The Best American Essays 2011

by Edwidge Danticat

  Je’Rean’s crime? He looked at Chauncey Owens the wrong way, detectives say.

  It was 2:40 in the afternoon on May 14 when Je’Rean went to the Motor City liquor store and ice cream stand to get himself an orange juice to wash down his McDonald’s. About forty kids were milling around in front of the soft-serve window. That’s when Owens, thirty-four, pulled up on a moped.

  Je’Rean might have thought it was funny to see a grown man driving a moped. He might have smirked. But according to a witness, he said nothing.

  “Why you looking at me?” said Owens, getting off the moped. “Do you got a problem or something? What the fuck you looking at?”

  A slender, pimply-faced kid, Je’Rean was not an intimidating figure. One witness had him pegged for thirteen years old.

  Je’Rean balled up his tiny fist. “What?” he croaked.

  “Oh, stay your ass right here,” Owens growled. “I got something for you.”

  Owens sped two blocks back to Lillibridge and gathered up a posse, according to his statement to the police. The posse allegedly included Aiyana’s father, Charles “C.J.” Jones.

  “It’s some lil niggas at the store talking shit—let’s go whip they ass,” Detective Theopolis Williams later testified that Owens told him during his interrogation.

  Owens switched his moped for a Chevy Blazer. Jones and two other men, known as Lil’ James and Dirt, rode along for Je’Rean’s ass-whipping. Lil’ James brought along a .357 Magnum—at the behest of Jones, Detective Williams testified, because Jones was afraid someone would try to steal his “diamond Cartier glasses.”

  Je’Rean knew badness was on its way and called his mother to come pick him up. She arrived too late. Owens got there first and shot Je’Rean clear through the chest with Lil’ James’s gun. Clutching his juice in one hand and two dollars in the other, Je’Rean staggered across Mack Avenue and collapsed in the street. A minute later, a friend took the two dollars as a keepsake. A few minutes after that, Je’Rean’s mother, Lyvonne Cargill, arrived and got behind the wheel of the car that friends had dragged him into.

  Why would anyone move a gunshot victim, much less toss him in a car? It is a matter of conditioning, Cargill later told me. In Detroit, the official response time of an ambulance to a 911 call is twelve minutes. Paramedics say it is routinely much longer. Sometimes they come in a Crown Victoria with only a defibrillator and a blanket, because there are no other units available. The hospital was six miles away. Je’Rean’s mother drove as he gurgled in the backseat.

  “My baby, my baby, my baby. God, don’t take my baby.”

  They made it to the trauma ward, where Je’Rean was pronounced dead. His body was transferred to Dr. Schmidt and the Wayne County morgue.

  The raid on the Lillibridge house that took little Aiyana’s life came two weeks and at least a dozen homicides after the last time police stormed into a Detroit home. That house too is on the city’s East Side, a nondescript brick duplex with a crumbling garage whose driveway funnels into busy Schoenherr Road.

  Responding to a breaking-and-entering and shots-fired call at 3:30 A.M., Officer Brian Huff, a twelve-year veteran, walked into that dark house. Behind him stood two rookies. His partner took the rear entrance. Huff and his partner were not actually called to the scene; they’d taken it upon themselves to assist the younger cops, according to the police version of events. Another cruiser with two officers responded as well.

  Huff entered with his gun still holstered. Behind the door was Jason Gibson, twenty-five, a violent man with a hist ory of gun crimes, assaults on police, and repeated failures to honor probationary sentences.

  Gibson is a tall, thick-necked man who, like the character Omar from The Wire, made his living robbing dope houses. Which is what he was doing at this house, authorities contend, when he put three bullets in Officer Huff’s face.

  What happened after that is a matter of conjecture, as Detroit officials have had problems getting their stories straight. Neighbor Paul Jameson, a former soldier whose wife had called in the break-in to 911, said the rookies ran toward the house and opened fire after Huff was shot.

  Someone radioed in, and more police arrived—but the official story of what happened that night has changed repeatedly. First, it was six cops who responded to the 911 call. Then eight, then eleven. Officials said Gibson ran out the front of the house. Then they said he ran out the back of the house, even though there is no back door. Then they said he jumped out a back window. It was Jameson who finally dragged Huff out of the house and gave him CPR in the driveway, across the street from the Boys & Girls Club. In the end, Gibson was charged with Huff’s murder and the attempted murders of four more officers. But police officials have refused to discuss how one got shot in the foot.

  “We believe some of them were struck by friendly fire,” the high-ranking cop told me. “But our ammo’s so bad, we can’t do ballistics testing. We’ve got nothing but bullet fragments.”

  A neighbor who tends the lawn in front of the dope house out of respect to Huff wonders why so many cops came in the first place, given that “the police hardly come around at all, much less that many cops that fast on a home break-in.”

  But the real mystery behind Officer Huff’s murder is why Gibson was out on the street in the first place. In 2007, he attacked a cop and tried to take his gun. For that he was given simple probation. He failed to report. Police caught him again in November 2009 in possession of a handgun stolen from an Ohio cop. Gibson bonded out last January and actually showed up for his trial in circuit court on February 17.

  The judge, Cynthia Gray Hathaway, set his bond at $20,000—only 10 percent of which was due up-front—and adjourned the trial without explanation, according to the docket. Known as Half-Day Hathaway, the judge was removed from the bench for six months by the Michigan Supreme Court a decade ago for, among other things, adjourning trials to sneak away on vacation.

  Predictably, Gibson did not show for his new court date. The day after Huff was killed, and under fire from the police for her leniency toward Gibson, Judge Hathaway went into the case file and made changes, according to notations made in the court’s computerized docket system. She refused to let me see the original paper file, despite the fact that it is a public record, and has said that she can’t comment on the case because she might preside in the trial against Gibson.

  More than four thousand people attended Officer Huff’s funeral at the Greater Grace Temple on the city’s Northwest Side. Police officers came from Canada and across Michigan. They were restless and agitated and pulled at the collars of dress blues that didn’t seem to fit. Bagpipes played and the rain fell.

  Mayor Dave Bing spoke. “The madness has to stop,” he said.

  But the madness was only beginning.

  It might be a stretch to see anything more than Detroit’s problems in Detroit’s problems. Still, as the American middle class collapses, it’s worth perhaps remembering that the East Side of Detroit—the place where Aiyana, Je’Rean, and Officer Huff all died—was once its industrial cradle.

  Henry Ford built his first automobile assembly-line plant in Highland Park in 1908 on the east side of Woodward Avenue, the thoroughfare that divides the east of Detroit from the west. Over the next fifty years, Detroit’s East Side would become the world’s machine shop, its factory floor. The city grew to 1.3 million people from 300,000 after Ford opened his Model T factory. Other auto plants sprang up on the East Side: Packard, Studebaker, Chrysler’s Dodge Main. Soon the Motor City’s population surpassed that of Boston and Baltimore, old East Coast port cities founded on maritime shipping when the world moved by boat.

  European intellectuals wondered at the whirl of building and spending in the new America. At the center of this economic dynamo was Detroit. “It is the home of mass-production, of very high wages and colossal profits, of lavish spending and reckless instalment-buying, of intense work and a large and shifting labour-surplus,” British historian and MP Ramsay Muir wrote in 1927.
“It regards itself as the temple of a new gospel of progress, to which I shall venture to give the name of ‘Detroitism.’”

  Skyscrapers sprang up virtually overnight. The city filled with people from all over the world: Arabs, Appalachians, Poles, African Americans, all in their separate neighborhoods surrounding the factories. Forbidden by restrictive real estate covenants and racist custom, the blacks were mostly restricted to Paradise Valley, which ran the length of Woodward Avenue. As the black population grew, so did black frustration over poor housing and rock-fisted police.

  Soon the air was the color of a filthy dishrag. The water in the Detroit River was so bad, it was said you could bottle it and sell it as poison. The beavers disappeared from the river around 1930.

  But pollution didn’t kill Detroit. What did?

  No one can answer that fully. You can blame it on the John Deere mechanical cotton-picker of 1950, which uprooted the sharecropper and sent him north looking for a living—where he found he was locked out of the factories by the unions. You might blame it on the urban renewal and interstate highway projects that rammed a freeway down the middle of Paradise Valley, displacing thousands of blacks and packing the Negro tenements tighter still. (Thomas Sugrue, in his seminal book The Origins of the Urban Crisis, writes that residents in Detroit’s predominantly black lower East Side reported 206 rat bites in 1951 and 1952.)

  You might blame postwar industrial policies that sent the factories to the suburbs, the rural South, and the western deserts. You might blame the 1967 race riot and the white flight that followed. You might blame Coleman Young—the city’s first black mayor—and his culture of cronyism. You could blame it on the gas shocks of the ’70s that opened the door to foreign car competition. You might point to the trade agreements of the Clinton years, which allowed American manufacturers to leave the country by the back door. You might blame the UAW, which demanded things like full pay for idle workers, or myopic Big Three management, who instead of saying no simply tacked the cost onto the price of a car.

  Then there is the thought that Detroit is simply a boomtown that went bust the minute Henry Ford began to build it. The car made Detroit, and the car unmade Detroit. The auto industry allowed for sprawl. It also allowed a man to escape the smoldering city.

  In any case, Detroit began its long precipitous decline during the 1950s, precisely when the city—and the United States—was at its peak. As Detroit led the nation in median income and homeownership, automation and foreign competition were forcing companies like Packard to shutter their doors. That factory closed in 1956 and was left to rot, pulling down the East Side, which pulled down the city. Inexplicably, its carcass still stands and burns incessantly.

  By 1958, 20 percent of the Detroit workforce was jobless. Not to worry: the city had its own welfare system, decades before Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The city provided clothing, fuel, rent, and $10 every week to adults for food; children got $5. Word of the free milk and honey made its way down South, and the poor “Negros” and “hillbillies” flooded in.

  But if it weren’t for them, the city population would have sunk further than it did. Nor is corruption a black or liberal thing. Louis Miriani, the last Republican mayor of Detroit, who served from 1957 to 1962, was sent to federal prison for tax evasion when he couldn’t explain how he made nearly a quarter of a million dollars on a reported salary of only $25,000.

  Today—seventy-five years after the beavers disappeared from the Detroit River—“Detroitism” means something completely different. It means uncertainty and abandonment and psychopathology. The city reached a peak population of 1.9 million people in the 1950s, and it was 83 percent white. Now Detroit has fewer than 800,000 people, is 83 percent black, and is the only American city that has surpassed a million people and dipped back below that threshold.

  “There are plenty of good people in Detroit,” boosters like to say. And there are. Tens of thousands of them, hundreds of thousands. There are lawyers and doctors and auto executives with nice homes and good jobs, community elders trying to make things better, teachers who spend their own money on classroom supplies, people who mow lawns out of respect for the dead, parents who raise their children, ministers who help with funeral expenses.

  For years it was the all-but-official policy of the newspapers to ignore the black city, since the majority of readers lived in the predominantly white suburbs. And now that the papers do cover Detroit, boosters complain about a lack of balance. To me, that’s like writing about the surf conditions in the Gaza Strip. As for the struggles of a generation of living people, the murder of a hundred children, they ask me: “What’s new in that?”

  Detroit’s East Side is now the poorest, most violent quarter of America’s poorest, most violent big city. The illiteracy, child poverty, and unemployment rates hover around 50 percent.

  Stand at the corner of Lillibridge Street and Mack Avenue and walk a mile in each direction from Alter Road to Gratiot Avenue (pronounced Gra-shit). You will count thirty-four churches, a dozen liquor stores, six beauty salons and barbershops, a funeral parlor, a sprawling Chrysler engine and assembly complex working at less than half capacity, and three dollar stores—but no grocery stores. In fact, there are no chain grocery stores in all of Detroit.

  There are two elementary schools in the area, both in desperate need of a lawnmower and a can of paint. But there is no money: the struggling school system has a $363 million deficit. Robert Bobb was hired in 2009 as the emergency financial manager and given sweeping powers to balance the books. But even he couldn’t stanch the tsunami of red ink: the deficit ballooned more than $140 million under his guidance.

  Bobb did uncover graft and fraud and waste, however. He caught a lunch lady stealing the children’s milk money. A former risk manager for the district was indicted for siphoning off $3 million for personal use. The president of the school board, Otis Mathis, recently admitted that he had only rudimentary writing skills shortly before being forced to resign for fondling himself during a meeting with the school superintendent.

  The graduation rate for Detroit school kids hovers around 35 percent. Moreover, the Detroit public school system is the worst performer in the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests, with nearly 80 percent of eighth-graders unable to do basic math. So bad is it for Detroit’s children that Education Secretary Arne Duncan said last year, “I lose sleep over that one.”

  Duncan may lie awake, but many civic leaders appear to walk around with their eyes sealed shut. As a reporter, I’ve worked from New York to St. Louis to Los Angeles, and Detroit is the only big city I know of that doesn’t put out a crime blotter tracking the day’s mayhem. While other American metropolises have gotten control of their murder rate, Detroit’s remains where it was during the crack epidemic. Add in the fact that half the police precincts were closed in 2005 for budgetary reasons, and the crime lab was closed two years ago due to ineptitude, and it might explain why five of the nine members of the city council carry a firearm.

  To avoid the embarrassment of being the nation’s perpetual murder capital, the police department took to cooking the homicide statistics, reclassifying murders as other crimes or incidents. For instance, in 2008 a man was shot in the head. ME Schmidt ruled it a homicide; the police decided it was a suicide. That year, the police said there were 306 homicides—until I began digging. The number was actually 375. I also found that the police and judicial systems were so broken that in more than 70 percent of murders, the killer got away with it. In Los Angeles, by comparison, the unsolved-murder rate is 22 percent.

  The fire department is little better. When I moved back to Detroit two years ago, I profiled a firehouse on the East Side. Much of the firefighters’ equipment was substandard: their boots had holes; they were alerted to fires by fax from the central office. (They’d jury-rigged a contraption where the fax pushes a door hinge, which falls on a screw wired to an actual alarm.) I called the fire department to ask for its statistics. They’d not been
tabulated for four years.

  Detroit has been synonymous with arson since the ’80s, when the city burst into flames in a pre-Halloween orgy of fire and destruction known as Devil’s Night. At its peak popularity, 810 fires were set in a three-day span. Devil’s Night is no longer the big deal it used to be, topping out last year at around 65 arsons. That’s good news until you realize that in Detroit, some 500 fires are set every single month. That’s five times as many as New York, in a city one-tenth the size. As a reporter at the Detroit News, I get plenty of phone calls from people in the neighborhoods. A man called me once to say he had witnessed a murder but the police refused to take his statement. When I called the head of the homicide bureau and explained the situation, he told me, “Oh yeah? Have him call me,” and then hung up the phone. One man, who wanted to turn himself in for a murder, gave up trying to call the Detroit police; he drove to Ohio and turned himself in there.

  The police have been working under a federal consent decree since a 2003 investigation found that detectives were locking up murder witnesses for days on end, without access to a lawyer, until they coughed up a name. The department was also cited for excessive force after people died in lockup and at the hands of rogue cops.

  Detroit has since made little progress on the federal consent decree. Newspapers made little of it—until the U.S. attorney revealed that the federal monitor of the decree was having an affair with the priapic mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who was forced to resign, and now sits in prison convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice.

  The Kilpatrick scandal, combined with the murder rate, spurred the newly elected mayor, Dave Bing—an NBA Hall of Famer—to fire Police ChiefJames Barrens last year and replace him with Warren Evans, the Wayne County sheriff. The day Barrens cleaned out his desk, a burglar cleaned out Barrens’s house.

  Evans brought a refreshing honesty to a department plagued by ineptitude and secrecy. He computerized daily crime statistics, created a mobile strike force commanded by young and educated go-getters, and dispatched cops to crime hot spots. He assigned the SWAT team the job of rounding up murder suspects, a task that had previously been done by detectives.