[Short Fiction] "Shooter"
From the Upcoming Book of Short Stories "Wigger: Stories Of The 1990s" buy JB MInton
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.
Shooter killed seven children and four teachers. He shot thirteen others, and all but one are out of intensive care. My client bought him the weapon used in the crime. News networks are already broadcasting the Christmas video where Shooter opens the gift of the gun he will eventually use to commit mass murder, along with outdoor videos of my client teaching his son how to clear the chamber and reload the weapon. Our defense is to claim ignorance of the intention and planning. We will cite medical limitations to parenting with Benny’s stage 1 Hodgkins diagnosis from earlier this year, and mostly, we will beg the judge and prosecutor for mercy and leniency.
This could have been handled more quietly if the video hadn’t come out. I represented a husband who got off on the weakest technicality for murdering another man. It was apparent he did it. The prosecutor hammered every fact into its hole, and I’m positive the jury would have convicted him unanimously. Then, the judge came in with an eleventh-hour mistrial because of something wrong with the evidence presented to the jury. I found that discrepancy and brought it to the judge’s attention during the trial. I’m good at what I do. That discrepancy was flimsy, but it stuck because there are two justices in America, and I was breaking my back to get Benny judged by the one I worked inside and knew so well, where justice is for sale and silence is the golden currency of that realm.
I’ve been in a lot of jails over my legal career. They are the saddest places on Earth, far lonelier and more miserable than any cemetery, no matter how solemn. Cemeteries are where people go to be free, and jails are where people go to live as slaves. Death is a release from prison, but I’m burying the lead. My client, my old friend Benjamin Prince, is being charged with mass murder even though there is no evidence to support that he acted with or was even aware of what his son was planning. I believed Benny when he confessed his innocence to me. His sobs sounded like they ruptured his throat. I don’t think he is lying about knowing what his son was up to. He seems to have been as lazy a parent as a student, phoning it in for over forty years.
The prosecution can’t prove his complicity, and I suspect they don’t care if they can. They need someone’s picture to put on the cable news porn that will soak the public in manufactured outrage to drive advertising revenue. The modern news cycle is sad but ironically necessary in a world operating on a cycle of grievance and punishment. I’m confident I can get Benny off the murder charges. Reckless child endangerment and a few other charges will be harder to beat, and we’ll soon start negotiating time served and minimizing criminal fines.
The most critical question for our defense to provide is why Shooter lived up to his name. That question has to be answered in Benny’s case, and if it helps the Prosecution’s case, I think I can get my client off. Forcing the conversation on the news to be about why his son did it casts the perception of my client as a shocked, sick, and grieving father who is also a victim of his son’s alleged crime. This legal defense strategy has worked for hundreds of high-profile school shootings over the last twenty years in America. It’s legal precedent, established law, and a best practice that is practically an incentive for more shootings while lawyers and politicians farm money from fields of blood. I understand and accept my place in this system because it paid off my house, cars, and keeps my children in private school. But it still feels wrong when I’m rubbed raw during my worst days.
Many people in America are reflexively sympathetic to a poor, tax-paying white man whose child got caught up in a nest of violence and firearms. They want to believe liberal policy and policing are at fault. My job is not to judge the morality of my jury but to save my client’s life in a State that still executes for the crime of murder. I must convince twelve of them that my client is just like them and did what any of them would have done. But before I argue in front of a jury, I’m going for the plea deal, and I’ll push any button to make it happen.
I will visit Benny today in the county jail to propose this strategy. I don’t know how he will react to betraying his son on a public stage.
A few hours later...
I expected anger. I expected shouting. I could even have seen violence. But to sit there in that cold room on that hard plastic chair and look me in the eye after I told him his son would have to be sacrificed and scorned to save Benny’s life, and he said to me, “Fuck that boy. He made his bed.”--well, that messed me up. I wasn’t ready to see a father let his son go like that. Especially given what Benny went through with his dad, brother, and sister during all that ancient drama that I didn’t want to dig up from high school. And yet, here we stand with our shovels at this big pile of shit from our days gone by.
Day Seven...
Benny has agreed to the prosecution’s deal. He’s going to say what needs to be said about his son. He’s decided to betray his only child. None of this surprises me because I’ve seen this behavior from Benny before in a survival situation where it’s him or them. I was once on the wrong side of that line, and we didn’t talk again for thirty years.
“Report it like the news.” That is the direction I was given by the therapist who taught me this technique of trial journaling. He said, “Write a summary sentence about what’s going on. Then get into your feelings about what’s happening.” It was an effective technique that helped me separate the facts of these situations while allowing me to editorialize my emotional reaction to the high-pressure shit I deal with in my life and work. My wife says I take too much of my clients’ pain and suffering on my shoulders. I say it’s a welcome distraction, seeking to understand how other people suffer in these journals. It helps me separate signals from noise. Everyone needs a way to pull themselves together in tight spots, and this is my way.
I remember the day we buried Benny’s Rottweiler, Sam, on one of Benny’s dad’s many junkyard properties. Benny’s dad was a character. I won’t go into all that, but he was a scary man and was not to be dealt with lightly. It was about a mile walk into the deep Ohio woods past a junkyard filled with old cars, refrigerators, and all the refuse of our little community that his father made a lot of money from hauling, scrapping, and shipping out of Ohio. Junking is a cash or purchase order business model that is also a convenient shield for the untaxable business services of our economy and the kind transacted only with grubby cash. Drugs, gambling, prostitution, and loan-sharking are all criminally adjacent underworld services, and they were understood to be enterprises of the Prince family. But I also heard about things that disappeared, like cars supposedly involved in crimes. There were other rumors, far worse. A person we knew disappeared and she likely wasn’t the only one over the years. Most of Benny’s friends didn’t know what his dad was into and were smart enough not to want to know. Self-protection is a marker of the wise, and only dead people can hold onto courage forever.
Hauling that dog’s carcass into the forest wilderness of Ohio was an experience that changed my life because I decided then and there that I would never live in this State or raise my children near people like Benny’s family. I carried the shovel, and he carried the dead dog, possibly the meanest animal I’ve ever known. He bit three other kids that I knew of, and nothing happened because the parents of the kids that got bit knew you didn’t fuck around with the Prince family in this area. You put your head down, paid your kid’s medical bills, and counseled them as best you could to stay away from those Prince kids: Jimmy, Benny, and their troubled sister, Sandy. They were nothing but trouble. And those parents were right to think and say that to their children. The wise kids dropped out of sight and never came back. A few of us kept coming, and some kept getting bit.
It was a cold October day, and the ground in the forest was hard, with pine needles everywhere. There was the stink of something rotting nearby, and the vultures were circling over the treetops. I remember a hawk following our journey into the woods. I kept thinking it could smell the dog. We carried death into a place of death. We took turns digging the hole. Benny laid Sam’s body into the grave and put the tarp he was wrapped in over him, a temporary blanket between the earth and death. We stood quietly for several seconds. I thought Benny would say something nice about his dog. Instead, he looked at me and said, “I could bury you right here, and they’d never find you.” And then he smiled like it was a joke. I tried to laugh it off, but it messed me up, and that’s when I decided Ohio wasn’t for me. That was the Winter of my senior year, Benny’s Junior year, before things got messed up and fell apart. Whatever was in Benny’s head the day he said that to me in the forest is what I felt in the room with us today when he cut his son off to save himself. And I was the one who made that deal happen, all for my client and supposed friend.
Day Eleven...
Benny will pay his extensive bail by selling the last remaining land from his family’s trust (the last junkyard), and it will become a prison and solar farm. His family used to own half of this county, and for decades, they were above the law.
Today marks the final downfall of the Prince family in Ohio. It should have happened thirty years ago. These kids shouldn’t have died because Benny was destined to raise a mass murderer. He could have been one himself back in high school. He certainly played with guns enough. I saw it in his eyes the day we buried his dog. He was going to get me hurt or worse, like an oncoming semi-truck swerving into my lane. I pulled off that metaphorical highway.
His bail is $400,000, a large sum for this semi-wealthy area. It could buy a middle-class house here. Benny told me his Dad was worth twenty-five million dollars at his peak, and they lived in a dilapidated shit-hole with cars on blocks in the yard. Sam barked all hours of the day and night, chained to his pipe outside, embedded in concrete. Sam’s subdued canine rage in the cold of Winter gave way to ferocious anger in the heat of Summer. There are so few beautiful days in Ohio for an outside dog.
The Prince Family’s land sold fast every time a little bit went to auction over the decades, and eventually, a little bit was all that was left. Now, there is nothing but a prison coming. Rumor has it Ohio Law Enforcement will seize the final plot of Prince land to imprison immigrants who choose the option of slave labor over being deported back to the countries they sacrificed everything to leave. In a cynical moment, an American abolitionist, frustrated at the lack of systemic social progress, wrote, “It seems it is preferential for many to be a slave in a land of plenty rather than starve free in a land of nothing.”
Benny’s dad died ten years ago. Besides land, he was broke. He spent a few years in prison after we graduated high school, from dealing cocaine to the wrong undercover cop. Benny doesn’t speak to his sister Sandy, but she lives around here with all her criminal boyfriends, and it sounds like she runs a fight club between them. Some people change while others grow up to be exactly who we thought they were. It’s a mystery why. Benny won’t talk about his brother Jimmy, except that he is still alive and has lived in California since he left Ohio in 1993. Some things are better left unsaid.
I pick Benny up from county jail tomorrow. Somehow, he must put a life back together from this void. I don’t see it happening, but that’s the cynic in me talking. I’ve been advised the Prosecutor seeks the death penalty against Shooter Prince to be enforced immediately after the appeals run through. My client’s testimony will make that happen, and he is now free to reclaim his broken life.
Day Twelve...
Benny is out on bail. He is now one of the star witnesses for the prosecution. He will participate in sending his only child to death by the executive hand of the State of Ohio.
I picked Benny up from county jail at 10 AM. We spent the day cruising the old town as we had many times in the early ‘90s when we drove to Circuit City after school to buy the latest CDs that we listened to at full bass thumping volume in Benny’s Fiero, driving the 275 loop around the city and into Kentucky then back. That Fiero felt like we were sitting on the street, so low to the ground. Benny’s windows were tinted, and his stereo was the best money could buy. That red Fiero poured through suburban neighborhoods like a hungry sex machine running on a bass rhythm, which is precisely what it was when we were on the prowl with our dicks hard and sticks of gum soft in case we got to kissing on some young ladies. We listened to gangster rap, hardcore punk, and death metal. Then Benny got into some racist music that I couldn’t get down with—awful stuff. I felt my grandmomma’s ghost frowning at me just for hearing some of those songs.
And then, one Saturday night, Benny took me to a yard party during my senior year with a few of those racist bands playing. I have never been more frightened in my life. I stood in the shadows under the eaves of a barn on this large farm plot (I still don’t know whose house that was), way out in East Ohio, down in Appalachia, so close to the Ohio River we could smell it. I remember being dizzy drunk, telling Benny, “I can hear the fucking river!” I said it so many times, walking up through this property from where we parked, that he got pissed. “Shut the fuck up, man. You’ve got to be cool in here. Don’t say anything to anyone. Just nod to the music, drink your drink, stay by me, and shut the fuck up. These people don’t play around.” It was good counsel because we weren’t at that party ten minutes before I saw someone get stabbed in the leg.
Luckily, that night, I wore a plain black t-shirt with a turned-around Cincinnati Reds ball cap, which helped me fade into the background like I was nothing to worry about, which was confirmed in this crowd. Benny was trying to ball this lady, who was at least ten years older than him. And she was into him. They dipped out behind this barn, and I was left standing watch or standing around watching. What I saw was terrifying. Where do these motherfuckers come from? That’s mostly what I thought about watching the fighting and naked titties flashing to a soundtrack of punk rock where racist insults were wrapped into every chorus. And they sang along and screamed at each other and the band. Leaving that party was an escape.
My ringing ears were a blessing on returning to the car because Benny and I didn’t have to speak about what I just witnessed. It was two weeks before I hung out with him afterward, and he never played that music around me again or talked to me about what happened behind that barn with a woman nearly thirty years old in 1993. He was seventeen then, and she might be dead now. She probably is dead, along with many others in that crowd, because that was not a celebration of communal longevity. I saw one person light a short stick of dynamite with a cigarette and toss it into the mosh pit. No one got hurt, but not everyone laughed. I sure didn’t.
Trial Journal Conclusion and Journal Summary.
Benny took me somewhere unexpected today. I can’t write about it yet. I can’t even believe it.
Benny’s text woke me up. I’m leaving tomorrow and returning to New York to fix things with my wife. Whatever she wants, I’m doing it. I’ll quit my job, buy a puppy, and move our house to another state or country. I’ll get a Peloton and really use it, or we can even have another baby. I’m doing whatever she wants because nothing else matters to me now except getting out of Ohio and away from Benny Prince.
Trial Summary.
This was a successful case in that my client never went to trial. He is currently a free man out on bail and engaged in the judicial process of appealing to a higher court to mitigate his financial losses from legal fees and fines. He is pleading No Contest to a separate charge of endangering minors, which is a tremendous understatement of the crime he committed: having a child and pouring evil into him by design or allowed it to be poured in by ignorance, apathy, and complacency. Negligence is a kind word applied to Benny’s crimes. It won’t matter to the parents of those murdered children. They want to see Shooter Prince die, and Benny has given them their wish. But they will each learn that revenge will never ease the pain of their loss because that’s not how suffering a loss of love works. You can’t get over some experiences.
Benny is a sad person. I don’t know how he will pick up his life from here, and I don’t care. I’m the closest person he has to a friend right now, and I hate his fucking guts. I hope I never hear his voice again, not even in my dreams.
Post-Script.
It’s been a year since I talked to Benny and two months since Shooter Prince lost his appeal to the Ohio Supreme Court. Shooter will be executed by lethal injection in two months. But Benny won’t witness his son’s execution. As the Prince Family Trust executor, I got a call this afternoon informing me that Benjamin Prince shot himself this morning. His body is being cremated. There will be no funeral for Benny Prince in Ohio before the execution of his only son. I told the coroner to bury both of their ashes in the county municipal beggar’s plot and don’t bother with a funeral.
