A 2010 study by scholars Bruce Western and Becky Petit showed that 2.7 million US children under the age of eighteen were forced to face a parent’s incarceration; that’s one in every twenty-eight, an increase from one in 125 in 1995.17 (For black children, the stats are even grimmer: one in nine loses a parent to prison or jail. 18)This loss has been compared to death in the eyes of a malleable child.19 Those youngsters have a wide variety of traumatic responses: they are more likely to do poorly in school, turn to drugs, develop mental health issues, have a pervasive sense of apathy, lose trust, are susceptible to risky behavior, and experience shame and social stigma.20 In many cases, kids of the imprisoned try to hide the trauma of parental arrests, convictions, and incarceration. While some act out, or end up suspended or dropping out of school, others, like Karter, mask the pain.21 It wasn’t until years later that Karter discovered the wisdom of sociologist Jackson Katz, whose groundbreaking documentary Tough Guise showed how many broken boys learn at a young age to put up a guise to protect themselves from their feelings.22 They succumb to the belief system that equates manhood with invulnerability; they act “tough.”23
By April 1993, Karter was feeling upset much of the time, and knew his life was a mess. Complicating matters was the anger he felt for continuing to love his father despite being abandoned by him. He was also embarrassed that his family was unable to afford school lunches, so much that he refused a free lunch pass; instead, he borrowed change, went hungry, or stole snacks from the lunch line. Talking about his feelings was out of the question; discussing his emotions was not something Karter knew how to do. So he told everyone he was “fine,” and that it didn’t bother him that his father was in prison.
Karter had always been taught to tough it out, no matter what happened to him. There was the time when his mother left the five-year old Karter with a babysitter while she and Derek partied at a friend’s house. Karter remembered a trip with the babysitter to a nearby convenience store and a pleasant ride in a shopping cart. All of a sudden, the sitter let go of the cart, thinking it would be fun for the toddler, but Karter found himself spinning out of control down a hill. The cart crashed with him still in it; his leg was bent in half, crushed in the middle of his thigh. It hurt—the leg was broken, it was later discovered—but he tried not to cry. There was also the time in seventh grade when he was beat up by a boy who “was looking to pummel some younger victim.” Karter wove between parked cars until he was caught, thrown to the ground, punched, and kicked. He yelled for help but nobody came.
Teenagers who experience violence in the home and in their communities often react in extremes. For example, some may do poorly in school, while others feel obliged to always get straight A’s.24 Sometimes, their low self-esteem leads to poor social skills, and they may feel responsible for siblings and/or an abused parent. But children are also resilient, and when violence frequently erupted around Karter and wove its way through his memories, he always managed to keep the hurt inside and stay out of major trouble.
It is not surprising then, to learn that children with incarcerated parents frequently have trouble with attachments.25 Although they cannot acknowledge it without shame, they experience their parent’s incarceration as a rejection of them, and are often afraid to let themselves get close to anyone else.26 This may be, in part, because many incarcerated parents are very involved in the lives of their children before their imprisonment.27 With a parent behind bars, families are split apart, and the child begins to feel like he or she is also doing time.28 Caretakers left behind often do not have enough time for the family, or sufficient finances to manage the home.29
After his father left, Karter started to create elaborate fantasies as he walked through dangerous neighborhoods. He imagined both attacking and being attacked, but always with the same goal, as he wrote in 2008: “to end up a hero.” Sociologist Jackson Katz writes about how “We live in a culture that connects manhood to . . . a willingness to use violence at the deepest levels of men’s identity, telling young men that is the first, and preferred, method of proving you’re a man.”30
A Cape Verdean, Shawn Pina attended Dartmouth High. A teacher would later tell me that in a school that was 90 percent white, Shawn struggled to fit in.31 About a week before that fateful April day, Shawn had verbally insulted Nigel’s mother, and while this was not reported in the media, Karter wrote that Shawn called her a “whore” and said that he had “fucked her.” Nigel warned Shawn to stop saying such things—his mother was dead—but Shawn continued, daring him to do something about it.
While Karter had been a victim of bullying himself, he did not shy away from bullying others. After one boy in his junior high all-white clique was ambushed by a group of African American kids in a neighborhood lot, Karter’s group rounded up a random black boy to exact revenge, despite knowing that he was not among those who had done the beating. As they pushed the terrified boy around, Karter yelled along with the crowd: “We know you were one of them. You think you’re tough with all your boys, jumpin’ white boys?” Finally, Karter realized how scared the child was and, without losing face, said, “Forget it, he’s not one of them.” The clique walked away, but Karter thought at the time, that maybe he had been too “chicken” or too “soft.” He wrote in 2011 that it would be years before he realized that he had been driven by “anger, frustration, resentment and powerlessness.” By senior high, the code was clear: Karter and his friends could not be “weak” in any situation. Show courage for your men. Be strong. Don’t back down.
By 4 p.m. on Easter Sunday 1993, Karter was piled into the backseat of Gator’s car, along with Shad Sacremento and his girlfriend, Beth Streck. Shad was nineteen; by age twenty-one, he would join the military.32 He was also a skateboarder. Karter looked up to Shad and was glad to have him along—he was wiry and a good fighter. Karter knew that Shad had been in trouble a few times, that his mother, a police officer, had recently thrown him out, and that he was staying across the harbor in nearby Fairhaven with Beth. Hard-hitting and pretty, Beth loved all the Boston sports teams and attended Fairhaven High.33 The group drove off to do what they believed was the honorable thing: to give Nigel a chance to fight with the boy who had picked on him one too many times.
Upon arriving at Shawn’s house, the group discovered a couple of Shawn’s friends outside. They told them that Nigel wanted to fight one-on-one to settle the score. “One-on-one” was important to these boys. It meant that each person was pulling his own weight and could stand up to provocation by boys as tough or tougher than they were. It was part of a code of fair fighting, by which you took on your own battles, individually. With a one-on-one fight, people could cheer from the sidelines, but no one could participate except the fighters.
Shawn’s crew crowded around the car, harassing Beth verbally, which angered Shad.34 He jumped out of the Hyundai. Some witnesses said he picked up Gator’s metal baseball bat, and, wielding it, chased the guys down the street.35 But Shawn never mentioned the bat in his testimony at the trial. He said Shad chased them until Shawn’s friends ducked inside his house.36 There was yelling, an attempt to get them to come back outside by the boys in the car, but no one budged.
Finally, the five drove off. Shad and Beth decided to opt out, and after Gator drove them back to Fairhaven, the remaining trio sped back toward Shawn’s. When they turned down Shawn’s street, they saw a bunch of boys waving sticks or bats—Shawn Pina said there were five, while Karter said twelve or fifteen—daring them to get out of the car.37 That’s when Karter realized they were in too deep. They just kept driving; to get out of the car would have risked too much.
Later that night, Karter, Gator, and Nigel agreed that they had royally screwed up and were in big trouble. They had wanted it to be over, but instead they had angered Shawn and his buddies and failed to finish the fight. The next day, Shawn and his crew would surely be waiting for them at Dartmouth High. The boys prized loyalty above what some might say was rational thought: what happened to their friends happened to them. That night, they made a deal.