Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (23 page)

If that were not enough, there is also a significant gang presence in the school—not from one gang but from the whole gamut of black and Latino gangs that are rife in the area. While I was interviewing Ms. Thomas, her administrator rushed in to tell her she was needed urgently outside, where a fight had broken out. Ms. Thomas excused herself and went to slip on her shoes. “Faster,” urged her administrator, and Ms. Thomas was off to try to mediate. Within a week of my being there, several pupils would be arrested onsite after a huge fight.

Gabriel was like a don in the school. He was a quiet, unflashy presence whose word carried as much weight as, if not more than, that of many teachers. He’s a cool customer with a commanding aura. Edwin was his wisecracking sidekick: taller, skinnier, sillier, barely in control of himself let alone others. Gabriel and Edwin did a lot of “chilling.” Whereas Stanley Taylor’s friend Trey could not quite describe what that involved, Gabriel was more forthcoming—for Edwin and him it meant playing soccer, smoking weed, playing Grand Theft Auto, drinking, and talking. “Edwin wasn’t
bad
,” says Ms. Thomas. “He was immature. He was acting in high school how he should have been acting in middle school. In middle school he was still quiet and in his little shell. When he got here, he started being playful. He’d do things like take kids’ ID badges, run down the hallway, slap boys between their legs—boy stuff. But he wasn’t
bad;
he was
busy.
So almost every day he would get sent here because they couldn’t handle him. He was all over the place.”

Impulsive and childlike, if Edwin sensed he could provoke a teacher, he would not only “go there” but stay there until the job was done. “He got a kick out of seeing teachers get to that boiling point,” says Ms. Thomas. He also lacked any kind of filter. If he thought your hairstyle sucked, your dress didn’t fit, or your nose ring looked daft, he’d tell you, apparently not realizing he might be causing offense. For the most part, his misbehavior manifested itself in episodic acts of senseless defiance, particularly with regard to one teacher.

For example, students were not allowed to wear black undershirts since they were identified with the Southwest Cholo gang. Edwin wore one anyway. When that teacher told him to take it off, Ms. Thomas said, Edwin acted up. “I’m not giving you this shirt,” he said. Over the PA the call went out for Ms. Thomas to assist in talking Edwin down. “Edwin, what’s the problem,” she said. “He want me to take off my shirt,” Edwin said. “He gay. He just wants to look at my body. I don’t want him looking at me.” “Edwin take off that shirt,” said Ms. Thomas, through gritted teeth. “I ain’t gonna give it to him. I’m gonna give it to her,” said Edwin, gesturing toward Ms. Thomas. “I don’t care who you give it to, just take it off,” said Ms. Thomas. Edwin took the shirt off and threw it on the floor.

Most teachers in the special-education department didn’t have a problem with him. “You always knew what you were getting,” said one. “He was straightforward,” said another. Most did not indulge him, but they picked their battles. Others found him frustrating and disruptive. “There were particular teachers he knew he could get a rise out of,” says Ms. Thomas. “Full throttle. ‘You at school today?,’” she said, imitating Edwin’s thought process. “‘Let me see if I can make you mad.’”

He’d never been diagnosed, but Ms. Thomas guessed he was more likely to have attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder than oppositional defiant disorder. “If you’re oppositional defiant you’re like that with everybody. We never had that problem with Edwin here because we always shut it down. He was never disrespectful to us. But he would be referred here almost every day for something. There wasn’t a day when I didn’t have to fuss at him.”

Edwin liked school, says Gabriel, because he saw it as a great venue for horsing around. “I think he liked it because there are lots of people here and he could be distracted and mess about,” he explains. The actual schoolwork Edwin found both boring and pointless. When his childhood friend Camilla (not her real name) would ask him what he wanted to do with his life, he’d say, “Nothing.” “I don’t like school,” he told her. “I just want to work at High Times,” a local tobacco shop that sells pot paraphernalia.

A number of times over the few months since school had started that semester, Ms. Thomas had called Edwin’s mother, Marlyn, to discuss his behavior and to try to make plans to set him back on track. Marlyn, age thirty-nine, was eight months pregnant when I met her more than a year after the shooting. She speaks almost no English, relying on her children to interpret for her, so we spoke through a translator, Miriam Garcia. Marlyn came to the United States via the border town of Laredo in 1985, hiding in the driver’s cabin of an eighteen-wheeler with eight other people. She was nineteen, and she wanted something better than what she felt the future held in her native Honduras. One of seven children from El Progreso, an impoverished farming town at the foot of the Mico Quemado mountain chain, her future there appeared bleak. She paid coyotes $1,800—half up front and half on the Mexican side of the border—and traveled for a month, through Guatemala and Mexico. “I always wanted to have a family and give them more than we had, but I knew that doing that would be very difficult. I wanted to come to America because I thought I could make decent money and send it back to my parents to help them out.”

It didn’t quite work out like that. She did raise a family. Edwin was her oldest, followed by Sandra, fourteen, Victor, twelve, and Giovanni, nine. But she never learned English and never got the kind of training that would pull her out of the most basic, vulnerable manual labor. She cleans apartments and sometimes cooks for people. “The gold fell from very high in the sky,” wrote John Berger in his book about the immigrant experience,
A Seventh Man: Migrant Workers in Europe.
“And so when it hit the earth it went down very, very deep.”
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She barely has enough money to support her own family; it’s unlikely she’s sending much home.

Marlyn had come a long way at great risk and effort to give her children a better life. Now her eldest was playing the fool at school. She could not fathom what had gotten into him. He had been a sickly infant, hospitalized for seven days when he was eight months old for pneumonia. Marlyn was terrified back then. “He was my first child. He was my life. I was very worried. They are all my life,” she said casting her hand in the direction of her other children. “But he was my first, so he was very special in that way.” While he was in the hospital, he was also diagnosed with asthma. His father had asthma. The doctors told them it was hereditary. It was the reason why they could never have a pet. But as the years went on, Edwin’s asthma became less pronounced before effectively dissipating into a range of less serious allergies. As a child, he had always been very calm and obedient and sought to set an example for his three younger siblings. He’d never done brilliantly in school academically, but up until this point he had not caused any trouble either. Now Ms. Thomas kept calling her in.

Each time they told Edwin they were calling his mother, his demeanor would change markedly. His mother was not familiar with the clowning and defiant behavior of his school world. Having her hear about it would not get him in serious trouble—Marlyn doesn’t appear to be a big disciplinarian. But, more devastatingly to him, it would disappoint her and diminish her impression of him as the responsible eldest son.

Holding her hands together palm to palm, as though in prayer, she would say to him in front of his teachers, “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me. Promise me you’ll stop. You’re supposed to be an example for your brothers and sisters.” Edwin would give his word. He said he was just playing and put the trouble down to a bad relationship with just one teacher. “I promise you they’re not going to call anymore,” he’d tell her. And that promise would be as good as the next call. “By December I promise you my grades are going to go up,” he told her. “That’s what I was looking forward to,” she says.

Ms. Thomas had a plan for Edwin. She’d decided to move him into her behavior class, which had fewer students and two teachers. She called a meeting for eight a.m. on Monday, November 25, to talk about it with
her superiors and was getting the paperwork together the previous week. On Friday, November 22, as Jaiden lay on life support over a thousand miles away, Ms. Thomas came back to school from a meeting elsewhere to find that Edwin had been sent to her again. “Why are you down here?” she asked him, somewhat wearily. He wouldn’t say exactly, beyond saying that his teacher had sent him to wait for her. She entered her office, and he followed her in, placed a chair against the wall, and sat in front of her desk playing Fruit Ninja on his phone. “Miss, do you like playing Fruit Ninja?” he asked, swiping away at the produce with his finger. “No, Edwin,” she said. “I don’t play those stupid games.” She asked him what he’d done this time. Once again he’d been joking around and refused to stop when he was told. “Edwin, I’m gonna choke you if you don’t stop,” she said, repeating the threat she jokingly made to all her students whose behavior wore out her last nerve. Edwin carried on playing Fruit Ninja. He stayed in her office for the remainder of the day, and when the bell rang he got up. “See you later, Miss,” he said. “See you Monday,” said Ms. Thomas, who starts to cry as she recalls saying good-bye for the last time.

That weekend, Ms. Thomas collated the paperwork for the Monday morning meeting. “I’d already pretty much completed it, but I’m, like, a perfectionist, and everyone has to put their eyes on it,” she says. “So after I cleaned up the house on Saturday morning I took another look, made sure everything was laid out in his folder correctly, and put it in my little backpack so it’d be ready.”

A
T FIVE FEET TEN
, Edwin was a fairly tall, slender, handsome boy with tight black hair like wire wool and bushy eyebrows to match. He looked young, even for sixteen; he had a smooth-looking face not yet ravaged by acne or stubble, with the complexion of watered-down milk. Depending on where you are, he could have been mistaken for many races and ethnicities, including white. Marlyn has darker, Amerindian features one would associate with South or Central America. But Edwin was more of a
shape-shifter. In France people would assume he was from the Maghreb; in Germany he might be Turkish; in Spain or Portugal some locals might claim him as their own. In Houston, he was Latino.

It was perhaps a mark of his immaturity that he’d not found a way to capitalize on his good looks. He never had a romantic relationship. He’d had plenty of crushes, says Gabriel, but he was always too shy to talk to girls. No matter how many times Gabriel told him to lighten up, Edwin could never get up the courage up to ask a girl out. He’d laugh it off. “Your girl will be my girl too,” he’d tell Gabriel. When Gabriel told him he’d have to get his own girlfriend, Edwin would plead for help. “I can’t, but that’s because you don’t help me, man,” he said. Gabriel would tease him relentlessly, approaching “random girls” and telling them Edwin liked them. “He’d turn completely red,” says Gabriel, who would then tease him some more. “Hey, what’s up with you, Mr. Tomato Head.” “He was shy,” says Marlyn. “But the girls were after him.”

One girl he was particularly close to was Camilla. She came from a rough family. Her mother, it is claimed, was a Cholo gang member. Her apartment is defended by a ferocious pit bull. Camilla openly and proudly identifies as a gang member. Her Facebook page carries the letters SWC (Southwest Cholo) after her gang name. She has not only bought into the gang culture; she literally wears it. Her hair sits high atop her head in a supertight ponytail, her eyebrows are drawn on in black, string rosaries hang around her neck. Big black shirt, big black pants, a black belt so long one end hangs lank close to the ground, black and white bandanna around her neck, and a pair of black Chuck Taylors on her feet. Butch and dark, black on brown—it’s the chola style.

“He was always playing with her, but she had a tough attitude,” says Marlyn. “They loved each other very much. She protected him a lot.” “I knew him since third grade,” says Camilla. “He was my best friend. We went to school together in the morning, and then we’d come home together after school. We were like brother and sister.” Once, Gabriel asked him why he didn’t date Camilla. “You’re always with her. You might as well go out with her.” “Nah man, she’s like my sister,” said
Edwin. “Are you sure? Because you’re always with her,” said Gabriel. “Nah,” insisted Edwin. “She’s my home girl.”

For the last few years, Edwin and Camilla had been living in Bellaire Gardens, a low-rise apartment complex on a busy road of commercial and residential properties in southwest Houston in an area called Gulfton. A greenfield site until shortly after the Second World War, Gulfton was rapidly developed during the seventies, at the height of Houston’s oil boom. Ambitious energy workers flocked to Texas from the Rust Belt and abroad, prompting opportunistic developers to hastily build “luxury” apartment complexes for young professionals. In the absence of zoning laws, these new complexes sprouted up all around Gulfton and boasted fancy names like Chateaux Carmel and Napoleon Square with amenities like swimming pools, hot tubs, laundry rooms, and even discos while offering free gifts like VCRs to new tenants. These gated communities, strewn along roads with dense traffic in between commercial outlets, were often built like small fortresses, with many stipulating that no children were allowed. Precious little in the way of social infrastructure—parks, libraries, even schools—followed.
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