by Robbie Tolan
Although I didn’t have protest marches in my name, I have to say that my most stalwart allies came from the hospitals. Nurses, doctors, and other people from the hospital used to come by my house to lend their support. And when I talk about support, it was sometimes nothing more than being blessed by people who cared enough to tell me that getting shot wasn’t my fault and that having to deal with the aftermath really sucked. I knew they couldn’t go out in public and cheerlead for me, but I knew that they were on my team. I mean, on my last day at the hospital, everyone in the hospital who had attended to me, from nurses to staff, came to see me off. You can’t overestimate how much those gestures picked up my spirits and made me feel connected with people who empathized with me. Hell, as they lined the walls as I was rolled out in a wheelchair, I felt like Kanye as they cheered!
That was the physical disconnection and the support that came from it. But the psychological detachment wasn’t as positive, nor did I know how to plot a course through it. Slowly but surely, the visits stopped and a sense of isolation crept in. I found that people really did have the same attitude as Michael Harris, a sort of “Hey man, you’re alive, so that means you’re good, right?” As long as people came to see me, I was good because I was distracted from the negative thoughts. But once they stopped, I was left alone with my own demons.
And let me say clearly that that shit was terrible.
From the first night I spent at my Aunt Carolyn’s house, I began having nightmares, horrible nightmares where I’d wake up drenched in sweat from head to toe, soaking my sheets on a nightly basis. It got so bad that I began sleeping on one side of the bed, with a set of dry clothes in a chair, all because I knew that every two hours I’d be drenched in sweat.
The more I slept, when I could sleep, the worse the nightmares got. They became more gruesome and more vivid with each hallucination; the details weren’t always the same, but they always ended with me being found dead. There was always a vision of me, in an out-of-body experience, looking down at a lifeless me in a casket, while standing right next to my parents who are looking down at me with an inconsolable grief. My subconscious brain would see that, and my body would react by getting physical and violent.
I’d fight my way awake, thrashing, punching, and strangling at the air to the point where it scared everyone in my family as they ran into my bedroom. I became so terrified of closing my eyes, even for a few minutes, that I became a part-time insomniac. I’d convinced myself that if I went to sleep I wouldn’t wake up. So only after I became exhausted would I get a few hours of peaceful sleep each night. But by that time, I’d begun to hate myself. How could a young man who’d not had a fear in the world, even when a one-hundred-mile-per-hour baseball was headed at my head, suddenly be frightened about sleeping? What was going on in my life?
I felt like no one around me could help, and I didn’t want to throw yet another burden on them, so I began self-diagnosing my problem. I’d been prescribed both Xanax for my anxiety and Vicodin for my pain, and I thought that if I went off both maybe, just maybe, I might be able to stop having the night sweats and nightmares combo platter each night.
Boy, was I wrong.
What happened was that instead of only being able to sleep for a few hours a night, I’d become a full-time insomniac. The pain from not taking the Vicodin was so intense that it was nothing for me to stay up for thirty-six to forty-eight hours, just so I could get about three hours of normal sleep. It was a deep sleep that was so all-consuming that my brain apparently couldn’t go into nightmare mode. But to me, that was a burden that I was just going to have to deal with.
I saw the trouble that my family was going through, both emotionally and financially, and I felt guilty. It’s weird to say that because I hadn’t done anything except be the victim, but I thought about it all the time. My brain kept going over alternative scenarios where my family wouldn’t have to be burdened with me.
What if I’d just made the decision to stay in that night and not gone out with Anthony? None of this would have happened then, right? But then, my brain would snap back and tell me that nothing should have happened when we did go out, so what would have been the guarantee that the Bellaire police wouldn’t have done the same thing a day later or a year later? There was none.
Or what if I’d let Cotton throw my mom against the garage versus standing up for her? Yeah, but I wasn’t raised like that, my brain would respond. When you see your tiny little petite mom thrown against the garage, then you react. It’s a human response. No, that wasn’t my fault, but it was the fault of the cop who shouldn’t have escalated the situation.
But my last thought was the darkest one. What if I had been killed by that bullet instead of just injured?
Maybe if I hadn’t survived, my family could have just had the funeral, grieved over my death, and then eventually, no matter how painful my loss would have been, moved on with their lives. Instead, now I was living with my Aunt Carolyn and Uncle Charles, who despite the fact that they had already raised all of their own kids, had a new inconvenience in their lives—me.
It got to the point that, because I couldn’t sleep and because I felt so guilty, I’d only come out of my bedroom when I was certain that my aunt and uncle were asleep. Despite their kindness and hospitality, I didn’t want to be a reminder to them about the burden I was causing.
I also saw the huge amounts of money that everyone was spending, and it just hurt my soul. I mean we had a bill of over two hundred grand just from the hospital alone, with the private rooms, the tests, and the pills. And then we had almost three hundred thousand dollars in legal fees, and I just thought, “Man, I am the problem at the center of all of this turmoil.” And I’m not ashamed to say that I thought about suicide quite often during that period, thinking that it would be so much better for everyone involved if my problems were gone from everyone else’s lives. The physical damage and the mental damage were overwhelming.
I ended up going to a psychologist who specializes in trauma, but I never wanted to see a therapist, mainly because I didn’t want to hear someone who didn’t look like me playing devil’s advocate for the police.
“Do you think that if you’d done what the police had asked, you wouldn’t have gotten shot?” “If, if, if…” I didn’t want to hear any of that. I regret the fact that this shooting caused so much pain and financial issues for my family, and yeah, those questions may bounce around in my own head, but I don’t regret a single thing I did that night. I would do it again in a heartbeat.
I tried to create outlets for getting the shit out of my head whenever I got too low. I had people I could talk to, friends and family, but my saving grace was that fact that I also wrote quite a bit in a diary. Writing was therapy for me, and because of that, I didn’t want to go to a therapist just to please everyone else. I felt like I had this situation, even with the dark thoughts, handled. Like most of the people in my family, I was independent and proud of it. What would I gain from telling my story to a stranger?
But everyone, especially my mom, kept saying, “You need to talk to somebody. You need to talk to somebody.” I finally gave in and said I would do it. So off to the psychologist I went. The session lasted for about an hour and a half, during which she asked me all types of questions.
“How do you feel?”
“Do you think being shot changed your life?”
“Tell me about the nightmares.”
“What do you think about life and living now?”
“What do you think your new normal is now?”
After the session, she told me that it was obvious that I’d gone through something very traumatic (ya think?), and I was either very strong or very good at bullshitting. I told her that it was a little bit of both, and I never went back to her again.
It’s not that I’m against therapy, but I just didn’t see any value in having a stranger tell me things that I either already knew or had figured out for myself. Plus, there are things that I think you can�
�t analyze simply because you went to school and read about them. Trauma is a very personal experience, and only people who’ve experienced it can relate, as I’d find out later. But my mom thought otherwise.
My mom thought I was a great bullshitter because when things got dark, when emotions would try to come in, I’d try to crack a joke in order to change the atmosphere. She thought I was just repressing my emotions.
What I decided to do was to concentrate on expressing myself with my writing. I wrote in a journal every day, detailing my thoughts, my emotions, and where I was in the world on any particular day. That proved to be more cathartic than lying on a couch talking to a stranger. I found that I was working it out myself and that I had the answers within me. I believe that because I’d been venting through my diary posts, the dark cloud of depression suddenly lifted, never to return. Like just out of the blue, I wasn’t blue anymore, and depression has never touched me again.
However, I’ll admit that with hindsight being 20/20 and a slight bit of gallows humor, if I may, maybe I wouldn’t have had so many suicidal thoughts if I’d scheduled a few more therapy sessions with her. Writing wasn’t the only solution, and maybe I’d have been better off if I’d used a combo plate to deal with my mental issues. But I didn’t and I’m still here. Let me repeat: I’m still here.
And that’s the ultimate victory.
CHAPTER 4
A LONG SERIES OF ISOLATED INCIDENTS
Victor Steen, 17, Pensacola, Florida—October 3, 2009
Victor Steen, a seventeen-year-old African American teen, was riding his bike when Pensacola officer Jerald Ard chased him down, tasered him from his patrol car window, and then ran over him, killing him instantly. Steen had been nearly torn in half due to the impact from the police car. Officer Ard was then suspected of planting a gun in the pocket of Steen after being seen on video planting an object next to the dead boy. Officer Ard was placed on administrative leave immediately after the death of Steen but returned to plainclothes duty ten days later. Later, the City of Pensacola paid the family $500,000 to settle the case.
I learned quickly that in a police shooting drama involving a white officer shooting a black victim, the institutions and organizations associated with the police are going to do their best to protect the white officer. The City of Bellaire and the Bellaire police union wanted to shine the best light possible on Sgt. Cotton. Society looks upon police as doing a tough job, and as such, they are given as much latitude to keep the bad guys away as they need. You know how on Mother’s Day, every mother on earth is considered to be the best mother on earth, no matter what? It’s just the default premise everyone goes with because no one wants to sully the name of mothers by pointing out that there are some bad mothers who don’t love their kids, who cook bad meals, and who sometimes jump in cars with strange men and leave their kids behind for a new life. Well, that’s what happens when we talk about the police. No one ever wants to say that police can be bad. And not only that, but police departments across the country can be corrupt when it comes to violence against black people.
Look, I support the police, but what was said as a way to justify my shooting was downright cruel. Every police officer, even the ones who shoot innocent people, is considered a hero. They put their lives on the line each day to be the thin blue line between criminals and good people. They are the people who run to the disaster and not the people who run away from it. At least that’s how they’re portrayed, instead of being portrayed as people who may do a tough job, but also do it with the same bigotries, biases, and prejudices that non-policemen have in society. Except police officers carry a deadly weapon, and we depend on them to make good judgments so that the innocent don’t get hurt or die as a result. However, in the case of black people, even when the innocent don’t do anything at all, their blackness can be enough to get them killed by police.
Take for example the tragic death of Philando Castile, a regular black guy who lived in St. Paul, Minnesota. By all the news accounts that I saw, Philando loved being in his community. He worked as a nutrition services supervisor at J. J. Hill Montessori Magnet School, and when the school staff and students were interviewed, it was clear that he was beloved. I mean, the guy had a tattoo of the Twin Cities. What else do you need?
So Castile is driving, with his girlfriend Field Reynolds in the passenger seat and her four-year-old daughter in the backseat, when his car gets stopped for a broken taillight by St. Anthony, Minnesota, police officers Jeronimo Yanez and Joseph Kauser. Fine. It should be a routine stop. Write the fix-it ticket, and then everyone goes on their way. But it didn’t go that way, just like Jose Cruz’s stop didn’t go that way. We know that because we saw the aftermath when Field Reynolds logged into Facebook Live to show Yanez’s gun still pointed at a dying Castile; her calm voice says, “We got pulled over for a busted taillight in the back and the police… just killed my boyfriend.”
According to the police dash cam, Officer Yanez walks to the driver side where he asks Castile for his ID. Castile, in a very clear and calm voice, lets the officer know that he’s carrying a firearm, for which he has a legal permit.
“Sir, I have to tell you, I do have a firearm on me,” Castile said.
“Okay,” said Yanez. “Okay, don’t reach for it.”
“I’m reaching for…,” Castile started, as he reached for his ID.
“Don’t pull it out!” Yanez said, suddenly taking out his weapon and pointing it at Castile. His partner, Officer Kauser, stands to the side, calm. He shows no concern or sense that they’re in danger. Castile, still trying to be calm, tries to explain.
“I’m not pulling it out,” Castile says, still calm and still measured.
“Don’t pull it out!” yells Yanez, who is clearly out of control. Suddenly, Yanez fires seven times at point-blank range at Castile, hitting him five times, twice through the heart. One bullet hits the console and barely misses Reynolds, and the other misses the four-year-old daughter in the backseat by inches.
What’s amazing about this situation is that Reynolds knew that in order to preserve her own life, she had to tamp down her emotions as much as possible, so she calmly described the horrific scene to a live Facebook audience, all while interacting with a hyperventilating Yanez.
“I told him not to reach for it! I told him to get his head up!” Yanez yelled, still out of control, his breathing rapid and deep.
“He had,” Reynolds said calmly, “told him to get his ID, sir, his driver’s license. Oh my God, please don’t you tell me he’s dead.”
“Fuck.”
“Please don’t tell me my boyfriend just went like that.”
“Keep your hands where they are please,” Yanez commanded.
“Yes I will, sir,” Reynolds said, as she tried to keep calm and also calm her four-year-old daughter who’d just seen her mother’s boyfriend murdered.
“I will keep my hands where they are. Please don’t tell me this. Lord, please Jesus, don’t tell me that he’s gone. Please don’t tell me that he’s gone. Please officer, don’t tell me that you just did this to him. You shot four bullets into him, sir. He was just getting his license and registration, sir.”
After the police took Reynolds out of the car and placed her and her four-year-old daughter into the back of the police car, the scared four-year-old pleaded for calm.
“Mom, please stop saying cuss words and screaming because I don’t want you to get shooted,” the girl said. Reynolds gave her a kiss.
“I could keep you safe,” her daughter said.
It’s heartbreaking. An innocent black man was killed for doing nothing but having a broken taillight. And it was all on camera. And yet, when Yanez went to trial for second-degree manslaughter, he pulled out the same old canard that police officers everywhere use when shooting black people.
I was scared for my life.
“I know he had an object and it was dark,” Yanez said during his deposition. “And he was pulling it out with his right hand. And a
s he was pulling it out I, a million things started going through my head. And I thought I was gonna die. And, I was scared because, I didn’t know if he was gonna, I didn’t know what he was gonna do. He just had somethin’ uh his hands and he, the first words that he said to me were, some of the first words he said is that he had a gun. And I thought he was reaching for the gun. I thought he had the gun in his hand, in his right hand. And I thought he had it enough to where all he had to do is just pull it out, point it at me, move his trigger finger down on the trigger and let off rounds. And I had no other option than, to take out my firearm and, and I shot. Um I shot him.”
And guess what? Despite the fact that it was on video and that anyone could see that Castile posed no threat and that Yanez had panicked for no reason, a jury found Yanez not guilty. The jury bought the idea that Yanez was reasonably scared and that was enough reason to murder Castile. Castile as the dead black man in this case was considered to be guilty by his very existence, and therefore, a huge hurdle would need to be cleared for Yanez to be convicted. And not even the apparent innocence of Castile could do it.
To a certain extent, that’s what happened with me. As a black man, I was considered guilty until proven innocent, just like Castile, and it was as though the public needed to find something they could pin on me as a justification for Sgt. Cotton pulling the trigger. Let’s say that it had come out that in the past that I had not paid a traffic ticket; in the eyes of some people, that would have been enough rationalization for me getting a bullet to the chest. For Castile, some people justified his death by pointing out that he’d been stopped fifty-two times for minor traffic infractions, as though being a bad driver was a reasonable excuse for being blasted by a cop.
Hell, despite the fact that I’d received a lot of support, I still had people play on racial stereotypes, saying that my family and I were on welfare, from the ghetto, and uneducated, to justify why I shouldn’t speak out about my shooting. Others said that we were just out here to get rich from a payday, as though it made logical sense to get shot in order to make a lot of money. Who would do that? I was used to fans booing me because I’d struck out or made an error in the field, but I couldn’t fathom why people who didn’t know me would concoct these racist fantasies as a way to justify Sgt. Cotton shooting me. Maybe it’s because I was raised to treat everyone with respect and kindness that breaking out of that utopian bubble meant that I was shocked to realize that the real world is often cruel and nonsympathetic.
