Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  “I’ve moved on past the situation. It made me a better person today. And I’m the last one standing, laughing.”

  Gilbert’s affair was allegedly not the only one. The 141-page report included allegations of drug use and trafficking by guards, inmate abuse, one instance of falsifying documents in an attempt to get an inmate released, and the forced resignations of “several” guards for having sexual relations with prisoners. Despite his longtime authority over the guards there, David was not held responsible. In 2007, he ran for sheriff and won.

  “Me and her got along very well,” David said of Diana Gilbert. “She just messed up.”

  Years later, when David, as Beaver County sheriff, was led out of the courthouse in handcuffs to face eleven misdemeanor charges—­including obstruction of justice and terroristic threats that involved allegedly menacing a reporter with a revolver and vowing to a campaign volunteer that he’d cut off his hands and eat them—Diana Gilbert tried not to gloat. David was cleared of all charges, but lost his job in the next election.

  “Karma is a mother,” Diana said. “The list of his manipulations is so long. He has done so much to so many—and he still hasn’t really gotten what he deserved.”

  18

  When the World Opens

  Forever, the school had been a refuge. After the racial strain of the ’60s and ’70s had eased, once white flight had exhausted itself and Aliquippa High had become mostly black, the high school on top of the hill, The Pit, and the football team that called old and young to return each fall Friday gained an immunity to the town’s most fearsome extremes. Teachers, parents, and administrators toiled to make that so. Kids and criminals, dealers and gangbangers knew that anyone crazy or dumb enough to bring the street to the school risked universal censure.

  Because the school was the one last pipeline to a future. The school meant academic and athletic scholarships, football stardom, a job someday. The school was pride and hope, the last bit of it, and even the worst could sense that if that flickered out, the earth could split open and swallow the rest and nobody would give a good goddamn.

  Still, by 2009 you could feel a cancer nibbling, insinuating itself closer to the now-consolidated Aliquippa Junior/Senior High than ever before. Once the exclusive domain of whites, the fabric of Plan 12 frayed as longtime families moved away and slumlords rented the old houses to the poor and transient and suspect. The random cruelties of Plan 11, the Funky Four Corners, and both sides of The Hill began to filter in.

  “When we first moved up here, it was love-ly,” said Tezmalita Baldwin, who, with Jonathan and his older sister, moved from Plan 11 into a house in Plan 12 in the early 2000s. “My friends used to laugh at me because I’d always say, ‘When I move, I don’t want any black neighbors.’ Them being white, they used to be, like, ‘You know, you’re a jerk.’ And I said, ‘You don’t understand, it’s not that I’m a prejudiced person. I just know what’ll happen.

  “I wanted to be where it’s comfortable and you don’t have to worry about the loud stuff and trying to raise the kids right. I wanted to be where they weren’t in situations that were sitting right at their front door. And a couple years later, I was like, What the hell? This is done turned into Plan 11: They EVERYWHERE. I don’t have a problem with my own people, but my own people seem like they have a problem with themselves. Insecure ways. Everybody wants to prove a point.”

  Random gunfire became an everyday hazard. In September 2009, while students were meandering home from school, five shots blazed from a black Dodge Durango on the streets of Plan 12, aimed at one juvenile but instead hitting twenty-one-year-old Shawn Kimbrough just behind an ear. Junior Kevin Johnson, a wide receiver on the Quips football team who would receive a full scholarship to Howard University, found himself caught in the crossfire en route to practice.

  “Someone drove past me and just started shooting recklessly,” Johnson said. “I ran and felt the bullets go through my pants leg, and then as I got to the top of the hill, out of the way, I checked. Went to see that I didn’t have no marks on my legs. I was happy. I smiled and I was, like . . . Yes.”

  Thirty minutes later, a car parked near the market went up in flames. Two days later, about a block away, a thirty-six-year-old man took a bullet in the leg.

  Indeed, with the carnage becoming so common only the most senseless loss could cut through. And more than any drive-by, nothing crystallized parental fear over the encroaching “street” more than one bizarre auto accident. On May 22 of that year, just before midnight, Aliquippa ninth-grader Tiquai Wallace, fourteen, died after a parked and revving car jumped the curb on Meadow Street and hit him on the sidewalk. Wallace pushed a sixteen-year-old girl out of harm’s way as the car bore down, and was pinned against a building wall as its wheels spun.

  “The car hit him straight-on,” said Della Rae Campbell, Tommie’s mother, who was walking with her boyfriend, Rick Hill, when they saw the accident unfold. “Doing at least fifteen, twenty miles an hour. And it hit him—Boom!—and bounced back. Then, Boom! again . . . bounce back. Then it hit him, Boom!—and that’s when it stopped. The driver was unconscious. They was just coming from a party, the passenger was alert, and he just threw the car in gear. He was, like, ‘What did I do?’ I’m, like, ‘What did you DO? You just caused this car to go up in this boy.’”

  Immensely popular in Plan 12, the goofy and competitive Wallace was nicknamed “Goldie” for his light hair and “Wall Street” as a play on his last name. Della Rae and her boyfriend unpinned the boy from the wall.

  “His face was, like, leaning this way on top of the hood of the car and his eyes just looked up at me,” Della Rae said. “I told him, ‘Tiquai, you know what to do, baby. You come from a praying family. Right now is your time to pray. . . .’ He was looking at me, like, Somebody help me. He couldn’t say nothing; it was all in his eyes. I see those eyes to this day.”

  The girl suffered a broken wrist. Wallace was pronounced dead at 12:40 a.m.

  The driver was seventeen-year-old sophomore Chaquille Pratt, the leading scorer on Aliquippa High’s basketball team and by all accounts the best player in Beaver County. Pratt jumped out of the car and ran; the next day, he turned himself in and was charged with homicide by vehicle while driving under the influence. Few condemned him outright: Pratt’s family had long been friends of Wallace’s. Tiquai had played on Aliquippa’s freshman team. The two were friends.

  In the following days, those who knew both boys wondered about the invisible hands that gave alcohol and car keys to a seventeen-year-old, the invisible forces that had eroded community and family will to the point where it seemed normal for a fourteen-year-old to be hanging out on a dicey street at midnight. “That one-block section by the high school where Plan 12 Market is?” said Plan 12 resident Donald Walker two years later. “It’s a drugfest.”

  And it was worse in 2009. Word spread that Tiquai’s last utterance was, “I can’t fight no more,” and that resonated for years: another youth worn out way too soon.

  Later that night, after the ambulance took his body away and the crowd cleared, Della Rae Campbell went back to the wall where Wallace died and spray-painted a few words: “Tiquai,” and his nickname, “Wall St.” In time, other words would go up, a makeshift memorial: “God has another angel . . . Gone but not forgotten . . . We love you.”

  Dwan Walker, thirty-four-year former Aliquippa High receiver, son of Chuckie and Chedda, knew Wallace. His sister, Diedre, had a daughter who was at Meadow Street that night and saw the boy fall. Dwan was holding the weeping teen at the funeral service at Plan 11’s Church in the Round. Plans were percolating to retire the number Wallace wore for Little Quips football: it didn’t seem enough. Dwan wanted to say something. Diedre all but forced Dwan to stand up and speak: “Go ahead,” she said. “Get up there.”

  Diedre had always pushed him. He had often talked, half-jokingly, about becoming mayor of Aliquippa, but she
always insisted it could be so. Walker heaved up his big frame, and trudged to the front of the church crowd. The room was filled with high school kids, and younger.

  “Now you all realize you’re not supermen or superwomen: death can reach out and touch you,” Walker told them. “You’re all too young for it to touch you this way, but you got to realize you’re our dreams, our hopes, our future. We see something in y’all that you don’t see in yourselves. And when you lose your lives, that’s a dream unfulfilled, that’s a goal not met.

  “You see his mother up here crying? You see his dad and their family? Now you know death is bad. Death ain’t a good thing, especially if you can prevent it. Especially if you can stop being stupid and following the lead of other people and stop being Indians and become chiefs. Stand up for yourselves. . . .”

  He went on like that for some fifteen minutes. When he finished, many stood. Many applauded.

  “They’re ready for you now,” Diedre told him after. “You should run.”

  And she kept telling Dwan that, too, over the following months, whenever he would come back from scouting city council meetings, discouraged because only five people showed up. She was younger than he but had always acted older, always told Dwan he could do or be anything he wished. She pushed him to play football, pushed him until he graduated college—and now D was at it again. I’m telling you, she said. This town is ready.

  When Darrelle Revis walked off the field in Hershey, Pennsylvania on December 7, 2003, after nearly single-handedly leading Aliquippa High to its first state football championship in twelve years, he told his principal, “We did this for the school and the community.” Zmijanac praised the players for their class and poise, said he was prouder of how they conducted themselves than of how they played. The tough and relentless team was everything the town likes to believe about itself. Its players have been dying ever since.

  The funerals, the mourning mothers, came with numbing regularity in the decade after. Wide receiver Deon Johnson, shot in the eye during a gun battle in Linmar in 2005. Defensive end Jordan “Ricky” Cain, cut down at age twenty by thirty rounds from an AK-47 assault rifle in 2006. Backup running back Darius Odom, shot to death at twenty-one in 2009. Quarterback Stephen Hardy, killed in 2010 by seven gunshots at twenty-two. Then, in 2012, defensive end Marquay Riggins, shot dead in Linmar Terrace at the age of twenty-five, and defensive end Eddie Carter, taken by a weak heart at twenty-six.

  “Seven of my high school teammates have died,” Revis said. “One day I come here in the off-season and talk to ’em, and the next thing you know you’re getting a phone call and the guy is dead. Which is sad.”

  But no death had more impact on Aliquippa than the death of running back James “Larry” Moon. No. 22 wasn’t the most dependable player or even a starter; Zmijanac kicked him off the team during that championship season for some forgotten misdeed. But football kept Moon grounded like little else, and Zmijanac allowed him back for the title game in Hershey because he’d come begging for a second chance. It didn’t hurt that Moon also averaged 4.5 yards a carry. “He was sincerely apologetic,” Zmijanac said. “I don’t know if it’s like that everywhere: here it’s because we really truly care about the kids. Do I want to win? Fuckin’-A right.”

  Midway through the following season, during a home game his senior year, Moon became so irate over his limited playing time that he walked off the field and into the locker room, removed his Aliquippa High uniform, got dressed and walked off up the hill. He didn’t come back. And the further Moon got from the game, the more unstable he became.

  Moon had a close friend, Tony Gaskins. They had grown up together in and around Griffith Heights, the cracked curbs of Plan 11, rose through every level—Termites to Midgets—of Little Quips football in the same cadre with Revis and Tommie Campbell. Gaskins worked the trenches as a center, mostly, played in spurts his sophomore year. Then he realized he could do better elsewhere.

  “What stopped me playing was I seen how fast guys were making money out on the streets,” Gaskins said. His dad, Johnny Gaskins, had worked thirty years at J&L, in the simmering filth of by-products. When Johnny lost his job in the mid-eighties, he had little to offer but stories about how the town and the mill and he had it all humming once. “My parents weren’t as fortunate, and I couldn’t get nice things,” Tony said. “You know, Jordans tennis shoes or whatever? I just saw the opportunity to make some cash and get the things that I wanted. I knew it wasn’t the right way. But I went along and did it anyway.”

  Gaskins dealt drugs for five years in Griffith Heights; girls treated him like some kind of star. He did two stints in juvenile detention, the second for hitting someone in the face with a brick. Late one day in November 2005, he and Moon started throwing dice up in Griffith Heights. Gaskins kept winning, and when he left three hours later he carried off nearly $200 of Moon’s cash. He picked up his girlfriend, visited a friend, walked outside.

  “Next thing I know somebody blindsided me,” Gaskins said. “He suckerpunched real good, but it didn’t knock me out so I was able to catch myself and realize what was going on. He started beating me on my head again, talking about, ‘I want my f-ing money back, you’re going to give me my f-ing money back. . . .’” Moon pulled out a handgun, a .22. Gaskins told him the cash was in the car.

  “And I just turned around, grabbed him, took the gun, and shot him,” Gaskins said.

  Moon took two bullets in the chest and abdomen, but lived. Gaskins, then eighteen, was arrested on November 21, 2005, and spent the next eleven months in the Beaver County Jail. Eventually Moon recovered, if you can call it that.

  “If I would’ve killed him,” Gaskins said, “that girl would still be alive.”

  Four years later, at 3:15 a.m. on September 5, 2009, the now-twenty-four-year-old Moon shot his way into Diedre Walker’s apartment, No. 301, A Building, in the Valley Terrace apartments on the hill behind the police station. The two had been seeing each other a few months, having met when Moon was serving time in a halfway house for shooting at his child’s mother. Moon suspected Diedre, thirty-three, of seeing another man. That man was hiding in the closet when Moon shot Diedre three times in the head and chest.

  D’s youngest son, twelve-year-old Romerize “Ro-Ro” Owens, had been sleeping on the couch when the door gave way and Moon stepped in. He saw Moon shoot his mom. He saw Moon sit down on the couch, turn the gun on himself, and pull the trigger.

  Police found Ro-Ro covered in blood. An officer took the boy down to the police station. By then, Dwan—phoned by a cousin, Aliquippa High assistant football coach Vashon Patrick—had raced to the apartment. Police stationed at the bullet-blasted door wouldn’t let him enter. He saw his sister’s feet. He could hear the paramedics, hovering above, saying, “Diedre, stay with us. . . .”

  Dwan walked around for the next half hour numbed, hearing nothing. Then a cop told him that his sister was dead. “That’s when the world opened up to me,” he said.

  Dwan saw his aunt Brenda collapse. Heard his twin brother Donald yelling at the crowd of friends in the Valley Terrace parking lot: “She’s dead gone!” Saw his dad Chuckie on his knees, howling; saw his mom Chedda reaching out when they brought D out in a body bag. Saw the crowd mass toward the second body bag when they carried it out, trying to tear James Moon apart. They hadn’t known till then that he was dead, too.

  At the funeral home the following night, the family gathered. They rolled Diedre in on a gurney. Her eyes were open, the way they stayed open when she used to sleep. She had a bit of blood on her face, and Dwan took a napkin and wiped it off before his mom could see. Then his mom walked up and started shaking and screaming, “Why, D!”

  “That’s when I fell apart,” Dwan said. “Because this is the first time she really let out a cry—like, angry. My sister always loved the underdogs. She always liked the runts nobody else wanted, the stray dogs: I’m going to fix ’em, chang
e ’em. That’s our curse. We think we can change people—and they end up changing you.”

  All that killing didn’t happen in a vacuum. The Beaver County Times reported every detail, and the Pittsburgh newspapers and TV stations came out if the damage was notably bloody or strange, and now there was Revis, an instant, All-Pro force at cornerback with the New York Jets, spotlighting some of the town’s grimmer corners in the New York media. Soon Aliquippa’s narrative had changed, locked in: the town was about great football and terrible crime or, better yet, great football in spite of terrible crime, and the crumbling Pit and boarded-up windows along Franklin Avenue provided the perfect visuals for what, exactly, its kids were up against.

  No resident much liked it, being reduced to a Jekyll-Hyde tale, but there was no denying the facts. The steel mill and sports success that defined Aliquippa in its prime had been supplanted by a new duality, and for proof one only had to look at former Quips football star Jeff Baldwin. One of his sons was serving twenty to forty years for the town’s most notorious murder, and the other was a 6-foot-5 receiver with a 42-inch vertical, a 4.4 time in the 40, great hands, and no fear. Now Jonathan Baldwin was Aliquippa’s “Next One.”

  Jonathan was just eleven in 2001 when his twenty-four-year-old half brother Jamie Brown was arrested for the murder of patrolman James Naim, and so skinny that he couldn’t make weight for Little Quips football. Jonathan looked up to Jamie. “Every day we’d basically see each other, play PlayStation with the NFL,” Brown said. “Some days, I’d be riding past, and he always had a basketball or football. He would be playing close to where I was going, and I’d say, ‘Go back in that house. . . .’”