by Gary Younge
It’s not as though the movie she was watching was necessarily uplifting. As a single mother of three she remembers being exhausted, overwhelmed, and, at times, very down. “I wish I had done more with the boys. I wish I wasn’t so stressed and depressed all the time,” she says. “There were a lot of nights when I would come home from work and just order pizza because I didn’t feel like cooking anything. And I would stare at the TV, and Jaiden would either be at Quentin’s or he’d be upstairs or whatever. And I feel like I wish I’d gone outside and played with them. And I regret not doing those things with all my kids.”
But it was nonetheless a movie with a complete cast of characters, and it felt whole. “For the most part now it’s still just me trying to figure things out. Like I’ve always done. It’s nothing new. Except now instead of being a single mom of three I’m a single mom of two.”
The first time I met Nicole was in her office four months after Jaiden’s death. It was her birthday, but she hadn’t let on to her coworkers and had no plans to do anything special that night. She was wearing a hoodie bearing Jaiden’s name and face and the word Legendary. Her friend had set up a website so they could sell them to raise funds. She has one in every color and at the time was wearing one every day. She also wore a necklace spelling Jaiden’s name in curly script. She has another made from his thumbprint, which was taken at the funeral home. An image of Jaiden accompanied her pretty much everywhere she went. And yet at home she found it difficult to see him. “I can’t look at any of his pictures right now. I have school pictures in the living room over the mantel. I know where the picture is. I catch myself diverting my attention so that I don’t have to look in that area because it hurts too much to see him.” She’s in therapy, but struggling with the advice. “The only thing they keep saying is that grief is different for everybody. And they keep saying that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. They keep saying, ‘It’ll get better, it’ll get better.’ But I’m kind of at the point where I don’t see it.”
Five months later, when I saw her again she still couldn’t see it. We had dinner at the Longhorn Steakhouse and then went back to her house to meet friends who knew Jaiden. If anything, she was in a darker place. Most evenings she stayed up as late as possible to avoid going to sleep so that she could avoid the nightmares. Her mind whirs—an apparently endless loop of what-ifs and horror sequences that she can’t bear but also can’t prevent. “I keep replaying seeing him falling to the ground. I keep replaying, ‘I should have done this, I should have done that. I should have been there. I should have opened the door.’ I don’t want to sleep because I don’t want to think about it.”
So she stays up and tries to engross herself in a game or the TV or a book. Anything to keep her mind off her melancholic, self-flagellating regret. “When I go to sleep it’s because I absolutely can’t even keep my eyes open anymore. And I’m so hoping the dreams won’t even follow.” Three to five nights a week the nightmares come anyhow. Being awake is not much fun either. “If I don’t think about him, then I’m okay. But the second I start thinking about him and my brain starts going, then I just go crazy. It feels like I’m watching everybody else live their life in a TV show. And it’s like I’m going through the motions—talking to people and interacting with people—but I’m not really there.”
Schiff writes, “Far worse than lying awake all night, were the mornings. There seemed to be daily a brief period shortly after I opened my eyes when I completely forgot Robby was dead. Then, like a tidal wave, remembrance would come and engulf me and make me feel as if I were drowning. I had to fight my way out of bed every day—and I mean every day. This went on for several months and was probably my toughest battle.”13
So it has been for Nicole. Moreover, for every night she stays up trying to stave off nightmares, there follows a morning where she’s too tired to get herself together at a reasonable hour. Sometimes she simply can’t get out of bed. “I wish I could just get up and leave my problems at home, but I can’t.”
She has worked at the same small legal firm for some time and is on good terms with her boss. She says he has been very understanding since Jaiden died. But when she struggles, so does he. And she’s been struggling a lot. “I’ve had a lot of breakdowns and meltdowns.” Some days she doesn’t get in until noon. On others she doesn’t go in at all. “Sometimes I’ll just text him and say, ‘I’m not getting out of bed today. I just can’t do it.’”
“To bury a child,” writes Schiff, “is to see a part of yourself, your eye color, your dimple, your sense of humor, being placed in the ground. . . . In reality, when children die, not only are we mourning them, we are also mourning that bit of our own immortality that they carried.”14
In the reception area of St. Joseph’s Cemetery, where Jaiden is buried, a range of small pamphlets is assembled to assist the bereaved: “Losing Your Mom,” “Losing Your Dad,” “Losing Your Husband,” “Losing Your Wife,” “When Mom or Dad Dies,” “Talking with Your Kids About Funerals,” “Death of a Parent” “When Death Comes Unexpectedly,” and “Grieving the Death of a Grown Son or Daughter”—to name but a few. There is pretty much every permutation of grief possible but one—a pamphlet titled “Losing Your Young Child.” Because that’s not supposed to happen. It goes against the natural order of things that a parent would ever have to bury her child. When that child is as young as Jaiden, the tragedy is so unthinkable not even a cemetery has a leaflet for it.
“You know what I find interesting?” Brenda asks her undertaker boyfriend, Nate, in the TV series Six Feet Under. “If you lose a spouse, you’re called a widow or a widower. If you’re a child and you lose your parents, then you’re an orphan. But what’s the word to describe a parent who loses a child? I guess that’s just too fucking awful to even have a name.”15
CHAPTER 2
KENNETH MILLS-TUCKER (19)
Indianapolis, Indiana
NOVEMBER 23, 3:13 A.M. EST
A RAPID, REPETITIVE BARRAGE OF SHOTS HAD PIERCED THE NIGHT like the clacking of an almighty typewriter echoing through a dark, empty office. It was 3:13 a.m. when a woman, woken by the noise but still with the weight of sleep in her voice, called 911 and told the controller what she’d heard. “Some kind of gunfire,” she said, before deferring to her husband, a muffled presence on the line. “My husband says it’s automatic.” The controller asks which direction the gunfire is heading. “Going north. From just down to the street,” she says before her husband corrects her. “He says it’s going east. Going toward the main office.”
“How many did you hear?”
“Repeated fire. It’s more than six.”
“Six?”
“More than six. I’m in my bed, I didn’t get up. ’Cos they woke us up. It woke me up. I never heard this kind of fire before.”
The second caller was matter-of-fact and brief. “911? The police are round here now. But someone got shot outside my house.” As the drama unfolded in real time, residents in a patch of northwest Indianapolis offered what they could by way of information. Stray bullets peppered the area. One hit a bedroom wall, two others went through bedroom windows. The calls were partial, occasionally panicked accounts from residents whose slumber had been disturbed by the high-powered crackling of a weapon of war and who were now disoriented as they struggled to relate their versions of events to the dispassionate voice of a civil servant seeking hard, actionable information on the other end of the line.
“I’m at Three Fountains West apartments. And I think I heard gunshots. And then people running through right past my house,” a third caller says in breathless, abrupt sentences. “I heard the shots. And as soon as I looked out the window there were two gentlemen running right past my house. And I saw them stop.”
“Okay are they white, black, Hispanic?” asks the controller.
There’s a long pause.
“They are black. And they’re wearing black.”
“Both wearing black?”
“So my
roommate says the victim was shot right in front of his room.”
“He saw this happen?”
“He didn’t see it. He heard it. And looked out the window. He saw that he fell.”
The next caller is clearly terrified. “Me, my baby, and my boyfriend were in the house and then we heard a gunshot. My window. . . . My wall is just. . . . ” A bullet had just gone through her window. As she loses her train of thought, her boyfriend takes over, his tone more fretful and urgent. “They’re shooting from my house. We’re at Falcon Crest watching TV. I need to get out of here. Can you get a car so I can get out of here? I don’t want to be in this area.”
“I think there’s several officers already over there,” the dispatcher says.
“I don’t want to be in this area. What the hell.” He’s breathing hard.
“There are so many officers over there,” the controller says, trying to reassure him. “You’re going to be okay now. Okay. There’s a lot of them over there.”
He’s not listening. He’s instructing his girlfriend to gather their things. “Put the stuff in the baby bag. Find it tomorrow. We’ll carry it to a hotel.” His breathing is still labored.
“We’re going to let them know,” says the controller.
“How long is it going to take?” he asks.
“You want to leave now?”
“Yeah, we just want to sleep in a hotel.”
His girlfriend returns to the phone. “Hello ma’am. We’ve got a young two-month-old baby.”
“I understand.”
“So we really want to leave now, okay?” she says. “We really want to leave.”
The controller is getting testy. “I understand, ma’am, I’ve already told you that we’re going to get an officer inside your house, okay? They’re really busy out there. There’s a lot going on out there. They’ll be with you as soon as they can. But I’ll let them know that you want to leave and you want to go to a hotel. They’ll be there as soon as they can, alright? As soon as they can? As. Soon. As. They. Can. To talk to you, okay? Just stay inside your apartment. Do not go out. We’ll get an officer to you.”
“Alright. Thanks.”
Three Fountains West is in a curious part of Indianapolis where country, town, and suburb meet but don’t match. Within a three-minute drive you can be on the interstate, on a horse, in a box store, in an apartment, or in a town house. But Three Fountains West, a housing cooperative, is pleasant. It reminded me of the English new town that I grew up in during the seventies: newly built, affordable, cookie-cutter homes, with yards front and back, decent amenities—a few playgrounds, a community center, a swimming pool with a slide—and well-tended green space. A three-bedroom town house here goes for $620 a month, with management promising to “provide that ‘at home’ feeling without the hassles of home ownership.”1 According to the website of the census tract (a relatively small area usually comprising a few thousand people), this was the most diverse of all the places where kids got shot that day (62 percent black, 15 percent white, 20 percent Latino).2
The police got to Three Fountains West very quickly. They had been setting up for an unrelated detail nearby when they heard the shots reported in the 911 calls. Still, by the time they arrived, the shooters had fled, leaving what looked like a scene from a David Lynch movie. A green 2002 Honda Accord had struck a utility pylon and flipped onto its roof. Its four occupants were now scattered. Wayne Wilson, age twenty, the driver, was on the grass complaining of a pain in his back. Jaylen Grice, twenty, who was with him in the front, felt pain all over his body. Both were taken to the hospital. Tarell Davis, nineteen, was not there when the police arrived but returned later, apparently uninjured. Kenneth Mills-Tucker, nineteen, lay still, not complaining at all. He had staggered a short distance and fallen about a hundred feet from the car. He’d been shot in the left side of his torso; another bullet had grazed the right side of his abdomen. Police believe the gunfight took place right outside the administrative offices of Three Fountains West because casings were found in the parking lot there. Kenneth and his crew did not get very far. The car overturned yards away as they tried to head south on Moller Road, leaving the area in darkness for several hours after it struck the utility pole. The coroner’s verdict report reads, “Medical intervention was unsuccessful and the decedent was pronounced nonviable at 3:57 am.”
Around the time Amy Sanders and her family were crossing the Mason-Dixon line on their way from Houston to Grove City to see Jaiden inert but still technically alive, Kenneth became the second person whose story is told in this book to be shot and the first to die over the twenty-four-hour period covered. Jaiden was the youngest; Kenneth was the oldest—only three days shy of his twentieth birthday.
In the picture used for his obituary, Kenneth, who was also known as “kj,” looks quite the dandy, wearing a white shirt and bright white hat, tilted slightly to the right, and a matching bow tie and vest with gray and white diagonal stripes. His closed-mouth smile makes the most of a prominent chin and the goatee growing on it. Formal and handsome in his bearing and playful with his clothing, were he not black he could be an extra in The Great Gatsby.
Apparently, he had been looking forward to bidding farewell to his teens—his Twitter handle was his birthday, @Nov.26th. One of his last tweets, sent on the evening he died, read, “Out with the gang Dooney Wayne n Rell what’s going on tonight. My last weekend being a teenager.” According to the coroner’s report, the four had left a party at the Three Fountains apartment complex around 3:13 a.m.
As the sun rose, Twitter hummed with news of his death. In one exchange at 5:21 a.m., a friend commiserated with Kenneth’s girlfriend, Denise: “yu might be tha last voice he heard, no one can imagine what yu goin thru smh it’s hard for everybody but keep ur head up.” Denise had not heard. “what are you talking about,” she wrote. “kj dead” came the reply. “No TF he’s not what are yu talking about what’s your number where’s KJ.”
Those who know what the shooting was about have not come forward. If the police know, they are not saying. Meanwhile, Kenneth’s assailant has not been found.
DEAD MEN TELL NO tales. For each young person who fell that day there is a story beyond his death. The challenge, in compiling this book, was to unearth as many of those stories as possible. Finding family members was not always easy. There were short news reports, usually written by whichever general-assignment journalist was unlucky enough to be on the weekend shift. Occasionally, they included a quote from a family member. But often not. After that, there were online obituary notices, which provided names of parents, siblings, funeral directors, and churches. If the shooting had happened in or near the home, families often moved away—as Nicole had done. So contacting people was a mixture of persistence and luck: trawling online phone directories for names listed in online obituaries in the hope that there might be an address; messaging people on Facebook; literally walking streets and asking if anyone knew the family; approaching the funeral directors who buried the victims and the pastors who eulogized them; asking local journalists if they would share leads.
If any of those attempts bore fruit, then came the tough part: approaching the families.
Talking to the relatives of bereaved children is inherently intrusive. The issue is whether the intrusion is at all welcome. It is no small thing to trust a person you don’t know with the story of your dead child. Journalists are not entitled to such stories. But often parents are genuinely heartened to know that someone from outside their immediate circle is even interested. They are relieved to hear that someone, somewhere noted that the young person whom they bore and reared has been summarily removed from the planet.
Conversely, there are others who not only do not want to speak but resent being asked. The relative of one child in this book responded to my request for an interview with this angry voicemail: “Don’t call my phone. You’re a stupid son of a bitch. And I’ve got your number. And I’m gonna give it to my lawyer. And I don’t want anythi
ng to do with your dumb ass. Don’t you ever fucking call my phone. You bitch.” A family member, whom I’d already interviewed, had given me her number.
The truth is, you never know until you ask. I asked Kenneth’s grandfather. I found his name through the list of family members in Kenneth’s online obituary and then matched it to an identical name in the online phone directory. According to the census, his address was in a neighborhood with a substantial black community. I figured that of all Kenneth’s relatives, his grandfather was most likely to have a landline. So I called.
A woman answered and said I’d called the right place but he wasn’t home. I explained my idea for this book and she was very enthusiastic. “Thank God. Somebody should write about this,” she said. “They should teach children in first and second grade to stay away from guns. It’s a waste. The guys who shot him weren’t even looking for him,” she said. I asked if she had a contact number for either of his parents.
“Wait and I’ll call him,” she said, referring to the grandfather. “He’s in. I just thought you were a collector,” she laughed. The grandfather gave me Kenneth’s father’s cell phone number. In hindsight, I should have texted his dad. That would have given him time to process the inquiry in his own time. An unexpected call from an unfamiliar number in the middle of the day from someone wanting to talk about your recently murdered son would throw anyone off. I know that now. But I called. I told him how I’d got his number, what the book was about, and asked if I could see him when I came to Indianapolis in a few weeks.
