The next day Cooper drove to the offices of the Philadelphia medical examiner to face Rodney once again. This time, though, he got no closer than a whispered identification. Instead of entering a chilly, harshly lit room of slabs, Cooper waited in a bare office equipped with a desk, two chairs and a closed-circuit, black-and-white monitor. The screen rolled over once and there was Rodney, swaddled in a sheet, eyes tightly closed. Cooper stared into the screen and sadly spoke the words that rend parental souls: “That’s my son.”
Homicide is as American as a Colt .45, but the accumulated bodies piling up in the nation’s morgues retain their power to shock. According to FBI statistics for 1993, homicide is the one violent crime that continues to grow – up 3 percent to 24,500 last year. And July and August are the most murderous months – summertime, and the killing is easy – the result of too much irritating heat, too many drugs and drinks, too few nights when weapons are left locked in drawers. By all reasonable measures, this wave of murder should not be happening. The population cohort most likely to kill – young men between 18 and 24 – has bottomed out statistically. But if there are fewer of them, they are almost twice as likely to kill as was the same age group a decade ago. Their younger brothers, males 14 to 17, have picked up their pace, too: their rate has jumped 161 percent. Now, men 14 to 24 commit more than half of the nation’s murders, a horrifying trend that began in 1992 and one that will only get worse. “More young men are on the way,” says Northeastern University criminologist James Fox. “The bad news is that last year’s rise is nothing compared to what we’ll see in the future.”
It’s a thought straight out of vaudeville – you ain’t seen nothin’ yet – and it’s terrifying. Already, there is simply no underestimating the power of murder on the public consciousness. The famous cases seem to take on lives of their own – O.J., the Menendez boys, the insane politics of shooting an abortion doctor. They have an appeal, an entertainment value, that builds on yet somehow transcends the enormity of the taking of a human life.
But most murders pass unnoticed, except by the immediate families. Together, the dead form their own subculture, a place of violence and true victimization whose swath can be described but barely measured. To bring this world into high relief, Newsweek selected one week in July and dispatched a team of correspondents and photographers to chronicle a week in the death of America. The package of stories that follows highlights some memorable murders. Its intent, though, is to follow the trails of blood beyond the crime scenes and into the communities where the impact of murder reverberates daily. Meet the doctors who struggle to keep gunshot victims alive in the finest MASH units any war zone ever saw. Meet the survivors, the families who must live with the torment of unfulfilled dreams. Meet the children who wander streets where pools of blood and evidence bags are part of the local color, children who take violent death for granted. And listen to the killers themselves, some struggling with shame, others who’ll never know a moment of remorse.
There is the law-enforcement juggernaut, too. The cops weighted with chalkboards full of open cases – a greater percentage of murders go unsolved now than at any time in the past three decades. The courts caught in a trap between processing the killers like meatloaf and trying to mete out justice. And, after a very long time, and in a very few cases, the executioners armed with peculiar protocols that end in death.
This land of the dead and grieving is growing, and James Fox shows us how. His computer databank includes every reported homicide since 1976, a taxonomy of dread available at a keystroke. These are his basic rules: men who kill outnumber women 9 to 1 and blacks outnumber whites 5 to 4. Both races tend to kill intramurally: 94 percent of black victims are killed by other blacks, 83 percent of white victims by other whites. Guns cross all boundaries: two thirds of all murders are by firearms, 15 percent by knives, 5 percent by fists or feet.
Crime continues to lead in polls that ask Americans what they think are the most serious issues facing the country. But in truth, most Americans are as safe as they have ever been. “The vast majority of our population isn’t experiencing any more violent crime,” says Michael Rand of the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. A wildly disproportionate share of murder is committed by and against young black men; homicide is their leading cause of death. Their rate of victimization is 10 times higher than that of young white men.
Much of this juvenile distress appears to grow out of the drug business. At a meeting of the Homicide Research Working Group, a nationwide alliance of academic and government researchers, Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie Mellon University argued that the rise of homicides by boys under 18 began in 1985, following 15 years of flat lines. That was roughly the point when drug gangsters began recruiting kids into the crack-cocaine trade, a business in which most of the players carry weapons to protect their wares. Once armed, Blumstein concluded, the boys began firing at will.
Murder is a treacherous area for public policymakers, made worse because victims and offenders can often seem interchangeable. According to Carolyn Rebecca Block of the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority, 45 percent of all Chicago homicide victims older than 14 had themselves been arrested for violent offenses; according to a recent study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, 31 percent of New York’s homicide victims tested positive for cocaine.
It’s not as though families and other law enforcers are powerless in the face of cycles of violence. Police in Chicago, working with Block’s data, now target gangs trying to avert bloodshed. Even more ambitious, new programs around the nation work with “at risk” kids from the womb to the high-school gymnasium. Whatever the age group, the aim is the same: stopping the culture of violence from claiming another victim (page 47). And legislatures wrestle with the problem of guns (page 44) and how to punish juvenile killers.
While those efforts continue, a large woman with tenderness in her touch and too much sadness in her eyes will keep doing her job in the Philadelphia morgue. Wanda Henry-Jenkins is a nurse, counselor and ordained minister who has made homicide her life’s work. She sits by the side of Philadelphia’s survivors, soothing them, hugging them, cautioning them. On July 11 – another bloody Monday – she begins to deal with the families of a 75-year-old veteran killed for shooing neighborhood punks away from his home, a 31-year-old transvestite who went into a North Philly garage looking for love and took a bullet to the head for his troubles, and Rodney Williams. “You said he has a 19-year-old brother,” she says gently to Leo, the grieving father. “You’ve got to tell him not to listen to what folks say about who did it. You don’t want one bullet killing two sons.”
A child is a terrible thing to waste.
