Member-only story
My Cousin Died an American Death
A shotgun, an accident, and a life that turned out so differently from mine
It’s never truly silent in Ocala, Florida. Here, daytime commotion fades, and the light drains, but then a racket begins. The pulsing thrum of crickets. It just appears, quieter at first, then building into rapid-fire night song. Click, click, click.
The night passes, preoccupations move in, but soon that familiar chirruped mania of the bugs starts up again. And again, and again. The perennial soundtrack of silence, of the dark.
By day, in a nearby forest, Navy pilots pinpoint targets and drop dummy payloads inside a 450-acre zone, practicing for the real thing. It’s all been planned out. Sometimes they drop real ones.
Nearby, men and women stockpile weapons in their houses to defend themselves against these 1,000-pound explosives to ensure the freeness of the state. That these firearms function as de facto defenses against the variables of the community is probably a bit closer to the truth. The guns are there, day and night, in case something were to happen.
And sometimes things really do happen. Sometimes the weapons fire.
“Tussle Over Shotgun in Ocala Ends in Woman’s Death,” Ocala Star-Banner, May 16, 2018
The scruffy brown-haired man with cuts and scrapes on his cheeks looks down the camera and away again. He’s being escorted by officers into a cop car. Through pained expressions on his broad, wan face, he answers a reporter’s questions about the particulars of the death earlier that day.
“This is my family,” he says, “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”
The man responsible has been dressed in an apricot-and-cream-striped jumpsuit that blurs into a soft orange pall. He gives the impression of someone sorrowful but lost. His actions resulted in my cousin’s death. I wasn’t close to my cousin or the life she led, but this man––to me at least–– is postlapsarian flotsam, more an avatar of something else, a face to put to the dysfunction, than the real killer.
What happened in Ocala is cultural as much as it is criminal.
