Another Day in the Death of America

by Gary Younge

  Six weeks after Brandon was sentenced, it was Jerry’s turn. Citing his previous convictions, the judge sentenced him to a year in Sanilac County Jail for the first count of weapons-firearms possession by a felon and ninety days to run concurrently for the second count of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. He also had to cover certain costs, including for the court-appointed attorney.35

  The law had spoken. But it declared its values without any moral consistency. Jerry got a year because he’d once committed “serious crimes” that precluded him from having a gun. He got three months for leaving several guns, at least one of which was loaded, unattended in the house and then leaving his son and a friend unsupervised with them. That crime, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, would have been the same if Tyler and Brandon had found his porn stash. Not only did the punishments not fit the crimes; the crime in no way fit the transgression. His negligence had arguably left Brandon corrupted, but it had certainly left Tyler dead.

  Tyler’s family believes that both Brandon and Jerry got off too lightly. Particularly Brandon, who they are convinced shot Tyler on purpose. They think there has been a cover-up. Something fishy. They can’t say precisely what. But to them the story doesn’t hang together. Lora doesn’t buy the idea that Tyler was trying to put the gun down and the latch got caught on his shorts pocket. “To me I think he was lying. I don’t believe that even happened. I already knew from the get-go that I didn’t think it was an accident. I believe his finger was on the trigger.”

  Over pizza with Brittany, her mother, her stepfather, and her grandmother, I asked what would constitute justice for Tyler. Brittany paused. “I would want eye for eye,” she said. I paused. “You mean you want Brandon executed?” I asked. She nodded. “Brandon needs to be gone. I don’t think he should be able to live his life. That’s just my personal opinion.” I paused again and looked around the table. “Does everyone agree?” They all nodded. “And Jerry?” “He should have time for what he did,” said Lora. “He should probably sit inside for the rest of his life,” added Brittany. “He had a role in it, but he technically didn’t pull the trigger.” (In her capacity as the personal representative of Tyler’s estate, Lora has since filed suit against both Brandon and Jerry, seeking more than $25,000, according to the Sanilac County News.36)

  I asked Lora if Jerry or Connie had ever reached out to them since Tyler was killed. She said they’d had no contact since Jerry’s girlfriend had come over, a few days after the shooting, to return Tyler’s effects. Would they have liked to hear from them? “It would have been nice for them to say something. Put a card in my mailbox or something. But no. Never heard a word from them.”

  “Even at the court they could have turned around and said something,” said Janet. “Yeah, when he stood up in front of the judge and said it wasn’t his fault,” recalls Lora. “Well,” says Janet. “It wasn’t his fault because he wasn’t home.”

  WHEN IT COMES TO protecting children around guns, parents are flawed and laws are clearly inadequate. But with occasional encouragement from government, technology has become more reliable. For well over a century, gun manufacturers have been working on weapons that would be difficult for children to misuse.

  In 1887, Smith & Wesson produced the .38-caliber Safety Hammerless, followed two years later by the .32-caliber model. It had a metal lever at the back that the shooter had to push down with the base of the thumb as the forefinger pulled the trigger. This “New Departure” safety grip was designed specifically so that a young child’s hands would be too small to perform both functions at the same time. “One very important feature of this arrangement,” explained the catalog, “is the safety of the arm in the hands of children, as no ordinary child under eight years of age can possibly discharge it.”37

  But more recent, sophisticated initiatives have attracted the wrath of the gun lobby. In 2000, after Bill Clinton announced a deal with Smith & Wesson that would include putting locks on handguns and implementing “smart-gun” technology, the NRA branded the company “the first gun maker to run up the white flag of surrender and duck behind the Clinton-Gore lines.”38 They called for a boycott of the company. Smith & Wesson eventually backed out of the deal.

  The technology developed anyhow. There are now loading indicators that show whether a weapon is loaded and whether a round remains in the chamber. And smart guns have come a long way. The Armatix iP1—a stubby-looking handgun with a matte finish—doesn’t work without a watch, which is less a device for timekeeping than one for safety. Both watch and gun have electronic chips that communicate with each other. When the gun is less than ten inches from the watch, which needs a five-digit PIN before it can be activated, a light on the grip turns green, and it can fire. When it’s farther away from the watch, there’s no light and the gun can’t fire. In other words, the only person who can fire it is the person who has the watch and knows the PIN—which is likely to be the owner.39

  In a tear-stained press conference, standing next to one of the fathers who’d lost a child at Sandy Hook, President Obama expressed his frustration that technology commercially available and acceptable for more mundane purposes couldn’t be put to use to ensure safety. “If we can develop technology that you can’t unlock your phone unless you’ve got the right fingerprint, why can’t we do it for guns?” he said. “If a child can’t open a bottle of aspirin, we should make sure that they can’t pull the trigger on a gun.”40

  A range of versions of this kind of gun have been tested, including those that use voice recognition, grip recognition, fingerprints, and remote apps (through which you could disable the gun remotely). The benefits—in terms of making accidental shootings, suicides, and illegal gun transfers more difficult and rendering gun theft useless—are self-evident. So much so that in 2002, New Jersey passed a law stating that only smart guns would be able to be sold in the state within three years of a smart gun hitting the market anywhere in the country.41

  The Armatix was the first to make it to the United States commercially. For a short while, it looked like that “anywhere” would be the Oak Tree Gun Club, one of California’s largest gun stores, located just outside Los Angeles. Briefly, it was the only outlet in America to stock them. “It could revolutionize the gun industry,” James Mitchell, the store’s owner, told the Washington Post.42

  Nobody was claiming that smart guns would cure gun violence, but it was difficult to see how they could make anything worse. “If you have two cars, and one has an air bag and one doesn’t, are you going to buy the one without the air bag?” Belinda Padilla, president of Armatix’s US operation, told the Post. “It’s your choice, but why would you do that?”43

  One reason would be if that choice didn’t exist. The NRA is extremely hostile to smart guns. They see them not as part of the safety agenda but as part of the antigun agenda. They oppose “government mandates that require the use of expensive, unreliable features, such as grips that would read your fingerprints before the gun will fire.” They “[recognize] that the ‘smart guns’ issue clearly has the potential to mesh with the anti-gunner’s agenda, opening the door to a ban on all guns that do not possess the government-required technology.”44 They are particularly keen to prevent New Jersey from leading the way in government’s demanding such technology.

  Once news came out that Oak Tree would be stocking the Armatix iP1 gun, activists threatened a boycott of the store. Padilla was personally targeted. She received threatening messages after someone posted her cell phone number online. Someone else posted pictures of the address where she has a PO box, drew an arrow toward an image of a woman in the frame, and wrote, “Belinda? Is that you?” On Calguns.net, a California gun owner’s site, one person wrote, “I have no qualms with the idea of personally and professionally leveling the life of someone who has attempted to profit from disarming me and my fellow Americans.”45

  The pressure was so intense that the store eventually eradicated all evidence it ever had a deal with Armatix. Advert
ising signs were taken down, clothes with logos were removed, the stall at the shooting range disappeared. There was no suggestion that the NRA was behind any of the threats.

  Nonetheless, the New Jersey state senator who originally sponsored the bill to make smart guns the norm in her state offered a truce. She would drop the mandate if the NRA refused to stand in the way of the development and sale of smart guns. “I’m willing to do this because eventually these are the kinds of guns people will want to buy,” she said. The NRA was having none of it. “The NRA is interested in a full repeal of New Jersey’s misguided law,” Cox replied.46

  Whether any of these laws and technological developments would have saved Tyler’s life we will never know. The US General Accounting Office has estimated that 31 percent of accidental deaths caused by firearms might be prevented by adding child-proof safety locks and loading indicators.47 People are flawed, and only so much can be expected from children in terms of personal responsibility. It is also important in these cases to make a distinction between an accident and negligence. What is clear is that none of these things would have done any harm, and almost all of them would have limited the odds of its happening.

  TYLER’S FAMILY ARRIVED AT Sanilac County Courthouse for Jerry’s sentencing dressed for the occasion. Brittany wore a green hoodie with four different pictures of Tyler on the front and “Justice for Tyler” on the back. Lora wore a gray version without the pictures on the front. In the corridor outside the court, some sat and others stood. When they weren’t breaking the silence with chat and banter they paced aimless and somber circles across the marble floor.

  Jerry arrived five minutes late, wearing a blue shirt with white stripes, blue jeans, cowboy boots, and a black baseball cap for “Hercules Pumping and Concrete,” beneath which his lank gray hair hung down past his shoulder blades. He had brought a friend, dressed similarly, who took Jerry’s hat as Circuit Court Judge Donald Teeple called him forward. “Do you understand why you are here?” Teeple asked, explaining the charges. “Yes,” said Jerry. The judge asked his lawyer if she had anything to say. Acknowledging the “terrible incident” that had taken place, his lawyer explained, “There was no intent on [Jerry’s] part. It was an act of omission.” The judge then asked Jerry if he had anything to say.

  “It was a very bad, tragic accident,” he said. “I wasn’t there. I didn’t do it. I was working.”

  “But you did have guns in the house,” insisted the judge.

  “Yes,” said Jerry.

  “Well that’s how it happens. . . . This family has to live without their child for the rest of their lives.”

  “I understand that,” said Jerry, his voice becoming less audible with each response.

  “That’s about as bad as it gets.”

  “Yes,” Jerry said, so faintly now it was more a murmur than a word.

  The judge handed down the sentence—a year in jail—and as the room cleared Jerry was directed to sit in the jury area while an officer of the court collected the paperwork. Then, after Jerry had put one more signature to his incarceration, the infantilization of his new life began. He was no longer a free man. He stood and shook his head as the policeman asked if there was anything in his pockets, only to find some change in one of them. He took it out, reached over to his friend, and handed it to him. The patting down continued as he raised his arms. Then he stood with his hands in front as the cuffs went on. Right hand first. Click. Then left. Click. Then back to the jury chair while other paperwork was completed. It was 9:20 a.m. when he was escorted out of the empty courtroom into the hallway, hands cuffed before him. His friend, carrying two hats and his face wet with tears, walked behind. Jerry stepped into the elevator and was gone.

  CHAPTER 6

  EDWIN RAJO (16)

  Houston, Texas

  8:00 P.M. CST

  NEXT TO THE ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICE IN LEE HIGH SCHOOL, LOCATED in southwest Houston, hangs a banner announcing, “All doors. All hallways. Lead to college.” But for a handful of students, they are more likely to lead to room 143—the special-education center run by Jennisha Thomas, a driven, African American woman in her thirties. Any student who needs particular academic support passes through here. Ordinarily, that might only be once or twice for registration and review. But each year, one or two end up camping out in her room because they struggle behaviorally in a formal classroom setting and keep getting sent there. In his first year at Lee, Edwin Rajo, age sixteen, was referred to her office at the beginning of the year but scarcely ever went back. “We would hardly have known he was here,” says Thomas. “We never heard about him.” But in his second year, he and his friend Gabriel (not his real name) were there virtually every day. “I don’t know what happened,” she says. “It was like he’d had some go-go juice.”

  Lee is a tough school, serving a student body that struggles with a range of challenges. Seven out of ten students failed the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness English test; 96 percent are economically disadvantaged.1 The school runs a backpack program, which provides students with two days of meals on weekends. Lee draws much of its intake from refugee communities from all over the world—wherever there’s a war going on, there’s a good chance students from that region will end up at Lee.

  If that were not enough, there is also a significant gang presence in the school—not from one gang but from the whole gamut of black and Latino gangs that are rife in the area. While I was interviewing Ms. Thomas, her administrator rushed in to tell her she was needed urgently outside, where a fight had broken out. Ms. Thomas excused herself and went to slip on her shoes. “Faster,” urged her administrator, and Ms. Thomas was off to try to mediate. Within a week of my being there, several pupils would be arrested onsite after a huge fight.

  Gabriel was like a don in the school. He was a quiet, unflashy presence whose word carried as much weight as, if not more than, that of many teachers. He’s a cool customer with a commanding aura. Edwin was his wisecracking sidekick: taller, skinnier, sillier, barely in control of himself let alone others. Gabriel and Edwin did a lot of “chilling.” Whereas Stanley Taylor’s friend Trey could not quite describe what that involved, Gabriel was more forthcoming—for Edwin and him it meant playing soccer, smoking weed, playing Grand Theft Auto, drinking, and talking. “Edwin wasn’t bad,” says Ms. Thomas. “He was immature. He was acting in high school how he should have been acting in middle school. In middle school he was still quiet and in his little shell. When he got here, he started being playful. He’d do things like take kids’ ID badges, run down the hallway, slap boys between their legs—boy stuff. But he wasn’t bad; he was busy. So almost every day he would get sent here because they couldn’t handle him. He was all over the place.”

  Impulsive and childlike, if Edwin sensed he could provoke a teacher, he would not only “go there” but stay there until the job was done. “He got a kick out of seeing teachers get to that boiling point,” says Ms. Thomas. He also lacked any kind of filter. If he thought your hairstyle sucked, your dress didn’t fit, or your nose ring looked daft, he’d tell you, apparently not realizing he might be causing offense. For the most part, his misbehavior manifested itself in episodic acts of senseless defiance, particularly with regard to one teacher.

  For example, students were not allowed to wear black undershirts since they were identified with the Southwest Cholo gang. Edwin wore one anyway. When that teacher told him to take it off, Ms. Thomas said, Edwin acted up. “I’m not giving you this shirt,” he said. Over the PA the call went out for Ms. Thomas to assist in talking Edwin down. “Edwin, what’s the problem,” she said. “He want me to take off my shirt,” Edwin said. “He gay. He just wants to look at my body. I don’t want him looking at me.” “Edwin take off that shirt,” said Ms. Thomas, through gritted teeth. “I ain’t gonna give it to him. I’m gonna give it to her,” said Edwin, gesturing toward Ms. Thomas. “I don’t care who you give it to, just take it off,” said Ms. Thomas. Edwin took the shirt off and threw it
on the floor.

  Most teachers in the special-education department didn’t have a problem with him. “You always knew what you were getting,” said one. “He was straightforward,” said another. Most did not indulge him, but they picked their battles. Others found him frustrating and disruptive. “There were particular teachers he knew he could get a rise out of,” says Ms. Thomas. “Full throttle. ‘You at school today?,’” she said, imitating Edwin’s thought process. “‘Let me see if I can make you mad.’”

  He’d never been diagnosed, but Ms. Thomas guessed he was more likely to have attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder than oppositional defiant disorder. “If you’re oppositional defiant you’re like that with everybody. We never had that problem with Edwin here because we always shut it down. He was never disrespectful to us. But he would be referred here almost every day for something. There wasn’t a day when I didn’t have to fuss at him.”

  Edwin liked school, says Gabriel, because he saw it as a great venue for horsing around. “I think he liked it because there are lots of people here and he could be distracted and mess about,” he explains. The actual schoolwork Edwin found both boring and pointless. When his childhood friend Camilla (not her real name) would ask him what he wanted to do with his life, he’d say, “Nothing.” “I don’t like school,” he told her. “I just want to work at High Times,” a local tobacco shop that sells pot paraphernalia.