A suicide leaves questions lingering behind
The Black Lives Matter movement has claimed its first death through suicide, and the victim was white. I mention the race, because it’s ironic that this white life did not matter in the grand scheme of things.
Back in May, Omaha businessman Jake Gardner was involved in a scuff le with protesters outside of his bar. During the struggle, in which he was pushed down on the ground, Gardner fired off two shots, one of which hit James Spurlock, killing him. Initially, the District Attorney refused to file charges, describing Gardner’s actions as self-defense. This was after speaking to witnesses and reviewing video of the incident. But that made a lot of people very angry.
I remember what it was like in the days after the George Floyd killing. I spent an afternoon shortly after the killing became a national story, walking in Center City Philadelphia. Stores that had been closed because of the pandemic were now boarded up in anticipation of protests, otherwise known as rioting. A helicopter kept circling overhead, and there was a strong police presence. I stopped by the Starbucks at 18th and Spruce, stood outside to snap a selfie and entitled it “Coffee in Fallujah.” It looked that bad, that desolate.
So I do remember what it was like in those days right after the Black Lives Movement had its resurgence, and while some might have felt empowered, I was deeply troubled. A nNewspaper editor was forced to resign because they allowed “offensive” headlines like “Buildings Matter Too” to run in their paper. Murals were painted over, statues removed during the middle of the night. Stores were looted. Fires were set, police cars were vandalized, and the police themselves were denied service in places where “woke folk” who called themselves allies of the
BLM movement needed to make their nausea known.
It was bad then, and it hasn’t really gotten any better. But in those heated days after the killing, there were a lot of confrontations, and there was a lot of anger. That public anger forced the District Attorney of Douglas County, Neb., to reopen Spurlock’s killing because the idea that a white Iraq War veteran had killed a Black BLM protestor in “self defense” was a match to kindling. The city was ready to explode, so the D.A. acquiesced in having a special prosecutor review the case. Last week, a grand jury issued an indictment against Gardner containing four criminal counts: Manslaughter, attempted first-degree assault, terroristic threats and use of a firearm in connec
tion with a felony.
And while we will never know what went through Gardner’s mind, one that was already filled with memories of war and crisis from two tours of combat in Iraq, it’s not a stretch to think that this decision to prosecute him pushed him over the edge into a despair from which return is impossible. Gardner’s body was found outside of a medical clinic on Sunday afternoon. He had taken his own life.
I have written a great deal about suicide. Those who know me, know why. It’s not necessary to go into any details, but my antenna are highly attuned to those who teeter on the edge of hope, tethered to this reality by the thinnest and most fragile of threads. I know that the abyss is deep, dark, and permanent.
I’ve often said that no one should bear the guilt of another person’s decision to end his life. We have agency and, like William Ernest Henley wrote in his magnificent poem “Invictus,” we are the captains of our soul, the masters of our fate. Someone who is determined to leave cannot be held back by even the Herculean efforts of loved ones.
But most do not want to leave. Kindness can work miracles on troubled minds. The corollary is that hostility and a desire for vengeance can push someone over the edge. While I doubt that the people who were clamoring for an investigation into the shooting of Spurlock wanted Gardner to die, it’s equally likely that they really didn’t give a damn about his welfare, his life, or his service as a veteran. They saw a dead Black man, and in those crazy heated days of madness this past summer, that was all they needed to see. The story was written even before the names of the characters were known.
So a man who, as his lawyer insists, acted in self-defense because he was threatened by angry protestors became a casualty of the social justice movement that talks about lives mattering. And because not all lives really do matter to the angry mobs, we will never really know if justice was served after all.