Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (6 page)

The subjects of the study were all between the ages of eighteen and fifty-four, 98 percent were male, most had a criminal record, and a third were involved in domestic violence cases. As such, says Hutson, Danny’s case sounds “pretty classic.” “He was depressed. He didn’t want to live anymore. He didn’t think he could carry on.”

An hour and forty-five minutes after he shot Vicki, Danny was traced to a Walmart parking lot in Easton Town Center, a twenty-minute drive from her workplace and not far from the motel where he’d been staying. At 9:46 he sat in his car trapped by two police vehicles. “Most of these incidents are over pretty quickly,” explains Hutson, with 70 percent of shootings taking place within thirty minutes of the police arriving. Sure enough, a shoot-out soon ensued in which one policeman was injured and Danny finally got his wish: suicide by cop.

Vicki’s first thought when she woke up from surgery was that he could still be out there. “Did they get him?” she asked her dad. “No,” he replied. Vicki tried to get out of bed. “Oh my God, he’s coming back to get me,” she thought. Her father clarified that Danny hadn’t been arrested but rather had been shot dead. She sank back down into the bed. She said it was the first time in years she’d felt safe.

Across town, Nicole was told that Jaiden wouldn’t make it. “His injuries aren’t survivable,” the neurologist told her. “There’s nothing we could do.” The neurologist said that Jaiden’s CT scan was one of the worst she’d ever seen. The bullet had taken a path straight to the back of his brain, where it had ricocheted around, causing irreparable damage. They put Jaiden on a ventilator while a decision was made about organ donation. “I don’t remember feeling anything,” says Nicole. “I don’t know if I cried. I
was in shock and numb. ‘This cannot be real. It cannot be real. This is not happening right now.’ All I remember is having this image of him in his shoes. He’d just put his shoes on, and his T-shirt was on the floor. And now he’s in a hospital gown with a thing down his throat and a patch on his head. All in about an hour or so.”

Her last entry on Facebook, the night before, had been a link to a story about Merrick McKoy, a Colorado man who, four days earlier, had posted a picture of himself and his nineteen-month-old daughter on his page shortly before shooting both her and himself. “This is the very definition of a monster,” wrote Nicole. “What is wrong with people?!!” Her first posting after the shooting read simply, “I love you Jaiden. I love you so much.”

N
EWS OF
J
AIDEN
’
S SHOOTING
spread through Grove City like a bushfire. When convoys of police cars and news trucks roll up on a street like Independence Way, people inevitably start talking. For most of the morning few knew the names of either the victim or the assailant or their fates. All they knew was that a child had been shot. Jimmy Lewis, who lived across the road from Jaiden and worked at his after-school program at the local YMCA, had gone in early to work out. The Y is a bustling facility where children are fed, do their homework, and participate in either sports, arts, nature class, or “brain work” while they wait for their parents to pick them up. Jimmy got a call from his mother alerting him to the commotion taking place at the end of their street. His colleague Pamela Slater knew that Grove City was a small-enough community that, whoever the victim was, the YMCA would be impacted somehow. “There was a 90 percent chance that it was one of our kids,” she said. “The age and the connections we have in the community, whether or not it was an actual YMCA kid, it could have been a previous kid or a sibling. Somehow, someway we were going to be affected, and our kids would be affected because they would have known.”

Within hours, Jaiden’s teacher, his baseball coach, Nicole’s sister, and many others were at the hospital. They had to give the security desk a password to stop the media from sneaking in. At around noon, Pamela was pulled out of a meeting and told that the victim was Jaiden. With only a few hours before the children were supposed to arrive for after-school care, she had no time to process her grief or shock as she pulled together the YMCA’s various departments to draft a letter to give to the parents. Their priority was to protect the children from rumor and let their parents break the news to them. So when the children arrived, the staff said nothing. When parents came to pick up their children, they were given the letter.

“I know you heard about the shooting,” Pamela would tell them. “I know, it’s terrible,” they’d reply. “But there’s a little bit more detail,” Pamela would interject. “I know, it’s terrible,” the parents would repeat. “And then,” says Pamela, “you hand the letter to the parents. And you say, ‘He was in our program.’ And they’d say, ‘Oh no. It was Jaiden.’

“It was tough. It was difficult to have to repeat and repeat and repeat over and over. You could just see these levels and layers of the immensity of what we were talking about as I broke it to them. But we wanted the parents to be able to talk to the kids, especially because it was the weekend.”

Most children found out that night or over the weekend. Jaiden’s baseball coach, Brady—a mild-mannered man who clearly understood his role as primarily coaching children rather than coaching a sport—says he knows of children who were never told. When the children came back to the YMCA on Monday, there were extra staff for them to talk to.

“I can remember that there were some kids who were just devastated coming right in off the bus that Monday,” recalls Jimmy. “Our child care and metro department staff coached us on how we could support them. It was off and on all week. We serve meals every evening, and for a good week or so they kept an empty chair for Jaiden and even put a meal out for him. Probably wasn’t until after Christmas that you didn’t say ‘Jaiden’ and everyone starts crying.”

Several months later, while wandering through the YMCA before the summer break, Pamela was struck by how many art projects were
devoted to Jaiden. “There’d be these hearts with ‘Jaiden’ on them or little wings with his name or crosses that say ‘Rest in Peace, Jaiden.’ I wasn’t even really looking for them. But once I started noticing them they were everywhere.”

A
MY
S
ANDERS AND
N
ICOLE
are like sisters. “We have a lot in common,” Amy explains. “We are both single moms. We both have biracial children. We were both struggling. She didn’t have family she was close to in Ohio, and neither did I. So we became like this team.” It was a very modern family. Two white women, coparenting their multiracial brood, who effectively grew up with two straight moms.

Sometimes Nicole might work two jobs and Amy would have the kids overnight and during the day, or vice versa. They kept them in the same schools. If any of them were in trouble, the school would call either mom. They raised the boys together like brothers. They didn’t need to pack bags to go to each other’s house—they always had stuff there. Amy’s youngest was a daughter, and shortly after she was born Nicole became pregnant with Jaiden. They were close in every way until Amy’s move to Houston.

Back in Grove City, Jaiden was being kept on life support until the doctors could remove his organs for donation. They wouldn’t declare him dead until they had done a test for brain activity. Nicole asked the doctors to put it off until Amy could get there from Houston. That would also give Jaiden’s paternal grandmother time to arrive from Akron. It was only a two-hour drive, but she kept having to pull over to cry.

When Amy broke the news to her kids, her sons Kamry and Kayaan started hitting things. Kayaan called Jarid. “Bro,” said Kayaan. “Bro,” said Jarid. “Literally me and him don’t talk,” explains Kayaan. “We just say, ‘Bro.’” But after a while they couldn’t even say that. They just sobbed until Jarid could get it together to ask, “When are you coming?” “We’ll be there right now,” said Kayaan. “Right now, man.”

It takes nineteen hours to drive from Houston to Grove City. They stopped for gas and one meal. Almost a full day of silence and grief
jammed in a car. They made it to the hospital by early morning. When they walked into the hospital room, it was packed. “Everyone’s looking at us. Everyone’s crying. No one says anything,” recalls Kayaan. “After that brief pause they cried and hugged. Finally someone said something and conversation started.” Jaiden looked like he was sleeping, says Amy. “He was breathing. His heart was beating. The swelling had gone down. His flesh was warm. It was hard to believe he wasn’t going to go home with us.”

Jaiden was pronounced dead at 3:47 p.m. on Saturday, November 23. Once his death was official they could start seeking out recipients for his organs. It took a day for all the different medical teams from as far afield as Delaware and California to get to the hospital. (His lungs found a home in a girl from St. Louis.) The long wait evolved into an affair similar to an Irish wake—only without the coffin. Nicole and the boys were with him on and off the whole time. Nicole would lie with him until she couldn’t bear the fact that his eyes would no longer open, and then she would ask Amy to take over while she went for a walk. By the time they took him away to the operating room to remove his organs the whole family was there.

Jaiden hadn’t had much of a relationship with his father, Rosell Dixon III, said Nicole, but the relationship he did have was pretty good. (Rosell didn’t respond to requests for an interview.) They were never close but he would go over sometimes to play with his sisters, who were the same age. “His dad loved him and he did care for him,” she told me, “but it wasn’t the type of thing where he’d go over just to hang out with his dad.” But Rosell was at his side that night, as were his paternal grandparents, cousins, brothers, and sisters from his father’s side—all telling stories and saying their good-byes.

Up until the moment they wheeled him away for his final journey to the operating room, Nicole kept it together. “She held up really well,” says Amy. “It was like she was on automatic.”

But witnessing that final journey was too much to bear. “I wish I would have,” says Nicole. “But I couldn’t see the doors close. It was surreal. It was almost like they were taking him to have his tonsils taken out.”

It was around three a.m. on Sunday. Nicole had been up for forty-five hours straight, during which time her life had been turned upside down and then crushed underfoot. What happened next was a blur. “I just remember breaking down and crying and all these people hovering over me, and then somebody put me in a wheelchair and took me out of the hospital. I didn’t go back to his room to pick anything up or to get anything. I didn’t go back to the hospital at all.” The fog did not clear until the viewing. “It was maybe a week after he died,” she recalls. “He was laying in his casket. And I remember that because I’d been able to touch him so much at the hospital I went right up to him and I kissed him on the forehead, and I grabbed his hand and it was cold as stone and hard. And that was when the reality hit me. Oh my God. My baby’s gone. Until I saw him go into the ground it was like going through the motions.”

Nicole never went back to the house on Independence Way. She went straight to the Drury Inn and stayed there until Christmas, when she went to Dallas to stay with a cousin and then to Houston to stay with Amy before coming back to Grove City for New Year.