Just Pursuit by Laura Coates

Author:Laura Coates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2022-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

9 Not Their Son, Too

On Watching the Victim’s Family Beg Not to Have Their Son’s Murderer Go to Prison

I still hear the wails.

These guttural cries traveled like a toxic gas across the courtroom, knocking each person over in the benches, causing their bodies to lean against one another in discombobulated comfort. Some stared ahead. Others leaned against those next to them, their necks pinned, unable to move or flee or succumb. It was a torturous scene, one that left you without recourse to process, a confusion of grief on both sides of the aisle.

Three families were in the courtroom: those of the two Black twenty-four-year-old defendants who were being sentenced for killing a man in a silly dispute over a woman they didn’t even know, and the family of the twenty-four-year-old Black man they shot. None of the families could stomach the nearly lifetime sentences just doled out by the judge, sentences that likely would amount to an exponentially greater number of years than the ones the defendants had spent on this earth. The defendants panted as each added the number to their own age and realized the bullets they fired had just killed them too.

I had only entered the courtroom moments before. I had come to handle a separate matter in that courtroom when I walked into the judge summarizing the case and explaining the sentences he had just handed down. My emotions were heightened, and hearing the wails brought tears to my own eyes as I tried to piece together the scene.

“Not their son, too!” the victim’s mother cried out in horror. “Don’t take him, too!” She choked on her words as she walked toward the mother of one of the defendants slumped in the aisle, wailing uncontrollably.

“Your Honor, please… not their son, too,” the mother insisted, extending an outstretched arm toward one of the women. “My son is gone—don’t take them, too. You’re killing them, too!” She looked torn, unsure what to do with the hand at the end of her outstretched arm. It alternated from a finger pointed, to a hand half recoiled into a fist, to outstretched fingers extended in anguish.

“Please,” the victim’s father shouted. “Please, there’s been enough loss already. We don’t want this.” His fist slamming on the front of the bench, his coat clenched in his hand as if he were about to leave. His coat lowered as his fist dropped.

“Son, we’re here, son, we’re here. We won’t leave you…,” another man offered softly on the other side of the courtroom. “Look at me! Look at me!” Both defendants looked back, swallowing hard. I wondered which was his son.

The prosecutors remained standing, stoic in their attempt to keep their shoulders squared. One hung his head as he leaned forward on the table, balancing his weight on his fingers. The other placed her hands in her pockets, bouncing forward on her toes. They watched the judge. They had secured the conviction, but no one in the room seemed to equate it with justice.

Both defendants looked up toward the ceiling, glancing toward each other along the way.

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