Another Day in the Death of America

by Gary Younge

  AROUND THE CORNER FROM where Samuel was shot is Gayglen Drive, where rows of homes resembling army barracks sit back from the street—a community billeted as though prepared for war. This was the only part of the area Audry considered rough. “Asante, Murdock Villas, Trinity Trails. They kept changing the name of those apartments, but it was always the same problem. It was all contained in those apartments. So we never heard gunfire. It all happened over there.”

  The stretch of Schepps Parkway where Samuel fell is literally on the way to nowhere: there is a barrier marking the end of the road, on the other side of which is a huge freeway. It sits wedged between middle class precarity and bucolic calm. On one side sprawls the Woodland Springs Park, complete with picnic tables, which is in turn attached to McCommas Bluff Preserve, a 111-acre wooded commons that looks like an unlikely starting point for a leisurely ramble.

  On the other side is a rabbit’s warren of streets with long, thin ranch-style houses. The mostly well-tended gardens and impressive cars in the driveways indicate more comfort than affluence; the bars on most of the doors and windows suggest a low-key sense of siege that has insinuated itself into everyday life. On the corner of Neuhoff and Schepps, the precise spot where Samuel fell, a makeshift sign pokes out of the ground offering “Cash 4 Junk cars.”

  The census tells a story of population growth and white flight. Between 2000 and 2010 the white population of this tract plummeted by 41 percent while the Latino population grew by 39 percent and the black population by 25 percent, leaving it more than half black and more than a third Latino and, like most of America, more populous and less white than it had been.32

  Samuel didn’t have any friends who lived in the neighborhood. But he did have a schoolmate, Denzel, who used to come to the area every month or so to visit his grandmother and who lived two streets down from Samuel. Denzel talks like molasses pours: slowly, richly, thickly. He tells his stories sparsely—with few embellishments and a Texas twang. He was dating Whitney at the time, so when she invited him over for a night in with the family he came right over.

  They made an evening of it, watching We’re the Millers and drinking cocoa. “We had a mini family night I guess,” says Denzel. Whitney and Denzel were in the kitchen with Audry when Samuel took a break from his Xbox to suggest that they all play Uno. Audry initially declined. “We hadn’t played Uno in a while,” she said. “And Samuel used to cheat.”

  “I’m not going to cheat this time,” Samuel protested. “I’m going to play fair.”

  So they settled down to play on the floor. Samuel cheated, though not as egregiously as usual. Around eleven, Denzel decided to go home, and Samuel offered to walk him part of the way. It takes around seven minutes to walk from one home to the other. Samuel was just going to walk him to the corner but decided to go a little further. He was on the phone to his girlfriend, Alexis, when he interrupted the conversation to point out to Denzel that they had passed a white Crown Victoria parked at the end of the street, near Gayglen. “I turned around and looked to see there was a car sitting there,” says Denzel. “It was all white. But it was black inside so you couldn’t see nothing. No bodies. Nothing. The headlights were off. But the brake lights were on. So we turned around and took some more steps. Didn’t think nothing of it. I’m thinking they just sitting there to just sit there, I guess. I don’t know. So we keep walking, and then two, three steps and I hear a shot fired.”

  When I ask Denzel to describe the sound he shrugs. “It was just like BLAH.”

  He continued, “[Samuel] said, ‘Oh, I’m hit.’ I thought he was playing. I said, ‘Stop playing.’ So I rushed over there to him.” Denzel corrects himself. Had he known what had happened he would have rushed. But at that moment he still couldn’t believe what was happening. “I didn’t rush over there. I was walking towards him. And then he’s hopping towards the curb. And he told Alexis over the phone he’d got shot.” Then Denzel called Whitney. “Whitney. Sam been shot.” “What happened? What happened?” said Whitney. “He been shot, you gotta come right away.”

  Audry drove straight down with Whitney to find Samuel lying on the ground. She stopped the car in the middle of the street, put it in park, and jumped out with the motor still running and the doors open. “When I did get round the corner Denzel is hollering and screaming and he’s upset. But for me I’m more in mama mode. Find the wound. Put pressure to it. When Samuel started regurgitating, turn him over to his side. Not hollering and screaming. I had no time for that. My reaction was more practical.”

  Samuel was wearing only one of his shoes; the other was across the street. “He was moaning when I came out. He said, ‘Mama.’ We were trying to find out where he was hit. We called 911. We located the injury site of the wound. I was trying to apply pressure. He started regurgitating from his nose and his mouth, and his eyes started to rolling in the back of his head. At that moment I knew that he was dying in my arms, but I was still hopeful.”

  The questions from the 911 dispatcher irritated her. “They were asking, ‘Is the person still out there with the gun?’ I mean do you think it would even matter to me if he was? When I see my child laying there on the ground. Or, ‘Are y’all safe?’ ‘Are you in a well-lit area?’ None of that makes sense to me. My focus can’t be on the crazy questions. Or, ‘What’s the major cross street you at?’ when I know you’ve got GPS and pick up the cell phone signal. So they’re asking all these crazy questions.”

  You can hear Audry’s frustration increasing during the call. She starts out urgent, clear, and panicked. “My son has been shot right here at Schepps and Parkway,” she yells, with Denzel and Whitney wailing in the background. “We need an ambulance.”

  The dispatcher asks her to spell the street name.

  “S-C-H-E-P-P-S,” she says, twice.

  But while Audry is desperate for someone to come and save her son, the dispatcher dispassionately and professionally—if ponderously—gathers a full account of the scene. “Did he see who did it?”

  “No.”

  “And he just got shot. You didn’t see who did it?”

  “No, he was walking with a friend.”

  “Is the friend there too?”

  “Yes,” and then Audry refocuses on Samuel. “Breathe, breathe, breathe,” she says.

  While she is trying to encourage life back into her son, the dispatcher asks, “Was there a vehicle you saw or anything like that?”

  Denzel’s voice enters from a short distance and then Audry relays the message. “It was a black Crown Vic. No. It was a white Crown Vic.”

  “Where did he go?” the dispatcher asks, and at this point Audry loses patience and becomes more formal.

  “I don’t know where it went, sir. I really don’t.”

  “Alright. Where was he shot?”

  “In the back.” She asks someone to get a blanket.

  “Are you there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure you don’t know which way the car went?”

  “Sir, someone called me on the phone and told me to get around here, so I don’t know nothing,” Audry says, finally closing that line of questioning down for good.

  “Is he conscious?”

  “DaDa are you conscious?” she asks. A long groan is audible. “Yes, he’s moaning. I can hear him.”

  “Okay. And no one is around there with a gun or anything like that?”

  “No.”

  “I’m going to connect you to the fire department for arrival instructions, alright?”

  “Thank you.”

  When the ambulance arrived, it kept its distance for what felt like several minutes, which Audry thought was odd. “How can you not see my car in the middle of the street with the lights on and doors open?” she wondered. Eventually the paramedics came, but Denzel could make no more sense of what had happened than they could. And he’d been there for the whole thing. “I know those apartments in that neighborhood were dangerous,” he told me, indicating the complex on Gayglen. “My si
ster used to stay over there, and she said they were dangerous.”

  Denzel sat at the crime scene for several hours. When the detective told him Samuel had died, he shrugged. The detective later asked a teacher if he was slow. “No, he’s very bright,” she told her. “But he’s in shock.”Audry looked through the ambulance window and saw them trying to resuscitate Samuel with CPR. She asked them if he was breathing on his own. They said no. She knew he was dead even before she reached the hospital because the ambulance did not turn its lights on.

  She called Willie, whose immediate response was dramatic, says Audry. “The whole night it was him running up and down the hallway of the hospital hollering and screaming,” she recalls, “sinking to the floor with Whitney, apologizing all the time.”

  Audry was particularly upset about her last moments with Samuel at the hospital. “I felt that I didn’t get a proper good-bye because at the hospital I wasn’t allowed to touch him,” she says. Her son’s body was now a crime scene. “That was really devastating. The only thing I could do was see him from behind the glass. He was laying there like he was asleep, but then I knew he wasn’t.” Three months later she showed me a picture she’d taken from the other side of the glass, of Samuel lying on a gurney with his body covered by a white sheet up to his neck.

  “How often do you look at that?” I asked “Every day,” she said.

  AUDRY’S COPING MECHANISM FROM the outset was to try and keep herself busy. Samuel died late Saturday night. On Monday morning she went to work. She went back again on Wednesday. “It was really just to get away,” she explains. “I wasn’t at peace at the house. There was so many people in and out constantly. I know everyone was there with good intentions. You know, to feed us and check on us. But it wasn’t the hug I wanted. It wasn’t the laughter or the voice I wanted to hear. So it felt like work was the only place I could go where I knew no one would bother me. When my phone would ring someone else would answer it. It was like my boss knew and didn’t want to say nothing to me if I went in. If I worked a little bit and said, ‘Okay, I’m going to go now,’ no one said anything. It was my place of peace to go to.”

  Her doctor told her she was in denial and moving too fast and put her on medication for anxiety, to help her sleep, and, finally, for depression. The wake, held on November 29, was on Samuel’s birthday. He would have been seventeen. They released balloons at the funeral home and sang “Happy Birthday.” Samuel always said he wanted his siblings, scattered over different families across the city, to be together. And here they were. “Well, you got what you wanted,” said Audry. The funeral was on November 30. Audry was back to work full time by December 2.

  At the funeral, Willie’s second wife, Claudia, sat directly behind Audry, in the second row. When it came time to close the casket, Audry reached behind, grabbed Claudia’s hand, and took her along as she went to see Samuel for the last time. She put Claudia’s hand on the casket and her hand on top of Claudia’s, and together they closed it for good.

  Whitney was in a terrible state. “I don’t think I’ve seen anybody grieve like Whitney did,” said one friend. “At the burial I came over and gave her a hug and said, ‘Are you going back to school?’ Whitney said she didn’t know. ‘What would Sam want you to do?’ asked the friend. ‘He’d want me to jump in that grave with him,’ she said.”

  When I first met Audry in February 2014, she fetched a leopard-skin box, roughly the size of a shoebox, and opened it up quite matter-of-factly as we spoke. Inside were keepsakes from the funeral. A couple of papier-mâché doves on thin metal rods, copies of the funeral service bearing the same picture that had appeared on the local news website, testimonies written by friends from school, and pictures of Samuel at various stages of his childhood, from infancy up. Going to the box is a daily routine.

  It’s one of the many rituals Audry has adopted since her son died. A few months after the shooting, every Saturday night she was still putting on the same clothes she wore the night he died—a pair of pink jogging pants and a T-shirt that says “All stressed out and no one to choke.” “It’s not even intentional sometimes,” she says. “I just find myself with it on. Every Saturday, around the same time, I’m angsty. I don’t go to sleep. I never go to sleep until the Sunday morning, only to wake up in tears.”

  When I met her again in June, things had improved a little. “I don’t put on the same thing every Saturday. The sleeping I still have an issue with. I don’t go to sleep until three or four in the morning. I’m not as angsty and anxious as I used to be. That could be the medication. When I’m with people I try to interact most of the time. When I’m at home I’m quiet.”

  Whitney struggles. She says she sees DaDa everywhere. “Every day. Every little thing reminds me of him,” she says. “We all had this one particular song. I’d sing and say, like, DaDa, join in. But he’s not there. School? He’s not there. Home? He’s not there. I hate being in the house without him.”

  “One day,” says Audry, “Whitney just came knocking on the door of my room. She said, ‘He’s not responding.’ I said, ‘Who’s not responding?’ She said, ‘DaDa. He’s not responding to my text messages.’”

  Whitney left the school in the end. “Even to look over at his desk and not see him there just made it much harder for her to deal with every single day,” says Audry. “Samuel was always the one to calm Whitney down in certain situations. He was her voice of reason. Whenever she would get hot about something or mad he calmed her down. I couldn’t. I tried to get her to talk to someone. I said it’s only a matter of time before she blows up. It’s going to happen in school. She’s constantly looking over at the desk. And she’s mad.”

  She didn’t get counseling, even though Debra says she needs help. “More so her because she’s a child and doesn’t really know how to deal with it. But she doesn’t like to open her head.” Denzel says he wasn’t offered any counseling and didn’t want any. “I don’t open up to nobody,” he says. “That’s just the way it is.”

  Counselors came to the school, where Samuel’s desk was left unoccupied for the rest of the academic year, with a Bible in it opened to the book of Samuel. One teacher put an angel outside the entrance with a poem on it, to help talk the children through it. But few thought the counselors were very effective. One of them called Samuel by the wrong name. “It just instilled in these kids that this is nothing to you,” said another teacher.

  Willie has retreated into himself. “From what I can tell, I think he’s grieving hard,” says Claudia. “He’s the life of the party. He’ll get you up dancing. Singing. He’d go out at the weekend and have fun with his friends. But now? He’s in a shell. It’s understandable because you’d never have thought you’d have to bury one of your own children.”

  Willie says he’s constantly on edge. “Basically you can’t relax no more. There’s no ease anymore. There’s no way I can come in, lay down, and think the kids are okay, nothing’s gonna happen. You don’t know. You always on guard now. God makes no mistake. So I can’t sit up and say why mine? Because we all gonna die sooner or later. Everybody’s name is on the roll. But I question myself: maybe if he was here with me. Well, it can happen out here just the same as it happen anywhere else. As a father you wanna protect them.”

  AUDRY STILL STRUGGLES TO piece together the precise details of what happened that night. “I had heard so many different stories in the beginning of how he got shot. At first he was hit in the stomach—in the abdomen. I said no, it’s not true. I asked, ‘Did the bullet come out the stomach, because the only wound I seen was in the pelvis?’ And no one could tell me anything. Denzel was emotionally distraught, and so his story changed too. He said he didn’t hear gun shots. And after a few weeks he said he did.”

  Only an eight-year-old girl in the area said she’d heard gunfire. When the police and a journalist knocked on doors, nobody else admitted hearing anything. And despite the arrival of fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars, despite the screaming and the gunfire, nobody
emerged to see what was going on. “No one came out,” says Audry. “No one. It’s weird. They would have heard the ambulance. Not only the ambulance, but the fire truck and the police. It’s like no one was talking.”

  And she was reluctant to probe further on her own. When Jeremy, her elder son, started asking questions at the corner store, she asked him to stop. “I told him when you start drawing attention to yourself, you never know who comes out. I’d rather let me move and then if someone comes forward and says something that’s different. But you’ve still got a sister you have to worry about.”

  Nobody knows why anyone would do this. There was no obvious motivation. The police were convinced it wasn’t gang related; their trail was cold from the get-go. Denzel didn’t catch the license plate number—why would he? And even if he had, the policewoman told Audry she wouldn’t believe how many Crown Vics are just stolen and abandoned in the adjacent neighborhood.

  “He had his whole life to live for,” says Claudia, lamenting the senselessness of it all. “He missed his senior prom. He missed graduation. He missed everything because somebody else wanted to be stupid. And who knows who he is? It coulda been someone he knew. It could have been someone who lived next door. You just shootin’ to be shootin’? You just doin’ what you want to do? So what do you want to do?”

  “One minute we’re playing Uno,” says Denzel, reflecting on the capriciousness of his life and Samuel’s death. “Ten, fifteen minutes later. Boom.”

  CHAPTER 8

  TYSHON ANDERSON (18)

  Chicago, Illinois

  11:50 P.M. CST

  SHORTLY AFTER I MOVED TO CHICAGO, IN 2011, I WENT TO A meeting on traffic awareness at my son’s day care. The director advised us that to help children orient themselves, we should try to be consistent with the routes we took when walking to familiar places so the kids would have a fighting chance of finding their way home if lost. To illustrate the point, he outlined the routes the day care center took on regular outings. One of the parents asked whether they would continue to pass the site by the subway where there had been a recent shoot-out. The teacher smiled. “I knew that would come up,” he sighed. “It’s a good point, and we are really going to have to get on top of it. We must talk to the children about how to handle situations like that, because the big problem in those moments is that they panic.”