Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives Read Online Free PDF Page A

father a few months earlier, he’d have found a 1998 paper published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine. It was written by several academics and medical practitioners who reviewed all the files of officer-involved shootings investigated by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department from 1987 to 1997 related to the phenomenon. It is a term used by police to describe incidents in which people ostensibly deliberately provoke law enforcement into fatally shooting them. Not surprisingly, the term is hotly contested because it can provide one more justification for police killings on the basis of a psychiatric state that officers can generally only guess at when they shoot someone. Exactly what Danny had in mind when he mentioned it we will never know.
    The paper’s authors argue that to qualify, a case must meet four criteria: “(1) evidence of the individual’s suicidal intent, (2) evidence they specifically wanted officers to shoot them, (3) evidence they possessed a lethal weapon or what appeared to be a lethal weapon, and (4) evidence they intentionally escalated the encounter and provoked officers to shoot them.” By that definition they concluded that suicide by cop accounted for 11 percent of all officer-involved shootings and 13 percent of all officer-involved justifiable homicides during the time frame they reviewed. “Suicide by cop,” they concluded, “is an actual form of suicide.” 11
    “People who sought suicide by cop have to be in some kind of depression,” Dr. Harry Hutson told me in a phone interview. Hutson, who wrote the paper, is assistant professor in the department of emergency medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School. “The police shoot over four hundred people every year, and people know that if you brandish anything that looks like a weapon the police will act in self-defense or in defense of the community. So if you want to die, these people will do it for you.”
    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. Iwas 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