It was comforting to see how many people felt compelled to come by, how many people loved Alison, but I was in no way up to entertaining them. They mostly left me alone. No one really knew what to say, other than “I can’t even imagine.” My part would come later.
On that first afternoon, unsure what else to do, I sat down in the kitchen, mostly oblivious to the chaos bustling around me, and I looked out at the bird feeder. It was getting low. I thought about going out to refill it, just to have something to do, when my phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out and read the CNN update:
POLICE: VESTER FLANAGAN KILLS SELF AFTER ON-AIR SLAYINGS
Vester Flanagan? I thought his name was Bryce Williams? Who the fuck is Vester Flanagan? My pulse racing, I skimmed the story: just before 11:30 a.m., Virginia State Police spotted the shooter’s car heading east on I-66, almost 170 miles away from the marina, and attempted to pull him over. Instead of stopping, he sped up and led police on a high-speed chase down the freeway until he crashed into an embankment along the side of the road. When officers approached the vehicle, they found him dead from a self-inflicted gunshot.
It’s difficult to explain what I felt in that moment. I certainly didn’t mourn him. I obviously wasn’t sad that the world had lost him, but I also didn’t take any pleasure in his death. Mostly I felt the loss of a sense of purpose: he had killed himself before being brought to justice. There would be no arraignments, no trials, no tear-filled testimony, the shooter in handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit at a solid oak table, Barbara and I sitting day after day with our arms around each other in the front row of the gallery, staring daggers into the shooter and choking back tears. To be clear, I didn’t want any of those things, but at least they would have given me a reason to get up in the morning. I felt, if anything, somehow emptier than before. I didn’t mourn the shooter, but I did mourn my loss of purpose.
As I stared at my phone, my head throbbing, my stomach in free fall, I flailed about for a new cause, a new reason to keep on living. There had to be justice for Alison. She was too special and meant far too much to me for her to fall victim to a senseless tragedy, to be just another statistic. Her life had meant something. I vowed that her death would mean something too. There would be justice for Alison yet.
Thumbing quickly through the rest of the story, I felt my stomach lurch before the words mentally registered: my daughter’s killing was recorded on video. Not just the interrupted news footage, which I knew existed but had no intention of ever seeing. The killer himself had taped the whole thing. He’d worn a GoPro camera mounted on his forehead. He’d shot three people in cold blood and then unloaded six or seven bullets into two lifeless bodies. Then he’d calmly walked back to his car and uploaded the footage to Facebook. On Twitter he added, “I filmed the shooting see Facebook.”
As if it wasn’t bad enough that my daughter, my vivacious, beautiful, award-winning daughter, had been murdered this morning.
Live footage of my daughter’s murder was on fucking Facebook.
No, this couldn’t be a nightmare. This was far, far worse than anything I ever could have imagined, because I didn’t have to imagine it. It was right there in front of my face, the little gray triangle pointing directly toward the moment at which Alison’s life was snuffed out.
This time I felt sure I was going to throw up. I stood up abruptly, my chair skittering across the linoleum, and quick-stepped my way to the bedroom.
I’ve been asked about that moment more times than I can begin to count. Yes, I was sickened, and yes, I was saddened, but those words aren’t strong enough. No words are strong enough. This was a whole new level of violation. It was like some medieval execution, having your beating heart torn out and shown to you as you die.
As every parent knows, having a child is the best and the worst thing that can ever happen to you, the source of your highest highs and lowest lows, your greatest joys and your deepest sorrows. When you have a kid, you’re no longer just wearing your heart on your sleeve. You’re wiping her nose and tying her shoes and walking her to the school bus in the morning. Alison was my beating heart, and this son of a bitch wanted me to watch it stop beating in real time.
Never.
I have never seen that video, and I will never see that video. More than once I have exploded at people who tried to show it to me. Why? Why would anyone assume I had seen it, and more than that, why would anyone assume I want to see it? Isn’t it enough that my daughter died? Do I really need to watch it happen on live TV? Isn’t it enough for me to know that it’s floating around out there on the internet for any sick fuck who wants to watch it? Who would want to, anyway? What kind of cruel, ghoulish rubbernecker would want to watch my daughter die?
I slammed the bedroom door and collapsed onto our unmade bed. The room began to spin. My daughter, murdered on live TV, the video available for all the world to see. It truly was worse than my worst nightmare, the perfect tragedy for the digital age. Shakespeare couldn’t make this up. Already I felt wounded by all the unseen eyes gawking at the electric spectacle of her death, and I lay there listening to the muffled conversations in the kitchen, staring at the motes of dust aloft in the long shafts of sunlight, wondering if I could just go to sleep forever.
Why had this happened?
I had so many questions. I had to finish reading the article. Still flat on my back, the thin green blanket rumpled beneath me where I had thrown it off to get dressed earlier that morning, seemingly a lifetime ago, I curled one hand toward my face and unlocked my phone. Details were still coming in, the article said, and they would for days afterward. The biggest bombshells were yet to come, but what was known already was plenty explosive. Not two hours after the shooting, ABC News had received a twenty-three-page fax: “Suicide Note For Friends & Family By Bryce Williams (legal name: Vester Lee Flanagan II).” He’d gotten the fax number a few weeks earlier when he called the network wanting to “pitch a story.” He never said what the story was.
I was wracked with a new wave of agony roiling in my gut, but still I couldn’t stop reading. According to the article, the shooter alleged that he had been fired from WDBJ because of racial discrimination and sexual harassment, which he said had steadily fueled his anger. The final straw, however, came when he claimed that Jehovah appeared to him two months earlier, right after the Charleston church shooting, and told him to act. He put down a deposit on a gun two days later.
The murder weapon.
This guy’s fucking nuts, I thought, and he purchased his gun legally.
In his fax he professed admiration for the Columbine shooters and the Virginia Tech gunman. But he wrote such vitriol about the Charleston shooter that CNN felt compelled to redact every other word: “As for Dylann Roof? You [deleted]! You want a race war [deleted]? BRING IT THEN YOU WHITE [deleted]!!!”
I shook my head. This guy was seriously messed up. He had needed real help. Part of the crime, I thought, was that instead of help, he was given a gun. This was the obvious outcome of handing a gun to a lunatic like him. The fault didn’t lie with gun owners, by and large, and it didn’t lie with gun sellers or gun manufacturers. The fault was with those who wanted to make guns available to anyone with as few restrictions as possible. The fault was with the gun lobby and their paid-for politicians.
How many shootings do we have to witness before we finally do something substantial to stop them? I had seen the president cry on national television, for God’s sake, and I knew those tears were real. I knew how President Obama felt about Charleston and Sandy Hook, and as I lay in bed, clutching my phone, my world spinning, I wondered why more people didn’t stand up, didn’t pressure their legislators to finally do something about the endless shootings, didn’t push to keep guns out of the hands of crazy people, to provide at least some half-hearted funding for mental health. I feared it was simply because they don’t know what it feels like to lose a child. They’re right; they can’t even imagine. I felt another eruption building.
My phone rang.
“Mr. Parker, this