by Robbie Tolan
News cameras weren’t allowed into my courtroom, but they were everywhere in the hallways just outside the courtroom doors. Whenever we needed to use the elevators to get lunch, use the restroom, or anything, you could hear the photographers scramble to get a great shot of the Tolan family. Again, we were living in a fish bowl.
From what I learned after the trial, the second day consisted of the technical aspects and the gruesome details of what happened the night I was shot. According to my relatives, the entire courtroom was filled with dozens of blown up diagrams, pictures of our bloodied doorstep, the bullet holes in our roof, and the gaping hole in my chest, along with the thirty-eight staples holding my stomach together. It’s funny, but I remember that day quite clearly because when I saw my relatives, they all had puffy eyes and red noses from crying, but they couldn’t tell me what had happened.
“They played the video from one of the dash cams,” they told us later. “We could hear you moaning in pain, Marian praying; it was really hard to hear.”
Something happens when a shooting moves from being theory, or a story that you read in the newspapers, to real. And although I wasn’t interested in going into a courtroom full of people who felt sorry for me, I did want them to be impacted by the devastation that Cotton’s actions had caused. My relatives loved me, so that’s why they reacted the way they did. Could twelve strangers feel the same?
One critical aspect of the trial centered on the lapel microphones that the Bellaire police officers were wearing that night. In the nearly two years since I’d been shot, the one consistent thing current and ex-cops would say to me when talking about the situation was that the lapel microphones would be crucial to the case.
“The lapel microphone will tell the story of what really happened,” they’d always say. They told me that they were trained to turn on their microphone in any encounter like this, not to protect me, but to protect them against false allegations. At least that’s the theory.
It’s the same theory people have behind body cameras on cops. The idea is that if police officers know that their actions are being recorded, then they’ll make sure to change their behavior. I don’t know about that. First, we keep getting video footage from those body cams of black and brown people being shot and killed, so it doesn’t seem to be that big of a deterrent. If you’re gonna shoot someone because blackness makes you afraid, a body cam ain’t gonna make a damn bit of difference.
Second, and this is what I’d love to ask the experts, doesn’t the existence of body cams, and lapel microphones for that matter, show that there’s a systemic issue with the type of training we’re giving this nation’s police force and that it would be much better to address the racial biases that cause them to pull out their weapon in the first place? I know that would have helped me.
Regardless, the lapel mics weren’t magic elixirs for my case. Neither Cotton nor Edwards had his microphone turned on during our encounter, and after I’d been shot, they turned their mics on and off as they talked with other officers. For example, Cotton turned his microphone on to ask me, “What were you reaching for?” and then turned it off when I answered, “Nothing.” You can’t tell me that was just an unlucky coincidence that Cotton wanted to get it into the record that he thought that I was reaching for something, while conveniently not recording my answer.
Also, did you catch that? The question about a black man reaching for something and it turning out to be nothing is the same thing that has happened in other cases, like the Philando Castile case. It’s easy to see the pattern if you’re not blinded by the notion that police officers have a right to be scared because they have a tough job.
On the third day of the trial, the prosecution finally said that we were going to be called to the witness stand. The four of us had gotten beyond bored sitting in that children’s–witness playroom, and we couldn’t wait for Maria to come in and let us know it was our turn. Suddenly, the buzzer sounded, and Maria stepped into the room.
“Bobby, they’re ready for you.”
My dad looked at me and grinned, while putting on his jacket. Honestly, his grin disturbed me more than anything because I knew that he was only doing that because he wanted to make me feel like there wasn’t anything to worry about, but I knew better. I still wanted to protect him from this whole thing. This thing that had caused him to have a double bypass due to the stress of watching his son get shot, and who knew what would happen on the stand?
I loathed the idea that the defense team was going to get a chance to interrogate my dad. To me, the defense team was an extension of the Bellaire Police Department and the City of Bellaire, two entities that had fought tooth and nail to discredit me and pretend that there wasn’t a problem between their police department and black people. Plus, I’d been in several depositions with the District Attorney, the grand jury, and Bill Helfand, the City of Bellaire’s civil attorney, and I know how sarcastic and condescending they could be.
With a pat on my shoulder, my dad told me, “See ya in a bit,” as though he was going to the ballpark to play a game. He was gone about twenty-five minutes, which was pretty much about how long his depositions had been in the pretrial interviews. The fact is that when the shooting went down, my dad had his face and hands pressed to our Chevy Suburban SUV, with a gun pointed at him, when Cotton came around the front of the truck. My dad didn’t get a solid view of what happened because he couldn’t turn his head, but he heard everything.
As we’d been warned before, my dad didn’t pretend that he’d seen something he hadn’t, and that meant that we were able to keep our credibility. Unlike the police officers, I might add.
“This is my son. This is my house. This is my car. We live here,” my dad testified. “Two to three seconds later, I heard a bang (of Marian Tolan hitting the garage). A second or two after that I heard a gunshot. Then all I heard was my wife saying ‘Call on Jesus. Pray Robbie. Call on the Lord.’”
Anthony was in the room with us, but Greenwood and Morris told us that they weren’t going to call him. That hit me hard, and I think it hit him hard. For the most part, during this ordeal, because he wasn’t shot, he’d pretty much been ignored.
Years before, Anthony came to live with us when he was a teenager, around fifteen or sixteen, and we instantly saw that he was a good kid with a good heart. Like a lot of families, my parents opened their home to him because they thought that he needed a stable home. Without getting too much into his previous situation, my mom and dad figured that, at such an impressionable age, he needed that special positive attention that could make or break a kid.
I loved having him around because it filled a void in my own life. They say that twins have a sixth sense about the other person who shared a womb with them. Well, my twin died before I was born, and I was the only survivor. Having Anthony in our home felt like a void was being filled. Forget about the cousin versus brother thing, Anthony Cooper, for all intents and purposes, was a Tolan in our house, and that meant that I considered him my little brother, and I’d like to think that he considered me his big brother.
Thoughtful, sensitive, and a person who wears his emotions on his sleeve, Anthony was affected by the shooting as much as I was. In fact, other than the bullet entering my body and not his, I sometimes thought that his mental pain was greater than my physical pain. When I was in the hospital, we never got a chance to talk one-on-one, which is something I’d suggest families allow for if you’re in the situation I was in. A one-on-one conversation would have allowed us to sit down and flesh out our trauma, but without that, Anthony just had to deal with the hurt without having a voice. He didn’t get a therapist, and he didn’t spend his time writing. He just became an afterthought.
We didn’t know anything about the type of legal battle we were entering, nor did we have a clue about the severity of the struggle, but the family knew that it wanted Anthony to be involved in every aspect. He’d been there at the shooting, after all. But we didn’t really talk to him about what he w
as going through. From the minute they rushed me to the hospital to save me, the story had been about me, and I think that if I felt trapped, he also felt a bit caged in terms of his feelings. He was in a situation that he could barely make heads or tails of and yet no one was paying attention to him. And just like I wanted to run from the world, Anthony wanted to do the same. So it wasn’t surprising that he left our house right after I was released from the hospital and headed to California to live with family friends.
I imagine that Anthony had feelings of emptiness and insignificance, but for practical means, we needed him with us through the criminal and civil trials. The fact that he wasn’t there for depositions, or interviews, or a lot of things inevitably drove a wedge between not just him and me, but also between him and my parents. I think my parents looked at his absence as being a bit of a betrayal, in that they’d taken Anthony in when he needed help, and yet when we needed him to be there for us at the weekly press conferences or the several meetings with the attorneys, he wasn’t there. No matter what, he wouldn’t fly back from California, except for the trial itself.
I don’t think Anthony understood that despite the focus being on me as the victim, as a family, we thought of him as being a victim in this situation too. You can’t go through something like this and not be harmed, and we knew he was going through the same types of emotions as we were, and in order to get through them, we needed to stay strong as a family. Not just for appearances’ sake, but for real.
I could feel that our opponents—the City of Bellaire, the police department, the attorneys for Cotton and Edwards—wanted the Tolan family to be down and defeated, worn down and torn apart by the enormity of the task of finding justice. But we weren’t torn apart. We were strong, and I wanted Anthony to see and feel that strength. I knew that if he lived his life feeling that he wasn’t in control, such as by not doing something as simple as walking into a room with his adversary and looking them straight in the eye, then he could end up falling down a slippery slope.
I know that sometimes running away feels like the best thing to do, and Lord knows I tried to run. But I wanted Anthony to know that he shouldn’t feel guilty about anything and that he didn’t have to run away from this traumatic part of his life. Because like anything, if the trauma finds a weakness, or the opponent who caused the trauma sees the weakness, then they can capitalize on it and destroy you. Moreover, you might end up destroying yourself. I don’t think that we did a good enough job telling Anthony that he mattered, and I think he felt overlooked and overwhelmed.
There were signs early on that we should have seen. When Anthony gave Bryant Gumbel a tearful and poignant interview during the taping of Real Sports, no one ever saw it because it ended up on the cutting room floor. Just before the piece aired, Bryant’s producer, David Scott, called Anthony to tell him that he wouldn’t be featured in the segment.
“People want to hear about the Tolans, the people who were affected by the incident,” Scott reportedly told Anthony.
I don’t think Scott meant any harm; he probably just meant that with the limited amount of time for the segment, they only had time to air interviews with my parents and me. But I’m sure the comment cut Anthony, who considered himself to be a Tolan and who we considered to be a Tolan, and I think we missed the impact this total process had on him. I honestly think this broke his heart. He’d been asked to give an interview, a cathartic expression that was about telling his story and healing, and then was later told that no one wanted to hear from him. It was a devastating blow to his already withering spirit.
In his interview, Anthony said something that stayed with me. He said that he wished that he had been shot instead of me.
“Robbie is smart and he has so much going for him,” Anthony said, fighting back the tears, “and it should have been me and not him getting shot.”
I was in the next room watching the monitors and tears ran down my face. This wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I didn’t want to see my little brother feel so worthless, so without value, that he’d want to sacrifice himself for me. I wanted him to know that he had value and that we loved him. No, I didn’t deserve to be shot, but he sure as hell didn’t need to think that his life was lesser than mine or that he was expendable. He had the same survivor’s guilt that I struggled with after being shot.
It is not hard to understand why, from his vantage point, he felt expendable. All of the early news reports mentioned him being at the scene. But as time went on, he faded from the public eye, and it was just, “the Tolans” this and “the Tolans” that. Media accounts went from mentioning “Robbie Tolan and his cousin Anthony Cooper,” to simply mentioning, “Robbie and his cousin.” Anthony had been erased, and although I couldn’t control that, I hated it.
I seek anonymity, which comes from being exposed constantly to the hot glare of the media’s spotlight, but that’s my choice as I try to maintain control over my life. But it’s different to be erased by others and become invisible, and that’s what happened to Anthony. He was standing there, all alone, watching as he became the “other,” and it took an emotional toll on him. I thought that Anthony would finally get his chance to speak at the trial, to have his say, and I was hoping that it would be emotionally therapeutic for him. But it wasn’t to be.
Next up was my mom, and the same feelings overcame me with her that I had felt with my dad. She was the one I was trying to protect, and my heart raced as she stood up to go to the courtroom. I didn’t want my mom to have to walk into a courtroom full of pictures of my bullet-mangled body, because I knew that she’d cry just at the mention of my being shot.
I wasn’t the only person dealing with trauma, but my mom did a great job hiding it from the world. But the thought of her crying in front of Cotton and the City of Bellaire was repulsive to me. I get angry just thinking about it because Cotton and Edwards, who were at the trial each day, weren’t worth any of the tears my mother shed. I didn’t want them to see her as anything but the strong and powerful black woman that she is; I didn’t want them to see her as vulnerable to their actions.
Sure enough, my mother came back to the witness room about an hour later, her eyes red from the tears. I tried to be emotionless as she quietly described her emotional roller coaster because I knew I was next up on the stand, and I needed to be emotionally steady. She told them about the various bruises she’d suffered from Cotton as he manhandled her.
“I kept telling them that this was our house and that was our car, but they [Cotton and Edwards] wouldn’t listen,” Mom told them. It was hard for me to see my mom go through this trauma again, but I thought to myself that I had to use that as motivation.
“Concentrate on being focused and fearless,” I repeated to myself. “Concentrate on being focused and fearless.”
A few minutes after my mom sat down, my Uncle Charles and Maria came into the room.
“Robbie, they’re ready for the star,” she said.
I was ready. I was more than ready.
I stood up, put on my jacket, and hugged and kissed my parents. I gave a bro hug to my cousin Anthony and then headed to the elevator. Once the elevator doors closed, Maria turned toward me.
“You’re going to first go to an empty waiting room just across from where the trial is being held,” she said. I just nodded. I hadn’t said a word; I was concentrating on what was going to be the biggest at bat in my life.
As the elevator slowly approached the ground floor, I could hear the now familiar scuffling of the photographers jockeying for position to get the money shot of the guy who’d been shot. When the doors opened, it was madness.
Hundreds of camera shutters snapped at the same time, and I could hear the telltale sound of the photographers’ shoes skidding against the cheap courthouse linoleum floor, as they fought over themselves to get the best position to watch me walk to that empty room. I kept my head down and focused on Maria’s heels as we walked. That was my own rebellion against everyone wanting a piece of me. I think at
that moment I finally understood what some Native Americans say about the camera stealing one’s soul. Each photographer, and I’m pretty sure they’re good people, was attempting to use his or her camera to capture some essence of my soul. What was I thinking? Did I have fear on my face? Was I nervous? By looking down, I retained my humanity.
Before I walked into the empty room, my Uncle Charles approached me.
“I’ll see you inside,” he said, pointing to the courtroom where the trial was being held. He went to the left, back to his seat, and I went to the right.
“I’ll be back as soon as they tell me that they need you on the stand,” Maria said. And like that, I was alone in the room. For a ten-minute period that felt like an eternity, I was alone with all of my fears and trepidations. I just wanted it to be over. Then suddenly, Maria came back into the room.
“Ready?”
I nodded again. I stood up, buttoned my jacket, and followed Maria into the hallway, where the photographers lay in wait. This was the moment they’d been waiting for, the entry into the courtroom. But this time, I hardly noticed them. I was concentrating on the packed courtroom.
When I reached the entrance of the courtroom, I stopped and took it all in. The placed was packed. I had a thousand knots in my stomach and a nervousness I’d never felt on the baseball field, but there was something comforting about seeing every pew in the room filled to capacity with friends, family, and people who were just interested in the case. There were so many people in the room that many of them were squeezed together uncomfortably, their arms and legs pressed together. This was going to be Houston’s trial of the year, and apparently, people wanted to see it for themselves.
“Keep focused,” I kept saying to myself mentally as I slowly made my way to the front of the court. I searched for Cotton and Edwards because I wanted them to know that I wasn’t afraid. I found them, and they stared beyond me. I didn’t even see the court registrar approach with his Bible. I placed my hand on it.