Another Day in the Death of America

by Gary Younge

  “Sir, was he shot? Where was he shot?”

  “In the door. He answered the door.”

  “Where in his body was he shot?”

  “In his face.”

  “In his face?”

  “In his head.”

  “In his head? The front or the back? Can you feel any air moving?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Alright. Stay calm. Is he in the house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where’s the man who shot him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you know him? Do you know where he went?”

  “I don’t know. Danny Thornton.”

  “Did they do it on purpose?”

  “I don’t know. I think so.”

  “The person with the gun. Did they leave or are they still there?”

  “They left.”

  “Did he leave in a car or on foot?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sir, what’s your name?”

  “Jordin Brown.”

  “Stay on the phone with me. Who shot him, do you know?”

  “Danny Thornton, I guess.”

  “Do you know where he went?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Okay, Jordin, stay on the line with me.”

  Jordin is sobbing. The dispatcher is calm and tries to be calming. “Do you know who shot him, Jordin? Do you suspect who shot him?”

  “I don’t know. Can you please get me the police?”

  “They’re on their way, sir. Jordin, I know this is very hard but I need you to tell me. Tell if you know where they went, okay?”

  “I don’t know. I was upstairs, then I heard shooting and I came downstairs.”

  “Alright, Jordin. Is this your little brother?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Can you feel any airwaves moving in and out of his mouth? Are you there with him?”

  “Airwaves? No, no, no, no. Please. Please,” says Jordin, pleading for the police to hurry up.

  “They’re on their way, Jordin, okay? Do you know where the person went?”

  “I don’t know. Please, please.”

  “They’re on their way, Jordin, okay?”

  “They’re here. They’re here.”

  “They’re right there, Jordin. Stay on the phone until they’re with him, okay?”

  “They are. They’re here. Yes. Yes.”

  “Okay, Jordin, I’m going to let you go, okay? Jordin. They’re right there. Jordin.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who is with you?”

  “My mom and my brothers and two cops.”

  “The cops are there with you. I’m going to let you go now, Jordin, okay?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  Throughout, Nicole did her best to focus despite the hysteria. She put one hand over the wound and the other on the back of Jaiden’s head, where she could feel the bullet. She scooped Jaiden up, hugged him, rocked him, and then laid him back down. His eyes were closed the entire time as he lay straight with his hands down by his sides. Then, still unconscious, Jaiden lifted his left arm three or four inches off the ground and let it fall again.

  “I freaked out,” she says. “I said Jerry, Jerry”—her nickname for Jarid. “He’s still alive. He’s still okay. We felt his heart, his pulse. He was never just dead. So after he lifted his arm up I was thinking this is what they do on TV. CPR. Mouth-to-mouth. And all it was, was just gurgle. . . . And I scooped him up again. And was holding him against my chest.”

  The emergency services arrived and took over as the boys cried in the front yard and Nicole shook with shock. The fact that he had raised his arm, she felt, signaled there was still hope. “Now I know. But we felt his pulse and his heart beating. We could feel him alive. I hugged the boys and was saying, ‘Be strong. We’ll get to the hospital and get him fixed.’ Because I kept thinking the whole time, Just get him in there, get him to surgery, get the bullet out, and get him fixed. We’ll fix him. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.”

  “THE AMOK MAN,” WRITES Douglas Kellner in Guys and Guns Amok: Domestic Terrorism and School Shootings from the Oklahoma City Bombing to the Virginia Tech Massacre, “is patently out of his mind, an automaton oblivious to his surrounding and unreachable by appeals or threats. But his rampage is preceded by lengthy brooding over failure and is carefully planned as a means of deliverance from an unbearable situation.”4

  Such was Danny, gaining his power from the fear he instilled in others as the full extent of his inability to cope with adult life—an inability to keep a job, a home, a relationship, or to financially support himself or his many children—overwhelmed and enraged him. Humiliation came easy to Danny. When Jarid was about eight years old Danny took him to buy a new pair of shoes. Danny wanted Jarid to stay the night with him afterward, but Danny’s visits had been irregular and Jarid didn’t feel comfortable going back to Danny’s house. In retaliation, Danny returned the shoes and told Nicole he didn’t love anyone who didn’t love him back. When Nicole asked how he could say that in front of his own son, Danny responded, “I wouldn’t care if he got hit by a car in front of me. . . . I wouldn’t even stop.”

  “He was a sociopath,” Amy Sanders told me, as I sat with her and her four children in the living room of her home in Houston, where she’d moved in August 2013 to be closer to her father. “He never took responsibility for anything. He never had any conscience when it came to hurting other people. He’d say and do anything.”

  “The amok state is chillingly cognitive,” writes Kellner. “It is triggered not by a stimulus, not by a tumor, not by a random spurt of brain chemicals, but by an idea.” The idea, argues Kellner, was best described by a psychiatrist in Papua New Guinea who interviewed seven men who’d run amok and summarized their self-images thus: “I am not an important or ‘big man.’ I possess only my personal sense of dignity. My life has been reduced to nothing by an intolerable insult. Therefore, I have nothing to lose except my life, which is nothing, so I trade my life for yours, as your life is favored. The exchange is in my favor, so I shall not only kill you, but I shall kill many of you, and at the same time rehabilitate myself in the eyes of the group of which I am member, even though I might be killed in the process.”5

  If such men can be found in Papua New Guinea, there is no reason why they might not be found in the suburbs of Columbus. But when they do appear they are, of course, a shock to the system. “That doesn’t happen here,” says Nicole. We’re sitting in the house she moved to after leaving Independence Way—a spacious place with a porch and a garden. “It never has. I’m not living in the ’hood. It happens in Columbus. It happens in Reynoldsburg. It doesn’t happen in Grove City. It’s boring. It’s secure.” Of all the places where children were shot that day, Grove City had the lowest homicide rate that year—2.7 per 100,000 inhabitants,6 the same as Bangladesh.7 The crimes Grove City residents are used to are mostly petty—car break-ins, burglaries maybe. When I ask Nicole and Amy Baker about violent crime in the town, they struggle to work out the last time anyone got murdered and settle on a domestic dispute two years earlier. As though to illustrate what qualifies as a nuisance, the police arrived during our interview to ask if Nicole could get her dog, Jango, to stop barking so loudly—it was 9:30 p.m.

  But if a man like Danny running amok is a shock to the system, the system is nonetheless built to contain it. With the facts of Jaiden’s shooting both partial and evolving and Danny’s whereabouts still unknown, the suburb’s security apparatus curled reflexively into a tight fetal ball. Within five minutes of the first 911 call, Highland Park Elementary, just one block from Nicole’s house, went into lockdown. School hadn’t started yet, so the Grove City Police Department secured a perimeter around it, diverted buses, and told parents arriving in cars to take their children home, while ushering in kids who’d arrived early.

  By that time Danny was long gone, heading eastbound on I-270 to Groveport, twenty minutes away, where his ex-partner, Vicki V
ertin, with whom he had an eighteen-year-old daughter, worked as a dental hygienist. Vicki, unaware of what had just happened, came out to meet her unexpected visitor in the lobby.

  She hadn’t seen Danny for twelve years but, like Nicole, lived in fear of his temper. “He told me one day he’d kill me,” she told a local news channel. “The day he walked in, I knew it was that time.”8 Danny was wearing a gray hoodie and had his hands in the front pocket. “Haven’t seen you in a while,” Vicki told him. Danny took out his gun, shot her in the stomach, and raced off again.

  By this time, the 911 dispatch office was in overdrive. Calls were pouring in from all over. On the recordings you can overhear new information being received even as dispatchers struggle to process the facts they have. The dispatchers were not long finished with Jordin and Jarid when one of Vicki’s coworkers was on the line. With Danny now identified as the gunman in both locations, it took them six minutes to link the two shootings and realize they were dealing with an assailant committed to both murder and havoc: an amok man.

  Two of his friends also called the police. He’d told them that he’d “killed two people and that he’s not going back to jail,”9 and “he will not go down without a fight with police.”10 More schools went into lockdown. Vicki’s family, who had been notified of the shooting, were taken to a protective room.

  Nicole, meanwhile, had arrived at the hospital, where they paged for a neurologist to come to the trauma unit. As they took Jaiden for a CT scan, more doctors and a pastor came in. Detectives pulled her aside to ask if she had any idea where Danny would be going or whom else he might be targeting. That was when she found out he’d shot somebody else.

  She told them that although she hadn’t seen the shooter she knew who it was. “Who would the gunman be targeting?” “Where would he be going?” “Where would he be staying?” Her mind was blank. Her thoughts were with Jaiden; she couldn’t get into Danny’s head to divine his intentions at the best of times. And this was not the best of times.

  HAD JARID GOOGLED suicide by cop after the conversation he’d had with his father a few months earlier, he’d have found a 1998 paper published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine. It was written by several academics and medical practitioners who reviewed all the files of officer-involved shootings investigated by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department from 1987 to 1997 related to the phenomenon. It is a term used by police to describe incidents in which people ostensibly deliberately provoke law enforcement into fatally shooting them. Not surprisingly, the term is hotly contested because it can provide one more justification for police killings on the basis of a psychiatric state that officers can generally only guess at when they shoot someone. Exactly what Danny had in mind when he mentioned it we will never know.

  The paper’s authors argue that to qualify, a case must meet four criteria: “(1) evidence of the individual’s suicidal intent, (2) evidence they specifically wanted officers to shoot them, (3) evidence they possessed a lethal weapon or what appeared to be a lethal weapon, and (4) evidence they intentionally escalated the encounter and provoked officers to shoot them.” By that definition they concluded that suicide by cop accounted for 11 percent of all officer-involved shootings and 13 percent of all officer-involved justifiable homicides during the time frame they reviewed. “Suicide by cop,” they concluded, “is an actual form of suicide.”11

  “People who sought suicide by cop have to be in some kind of depression,” Dr. Harry Hutson told me in a phone interview. Hutson, who wrote the paper, is assistant professor in the department of emergency medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School. “The police shoot over four hundred people every year, and people know that if you brandish anything that looks like a weapon the police will act in self-defense or in defense of the community. So if you want to die, these people will do it for you.”

  The subjects of the study were all between the ages of eighteen and fifty-four, 98 percent were male, most had a criminal record, and a third were involved in domestic violence cases. As such, says Hutson, Danny’s case sounds “pretty classic.” “He was depressed. He didn’t want to live anymore. He didn’t think he could carry on.”

  An hour and forty-five minutes after he shot Vicki, Danny was traced to a Walmart parking lot in Easton Town Center, a twenty-minute drive from her workplace and not far from the motel where he’d been staying. At 9:46 he sat in his car trapped by two police vehicles. “Most of these incidents are over pretty quickly,” explains Hutson, with 70 percent of shootings taking place within thirty minutes of the police arriving. Sure enough, a shoot-out soon ensued in which one policeman was injured and Danny finally got his wish: suicide by cop.

  Vicki’s first thought when she woke up from surgery was that he could still be out there. “Did they get him?” she asked her dad. “No,” he replied. Vicki tried to get out of bed. “Oh my God, he’s coming back to get me,” she thought. Her father clarified that Danny hadn’t been arrested but rather had been shot dead. She sank back down into the bed. She said it was the first time in years she’d felt safe.

  Across town, Nicole was told that Jaiden wouldn’t make it. “His injuries aren’t survivable,” the neurologist told her. “There’s nothing we could do.” The neurologist said that Jaiden’s CT scan was one of the worst she’d ever seen. The bullet had taken a path straight to the back of his brain, where it had ricocheted around, causing irreparable damage. They put Jaiden on a ventilator while a decision was made about organ donation. “I don’t remember feeling anything,” says Nicole. “I don’t know if I cried. I was in shock and numb. ‘This cannot be real. It cannot be real. This is not happening right now.’ All I remember is having this image of him in his shoes. He’d just put his shoes on, and his T-shirt was on the floor. And now he’s in a hospital gown with a thing down his throat and a patch on his head. All in about an hour or so.”

  Her last entry on Facebook, the night before, had been a link to a story about Merrick McKoy, a Colorado man who, four days earlier, had posted a picture of himself and his nineteen-month-old daughter on his page shortly before shooting both her and himself. “This is the very definition of a monster,” wrote Nicole. “What is wrong with people?!!” Her first posting after the shooting read simply, “I love you Jaiden. I love you so much.”

  NEWS OF JAIDEN’S SHOOTING spread through Grove City like a bushfire. When convoys of police cars and news trucks roll up on a street like Independence Way, people inevitably start talking. For most of the morning few knew the names of either the victim or the assailant or their fates. All they knew was that a child had been shot. Jimmy Lewis, who lived across the road from Jaiden and worked at his after-school program at the local YMCA, had gone in early to work out. The Y is a bustling facility where children are fed, do their homework, and participate in either sports, arts, nature class, or “brain work” while they wait for their parents to pick them up. Jimmy got a call from his mother alerting him to the commotion taking place at the end of their street. His colleague Pamela Slater knew that Grove City was a small-enough community that, whoever the victim was, the YMCA would be impacted somehow. “There was a 90 percent chance that it was one of our kids,” she said. “The age and the connections we have in the community, whether or not it was an actual YMCA kid, it could have been a previous kid or a sibling. Somehow, someway we were going to be affected, and our kids would be affected because they would have known.”

  Within hours, Jaiden’s teacher, his baseball coach, Nicole’s sister, and many others were at the hospital. They had to give the security desk a password to stop the media from sneaking in. At around noon, Pamela was pulled out of a meeting and told that the victim was Jaiden. With only a few hours before the children were supposed to arrive for after-school care, she had no time to process her grief or shock as she pulled together the YMCA’s various departments to draft a letter to give to the parents. Their priority was to protect the children from rumor and let their parents break the news to them. So
when the children arrived, the staff said nothing. When parents came to pick up their children, they were given the letter.

  “I know you heard about the shooting,” Pamela would tell them. “I know, it’s terrible,” they’d reply. “But there’s a little bit more detail,” Pamela would interject. “I know, it’s terrible,” the parents would repeat. “And then,” says Pamela, “you hand the letter to the parents. And you say, ‘He was in our program.’ And they’d say, ‘Oh no. It was Jaiden.’

  “It was tough. It was difficult to have to repeat and repeat and repeat over and over. You could just see these levels and layers of the immensity of what we were talking about as I broke it to them. But we wanted the parents to be able to talk to the kids, especially because it was the weekend.”

  Most children found out that night or over the weekend. Jaiden’s baseball coach, Brady—a mild-mannered man who clearly understood his role as primarily coaching children rather than coaching a sport—says he knows of children who were never told. When the children came back to the YMCA on Monday, there were extra staff for them to talk to.

  “I can remember that there were some kids who were just devastated coming right in off the bus that Monday,” recalls Jimmy. “Our child care and metro department staff coached us on how we could support them. It was off and on all week. We serve meals every evening, and for a good week or so they kept an empty chair for Jaiden and even put a meal out for him. Probably wasn’t until after Christmas that you didn’t say ‘Jaiden’ and everyone starts crying.”

  Several months later, while wandering through the YMCA before the summer break, Pamela was struck by how many art projects were devoted to Jaiden. “There’d be these hearts with ‘Jaiden’ on them or little wings with his name or crosses that say ‘Rest in Peace, Jaiden.’ I wasn’t even really looking for them. But once I started noticing them they were everywhere.”

  AMY SANDERS AND NICOLE are like sisters. “We have a lot in common,” Amy explains. “We are both single moms. We both have biracial children. We were both struggling. She didn’t have family she was close to in Ohio, and neither did I. So we became like this team.” It was a very modern family. Two white women, coparenting their multiracial brood, who effectively grew up with two straight moms.