by Gary Younge
Much was made of the fact that Pedro was the city’s forty-fourth homicide victim of the year.7 That’s forty-four too many. But still, for a city of San Jose’s size, by American standards it’s not that many. Most only bother to count if the homicide rate reaches a round number or a significant milestone, like exceeding the previous record or last year’s figure. Compared to other cities and towns featured in this book, only Grove City, where Jaiden Dixon was shot the day before, had a lower homicide rate. The deadliest city of all, Newark, had a rate more than ten times as high.8
But San Jose is different. It has grown exponentially since the Second World War to become the nation’s tenth largest city. Between 1950 and 1970 its population grew fivefold as large numbers of people relocated there after the war; between 1990 and 2010 it leapt another 20 percent thanks to the tech boom and immigration.9 “It used to be a cow town,” a friend from Oakland told me. “And then Silicon Valley happened, and it just blew up.” The consequent low-rise sprawl gives the city a distinctly suburban feel; it seems you are rarely more than fifteen minutes from anywhere but will probably have to take the interstate or the freeway to get there. It’s a city dwarfed in reputation by its two closest neighbors, San Francisco and Oakland, even as it continues to outgrow them.
Expansion brought its problems. San Jose once prided itself on the sobriquet Safest Big City in America.10 By the beginning of 2013, it was the fifth safest. It had a higher crime rate than the rest of America, and yet police were catching half as many criminals as they had a few years earlier.11 “San Jose never compared itself to places like Newark or Chicago,” explains Rodriguez, the newspaper columnist. We met one night for drinks while I was in town trying to find Pedro’s family. “It compares itself to how it used to be. Things went downhill pretty fast. When you’re doing really well and then suddenly you’re not, then you take the fall badly. It’s like Paradise Lost. So at the paper we followed up on all the deaths, because in San Jose these kind of shootings are still news.”
Four days after Pedro was shot, at around 8:30 p.m., San Jose Police Department’s Covert Response Unit, along with patrol officers, dogs, and officers from the Gang Suppression Unit, arrested twenty-year-old Balam Eugenio Gonzalez. He had bushy black eyebrows and thick black hair, compensating for what might one day pass for a mustache. They booked him immediately for Pedro’s murder but did not release his name for another few days, citing the sensitivity of the investigation. They believed the murder was gang-related, making it the tenth such homicide that year.12
After two-and-a-half years in prison, Balam was also charged with the fatal shooting of Armondo Miguel Heredia on August 23, 2012, as well as an attempted murder, on August 18, in another drive-by shooting that left one person wounded.13
I’M A LINGUIST BY training. I studied to be an interpreter and translator in French and Russian and hoped to one day be a Moscow correspondent. Then I did a placement at the Washington Post, fell in love with an American, and ended up there instead. From the time I was first posted in New York, I intended to learn Spanish but never did. For the most part, I could get away with it. When I went out West there were translators, and sometimes down South people would translate for me and I would muddle through. It wasn’t ideal. But thanks to my linguistic privilege as an English speaker, I could function. However, in stories as sensitive as this, in communities that can be hard to reach, my inability to speak Spanish may have been a problem.
From everything I could tell from their Facebook pages, most of Pedro’s family spoke English, although his grandparents, with whom he lived, spoke Spanish. I left notes and messages for them everywhere I could on social media. I sent letters (some translated into Spanish) everywhere I thought they might be in San Jose. I flew to San Jose and knocked on the doors for which I had addresses. I received no response. At this point I just started asking around. Elsewhere in the country, while pursuing stories for this book, that has worked. Here it didn’t. Not because nobody spoke English. I’m sure lots of people did. But in a gang-rife area that is 90 percent Latino, a black man with an English accent asking if anyone knew the family of a Latino teenager who’d been shot just couldn’t win the confidence of those who had come to the park to watch their children play and to have a stroll. It was one variable too many. Aside from Kenneth, Pedro was the only other child who was killed that day with whose family or friends I did not make a connection.
On the first day I walked around Capitol Park, where Pedro was shot, I saw a small shrine to his death next to the entrance sign. Some synthetic roses and a candle with a picture of the Virgin Mary on it—the kind that adorns so many sites of gun shootings—had been placed under it. Had I just stood there for twenty-four hours, rather than racing around to different addresses, I would certainly have met someone, for the next afternoon I came back, and the shrine was still there with one addition: an empty bottle of Hennessy—Pedro’s favorite tipple.
CHAPTER 5
TYLER DUNN (11)
Marlette, Michigan
8:19 P.M. EST
AS CLOUDS GLOWERED OVER RURAL MICHIGAN, THREE LONG, sharp, discordant beeps sounded in slow, even succession over my car radio, followed by a dispassionate voice on every available station warning of extreme weather. In measured, urgent, intrusive tones, it promised conditions that were not just extreme—thunderstorms, lightning, flash flooding—but almost Biblical in their impact. Hail was coming, the voice said, that might ruin your roof, lightning that could kill, weather so ferocious one should stay away from windows. These calamities, I was warned, would be moving through counties I had never heard of, which meant I had no idea whether I was heading toward the storm or away from it.
But there was little reason to worry. Unlike in the city, where weather creeps up on your built environment and then mugs you unawares, here it made its presence and intentions clear long before it approached. The horizon is so broad, the landscape so sparse, and the sky so huge that the weather declares itself with great ceremony. Long streaks of lightning cracked at the early-morning sky to the west like a huge cosmic whip. The clouds brooding in the distance were drifting south and west and clearing on their journey. Despite the dire warnings from my car radio as I headed northeast, toward Michigan’s thumb, I could see that the storm was skirting around me.
Sanilac County, where I was heading, has a lower population density than Finland1 and is slightly less racially diverse than Norway (it is over 95 percent white).2 According to Michigan’s Department of Agriculture, Sanilac leads the state in its acreage devoted to soy, corn, wheat, dairy farms, and general cattle operations and is third in its acreage dedicated to sugar beets.3 Straight roads lead past silos, Dutch barns, rows of corn, grazing livestock, and fallow fields interspersed with the occasional township and homestead as you head toward Lake Huron (one of the Greats), which serves as its eastern border.
Marlette, population 1,879, lies on Sanilac’s southwest flank, the third-biggest town and a twenty-five-minute drive to the county seat of Sandusky. The shiny blue water tower bearing the town’s name announces itself from afar to the left while McDonald’s golden arches peer over the trees to the right. From the south, the first sign welcoming you into town bears the motto “Marlette, The Heart of the Thumb.” Underneath the second sign, which simply states “Marlette City Limit,” is a footnote of sorts boasting, “Home of the Boys’ Cross Country Div 3 State Champion Runner Up.” The nearest cinema is in Sandusky; you’re about half an hour drive from the nearest Starbucks and non-Christian bookshop.
Long ago, writes Kate McGill, one of the town’s early settlers, in The Beginnings of Marlette, this “had been the home of the Sauk Indians, later of the Chippewas. But the settlements at Detroit had driven them back until in 1854 only a few scattering bands remained. Through the primeval forests, guided only by the blazed trail of the woodsman surveyor, came the hardy pioneer, to hew out for himself a home and fortune in the new land.”4
The Irish and Scots in Ontario, Canada, “l
oaded their guns, sharpened their axes and came to investigate,” floating over the Huron. Rumors had swirled of “tall timber and fertile soil that was almost free for the asking,”5 and gradually the immigrants made the area their own. A century and a half later it feels like the town that ate Gilbert Grape by day; driving through by night, particularly during the winter, you feel like an extra in the movie Fargo.
Brittany Dunn, age twenty, wouldn’t be anywhere else. “I’d rather live here than in the city,” she says. “It’s more laid back,” says her grandmother, Janet Allen, who moved the seventy miles from White Lake for the “peace and quiet.” “You’ve got your own space,” continues Brittany. “In the city you’re, like, on top of each other, neighbor to neighbor.” I was sitting in a pizzeria opposite Marlette’s only Chinese restaurant, with four generations of the Dunn family: Janet, Lora Dunn Bartz (Janet’s daughter), Brittany (Lora’s daughter), and Ciannah (Brittany’s very well behaved seven-month-old baby), as well as Thomas Bartz, Lora’s husband. “Doesn’t it get boring?” I ask.
“No,” says Lora. “It doesn’t get boring. It’s like a journey if you have to go to the mall or something. It’s like a day’s worth of traveling.” She says this as though it’s a good thing, allowing her poker face to give way to a wry smile.
This vast expanse of land, both fertile and fallow, wild and tamed, was her son’s playground. To a city dweller like me, Tyler’s outdoor hobbies make him sound like a character from a Mark Twain novel. Tyler Dunn, who was eleven when he died, loved trapping critters, hunting, catching fish in the creek behind the house, four-wheeling and dirt-biking in the summer, and sledding in the winter. “When children are demonized by the newspapers, they are often described as feral,” wrote George Monbiot in the Guardian.6 “But feral is what children should be: it means released from captivity or domestication. Those who live in crowded flats, surrounded by concrete, mown grass and other people’s property, cannot escape their captivity without breaking the law. Games and explorations that are seen as healthy in the countryside are criminalized in the cities. Children who have never visited the countryside live under constant restraint.”
By this definition, Tyler was semiferal. He was free to roam and explore and engage with the natural world and was trusted to do so with precious few constraints. The Dunns lived three miles down a dirt road off Highway 53, which runs straight from the interstate into Marlette. Several miles from the nearest traffic light—or even streetlight—and surrounded by fields, he was safe to do “his own thing” and have his parents check in on him occasionally.
Yet the call to the wild was always competing with the call to the screen. Like Jaiden, his favorite TV show was Duck Dynasty, with Sponge-Bob and Family Guy close runners-up. But it was gaming that really had him hooked. When he accompanied his parents on errands, he’d take a computer game with him. At home, he’d keep to himself, texting friends on his mother’s phone. And he loved video games. Particularly Call of Duty, which morphs modern warfare into entertainment. Mark Twain never had these distractions; if he had, Huckleberry Finn would, no doubt, have turned out quite differently, if Twain had got around to writing it at all.
“Whenever he came to my house, it was just a weekend of Call of Duty,” says Brittany. “That’s all I heard on the TV.” “Then he came over to our house and he just raced cars,” says Janet, referring to a different video game. “That’s because you didn’t have Call of Duty,” explained Lora.
TYLER HAD A ROUND, almost perfectly spherical face, crowned with a crew cut. To look at his pictures from infancy, it’s as though he never really lost his baby fat—he simply grew into it and developed a character that suited it, with a slight dimple in his chin, a button for his nose, and full cheeks that an overly familiar adult might just lose their fingers in. He was, by all accounts, a happy kid. When he was in fifth grade, his class was across the hall from sixth-grade teacher Luke Reynolds. Whenever Luke saw Tyler they would fist-bump. “I don’t know how it started or why,” says Luke. “But that’s what we always did. We wouldn’t even say anything. Just bump, smile, and keep walking.” The next year, Luke was his homeroom teacher. “He was just a very easy kid. There were never any discipline problems. He always seemed pretty content.”
With a willing audience at home, Tyler was happy to be both the jester and the butt of the jokes. Brittany moved away to live with her boyfriend, leaving Tyler with his mother, two other sisters, and Thomas, who was technically his stepfather, although he’d always been present in Tyler’s life. Janet tells how he’d “wiggle his butt like a worm” to the “girly songs” when he was smaller. Another time, at Brittany’s graduation, he allowed his sisters Ashley, fifteen, and Tiffany, seventeen, to duct-tape him to a tree. “He was only there for a few minutes,” insists Brittany. In one picture that regularly resurfaces on Facebook, he stands bare-chested with a big smile and a bra made out of two coconut halves that Ashley had worn to a Hawaiian-themed birthday party a year or so earlier.
Tyler came by those full, fleshy cheeks honestly. Lora, his mother, bears a resemblance to Roseanne Barr, and Brittany shares his features. When I asked them what he liked doing, their first response, as a chorus, was “eating.” “He loved food,” said Lora. “Junk food.” “Grandma used to make these little crabbie patties,” recalls Brittany. “And those hamburgers. He’d eat those. Nobody else could get one.” “Actually, he did take a bunch one day,” Janet says, recalling Tyler in the act of a flattering transgression. “There was a bunch in his pockets.” “Saving them for later, probably,” said Brittany.
One of the rare moments of disagreement between them came when I asked if he was spoiled. “Yes,” said Brittany and Janet, as one and without hesitation. “No,” said Lora, somewhat unconvincingly.
“Yes he was,” repeated grandmother and granddaughter in disbelief.
Brittany took up the case and ran with it. “He was the only boy out of three girls, he’s the youngest, he’s the baby, yes he was spoiled,” she said, with an air of resignation rather than resentment. “‘Mom, so-and-so’s picking on me,’” she said, imitating Tyler. “And then the girls would get in trouble. Tyler never did anything. Never had to do his own laundry. He was spoiled.” Lora looks down at her pizza with half a smile, refusing to admit an indulgence that she is pleased others have noticed. “He wasn’t spoiled,” she mutters.
But he could be sedentary. When he was doing something with a clear goal, like fishing or hunting, he was engaged. But exercise for its own sake—competitive sports, for example—was of little interest. “I don’t know if he was so into the gym thing,” said Lora, when I asked what he liked doing at school. “He’d rather sit than move.” If there was work to be done, he’d find a way to avoid it. When the men in the family went to fetch wood one winter, Tyler was found in a ditch, making snow angels.
BECAUSE ALL THE OTHER children who died that day lived in cities, towns, or suburbs, they were almost certainly oblivious to the fact that hunting season had just begun. In this part of Michigan, around November 23, you couldn’t avoid it. Deer hunting had started only a week earlier, on November 15; pheasant shooting had started on Wednesday, November 20. In late fall, churches in Marlette advertise evenings for “deer widows,” and men bond in search of prey and tall tales.
“Tradition here in the Thumb is that the opening day of pheasant-hunting season and deer-hunting season, you can just about close all the schools because the kids are going hunting,” the Sanilac County sheriff, Garry Biniecki, told me. “You go and try and get a seat at the downtown restaurant in Sandusky, and you’ll probably have a hard time because there’ll be this mass army of orange,” the color of hunting uniforms worn to identify people so they’re less likely to get shot. “It’s an exciting time.”
With the exception of Tyler, hunting season didn’t particularly excite the Dunns. Apart from his paternal uncles, none of his immediate family hunted. And although Tyler enjoyed field sports, there is little evidence he was particula
rly good at them. He had never, to anyone’s knowledge, successfully shot a living thing. He only had a pellet gun and an air-soft gun of his own. He loved to fish in the creek behind the house, but he didn’t have an awful lot to show for it. “Sometimes he’d catch something about this big,” says Brittany, bringing her thumb and forefinger close together to indicate the trifling size of his haul.
One winter, Darren, her boyfriend, took Tyler trapping. “They trapped for muskrat and things like that,” explains Brittany, barely concealing her disgust. “You put a trap in the ditches. You catch ’em and then you skin ’em and then you cook ’em. . . . Yeah. Nasty. It’s gross. Real nasty. . . . He liked that.” But for more regular hunting trips, Tyler turned to his friend Brandon (not his real name). Brandon lived about a mile away (which in these parts qualifies as “round the corner”) toward town, on a dirt road off Tyler’s dirt road. Brandon, age twelve, would sometimes come down and pick up Tyler on his preteen hybrid—a go-cart with a monster truck body and a motor—and they would roam the neighborhood on it together. They’d been friends since kindergarten. They weren’t inseparable; both had other friends they liked to hang out with, and they occasionally fell out. Once, Lora told Tyler he could no longer play with Brandon after Brandon abandoned him in town and went off with another friend, leaving Tyler crying as he called his mom to come and pick him up. Their friendship also had a brief hiatus when Brandon moved to Colorado with his mother, Connie, who went there to care for her sister, who was “possibly dying of terminal cancer.”