Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (17 page)

To that extent, Pedro’s assassination was a textbook case. Before dusk could roll over the Diablo mountains, a black Camaro convertible pulled up alongside him and his friends, and a gunman wearing a bandanna over his face started shooting. The car then “took off burning rubber,” most likely down Galahad or Peter Pan, leaving Pedro with a bullet in the heart. He died right there. According to one local website, over the next twenty-four hours East San Jose crackled with gunfire in apparent retaliation, with some homes being shot at.
⁵
That morning, Pedro had called his sister, Miranda Brianna, with whom he was close, just for a chat. That evening she downed some Hennessy—his favorite drink—in his memory: Pedro was on the “Heeeeeen Team.”

“Blue, red, orange, none of that is going to save you,” his stepfather told youngsters at a vigil in the park a few days later, listing the gang colors as his face flickered in the flames. “That didn’t save my Junior. I was supposed to be working with him today. Instead I went to work alone,”
he said, his voice cracking and eyes welling. “I cried in the elevator.” One of Pedro’s memorial videos, showing pictures of him in everything from a tux to three-quarter-length shorts, scrolled to the sound of Philthy Rich’s “Thinking of You,” a rap ballad with a sampling of Diana Ross. “Shit is all the same, niggas die, mommas cry / Bitches turn sour now she fucking on that other guy. . . . Nothing to live for, my niggas doing life sentences / Either dead or in jail we doing life sentences.”

Finding money to bury Pedro was a problem. A fundraising site went up. “Please help with anything,” asked his aunt. On the Wednesday after his death, they held a car wash. At the candlelight vigil people collected coins and bills. It was more than two weeks before Pedro was finally laid to rest. According to her Facebook postings, by that time Miranda was struggling to get out of bed in the morning; by the New Year she was worried about her drinking. Requests went out for people not to wear gang colors to Pedro’s funeral. “No colors, no drama,” Miranda wrote on Facebook, “we are trying to have a good time saying our last goodbyes to Junior.”

I
N MOST
US
CITIES
where children got shot on the day profiled in this book, such a murder would have barely made it through a twenty-four-hour media cycle. A few seconds on the television, maybe. A few hundred words in the paper with a quote from a family member, maybe—and that’s it. If the perpetrator was caught, that too would merit a couple of hundred words. An event of note, but of precious little import. Pedro’s murder was different. His death appeared not only on the evening news in San Jose and in the next day’s paper but also in follow-up TV bulletins from the family vigil in the park a few days later and in a feature by
San Jose Mercury
columnist Joe Rodriguez titled “Teen Slain on Street Named for Kids’ Tales.” “In a neighborhood inspired by imagination and fantasy,” he wrote, “a starkness had set in, and there is a fear over what may come next.”
⁶

Much was made of the fact that Pedro was the city’s forty-fourth homicide victim of the year.
⁷
That’s forty-four too many. But still, for a city
of San Jose’s size, by American standards it’s not that many. Most only bother to count if the homicide rate reaches a round number or a significant milestone, like exceeding the previous record or last year’s figure. Compared to other cities and towns featured in this book, only Grove City, where Jaiden Dixon was shot the day before, had a lower homicide rate. The deadliest city of all, Newark, had a rate more than ten times as high.
⁸

But San Jose is different. It has grown exponentially since the Second World War to become the nation’s tenth largest city. Between 1950 and 1970 its population grew fivefold as large numbers of people relocated there after the war; between 1990 and 2010 it leapt another 20 percent thanks to the tech boom and immigration.
⁹
“It used to be a cow town,” a friend from Oakland told me. “And then Silicon Valley happened, and it just blew up.” The consequent low-rise sprawl gives the city a distinctly suburban feel; it seems you are rarely more than fifteen minutes from anywhere but will probably have to take the interstate or the freeway to get there. It’s a city dwarfed in reputation by its two closest neighbors, San Francisco and Oakland, even as it continues to outgrow them.

Expansion brought its problems. San Jose once prided itself on the sobriquet Safest Big City in America.
¹⁰
By the beginning of 2013, it was the fifth safest. It had a higher crime rate than the rest of America, and yet police were catching half as many criminals as they had a few years earlier.
¹¹
“San Jose never compared itself to places like Newark or Chicago,” explains Rodriguez, the newspaper columnist. We met one night for drinks while I was in town trying to find Pedro’s family. “It compares itself to how it used to be. Things went downhill pretty fast. When you’re doing really well and then suddenly you’re not, then you take the fall badly. It’s like Paradise Lost. So at the paper we followed up on all the deaths, because in San Jose these kind of shootings are still news.”

Four days after Pedro was shot, at around 8:30 p.m., San Jose Police Department’s Covert Response Unit, along with patrol officers, dogs, and officers from the Gang Suppression Unit, arrested twenty-year-old Balam Eugenio Gonzalez. He had bushy black eyebrows and thick black hair, compensating for what might one day pass for a mustache. They
booked him immediately for Pedro’s murder but did not release his name for another few days, citing the sensitivity of the investigation. They believed the murder was gang-related, making it the tenth such homicide that year.
¹²

After two-and-a-half years in prison, Balam was also charged with the fatal shooting of Armondo Miguel Heredia on August 23, 2012, as well as an attempted murder, on August 18, in another drive-by shooting that left one person wounded.
¹³

I’
M A LINGUIST BY
training. I studied to be an interpreter and translator in French and Russian and hoped to one day be a Moscow correspondent. Then I did a placement at the
Washington Post,
fell in love with an American, and ended up there instead. From the time I was first posted in New York, I intended to learn Spanish but never did. For the most part, I could get away with it. When I went out West there were translators, and sometimes down South people would translate for me and I would muddle through. It wasn’t ideal. But thanks to my linguistic privilege as an English speaker, I could function. However, in stories as sensitive as this, in communities that can be hard to reach, my inability to speak Spanish may have been a problem.

From everything I could tell from their Facebook pages, most of Pedro’s family spoke English, although his grandparents, with whom he lived, spoke Spanish. I left notes and messages for them everywhere I could on social media. I sent letters (some translated into Spanish) everywhere I thought they might be in San Jose. I flew to San Jose and knocked on the doors for which I had addresses. I received no response. At this point I just started asking around. Elsewhere in the country, while pursuing stories for this book, that has worked. Here it didn’t. Not because nobody spoke English. I’m sure lots of people did. But in a gang-rife area that is 90 percent Latino, a black man with an English accent asking if anyone knew the family of a Latino teenager who’d been shot just couldn’t win the confidence of those who had come to the park
to watch their children play and to have a stroll. It was one variable too many. Aside from Kenneth, Pedro was the only other child who was killed that day with whose family or friends I did not make a connection.

On the first day I walked around Capitol Park, where Pedro was shot, I saw a small shrine to his death next to the entrance sign. Some synthetic roses and a candle with a picture of the Virgin Mary on it—the kind that adorns so many sites of gun shootings—had been placed under it. Had I just stood there for twenty-four hours, rather than racing around to different addresses, I would certainly have met someone, for the next afternoon I came back, and the shrine was still there with one addition: an empty bottle of Hennessy—Pedro’s favorite tipple.

CHAPTER 5

TYLER DUNN (11)

Marlette, Michigan

8:19
P
.
M
.
EST

A
S CLOUDS GLOWERED OVER RURAL
M
ICHIGAN
,
THREE LONG
, sharp, discordant beeps sounded in slow, even succession over my car radio, followed by a dispassionate voice on every available station warning of extreme weather. In measured, urgent, intrusive tones, it promised conditions that were not just extreme—thunderstorms, lightning, flash flooding—but almost Biblical in their impact. Hail was coming, the voice said, that might ruin your roof, lightning that could kill, weather so ferocious one should stay away from windows. These calamities, I was warned, would be moving through counties I had never heard of, which meant I had no idea whether I was heading toward the storm or away from it.

But there was little reason to worry. Unlike in the city, where weather creeps up on your built environment and then mugs you unawares, here
it made its presence and intentions clear long before it approached. The horizon is so broad, the landscape so sparse, and the sky so huge that the weather declares itself with great ceremony. Long streaks of lightning cracked at the early-morning sky to the west like a huge cosmic whip. The clouds brooding in the distance were drifting south and west and clearing on their journey. Despite the dire warnings from my car radio as I headed northeast, toward Michigan’s thumb, I could see that the storm was skirting around me.

Sanilac County, where I was heading, has a lower population density than Finland
¹
and is slightly less racially diverse than Norway (it is over 95 percent white).
²
According to Michigan’s Department of Agriculture, Sanilac leads the state in its acreage devoted to soy, corn, wheat, dairy farms, and general cattle operations and is third in its acreage dedicated to sugar beets.
³
Straight roads lead past silos, Dutch barns, rows of corn, grazing livestock, and fallow fields interspersed with the occasional township and homestead as you head toward Lake Huron (one of the Greats), which serves as its eastern border.

Marlette, population 1,879, lies on Sanilac’s southwest flank, the third-biggest town and a twenty-five-minute drive to the county seat of Sandusky. The shiny blue water tower bearing the town’s name announces itself from afar to the left while McDonald’s golden arches peer over the trees to the right. From the south, the first sign welcoming you into town bears the motto “Marlette, The Heart of the Thumb.” Underneath the second sign, which simply states “Marlette City Limit,” is a footnote of sorts boasting, “Home of the Boys’ Cross Country Div 3 State Champion Runner Up.” The nearest cinema is in Sandusky; you’re about half an hour drive from the nearest Starbucks and non-Christian bookshop.