Another Day in the Death of America

by Gary Younge

  This book is full of people who made bad decisions; as a result, some put themselves in the line of fire, while others pulled the trigger. Not all bad decisions are equal. Some of the people who populate these pages are dead; others are in prison; some are still walking the streets. In all likelihood, Demontre Rice was born black and working class just like Stanley, Judy, and Mario. So race and class excuse nothing. They are not the crutches with which the misanthropic and morally ambivalent can prop themselves up as though standing tall.

  But they can explain a great deal. The circumstances into which people are born and the range of opportunities to which they are exposed shape both the choices available to them and the process by which they make those choices even if they, ultimately, still make the choice. I have yet to meet anyone who denies that individuals have free will. But I also have yet to meet anyone who makes a convincing argument that circumstances don’t shape what you can do with that will.

  A paper presented to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s annual conference in October 2014 revealed that, by the time they get to age forty, high school dropouts born to rich families are as likely to be earning high salaries as college graduates from poor families.34 Or as the Washington Post put it, “Poor kids who do everything right don’t do better than rich kids who do everything wrong.”35

  Some beat the odds. In his career as a behavior specialist, Mario can recall those who made it. “I will say it’s possible,” he concedes. There was a boy at Stanley’s elementary school they called “the runner.” “He would get mad and start running. We ended up on I-77 chasing this boy in and out of traffic,” says Mario with a smile. That boy managed to work his way out of behavior class and into the mainstream. “Now he’s in his junior year in college,” says Mario. But the fact that he can even remember this particular case suggests that “the runner” wasn’t running with the pack. He was the one who got away.

  Such stories don’t change the odds. They just illustrate them. Failing to understand that seems like a chronic lack of imagination and empathy. “Take a bunch of teenage boys from the whitest, safest suburb in America and plunk them down in a place where their friends are murdered and they are constantly attacked and threatened,” writes Leovy in Ghettoside. “Signal that no one cares, and fail to solve murders. Limit their options for escape. Then see what happens.”36

  Trey, Stanley’s friend, made it out. He left Charlotte to study at Benedict College, a historically black college in Columbia, South Carolina. “Before I left, I was in the same predicament as everybody. I weren’t too focused. I was always in trouble. With the wrong crowd and the police.” When I asked him what had steered him from the path that had taken both Stanley’s and Ajewan’s lives, he answered with one word. “School. Once I got that acceptance letter. . . . Oh snap. God let me try to change my life.” How he managed to apply himself, to separate himself from the bad influences wasn’t clear. Trey did not even know himself.

  FOR ALL THAT, IT is not difficult to see why so many critics—like Cosby, Mario, and Williams—focus on parenting, albeit in different ways. It’s not an inverted sense of racism that leads them there so much as a lack of alternative framings for what they can see and influence. The structural roots of this crisis are deep and horribly knotted. They include, among other things, race, class, geography, poverty, history, education, health, politics—a panoply of endemic issues over which people feel they have little control and for which the polity offers few solutions. Racism and poverty are not going away anytime soon, so anyone interested in saving the lives of the young people they are working with right now may understandably see little benefit in utopian thinking and concentrate, instead, on what they feel they have some control over.

  On no issue is this more evident than guns. When I asked an openended question to all the parents who lost children that day about why they thought these tragedies keep happening, firearms never came up. Guns are ever present. They’re part of the reason why I’m meeting the families. But the connection between the prevalence of guns and the families’ bereaved state is not initially acknowledged.

  But it is there. When I asked them specifically, “What do you think about guns?” all who had an opinion, which was most, would bemoan the fact that they are so freely available. But given that their children were killed less than a year after Sandy Hook and that, despite serious efforts from the White House, gun control legislation could not even make it out of the Democratic-controlled Senate, none of them expected anything to happen about it. Instead, most lamented the way in which adolescent arguments have now become deadly and reminisce about the good old days when disagreements between youths were settled by the ancient art of pugilism.

  A father whose son died from a gunshot in Newark in the early hours of the next morning (the son’s story is featured later in this book) echoed the sentiments of many when he said, “Back in the day, when we grew up, you get in a fight, somebody might jump you, you know, but the next day you speak to the person and you keep going. But now you get in an argument with somebody, they come back and shoot you.”

  Most of the family members I spoke to evidently see the ubiquity of guns as a problem. But it does not necessarily follow that they see getting rid of guns as a viable solution. So child gun deaths, indeed any gun deaths, have become generally understood in the same way as car accidents. They are the unfortunate, if heavy, price one pays for living in twenty-first-century America. Even those at the roughest end of the problem can no more imagine ridding the country of guns, or limiting their distribution, than they can imagine getting rid of cars if their loved one were run over. It just would not be a feasible thing to even consider. Indeed, with a car death there might be a local campaign to put up a stop sign or change the speed limit. At least no one would claim that was unconstitutional. But in virtually every case, on the day on which this book is set, the deaths prompted no broader question about the role of guns, let alone an engagement with the issue.

  Even for those living with and combatting the consequences of gun violence, such as Mario, who organized the Million Youth March of Charlotte, challenging this element of the status quo is scarcely understood as a priority. When I explained the premise of the book, Mario understood it immediately. Why wouldn’t he? The Million Youth March of Charlotte was founded in response to a shooting. Nonetheless, it’s as though imagining a world without guns on this scale, like imagining a world without poverty or segregation, is the kind of utopian indulgence that serves no obvious purpose.

  When I ask him whether gun control is part of MYMOC’s agenda, he pauses. “We haven’t discussed that yet,” he says. “I’m not for guns, to be honest. They have laws and regulations here. But you look at Facebook, and it’s nothing to see a teenager holding a gun. And that bothers me. They can get it just like that.”

  In 2010, when the NRA held its annual convention in Charlotte, Judy Williams protested. They staged a mock funeral with all the names of those who had died by gun violence taped to the casket. “I don’t think the Second Amendment means what they think it means,” she says. “You can dress it up and take it to church, but that don’t make it right that there should be no control.” If the NRA were coming back next year, would she do it again? I ask. She pauses. “The reality of it is they are not going to do away with guns in this country. . . . The fact is that they are so plentiful on the streets and people have them. . . . It’s ludicrous to think you can take guns out of people’s homes in this country. . . . It ain’t gonna happen.”

  But would she protest or not? Another pause. “I would, because I don’t think they should be as easy to access as they are, and they could change the laws. I think a lot of murders wouldn’t occur if people didn’t have access to a gun.” But even she, who has dedicated so much of her life to supporting families whose loved ones were slain by guns and who believes such laws are necessary, also, deep down, believes they would be ineffective. “Most of the guns used in crime are illegal guns. So even if you change
the law, felons don’t care nothing about the law.”

  By the time the anniversary of Stanley’s death had come around, the graffiti at the Marathon station had been painted over. His former girlfriend had had a baby by another man, which had seriously upset Trey. Ms. Hepfinger, with whom Toshiba had lost contact, wrote on the online register, “I will always have great memories of Stanley. He touched my life and many others. He was a student of mine at Walter G. Byers and I will miss him. I am thinking of you and your family.”

  In August 2014 Mario was honored at the Trailblazers 100 event for his service to the community. On the anniversary of Stanley’s death, Mario posted on Facebook, “I have had a lot going on the last few weeks, that I honestly thought I would wake up and be alright today. Who was I kidding, I woke up in tears, it hit me so hard as if it just happened. It’s so hard to believe that a whole 365 days have gone by and today marks one year since your life was cut so short. . . . So I say continue to Rest Easy Stanley N. Taylor, Rest In Paradise.”

  When we met the first time, in early March 2014, he’d been planning to hold a demonstration in late May to raise the issues confronting the city’s youth. “We’re going to make it a family day,” he said, before going on to list a couple of the key elements. “There’ll be giveaways, marching bands preferably.”

  Even back then, he was disappointed by the lack of support his initiative was receiving from community leaders. “When I first started, my goal was to get the city to embrace it and churches to embrace it,” he said. “But it hasn’t happened like that. It’s like pulling teeth. You’d think that with doing something positive for the youth that more would get involved. But I’m having a hard time getting the city leaders involved. The same people who are talking about it won’t do anything about it. Having a hard time getting donations. We need donations. Everything we’re doing is coming out of our pockets. All churches have youth groups, and you’d think they’d want to be involved in something positive like that. We’re at a standstill because we don’t have donations.” He was worried they might not make their goal of a march on May 31. “Time is steadily ticking.”

  When I caught up with him for a second interview in December 2014 at MYMOC’s second Community Give Back Day, the clock was still running. The march had not taken place, but nationally the #BlackLivesMatter movement had taken off. Eric Garner’s killer had just escaped indictment by a grand jury. Darren Wilson, the policeman who shot Michael Brown, had also walked free from a grand jury, and the embers in Ferguson still glowed dimly. After lighting a candle for Ajewan, those assembled held a minute’s silence for the Garner and Brown families. The march had first been postponed until late July and was now on hold indefinitely until they could summon the funds and political support. As he picked up frosting from the carpet and pleaded with the children to take their sticky cakes into the hall, I asked him what he thought the problem was. He sighed. “I wish I knew. We’ve tried. We’ve really tried.”

  CHAPTER 4

  PEDRO CORTEZ (18)

  San Jose, California

  4:22 P.M. EST

  CAPITOL PARK, IN EAST SAN JOSE, SITS AT THE FOOT OF THE Diablo mountain range, ensconced in childhood fantasy. It’s a vast patch of green with a playground, fenced-off basketball courts and soccer fields, picnic tables, barbecue grills, a baseball diamond, and a school. It’s bordered by Bambi Lane, Van Winkle Lane, Peter Pan Avenue, and Galahad Avenue. From here you can either wander off on the Lower Silver Creek Trail—a 6.5-mile walk that will, once developed, take you from Lake Cunningham Park to the Coyote Creek Trail—or leave the area on Cinderella Lane. The yards of the modestly sized bungalows that surround the park in this mostly Latino area boast lush greenery, including palm trees and the occasional fountain. It was by far the most scenic place where any child lost his life to gunfire that day and had the most expensive real estate (you could sell a house here and use the proceeds to buy seven houses where Stanley Taylor was shot). At sixty-four degrees with a light wind, it was also the warmest.

  In the late eighteenth century, San Jose belonged to the Spanish, which made it the first civilian town in their colony of Nueva California. It passed to the Mexicans in 1821, only to join the United States in 1850. Today the turf is claimed by the Norteños, a constellation of gangs loosely affiliated with the Nuestra Familia, a Chicano prison gang. Norteños means Northerners—more precisely, Northern Californians. They wear red, often have tattoos with four dots on their hands or at the corner of their eyes, and may sport the number 14—N is the fourteenth letter in the alphabet. More Americanized than other Latino gangs, some of their members may not even speak Spanish. They also lay claim to the imagery of and nostalgia for the Latino American labor movement in general and labor leader Cesar Chavez in particular, who came into contact with many Norteños while he was imprisoned for his union work.

  Their principal rival gang, the Sureños (Southerners), is larger but less well organized and has its base in Southern California; they wear blue and also sport tattoos with three dots. The widely recognized border between North and South is 240 miles downstate, in Bakersfield. “It is true that this is marked territory,” Arturo Dado told the San Jose Mercury a few days after he lost his grandson. “It is marked red.”1

  On November 23, 2013, Arturo’s grandson, eighteen-year-old Pedro Dado Cortez, wore black. His family insists he was not a gang member, although they feared he might be attracted to gang life. “I used to take away his red clothing,” said Silvia Dado, his grandmother.2 “He would always say he would be fine, to not worry about him or his friends, but I would worry anyway and still get rid of his red shirts.” Pedro lived with his grandparents, who described him as “popular but naive.” “They just like to hang out the way young men do,” said Arturo. “And they didn’t carry guns, shoot at people or rob them—none of that.”3

  To friends and family, Pedro went by Junior or Moko. In most pictures he wears a wide-peaked baseball cap and a relaxed smile crowned with peach fuzz. In memorial videos he’s nearly always got his arm around someone—his sister or an assortment of young women—often with a bottle of Hennessy in the other hand. In one YouTube video he lip-synchs to “Beautiful Girls,” dancing his way in and out of self-consciousness as his friends, entangled in a pile on a mattress, laugh in encouragement. Pedro was legally blind—with a condition that had deteriorated considerably since he was thirteen—but managed to get by with what sight he had. He wore powerful contact lenses that he said were painful. He had dropped out of school and worked for his stepfather in a moving company. He was still hopeful that he could save up enough money to learn to drive and get a car.

  Although he and one of his friends were wearing black that afternoon, it’s believed that another in their group may have been wearing red. They were walking up Van Winkle Lane at around four—in broad daylight and a very public place. This, it turns out, is the most dangerous time to be out in a gang-ridden area.

  In several studies of gang homicides in Los Angeles, researchers uncovered a range of characteristics that distinguish gang killings from other killings. They are more likely to take place on the street, involve guns and cars, take place in the late afternoon, and have more participants of younger ages, usually men.4

  To that extent, Pedro’s assassination was a textbook case. Before dusk could roll over the Diablo mountains, a black Camaro convertible pulled up alongside him and his friends, and a gunman wearing a bandanna over his face started shooting. The car then “took off burning rubber,” most likely down Galahad or Peter Pan, leaving Pedro with a bullet in the heart. He died right there. According to one local website, over the next twenty-four hours East San Jose crackled with gunfire in apparent retaliation, with some homes being shot at.5 That morning, Pedro had called his sister, Miranda Brianna, with whom he was close, just for a chat. That evening she downed some Hennessy—his favorite drink—in his memory: Pedro was on the “Heeeeeen Team.”

  “Blue, red, orange, none of that is going to save you,”
his stepfather told youngsters at a vigil in the park a few days later, listing the gang colors as his face flickered in the flames. “That didn’t save my Junior. I was supposed to be working with him today. Instead I went to work alone,” he said, his voice cracking and eyes welling. “I cried in the elevator.” One of Pedro’s memorial videos, showing pictures of him in everything from a tux to three-quarter-length shorts, scrolled to the sound of Philthy Rich’s “Thinking of You,” a rap ballad with a sampling of Diana Ross. “Shit is all the same, niggas die, mommas cry / Bitches turn sour now she fucking on that other guy. . . . Nothing to live for, my niggas doing life sentences / Either dead or in jail we doing life sentences.”

  Finding money to bury Pedro was a problem. A fundraising site went up. “Please help with anything,” asked his aunt. On the Wednesday after his death, they held a car wash. At the candlelight vigil people collected coins and bills. It was more than two weeks before Pedro was finally laid to rest. According to her Facebook postings, by that time Miranda was struggling to get out of bed in the morning; by the New Year she was worried about her drinking. Requests went out for people not to wear gang colors to Pedro’s funeral. “No colors, no drama,” Miranda wrote on Facebook, “we are trying to have a good time saying our last goodbyes to Junior.”

  IN MOST US CITIES where children got shot on the day profiled in this book, such a murder would have barely made it through a twenty-four-hour media cycle. A few seconds on the television, maybe. A few hundred words in the paper with a quote from a family member, maybe—and that’s it. If the perpetrator was caught, that too would merit a couple of hundred words. An event of note, but of precious little import. Pedro’s murder was different. His death appeared not only on the evening news in San Jose and in the next day’s paper but also in follow-up TV bulletins from the family vigil in the park a few days later and in a feature by San Jose Mercury columnist Joe Rodriguez titled “Teen Slain on Street Named for Kids’ Tales.” “In a neighborhood inspired by imagination and fantasy,” he wrote, “a starkness had set in, and there is a fear over what may come next.”6