Another Day in the Death of America

by Gary Younge

  Within the monthly costs the gang had to cover—this was in the nineties, during the height of the crack epidemic—2 percent was spent on weapons and more than 10 percent on “mercenary fighters.” If you stayed in the gang for four years, then you could reasonably expect to be arrested 5.9 times, incur nonfatal wounds or injuries 2.4 times, and sustain a one-in-four chance of being killed.

  These were the kinds of odds that caught up with Tyshon, who died in Chicago just moments before Gary died in Newark. And in the absence of any concrete intelligence from the police, my guess is they are the same odds that sent Gary’s murderers (who were probably not that different from Tyshon’s) in pursuit of the boy in a red hoodie, later imprisoned on a drug charge.

  Moreover, research by Professor Delbert S. Elliott, founding director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, in Boulder, Colorado, found a clear correlation between the inability to find work and the propensity toward violent behavior. Race and class differences related to violent offending are small during adolescence, he discovered, but disparities widen considerably going into adulthood, depending on the ability to find work. This occurs for two reasons. First, the absence of employment severely reduces the likelihood that people will get married, which is one of the key routes to more stable, less violent behavior. Second, growing up in poor, disorganized neighborhoods inhibits the normal evolution of adolescent development. Young people in such areas, Elliott found, tend to have lower levels of personal competence, self-efficacy, social skills, and self-discipline. “Many are not adequately prepared to enter the labor market even if jobs were available. They are, in some ways, trapped in an extended adolescence and continue to engage in adolescent behavior.”30

  Gary’s adolescent transgressions were unremarkable. His father recalls how the reverend who performed his funeral service once saw him hanging out on the block and asked him what he was up to. Gary smart-mouthed him to the effect that it was none of his business. When the reverend told him he knew Gary’s grandmother, Gary said, “Well, you ain’t gonna tell her nothin’,” and walked away. The very next day Gary was on the porch with his grandmother when the reverend pulled up and told the grandmother what had happened. Gary got a slap right there and then, his father told me with a big laugh. “Since then, he was like, ‘How you doin’, preacher? How you doin’, sir?’”

  He was thinking of leaving Newark and maybe heading south to start a new life in North Carolina with his older sister. She had been in town just a week before he died and told him he should go with her when she returned. But Gary thought it better to wait until graduation.

  He was, his father said, a “typical teenager.” “He liked school to a certain extent. You know kids. They like school. But then when the teacher’s trying to teach them something they don’t want to be bothered. ‘I don’t want to be in school.’ He passed his classes. He did what he had to do.”

  “Typical teenager” in Newark comes with some caveats, which by now are all too familiar. In Gary’s room, where his cat, Mocha, still lurks and his clothes still hang six months after his death, an RIP notice hangs in memory of one of his friends who was shot down.

  It was his final year in school, and Gary Jr. had initially decided that he had no interest in marking the occasion. “He didn’t want to go to prom. He didn’t want to go to graduation. But as soon as he turned eighteen, he said, ‘Daddy, I want to go to the prom. I want to go to my graduation. So we need to get my stuff together.’ He had a little girlfriend. So I said alright. So at the time he was shot, he just talking about going to school and going to graduation.” His father felt that North Carolina might have provided opportunities Gary Jr. wouldn’t have had in Newark. “If that’s where he’s going to go and be successful, I had no problem. I told him that. Because Newark is crazy. Being a young black guy here. . . . It’s hard,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s hard here, trying to be young.”

  CHAPTER 10

  GUSTIN HINNANT (18)

  Goldsboro, North Carolina

  3:30 A.M. EST

  THE TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR PERIOD IN WHICH THIS BOOK IS SET ends with a green 1996 Cadillac Sedan Deville rolling to a stop in somebody’s yard in the early hours of November 24 on the corner of Walnut and South Audubon in Goldsboro, North Carolina. It’s a quiet, verdant street where, in the fall, leaves are heaped in tiny piles, in a small town that many in North Carolina have not even heard of. When the police spotted the car, while answering another call, its doors were open and lights were on. The passengers had fled. The driver, eighteen-year-old Gustin Hinnant, was not so lucky. His body lay slumped back between the two front seats, his head hanging where the backseat passengers’ feet might be, dripping blood that collected in a pool on the floor. He’d been felled by a single bullet that had pierced the rear window and hit the back of his head.

  Gustin’s slender, long face was as dark and smooth as melted chocolate, a gloss finish in a picture that might have been Photoshopped but for the hint of peach fuzz (his autopsy mentions a “faint beard and mustache present”). Not quite angelic-looking, perhaps, but both youthful and playful. “In his physique he was a small-statured guy,” says Daina Taylor, a family friend who’d known Gustin (pronounced Justin) since he was a small child. “He was what we’d call light in the butt . . . not meaty. So the only thing he had going for him was that”—she opens and closes her hand as though she were operating a puppet. “Yapping with the hands.”

  “He was slim,” says his father, Greg, who raised Gustin by himself for most of his life. “His body was cut a little from doing weights and pushups. Muscular, but still no big guy . . . petite.”

  Young enough that his favorite movies, according to Facebook, were Happy Feet and Toy Story and that his favorite hobby at home was to sit in his room quietly and draw pictures. Old enough that just a few days before he died he changed his Facebook cover photo from a graffiti-emblazoned wall to a sprawling array of high-caliber bullets.

  Old enough to spend the night with girls. Young enough that they would usually get caught climbing through his window. “A couple of young women did it,” says Greg, shaking his head. “And every time they come through I’ve caught ’em. I tell ’em, ‘You welcome in my house through my front door anytime you want to. But you come in through that window, you ain’t welcome in my house. Don’t let Gustin talk you into coming through that window.’” Too young to respect the considerable leeway he was given by Greg’s working hours (his dad was on the night shift at Walmart). “‘Listen, ‘bro. I work at night. You know my days off. Don’t be hardheaded,’” Greg had told him.

  “On more than one occasion, his father came home and there were girls in the house,” adds Daina, barely stifling a smile. “Now if you know that your father gets home at seven a.m., kick them girls out at five or six. Don’t defy him fully. Everybody’s falling asleep on each other naked and stuff. Check yourself. You want to be a man. This is part of being a man.”

  Old enough to be making plans for a proper career, even if there was some discrepancy among those who knew him about what that career would be. According to Greg, he wanted to be a physiotherapist for elite sports players. “They throw their knee out or something, he wanted to be that guy who would bring them back to the level where they could go back to work,” he explained. But he told Daina he wanted to go to Wake Technical Community College and train to work for a cable company. Hardy, a friend from school, says he wanted to be “an entrepreneur.”

  But Gustin was still too young to let go of his dream of becoming a rapper one day. He spent a lot of time on the computer working on Virtual DJ applications and had started a record label, called Green Team, with his friends. The one song I heard online, performed with someone called T. Quail, was not bad. Mellow, rhythmic, and cut under with some soul. The lyrics are basic. “Keeps telling niggas to fall in line / You can say that you’re better / but we know that that ain’t true / all we hear nowadays is disses / that’s what rappers do.” Also, “You see mo
ney and you gotta get it / You see money and you gotta spend it.” It’s not brilliant. But compared to the other amateur rap that’s out there, it’s certainly respectable.

  Old enough to seek his kicks in forbidden places. For a few months, Gustin had been sneaking out of his bedroom window as soon as Greg left for work and heading to Slocumb Street, which Greg considered a hangout for ne’er do wells. Gustin’s room was at the back of the house (a roadside cottage opposite an industrial park) that backed up to a wooded area which, on many an evening, served as Gustin’s escape route. “He’d go out that window, walk round that fence, and go down that dirt road to where the action’s at,” explains Greg.

  Gustin was too young to realize he was swimming in shark-infested waters and way out of his depth. One of the boys he used to spend time with on Slocumb Street is now in jail for shooting two boys, says Greg, who grew up in the Bronx. “I said, ‘Gustin, man, you ain’t ready for those boys over there on Slocumb Street, man. You gonna end up getting yourself killed. You ain’t grown up like I did. You don’t have that killer instinct in you because you don’t have to survive like we had to survive. You got a mother and father to buy you stuff.’”

  Daina, who lives on Slocumb Street, was worried the message wasn’t getting through. Raised in Queens, New York, she is, in her own way, a community organizer. As well as running her own company doing residential and commercial janitorial work, she is also director of a charitable organization that helps ex-convicts avoid reoffending. In the old days people called her “the book lady.” “I would ask children what they were interested in and then get books shipped from different publishing companies based on what the child’s interest was,” she explains. “Anything that would make them read. My focus was on the children who didn’t know how to read. But Gustin did not need remedial help.” She would also check report cards, and those who got good grades would get a couple of dollars or a trip to McDonald’s. Gustin always got a treat.

  “I was afraid for him,” she says. “I know the streets. I grew up in the streets. And Gustin didn’t strike me as being street material.” If anything, says Daina, he was “a little nerdy”—a very bright honor-roll student who liked to play Words with Friends in chemistry class. “Even when he was hanging out with them boys, he kept his grades up,” says Greg. He would have been the first person in his family to graduate from high school. The green Cadillac was originally intended as a graduation present. “Greg always bragged about his children’s accomplishments, especially when it came to the report cards,” says Daina.

  THERE’S A REASON WHY car insurers charge higher premiums for young drivers, and why young offenders are—or at least should be—treated with more leniency in the criminal justice system. Adolescence is a stage in life with its own dynamic. Teenagers have the capacity to perform as adults—they can produce children, drive cars, and kill people—without the life experience to always put those abilities to good use. They are more likely to take risks and less likely to understand what those risks entail. They are experimenting not only with substances (alcohol and drugs) but also with relationships (sexual, familial, social) and lifestyles. They are working out what kind of person they want to be, and in that process they are about as likely to make sound judgments as the elderly are to make rash ones.

  This is not simply a social and cultural process—a period when young people figure things out and have fun before settling down. It’s a physiological one. And its primary driver is not hormonal—though of course hormones have a lot to do with it. At that age our brains are actually changing.

  “The brain is a collection of cells that communicate with one another using chemicals called neurotransmitters,” explains Daniel Siegel in Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain. “During adolescence there is an increase in the activity of the neural circuits utilizing dopamine, a neurotransmitter central in creating our drive for reward. Starting in early adolescence and peaking midway through, this enhanced dopamine release causes adolescents to gravitate toward thrilling experiences and exhilarating sensations.”1

  This dopamine rush, explains Siegel, a psychotherapist and clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, has three distinct consequences: a tendency toward impulsivity, addiction, and hyperrationality. The latter, he explains, can lead to a greater propensity to take risks. “[Hyperrationality] is how we think in literal, concrete terms. We examine just the facts of a situation and don’t see the big picture; we miss the setting or context in which those facts occur. With such literal thinking, as adolescents we can place more weight on the calculated benefits of an action than on the potential risks of that action.”2

  Add to this combustible cocktail a brain that is more prone to novelty seeking, heightened emotional intensity, creative exploration, and peer-group socializing, and you have the recipe for the most volatile, vulnerable, exciting, and challenging period of most people’s lives. “While most measurable aspects of our lives are improving during adolescence,” writes Siegel, “such as physical strength, immune function, resistance to heat and cold, and the speed and agility of how we respond, we are three times more likely to suffer serious injury or death during this time than we were in childhood or than we will be in adulthood. This increase in risk is not ‘by chance’—scientists believe it comes from the innate changes in how the brain develops during this period.”3

  Such behavior is arguably not only natural but necessary. A bid to break through the borders of childhood and strike out on our own as apprentice adults involves facing fears and assessing danger. Notwithstanding the perils, if we didn’t go through this stage then we might be ill-equipped to mature at all.

  “A similarly lowered risk threshold—indeed, a new pleasure in risk taking—likely propels nearly grown birds out of nests, hyenas out of communal dens, dolphins, elephants, horses, and otters into peer groups, and human teens into malls and college dorms,” write Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers in Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing. “As we’ve seen, having a brain that makes you feel less afraid enables, perhaps encourages, encounters with threats and competitors that are crucial to your safety and success. The biology of decreased fear, greater interest in novelty, and impulsivity serves a purpose across species. In fact, it could be the only thing more dangerous than taking risks in adolescence is not taking them.”4

  Greg had another term for all of this. He called it hardheaded. No matter how often he warned Gustin, his son just wouldn’t listen. “I told him, ‘I’m fifty-seven years old, man. I’ve been living longer than you, dude. I can tell you what I been through in fifty-something years in ten minutes if you’d listen. You gonna go through the same thing.’”

  Greg, who thanks to his roguish good looks can still carry off denim jacket and trousers with white sneakers, really did have some stories to tell. “I used to tell him stuff we used to do. You know, I sold drugs. I gangbanged a little bit. But yo, man. You see me now. I go to work every day. I knew that that life weren’t nothing.”

  Gustin was Greg’s eldest son. He has several children from different “baby mamas” and is clearly a devoted father—quick to bring out pictures from holidays and home—but he’s not exactly a doting one. When I ask him how many children he has, he stumbles. “I got . . . let me see,” he says, listing them to himself quietly while counting on his fingers. “I got . . . three girls . . . and four boys.” Then he pauses. Something’s amiss. He recites their names to his fingers once more, as though doing his multiplication tables. He forgot one. “I have five boys and three girls,” he insists. The youngest, whom I saw after day care one day, is just two.

  His warnings to Gustin came from bitter experience. About twenty years ago, Greg was shot by some “random dudes” he hung out with in Goldsboro. “You don’t know these niggas like I know them,” he told Gustin. “’Cos they shot me. I got shot messing with these same cats. Just hangin’ in the street with them boys. Gettin’ high a little bit, and
they tried to rob me. They shot me in both of my legs. . . . I had to hide in some bushes. But I got away. I thought they were my friends. But then jealousy set in. We started makin’ a little money. They tried to rob me. Then they shot me.’”

  Pointing first to his left leg and then his right, he says, “I got a long scar right here. I got a bullet hole in this leg. And a bullet hole back here where they bust my vein open. Shot me in both of my legs. I limped back to my apartment, and my baby’s mama called the rescue car for me.”

  Gustin would generally dismiss these warnings as the chidings of a fretful old man out of touch with the mood of the moment. “Oh Dad, you scared, man. You old school. This is our time now. That stuff is old.” (Whenever Greg imitates Gustin as an adolescent, his voice drops half an octave and slows a couple of beats, dragging the syntax through the sentence with all the energy of a teenager hauling himself out of bed.)

  GREG SEPARATED FROM GUSTIN’S mother, Melissa, when Gustin was about four. Gustin stayed with his mother for a while before he and his brother, also named Greg, moved back in with their father when they were around seven. But when Gustin reached his early teens, the boys bristled at the boundaries Greg was setting and moved back in with their mother in Raleigh. “Daddy too hard,” Greg said, mimicking the whiny voice of his boys when they were younger. “He won’t let us do this. He won’t let us do that.”

  But life didn’t end up being too rosy at their mother’s either. After a short while, Melissa rang Greg to tell him it wasn’t working out. “She called me up to come and get ’em. I went to get ’em at the roller-skating rink because they were getting ready to talk back to her and stuff,” he explains. Gustin lived with his older sister for a brief period, but that didn’t go too well. “She drove him down here and dropped him off because her boyfriend didn’t want him staying with her no more. His sister’s boyfriend and Melissa’s boyfriend got mad with Gustin and put him out. So she brought him to me.”