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Did Brian Easley Have to Die?

Calvin Easley holds a wallet-sized portrait of his brother, Brian. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

Aaron Gell | Longreads | April 2018 | 37 minutes (9,230 words)

This feature is published in collaboration with Task & Purpose, whose team of veterans, military family members, and journalists tell the stories of the military and veterans communities.

The thing that everyone remembered about the man in the light gray sweatshirt was how composed he was, how polite and respectful. One morning this past summer, he quietly entered a Wells Fargo bank branch in the Atlanta suburbs in a desperate state. But he didn’t curse or even raise his voice. He just calmly relayed the litany of setbacks and obstacles that had led him to an extraordinarily reckless act.

Brian Easley, 33-years-old, standing 6 feet 2 inches with close-cropped hair and glasses, had woken up on the morning on July 7, 2017, in Room 252 of a $25-a-night hotel nearby, where he’d been living, scraping by on a small monthly disability check from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

A former lance corporal in the Marine Corps, he had served in Kuwait and Iraq as a supply clerk, separating with an honorable discharge in 2005. But his transition to civilian life had been fraught. Joining his mother in Jefferson, Georgia, he found himself suffering from backaches and mental illness. He met a cashier at the local Walmart, and soon they married had a daughter together, but he disappeared for long stretches as his symptoms worsened. After his mother died in 2011, he bounced around — alternating between relatives’ spare rooms, VA mental hospitals, and nonprofit housing facilities. During a few especially difficult periods, he slept in his car.

By the summer of 2017, Easley had lost even that option. His usual disability check from the VA had mysteriously failed to materialize, and the rent was due. If he couldn’t cover it, he’d be on the street, and the thought terrified him. In the first week of July,  Easley called the Veterans Crisis Line repeatedly to inquire about the status of his disability payment. When they hung up on him, he called back. On Monday, July 3, Easley made his way to the VA’s Regional Benefits Office in Atlanta. But after an argument with staffers there, he left in humiliation, his issue unresolved.

A few days later at around 9:30 a.m, the Marine veteran entered the Wells Fargo branch, a faux colonial building on Windy Hill Road, a six-lane commercial roadway, and claimed that the backpack slung over his shoulder contained C-4 explosive. He allowed several employees and customers to exit and informed the two remaining employees that they should lock the doors and stay put. Then he began making calls, dialing 911 to let the authorities know what was happening, and a local news station, WSB-TV, to explain his predicament. “They took everything,” he told the assignment editor who picked up the phone. “With my last little bit of money I got I’ve been able to hold up at a hotel, but I’m going to be out on the street and I’m going to have nothing. I’m not going to have any money for food or anything. I’m just going to be homeless, and I’m going to starve.”

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The Wells Fargo bank in Marietta, Georgia where Brian Easley took hostages during a three-hour standoff with police. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

Easley spent nearly 38 minutes on the phone with the editor, relating his military history, his love for his young daughter, and his frustrations with the VA. At one point, he allowed her to speak with the hostages. One described her captor as “very respectful.”

Easley insisted he didn’t want to harm anyone. “I already told them if I detonate this bomb, I’ll let them go first,” he promised. “These ladies are very nice, and they’ve been very helpful and supportive.” He said he had no intention of robbing the bank, and though an employee had fled leaving piles of cash just sitting out at their workstation, he showed no interest in it. His focus was exclusively on his own money — that monthly disability payment from the VA.

“How much money are we talking about?” the editor asked.

“Not much,” Easley said. She pushed for a dollar figure.

“Eight hundred and ninety-two dollars,” he answered.

As Cobb County police deployed around the Wells Fargo, establishing an incident command center in the parking lot of the nearby Texaco gas station, two snipers, Officers Dennis Ponte and Brint Abernathy, took up positions at the edge of the bank’s rear parking lot. Chief Mike Register, who’d only recently taken over the department, arrived on the scene shortly thereafter. Easley, meanwhile, spent most of the morning on the phone.

In addition to WSB, he spoke to his wife, Jessica, and her cousin, Yolanda Usher. He fielded calls from random bank customers, politely informing them that there was an emergency underway and that they should call back later. He told his daughter, Jayla, then 8, that he loved her and to work hard in school. “Okay, Daddy,” she said. “I love you.” Through it all, he kept his cool, even indulging in some dark humor. He mused that he might be the “worst bank robber ever.” And when the WSB editor asked him for his Social Security number, he joked, “You’re not going to steal my money too, are you?”

As the three-hour ordeal unfolded, he remained unfailingly polite to his captives, allowing them to place calls to their loved ones and even maintain contact with police. “He just kept saying, ‘Ladies, I’m so sorry,’” one of the hostages told the Georgia Bureau of Investigation later. “And I was like, ‘I feel really bad. I understand. You’re in a hard spot.’ And he said, ‘Thank you. I appreciate that.’”

As reasonable and mild-mannered as he seemed, Easley did show some clear signs of mental illness. In his call with WSB, he explained that he was being followed and had been the victim of four kidnapping attempts, which he attributed to his halfbrother Calvin and a secret society. “I don’t know these people,” he said. “They seem to be able to track me wherever I go. They have my information.” During several difficult moments, he held his head in his hands and sobbed, muttering softly, “I just snapped.”

In an effort to understand the many factors that led to the Windy Hill Road incident, I spent seven months speaking to Easley’s family members and fellow Marines, officers of the Cobb County Police Department, Veterans Affairs officials, community activists, and experts in law enforcement, mental health, and military transition.

I found a story that was considerably more complex than it first appeared, involving the failure of the nation’s safety net; VA policies better designed to exploit former warriors than to assist them; a confused police response; and maybe an undercurrent of racial bias, one that the community liked to think it had outgrown long ago.

It was also the story of four former members of the U.S. armed forces, whose paths converged one morning in July on a busy suburban thoroughfare. Before the day was over, two would be recounting the incident to investigators, another would be facing the news media, trying to explain to the public just how it happened, and a fourth would lay dead on the floor of the bank, his head pierced by a single gunshot.

***

Born in 1983, Brian Easley was a mama’s boy as a child, his thumb rarely straying from his mouth. The youngest of eight kids, Easley lived with his siblings and parents, Barbara Easley and Bobby Lee Brown, in a ranch home in Williamstown, New Jersey. It was a tight fit — 10 of them in all, crammed into three bedrooms — but they made it work. Located south of Philly, it was a safe, quiet neighborhood with a small-town feel, notable mostly for the aroma of pizza sauce from the local cannery, which wafted across the local sports fields every afternoon.  Barbara was an indomitable woman, laboring tirelessly to make sure none of her children ever felt neglected despite their parents’ modest income. Brian was the baby, her very last, and she doted on him.

Easley had few friends growing up, but he was close with his brother James, the next oldest, joining him in PlayStation marathons that typically went on until there was no more game to play. Despite his height, he was soft-spoken and timid as a teenager. In school, he was painfully shy around girls, later confiding to his fellow Marines that he’d been a virgin when he signed up at 18.

Twelve weeks of basic training at Parris Island outwardly transformed him, precisely as the military intended. Watching him graduate in a ceremony at Camp Lejeune, his family members were dumbstruck. “I could not believe my eyes, how polished he was, how sharp, tall, strong,” said his brother Calvin, the oldest sibling. “I sat there in awe the whole entire time. He went in a little boy, and they turned him into a man.”

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Calvin Easley with a portrait of Brian from his service in the Marine Corps. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

Assigned to the 2nd Marine Logistics Group, based at Camp Lejeune, the soft-spoken recruit fell into a circle of friends who each quickly took him under their wing. To them, Easley seemed less a warrior than a big goofy kid, more content to eat cereal and watch his favorite anime series than to hit the local bars or shoulder a rifle.

The group formed a tight bond, fortified during their deployment to Kuwait in 2003. Though Easley’s fellow Marines would roll their eyes at his devotion to Tolkien novels and compare him to Steve Urkel, the teasing was affectionate. His tranquil demeanor, generosity, and maddening compulsion to apologize for the smallest offense — and then apologize for doing so — earned him the nickname Easy. He mostly stayed out of the boisterous debates that often preoccupied his unit, only to pipe up seemingly out of nowhere with some deliberately inane assertion, like, “I hear Somalia has the world’s strongest navy,” and then hold a poker face as long as he could — which usually wasn’t long.

Deployed to Iraq in 2005, Easley was stationed at the Al-Taqaddum Air Base, known as TQ, where he served as a warehouse clerk with the 2nd Supply Battalion. Easley’s job was to fill requisition orders for Marine combat units operating throughout Al-Anbar province, where insurgents, including the nascent al-Qaeda in Iraq, were mounting a surprisingly fierce campaign to drive American forces from the Western Euphrates River Valley.

As the three-hour ordeal unfolded, Easley remained unfailingly polite to his captives, allowing them to place calls to their loved ones and even maintain contact with police

The work was arduous — up to 17 hours a day for months at a time without a break — contributing to the chronic back pain that would plague Easley when he eventually returned to civilian life. “The warehouse jobs are out in the rear, so I wasn’t on the front lines,” Easley told WSB. “I had one close call during a security detail, but that’s about it.” Nevertheless, according to James Dunlap, who served with him, mortar fire was a regular feature, often sending everyone scrambling for bunkers. “I’m thinking, ‘We’re in supply, we’re not going to see this type of action,’” he recalled. “But when they say ‘Every Marine is a rifleman,’ they mean it.”

Following his honorable discharge in 2005, Easley returned to his mother’s home in Jefferson. He met a woman, Jessica Tate, and they moved in together and eventually got married. Around Jessica, Brian seemed fine — strangely quiet maybe, but also devoted, sweet, and easygoing. To his family, though, it was clear that something was wrong. “We noticed a difference in him right away,” Calvin recalled. Diagnosed with PTSD, and suffering from schizophrenia and paranoia, Easley told relatives he was barred from reenlisting. He often set off on long walks by himself. On one occasion shortly after his discharge, he grew so upset at a sibling’s teasing that he flew into a rage that left the family shaken.

These symptoms are not uncommon. “After we got out, it got rough for everybody on the tour,” James Dunlap explained. “It’s easier to be in a war zone than live life out here. You’re not in the Marine Corps anymore, so what’s your purpose?”

***

In 2008, Jessica became pregnant. Both of Brian’s parents fell ill around the same time, and he found himself in New Jersey helping to help care for them, visiting Georgia only briefly for the birth of his daughter, Jayla, but vowing to come back soon.

“He never did come,” Jessica recalled. His phone rang and rang. Eventually, family members told her how he’d just stood up one day, announced he was going for a walk, and never returned. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, I just had his baby and he disappeared. Is he leading a double life?’” she said. Fearing for his safety, she spent many nights crying herself to sleep. “I’m tearing up now just thinking about it.”  

It turned out Easley had checked himself into a VA mental hospital. Upon his release, he stayed with a brother in New Jersey. Aside from one trip to Georgia to meet Jayla when she was about 3, he mostly kept his distance. He explained to Jessica that people were after him — he wouldn’t say who — and he didn’t want to put his family in danger.

Just a week or so before Barbara Easley died, in 2011, Brian ley once again “up and walked off,” Calvin said. Voicemails and texts went unreturned. The funeral came and went with no sign of Brian, and years went by without a word. After calling every VA hospital in the directory, Jessica tried to move on.

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Brian with his daughter, Jayla, possibly around 2014. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

When he surfaced again around 2014, Easley moved in with Calvin in Georgia, taking his medication, keeping his VA appointments, and generally trying to get his life back on track.. He said he’d been in Orlando, enrolled in filmmaking classes. He made no mention to his brother about a brief spiritual detour, as a follower of the Black Israelites, a religious sect famous for preaching that African Americans are the true Jews. But perhaps it isn’t surprising that in his troubled state, Easley had gravitated toward a tight-knit community. “I think he wanted to belong to something larger than himself,” recalled Dunlap, who was in touch with Brian during this period. Eventually Easley “woke up,” Dunlap said, and was ejected from the group.

Easley didn’t spend much time in Georgia with Calvin and his wife, Anita—maybe a half year or so—before he was on the road again, moving to New Jersey to live with another brother. After several episodes, though, he returned to Marietta in early 2017, enrolling in computer classes at Lincoln College of Technology, a for-profit college located in a strip mall in Marietta. He had bought Jayla a phone and called regularly, helping her with homework and joining her in a prayer via Facetime nearly every night. Some of his money from the government went toward child support, and he wired more whenever Jayla needed it. Not long before Brian walked into the Wells Fargo, he had the idea to surprise Jayla with a dog. Jessica thinks the realization that he wouldn’t be able to follow through may be what set off the episode.

***

In the spring of 1971, 10-year-old Mike Register was walking through an affluent neighborhood of Macon, Georgia, when a pair of young men in a car waved him over with a proposition: How would he like to earn $5 helping out with some yard work? It was a tempting offer, but the situation seemed off. For one thing, Register was white, and the men in the car were black. Job offers like that just didn’t happen in Macon in those days. Register bolted toward the woods, but the men gave chase, abducted him, and later kept him captive in an abandoned house, demanding a $5,000 ransom from his family. His mother alerted the authorities and delivered the money as instructed.

All told, Register spent 20 hours as a prisoner, while the men debated whether to kill him. Eventually, they essentially let him go, threatening to slaughter his family if he said a word. The boy didn’t heed the warning. At some point, he’d managed to snag an ID belonging to the ringleader, 20-year-old John Plummer. After his release, Register presented the card to local police, resulting in Plummer’s arrest and eventual conviction. (The other two men were never identified.) At the trial, which drew charges of racial bias from the defense team, the all-white jury found Plummer guilty of kidnapping, then deliberated for just 10 minutes before suggesting a life sentence.

Surprisingly unguarded for a chief of police, now leading a department of more than 600 officers, Register is a voluble storyteller, recounting this traumatic chapter from a difficult childhood in an easygoing, buttery drawl without a hint of disquiet. Asked how the terrifying crime he experienced as a child may have affected his response to the Wells Fargo hostage-taking, he insisted it had no impact. “I certainly have empathy for anyone who is held against their will,” he said. “Certainly that’s a part of my life, and I’m very thankful that it turned out the way it did for me. But no matter what my life experience may have been, I certainly try to be objective with any situation.”

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Cobb County’s Chief of Police, Michael J. Register. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

Register enlisted in the reserves in his early twenties, joining the 11th Special Forces Group and becoming what was then known as “SF baby,” jumping right into commando training without any prior military experience. He thrived in the reserves, taking time off from his work as a police officer with the Cobb County PD for intensive training and deployments to Germany, Haiti, and Belize, among other countries.

By 2002, when Brian Easley entered the Marine Corps, 40-year-old Register was in Afghanistan with the 20th Special Forces Group, serving on a mobile reconnaissance team. After retiring from active duty in 2005, the same year Easley left the service, Register worked for the Department of Defense, devising strategies to counter the insurgency’s devastating use of IEDs. In 2014, he returned to suburban Atlanta and eventually resumed his career in law enforcement, becoming chief of police for Clayton County, 20 miles south of Atlanta.

Register was recruited as chief of police for nearby Cobb, which includes the city of Marietta, just three weeks before Brian Easley walked into the Wells Fargo. Though both counties belong to the metropolitan Atlanta area, they pose distinct challenges for law enforcement. Whereas Clayton is economically depressed and predominantly black, Cobb County is a mostly white, affluent bedroom community that was represented in Congress by a former leader of the nativist John Birch Society for nearly a decade and was long known for its “legendary intolerance,” as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution put it.

Though an influx of recent transplants, mostly young professionals, has tilted Cobb’s politics left, the county retains its reputation as a stronghold of white conservatism. Despite the 2017 opening of a new stadium for the Atlanta Braves, Cobb had for years steadfastly refused to allow the construction of a rail link to Atlanta’s transit system, in part out of a longstanding desire to wall itself off from the so-called “black Mecca” across the Chattahoochee River. (Years ago, a county commissioner infamously declared he’d stock the river with piranha to block rapid transit.)

Although the violent crime rate is considerably higher in Clayton than in Cobb — with nearly eight times as many murders on a per capita basis in 2016 — Register’s new position is in some respects trickier to navigate, given Cobb’s fast-changing demographics and more fraught political atmosphere. As chief of police for Clayton County, Register was an advocate of transparency and community policing initiatives, and Cobb community activists viewed him as an ideal choice to take the helm of their department as it sought to transform itself from a hidebound reminder of the region’s troubled past into an exemplar of the bighearted cosmopolitan New South.

To judge by the stream of racially charged incidents that have made the news in the area in recent years, change was long overdue. In 2015, the county’s only black commissioner reported what appeared to be racial profiling by an undercover officer — a complaint that elicited a shrug from her fellow commissioners. A few months later, the same officer was involved in a disturbing encounter with a black driver that was captured on dashcam. (“Go to Fulton County,” he said. “I don’t care about your people”). Following a suspension, the officer resigned.

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The front desk of Cobb County Police Headquarters in Marietta, Georgia. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

The community’s negative perception of the department was confirmed last year in an independent report on police operations drawn up at the county’s behest by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Although the report did not find evidence of systematic bias, it identified “a concerning deficit of public trust in and among a portion of the population.” It also made 34 recommendations, many of which Register is now implementing. Among a host of other changes, he ordered that all members of his department receive additional training in crisis intervention, crime prevention, cultural diversity, and fairness in policing. The chief has also considered a proposal by the Cobb Coalition for Public Safety to ensure that mental health professionals be called upon on in crisis situations. Some departments mandate that specially trained teams be deployed whenever an incident involves a potential mental health emergency, but in Cobb County, such experts are only brought in at the request of the crisis negotiation team. In Easley’s case, no such request was ever made.

***

According to the Marshall Project, law enforcement is the third most common occupation for military veterans, after truck driving and management. In part, this is attributable to the preferential hiring encouraged by initiatives like the 2012 federal program Vets to Cops. A career in law enforcement has an additional appeal to veterans, offering, as few occupations do, the sense of fellowship, duty, and shared risk that they experienced in the military. “I think that everyone, no matter who you are, you want to belong to something,” Register said. “People that have served in the military understand that they are part of something that is great, admirable, honorable, and that is important.” A police force, he added, “is a natural transition”  — conferring membership in what Ken Vance, executive director of the Peace Officer Standards and Training Council of Georgia, termed a “blue brotherhood.”

A substantial percentage of CCPD officers are veterans — several of whom, like Chief Register, played key roles in the Wells Fargo incident. Sgt. Andre Bates, the lead negotiator, served in the Marine Corps, as did Officer Dennis Ponte, the sniper who took Easley’s life.

In his 2016 book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, Sebastian Junger advances a powerful case linking veterans’ struggles with PTSD largely to the difficulty of navigating the fraught transition from the tight-knit world of the armed forces to the more isolating and superficial existence of life on the homefront.

This certainly tracks with Brian Easley’s experience. Joining the Marine Corps at 18, the former wallflower quickly found the camaraderie, friendship and shared sense of purpose that had largely eluded him until that point. After his discharge, cut off from his social group, he found himself increasingly alienated and adrift — an experience that undoubtedly contributed to his mental illness. Soon, aside from his immediate family and Jessica, he was more or less on his own, so lonesome in those early years that in addition to his primary job at a Home Depot distribution center, he took a second gig at a Church’s Chicken, not for the money, he told Jessica, but “just to pass the time while you’re at work.”

A career in law enforcement has an additional appeal to veterans, offering, as few occupations do, the sense of fellowship, duty, and shared risk that they experienced in the military.

When I asked Register how he has dealt with his own traumatic experiences — the kidnapping as well as his later service in Afghanistan — he shrugged off the question, more comfortable speaking about the prevalence of PTSD in general. But as frightening as his childhood ordeal clearly was, his success in dealing with it is not surprising: After helping to foil his own abduction, he was hailed as a hero by the national news media. In recognition of his bravery and quick-wittedness, the local police department named the 11-year-old its honorary chief of detectives.

“Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact, they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary,” Junger wrote in Tribe. “Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.” Register seems to have found his purpose and his community in law enforcement, as did Bates, Ponte, and the many other veteran members of the CCPD.

***

As Brian Easley told the editor at WSB, the two hostages, and the crisis negotiator — basically anyone who would listen — his monthly disability check from the Department of Veterans Affairs came to $892. The VA confirmed that his last payment, for that precise amount, was sent on June 1. So perhaps it’s no wonder that when July 1 came and went, and the expected funds were not in the account, Easley began to panic.

According to WSB investigative reporter Aaron Diamant, Easley called the VA’s Veterans Crisis Line eight or nine times that week, including twice on the morning of the incident, and he was “hung up on a few times.” (When contacted, a VA spokesperson declined to comment on Diamant’s reporting.) According to its mission statement, the VCL was established in 2007 to “provide 24/7, world class suicide prevention and crisis intervention services to veterans, service members, and their family members.” But as the demand for its services has surged, the program has been plagued with issues. A March 2017 report by the VA’s Office of Inspector General found a number of shortcomings with the VCL, including deficiencies in operations and quality assurance. In response, the VA issued a press release touting improvements; a few months after Brian Easley’s death, it announced plans to open a third call center to handle another spike in demand.

According to Lincoln Educational Services senior VP for student financial services Rajat Shah, Easley visited the school’s Marietta campus on June 30 to discuss the possibility that his money had been garnished due to a tuition issue. A counselor at the school called the VA directly, and Easley was given an appointment at the VA’s Regional Benefits Office on July 3. He “was extremely agitated and belligerent,” a VA spokesperson told me , and as a result was briefly placed him in handcuffs. “Once Easley calmed down,” the spokesperson said, “police removed the handcuffs and a VA benefits supervisor … explained to him that his compensation check was recouped due to a debt he had created by his failure to complete college courses.” Easley agreed to return on July 6 with the proper documentation to set up a payment plan “and left the regional office voluntarily.” He never returned.

Perhaps unwittingly, Easley had become caught in a financial squeeze involving what are known as overpayments — a common pitfall for recipients of Post 9-11 GI Bill tuition assistance. Government tuition payments are made in full directly to an academic institution, but if a veteran drops too many courses or fails to attend class, the VA will initiate a process to recover the money directly from the student. According to Shah, Easley last attended class in late November 2016. He would have had to miss just six days of his module to trigger a mandatory notice to the VA, though Shah said the school tries to contact a student before taking that step. Easley’s overpayment was $1,163, so after the $892 was deducted from his account, he owed a mere $271.

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Objects found in Brian Easley’s pockets after his standoff with the Cobb County police. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

If, in fact, Easley did miss some classes, it would hardly be a surprise. He was suffering from a severe mental illness, something the Department of Veterans Affairs, which was responsible for his care, certainly knew. Although the VA claims it sent Easley five letters informing him of the overpayment, his erratic housing situation meant he probably never received them.

“This happens literally all the time,” said Carrie Wofford, president of Veterans Education Success, a nonprofit watchdog and advocacy group focused on veterans education. A 2015 report by the General Accounting Office estimated that a quarter of all veterans receiving tuition assistance are billed for overpayments, many without ever fully understanding how the system works. “Because VA is not effectively communicating its program policies to veterans,” the report said, “some veterans may be incurring debts that they could have otherwise avoided.”

Although Shah said Lincoln staffers tried to help Easley with the VA, the school has drawn criticism in the past for an apparent indifference to the welfare of its students. “The programs are costly, more than twice as much as at local community colleges,” the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee the committee wrote in a 2012 report, “and Lincoln makes virtually no investment in student services despite enrolling the students most in need of these services.” The committee said student retention and loan repayment rates were among the worst it had seen, and the report concluded, “Although the majority of students leave the company’s schools with no degree or diploma, the company also receives increasing amounts of Federal taxpayer dollars and profit.”

***

Shortly after Easley spoke to the 911 operator that Friday morning in July, the Cobb County Police Department showed up in force. They closed Windy Hill Road to all civilian traffic. They made sure those sheltering inside the Popeye’s, the Waffle House, the Wendy’s, the Subway, and the Chick-fil-A all knew to keep clear of the windows in case a detonation shattered the glass. The fire department was dispatched to the scene, as was the bomb squad, SWAT team, crisis negotiators, and a K-9 unit. Officers of the Sheriff’s Department handled traffic duties. Representatives from the Marietta PD, the ATF, the FBI, and its state equivalent, the GBI, turned up as well.

Register arrived within the hour, taking up a position at the makeshift command post. Solidly built, with a tree-trunk physique and wispy brown hair fading to gray, Register was viewed by community leaders as a reformer. The incident at Windy Hill Road would be his first test.

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Michael Register was recruited as chief of police for Cobb County just three weeks before Brian Easley walked into the Wells Fargo. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

Meanwhile, inside the bank, Easley was getting a crash course in how TV news gets made. WSB-TV boasts one of the top local news organizations in the country: In the June ratings period, the station had attracted nearly two-thirds of TV news viewers in the metropolitan Atlanta area. Now, the staff had landed an incredible scoop simply by picking up the phone, and they knew it. On an audio recording of the call turned over to the GBI, one can hear the assignment editor’s colleagues scrambling to press their advantage. As she works to nail down what to Easley must have sounded like trivial details (“You said you had lived in Marietta previously, when did you live in Marietta?”), it seemed to dawn on him that her interest lay less in solving his problem than in working the story. “Okay, ma’am, I’m sorry,” he finally said, “but I’m about to wrap this up.”

As the call ended, two of the editor’s colleagues could be heard discussing how to proceed. “What can I report?” one asks. The exuberant reply: “Everything!”

Sometime after 11 a.m., Sgt. Andre Bates, the incident’s lead crisis negotiator, settled into a black Ford Taurus at the Texaco. He took a deep breath and dialed the number given to him by the 911 operator. Bates — who, like Easley, is black — established a rapport with the hostage taker almost instantly based on their shared military background. “I’m going through it with Veterans Affairs myself, so I know it can be difficult when they drag their feet,” he said.

Their status as former Marines further cemented the bond. “Semper Fi, sir. I’m a West Coaster, MCRD San Diego,” Bates said. “What can we do to resolve this, sir, and help you out? From one Marine to the other?” Although only Sgt. Bates’s side of the conversation is audible on the recording, his skills as a negotiator are evident. He gets Easley talking about his back injury and mentions his own knee and ankle issues. He assures Easley nobody is going to get hurt: “That’s my responsibility — to make sure you stay alive.” He compares the police force to the Marine Corps and engages Easley as a fellow enlisted man. “I have three of my chiefs that are personally here … guys walking around with stars just like it is in the Marine Corps . . . they’re not happy,” he said. “Just asking from one Marine to the next — to show that you and I are communicating and we’re on the same program — could you release one of those ladies, please?” And he appeals to Easley’s personal dignity, reminding him, “Your honor is worth more than the $892 the VA owes you, sir.”

Around noon, Easley agreed to a deal: A pack of Newports in exchange for one of the hostages. He seemed to mean it. As soon as he got off the call, Easley turned to his two captives and invited them to decide which one would leave. They told him they couldn’t choose. “Well, you’re just the teller,” he told one, “so I’ll let you go, and I’ll keep the branch manager here so they won’t blow my head off.”

The deal marked a significant breakthrough. They were working together now. A resolution seemed well in hand. In a brief interview, Sgt. Bates expressed absolute confidence that Easley would have honored his side of the bargain. “We were brothers who had bonded with each other,” he said. “I felt that me and him had connected as men, as Marines, and as family men.”

Bates hustled over to brief his superiors in the mobile command center, a large RV parked nearby. Among them were Register and the incident commander, Maj. Jeff Adcock. Reporting to him were Lt. Joel Preston, another Marine veteran, who commanded the tactical team, and Lt. Jorge Mestre, the crisis team commander.

It was a formidable group, with decades of experience. Mestre was a key figure in a 1999 incident in which he was wounded after trying to reason with a local man who was reportedly suffering from paranoid delusions. After opening fire on the officer, the man barricaded himself inside the house with his aging mother, and later killed two members of the Cobb County SWAT team after they stormed the family home. The tragedy is viewed as a critical lesson among tactical-policing experts, who blamed the incident on poor intelligence and inadequate staffing, revising standard procedures accordingly. For some members of the Cobb County PD, the killing may have carried an additional lesson: In a barricaded subject situation, avoid unnecessary risks.

The negotiator tried to appeal to Easley’s personal dignity. ‘Your honor is worth more than the $892 the VA owes you, sir.’

As Adcock and the other commanders quickly began hammering out a plan to deliver the cigarettes without endangering their officers, they had good reason for optimism. According to Chris Grollnek, a former SWAT officer who now provides training in dealing with active-shooter situations, “Ninety-nine percent of the time, when a negotiator is making a deal for one thing for another, the incident ends peacefully.”

Around the same time, another opportunity to end the standoff safely presented itself. One of the hostages who’d been on the phone with the police throughout much of the morning reported to Officer Christopher Few, Bates’s colleague on the crisis negotiation team, that Easley had gone to the bathroom. He was in there for more than a minute, it seemed, long enough for both hostages to potentially run out the doors. Once Few understood what was happening, he began to walk the hostage through an escape plan. But seconds later, Easley returned. “He’s out,” she said quietly.

Meanwhile, along the wood line, the snipers lay on the ground, squinting through scopes at the action inside the bank. One of them, Officer Ponte, had also served in the Marine Corps, working as a helicopter crew chief before his discharge in 1992. On assessing the situation, he’d selected a Lapua .338, a $5,000 semiautomatic rifle billed as “The Long Arm of the Free World,” and loaded it with Sierra MatchKing .338 250 grain ammunition, a combination he felt certain would have the power to penetrate the two glass doors and still maintain its trajectory. Then he’d aimed his laser at the building and noted a range of approximately 66 yards. Every once in awhile, as he peered through the scope, he got a good visual of the man in the gray sweatshirt. He radioed Lt. Benjamin Cohen, the assistant SWAT commander, and advised him that he had a clean shot. Should he engage the threat, he asked. Word came back: “Not at this time.” The rest of the tactical team was not yet in position. Stand by.

Minutes passed. On the SWAT team’s radio frequency, Ponte heard indications that a hostage might be released, but from what he could see, he later told the GBI, “There was no effort or energy being put forth toward releasing somebody.” Then Ponte made a fateful decision.

Around 12:15 p.m. on July 7, a single shot rang out on Windy Hill Road, ending the three-hour ordeal in the Wells Fargo and adding Easley’s name to the list of 236 mentally ill people killed by police in 2017.

***

Not only were Sgt. Bates and the various commanders caught off guard by Ponte’s action, his own fellow SWAT team members were as well. In a well-planned operation, the tactical team would have reacted instantly to the gunshot. Instead, nine long seconds ticked by before an officer put the CCPD’s BearCat armored vehicle in drive and began barrelling toward the door of the bank, inadvertently endangering the hostages, who were just then preparing to dash out in the opposite direction. After the BearCat struck a column and backed up, its hood covered with broken bricks, the hostages escaped, and members of the SWAT team hustled them into the back of the vehicle, which quickly reversed away from the bank.

The standoff was over. But exactly what happened to Brian Easley — and who made the decision to kill him — would remain a mystery for months. Addressing the news media shortly after 1:30 p.m., Register incorrectly framed the incident as an extraction operation gone awry. “We had a SWAT team, tactical team, move up on the bank to help get the hostages out,” he said. “During the extraction process, contact was made with the suspect, and it appears the subject is deceased.” The explanation seemed to imply that Easley had been shot during some kind of confrontation with the entry team rather than by a sniper hidden in the woods. No mention was made to the public of Bates’s negotiations with Easley to release one of the women for a pack of smokes. Although the entire command team knew of the arrangement — as did the two hostages and other members of the CCPD — it is only being made public now as a result of an open records request.

Barricaded-subject incidents, especially those involving hostages, are among the most difficult circumstances police officers face. Typically, attempting to negotiate a peaceful resolution is the preferred approach, with a tactical assault reserved as a last resort. But the balance between crisis negotiators and SWAT elements is a delicate one. Negotiators are trained to strike up a rapport with a suspect, calm them down, appeal to their sense of reason. Tactical officers, increasingly outfitted with military-style gear, are primed to take swift, decisive action.

The Cobb County Police Department’s internal Policy Manual states that in a hostage situation like the one at the Wells Fargo, a tactical solution must only be initiated “should communication with the subject fail to resolve the incident,” and that “the ultimate decision [on how to respond] will be made by the On-Scene Commander.” In the case of Brian Easley, communication was making genuine progress, and the On-Scene Commander, Major Adcock, had decided to let the negotiations play out. According to Ponte’s own testimony, he made the ultimate decision himself, an apparent violation of both policies. He cited no particular action on Easley’s part — an erratic movement or aggressive gesture, for instance — that might have indicated an elevated risk. When I reached him for comment, Ponte declined to speak except to say that his side of the story would be told “at the appropriate time.”

The standoff was over. But exactly what happened to Brian Easley — and who made the decision to kill him — would remain a mystery for months.

Sgt. Bates, the crisis negotiator, refused to criticize the actions of a colleague and fellow Marine. But asked whether he’d been sincere when he’d promised Easley that nobody would hurt him if he cooperated, Bates told me, “I meant that from the bottom of my heart. I’m out there to do a job. I’m pretty good at what I do, and the things I’m telling him are coming from the heart, one human being to the next. My job is to protect everyone so we can all walk out of there and play out whatever happened in court. That is the win for me.”

All of the experts I contacted were careful to emphasize they lacked a complete picture of what happened, and they expressed reluctance to second-guess CCPD’s handling of a dangerous and chaotic situation. They agreed, however, that the decision to shift away from a negotiating posture and initiate a tactical operation is not typically made lightly or based on the judgment of an individual officer, and that the situation on Windy Hill Road might well have concluded peacefully had negotiations been given more time.

Easley “articulated he’s not going to do anything to harm the hostages, so that’s a great sign,” said Randall Rogan, a crisis negotiation expert and co-interim dean of communications at Wake Forest University. “If a suspect is emotionally calm at the beginning of a siege or incident, that is the most critical moment.” He added that Easley’s demands were extraordinarily modest. “He’s not asking for a helicopter and $2 million dollars and taking two hostages on a plane.”

“Easley was very calm, he indicated wasn’t looking to hurt anybody, and he demonstrated a willingness to cooperate,” noted Jack Cambria, a 33-year veteran of the New York City Police Department who spent more than a decade in tactical operations and, later, as commander of the NYPD’s crisis negotiation squad, responded to more than 4,000 incidents. “Tactical assault is reserved for the last option, when it becomes absolutely necessary.”

Following a grand jury hearing, Ponte was cleared of any wrongdoing in connection with Easley’s death. District Attorney Vic Reynolds told WSB that the officers “followed the law and did what they were supposed to do.” According to the policy manual, “ability, opportunity and jeopardy” must all be present for a shooting to be justified. As far as anyone knew, Easley had the ability to cause harm to the hostages with a backpack full of explosives. He had the opportunity to do so. And the hostages were plainly in jeopardy.

Cambria, who trains law enforcement agencies around the country in crisis and hostage negotiation, agreed that Ponte likely acted within the law. Nonetheless, he pointed out, “Just because an action might be lawful doesn’t mean it was necessary.”

The operation appears to have been flawed in several additional respects. Given Ponte’s testimony that the hostages were not in sight when he opened fire, he ran the risk that one might have been injured by debris or a wayward bullet. A poorly aimed round might have set off the explosives Easley claimed to have in the backpack, mere inches from where the shot made contact. And there was one more possibility to consider: “When there are people alive near the subject, you very rarely will take a shot to neutralize him in the event that God forbid, he has a dead-man’s switch,” Grollnek said, referring to a detonator wired to explode if a trigger is released. Such devices, which work like a hand grenade, are simple to engineer. Had Easley been using one, Ponte’s shot could well have caused the deaths of the hostages. Finally, the haphazard extraction of the two captives also indicated that the decision to act may have been taken too hastily.

As the hostages were whisked to safety, a robot entered the bank and retrieved Easley’s backpack, placing it in a “total containment vessel.” It was eventually deemed harmless, and inside investigators found a Bible, some papers, and a small machete, among other incidentals. (Easley had never taken out the knife or mentioned having it, and Calvin later suggested he may have been carrying it for protection.) On his body, they found a wallet, a broken cross pendant, and an electronic device one hostage had assumed was a switch to detonate a bomb. In fact, it was a tool for detecting hidden listening devices, perhaps a prudent purchase for a man suffering from the paranoid delusion that he might be kidnapped at any time.

Before long, patrons of the nearby establishments, who’d been on lockdown all day, were finally allowed to go about their business. After being interviewed by police and GBI agents, the two hostages went home to their worried families. The local news teams packed up their gear. Easley’s body taken to the Cobb County’s Medical Examiner in Marietta. Chief Register addressed the media and then headed back to headquarters. Traffic on Windy Hill Road resumed in both directions.

***

The killing of Brian Easley was just the first of several crises to engulf the Cobb County Police Department in the early months of Register’s tenure. In late August, WSB aired bodycam footage from November 2016 in which Officer James Caleb Elliot is seen firing multiple shots at the back of an unarmed teenager as he flees through a residential neighborhood, striking him in the leg. A grand jury declined to recommend charges against Elliot, and DA Reynolds noted that officers pursuing a fleeing suspect in a “violent, forcible felony” are allowed to use lethal force. The fact that the teenager was not actually involved in a carjacking was viewed as immaterial, since the officer merely had to believe he was.

The new chief, for his part, indicated that legalities aside, the shooting endangered the public, and he used the release of the video as an opportunity to initiate additional use-of-force training. He also noted that the department recently purchased a new simulator to better prepare officers to handle such situations. Elliot left the force three weeks after the shooting, and a lawyer for the victim announced plans to file a federal lawsuit.

Then on August 31, Channel 2 released another dashcam video, this one from the summer of 2016. In it Lt. Greg Abbott, who is white, is heard remarking to a white motorist, “Remember, we only kill black people.” Though many observers pointed out the officer’s sarcastic tone, the starkness of his statement at a time of heightened concern over police shootings of African Americans (the killing of Philando Castile outside St. Paul, Minnesota, had happened just four days before the traffic stop) seemed emblematic. The video went viral. National outlets picked up the story. Representatives for Al Sharpton’s National Action Network told Register a protest march was being organized. Register’s office was bombarded by media calls from as far away as the United Kingdom. This time, Register moved swiftly, announcing that the process to terminate Abbott had begun.

“It’s been one of those weeks in Cobb County,” Register told me with a sigh not long after. The decision, he said, had not been easy. But Register was unmoved by the argument that Abbott had been trying to gain the motorist’s compliance by creating a casual rapport, calling the statements “inexcusable and inappropriate” and “not indicative of the values and the facts that surround the Cobb County Police Department and this county in general.”

A vocal contingent within the CCPD expressed unhappiness that he hadn’t defended Abbott. “They took it as me not supporting them,” Register said. After a local talk radio jock went after him — taking care to inform listeners that the police chief’s wife is African American and even noting her place of work — white nationalists went on the offensive, sending Register hate mail in which they called him “a disgrace to the white race.”

Following the decision, Register scheduled a set of mandatory staff meetings in which he laid out his rationale for demanding Abbott’s ouster. The radio station apologized. Eventually, the controversy seemed to die down. Still, it was clear the job was weighing on him. “I’ve got to tell you,” he admitted, “sometimes I’m like, ‘Damn, maybe I should have stayed in Clayton County.’”  

***

The tendency of police departments to close ranks in an effort to shield their actions from public scrutiny is well established and perhaps unsurprising. The same “blue brotherhood” that bonds law enforcement officers can easily slip into a form of tribalism when a member of the team is under threat. The commitment to one another that keeps officers alive in dangerous situations also seems to discourage self-reflection when things go wrong. Initially, after I asked Register about the killing of Easley, he mounted a strong defense of Ponte. “He saw this thing unfolding and felt that this might be the only chance to immobilize the suspect and save the two women, and he took it,” Register said. “If we would have waited five more minutes, and he had detonated explosives and killed himself and the two hostages, then we may have been having a conversation — ‘Now, why did we wait so long?’”

Register also emphasized that Ponte — who was cleared by a grand jury following another fatal shooting in 2016 — had struggled in the aftermath of the Wells Fargo incident. “One reason why it’s been so hard on this young man who took the shot,” he said, “is that he is a veteran himself and a Marine. It’s very hard on him. It makes you want to cry.” (Although Register repeatedly spoke of his officer as a “young man,” records indicate that Ponte was born in 1966.)

A month later, when I pressed Register about the revelations contained in the GBI report, which he indicated he had not yet seen, he reconsidered his position. While reiterating that the shot was legal, he said, “I do call into question the timeliness of it.” He also said he’d be looking into the apparent breakdown in command and control, explaining that he would “dig deeper and ensure that if there were any issues that created the dysnchronization between the negotiating team and the tactical team that we address that and we fix that. Certainly, as the event was unfolding, I don’t know if the communication was transpiring as quickly as it possibly should have.”

If we waited five more minutes, and he had detonated explosives and killed himself and the two hostages, then we may have been having a conversation — ‘Now, why did we wait so long?’

The next morning, Register called back. He mentioned an additional change he’d implemented a few months before, a monthly training session with his incident commanders to do “tabletop exercises,” reviewing some of the scenarios they might face in the field. He added that he’d been up half the night digging into the reports on the Easley shooting, and he’d scheduled a weekly meeting with his leadership staff to talk about developing a procedure for identifying mistakes so they won’t be repeated. “We have to take some time to look at what the findings were and come back for after-action reviews,” he said. “That’s the only way we were going to be better.”

***

Whatever mistakes may or may not have been made on Windy Hill Road on July 7, there’s one issue about which everyone seems to agree: Brian Easley himself bears a good portion of the blame. Even when one takes into account his mental illness and the other formidable struggles he was facing, the fact remains that Easley alone made the choice to enter the bank, claimed he had a bomb, and hold two women against their will.

“I’m sorry for what happened,” Calvin Easley told me when I visited him and his wife, Anita, in their tidy home in the Atlanta suburbs. “I’m sorry he went in there and took hostages. I’m very sorry for that. He was not in his right mind. But they didn’t have to kill him. He just wanted to get his story out.”

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On a phone call from the Wells Fargo, Easley told his daughter Jayla that he loved her and to work hard in school. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

That story is one that many veterans can relate to. The same military experience that helped make him a man left him anxious, troubled, and eventually unable to work. Perhaps for the first time in his life, he discovered a sense of brotherhood and meaning in the Marine Corps, one he was unable to replicate once he returned home.

But Easley did what he could. He cared for his daughter, calling her every day and sending gifts when finances allowed. He battled the VA for years to receive the benefits he’d earned through his service. He sought an education, hoping to start a career, support his family, and make a new life, only to find himself in a trap that has ensnared thousands of his fellow veterans.

Then, one morning in July, he woke up to find that the money he counted on to make it through simply wasn’t there. And just like the Marine Corps had taught him, he took initiative. He called the hotline. When they hung up, he called again and again. Finally, he walked into the benefits office to plead his case in person. But instead of recognizing a veteran in crisis and working out a plan, or perhaps directing him across the street to the hospital, writing a prescription, and getting him back on track, they sent him away in search of paperwork.

“The problem was bigger than the Cobb County Police Department and Mr. Easley,” Bates told me. “The problem is the system — how they treat retired veterans. You should get more than ‘I appreciate your service.’ The VA owes these guys more. They’re willing to put their life on the line for their country, and when they separate from military they deserve better.” In particular, he criticized the VA’s decision to handcuff Brian Easley rather than help him. “That’s where the whole thing went bad, I believe,” he said.

He was not in his right mind. But they didn’t have to kill him. He just wanted to get his story out.

“I’m just baffled about what is so hard to negotiate,” said John Delorme, a Marine who served with Easley. “This isn’t a terrorist. This is a guy who fought against terrorism. As a veteran it makes me feel smaller than a grain of sand, the way he was treated.”

“I just don’t want his little girl to grow up to think her dad was a bad person,” said Ian Emmett, another battle buddy. “He was a good person.”

Alecia Miller, who dated Easley for two years when he was in the military, agreed. “I hate for him to be painted as this crazy deranged person,” she said. “This is someone who the system failed, and because of that, a decision was made out of desperation, and someone has lost their life because of it.”

“You go over there and you fight a war for our country and everybody’s out to kill you,” Calvin Easley told me. “You don’t know nobody. You’re in a foreign land. But the real sharks? The real sharks are back at home. There’s no reintegration. You don’t get support from the country that you fought for.”

It was late. Anita stood behind him as he spoke, patting his back. “I’m livid,” he went on, fighting back tears. “He was a hero. He was not some psycho on the corner. He was not. He was a gentle giant until you pushed him. If you pushed him to the max, then you’d see a different person. But it took an awful lot. It took a lot.”

“I know this,” he said. “He was my brother.”

***

Aaron Gell is the features editor of Task & Purpose and an adjunct instructor at NYU’s Prison Education Program. He has contributed to numerous publications, including New York magazine, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair,

This article was published in collaboration with the editorial team at Task & Purpose. 

***

Editor: Michelle Legro
Photographs: Hector René Membreno-Canales

Fact checker: Matthew Giles
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

This Is How They Saved Me

Getty / Photo courtesy the author / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Neda Semnani | Longreads | March 2018 | 20 minutes (4,986 words)

August 8, 1982. It was nearly five in the morning when my uncle Kavoos woke up my six-year-old cousin Laleh to say goodbye. He left her his calligraphy pen and asked her to keep it safe for him until he could come back for it. She nodded sleepily and promised that she would. She kissed him before falling back to sleep. In the other room, my mother, aunts, and uncles were gathering the last of our belongings and arranging them in the trunk of the car, while Laleh’s older brother, my cousin, Asef, wailed.

Why can’t I come? he asked, tears streaming down his face. At eight years old, he knew a long road trip meant picnics, and picnics meant freshly grilled kabobs.

I want to come too! he screamed, inconsolable. I want to kabob!

For goodness sake, his mother said. No one is going to eat kabob without you.

***

When my father’s eldest brother first contacted the smugglers to get us out of Iran, they promised we would make the journey to Turkey by car. It would be a long trip, but a relatively simple and straightforward one: an eight-hour drive from Tehran to Tabriz, a city in the north near the Turkish border. From there, a five- or six-hour drive by Jeep or Land Rover to the border. Once at the border, another car would pick us up and we’d drive three hours to Van, a border city in Turkey.

My mother was seven months pregnant and worried that the car rides would be dangerous. She wouldn’t agree to the plan until her doctor assured her that, as long as she took breaks whenever possible, both she and the baby would be fine. If the pressure in her legs became too painful, he prescribed Valium to help relax her muscles. My mother’s fears assuaged, she agreed that she and I would leave the country. My mother then convinced my father’s father to send his youngest daughter, Astefe, over the border with us. She promised him that she would be safe with us. She told my father’s youngest brother, Kavoos, he must come too. His place, my mother insisted, was with his wife and daughter, not waiting for the Revolutionary Guards to find him.

Read more…

Climate Change Is Personal for These Alaskan Women

AP Photo/Gregory Bull

Alaska is ground zero for climate change. Miranda Weiss moved to Homer, Alaska, in 1999. Her family relies partly on wild foods to live, and she’s watched these changes mount as both a resident and reporter. For The American Scholar, Weiss talked with six Alaskan women about their practical concerns, their anxieties, and how they’re handling these monumental changes physically and psychologically. Fires burn. Insects descend. Acidity and warm waters damage the marine ecosystem, killing birds and poisoning shellfish. As Weiss put it, “The bad news is relentless.” Melting permafrost doesn’t only topple buildings. It topples the economies and identities of subsistence hunters, Indigenous people, scientists, and commercial fisherwomen.

The changing chemistry of the ocean is not abstract to Hannah. She has a boat payment to make, a student loan to repay.

Across Alaska, there’s a $6 billion economy at stake, one that employs tens of thousands of people. More than half the nation’s commercial seafood harvest is at risk. Also on the line is the survival of scores of coastal communities dependent on the fishing industry, and the very character of the state itself.

Alaska’s commercial fisheries harvest more than 40 species of marine life, and fishermen and researchers believe it’s only a matter of time before the industry suffers a catastrophe. Already, the world is looking different to people who live on or by the ocean. They’re seeing warm-water species appear off Alaska’s shores. Oyster farmers are having a hard time getting spat—the small larvae used to start a crop—because their sources are affected by acidification. Lucrative crab and pollock industries are expected to face declines with further acidification and warming. Uncertainties swirl around salmon, which are notoriously sensitive to water temperature.

Read the story

It’s Never Too Late to Apologize

Hindudstan Times/Getty Images Justin Bieber asks, “Is it too late now to say sorry?” Longreads says, “Better late than never!”

Taking criticism is hard. Lately, it appears especially hard for writers who are also on Twitter, which is many — maybe even most — writers.

Earlier this week, New York Times opinion writer Bari Weiss tweeted a video of American Olympic skater Mirai Nagasu landing a triple axel. Nagasu was the first American to ever achieve this at the Olympics — a huge feat. Weiss appended her tweet with a reference to Hamilton: “Immigrants: They get the job done.”

Twitter users were quick to point out that Nagasu is not an immigrant. Her parents are Japanese immigrants, but she was born in California and held dual citizenship until she was 22. (Also, the lyric in Miranda’s song is phrased “Immigrants: we get the job done.”) To the first correction, Weiss claimed she knew that fact, but she was taking “poetic license.” In a vacuum, Weiss’ tweet is a misstep, but not unforgivable. The desire to celebrate Nagasu is good, referencing Hamilton is good. But in the context of her work and public statements, the implicit assumption that someone non-white, with an “ethnic” name, was automatically an immigrant rubbed people the wrong way.

Rather than considering this point, Weiss lashed out. She claimed she deleted the tweet after “being told I am a racist, a ghoul and that I deserve to die.” A cursory look through her mentions showed no evidence supporting this claim, but women are attacked on the internet regularly and virulently, so it’s possible people had taken to email with particularly galling attacks.

But this claim that being criticized, and corrected, is akin to being “silenced” is becoming a common theme of late. People are responding to criticism as though it is some sort of form of torture. Katie Roiphe, a professional critic, dislikes being criticized so much that she responds by accusing her critics of being “low-level secret policemen in a new totalitarian state.” Weiss believes that when she is criticized, it is “another sign of civilization’s end.”

If I were Roiphe, I might deem these reactions “hysterical” but I dislike the gendered connotations of that word. Men who balk at “political correctness” have been reacting this way for years. Any criticism of their behavior or their opinions is galling, is somehow an attempt to erase them off the face of the earth. “We have a right to free speech!” they shout, but what they really want is a right to be free from criticism, from reflection, from having to think about the experiences of anyone other than themselves.

It is an interesting form of entitlement, this belief that criticism is an infringement on some fundamental right. As Rebecca Traister pointed out in a recent essay for The Cut, published after Roiphe’s much-hyped contra-#MeToo essay in Harper’s, it is “a tic of the powerful… mistaking the right to speech for the right to unquestioned authority.”

In a recent issue of n+1, Dayna Tortorici wrote of this same phenomenon, time-pegging it to the end of 2014: “The right to free speech under the First Amendment had been recast in popular discourse as the right to free speech without consequence, without reaction.”

This is, it should be obvious, not a right that any government or other entity ensures. Alexis Grenell wrote about this last September in a column in the New York Daily News touting the value of “shame speech,” and “the soft power of shame.”

“The First Amendment only protects freedom of expression; there is no right to be heard, or respected,” Grenell explains. “The state of shame is made possible by thousands of people of different backgrounds finally having their voices heard.”

While writers like Roiphe and Weiss are still the ones getting platforms in publications like Harper’s and The New York Times, the internet — that great equalizer — is facilitating this “state of shame.” Twitter might be overrun by Nazis, white supremacists, and angry basement-dwellers making rape and death threats, but it has also increasingly become a place where marginalized voices are able to make themselves heard.

Some people hate that. People you wouldn’t expect! Just this week, Eric Lipton, an investigative reporter at the New York Times, appeared to be so moved watching the teens who survived the school shooting in Florida this week speak on television, he tweeted, “Impressive how articulate and well-educated these kids are from this school. Obviously a good school. Another sad reason for yesterday’s events.”

More than 200 people replied to his tweet, pointing out how hurtful his words were, so Lipton attempted a clarification, “And not saying it would be less sad it [sic] there were poor kids, obviously. Just such a waste to see kids with so much opportunity before them wiped out.” More than a thousand people responded to that one, which anyone who spends any time on Twitter could have predicted.

After a few hours, he deleted those tweets, and wrote a new one. “I deleted an earlier tweet that was misread by many people. What I was saying was not meant to me [sic] disrespectful. Sorry it was read that way.”

This type of reaction is so common, and it confounds me. It is so, so much easier to listen, see that you’ve hurt people (usually people with less institutional and systemic power than you), and say sorry. Then it all goes away!

Bret Stephens, a colleague of Weiss’ in the opinion section at the Times, who seems to live for the thrill of being a bogeyman contrarian, came to Lipton’s defense.

The last line is a reference to the fact that Stephens dislikes criticism so much, he keeps threatening to leave Twitter but then fails to do so.

Opinion writers, in particular, should be able to handle criticism better, given their job is to criticize — and, at their best, honestly and diligently examine different ideas in good faith.

This week, NYT opinion editor James Bennet issued a 1,500-word memo in defense of Bari Weiss, insisting that she, and everyone else in his stable, are operating in good faith. The way he described the opinion section is exactly what its critics want it to be, and what they feel it’s falling short of achieving:

[W]e owe our readers an honest struggle over the right paths ahead, not a pretense that we’re in possession of God’s own map.

That means being willing to challenge our own assumptions; it means being open to counter-arguments even as we advance our own convictions; it means listening to voices that we may object to and even sometimes find obnoxious, provided they meet the same tests of intellectual honesty, respect for others and openness. It means taking on the toughest arguments on the other side, not the straw men. It means starting from a presumption of good faith, particularly on the part of our colleagues, including those we disagree with. It means having some humility about the possibility that, in the end, the other side might have a point, or more than one.

Bennet! Bennet. This is exactly what we are asking you, and Stephens, and Weiss to do. This is all we want! Take your critics seriously. Don’t dismiss them as too stupid or “insane” to understand your point. You are writers. You are writers of opinion, which ultimately means you are rhetoricians, so your goal is to persuade. If people are arguing with you, it means you have fallen short of that goal. Engage with them! Start from a presumption of good faith! And please, please think about why you think that presumption is owed “particularly” to people who work for the Times, not to those who read it, and love it enough to try to push you to be better.

Bennet’s memo was written after an internal Slack chat was leaked, showing NYT employees frustrated both by Weiss’ tweet and her entitled self-defense earlier this week. One anonymous employee wrote:

i wasn’t here when we had a public editor, but i understand how it worked. it was clear. what i don’t understand now and now what’s unclear is what’s supposed to happen when the same mistakes keep getting made again and again. at what point is the company willing to take the responsibility off the public for calling this stuff out? will the reader center step in? is that even what the reader center is for? i genuinely don’t know!

What seems to be obvious both to us readers and internally at the Times is that the Reader Center is not living up to the legacy of the public editor. As I’ve mentioned previously, I wrote NYT public editor Margaret Sullivan in 2014 — around the time Tortorici references in her essay, when this outcry about the audacity of plebeian critics surfaced. I was frustrated about three separate instances when NYT writers had been criticized for insensitive language and responded by pooh-poohing an uptight, uncomprehending Twitterati. (Sullivan was at the time working on a column in response to the latest incident — Alessandra Stanley referring to Shonda Rhimes as an “angry black woman” — but it was also in the wake of a column about Ray Rice that used florid language to describe his spousal abuse, and the infamous Mike Brown “no angel” article.) The writers were, similarly to Weiss, defending their perceived “right” to use the language they want without considering the impact it would have on readers, and vulnerable readers in particular.

I wrote the following to Sullivan at the time, and I still believe it today:

Journalism does not occur in a vacuum. When your artful words are sent out into the world, they have the power to hurt people who are particularly vulnerable.

That these articles get past not only a writer but — I assume — multiple editors without one person stopping to think about the effects the language will have, not in their stylistic quality, but in their existence in the world of readers who may be victims of violence or domestic violence or systemic discrimination and racism, is absurd.

Pretty writing is not more important than empathy and respect for people with less power and less of an ability to have their voices heard.

The problem here is not Twitter. It is a culture in which a writer can receive criticism from people their writing has harmed, and respond not with a gracious, empathetic apology, but with the dismissive arrogance it must take to claim that anyone who disagrees with you just isn’t smart enough to understand your point.

If Bennet wants people to assume his writers are operating in good faith, they need to show that. For now, Weiss has shown exactly the opposite, both in her work (as when she claimed the motto of contemporary feminism is “Believe All Women” or reductively cited a vague Instagram post in a claim of a black activist’s anti-police bias), and this week’s dustup. Tom Scocca outlined this well on — of course — Twitter:

Here’s the thing. Weiss, Stephens, and Roiphe claim they want a gentler, kinder discourse. That’s a good goal. It can be exhausting to be patient in the face of microaggressions, especially for people who have been on the receiving end of them for so long. But if we can muster it, I have no doubt it will lead to a better discourse.

The flipside of that, though, is that Weiss, Stephens, Roiphe et al need to come down from their mountain and actually listen to and consider the criticism leveled against them. They have to try to be better right along with the rest of us.

Is 2018 the Year We Step Away From Social Media?

(Getty Images)

I checked Twitter and Tumblr before I started writing this piece, and I’ll probably check them again as soon as I’ve finished. I keep telling myself that I should stop automatically turning to social media, and I’ve taken steps to reduce the amount of time I spend on the sites — I regularly cull my feeds, for example, and I’ve removed all push notifications from my phone — but the urge to take a break from my own thoughts and see what other people are thinking about is too strong. (Are my friends posting Google Arts & Culture selfies? Is everyone discussing a specific article? Did Lin-Manuel Miranda tweet something inspiring that’ll make me feel a little better about the world?)

Plus I like to keep up with the news.

But I don’t necessarily enjoy the time I spend on social media, and I doubt you do either. I used to compare it to hanging out in a library with friends — the sort of thing where you’d look up from whatever you were studying and say “hey, check this out!” — and now it feels like stepping into a room where everyone is shouting at each other. Even when the arguments are important, they still feel unproductive and unhealthy. To quote M. C. Mah, at LitHub: “Good-faith argument on social media is probably impractical, and definitely unclickable.”

So I want to spend less time on social media in 2018 — and I’m not alone. Read more…

Stewards of the Blood

A memorial for one of the four young men killed in Long Island in April 2017. The street gang MS-13 has been blamed for the deaths. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

 

Caille Millner | Michigan Quarterly Review | Winter 2016 | 16 minutes (4,329 words)

I need to tell you about someone whose name I can’t speak. The lack of a name is inconvenient, but it’s not the most important thing about him; he gave it up so long ago. Everything important that I can tell you has been a fight against time and language, and I’m still only halfway there.

Halfway. We were half-grown when we met: eleven years old. Some concerned adult had determined that he was at risk. We all are, but in his case there were metrics. He had immigrated from Mexico. He lived with too many siblings; there was a rotating cast of uncles and cousins in his life. This seemed dangerous ─ we lived in San Jose before it became a booming city, when it was still threaded with apricot orchards and poverty. Some of his uncles and cousins had joined La Nuestra Familia, the Norteños, the gangs that offer protection to Chicanos and Mexicans who lived in Northern California. Joining the gang meant that they had joined a violent feud, with the Sureños from Southern California and also with the Salvadoran gangs — La Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.

I should have asked him questions about this. The truth is that I failed to find the language to do so. The first reason for this failure is that I was impressed with the ornate speech used by so many of these uncles and cousins. They never spoke about gangs or violence or illegal anything. Instead, they had a seductive patois of slang and simple commands and complex phrases about their respect for tradition, their commitment to duties as men. To my 11-year-old ears these were ancient, powerful words; it sounded like the language of legend. Warriors and glory.

I could only speak about homework and grades. Such words could not compete with theirs even in my own imagination. How could I use them to convince someone else?

When I was near all of them I couldn’t even say what it was that captivated me about the drudgery I was supposed to be championing. When I was alone it became all too clear: That drudgery was my way to be special. What I really liked was the approval I received from those concerned adults for caring. The kind of regard that allowed me to be chosen as a positive influence in another 11-year-old’s life was intoxicating.

Looking back, of course, I made sense as a translator of this other life. I was going places even then. My family was steady and ambitious. They were teaching me the language of the higher classes, but more importantly, they were teaching me their timelines. I understood that for many years my life would be a slowly unfolding landscape of education and that in the distant future I would have nothing to do with boys like him.

Not that this mattered in our moment. I fell hopelessly and immediately in love with him. He was smaller than I was: a thin body, all angles like an arrow tip. His was a face of beveled edges rather than common features — the only curve on him was a radiant smile. As soon as I met him I wanted to see more of it, and I hung around for as long as I could.

To even speak about it now is to risk embarrassment, for this was eleven-year-old love: a love that bloomed over secondhand video game consoles and dimly lit strip malls. We gawked at passing teenagers; we pooled our quarters to split Orange Juliuses and McDonald’s French fries. It was the love of one child — puffy, awkward, patiently hoping to bloom into beauty — for another child who was beautiful and lean and waiting only for others to be overcome by his charm. He never had to wait long. Where I was aloof and serious, he was open and easy.

He knew how to be eleven years old. He took joy in the moment — in the good slice of pizza, the trip to the arcade, the tickle fight. As part of a big family he was happy to be in company with lots of people. To his relatives I must have seemed like the strange one: quiet, introverted, demanding of difficult pleasures that were a long time in coming. I never talked to him, or to them, about love.

The next year he joined the feud.

We lost him, one of those concerned adults told me.

I found the judgment unfair. Even today I can tell you in which prison his body may be found.

He is doing time. Yet I wonder if he sees time in the way that I do, in the way that all of those concerned adults do. We cling to years because our imagination does not extend to the language of duty and obligation. We hoard our years because they belong to us alone, not to the ages.

At 11 years old it is easy to believe in the ages; I was enthralled by them myself. And in many ways, his transformation happened much faster than mine did. At 12 years old he had a new name, new clothes, new friends, a new body. New constraints and intimacies. He had a duty now, and it stood as an immutable fact of life, something beyond individuality. When it was clear to me that I should abandon him so that I could continue on my own slow line of time I did so without regret, and for many years I stopped trying to find words to talk about him. I spent much time on my education and my goals. I busied myself with the intricacies of language and the books of long-dead men.

They never spoke about gangs or violence. Instead, they had a seductive patois of slang and simple commands and complex phrases about their respect for tradition, their commitment to duties as men.

Then as our paths diverged my own line of time sped up. The years that are ticking slowly for him, in his cell, are moving much faster on the outside. Time has become a relentless crush for skill and for money, at least in the land of his feud. San Jose has changed. Like me, it became educated and upper-middle-class. The orchards were paved over for expensive housing; the immigrants from Mexico and El Salvador moved to cheaper cities further south. The crime rates dropped, the feud grew quiet.

Things were different now, I thought. The wounds from the feud would heal. There would be no need for these battles that seemed to have no purpose. Too many were gone but at least it would slow down.

* * *

Years passed. I moved to San Francisco. I chose to live in a neighborhood that seemed to have the familiarity of my birth neighborhood and none of its problems. My neighbors came from Mexico and Panama and El Salvador and Nicaragua and Brazil. It was a neighborhood of modest and miraculous prosperity. Everyone worked as often as they could. Their children played on the sidewalks day and night and they were full of memories of the children they had left behind in the old countries. Their lives ran on the rhythms of phone cards and remittance payments and scratch-off lottery tickets.

When I moved in I asked many of them about the feud. We had similar worries about it, and similar feelings of denial. It was close but we believed that it was far enough away. Two gangs — one linked to MS-13, the other linked to the Norteños — operated on the blocks that bounded us. But because there had been no violence in our small bubble for years we thought that they would always remain there.

Around 8 pm on June 16, 2007, a 15-year-old named Edivaldo Sanchez was standing with a friend outside of his family’s apartment on 24th Street. Eddie, as we called him, often stood outside of that apartment in the evenings. It was a practical choice. He had five siblings and a rotating cast of relatives in his life. He needed space, like any teenager.

Eddie was a student at Horace Mann Middle School. He was a recent immigrant from Puebla, Mexico, a city whose important industries include maquiladoras and drug trafficking.  After her husband died, Eddie’s mother had brought the family to San Francisco. She thought that the move would give her children the peaceful years they needed for an education and a more prosperous future.

What is there to say about him. Eddie made friends in the neighborhood fast. His personality was gentle. He was crazy about soccer and music, eager to help fellow students fix their old electronics or put together a pick-up game. He smiled easily and often. I remember thinking how delightful it was to see that. He was at the age for boys when smiling tends to stop.

We had a nodding acquaintance when we passed each other on the street. He was shy, and being a recent immigrant he was also tentative about the way he sounded. I didn’t want to make him feel nervous by speaking too often. It was another one of my failures of language.

Two men in a stolen Honda pulled up beside the boys that night. We will never know what they said, or if they said anything at all. In the neighborhood, we decided that the men asked who they claimed. We decided that because we knew that the boys claimed no gang associations, and because it was the only question we knew that fit with what happened next.

The passenger in the car pulled out a gun. The boys ran for their lives and he shot at their backs.

Eddie’s friend escaped.

Eddie was hit. He staggered for half a block, collapsed, and bled out in front of a taqueria on 24th Street at the corner of Balmy. He was dead before the emergency response team arrived.

Eddie died near a mural painted with folk spirits, one of whom is giving birth to the world. It’s the first mural at the entrance to Balmy, a short block that’s also a gallery for more than 60 murals. These bright, splashy scenes stretch from the roof to the foundation of almost every building. The murals were begun by a collective of artists known as La Mujeres Muralistas, whose desire to add more peaceful, domestic images to the macho mural art scene in San Francisco during the 1970s grew into a massive visual celebration of Latin American myth and history. Eddie died among a kaleidoscope of life from all around the Americas, the red of his blood joining an explosion of yellows and blues and purples and greens. While he died he was watched over by Archbishop Oscar Romero, by Frida Kahlo, by Diego Rivera, by La Virgencita of Guadalupe, by children escaping war and poverty, and above all by weeping women, women who are weeping for Mexico and for El Salvador and for the innocents massacred in those countries and in this one.

Eddie died near a mural painted with folk spirits, one of whom is giving birth to the world.

When I stepped out of my house the next morning the altar for Eddie had already been assembled. The sun was bright but the red candles were blazing. Most of them filled tall glass cases to the brim and were plastered with a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Every corner store on 24th Street sold these candles, but that day they handed them out for free.

Within a few hours it was impossible to walk down that strip of sidewalk. The mourners spread a blanket of flowers and candles and homemade signs that crowded out all of the space in front of the taqueria. Eddie’s family members hung small cardboard signs to rest his soul in peace on the lampposts nearby. The schoolgirls he had helped at Horace taped up pictures of him.

For a few weeks, I passed by him every day. We all looked up when we saw him. I think the memory of seeing him on the same corner, alive and wiry, kept us from cleaning up his memorial in the normal frame of time. We left Eddie’s altar up until it had fully disintegrated. As the days and then weeks passed it underwent a metamorphosis. Bunches of flowers shrank and died. They stained the sidewalk with the violet colors of exploded petals and the yellow powder of broken stamens. The cathedral of candles melted onto the sidewalk, spreading out into red gooey puddles. The goo hardened into something brittle, geological. If I squinted, the sidewalk in front of the taqueria looked like a mural on Balmy.

And above the mess floated Eddie’s face — thin, a little pimpled, forever smiling.

* * *

After Eddie’s time stopped and I was yanked back into an age of ruined myths and false legends I began to look for the language that would help me speak about it. Though I’ve read many pieces about MS-13 and the Norteños, most of them are disappointing. I’m not looking for lurid chronicles or patronizing analysis of the young men who join what is, for them, a ritual battle that exists not just in our time but in all of the ages before us.

Where I’ve found the language to express this has been a matter of accident: like the 1978 novel Broken April. I picked up this book because I was curious about its author, the great Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare. I wondered how a learned, upper-class man (his author photos show him reclining in his Parisian apartment, clad in cashmere sweaters) had found the words to chronicle the martial traditions of his tiny, impoverished country. Kadare’s work is awash in blood and violence — war, feuds, sieges, occupation, brutality — and he writes it all with the calm candor of a professional and the deep passion of a lover.

So I picked up Broken April and I discovered that, for Kadare, it’s partly a matter of translation. The novel is all about making clear the circumstances of the blood feuds that still take place in Albania today, feuds that seem strange to outsiders yet indispensable to those who act them out. As usual, Kadare doesn’t shy away from the horrible toll: Broken April opens with the premeditated murder of an innocent man.

On an early spring day in Albania’s High Plateau region, Gjorg of the Berisha has been perched behind a ridge overlooking the highway since daybreak. As the hours drag on, he’s startled over and over by passerby. He pulls out his rifle at each disturbance.

He’s waiting for a man named Zef Kryeqyqe. Zef Kryeqyqe and Gjorg of the Berisha barely know each other and have no personal animosity, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is what happened the previous year, when one of Zef Kryeqyqe’s relatives killed Gjorg of the Berisha’s elder brother, Mehill. In keeping with the blood feud that their families have been engaged in for generations, it’s now Gjorg’s duty to kill Zef.

The fated man doesn’t appear until dusk. He wasn’t expecting to meet Gjorg near the highway. When Gjorg appears before him, rifle cocked, Kryeqyqe fumbles uselessly for a defense.

Gjorg shoots him. He falls. Gjorg steps out of hiding onto a deserted road and stares at the fallen body.

The crucial act of violence takes place over the first ten pages. By swiftly dispensing with the murder, Kadare can expand at length on the real subject of Broken April: the culture that surrounds and maintains the blood feud. It is a culture that, above all, depends on a strange sense of time. Its rituals are measured in moments and days but its sense of value and consequence stretches over centuries. We learn that the Berishas are villagers in a part of the country that has seen little social change since the Dark Ages. The economy is subsistence agriculture; the residents abide by a medieval code of conduct known as the Kanun. The Kanun regulates manners, marriages, and above all the blood feud in which the Berishas have found themselves.

After Gjorg kills Zef, Kadare flashes back to the weeks after Mehill’s death. Abiding by the age-old custom, the Berisha matriarch hangs her dead son’s bloody shirt up on the family clothesline. She leaves this shirt on the line so that the neighborhood, and Gjorg, can see it. They need the sight of the bloodstain to torment Gjorg until he avenges his brother.

It works. Gjorg has an extended, Hamlet-like season of agonized inaction, but when the winter ends he leaves his family and goes to the highway. In killing Zef Kryeqyqe, Gjorg knows that he is launching his final cycle in the feud. After a month’s truce, he will no longer be the killer but the prey.

Still, when Gjorg walks back into the village he can walk with pride. He has returned honor to his family and banished humiliation, its dark twin. For a long, slow moment in his short life, he is envied and feared and powerful. The villagers spread the word that he has “taken back his brother’s blood.” His mother pulls the stained shirt down from the clothesline and washes it. His father can look at the neighbors with satisfaction. A brief expansiveness opens his family’s existence even as Gjorg feels the looming constriction of certain death.

Zef Kryeqyqe’s death launches another series of actions set forth by the Kanun. The two families fulfill their roles solemnly, without emotion, as though what were at stake was not a murder but a legal transaction. Everything is prescribed and organized, including the fine, or blood tax, that Gjorg of the Berisha’s family must pay. They must pay this tax not to the Kryeqyqe family but to the prince. So, after the men of the village have negotiated the 30-day truce, Gjorg of the Berishas embarks on a long walk across the Plateau to present this payment.

Gjorg’s only possibility for escaping death would be to hide in one of the 74 Towers of Refuge. These towers dot the bleak landscape that we travel through with him. With their comfortless cells and desperate inhabitants, they resemble prisons: “scattered, dark forbidding, with their black loopholes and their heavy doors.” The values of the Plateau villagers assure that their purpose is to function as places of incarceration as well. There’s a special shame for the men inside, one that is visited on their families. Deprived of their prideful place in the community for as long as they have unredeemed blood, these families do not farm: “Whole clans allowed their fields to go uncultivated and themselves to suffer hunger so that the blood might be redeemed….Each man chose between corn and vengeance.” Despite the business-like aspects of the feud, the concepts of comfort and profit are foreign to its priorities of duty and pride. Comfort and profit are concepts for another time, another moment, outside of the feud.

Eventually, we make it to the castle and to one of the most loathsome characters in the book: Mark Ukacierra, the prince’s first cousin. Ukacierra is the “steward of the blood,” the man who is responsible for keeping accounts of all blood feuds on the High Plateau. His archives, which stretch back for centuries, detail every feud that has gone settled or unsettled, and every murder that has maintained it. Ukacierra loves the feud with a possessive madness, fears for its survival, and looks upon the incursions of the contemporary world with hatred. An educated man, he reads contemporary books and journals from the capital city, Tirana, and stokes the flames of his hatred with their interpretations of the blood feud. In the opinion of these learned authors, the feud has been “changing gradually into an inhuman machine, to the point of being reduced at last, according to the author of the article, to a capitalist enterprise carried on for the sake of profit.” The idea that the ancient feud can be reduced to something so shallow, so contemporary, as capitalism — that, to Ukacierra, is outrageous.

Thanks to the impertinence of these outsiders, as well as a general worry that the men of Albania have grown soft and do not take the feud as seriously as they used to, Ukacierra looks on the pale, shaking Gjorg with the closest approximation to love that we see in Broken April. To him, Gjorg is the future of an age, an actor in a long tradition that he adores. Meanwhile, the writers of the contemporary books live in a “weakening” time “without honor.”

The time that Ukacierra lives in is expansive and everlasting. Meanwhile, Gjorg’s time is growing precarious and short. Once he has paid his fee and began the trek back to his village, he has already used up many precious days of his truce. While he walks, Zef Kryqeqye’s family is watching the calendar and making their preparations. Should they miss their son, they may visit his murnanë — a small stone altar that passerby built to mark the place where the dead man fell.

* * *

In the seventh year after Eddie’s death I requested the public documents for a murder case that had started just a few blocks away from where he was murdered. The U.S. Attorney’s office in San Francisco released these documents in October 2014, after the three young defendants were each sentenced to 27 years in federal prison on charges related to the murder of Alexander Temaj-Castanon.

It was a strange moment to see a case like this one. I still thought about Eddie, though seven years on it was clear to that he would never get any justice. No arrests were ever made in his case. No murderer was ever found. His family had moved back to Mexico, torn by their grief, to face their uncertain future in a more familiar country.

There were few people left in the neighborhood who remembered Eddie, or had any knowledge of what the feud was.

Time had transformed another place. Many of my neighbors were long gone. They left for a less tragic reason than Eddie’s family had: they simply could not afford to live there anymore. The new residents were upper-middle-class and educated. They needed things that would help them thrive on a faster line of time ─ coffee shops, express workouts, places that sold the latest technology. The neighborhood sped up to reflect their needs.

Yet for all that time was speeding up something was still happening in a slower and more ancient era.

On the night of June 21, 2010, Davie Jimmy Mejia-Sensente, aka “Crazy,” or “Loco,” Carlos Mejia-Quintanilla, aka “Sleepy,” or “Dormido,” and Luis Amilar-Zanas, aka “Trucha,” or “Yomo,” were on a 14-Muni bus, traveling on Mission Street from San Francisco to Daly City. The three young men were members of the transnational gang known as La Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.

A 26-year-old man named Alexander Temaj-Castanon boarded the bus after leaving his job as a cook at a San Francisco barbeque restaurant. Mejia-Sensente, Mejia-Quintanilla, and Amilar-Zanas watched Temaj-Castanon and decided that he was a member of La Nuestra Familia, or the Norteños. They based this decision on their observations of Temaj-Castanon’s tattooed body and his general bearing.

When Temaj-Castanon stepped off the bus on a quiet stretch of Mission Street in Daly City, Meijia-Sensente and Mejia-Quintanilla collected a backpack from Amilar-Zanas and followed him. Amilar-Zanas had placed a gun in the backpack.

The night was dark, the hour was late, and the street was deserted. They crept up behind him. Mejia-Quintanilla pulled the gun from the backpack and shot Temaj-Castanon once. Mejia-Sensente took the gun and shot the dying man again. They watched the body fall. Then they ran.

Temaj-Castanon was not a member of the Norteños or any other gang.

None of these facts were in dispute, not even by the defendants. This was a senseless murder, executed for no other reason than that the defendants believed it was their duty and obligation to eliminate a rival in a blood feud that has persisted for decades. But that duty and obligation, though so compelling as to bring these three young men to assassinate an innocent man, is nowhere to be found in the public documents. The U.S. Attorney’s office dismisses it in the same way that enraged the steward of the blood: “MS-13,” reads the sentencing memorandum for the case, “constitutes an ongoing organization whose members function as a continuing unit for a common purpose of achieving the objectives of the enterprise.” In this rendering, murder has been reduced to a business enterprise that must be done on a schedule according to the time demands of a corporate entity.

I can understand this sense of time. I live in it, I fought for it, and I will do all that’s in my power to remain within it.

But in looking through the public docket for this case I located one time factor that the U.S. Attorney’s office may have overlooked.

In 2002, when he was jumped into MS-13, Mejia-Quintanilla was a 12-year-old named Wilfredo Oliva-Castro who lived with his family in El Salvador.

In 1996, when he was jumped into MS-13, Mejia-Sensente was a 12-year-old, name unknown, who lived with his family in El Salvador.

In 1991, when he was jumped into MS-13, Amilar-Zanas was a 12-year-old named Luis Sana who lived with his family in El Salvador.

We will never live in their time but they will always live in ours.

There is one more important notation in the paperwork for this case. Though they’re not publicly available, the docket shows that each defendant requested a translator during the course of the legal proceedings. Presumably the three defendants, all native Spanish speakers, wanted to be certain that they could follow the language of the prosecutors, the defense attorneys, and the judge as these people presided over the direction of the rest of their lives. The case files note that the translators all came to assist the defendants.

I am so glad that they came. But how I wish, oh how I wish, that these translators had spoken sooner.

* * *

This essay first appeared in the Winer 2016 issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review. It was also named a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2017. Our thanks to Caille Millner and the MQR staff for allowing us to reprint this essay.

 

Longreads Best of 2017: Under-Recognized Stories

Here are the best stories we thought deserved more attention this year. If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday.

Sari Botton
Essays editor, Longreads

How to Write Iranian-America, or The Last Essay (Porochista Khakpour, Catapult)

Women writers of color aren’t given enough opportunities, and too often when they are, the opportunity is limited. They’re asked, again and again, to write about aspects of their identity, and are rarely afforded chances to write about anything else. Writing in the second person, Porochista Khakpour helps the reader to imagine being an artist hemmed in by such limitations. She takes us through the arc of her career thus far: from deciding early on that she didn’t want to “write what you know,” as a mentor suggested; to becoming the Iranian-American essayist of choice every time certain publications wanted an opinion from that particular demographic; to deciding she was no longer willing to be limited in that way, but feeling conflicted nonetheless. As a fan of Kahkpour’s writing, I certainly hope this isn’t her last essay but instead marks the beginning of a new chapter in which she feels free to write about whatever she chooses.

Kate’s Still Here (Libby Copeland, Esquire)

I’ve reached an age where death — of friends, family, colleagues — has become a more regular occurrence. I’ve become slightly obsessed with it, but at the same time, remain afraid to discuss it and plan for it. It was refreshing and moving for me to read this feature by Libby Copeland about a couple who embraced the inevitable so boldly and lovingly. Copeland spends time with Kate and Deloy Oberlin as they consciously prepare for Kate’s death from metastatic breast cancer, and again in the aftermath of her passing. Deloy honors his wife’s wishes that once she’s gone, a gathering will be held where family and friends can visit with her body, chilled with dry ice and frozen water bottles. Afterward, he delivers her body to a site where it is composted as part of a study in green burial. I believe it might be impossible to get to the end of this piece without feeling warmed and shedding some tears.


Aaron Gilbreath
Contributing editor, Longreads

In the Land of Vendettas That Go on Forever (Amanda Petrusich, Virginia Quarterly Review)

Amanda Petrusich she traveled to Northern Albania to write about the culture of vengeance that guides the region’s sense of justice. Her story takes readers along rocky roads to mountain villages, but the real journey takes place inside the minds of the local people, whose ideas about justice require a vigilante, not the law, to kill a person who was involved in a murder. His eye-for-an-eye approach harkens back to early tribal times in the country. Perfectly mixing narration with analysis, the story ultimately asks philosophical questions: Does revenge really make up for a loss? What is justice? In a year when many of us eagerly watch special counsel Robert Mueller investigate a president who flaunts his disregard for the law, justice is on the forefront of our minds, except some of us want it to arrive through legal channels.


Matt Giles
Contributing editor and chief fact-checker, Longreads

Jumpin’ Joe (Robert Silverman, Victory Journal)

Much of sports discourse this year has centered on Colin Kaepernick. Thousands of words and hours of conversation have been unspooled on the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, his stance on athletes’ rights, and why the NFL has seemingly blacklisted the QB who nearly won a Super Bowl four years ago. But to understand the present, it helps to look to the past, and Silverman’s profile of Jumpin’ Joe Caldwell, a star forward with the ABA in the 1970s, is timely and worth highlighting. Caldwell was vice president of the league’s players union, and after a contentious episode with the management of the St. Louis Spirits, who believed Caldwell convinced Marvin Barnes, the team’s best player, to jettison to the NBA, Caldwell couldn’t land another contract in either league. Caldwell’s story is truly one of the first in which athletes sought the control they deserved from their employer, and though Silverman doesn’t overtly connect Caldwell’s situation to Kaepernick’s, the parallels are more than evident.


Ethan Chiel
Contributing editor and fact-checker, Longreads

The Immortal Life of John Tesh’s NBA Anthem “Roundball Rock” (David Roth, Vice)

The first time I heard John Tesh’s voice was in the passenger seat of my dad’s Mazda, driving through upstate New York as part of a road trip to visit colleges. Tesh was hosting his daily radio show and he was telling an interminable story with no point, but I ate that shit up. It was only later that I’d see the famous Red Rocks video David Roth mentions in his wonderful story about Tesh’s NBA on NBC anthem, or learn anything about that part of Tesh’s life. But through the story of that instrumental anthem — which remains a banger — and his conversation with Tesh, Roth manages to tease out the easygoing, very slightly anodyne, successful-yet-anonymous nature of Tesh’s work and life, as well as what makes him so bizarrely charming.


Ben Huberman
Senior editor, Longreads

The Age of Rudeness (Rachel Cusk, The New York Times Magazine)

Last February feels like centuries ago. There were still so many terrible things for us to endure in a year that had just started. Yet 10 months and 10,000 news cycles later, Rachel Cusk’s essay remains fresh and unsettling, like a prophecy in which the worst parts may or may not have already come true. Cusk looks at airport agents and shop assistants, Sophocles and Jesus, and yes, Trump makes an appearance too. Through this tangle of anecdotes, she channels something many of us have been feeling yet have failed to articulate: The sense that all previous protocols of basic social decency are broken, and that we’re still not sure how to handle the shards.


Catherine Cusick
Audience development editor, Longreads

The Selfie Monkey Goes to the Ninth Circuit (Sarah Jeong, Motherboard)

Humor never really felt like an option in such a serious year, but Jeong’s simian legal saga reminded me that humor shouldn’t be so disposable. Her story isn’t really about the monkey; it’s about who can rightfully be considered the “next friend” of an Internet-famous crested macaque. It’s about whether or not we can fight the good fight and giggle our way through it and still make a case for justice when it really matters. Bonkers things happened in 2017 — absurd, hilarious things — and not all of them were life-threatening or world-ending or rights-violating. (Unless monkeys have standing to sue under the Copyright Act. Then yeah, some violations went down.)

Humor is like taste-testing non-lethal poison: you never forget it. It’s what made Naruto stand out as the one monkey I clearly didn’t appreciate enough at the time. Most of what flew under the radar this year was probably funny, and I think missing out on that laughter cost us. But writing that has a punchline isn’t an indulgence, it’s a vitamin. We always need more of it than we think we do.


Emily Perper
Contributing editor, Longreads

Contemplating Death at the Edge of the Continent (Laura Turner, Catapult)

This year, I wrote rarely. Every time I put pen to paper or started to type, I began and ended in the same place, full of dread. Writing, which used to be a way to work through my fear, seemed only to reinforce it. And so I looked for writers who could say what I could not. Laura Turner was one of those writers. Her column at Catapult, “A Cure for Fear,” made me feel less alone. Every entry was poignant and true, in an eerie get-out-of-my-brain sort of way.

But my favorite essay of hers predates that column, and it’s called “Contemplating Death at the Edge of the Continent.” Maybe you, too, spiral into a panic when you think about the inevitability of dying. Many nights, I lie awake and hyperventilate while my partner sleeps peacefully next to me. Catapult published Turner’s essay on January 11, the week before Trump’s inauguration, and dying felt closer than ever this year. Would my death come via nuclear war with North Korea? Cancer I wouldn’t be able to treat when my healthcare disappeared? Assault at the hands of someone who hates trans people?

To come to terms with her own anxiety about The End, Turner sought out solitude at the New Camaldoli Hermitage on the Pacific coast. In addition to our shared chronic anxiety, Turner’s writing is infused with a Christian spirituality I recognize and appreciate deeply. I am a person of lapsed faith, but in these uncertain days, Christianity feels comforting in its familiarity. There are no neat answers. We have to sit with that — Turner in her quiet cell on the coast, me at my desk in my cold apartment. So I implore you to read Turner’s work — not just this essay, but her entire oeuvre about anxiety, because it is beautiful, authentic, and necessary.


Danielle Jackson
Contributing editor, Longreads

Eve Ewing: Other Means to Liberation (Kiese Laymon, Guernica)

This conversation between Laymon and poet and sociologist Eve Ewing on the publication of her well-received collection of poems Electric Arches, is spirited and wide-ranging. They talk through the policies that shaped the conditions of Chicago’s public schools, the migratory patterns of black Americans in the 20th century, and the case of Assata Shakur. What has stayed with me is how the sense of comfort and warmth between Ewing and Laymon makes space for them, and by extension, their audience, to imagine new ways of thinking, talking, and doing creative work.


Danielle Tcholakian
Staff writer, Longreads

How a Pearland Mom Changed Her Life to Save Her Transgender Child (Roxanna Asgarian, Houstonia Magazine)

It may seem strange to deem a story tweeted by the ACLU of Texas “under-recognized,” but Roxanna Asgarian’s feature on a devoutly religious, long-conservative Texas woman’s decision to give up her entire life — losing friends, family and community — and reconfigure her own identity to save her young transgender daughter’s life didn’t seem to generate the attention and discussion it deserved. Maybe it was because it came out in Houstonia’s December issue, maybe because the mother and daughter featured in it had also been written about by national outlets. But Asgarian did the crucial thing that local outlets do, after the national media parachutes in and back out again: She stayed on the story. Her account of Kimberly Shappley’s awakening and devotion to her daughter Kai spans years and is excruciating in its heartbreaking detail. I still wince and shudder thinking about the time Kimberly discovered Kai’s legs were cold while tucking her into bed, only to find her daughter — still called Joseph then — had taken too-small underpants from a toy doll and worn them herself, cutting off her own circulation. While national outlets heralded Kimberly’s heroism, Asgarian showed that their story, and their struggle, is far from over.

Before first grade started, Kai asked her mom a question. “She said, ‘Mommy, when I grow up and have really long hair, will I look weird that I have a penis?’” Shappley recalled. It started a long conversation between them about what makes someone beautiful, and about how everyone’s body is different. Kai seemed satisfied, but later, she followed up: Why, then, don’t princesses have penises?

“I said, ‘How do you know that? How do you know that Ariel wasn’t born with a penis? Because she didn’t like the body she was born in either, and so she changed her body to look like what she felt she was born to be.’”

Now, Shappley said, her and Kai’s “secret giggle-giggle” is that Ariel is transgender, and that other princesses might be, too, because “not everybody tells.”

“It’s constantly having to be an inventive parent, and being quick on your feet,” Shappley said. “But isn’t all parenting that way?”


Krista Stevens
Senior editor, Longreads

The Detective of Northern Oddities, (Christopher Solomon, Outside)

As someone who earns her living seated indoors, laptop in hand, I’m endlessly curious about people whose jobs are very different from mine. At Outside, Christopher Solomon profiles Kathy Burek, a veterinary pathologist who examines unusual deaths in the Alaskan animal kingdom. Elbow deep in bodily fluids, Burek works on everything from sea otters to polar bears, and her necropsies are revealing stunning evidence of climate change in the North that will soon find its way South. The fascinating science in Solomon’s beautiful prose made this a satisfying read.

When they captured her off Cohen Island in the summer of 2007, she weighed 58 pounds and was the size of a collie. The growth rings in a tooth they pulled revealed her age—eight years, a mature female sea otter.

They anesthetized her and placed tags on her flippers. They assigned her a number: LCI013, or 13 for short. They installed a transmitter in her belly and gave her a VHF radio frequency: 165.155 megahertz. Then they released her. The otter was now, in ­effect, her own small-wattage Alaskan ­radio station. If you had the right kind of ­antenna and a receiver, you could launch a skiff into Kachemak Bay, lift the antenna, and hunt the air for the music of her existence: an ­occasional ping in high C that was both solitary and reassuring amid the static of the wide world.


Michelle Legro
Senior editor, Longreads

The Painful Truth About Teeth (Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan, The Washington Post)

Filling the Gap (John Stanton, Buzzfeed)

It’s almost hard to believe that the life and death battle over health care dominated the first half of this year, as stories about Medicare, Medicaid, pre-existing conditions, and outrageously expensive medications helped defeat the bill in Congress.

Among these dire stories there was a medical desperation still in the shadows: that of inadequate or nonexistent dental care. The Washington Post’s visit to an enormous mobile clinic on the Eastern Shore showed the lengths people were willing to go to in order to fix just one thing. And in a Mexican border town, John Stanton’s riveting reporting revealed a parallel economy thriving on the shoddy American healthcare system, one where patients — many of them Trump voters — cross the border for cheap dental procedures, if they can afford to make the trip. These stories were a stark reminder that medical care is about far more than life or death, it’s about living with dignity.


Mike Dang
Editor in chief, Longreads

Series on Children and Gun Violence (John Woodrow Cox, The Washington Post)

Whenever someone asked me for a story recommendation this year, I asked them if they were reading Cox’s Washington Post series on how children are being affected by gun violence in the U.S. They would either say “no” or would tell me, “Oh, I’ve seen that but haven’t gotten around to it yet.” Well, now is the time to read this stellar series that might have been overshadowed by so many other stellar reporting done this year.

Start here, and then go here, here, here, here and here. If you’ve only got time for one, in this piece Cox does a particularly good job of showing the trauma suffered by six teenagers following the Las Vegas shooting massacre. If I were on a committee handing out journalism awards, John Woodrow Cox would be on my list of honorees.

A Muslim, a Christian, and a Baby Named “God”

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad, painting by Homunkulus28/Getty

Rachel Pieh Jones | Longreads | December 2017 | 15 minutes (3,733 words)

 

“And sometimes it’s the very otherness of a stranger, someone who doesn’t belong to our ethnic or ideological or religious group, an otherness that can repel us initially, but which can jerk us out of our habitual selfishness, and give us intonations of that sacred otherness, which is God.”Karen Armstrong, author of several books on comparative religion.

When God and his mother were released from the maternity ward they came directly to my house to use the air conditioner. It was early May and the summer heat that melted lollipops and caused car tires to burst enveloped Djibouti like a wet blanket. Power outages could exceed ten hours a day. Temperatures hadn’t peaked yet, 120 degrees would come in August, but the spring humidity without functioning fans during power outages turned everyone into hapless puddles. I prepared a mattress for Amaal* and her newborn and prayed the electricity would stay on so she could use the air conditioner and rest, recover.

In 2004 when my family arrived in Djibouti, I needed help minimizing the constant layer of dust; Amaal needed a job. I needed a friend and Amaal, with her quick laugh and cultural insights became my lifeline. My husband worked at the University of Djibouti and was gone most mornings and afternoons, plus some evenings. We had 4-year-old twins and without Amaal I might have packed our bags and returned to Minnesota out of loneliness and culture shock.

I hired Amaal before she had any children. She wasn’t married yet and her phone often rang while she worked, boys calling to see what she was doing on Thursday evening. To see if she wanted to go for a walk down the streets without street lights where young people could clandestinely hold hands or drink beer from glass Coca-Cola bottles. She rarely said yes until Abdi Fatah* started calling. He didn’t drink alcohol and didn’t pressure her into more physical contact than she was comfortable with in this Muslim country. She felt respected. She said yes.
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Where It’s Always Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

an ice-covered road leading toward evergreen trees covered in snow
Photo by JLS Photography via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)

At LitHub, Marissa Weiss explores life in Alaska: The cold, the dark, the ice, the 3,000 miles between her and her parents in Maryland. Despite the many hardships, she’s lived there for 15 years and can’t imagine leaving a place where cold is no longer a four-letter-word.

Even so, the benefits of the cold can be hard to remember in the face of ice cleats, May snowstorms and frozen pipes. Not to mention our cultural bias against the cold. There’s no comfort in cold comfort, no welcoming from a cold shoulder. A killer is made even worse by being cold-blooded, an enemy by being cold-hearted. There is nothing cathartic or healthful about breaking a cold sweat, and a cold fish is not attractive as entrée or lover.

In spite of it all, being cold makes me feel alive. I’m not sure who I would be if I moved back to the comfortable life — if I swapped rubber boots that are always getting mucky for sleek sandals that knew only pavement. How would I fill all of the hours I now spend with my children, dressing and undressing them? Whom would I relate to if I could no longer commiserate with those around me about the cold?

Read the story

A Fleeting Resource: In Praise of the Cold

Longreads Pick
Source: LitHub
Published: Dec 4, 2017
Length: 15 minutes (3,858 words)