Another Day in the Death of America

by Gary Younge

  But there were also significant differences between the fallout from Edwin’s death and that following Tyler Dunn’s. First of all, unlike with Tyler’s death, after which two people were punished by the courts, nobody has been held accountable for Edwin’s death. The case was referred to a grand jury, but there’s no evidence that it ever met, and no one was ever charged. Less than two weeks after we spoke, Camilla had been arrested for “retaliation” in what appears to be an unrelated matter. She was later sentenced to two years in prison.

  Marlyn’s principal grievance is that more than a year after that fatal day, no charges have been brought and no price has been paid. “They never called me when it happened,” she says, referring to Camilla and her mother. “They had him there, and they didn’t do anything. Perhaps if they’d called me when it happened, I could have done something. By the time I got there, he’d already been there for half an hour. She wasn’t imprisoned. She faced no charges. I called the police to find out why she wasn’t imprisoned. She’s free. She wasn’t even reprimanded. They said there will be justice. There will be a process. But it’s been more than a year. Somebody should be held responsible for this. She sells drugs. They should go to prison. If a pet was killed like that, there would be justice. They showed no remorse or guilt, and in the end nothing happened to them.”

  Paradoxically, given that there has been no punishment, there has also been more forgiveness. Camilla went to Edwin’s funeral. Her Facebook cover photo shows her sitting next to Edwin’s grave, all in black, surrounded by flowers and balloons, smoking what looks like a joint. Her previous photo shows a large crowd standing around the grave. She says she’s still in contact with Sandra and Victor. (Sandra said she wasn’t.) “His sister and brother are cool,” she says. “But every time I’m with them I know what happened. I feel bad because they don’t have a brother no more. The only person I’m not cool with is his mom. And I understand that. Because sometimes I even get mad at myself. He was my best friend.”

  There was a moment on Facebook when it looked like tensions might flare, as they did in Marlette. The day after the shooting, Adan Castaneda posted, “Fucked up Knowing Who Killed Him!” At that stage, most didn’t know what happened or who was involved. A rumor that it was suicide was quickly quashed. But Adan’s friends demanded to know what he knew. Yasmine stepped in and said, “Don’t say her name.” Then Camilla joined the fray.

  Camilla: “Adan, don’t be saying he got killed nigga. It was an accident.”

  Adan: “I know it was an accident.”

  Camilla: “I sorry doe nigga.”

  Adan: “Is alight.”

  Emjay: “we know it was an accident and accidents happens to everybody.”

  Camilla: “life’s a bitch I don’t wanted to end like this.”

  Within the gang, it was debated whether she should be kicked out, killed for killing one of their own, or given a pass. She talked to her OG (Original Gangster or gang leader) about it. They decided it was an accident and she had suffered enough. “They said we were young and stupid and it was just an accident, and if someone messes with me about that then it’s them who’s gonna die or whatever,” she told me. Even Marlyn, despite their altercations, believes it was a genuine accident—most of the time. “I don’t think she would have killed him on purpose,” she says. “I think she loved him. But sometimes my pain as a mother makes me feel otherwise.”

  The Rajos moved away from Bellaire Gardens. Marlyn couldn’t stand the memories. When I met them they had just settled into a new housing complex ten minutes away. They’d moved in a week earlier and were not yet unpacked. There was no furniture, and though she was heavily pregnant Marlyn insisted that the translator and I sit on two tables. She stood, running her hand over the curve of her extended belly. Shortly before the interview was over I asked if, given everything that had happened, she regretted coming to America. Honduras has a far, far higher rate of homicide in general and gun deaths in particular. But she’d come looking for a better life for a family that did not yet exist, and now her eldest son was dead. “No,” she says. “It’s hard here. It’s very hard. It’s hard work just to stay alive. But I don’t regret leaving. I don’t regret coming. Sometimes I think God must know what happened to my son and why. But I don’t blame the country. It could have happened anywhere. Knowing the situation in Honduras I think my children are better off here.”

  A month after I spoke to her, she gave birth to a five-pound twelve-ounce boy. She named him Edwin.

  CHAPTER 7

  SAMUEL BRIGHTMON (16)

  Dallas, Texas

  11:15 P.M. CST

  IN HER BIOGRAPHY OF HARLEM RENAISSANCE WRITER ZORA NEALE Hurston, Wrapped in Rainbows, Valerie Boyd explains why it was so difficult to track Hurston’s whereabouts during her early twenties: “In 1911 it was relatively easy for someone, particularly a black woman, to evade history’s recording gaze.” She continues, “If not legally linked to a man, as daughter or wife, black women did not count in some ways—at least to the people who did the official counting.”1

  The question of who counts and who is counted is not simply an issue of numbers. It’s also about power. Collecting information, particularly about people, demands both the authority to gather data and the capacity to keep and transmit it. Those who have both the authority and the capacity need to feel that those they are keeping tabs on matter. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as the dead floated in the streets of New Orleans and the living were stranded on highways and rooftops, a huge crowd of mostly black and poor people descended on the city’s convention center. When asked why relief organizations had been caught off guard, Michael Brown, the hapless director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, responded, “We’re seeing people that we didn’t know exist.”2

  In short, not everybody counts, and therefore not everybody is counted. We know, for example, how many American soldiers died during the Iraq invasion, because the US government had to keep record. One can only imagine the outcry if they hadn’t. But we can only guess how many Iraqi civilians or insurgents have died, because there was no Iraqi state to count them and it was not in US interests to keep a tally, let alone learn their names. We know how many US police officers are killed in the line of duty in any given year, but there is no national tally for how many people are killed by police officers.

  During the early nineties, when child and teen gun deaths ran at more than twice the rate they do now,3 many a child’s death went unreported in the media. The deaths were deemed so frequent and predictable, and they occurred in places so foreign to those who had the power to cover them, that they might as well have been in Iraq. So back then, a young life could be extinguished without trace. The police would barely be interested. The circumstances, the names, the ages of the dead were not considered of sufficient public interest to log each one as a matter of course. Dan Kois, who ran the Gun-Death Tally for the online magazine Slate, says that would not happen today.

  “I think by this stage, pretty much every homicide or accident that takes place is reported,” Kois told me. The development of social media, citizen journalism, and new technology has made it more difficult for the established media to simply ignore gun deaths in certain areas. “In most cities, there are separate blogs recording gun deaths, and this keeps the newspapers and other local media outlets honest. The numbers we got chimed with the statistical projections [for gun homicides and accidents].” Kois, a senior editor for Slate, acknowledged that the numbers it collected fell well short (by more than half) of all the gun deaths that occurred, because, as I pointed out in the Introduction, suicides are generally not reported.

  The Gun-Death Tally, set up in the wake of the Newtown shootings, sought to record every gun death in the country.4 The website, which ran for a year, compiled its data through basic Internet searches and crowd-sourcing; anybody could send in news of a gun death, and site managers would add it to the tally. The site represented each death using a stick figure in one of thre
e sizes—large for adults, medium for teens, and small for children—with web links to news reports of what happened.

  “The feature was meant to be a provocation of sorts,” Kois wrote when the site was closing. “We knew that those rows of figures, each one attached to a name, piling atop one another every day, made for an arresting visual, one that might trouble even the most ardent gun-rights supporter.”5

  Five weeks after the Gun-Death Tally was launched, Joe Nocera wrote a column for the New York Times titled “And in Last Week’s Gun News . . . ,” in which he provided brief descriptions of a handful of those who had died from gun violence in the previous week.6

  “There were nine or ten items,” Nocera told me. (In fact, there were fourteen.) “There was no editorializing by me whatsoever. Just these clips. I thought it was powerful and very effective. If you live in Lexington, Kentucky, or Providence, Rhode Island, you don’t have a sense of all the gun violence there is out there.” From this emerged “The Gun Report,” a daily digest on the New York Times’ website relating to all things gun-related, including fatalities. It ran from Monday to Friday; the one on Monday compiled the events of the preceding weekend. “It’s simply a google search every day of gun deaths,” says Nocera. “It’s the only thing I’ve ever done that got reviewed by the New York Review of Books,” he adds with some pride.

  Both Slate’s Gun-Death Tally and the New York Times’ “Gun Report” were comprehensive and provided useful starting points. Neither were definitive. Four of the young people featured in this book did not appear on one site or the other; one death appeared on neither.

  Slate wound down its efforts after a year and directed followers to the Gun Violence Archive, which conducted a similar but more extensive effort on a website bound to attract less traffic since it was not part of a general news outlet. The New York Times held out for a little longer before a dispute regarding overtime pay for the editorial assistant compiling the data allegedly triggered its demise.7 In the paper, Nocera offered a different explanation. “A few months ago,” he wrote, “I began to feel that we had made the point already. Day after day, week after week, there was a numbing sameness to the shootings.”8

  But if the fact of a gun death is now generally reported, it is often done so in the most summary, almost dismissive, fashion. Such was the case for Samuel Brightmon’s shooting, which appeared in the Dallas Morning News under the headline “Teen Fatally Shot While Walking Down Street.” “Police are investigating after a teenager was fatally shot Saturday night when walking down the street in Southeast Dallas,” the article read. “Police say Samuel Brightmon, 16, and another 16-year-old were walking in the 7300 block of Schepps Parkway around 11 p.m. when they heard gunshots. As the teens tried to run away, Brightmon was shot and collapsed in the street, according to police. Brightmon was taken to Baylor University Medical Center of Dallas where he was pronounced dead. No suspect has been identified.”9

  The following day, the Dallas Morning News filed another brief report by Claire Z. Cardona, adding that: “Crime Stoppers is offering a $5,000 reward for information that leads to the arrest and indictment for the felony offense,” and giving readers the number of the tip line to call.

  The local Fox News affiliate ran a picture of Samuel bearing a wide, bright, toothy smile and wearing a blue and white shirt. He has clear skin, a strong jaw, and bright eyes—a face too young for life to put lines on it. The Fox website had almost identical information, under the headline “Dallas Teen Killed by Random Gunfire.” “Dallas police are asking for help to find the person who killed a teen who was walking down a street. It happened just after 11 pm Saturday along Schepps Parkway in Pleasant Grove. Sixteen-year-old Samuel Brightmon was with a friend when they heard gunshots. They tried to run, but Brightmon was hit. He died at the hospital.” They did manage to get a quote from his mother. “‘It’s so unreal right now. It’s a million and one things going through my head, but then I just can’t focus on anything. The only image I see is the last image I have of me holding him,’ said Audry Smith, the victim’s mother. Brightmon’s friend was not hurt. Crime Stoppers is offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to an indictment.”10

  That was it. They didn’t have an awful lot to go on. The police report is similarly minimal, adding only that it believed the shooting was not gang related. There was no profile, no testimony from his school friends or teachers. No sense of who he was, let alone why he was killed. His death was counted. It just didn’t count for much.

  SAMUEL COURDE-BERNARD BRIGHTMON, KNOWN to his family as DaDa (a nickname based on his middle name), died less than a week short of his seventeenth birthday. He was the second of three children of Audry Smith and the third of seven children by Willie Brightmon. Willie and Audry were long separated, but Willie was a constant presence in Samuel’s life. They were two of a number of parental figures, including his Aunt Debra (Audry’s sister), and Claudia, Willie’s second wife, who remained a good friend of Audry’s.

  Samuel’s best friend was his sister, Whitney, a tall, reedy girl only eleven months his junior, who paid close attention as I twice interviewed her mother but said little. When they were younger, they’d sleep together because Whitney didn’t like sleeping by herself. When they were older, Samuel would often climb into bed with Whitney after he woke up. They would finish each other’s thoughts and sentences. “Them two, they were like Bonny and Clyde,” says Audry. “Everyone used to think they were twins because they were so close in age and did everything together.”

  Whitney was Samuel’s fiercest defender. “I acted like a big sister to him,” she told me. Once, when they were at their Aunt Debra’s house, Samuel told his aunt that some boys had jumped him. “Before I could even get my shoes on, my middle daughter and Whitney took out running to fight the boys for him,” Debra recalls. “By the time I got there they had already found the boys and cornered them down. They were hot.”

  Samuel was a prankster. His friends recall his japes the way teenagers do—laughing so hard that you’re still struggling to follow the story when it becomes clear that they’ve already delivered the punch line. The kind of anecdotes you really had to be there for. Once, he brought in a rubber duck and chased students around while making voices like Ernie from Sesame Street. Another time, he put on Whitney’s pink, fluffy boots and scarf and made like he was on a catwalk. He put a cornball on someone’s desk. His mother has a video clip of him doing a daft dance in school—all spidery legs and flapping arms. “That’s him,” she said. “Just goofy. Always.”

  The fact that he rarely made anybody else the butt of his jokes was consistent with his personality. He was conflict averse. And from an early age he was always eager to please. “He wanted to fit in,” says Claudia, who met me at Soulman’s Bar-B-Que, a Texas chain, at a location next to the freeway. “He was like the peacekeeper. So when the other sisters and brothers would get to fighting, he would always say, ‘Let’s stick together.’” She continued, “Whatever he did he just smiled his way out of it. He didn’t want to get in trouble. So he would just put a smile on ya so you’d be like, ‘Okay, I’ll give you a second chance,’ because of his smile. He was sweet.”

  “DaDa was like the son I never had,” says Debra. “Whenever I needed something done, like taking out the trash or something a son would do, he would do it. If I just got home from the grocery store, I didn’t have to worry about my groceries being taken out of the car. He was just a helpful kid. A happy kid. Full of jokes. He wasn’t a fighter. He wasn’t a troublemaker.”

  There was a worry that his trusting nature would get him in trouble. “My most fear for him was because he’ll befriend anybody,” says Willie. “He ain’t never met no stranger. That’s his type of mentality. He’s so naive.” Willie grew up in Marshall, Texas, a small town a couple of hours’ drive away, not far from the Louisiana state line, where everybody knew everybody else. He felt Samuel’s manner was better suited to his own rural upbringing than to an urban environment. “B
ack home, ain’t no such thing as a stranger. But in the city, some people will take your kindness for a weakness. For him it was like, ‘Oh Daddy, no, it won’t be like that.’ And I said, ‘Yes, son, it will.’”

  Debra also worried that his desire to please might lead him into bad company. Once, when Audry and the children were staying with her, Samuel started hanging around with a group of kids, including a girl he’d taken a fancy to, whom Debra didn’t like and of whom both her daughters had given poor accounts. “I think he just wanted to make everybody happy,” she said. “But these kids could have got him in trouble.” Debra told him to stay away from them. She was worried that he was so anxious to please others that he risked losing all sense of who he was and what he wanted. “I broke it down for him. I used to try to get him to understand that it’s okay to be different. I’d tell him, ‘Be true to you. Be who you are.’”

  Samuel took it badly. He huffed and sulked for a while. “He was upset about it that night,” Debra recalls. “But the very next day he wrote me a letter apologizing for his behavior and saying he understood. That meant a lot.”