White River Burning. John Verdon
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onto the town road. The crunch of the tires on the gravel surface soon faded into silence.
The soaring vultures had disappeared. The sky was a piercing blue, the hillside a painter’s palette of greens. Next to the patio, in the raised planting bed, the day’s growth of asparagus was awaiting harvest. Above the tender new shoots the airy asparagus ferns were swaying in an almost imperceptible breeze.
The overall picture of spring perfection was tainted only by the slightest hint of something acrid in the air.
4
Gurney spent the next hour visiting various internet sites, trying to get a broader view of the White River crisis than the perspective Kline had presented. He had the feeling that he was being manipulated with a carefully arranged account of the situation.
Countering an impulse to go to the most recent news of the shooting, he decided to search first for coverage of the original incident—to refresh his recollection of the fatal shooting that occurred the previous May and that the Black Defense Alliance demonstrations were commemorating.
He located an early newspaper report in the online archive of the Quad-County Star. The front-page headline was one that had become disturbingly common: “Minor Traffic Stop Turns Deadly.” A brief description of the incident followed:
At approximately 11:30 PM on Tuesday White River Police Officer Kieran Goddard stopped a car with two occupants near the intersection of Second Street and Sliwak Avenue in the Grinton section of White River for failing to signal prior to changing lanes. According to a police spokesman, the driver of the vehicle, Laxton Jones, disputed the officer’s observation and refused several requests to present his license and registration. Officer Goddard then directed Jones to switch off the ignition and step out of the vehicle. Jones responded with a series of obscenities, put the vehicle in reverse, and began backing away in an erratic fashion. Officer Goddard ordered him to stop. Jones then placed the vehicle in drive and accelerated toward the officer, who drew his service weapon and fired through the windshield of the approaching vehicle. He subsequently called for an ambulance as well as appropriate supervisory and support personnel. Jones was declared dead on arrival at Mercy Hospital. The second occupant of the vehicle, a twenty-six-year-old female identified as Blaze Lovely Jackson, was detained in connection with an outstanding warrant and the discovery of a controlled substance in the vehicle.
The next relevant article in the Star appeared two days later on page five. It quoted a statement issued by Marcel Jordan, a community activist, in which he claimed that the police version of the shooting was “a fabrication designed to justify the execution of a man who had embarrassed them—a man dedicated to uncovering and publicizing the false arrests, perjury, and brutality rampant in the White River Police Department. The officer’s claim that Laxton was attempting to run him down is an outright lie. He posed no threat whatever to that officer. Laxton Jones was murdered in cold blood.”
The Star’s next mention of the event appeared a week later. It described a tense scene at Laxton Jones’s funeral, an angry confrontation between mourners and police. The funeral was followed immediately by a press conference at which the activist Marcel Jordan—flanked by Blaze Lovely Jackson, out on bail, and Devalon Jones, brother of the deceased—announced the formation of the Black Defense Alliance, an organization whose mission would be “the protection of our brothers and sisters from the routine abuse, mayhem, and murder carried out by the racist law-enforcement establishment.”
The article concluded with a response from White River Police Chief Dell Beckert. “The negative statement issued by the group calling themselves the ‘Black Defense Alliance’ is unfortunate, unhelpful, and untrue. It demeans honest men and women who have dedicated themselves to the safety and welfare of their fellow citizens. This cynical grandstanding deepens the misconceptions that are destroying our society.”
Gurney found little in other upstate papers and virtually nothing in the national press regarding the shooting of Laxton Jones or the activities of the Black Defense Alliance for the next eleven months—until the BDA’s announcement of demonstrations to mark the one-year anniversary of the shooting and to “raise awareness of racist police practices.”
According to the ensuing media coverage, an initial peaceful demonstration was followed by sporadic instances of violence throughout the Grinton section of White River. The unrest had been going on for a week, becoming more confrontational and destructive with each passing day and generating increasingly dramatic media coverage.
The fact that he’d been only partially aware of this was the result of his and Madeleine’s decision to leave their TV behind when they moved from the city to Walnut Crossing and to avoid internet news sites. They felt that “news” was too often a term for manufactured controversy, superficial half-truths, and events about which they could do nothing. This meant he had some catching up to do.
There was no shortage of current coverage of what one media website was calling “White River in Flames.” He decided to make his way through the local and national reports in the sequence in which they’d been posted. The rising hysteria evident in the changing tone of the headlines as the week progressed suggested a situation spinning out of control:
UPSTATE CITY DEBATES YEAR-OLD CONTROVERSY
BDA PROTEST OPENS OLD WOUNDS
WHITE RIVER MAYOR CALLS FOR CALM IN FACE OF PROVOCATIONS
BDA FIREBRAND MARCEL JORDAN CALLS POLICE MURDERERS
DOZENS INJURED AS DEMONSTRATIONS TURN UGLY
JORDAN TO BECKERT: “YOU HAVE BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS”
WHITE RIVER ON THE EDGE OF CHAOS
ROCK-THROWING, ARSON, LOOTING
PROTESTERS BEATEN, ARRESTED IN CLASH WITH POLICE
SNIPER KILLS LOCAL COP—POLICE DECLARE WAR ON BDA
Gurney’s reading of the articles added little to the information in the overheated headlines. His quick perusal of the comments section after each article reinforced his belief that these “reader involvement” features were mainly invitations to idiocy.
His main feeling, however, was a growing sense of unease at Kline’s eagerness to pull him into the gathering storm.
5
When Madeleine returned from her hike, radiating the satisfaction and exhilaration she derived from the outdoors, Gurney was still in his den, hunched over his computer screen. Having moved on from the internet news sites, he was exploring the physical reality of White River with the help of Google Street View.
Although it was only an hour’s drive from Walnut Crossing, he’d never had a compelling reason to go there. He had a sense that the place was emblematic of the decline of upstate New York cities and towns, suffering from industrial collapse, agricultural relocation, a shrinking middle-class population, political mismanagement, the spreading heroin epidemic, troubled schools, eroding infrastructure—with the added element of strained police relations with a sizable minority community, a problem now vividly underscored.
The image of White River was further clouded, ironically, by the looming presence of the area’s largest employer and supplier of much of its economic lifeblood: the White River Correctional Facility. Or, as it was known locally, Rivcor.
What Gurney could see, as Google Street View led him along the city’s main avenues, supported his negative preconceptions. There was even a clichéd set of railroad tracks dividing the good section of town from the bad.
Madeleine was standing next to him now, frowning at the screen. “What town is that?”
“White River.”
“Where all the trouble is?”
“Yes.”
Her frown deepened. “It’s about that traffic-stop shooting of a black motorist last year, right?”
“Yes.”
“And some statue they want removed?”