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TEMPLATE NOTE: This is a trial journal template. I always start one of these notebooks when I agree to take a case because I find it helpful to capture details of what’s happening, along with my emotional reactions and thoughts about the circumstances of evolving situations. This planning template was last updated in January 2024. It should be reviewed and revised in January 2025.
Day One...
I was walking out the door when the alert hit our phones. My wife said, “Holy shit, a shooting at your old high school!” I said something stupid because I think I was in shock. “But it’s a middle school now!,” I said as if that mattered in this version of America. We didn’t talk more about it because I was already late for the train to the city and had at least fourteen things to finish before noon. I forgot about the shooting until the following alert hit at 10:37 AM. The shooter was captured live and was a student at the school—no more details. Things were normal until 11:57. I remember this because I was leaving for a lunch meeting at noon and was already late. Up until that phone call came, this was just another American school shooting that happened to other people.
I didn’t recognize the phone number, but the 513 area code got me to answer. Who is calling me from Cincinnati? I accepted the call before I thought it through and later wished to God I’d let it go to voicemail.
“This is Benny.” I immediately knew who it was because some people’s voices are like that; they pull you into the past like a hook through your cheek on a taut line. I hear voices of people from the past in my dreams at night. Often, these characters of memory admonish me and fill my sleep with dread. Benny’s is one of those voices I hear in my dreams the most often, but hearing it coming from my phone in waking life sent fear into my nervous system like I hadn’t felt in years, not since before I met my wife, had my kids, and paid my mortgage off. I hadn’t felt fear since I hung out with Benny in high school.
“You. You’ve... seen the news? About the shooting?” I said yeah, thinking he was reaching out because of the horror in our hometown. I thought, Wow, he thought of me when this happened. I was honored at first, and then he said what he said. “It’s my kid. The one who shot the others.” His voice broke, and he cleared his throat to cover it up. “Darrel, I... I don’t know what happened to the kid. I lost him a couple of years ago. He just stopped talking to me. And he started scowling all the time. I could have... I should...”
I had mercy on him and interrupted. “Benny,” I said. “Man, I’m so sorry.” And I meant it. It was a damn sorry conversation I was having with this guy I used to laugh with all the time. And his voice was the same. It was killing me how much it was the same, like an old recording on an answering machine. And then I asked a dumb question. “How can I help, Benny?” I should have checked my compassion, but my wife got me back into the church shortly after we were married. You listen to talk about forgiving people long enough, and you start to make soft moves with inconvenient consequences. I drifted from my faith in high school and college, chasing superficial things that mattered more to me then than they do now. And that’s a problem when you’ve made bad choices and got lucky with the results. Being a better person means offering help when someone comes asking, but being a better person sometimes sucks.
Even though Benny didn’t say it, he was asking for my help because I’m a lawyer, a criminal defendant. Benny knew this because he’d been following my career for years. I’m no Warren Buffet, but I make good money compared to most earners my age. Church changed me in more ways than forgiveness. I’m not greedy anymore, either. I appreciate what I have even as I’m throwing it away. I’ve been working to set more reasonable expectations for my happiness. I don’t need much but love and a little attention. I want to die peacefully in my bed after having sex with my wife one last time, but I’ve been an absentee father and husband for so long that I don’t know if I can fix it with her and the kids. It’s why I’m in therapy and doing these journals to understand the balance between my work and personal life. The cost of getting to enlightenment may be simply helping friends when they ask for it, especially when it’s inconvenient.
Benny and I paid a cost of silence and distance to preserve our friendship in time, frozen in the ice of 1993. We didn’t have a blowup but silently agreed to leave each other alone. I haven’t spoken to Benny in more than twenty years, but I hear his voice in my dreams at least once a week. And hearing his actual voice brought up dusty boxes from the basement of my heart, and I dumped their contents on the kitchen table of my brain and started sorting memories and misrememberings into different piles of crazy. I told my wife over dinner about how we hung out with some crazy motherfuckers in high school, Benny and I; white boys with nothing to lose and nothing to live for but getting laid, drunk, and gaining a reputation for being crazier than the kid last weekend. We witnessed and often participated in flagrantly reckless behavior, most of which I conveniently forgot happened. In our hour-long conversation, Bennie brought up some of the old stories, but in his versions, he was the craziest one. He pushed the boundaries further than anyone else. There wasn’t a dare he wouldn’t take. Benny once jumped out of a moving car on the highway because some dickhead bet him five bucks he wouldn’t. He broke his foot and took the cast off after a week, hacked it up with a saw, and cut his arm deep enough to butterfly band-aid back together. “Fuck that doctor,” he told us. “I can move my foot enough to kick your ass! Any of you needle dick motherfuckers!” And no one challenged him. That part of his story is true. We loved Benny. At parties, he made everyone laugh. Well, almost everyone. Benny could endure enormous physical pain without complaint, and that’s what made him tougher than the rest of us. Benny was a good friend until he was just a memory.
His mom was a special kind of mean and angry drunk. She left Benny’s dad the Summer I graduated high school, and I never asked or found out why. Parents can mess a kid up with words, silence, and bad ideas just as much as with their fists. Benny told me today she died a few years ago, having remarried to forget her old life with her old family. He said she eventually got her shit together and started climbing the AA steps. She called him to apologize, and he got so angry when he started crying that he hung up on her and they never spoke again. I don’t blame her for leaving Benny’s dad after what happened that Summer.
I deliberately lost touch with Benny by the end of the Fall of ‘93, just after I graduated high school when Benny was entering his senior year. Some shit went down at the time that couldn’t be undone. In retrospect, the situation could have likely been fixed if we had made a gesture to reconcile, but that didn’t happen. The truth is, I’m still fond of Benny. Despite the circumstances, the only possible good thing in this situation is for he and I to reconnect. This motherfucker made me laugh all the time. His humor started at crude and grew angrier the drunker he became and more whimsical and goofier when he was stoned. Stoned Benny was my favorite because his aggression and anxiety were lowered for a while, and it was like we were little boys again. We listened to great music while lying on the hood of his car for so many nights, passing bottles and joints while talking about the stars, God, and a life beyond Ohio’s sky.
Benny loved to chase women, but he never caught them for long, and that’s where he ran into trouble. I think it was because, back then, Benny was never told “No.” Or at least he never heard the word and understood its meaning. In high school, Benny expected things to happen a certain way for him, and mostly they did. There were a few exceptions; they all involved women or the girls they once were. He was always trying to fuck an older woman back then. None of our Moms were safe, but Benny couldn’t figure out how a woman worked, how to get her attention, or how to keep her happy. Instead, he professed to collect women and was always bragging about his teenage harem that never seemed to materialize in front of witnesses.
Shooter is Benny’s only child, and the more I learn about him, the more inevitable this tragedy seems. No mother in the picture. She’s in a long-term residential mental health hospital up near Cleveland, diagnosed with paranoid Schizophrenia. Benny sure could pick them. He was always a unique individual, far from perfect. Racist to the bone, the shit I’ve heard Benny say would break libel laws as well as the edicts of ethics, reason, and common decency. He seems to have mellowed over time, but I’m worried about building my defense around his ignorance of what his son planned and did.
Day Four...
Things are getting official now. Meetings with printed names, signatures, and check-in and check-out times are logged in visiting ledgers. The fundamental legal work begins with planning what to do next to achieve what we need to accomplish.
I’m in Cincinnati, set up in the hotel, and hosting strategy meetings to develop Benny’s defense. I’ve conferred with Shooter’s attorney to see if there was enough common ground to combine our cases and marshal our resources into a unified defense like OJ Simpson’s legal team presented when Benny and I were in high school. That was the first time I understood what a defense lawyer did when they did it well. We create reasonable doubt, the measure of law when applied to a formal accusation in a case presented before a judge and jury. Watching Johnny Cochran get OJ off a murder charge with a strong prosecutor wielding solid evidence was a master’s class for me. Eventually, it became clear that I wanted to be a criminal defendant. But today, I wish I had become a race car driver instead.
Day Five...
Details are coming out about the shooting. They aren’t good.
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