody here. Please.”

“Where is he bleeding from?”

“The head. There’s blood everywhere.”

“Did he take some kind of drugs or medication?”

“No, no, no.”

“Sir, how old is he?”

“He’s nine. Nine, nine, nine, nine.”

“He’s nine? Is he breathing?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. Is he breathing, Mom? Is he breathing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is he inside?”

“Yes, he’s inside.”

“Okay, I want you to get right down beside him and tell me if he’s breathing.”

“Mom, is he breathing? No, he’s not breathing.”

“Was he shot?”

“Are you right there beside him, sir?”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“I want you to lay him down on his back, remove his clothes, and place your hand on his forehead. Put your hand under his neck, tilt his head back put your ear next to his mouth. Tell me if you can hear breathing.”