Читать книгу Boy With A Knife - Jean Trounstine - Страница 11

2. THE DAY BEFORE

At 3:30 p.m. on Easter Sunday 1993, Gator Collet pulled up in his gray Hyundai and told Karter that their friend Nigel Thomas was going to fight Shawn Pina. Karter had known Gator since they were five, and the two had grown particularly close at Greater New Bedford Regional Vocational Technical High School (known as the “Voke”), which they had both attended until recently. Before moving a few miles away to Dartmouth, Gator had lived right around the corner from Karter. The two were often mistaken for cousins, a fact that annoyed Karter when publicity about his crime later hit the newspapers.

Outwardly, the boys seemed fairly ordinary. With a few other neighborhood friends, they played street games and climbed trees. They first named themselves the “Bloodhounds” until they realized that bloodhounds were floppy-eared dogs and in no way ferocious. So they became “The Wrecking Crue,” after a Nintendo video game, and their mischief escalated to include dumping people’s trash on the sidewalk, egging cars, and stealing video games from the mall. One summer, they accidentally set fire to an abandoned boat in the woods. They were not caught, the woods did not go up in flames, and no one was hurt.

Such antics could be considered typical of many adolescents trying to impress one another with macho cool. However, a 2012 report by the Sentencing Project which surveyed the lives of more than 1500 juvenile lifers found that frequent exposure to violence both at home and in the community, problems in school, familial incarceration, and relationships with delinquent peers were common in their formative years.¹

From an early age, Karter went along with Gator’s schemes: “He was content to take the blame; I was content to let him,” he later wrote. Studies show that antisocial boys are often drawn to those who are aggressive and can negotiate challenging situations or provide protection;² becoming friends with Gator may have made Karter feel more visible and accepted.³ Psychologists at his trial would later posit that Karter’s “absent” and “idealized” father might have led to his being influenced by Gator.⁴ Without a father present, children are more likely to follow the lead of what law professor Solangel Maldanado calls “their anti-social peers.”⁵

Gator had always been more outlandish than Karter. With sunken eyes and a shaved head, he courted the image of the tough guy. Some claimed he delighted in the skinhead look and called him “racist”;⁶ Karter thought his friend mainly enjoyed having a reputation, whether positive or negative. Gator hated his given name, “Jeremy,” and took his nickname from his skateboarding hero, Mark Rogowski, who reinvented himself through skating as Mark (“Gator”) Anthony. (Forget that Rogowski had raped and murdered a woman or that he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder upon entering prison—to boys like Gator, he was a rock star.⁷)

Gator was the kind of student who infuriated most teachers, as he loved to buck authority. Some of his fellow students believed he idolized the mass murderer Charles Manson.⁸ School administrators said he was a bad influence on his friends.⁹ Karter wrote in 2008 that Gator once joked to the school psychiatrist about hearing voices, a prank that resulted in a not-so-funny stay at Pembroke Hospital, the local psychiatric facility. Although he had once been a straight-A student, by high school, Gator refused to obey fundamental school rules, such as reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. When Gator said that he was a Nazi who didn’t recognize the US flag, his instructor, a war veteran, wanted him to be suspended. After a string of similar antics, Gator was asked to withdraw from the Voke in late 1992, before being officially expelled.

In January 1993, Gator, then sixteen, transferred to Dartmouth High School, where he continued to push buttons. It was there he met fifteen-year-old Nigel Thomas, a freshman, who he introduced to Karter. A friendship eventually formed among the three youths, cemented by similar backgrounds and troubled childhoods, The three boys were called the “skateboarders” by other students, and many at the school viewed them as a gang.¹⁰ After Karter’s crime, some of the more incendiary press added to this incorrect notion, calling Karter a member of “the skaters,” youths who supposedly wore low-riding pants, baggy T-shirts, and hoodies and who favored a mixture of rap and heavy metal music. “Many of them crop their hair or have their heads shaven,” wrote the Boston Globe.¹¹ The 1991 cult film Video Days had reinforced this stereotype by portraying skaters as rebellious nonconformists.

In fact, skateboarding for Karter and his friends was a way to be unique; with skating, they could be free outside while inside their worlds were crashing around them. Karter had started skateboarding in junior high, in part because he loved the thrill and the challenge. He also felt there was not a lot to do in New Bedford but skip school, smoke cigarettes or weed, drink alcohol, and commit petty crimes (mostly breaking and entering), none of which really interested him. Also, Karter had no car, and skateboarding allowed him to explore the city. On boards as well as on bikes and on foot, he and his friends ventured everywhere: east to downtown’s “Mickey D’s,” a building arranged like the deck of a ship whose bathrooms were labeled “Gulls” and “Buoys”; to the North End; and even into neighboring Freetown, south to the beach, and west to the mall.

Like Karter and Gator, Nigel had also faced his share of minefields growing up. Before he was ten, his parents divorced, after which his mother remarried a man with two sons. When she died of cancer in 1988, Nigel’s biological father moved to Denmark, leaving Nigel in the care of his stepfather. A month or so before the murder, Nigel, who never recovered from his mother’s death, told Gator that his stepfather was physically hurting him and that he had filed an abuse complaint against him under the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act.¹² The accusation was especially serious, considering that there were no corroborating abuse charges from his half-brothers, and that Nigel’s biological father lived abroad and had not been active in his son’s life since the divorce. Without a caretaker, Nigel might end up in foster care. Gator thought of Nigel in some ways as a younger brother, and the abuse infuriated him.

After Nigel filed the abuse and neglect complaint, the Department of Social Services became involved.¹³ Karter wrote in 2008 that Nigel asked Gator if he could move into his house, as long as DSS agreed. Gator’s mother, a bank teller, and his father, a grocer, willingly offered to take Nigel in; word was that the Collets planned to seek custody.¹⁴ Karter felt sorry for Nigel, whom he believed had been devastated by his home life. He wrote that Nigel “often went to school with bruises and black eyes.” One time, he saw the boy being picked on at a convenience store when a so-called friend opened a package of oatmeal cream cookies and stuck one on Nigel’s forehead. That image held fast for Karter: Nigel was a scapegoat. For Karter, Nigel’s rejection and Karter’s own self-professed inability “to tolerate injustice” were a fierce combination.

Also stored in Karter’s mind at that time was footage from The Outsiders, a 1983 film based on S. E. Hinton’s classic teenage novel from 1967. It was Karter’s favorite movie. The film, called a “librarian’s dream” when it went from being a best seller to the screen, made its way into many US junior and senior high classrooms across the country; for Karter, as for many boys of the era, the story spoke of justice.¹⁵ Karter believed with all his teenage being that Ponyboy and his brothers, whose parents die in a car crash before the film begins, are doing the right thing even while breaking the law: as members of the Greasers, they promise to defend their buddies in street fights and from abusive adults no matter the cost. They stand up to a rival gang; they struggle against jealousy and social status. Ultimately, even the law sees their well-meaning ways. About The Outsiders, Karter wrote, “I wanted to be the hero, standing up to the bad guys and saving my friends.”

So, Karter felt no qualms when, a few weeks before Easter Sunday 1993, the Collets sat down with him and Gator and told them they needed to keep watch over a fragile Nigel. Even though Nigel wasn’t one of Karter’s closest buddies, he, too, deserved protection. Just as in The Outsiders, Gator and Karter clung to the idea that loyalty was key to friendship. At sixteen, Karter needed a creed. He yearned desperately for something to believe in.

The desperation Karter was feeling in the spring of 1993 had begun some years before, as highlighted in this line from one of his letters in 2007: “My earliest memory is being abandoned by my father.” This recollection was of the first time Derek left the house for work and did not come home, a pattern that would repeat itself many times and add to Karter’s insecurities. When I asked Derek about this in 2011, he wept, thinking about how he had hurt his son. But in the early 1990s, Derek Reed was in the clutches of cocaine. “I wish I could take it all back,” Derek said, and speaking about his son: “He always got the short end of the stick.”¹⁶

It wasn’t just Karter: no one in the family had an easy time of it, even before Derek was arrested in 1991 and sentenced to eighteen to twenty years in jail, His drug use had been out of control for months before his arrest, and he blew thousands of dollars on cars, jewelry, and furs—extravagances that Sharon admitted she liked in spite of herself. She and Derek fought continually, their fights usually involving kicking and screaming, often sparked either by Derek’s drug use or his affairs with other women. For her part, Sharon retaliated by having an affair with another man and abusing alcohol. There was never enough money for the household. Sharon wished she could have protected her son from the clawing anger between her and Derek, a man she truly loved but never married. Karter hated their fights. He remembered times when he and his sisters stayed with friends or relatives until the situation calmed between his parents. Yet amid all the chaos, Karter went to school as if nothing was happening.

A 2010 study by scholars Bruce Western and Becky Petit showed that 2.7 million US children under the age of eighteen were forced to face a parent’s incarceration; that’s one in every twenty-eight, an increase from one in 125 in 1995.¹⁷ (For black children, the stats are even grimmer: one in nine loses a parent to prison or jail. ¹⁸)This loss has been compared to death in the eyes of a malleable child.¹⁹ Those youngsters have a wide variety of traumatic responses: they are more likely to do poorly in school, turn to drugs, develop mental health issues, have a pervasive sense of apathy, lose trust, are susceptible to risky behavior, and experience shame and social stigma.²⁰ In many cases, kids of the imprisoned try to hide the trauma of parental arrests, convictions, and incarceration. While some act out, or end up suspended or dropping out of school, others, like Karter, mask the pain.²¹ It wasn’t until years later that Karter discovered the wisdom of sociologist Jackson Katz, whose groundbreaking documentary Tough Guise showed how many broken boys learn at a young age to put up a guise to protect themselves from their feelings.²² They succumb to the belief system that equates manhood with invulnerability; they act “tough.”²³

By April 1993, Karter was feeling upset much of the time, and knew his life was a mess. Complicating matters was the anger he felt for continuing to love his father despite being abandoned by him. He was also embarrassed that his family was unable to afford school lunches, so much that he refused a free lunch pass; instead, he borrowed change, went hungry, or stole snacks from the lunch line. Talking about his feelings was out of the question; discussing his emotions was not something Karter knew how to do. So he told everyone he was “fine,” and that it didn’t bother him that his father was in prison.

Karter had always been taught to tough it out, no matter what happened to him. There was the time when his mother left the five-year old Karter with a babysitter while she and Derek partied at a friend’s house. Karter remembered a trip with the babysitter to a nearby convenience store and a pleasant ride in a shopping cart. All of a sudden, the sitter let go of the cart, thinking it would be fun for the toddler, but Karter found himself spinning out of control down a hill. The cart crashed with him still in it; his leg was bent in half, crushed in the middle of his thigh. It hurt—the leg was broken, it was later discovered—but he tried not to cry. There was also the time in seventh grade when he was beat up by a boy who “was looking to pummel some younger victim.” Karter wove between parked cars until he was caught, thrown to the ground, punched, and kicked. He yelled for help but nobody came.

Teenagers who experience violence in the home and in their communities often react in extremes. For example, some may do poorly in school, while others feel obliged to always get straight A’s.²⁴ Sometimes, their low self-esteem leads to poor social skills, and they may feel responsible for siblings and/or an abused parent. But children are also resilient, and when violence frequently erupted around Karter and wove its way through his memories, he always managed to keep the hurt inside and stay out of major trouble.

It is not surprising then, to learn that children with incarcerated parents frequently have trouble with attachments.²⁵ Although they cannot acknowledge it without shame, they experience their parent’s incarceration as a rejection of them, and are often afraid to let themselves get close to anyone else.²⁶ This may be, in part, because many incarcerated parents are very involved in the lives of their children before their imprisonment.²⁷ With a parent behind bars, families are split apart, and the child begins to feel like he or she is also doing time.²⁸ Caretakers left behind often do not have enough time for the family, or sufficient finances to manage the home.²⁹

After his father left, Karter started to create elaborate fantasies as he walked through dangerous neighborhoods. He imagined both attacking and being attacked, but always with the same goal, as he wrote in 2008: “to end up a hero.” Sociologist Jackson Katz writes about how “We live in a culture that connects manhood to . . . a willingness to use violence at the deepest levels of men’s identity, telling young men that is the first, and preferred, method of proving you’re a man.”³⁰

A Cape Verdean, Shawn Pina attended Dartmouth High. A teacher would later tell me that in a school that was 90 percent white, Shawn struggled to fit in.³¹ About a week before that fateful April day, Shawn had verbally insulted Nigel’s mother, and while this was not reported in the media, Karter wrote that Shawn called her a “whore” and said that he had “fucked her.” Nigel warned Shawn to stop saying such things—his mother was dead—but Shawn continued, daring him to do something about it.

While Karter had been a victim of bullying himself, he did not shy away from bullying others. After one boy in his junior high all-white clique was ambushed by a group of African American kids in a neighborhood lot, Karter’s group rounded up a random black boy to exact revenge, despite knowing that he was not among those who had done the beating. As they pushed the terrified boy around, Karter yelled along with the crowd: “We know you were one of them. You think you’re tough with all your boys, jumpin’ white boys?” Finally, Karter realized how scared the child was and, without losing face, said, “Forget it, he’s not one of them.” The clique walked away, but Karter thought at the time, that maybe he had been too “chicken” or too “soft.” He wrote in 2011 that it would be years before he realized that he had been driven by “anger, frustration, resentment and powerlessness.” By senior high, the code was clear: Karter and his friends could not be “weak” in any situation. Show courage for your men. Be strong. Don’t back down.

By 4 p.m. on Easter Sunday 1993, Karter was piled into the backseat of Gator’s car, along with Shad Sacremento and his girlfriend, Beth Streck. Shad was nineteen; by age twenty-one, he would join the military.³² He was also a skateboarder. Karter looked up to Shad and was glad to have him along—he was wiry and a good fighter. Karter knew that Shad had been in trouble a few times, that his mother, a police officer, had recently thrown him out, and that he was staying across the harbor in nearby Fairhaven with Beth. Hard-hitting and pretty, Beth loved all the Boston sports teams and attended Fairhaven High.³³ The group drove off to do what they believed was the honorable thing: to give Nigel a chance to fight with the boy who had picked on him one too many times.

Upon arriving at Shawn’s house, the group discovered a couple of Shawn’s friends outside. They told them that Nigel wanted to fight one-on-one to settle the score. “One-on-one” was important to these boys. It meant that each person was pulling his own weight and could stand up to provocation by boys as tough or tougher than they were. It was part of a code of fair fighting, by which you took on your own battles, individually. With a one-on-one fight, people could cheer from the sidelines, but no one could participate except the fighters.

Shawn’s crew crowded around the car, harassing Beth verbally, which angered Shad.³⁴ He jumped out of the Hyundai. Some witnesses said he picked up Gator’s metal baseball bat, and, wielding it, chased the guys down the street.³⁵ But Shawn never mentioned the bat in his testimony at the trial. He said Shad chased them until Shawn’s friends ducked inside his house.³⁶ There was yelling, an attempt to get them to come back outside by the boys in the car, but no one budged.

Finally, the five drove off. Shad and Beth decided to opt out, and after Gator drove them back to Fairhaven, the remaining trio sped back toward Shawn’s. When they turned down Shawn’s street, they saw a bunch of boys waving sticks or bats—Shawn Pina said there were five, while Karter said twelve or fifteen—daring them to get out of the car.³⁷ That’s when Karter realized they were in too deep. They just kept driving; to get out of the car would have risked too much.

Later that night, Karter, Gator, and Nigel agreed that they had royally screwed up and were in big trouble. They had wanted it to be over, but instead they had angered Shawn and his buddies and failed to finish the fight. The next day, Shawn and his crew would surely be waiting for them at Dartmouth High. The boys prized loyalty above what some might say was rational thought: what happened to their friends happened to them. That night, they made a deal. Although they were supposed to be in school on that snowy Monday, April 12, 1993, they agreed to go to Dartmouth High so that Nigel could find Shawn Pina and have a fair fight, one-on-one, without all of Shawn’s buddies involved.

Karter assured his friends that he had their backs.