Senseless south end murders takes me back to painful place

In 1998, my brother Jonathan was murdered.  His killing has long since been forgotten by the media and the police department. 

“JT”, as he was affectionately known to all of us, was a force to be reckoned with.  He loved life. 

Jonathan was not my biological brother.  I don’t know if I have biological siblings, because I was adopted at a young age.  I think being “chosen” as someone’s child made it easy for me to accept and embrace all sorts of people in my life.

It was an oddball pairing, he and I.    He was rough and tumble, and wasn’t afraid of the street life, and I was prim and proper, young and naive by comparison.

JT and I always managed to cross paths, and if I’d somehow walked my blind butt into a dangerous situation, just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, he would immediately point me in the other direction.  He knew, I think, that I had a life in front of me.  I already had a young child, and was working hard to stay off of welfare, finish my education and build a stable, happy life.

But I never shunned him.  I never looked down at him as someone who was less than me.  And more often than not, riding the #7 bus, we would bump into each other.  The smiles and head nods turned into “hello”, as he would pass by, his large frame headed to the back of the bus, which I avoided at all costs.

Pretty soon the “hellos” turned into “what are you up to”, and “where are you headed”, and I could tell, I could just tell that he was a good person.  Soon enough, on those regular bus rides, he’d sit for a few minutes at the front of the bus with me, until his friends, all waiting in the back, would tease him.  Then he’d say “alright girl, you take care now, you hear?” and he’d saunter on to the back of the bus.

A few years later, we bumped into each other on Broadway.

“Jonathan!” I said, a happy grin on my face, my arms wide open.

“Yo!” he said, giving me a big bear hug.

“What are you doing up here?” I asked.

He shrugged and pointed towards SCCC; “you know, doing my thang, trying to knock out these credits”.

“You’re…in school?” I remember silently scolding myself for the surprise in my voice.

“Yeah…” he said sheepishly.

“That’s so wonderful!” I exploded, giving him another hug.  His face lit up, and his shoulders squared quickly…he was proud of himself.  Proud.

From that moment, we were brother and sister.  We went to Dicks and grabbed some food, then went to the park and talked for hours, catching up on the years that had passed.

We exchanged numbers and would talk to each other all of the time, and he’d often find his way to my house for a late dinner; something home cooked was always better than Jack in the Box.  Soon he was bringing his younger brother around, and his best friend, Troy.

All of these young men had the reputation of “gang member” and “dope dealer”, but they never brought that to my door.  His friends and younger brother would leave, usually by ten, eager to “get out there and make some money”, but not JT.  He’d stay until past midnight and we’d talk.  Just talk.  About his life, his childhood, his plans for the future, and I would encourage him as best I could.  More than once we shared tears.  Painful tears.

Like the time he told me about dropping out of school.

“Those teachers hated me,” he said.  “I couldn’t do anything right”. 

I knew then what he meant, but years later, having worked in public ed, I really knew…hearing teachers in the staff lounge talk about children- mostly Black boys- as if they were worthless…and I knew that’s how all those years ago, teachers were talking about JT.  As a grown man, he would sit and cry about that pain.  The pain of having all of the adults around you, pre-judge, then simply give up on you.

He seemed to get it worse from the Black men that worked in his school.  One, who shall remain nameless, sat JT down after he’d gotten into a fight during the lunch hour, and told him “you ain’t shit.”

And when he recounted that story, and looked at me, this big “thug”, this big dangerous gang member, all I could see was that 12 year old kid, whose dad wasn’t around enough, relive the pain of having another potential father figure tell him “you ain’t shit, and you ain’t never gonna be shit, you just another nappy headed nigga”.

I knew that that was one of his defining moments in life, not just in childhood.

“They didn’t want me there, so I said fuck it.  I stopped caring.  I stopped doing my work.  And all the teachers would pass me to the next grade, until I just up and quit…there was no point in being there anymore, because to them I knew that I wasn’t shit.”

Many gang members and drug dealers always say, “why should I get a job, do you know how much money I can make in one night?”

JT wrestled with that for a time as well.  And then, he just let it go.  He got a job working the graveyard shift at a gas station in the U District.  Crappy hours, crappy work, crappy money.  But he went to school 5 times a week.  And he went to work, 6 nights a week.  He preferred nights.  He preferred being away from the South End when the moon was out.

“I want to live”, he would say.  “When I have children, I don’t want them to be ashamed of who their father is.”

So that’s what he did; work, school, school, work.  The occasional party- hell we’re entitled to that, right?

And then…he stopped returning my calls.  For three days, I heard nothing.  3 days stretched to 6, and I was in a panic.  I couldn’t get a hold of anyone who would know where to find him.  He wasn’t going to school, wasn’t going to work…poof.

Then I got the phone call.

“Yo this is Troy.”

Troy.  JT’s best friend.

I instantly felt nauseated, and tears sprang to my eyes before I could register what was happening.

“Yo!” he said louder, “this is Troy, are you there?”

“Don’t tell me over the phone,” I said.

I heard a long sigh.  “Listen,” he started to say.

“Don’t!  You come over here right now and tell me,” and I hung up the phone, went into the bathroom, and vomited.  I sat in the living room, on the floor, feeling dizzy, trying with all of my might to prevent my brain from finishing any thoughts in my head.  I just couldn’t do it.  I just couldn’t go there.

It only took 20 minutes for Troy to get to my house, but it felt like an eternity.  I heard his car pull up and I jumped up and threw the door open just as he was walking up.  He looked tired.  And serious.

I remember that I grabbed his shirt, just as he said “JT got shot.”

I was bawling.  This was my brother.  He might as well have been blood.  We might as well have known each other since infancy, because that was how tight the bond was.

“He’s in the hospital”, Troy said.

My breath came back.  The questions flew out; what was his condition, how did it happen, where did it happen, who was there…on and on and on.  Troy came in, sat me down, and told me the story.

They had been at a party.  Big shocker there.

There was someone there who had “old beef” with JT and they got into it verbally.  JT made the choice to leave.  He walked out of the house, and was moving away from the crowd when the shot rang out. 

A single shot in the back.

“Is he going to be okay?”

Troy knew not to lie: “I don’t know”.  He explained how, in the beginning, JT was talking and seemed to be doing fine all things considered, but then, he took a turn for the worse, and he was “pretty messed up”, as Troy put it.

The next day I went to the hospital.  Jt’s mom met me in the waiting room at Harborview, and tried to explain to me what was going on, before she led me to his room.  I nodded along as if I understood what she was telling me, but nothing could have prepared me for walking into that room.

The smell was indescribable, still to this day.  I guess, now that I think about it, it was the smell of death.  I know that smell.  I experienced it again 3 years ago when my youngest died of cancer.  In the final days, that scent was there, coming from his dying body.

JT was about twice his normal size.  He was naked, with just a towel over his groin.  He had the most severe bruise I have ever seen in my life, on one side of his belly button.

“Where the bullet stopped”, his mother told me.  The single shot to his back had gone through one of his lungs and stopped in his abdomen.

He was in a medically induced coma.  Fluids were pumping in one tube and out the other, stained red with blood.  Tubes in his nose, down his throat, in both arms.  His lips were so swollen they were splitting and chapped.  His head was so large that the same was happening to his scalp…and his feet and toes…his fingers and fingernails.  It was one of the most horrific things I have ever seen.

I could not stop crying.  I felt sick to my stomach but refused to leave the room, refused to give into the terror and the horror and the overwhelming sense of helplessness, anger, and fear.

After a time, his mother left us alone.  I sat in the window for a while, just looking at him, watching the nurses as they came and went.  None of them spoke to me and I didn’t bother to talk to them.

All I could do was stare at him.

Finally I moved to his left side, and I took his swollen, limp fingers in mine, and stroked the inside of his hand.

“You’re going to be alright”, I said.  Isn’t that what you’re supposed to say?  You’re supposed to be optimistic, right?  “You can get through this,” I said, again and again.  “You can’t die.  You have too much to do, remember?”

I looked desperately to his face, for any sign of recognition, knowing that none would come.

And then, it sank in.  This was it.  This was life and death.  I leaned over and whispered in his ear, “I love you, if you have to go, it’s okay.  If you have to go, it’s alright.  We’ll be fine…it’s okay to let go.”

I don’t remember how long I stayed there with him.  I don’t even remember how I got home.  I just remember being completely devastated, and I knew deep down that it wasn’t going to be alright.

I prayed a hundred times a day.  When you are desperate for God’s strength, you can stay in a constant state of prayer, and that’s what I did, because I knew I really didn’t have any other options but that.  His mom and I talked 3 or 4 times a day every day. 

14 days after he had been shot, I rushed home from work and called JT’s mom at the hospital.

“She’s not here,” the nurse said.

“Well could you please have her call me when she gets back?”

Silence.

“Hello?” I said into the phone.

“She’s not coming back hon,” she said to me with regret in her voice, “I’m so sorry to have to tell you this over the phone, but he di-“

I hung up.  I hung up and called someone, who I can’t recall now, and I screamed into the phone, “he’s dead”, over, and over, and over and over again.

I fell to my knees in my room and felt my heart shatter.

Hours later, I was in a daze.  The evening news was on while I worked on dinner.  Suddenly I heard from the tv, “an update tonight on a gang shooting that took place two weeks ago, the victim in that case has died today at Harborview medical center…”

I dropped the spatula on the kitchen floor and stormed into the living room just as the anchor was saying my brother’s first, middle and last name.

Known gang member.

Criminal history.

Drug dealer.

Gang related shooting.

Gang member, gang member, gang member, gang member, gang member, gang member.

I was furious.  Livid, is more like it.  Before the 1 minute report was over I had called information, gotten the number to the news desk at the station, and was screaming at some poor intern that my brother was a FORMER gang member.

Would I do an interview?

“Go to hell,” was all I could manage before throwing the phone across the room.

Just like that, the brother that I knew, the man who had worked so hard to change his life…really was dead.  And in the eyes of the law, and in the eyes of the media, he would only be remembered as one thing; gang member.

In the days that followed, the reports stayed the same, both on tv and in the newspaper.  I remember one specific newscast where a reporter had gone to the neighborhood where the shooting took place and interviewed a resident that lived next to the house where the party had been held.

“That’s what ‘they’ get”, she was saying with a shrug of the shoulder, “all the rest of us just need to make sure we don’t get caught in the crossfire.”

Translation: Not my problem.  Has nothing to do with me.  It’s ‘those’ people.

And that, dear readers, is why I have just written out that entire, painful story.

This week, after a slew of shootings that remain unsolved, yet another young Black man, all of 15 years old, was shot and killed while walking down the street with some friends.

And the only thing that seems to matter to anyone is that the police have said he was a gang member.  It’s sick, but it’s true; when the police and the media paint these kids as nothing more than gang members, everyone else adopts the same attitude as the neighbor who saw my brother lying in his own blood; not my problem…that’s what they get…forget about it and move on.  You never hear the word “murder” in these cases.  You hear “gang related shooting”, or “shot to death”.  Why are we all so quick to edit our “murder”.  Let me remind you that when one person kills another, it is murder.  Even when you’re a gang member, former gang member, or know people who know people who are gang members.

Somehow “gang members” become less than human.  They become disposable.  They person that they were, is forever replaced by their new position as a statistic.

Well I am here to tell you that my brother was more than a statistic.  He was a real person; a son, brother, and student.  He had a heart.  He had feelings.  He had a future that was stolen from him by some punk with a gun who wanted to show everyone else how big and bad he was.

So don’t be so quick to judge.  Don’t be so quick to dismiss these events, and those Black boys that have lost their lives, because no matter what path they may have been on, none of them deserved to be murdered. 

We have got to find a new way of looking at these situations, and we have to accept the fact that they are not mutually exclusive from the rest of society.

Kids turn to gangs not because they want to be violent criminals, but because they aren’t getting what they need at home and at school and who knows where else.

Who is really engaging the youth in the South end?  No one.  Not the city of Seattle.  Certainly not the police department.  They aren’t getting what they need at home, and are more than likely being labeled at school, making it nearly impossible for them to find a way out of the hole, and one way or another, they simply die there, their graves already prepared. 

That is unacceptable.

Or maybe it is.