Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: I read footnotes. I always have. Perhaps it seems like
Speaker 2: good manners to read everything someone else has written for you,
Speaker 2: like cleaning your plate when you're a kid. Or maybe
Speaker 2: it's because a footnote is where you put the bit
Speaker 2: of information that doesn't quite fit the main story, but
Speaker 2: at the same time is too important to leave out.
Speaker 2: And to my mind, the thing that is important and
Speaker 2: doesn't fit is often the most important thing of all.
Speaker 2: So I read footnotes, and occasionally that leads me somewhere
Speaker 2: entirely unexpected, like the footnote at the very end of
Speaker 2: a paper in the Journal of Criminal Justice entitled Damned
Speaker 2: upon Arrival, volume twenty three, number four, pages three thirteen
Speaker 2: to three, twenty three, nineteen ninety five. Lead author Penelope J. Hanke,
Speaker 2: Second author James H. Goodluck. It made me go all
Speaker 2: the way to a little town in Alabama to have
Speaker 2: the man who wrote the footnote explained to me thirty
Speaker 2: years later, just what it meant. Could you do me
Speaker 2: a favorite?
Speaker 1: Can you read that? Read the footnote for me?
Speaker 3: Small print At three or two am on September the
Speaker 3: twenty third, nineteen ninety four, a little over a month
Speaker 3: after doctor Hanche and I submitted this article to the
Speaker 3: Ejournal of Criminal Justice. A death following the pattern described
Speaker 3: in this article little Stuckholm Jay Brandon Young, age seventeen
Speaker 3: were shot in the back with a twelve gay shotgun
Speaker 3: and killed in my house and a predominantly black part
Speaker 3: of rue Macon County, Alabama.
Speaker 2: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
Speaker 2: my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is
Speaker 2: about the death of Brandon Young. James Gunlock lives in Shorter, Alabama,
Speaker 2: a little town just south of Tuskegee along I eighty five.
Speaker 2: Some parts of Alabama are wild and hilly. This is
Speaker 2: the other side of the state, flat swampy pine trees.
Speaker 2: Macon County one of the eighteen counties that make up
Speaker 2: the Black Belt of Alabama, where the cotton plantations were
Speaker 2: in the days before the Civil War. Gundlock lives with
Speaker 2: his wife in an eighteen forties plantation house, a doctress house.
Speaker 2: The old slave quarters are in the basement directly below
Speaker 2: the old surgery, so the slave stove could heat the
Speaker 2: doctor's offices during the winter. Two enormous Anatolian shepherds pat
Speaker 2: around presenting their giant heads for attention. The house looks
Speaker 2: untouched from the nineteenth century. There's an abandoned truck in
Speaker 2: the backyard.
Speaker 1: I grew up tough.
Speaker 3: I was a World War two baby, and my father
Speaker 3: came back from the war mentally messed up, and he
Speaker 3: became an alcoholic. And we lived on a farm, and
Speaker 3: he would take off on a drinking branch, taking my
Speaker 3: mother with him, and be gone for days.
Speaker 2: Gun Luck is tall, stooped, wisps of white hair. He
Speaker 2: moves and talks slowly.
Speaker 3: That continued on. When I was eleven, we ran out
Speaker 3: of the food and I saw this flock of blackbirds crows,
Speaker 3: and so I took the twelve gate shotgun and my
Speaker 3: brother and I we went up and stuck up on him.
Speaker 3: And as soon as I started flying, I went I
Speaker 3: got two shots off, and that's I was talking to you.
Speaker 3: My brother, reminiscing about this, said, yeah, if you said,
Speaker 3: your whope shoulder hurts so much, you may may go
Speaker 3: pick up all the dead birds. But we sat there,
Speaker 3: started the fire, stripped and dressed out the birds, and
Speaker 3: all the roasted them just to be able to have food.
Speaker 2: He escaped home by enrolling in the Army, went to college,
Speaker 2: then graduate school, then to Alabama and taught sociology at
Speaker 2: Auburn University. One time he caught a huge cheating ring
Speaker 2: going on with teachers in this department and football players,
Speaker 2: and blew the whistle. Made the New York Times in
Speaker 2: one of the most football crazed states in the country.
Speaker 2: He went, after football.
Speaker 3: Today's the twenty eighth day of my eighty first year.
Speaker 3: So I'm on the old side. And six months after
Speaker 3: I retired, I had an encephalitis infection to the brain.
Speaker 3: And I survived that when I was sixty six, which
Speaker 3: is quite rare. But when I came to from it
Speaker 3: in the hospital, I had company, but I couldn't think
Speaker 3: of I couldn't take the words to say what I
Speaker 3: wanted to say.
Speaker 2: He forced himself to go through the alphabet A to Z,
Speaker 2: counting all the words he knew that began with each letter.
Speaker 2: He came up with one hundred and ninety six.
Speaker 3: My first conclusion was that I was essentially brain dead.
Speaker 3: I might as well put myself down. Then after I
Speaker 3: thought of it, I thought, well, the way I measured
Speaker 3: it meant that I'm not completely brain dead. So I
Speaker 3: just decided to gets the suicide.
Speaker 2: Slowly he recovered built himself back up. He was working
Speaker 2: on a new paper when we spoke, an analysis of
Speaker 2: health insurance status and mortality rates. By the way, you
Speaker 2: will hear all kinds of strange noises in the background
Speaker 2: as you listen to Gundlock talking.
Speaker 3: Let me go turn that thing off. Okay, my wife
Speaker 3: always leaves it unbalanced and it makes it a lot
Speaker 3: of noise. And if I'm going off on tangents that
Speaker 3: you're not interested in, but.
Speaker 1: What actually.
Speaker 2: Some of what you're talking about now feeds into what
Speaker 2: I want to speak to. So sure, why don't we
Speaker 2: start with the stuff that was interested me the most,
Speaker 2: which was I read that damned on a rival paper
Speaker 2: and I just thought it was fascinating and I wanted
Speaker 2: to kind of talk to you a little bit about that,
Speaker 2: and that'd be a good place to start.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: We talked a little about the paper, and then James
Speaker 2: Gunlock went off on what seemed like one of his tangents,
Speaker 2: although as I found out, it wasn't really a tangent
Speaker 2: at all. It was about the time back in the
Speaker 2: early nineteen nineties when he got a call from his
Speaker 2: brother his brother's daughter had run away.
Speaker 3: The police called him and ask him why he hadn't
Speaker 3: canceled the missing child. He said, well, she's not back home,
Speaker 3: and they said, Welching's never missed school. She worked out
Speaker 3: a system by where she was just staying with friends
Speaker 3: overnight in sequence and just avoiding going home by living
Speaker 3: out in the world and still going to school.
Speaker 2: Gun Luck took his niece in. She was about fourteen,
Speaker 2: so is his daughter. Now he had two teenagers under
Speaker 2: his roof.
Speaker 3: She eventually decided that we were such good parents that
Speaker 3: she found a couple of street boys had been thrown
Speaker 3: out of their own homes, and we ended up taking
Speaker 3: them in.
Speaker 2: They were living in Montgomery then, and parts of the
Speaker 2: city were full of gangs, the bloods, the grips, the disciples.
Speaker 2: Word got out that the Gunlux house was a place
Speaker 2: of refuge.
Speaker 3: One time, we had this big lizard, and the lizard
Speaker 3: got out, so I was going around looking for it,
Speaker 3: and I looked under the bed and there was this boy.
Speaker 3: And I looked at him and he said, I guess
Speaker 3: you want to know why I'm here. And he was
Speaker 3: just kind of a temporary close eye street kid. He
Speaker 3: was sort of staying in our house to be out
Speaker 3: off the street and stuff without having contact with adults
Speaker 3: in the house.
Speaker 2: I sat in a small chair next to gunlux desk
Speaker 2: as he talked about the kids he took in, boys
Speaker 2: and gangs, boys living off the street, who stole car
Speaker 2: radios to stay alive and drank cheap liquor to stay
Speaker 2: warm at night. What is it about you do you
Speaker 2: think that led you to take in so many of
Speaker 2: these kids.
Speaker 3: Well, I think it was ruined in the time that
Speaker 3: our parents left us alone on the farm. That I
Speaker 3: can really relate to kids not having parental support and
Speaker 3: subsistence support and other kinds of things.
Speaker 2: One of the kids they took in came from a
Speaker 2: little town called Valley in the northern part of the state,
Speaker 2: an old textile town. He was seventeen. He was involved
Speaker 2: in one of Montgomery's many gangs, but he was looking
Speaker 2: for a way out. His name was Brandon Young. How
Speaker 2: long did Brandon live with you?
Speaker 3: Probably only about six months.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you got to know him, well, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: at first he was very you know, reserved and suspicious
Speaker 1: and other things.
Speaker 3: But you know, as we got to know him and
Speaker 3: stuff opened up and we talked about time she.
Speaker 2: And then James Gunlock started talking again about the paper
Speaker 2: he wrote with Penealty Hanky damned upon arrival. The number
Speaker 2: of homicides in any community is a combination of two
Speaker 2: completely unrelated variables. The number of people victimized by acts
Speaker 2: of violence minus how good a job the medical system
Speaker 2: does at saving the lives of those victims. And a
Speaker 2: lot of times, what a murder rate really tells you
Speaker 2: is how good you're doctors are, and not how safe
Speaker 2: your streets are. This is the idea we explored in
Speaker 2: the previous episode. But there's a twist on that observation,
Speaker 2: a really important twist which the people who treat gunshots
Speaker 2: for a living have known about for a long time.
Speaker 2: So I'm assuming over the course of your career you
Speaker 2: have treated innumerable gunshot wounds.
Speaker 4: Unfortunately true.
Speaker 2: This is doctor Babach Serrani. He's a trauma surgeon at
Speaker 2: George Washington University Hospital in Washington, d C. If you
Speaker 2: get seriously injured by a bullet, you get taken to
Speaker 2: a trauma center, more specifically a Level one trauma center,
Speaker 2: which is a self contained, twenty four hour facility equipped
Speaker 2: with everything necessary to treat traumatic injury, general surgeons, orthopedic surgeons, neurosurgeons,
Speaker 2: plastic surgeons, and the caesiologists, er docs, radiologists, nurses with
Speaker 2: the right qualifications on and on. Trauma centers cost hundreds
Speaker 2: of millions of dollars to build and operate. They're relatively rare.
Speaker 2: DC has thirteen hospitals, but only four level ones. One
Speaker 2: of those is at George Washington. Serrani is the chief
Speaker 2: trauma sursion there. Do you know how many, roughly.
Speaker 4: Speaking, Oh, my goodness, I would think probably by now
Speaker 4: the number of gunshrare victims I've seen personally. I've been
Speaker 4: in practice since two thousand and five, I would venture
Speaker 4: miss Bladwell five hundred plus.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And you weren't even there during DC's darkest years.
Speaker 4: Correct, yeah, correct.
Speaker 2: I wanted to talk to Serrani about time because trauma
Speaker 2: sursions are obsessed with time. There's a phrase common in
Speaker 2: their world, the golden hour. If you get shot, they
Speaker 2: really want to have you on the operating table as
Speaker 2: soon as possible. That's why we pull over for ambulances.
Speaker 2: Talk a little to me about time. You said, tends
Speaker 2: to get there within ten minutes, and you tend to
Speaker 2: get to the trauma center between twenty and forty five.
Speaker 2: What's the difference between twenty and forty five. What happens
Speaker 2: in that extra period of time that would diminish someone's
Speaker 2: chances of survival?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think it depends on where the injury is.
Speaker 4: You know, if you've been injured in the abdomen and
Speaker 4: it hits your intestine, honestly, nothing will happen between twenty
Speaker 4: and forty five minutes. That's plenty of time. But if
Speaker 4: you're bleeding, specifically speaking, if you're bleeding, then every minute
Speaker 4: that goes by is you know, the value of that
Speaker 4: is plutonium.
Speaker 2: Like, for example, if you take a bullet to your liver,
Speaker 2: the liver is a maze of blood vessels.
Speaker 4: Making the liver, of all things, stop bleeding is exceedingly difficult.
Speaker 4: You know, kidney, I can take it out, you have
Speaker 4: two kidneys, spleen, I can take it out. You don't
Speaker 4: need a spleen. I cannot take out your liver that
Speaker 4: you need a liver to live, and so I'm obligated
Speaker 4: to try to repair it while it just continues to bleed.
Speaker 2: When we spoke, Surrouni had just treated someone who had
Speaker 2: taken a rifle shot to the liver.
Speaker 4: The reason he's alive, and I will take some credit
Speaker 4: at George Washington, but honestly, one of the bigger reasons
Speaker 4: he's alive is the paramedics. They completely scooped and ran
Speaker 4: with this guy. I think their entire scene time was
Speaker 4: like ten or twelve minutes, and they just high tailed
Speaker 4: it to the trauma center. When he showed up on
Speaker 4: our doorstep. You figure by now it's been twenty twenty
Speaker 4: five minutes of the most from the moment of wounding
Speaker 4: to arrival to the trauma center. He was probably five
Speaker 4: to ten minutes away from dying. He was the extreme
Speaker 4: end stages of.
Speaker 2: Shock or what about a bullet to the lungs?
Speaker 4: A paramedic can actually treat a gunshot win to the lung.
Speaker 4: They can temporize that person very nicely.
Speaker 1: So do that.
Speaker 2: How do you temporize someone who's had a gunshot win
Speaker 2: to the lung?
Speaker 4: So, when you have a gunshot to the lung, assuming
Speaker 4: it has not hit a blood vessel, assuming you're not bleeding,
Speaker 4: all you have is a gunshot to the lung, which
Speaker 4: is I believe or not really really common. The problem
Speaker 4: is you have air leaking from your lung and that
Speaker 4: air is accumul inside the chest. As that air collects
Speaker 4: more and more inside the chest because it's leaking out
Speaker 4: of lung, it'll create a lot of pressure in the
Speaker 4: chest and it'll cause it'll alter the blood flow to
Speaker 4: your body. So the paramedic can simply put a needle
Speaker 4: inside your chest, believe it or not, just like literally
Speaker 4: in sort of needle through your skin into your chest
Speaker 4: and it's like popping a balloon. It'll allow that air
Speaker 4: that's accumulating to decompress and that's all you have to do.
Speaker 4: That will buy the person then tens of minutes if
Speaker 4: not more, to get to the trauma center to allow
Speaker 4: us to then fix the issue at hand. But that's
Speaker 4: a paramedic.
Speaker 2: Skill absince that intervention that would be a fatal event. Correct,
Speaker 2: Just to deling on this time question for a moment.
Speaker 2: So if I have a gunshot wound to the chest
Speaker 2: and I have exactly happening to me what you just described,
Speaker 2: how much time do I have without an AMS's intervention?
Speaker 2: Half an hour?
Speaker 4: Yeah, probably about half an hour or so, I mean
Speaker 4: plus minus, But yes, I would think.
Speaker 2: So, So let's think through the logic of this, a
Speaker 2: city or country's homicide rate is heavily dependent on how
Speaker 2: good its medical system is at treating gunshot ones. And
Speaker 2: what determines how good a medical system is a treating
Speaker 2: gunshot ones, at least in part, it's how quickly a
Speaker 2: gunshot victim can get to a Level one trauma center. Okay,
Speaker 2: second question, and in this case let's use Chicago as
Speaker 2: our example, classic big American city. Chicago absolutely confirms the
Speaker 2: theory that proximity to a trauma center matters. According to
Speaker 2: a big study done a couple years ago by the
Speaker 2: epidemiologist Marie Crandall, if you live more than five miles
Speaker 2: from a Level one trauma center in Chicago, you had
Speaker 2: a thirty five percent higher chance of dying from your
Speaker 2: wounds than if you were shot less than five miles
Speaker 2: from a level one. So here's the second question. What
Speaker 2: determines how quickly you get too trauma center in Chicago?
Speaker 2: Is it a random fact like whether there's an ambulance
Speaker 2: nearby when you get shot, or how bad the traffic
Speaker 2: is that day on the way to the hospital, or
Speaker 2: is there a pattern to who lives within five miles
Speaker 2: of a level one, and who doesn't. A physician at
Speaker 2: the University of Chicago named Elizabeth Tongue set out to
Speaker 2: answer that question a few years ago, what do you
Speaker 2: find in Chicago?
Speaker 5: And so we found that black majority census tracks were
Speaker 5: disproportionately in these trauma deserts.
Speaker 2: A trauma desert, by the way, is what er docs
Speaker 2: call places that are a long way from a level one.
Speaker 5: That racial disparity was essentially very large, approximately a sevenfold
Speaker 5: increase on the South Side in black communities.
Speaker 2: Wait to explain the sevenfold the racial disparity between what
Speaker 2: and what is sevenfold higher.
Speaker 5: The racial disparity between black majority census tracks and white
Speaker 5: majority census tracks is an x sevenfold sevenfold wow.
Speaker 2: For a period of thirty years between nineteen ninety one
Speaker 2: and twenty eighteen, the south side of Chicago didn't even
Speaker 2: have a Level one trauma center. So if you got
Speaker 2: shot on the south Side, and by the way, the
Speaker 2: south Side is the area of Chicago where you're most
Speaker 2: likely to get shot, the ambulance had to take you
Speaker 2: all the way across the city uptown to Northwestern or
Speaker 2: Cook County or west to advocate Christ Medical Center miles away. Now,
Speaker 2: why did the South Side go so long without a
Speaker 2: trauma center because it makes no sense for any hospital
Speaker 2: to open one on the south Side. Treating gunshot wounds
Speaker 2: serious ones is incredibly expensive, and the typical gunshot victim
Speaker 2: in Chicago is a young black man from a poor neighborhood,
Speaker 2: and young black men living in poor neighborhoods in Chicago
Speaker 2: typically don't have health insurance or they're on Medicaid, which
Speaker 2: reimburses at a fraction of what private insurance does. The
Speaker 2: euphemism used in the healthcare world is payer mix, which
Speaker 2: refers to how many of your patients come to you
Speaker 2: blessed with private coverage. Opening a trauma center in a
Speaker 2: bad neighborhood messes with your payer mix deeply, which is
Speaker 2: a paradox. Right. The point of a trauma center is
Speaker 2: to be closest to the places where people are getting shot.
Speaker 2: But if you put your trauma center close to the
Speaker 2: places where people get shot, your payer mix will go
Speaker 2: to hell in a handbasket and you won't be able
Speaker 2: to afford to run your trauma center. So you put
Speaker 2: your trauma center as far away as possible from the
Speaker 2: people who most need your trauma center. As I said,
Speaker 2: at the very beginning of this series, the way America
Speaker 2: deals with gun violence is bonkers. We have a misaligned
Speaker 2: healthcare system. Yeah, what's the simplest way to realign it.
Speaker 5: I mean, I think the simplest way to realign it
Speaker 5: is nationalized healthcare.
Speaker 2: What she's saying is that if everyone has the same
Speaker 2: insurance like they do in Canada or Europe, then hospitals
Speaker 2: don't have to worry about payamics. You can put your
Speaker 2: trauma center where your trauma center makes the most sense
Speaker 2: and not worry about how much your patients will pay you.
Speaker 2: It's funny you say this. So I'm not someone in
Speaker 2: the medical world. Yeah, but I'm certainly sort of familiar
Speaker 2: with arguments around national health care. It had never occurred
Speaker 2: to me until just now listening to you that if
Speaker 2: one of the consequences of national health insurance is that
Speaker 2: hospitals would look different, would do different things, and would
Speaker 2: be in different places.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, the idea would be that under a
Speaker 5: nationalized healthcare system, we could be a little bit more
Speaker 5: thought out in the planning of health care. We're essentially
Speaker 5: taking the market forces out of that and we're saying,
Speaker 5: let's plan this that it should be planned, and let's incentivate.
Speaker 5: Let's incentivize hospitals appropriately to essentially be able to care
Speaker 5: for their patients at the level of care they need
Speaker 5: to be cared.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or let's not penalize people who want to serve
Speaker 2: the sickest population exactly, which is what we're talking about.
Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly. Hospitals aren't even just not getting incentivized, they're
Speaker 5: actually getting penalized. And so that's the problem in terms
Speaker 5: of our healthcare financing system.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it is. Yeah, such a kind of like,
Speaker 2: it's so weird that you would penalize somebody for essentially
Speaker 2: for doing the job in the best way.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: The whole reason people go into medicine is to help
Speaker 2: the sickest people. Absolutely, but the system is set up
Speaker 2: such that if doctors do what they went into medicine
Speaker 2: to do, the institutions they work for are penalized.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and so they're actually has been a
Speaker 5: lot written recently about the moral injury of our healthcare
Speaker 5: financing system and how it really does make a lot
Speaker 5: of healthcare workers feel incredibly demoralized at the end of
Speaker 5: the day. And you know, I mean, that's just that's
Speaker 5: not good for anyone.
Speaker 2: Final question, and here we come to the twist that
Speaker 2: the people who treat gunshot wounds think about all the time. Ay,
Speaker 2: it really matters how close you are to a trauma center.
Speaker 2: B In a place like Chicago, black people for years
Speaker 2: were really, really far from a trauma center. See. So,
Speaker 2: how much of the reason that black people have such
Speaker 2: a high homicide rate is just a function of the
Speaker 2: fact that we're not doing a terribly good job of
Speaker 2: saving the lives of black people after they've been shot.
Speaker 2: It's an uncomfortable question, and one of the very first
Speaker 2: scholars to venture down this path were Penelope Hanky and
Speaker 2: James Gundlock in the Journal of Criminal Justice, Volume twenty three,
Speaker 2: number four, nineteen ninety five, Damned upon arrival. The idea
Speaker 2: behind the paper was ingenious. A sociologist at Auburn named
Speaker 2: Alan Shields had assembled a database of homicide offenders from
Speaker 2: Tutwiler Prison, the all women's prison just north of Montgomery.
Speaker 2: Not an especially nice place. Tutwiler's primary distinction was that
Speaker 2: it was once named to the ten Worst Prisons in
Speaker 2: America list. So Gundlock and Hankey looked at all the
Speaker 2: murderers in Tutwiler and divided them by race. First, the
Speaker 2: white murders. There were forty seven people victimized by white
Speaker 2: women who died instantly no amount of medical attention would
Speaker 2: have saved them head shots, bulled to the heart, and
Speaker 2: a roughly equal number who were dead on arrival those
Speaker 2: who could at least theoretically have lived if they had
Speaker 2: gotten medical attention sooner. The ratio of killed instantly to
Speaker 2: dead on arrival was essentially one to one. Then Gundluck
Speaker 2: and Hankey looked at the victims of black murderers. What
Speaker 2: was their ratio? It wasn't one to one. It was
Speaker 2: way out of whack. There were many, many more victims
Speaker 2: who died on the way to the hospital, and also
Speaker 2: a far higher percentage who died at some point after
Speaker 2: being admitted. What the studies suggested was that a big
Speaker 2: chunk of the difference in homicide rates between blacks and
Speaker 2: whites in Alabama had to do with the quality of
Speaker 2: healthcare given to their victims, not the violent tendencies of
Speaker 2: the people who attacked them. Here's the key conclusion. Although
Speaker 2: this is by no means a definitive study of the issue,
Speaker 2: the strength of the findings is striking. The Tutwiler prison
Speaker 2: data suggested that almost one fourth of the African American
Speaker 2: female killer might not have been in prison for the
Speaker 2: killing had their victims received the same transportation and medical
Speaker 2: care as their Caucasian counterparts. The study covered four hundred
Speaker 2: and sixty eight African American murderers at Tutwiler, So that's
Speaker 2: one hundred and thirteen people who wouldn't have been convicted
Speaker 2: for homicide if their victims had received the same medical
Speaker 2: attention as white people. They had been convicted on lesser
Speaker 2: charges like aggravated assault, they wouldn't be murderers. And at
Speaker 2: the very end of the paper, Gunblock and Hankey give
Speaker 2: us a little hint of what they think was going
Speaker 2: on in Alabama. One anecdote related by a female inmate
Speaker 2: at Tutwiller Prison is particularly revealing. I'm reading from the
Speaker 2: final paragraph of the study. Having seriously wounded a male
Speaker 2: in an argument, she drove him to the doctor's house.
Speaker 2: At that time, she was advised by the maid that
Speaker 2: the doctor was having dinner and could not be disturbed.
Speaker 2: The man died. The assailant and victim were African American,
Speaker 2: the doctor was Caucasian. Hanke and Gunluck presented an early
Speaker 2: version of their paper at the American Society of Criminology
Speaker 2: meeting in Phoenix in the summer of nineteen ninety three,
Speaker 2: and while Gunluck was putting the finishing touches on the paper,
Speaker 2: Brandon Young moved into his house in Montgomery.
Speaker 3: He was really a good guy. He was really smart,
Speaker 3: barely educated. Used a lot of words a bit wrong
Speaker 3: definition wise, because he had he was sort of working,
Speaker 3: I'm building his own vocabulary and that kind of stuff
Speaker 3: without the direction of teachers and such. He was very likable.
Speaker 3: He was very much for defending the down and out
Speaker 3: and that kind of kind of thing. He was. He
Speaker 3: was a very likable and even from an adults perspective,
Speaker 3: respectable person, even though he was a street gangster.
Speaker 2: How did Brandon me before he before he moved in
Speaker 2: with you? How did he survive on the streets?
Speaker 3: Never really told us. I don't know whether he was
Speaker 3: involved with selling drugs or not. If he was doing that,
Speaker 3: he wouldn't have told me. But he he never asked
Speaker 3: for money. He seemed he seemed to kind of know
Speaker 3: when we were kind of working toward pushing him to
Speaker 3: go ahead and work toward be where we could get
Speaker 3: him lined up where he could go to college and
Speaker 3: stuff before he was killed. But obviously that ended that
Speaker 3: he passed a ged uh that's the high school diploma
Speaker 3: equital time, so you know, and he actually did absolutely
Speaker 3: no studying for it or any of that other kind
Speaker 3: of stuff, and he just went in and took it
Speaker 3: and he plashed it with fine colors. You know. He
Speaker 3: was smart. He knew stuff, and I'm not sure how
Speaker 3: he picked up some of it stuff, but he would
Speaker 3: regularly read books. And if we could have gotten me
Speaker 3: on a route going through college and stuff, he would
Speaker 3: have turned into a very solid person. I'm I'm very
Speaker 3: sure he he had a strong streak aning of caring
Speaker 3: for people. Noah, I thought about him a lot back then,
Speaker 3: but I haven't lately, said.
Speaker 2: Brendan wanted out of the gang world, so he went
Speaker 2: to stay at a log cabin the Gunlocks owned forty
Speaker 2: five minutes or so north of Montgomery in the town
Speaker 2: of Nota Saga in Macon County. They thought he'd be
Speaker 2: safe there, and that's where he was with three of
Speaker 2: the other teenagers the gun Lucks had taken in on
Speaker 2: the night of August twenty third, nineteen ninety four. It
Speaker 2: was a few hours after midnight. Brendan heard a noise outside.
Speaker 2: He went to check.
Speaker 3: He put the other kids in a place that thing
Speaker 3: would be safe. There's a log house that has a
Speaker 3: suck up floor, which was the bedroom, and he had them,
Speaker 3: and the bedroom area essentially has no windows or other
Speaker 3: such things because the roof of the house is a
Speaker 3: ceiling in the bedroom area. And he got them upstairs
Speaker 3: and told them to get under the bed. When he
Speaker 3: first found out what was going on, and he stayed
Speaker 3: downstairs to try to figure out what he could do
Speaker 3: and that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2: There were four people waiting outside. They had a shotgun.
Speaker 2: They saw Brandon through the window an open fire. I'm
Speaker 2: reading now from the account of the crime a few
Speaker 2: days later in the Montgomery Advertiser. Neither Brandon's friends nor
Speaker 2: the adults who cared for him can give a specific
Speaker 2: reason for his slaying. They say that some of the
Speaker 2: suspects used to be his friends, even fellow gang members.
Speaker 2: Maybe they were angree He was trying to free himself
Speaker 2: from them, to make a better life for himself. His
Speaker 2: friends looked up to him. We used to say that
Speaker 2: he was Peter Pan and they were the lost Boys,
Speaker 2: said his fifteen year old girlfriend, who asked not to
Speaker 2: be named for her own safety. Brandon was everybody's hero.
Speaker 2: He was my hero. Brandon was in love with the
Speaker 2: words respect and honor. He didn't do dry bys because
Speaker 2: he said, if you want to fight, fight like a man.
Speaker 2: In an interview this week before Thursday's arrest, the fifteen
Speaker 2: year old girlfriend was guarded when she talked about the Knight.
Speaker 2: Brandon died fraile and blue eyed. Her bright red nail
Speaker 2: polished chipped. She wore a gold chain with a heart
Speaker 2: shaped locket and a boy's ring. While everyone else had lunch,
Speaker 2: she sipped a coke and smoked cigarettes. We were going
Speaker 2: to go to Auburn, she said. We were going to
Speaker 2: get married. So Gunlock goes back and adds a paragraph
Speaker 2: to their article. Not a changed the main body of
Speaker 2: the text, because Brandon Young wasn't a female inmate at
Speaker 2: Tutwater Prison. So it was a footnote, because a footnote
Speaker 2: is where you put things that don't quite fit but
Speaker 2: are still important to the story. Wait, so take me
Speaker 2: back to that night, so you're it's it's in the
Speaker 2: wee hours of the morning. You're in Montgomery and you
Speaker 2: get a phone call. Yeah, it was one of the
Speaker 2: kids in the house, and so you jumped in your car,
Speaker 2: jumped in the car, broke the space limit.
Speaker 3: Got there. I usually break the space limit, but it
Speaker 3: broke it more when I was going there, and I
Speaker 3: got there before the ambulance did.
Speaker 2: He was coming from Montgomery over forty miles away. The
Speaker 2: ambulance was coming from Tuskegee six miles away. He got
Speaker 2: there before the ambulance. The ambulance guy shows up, and
Speaker 2: did you confront him about why it took so long?
Speaker 3: I wasn't in any mood for confronting or other such things.
Speaker 2: He just asked the ambulance driver simply, where have you been?
Speaker 2: And the ambulance driver said, most of the calls out
Speaker 2: here are for blacks. We didn't know Brandon was white.
Speaker 3: What he was trying to do when he was telling
Speaker 3: me about this was trying to tell me how to
Speaker 3: behave as a white guy in Alabama. You let him
Speaker 3: know when you're asking for services, if you're.
Speaker 4: Quiet, it's.
Speaker 3: It's just, you know, the racism is so deep and
Speaker 3: pervasive that there's all kinds of subtle not really you know,
Speaker 3: taught the kids, but not really talk about kinds of things.
Speaker 3: And since I didn't grow up in Alabama, I didn't
Speaker 3: have that training.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, did you when he said that, do you remember
Speaker 2: how you reacted?
Speaker 3: I don't remember. I was just I was just kind
Speaker 3: of astonished and down at h and you know, they
Speaker 3: were still in the process of taking the body it way,
Speaker 3: so it wasn't It wasn't kind of thing where there
Speaker 3: was a lot of time to do things and think
Speaker 3: about it. But he was just trying to pass on
Speaker 3: to me the kind of information I should have to
Speaker 3: survive as a white guy at the benefit of racism
Speaker 3: in Alabama.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so he was.
Speaker 3: He was.
Speaker 2: He wasn't apologetic or indignity was He was just kind.
Speaker 3: Of trying to be helpful, trying to be help trying
Speaker 3: to teach me what I should have known.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Gunduck called his footnote a dedication to Brendan Young.
Speaker 2: I wanted to hear him read it.
Speaker 3: At three or two am on September the twenty third,
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety four, a little over a month after doctor
Speaker 3: HANKI and I submitted this article to the Journal of
Speaker 3: Criminal Justice. A death following the pattern described in this article.
Speaker 3: Little Stuckholm Jay Brandon, young age seventeen, was shot in
Speaker 3: the back with a twelve gay shotgun and killed in
Speaker 3: my house in a predominantly black part of Rulemaking County, Alabama.
Speaker 3: He bled to death while the ambuletce took over one
Speaker 3: hour to make the sixth trip from their station to
Speaker 3: our house. I want to recognize Brandon's good works. Brandon
Speaker 3: lived on the street for several years, and society did
Speaker 3: not approve of much of what he did to survive.
Speaker 3: Despite the street life, Brandon had the strength and the
Speaker 3: resolve to protect and care for other abused children he
Speaker 3: met on the streets. This good work has not been recognized. Also,
Speaker 3: in the early hours of September twenty three, nineteen ninety four,
Speaker 3: three killers attempted to kill everyone in our house. As
Speaker 3: they attacked, Brandon put his life on the line. He
Speaker 3: was murdered, but his actions saved three other young lives.
Speaker 3: I missed Brandon, and I know that he would have
Speaker 3: made many lives better if he had lived.
Speaker 2: Our revisionist history Gun series was produced by Jacob Smith, Bend,
Speaker 2: daph Haffrey, Kiara Powell, Tally Emlin, and Leemn gistoo. We
Speaker 2: were edited by Peter Clowney and Julia Barton. Fact checking
Speaker 2: by Arthur Gomberts and Kashelle Williams, original scoring by Luisquira,
Speaker 2: mastering by FLONN Williams, Engineering by Nina Lawrence. I'm Malcolm Glapwell.
Speaker 2: You may have noticed there are two different dates given
Speaker 2: for Brandon Young's death. August twenty third, nineteen ninety four
Speaker 2: is the correct date. There was an error in Gundlock's
Speaker 2: original paper.