Latest / Revisionist History / Guns Part 5: The Footnote

Transcript

Guns Part 5: The Footnote · Revisionist History

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.
0:20
Speaker 2: I read footnotes. I always have. Perhaps it seems like
0:24
Speaker 2: good manners to read everything someone else has written for you,
0:27
Speaker 2: like cleaning your plate when you're a kid. Or maybe
0:32
Speaker 2: it's because a footnote is where you put the bit
0:34
Speaker 2: of information that doesn't quite fit the main story, but
0:38
Speaker 2: at the same time is too important to leave out.
0:41
Speaker 2: And to my mind, the thing that is important and
0:45
Speaker 2: doesn't fit is often the most important thing of all.
0:49
Speaker 2: So I read footnotes, and occasionally that leads me somewhere
0:54
Speaker 2: entirely unexpected, like the footnote at the very end of
0:58
Speaker 2: a paper in the Journal of Criminal Justice entitled Damned
1:02
Speaker 2: upon Arrival, volume twenty three, number four, pages three thirteen
1:07
Speaker 2: to three, twenty three, nineteen ninety five. Lead author Penelope J. Hanke,
1:13
Speaker 2: Second author James H. Goodluck. It made me go all
1:19
Speaker 2: the way to a little town in Alabama to have
1:22
Speaker 2: the man who wrote the footnote explained to me thirty
1:25
Speaker 2: years later, just what it meant. Could you do me
1:31
Speaker 2: a favorite?
1:31
Speaker 1: Can you read that? Read the footnote for me?
1:36
Speaker 3: Small print At three or two am on September the
1:43
Speaker 3: twenty third, nineteen ninety four, a little over a month
1:47
Speaker 3: after doctor Hanche and I submitted this article to the
1:51
Speaker 3: Ejournal of Criminal Justice. A death following the pattern described
1:56
Speaker 3: in this article little Stuckholm Jay Brandon Young, age seventeen
2:02
Speaker 3: were shot in the back with a twelve gay shotgun
2:05
Speaker 3: and killed in my house and a predominantly black part
2:09
Speaker 3: of rue Macon County, Alabama.
2:15
Speaker 2: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
2:19
Speaker 2: my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is
2:26
Speaker 2: about the death of Brandon Young. James Gunlock lives in Shorter, Alabama,
2:42
Speaker 2: a little town just south of Tuskegee along I eighty five.
2:46
Speaker 2: Some parts of Alabama are wild and hilly. This is
2:50
Speaker 2: the other side of the state, flat swampy pine trees.
2:54
Speaker 2: Macon County one of the eighteen counties that make up
2:57
Speaker 2: the Black Belt of Alabama, where the cotton plantations were
3:01
Speaker 2: in the days before the Civil War. Gundlock lives with
3:05
Speaker 2: his wife in an eighteen forties plantation house, a doctress house.
3:10
Speaker 2: The old slave quarters are in the basement directly below
3:13
Speaker 2: the old surgery, so the slave stove could heat the
3:15
Speaker 2: doctor's offices during the winter. Two enormous Anatolian shepherds pat
3:20
Speaker 2: around presenting their giant heads for attention. The house looks
3:25
Speaker 2: untouched from the nineteenth century. There's an abandoned truck in
3:28
Speaker 2: the backyard.
3:31
Speaker 1: I grew up tough.
3:35
Speaker 3: I was a World War two baby, and my father
3:39
Speaker 3: came back from the war mentally messed up, and he
3:42
Speaker 3: became an alcoholic. And we lived on a farm, and
3:48
Speaker 3: he would take off on a drinking branch, taking my
3:51
Speaker 3: mother with him, and be gone for days.
3:54
Speaker 2: Gun Luck is tall, stooped, wisps of white hair. He
3:59
Speaker 2: moves and talks slowly.
4:01
Speaker 3: That continued on. When I was eleven, we ran out
4:06
Speaker 3: of the food and I saw this flock of blackbirds crows,
4:14
Speaker 3: and so I took the twelve gate shotgun and my
4:17
Speaker 3: brother and I we went up and stuck up on him.
4:20
Speaker 3: And as soon as I started flying, I went I
4:22
Speaker 3: got two shots off, and that's I was talking to you.
4:25
Speaker 3: My brother, reminiscing about this, said, yeah, if you said,
4:30
Speaker 3: your whope shoulder hurts so much, you may may go
4:32
Speaker 3: pick up all the dead birds. But we sat there,
4:37
Speaker 3: started the fire, stripped and dressed out the birds, and
4:40
Speaker 3: all the roasted them just to be able to have food.
4:46
Speaker 2: He escaped home by enrolling in the Army, went to college,
4:50
Speaker 2: then graduate school, then to Alabama and taught sociology at
4:54
Speaker 2: Auburn University. One time he caught a huge cheating ring
4:58
Speaker 2: going on with teachers in this department and football players,
5:01
Speaker 2: and blew the whistle. Made the New York Times in
5:04
Speaker 2: one of the most football crazed states in the country.
5:07
Speaker 2: He went, after football.
5:09
Speaker 3: Today's the twenty eighth day of my eighty first year.
5:12
Speaker 3: So I'm on the old side. And six months after
5:17
Speaker 3: I retired, I had an encephalitis infection to the brain.
5:22
Speaker 3: And I survived that when I was sixty six, which
5:27
Speaker 3: is quite rare. But when I came to from it
5:31
Speaker 3: in the hospital, I had company, but I couldn't think
5:38
Speaker 3: of I couldn't take the words to say what I
5:41
Speaker 3: wanted to say.
5:43
Speaker 2: He forced himself to go through the alphabet A to Z,
5:47
Speaker 2: counting all the words he knew that began with each letter.
5:50
Speaker 2: He came up with one hundred and ninety six.
5:53
Speaker 3: My first conclusion was that I was essentially brain dead.
5:56
Speaker 3: I might as well put myself down. Then after I
6:00
Speaker 3: thought of it, I thought, well, the way I measured
6:02
Speaker 3: it meant that I'm not completely brain dead. So I
6:05
Speaker 3: just decided to gets the suicide.
6:09
Speaker 2: Slowly he recovered built himself back up. He was working
6:12
Speaker 2: on a new paper when we spoke, an analysis of
6:15
Speaker 2: health insurance status and mortality rates. By the way, you
6:19
Speaker 2: will hear all kinds of strange noises in the background
6:21
Speaker 2: as you listen to Gundlock talking.
6:24
Speaker 3: Let me go turn that thing off. Okay, my wife
6:27
Speaker 3: always leaves it unbalanced and it makes it a lot
6:30
Speaker 3: of noise. And if I'm going off on tangents that
6:34
Speaker 3: you're not interested in, but.
6:36
Speaker 1: What actually.
6:38
Speaker 2: Some of what you're talking about now feeds into what
6:40
Speaker 2: I want to speak to. So sure, why don't we
6:42
Speaker 2: start with the stuff that was interested me the most,
6:46
Speaker 2: which was I read that damned on a rival paper
6:51
Speaker 2: and I just thought it was fascinating and I wanted
6:56
Speaker 2: to kind of talk to you a little bit about that,
6:58
Speaker 2: and that'd be a good place to start.
7:00
Speaker 3: Okay.
7:01
Speaker 2: We talked a little about the paper, and then James
7:03
Speaker 2: Gunlock went off on what seemed like one of his tangents,
7:07
Speaker 2: although as I found out, it wasn't really a tangent
7:10
Speaker 2: at all. It was about the time back in the
7:14
Speaker 2: early nineteen nineties when he got a call from his
7:16
Speaker 2: brother his brother's daughter had run away.
7:20
Speaker 3: The police called him and ask him why he hadn't
7:22
Speaker 3: canceled the missing child. He said, well, she's not back home,
7:28
Speaker 3: and they said, Welching's never missed school. She worked out
7:32
Speaker 3: a system by where she was just staying with friends
7:35
Speaker 3: overnight in sequence and just avoiding going home by living
7:42
Speaker 3: out in the world and still going to school.
7:44
Speaker 2: Gun Luck took his niece in. She was about fourteen,
7:48
Speaker 2: so is his daughter. Now he had two teenagers under
7:51
Speaker 2: his roof.
7:52
Speaker 3: She eventually decided that we were such good parents that
7:56
Speaker 3: she found a couple of street boys had been thrown
7:59
Speaker 3: out of their own homes, and we ended up taking
8:02
Speaker 3: them in.
8:03
Speaker 2: They were living in Montgomery then, and parts of the
8:06
Speaker 2: city were full of gangs, the bloods, the grips, the disciples.
8:10
Speaker 2: Word got out that the Gunlux house was a place
8:12
Speaker 2: of refuge.
8:14
Speaker 3: One time, we had this big lizard, and the lizard
8:19
Speaker 3: got out, so I was going around looking for it,
8:23
Speaker 3: and I looked under the bed and there was this boy.
8:28
Speaker 3: And I looked at him and he said, I guess
8:31
Speaker 3: you want to know why I'm here. And he was
8:38
Speaker 3: just kind of a temporary close eye street kid. He
8:42
Speaker 3: was sort of staying in our house to be out
8:44
Speaker 3: off the street and stuff without having contact with adults
8:49
Speaker 3: in the house.
8:53
Speaker 2: I sat in a small chair next to gunlux desk
8:56
Speaker 2: as he talked about the kids he took in, boys
8:59
Speaker 2: and gangs, boys living off the street, who stole car
9:02
Speaker 2: radios to stay alive and drank cheap liquor to stay
9:04
Speaker 2: warm at night. What is it about you do you
9:07
Speaker 2: think that led you to take in so many of
9:10
Speaker 2: these kids.
9:11
Speaker 3: Well, I think it was ruined in the time that
9:15
Speaker 3: our parents left us alone on the farm. That I
9:20
Speaker 3: can really relate to kids not having parental support and
9:28
Speaker 3: subsistence support and other kinds of things.
9:32
Speaker 2: One of the kids they took in came from a
9:34
Speaker 2: little town called Valley in the northern part of the state,
9:37
Speaker 2: an old textile town. He was seventeen. He was involved
9:41
Speaker 2: in one of Montgomery's many gangs, but he was looking
9:44
Speaker 2: for a way out. His name was Brandon Young. How
9:48
Speaker 2: long did Brandon live with you?
9:52
Speaker 3: Probably only about six months.
9:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you got to know him, well, oh yeah,
10:00
Speaker 1: at first he was very you know, reserved and suspicious
10:05
Speaker 1: and other things.
10:06
Speaker 3: But you know, as we got to know him and
10:08
Speaker 3: stuff opened up and we talked about time she.
10:12
Speaker 2: And then James Gunlock started talking again about the paper
10:15
Speaker 2: he wrote with Penealty Hanky damned upon arrival. The number
10:50
Speaker 2: of homicides in any community is a combination of two
10:54
Speaker 2: completely unrelated variables. The number of people victimized by acts
10:58
Speaker 2: of violence minus how good a job the medical system
11:01
Speaker 2: does at saving the lives of those victims. And a
11:05
Speaker 2: lot of times, what a murder rate really tells you
11:08
Speaker 2: is how good you're doctors are, and not how safe
11:11
Speaker 2: your streets are. This is the idea we explored in
11:14
Speaker 2: the previous episode. But there's a twist on that observation,
11:19
Speaker 2: a really important twist which the people who treat gunshots
11:22
Speaker 2: for a living have known about for a long time.
11:26
Speaker 2: So I'm assuming over the course of your career you
11:30
Speaker 2: have treated innumerable gunshot wounds.
11:34
Speaker 4: Unfortunately true.
11:36
Speaker 2: This is doctor Babach Serrani. He's a trauma surgeon at
11:40
Speaker 2: George Washington University Hospital in Washington, d C. If you
11:44
Speaker 2: get seriously injured by a bullet, you get taken to
11:46
Speaker 2: a trauma center, more specifically a Level one trauma center,
11:51
Speaker 2: which is a self contained, twenty four hour facility equipped
11:54
Speaker 2: with everything necessary to treat traumatic injury, general surgeons, orthopedic surgeons, neurosurgeons,
12:01
Speaker 2: plastic surgeons, and the caesiologists, er docs, radiologists, nurses with
12:06
Speaker 2: the right qualifications on and on. Trauma centers cost hundreds
12:11
Speaker 2: of millions of dollars to build and operate. They're relatively rare.
12:14
Speaker 2: DC has thirteen hospitals, but only four level ones. One
12:18
Speaker 2: of those is at George Washington. Serrani is the chief
12:22
Speaker 2: trauma sursion there. Do you know how many, roughly.
12:25
Speaker 4: Speaking, Oh, my goodness, I would think probably by now
12:32
Speaker 4: the number of gunshrare victims I've seen personally. I've been
12:34
Speaker 4: in practice since two thousand and five, I would venture
12:39
Speaker 4: miss Bladwell five hundred plus.
12:41
Speaker 3: Wow.
12:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, And you weren't even there during DC's darkest years.
12:46
Speaker 4: Correct, yeah, correct.
12:48
Speaker 2: I wanted to talk to Serrani about time because trauma
12:52
Speaker 2: sursions are obsessed with time. There's a phrase common in
12:56
Speaker 2: their world, the golden hour. If you get shot, they
12:59
Speaker 2: really want to have you on the operating table as
13:02
Speaker 2: soon as possible. That's why we pull over for ambulances.
13:06
Speaker 2: Talk a little to me about time. You said, tends
13:09
Speaker 2: to get there within ten minutes, and you tend to
13:11
Speaker 2: get to the trauma center between twenty and forty five.
13:14
Speaker 2: What's the difference between twenty and forty five. What happens
13:18
Speaker 2: in that extra period of time that would diminish someone's
13:21
Speaker 2: chances of survival?
13:22
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think it depends on where the injury is.
13:25
Speaker 4: You know, if you've been injured in the abdomen and
13:27
Speaker 4: it hits your intestine, honestly, nothing will happen between twenty
13:29
Speaker 4: and forty five minutes. That's plenty of time. But if
13:32
Speaker 4: you're bleeding, specifically speaking, if you're bleeding, then every minute
13:36
Speaker 4: that goes by is you know, the value of that
13:39
Speaker 4: is plutonium.
13:41
Speaker 2: Like, for example, if you take a bullet to your liver,
13:44
Speaker 2: the liver is a maze of blood vessels.
13:47
Speaker 4: Making the liver, of all things, stop bleeding is exceedingly difficult.
13:51
Speaker 4: You know, kidney, I can take it out, you have
13:53
Speaker 4: two kidneys, spleen, I can take it out. You don't
13:56
Speaker 4: need a spleen. I cannot take out your liver that
13:58
Speaker 4: you need a liver to live, and so I'm obligated
14:01
Speaker 4: to try to repair it while it just continues to bleed.
14:04
Speaker 2: When we spoke, Surrouni had just treated someone who had
14:07
Speaker 2: taken a rifle shot to the liver.
14:09
Speaker 4: The reason he's alive, and I will take some credit
14:11
Speaker 4: at George Washington, but honestly, one of the bigger reasons
14:14
Speaker 4: he's alive is the paramedics. They completely scooped and ran
14:18
Speaker 4: with this guy. I think their entire scene time was
14:20
Speaker 4: like ten or twelve minutes, and they just high tailed
14:24
Speaker 4: it to the trauma center. When he showed up on
14:26
Speaker 4: our doorstep. You figure by now it's been twenty twenty
14:30
Speaker 4: five minutes of the most from the moment of wounding
14:32
Speaker 4: to arrival to the trauma center. He was probably five
14:37
Speaker 4: to ten minutes away from dying. He was the extreme
14:39
Speaker 4: end stages of.
14:40
Speaker 2: Shock or what about a bullet to the lungs?
14:44
Speaker 4: A paramedic can actually treat a gunshot win to the lung.
14:46
Speaker 4: They can temporize that person very nicely.
14:48
Speaker 1: So do that.
14:49
Speaker 2: How do you temporize someone who's had a gunshot win
14:52
Speaker 2: to the lung?
14:53
Speaker 4: So, when you have a gunshot to the lung, assuming
14:56
Speaker 4: it has not hit a blood vessel, assuming you're not bleeding,
14:58
Speaker 4: all you have is a gunshot to the lung, which
15:00
Speaker 4: is I believe or not really really common. The problem
15:05
Speaker 4: is you have air leaking from your lung and that
15:08
Speaker 4: air is accumul inside the chest. As that air collects
15:12
Speaker 4: more and more inside the chest because it's leaking out
15:13
Speaker 4: of lung, it'll create a lot of pressure in the
15:16
Speaker 4: chest and it'll cause it'll alter the blood flow to
15:19
Speaker 4: your body. So the paramedic can simply put a needle
15:23
Speaker 4: inside your chest, believe it or not, just like literally
15:25
Speaker 4: in sort of needle through your skin into your chest
15:28
Speaker 4: and it's like popping a balloon. It'll allow that air
15:30
Speaker 4: that's accumulating to decompress and that's all you have to do.
15:34
Speaker 4: That will buy the person then tens of minutes if
15:38
Speaker 4: not more, to get to the trauma center to allow
15:41
Speaker 4: us to then fix the issue at hand. But that's
15:44
Speaker 4: a paramedic.
15:44
Speaker 2: Skill absince that intervention that would be a fatal event. Correct,
15:50
Speaker 2: Just to deling on this time question for a moment.
15:53
Speaker 2: So if I have a gunshot wound to the chest
15:56
Speaker 2: and I have exactly happening to me what you just described,
16:01
Speaker 2: how much time do I have without an AMS's intervention?
16:04
Speaker 2: Half an hour?
16:04
Speaker 4: Yeah, probably about half an hour or so, I mean
16:06
Speaker 4: plus minus, But yes, I would think.
16:08
Speaker 2: So, So let's think through the logic of this, a
16:13
Speaker 2: city or country's homicide rate is heavily dependent on how
16:17
Speaker 2: good its medical system is at treating gunshot ones. And
16:22
Speaker 2: what determines how good a medical system is a treating
16:25
Speaker 2: gunshot ones, at least in part, it's how quickly a
16:28
Speaker 2: gunshot victim can get to a Level one trauma center. Okay,
16:33
Speaker 2: second question, and in this case let's use Chicago as
16:37
Speaker 2: our example, classic big American city. Chicago absolutely confirms the
16:42
Speaker 2: theory that proximity to a trauma center matters. According to
16:46
Speaker 2: a big study done a couple years ago by the
16:49
Speaker 2: epidemiologist Marie Crandall, if you live more than five miles
16:52
Speaker 2: from a Level one trauma center in Chicago, you had
16:55
Speaker 2: a thirty five percent higher chance of dying from your
16:58
Speaker 2: wounds than if you were shot less than five miles
17:02
Speaker 2: from a level one. So here's the second question. What
17:06
Speaker 2: determines how quickly you get too trauma center in Chicago?
17:11
Speaker 2: Is it a random fact like whether there's an ambulance
17:14
Speaker 2: nearby when you get shot, or how bad the traffic
17:16
Speaker 2: is that day on the way to the hospital, or
17:19
Speaker 2: is there a pattern to who lives within five miles
17:22
Speaker 2: of a level one, and who doesn't. A physician at
17:26
Speaker 2: the University of Chicago named Elizabeth Tongue set out to
17:30
Speaker 2: answer that question a few years ago, what do you
17:34
Speaker 2: find in Chicago?
17:36
Speaker 5: And so we found that black majority census tracks were
17:39
Speaker 5: disproportionately in these trauma deserts.
17:41
Speaker 2: A trauma desert, by the way, is what er docs
17:44
Speaker 2: call places that are a long way from a level one.
17:47
Speaker 5: That racial disparity was essentially very large, approximately a sevenfold
17:55
Speaker 5: increase on the South Side in black communities.
17:59
Speaker 2: Wait to explain the sevenfold the racial disparity between what
18:02
Speaker 2: and what is sevenfold higher.
18:04
Speaker 5: The racial disparity between black majority census tracks and white
18:07
Speaker 5: majority census tracks is an x sevenfold sevenfold wow.
18:15
Speaker 2: For a period of thirty years between nineteen ninety one
18:18
Speaker 2: and twenty eighteen, the south side of Chicago didn't even
18:22
Speaker 2: have a Level one trauma center. So if you got
18:25
Speaker 2: shot on the south Side, and by the way, the
18:27
Speaker 2: south Side is the area of Chicago where you're most
18:29
Speaker 2: likely to get shot, the ambulance had to take you
18:32
Speaker 2: all the way across the city uptown to Northwestern or
18:36
Speaker 2: Cook County or west to advocate Christ Medical Center miles away. Now,
18:42
Speaker 2: why did the South Side go so long without a
18:44
Speaker 2: trauma center because it makes no sense for any hospital
18:48
Speaker 2: to open one on the south Side. Treating gunshot wounds
18:52
Speaker 2: serious ones is incredibly expensive, and the typical gunshot victim
18:57
Speaker 2: in Chicago is a young black man from a poor neighborhood,
19:00
Speaker 2: and young black men living in poor neighborhoods in Chicago
19:03
Speaker 2: typically don't have health insurance or they're on Medicaid, which
19:07
Speaker 2: reimburses at a fraction of what private insurance does. The
19:11
Speaker 2: euphemism used in the healthcare world is payer mix, which
19:16
Speaker 2: refers to how many of your patients come to you
19:18
Speaker 2: blessed with private coverage. Opening a trauma center in a
19:22
Speaker 2: bad neighborhood messes with your payer mix deeply, which is
19:27
Speaker 2: a paradox. Right. The point of a trauma center is
19:31
Speaker 2: to be closest to the places where people are getting shot.
19:34
Speaker 2: But if you put your trauma center close to the
19:36
Speaker 2: places where people get shot, your payer mix will go
19:39
Speaker 2: to hell in a handbasket and you won't be able
19:43
Speaker 2: to afford to run your trauma center. So you put
19:46
Speaker 2: your trauma center as far away as possible from the
19:50
Speaker 2: people who most need your trauma center. As I said,
19:54
Speaker 2: at the very beginning of this series, the way America
19:57
Speaker 2: deals with gun violence is bonkers. We have a misaligned
20:07
Speaker 2: healthcare system. Yeah, what's the simplest way to realign it.
20:11
Speaker 5: I mean, I think the simplest way to realign it
20:14
Speaker 5: is nationalized healthcare.
20:16
Speaker 2: What she's saying is that if everyone has the same
20:19
Speaker 2: insurance like they do in Canada or Europe, then hospitals
20:22
Speaker 2: don't have to worry about payamics. You can put your
20:26
Speaker 2: trauma center where your trauma center makes the most sense
20:28
Speaker 2: and not worry about how much your patients will pay you.
20:32
Speaker 2: It's funny you say this. So I'm not someone in
20:36
Speaker 2: the medical world. Yeah, but I'm certainly sort of familiar
20:40
Speaker 2: with arguments around national health care. It had never occurred
20:43
Speaker 2: to me until just now listening to you that if
20:47
Speaker 2: one of the consequences of national health insurance is that
20:50
Speaker 2: hospitals would look different, would do different things, and would
20:54
Speaker 2: be in different places.
20:56
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, the idea would be that under a
20:59
Speaker 5: nationalized healthcare system, we could be a little bit more
21:01
Speaker 5: thought out in the planning of health care. We're essentially
21:04
Speaker 5: taking the market forces out of that and we're saying,
21:07
Speaker 5: let's plan this that it should be planned, and let's incentivate.
21:12
Speaker 5: Let's incentivize hospitals appropriately to essentially be able to care
21:17
Speaker 5: for their patients at the level of care they need
21:19
Speaker 5: to be cared.
21:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, or let's not penalize people who want to serve
21:23
Speaker 2: the sickest population exactly, which is what we're talking about.
21:26
Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly. Hospitals aren't even just not getting incentivized, they're
21:30
Speaker 5: actually getting penalized. And so that's the problem in terms
21:34
Speaker 5: of our healthcare financing system.
21:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it is. Yeah, such a kind of like,
21:41
Speaker 2: it's so weird that you would penalize somebody for essentially
21:45
Speaker 2: for doing the job in the best way.
21:48
Speaker 4: Right.
21:48
Speaker 2: The whole reason people go into medicine is to help
21:52
Speaker 2: the sickest people. Absolutely, but the system is set up
21:57
Speaker 2: such that if doctors do what they went into medicine
22:01
Speaker 2: to do, the institutions they work for are penalized.
22:05
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and so they're actually has been a
22:09
Speaker 5: lot written recently about the moral injury of our healthcare
22:12
Speaker 5: financing system and how it really does make a lot
22:16
Speaker 5: of healthcare workers feel incredibly demoralized at the end of
22:21
Speaker 5: the day. And you know, I mean, that's just that's
22:26
Speaker 5: not good for anyone.
22:28
Speaker 2: Final question, and here we come to the twist that
22:32
Speaker 2: the people who treat gunshot wounds think about all the time. Ay,
22:37
Speaker 2: it really matters how close you are to a trauma center.
22:40
Speaker 2: B In a place like Chicago, black people for years
22:44
Speaker 2: were really, really far from a trauma center. See. So,
22:47
Speaker 2: how much of the reason that black people have such
22:49
Speaker 2: a high homicide rate is just a function of the
22:52
Speaker 2: fact that we're not doing a terribly good job of
22:55
Speaker 2: saving the lives of black people after they've been shot.
23:00
Speaker 2: It's an uncomfortable question, and one of the very first
23:04
Speaker 2: scholars to venture down this path were Penelope Hanky and
23:08
Speaker 2: James Gundlock in the Journal of Criminal Justice, Volume twenty three,
23:13
Speaker 2: number four, nineteen ninety five, Damned upon arrival. The idea
23:20
Speaker 2: behind the paper was ingenious. A sociologist at Auburn named
23:25
Speaker 2: Alan Shields had assembled a database of homicide offenders from
23:30
Speaker 2: Tutwiler Prison, the all women's prison just north of Montgomery.
23:34
Speaker 2: Not an especially nice place. Tutwiler's primary distinction was that
23:39
Speaker 2: it was once named to the ten Worst Prisons in
23:41
Speaker 2: America list. So Gundlock and Hankey looked at all the
23:46
Speaker 2: murderers in Tutwiler and divided them by race. First, the
23:50
Speaker 2: white murders. There were forty seven people victimized by white
23:55
Speaker 2: women who died instantly no amount of medical attention would
23:59
Speaker 2: have saved them head shots, bulled to the heart, and
24:02
Speaker 2: a roughly equal number who were dead on arrival those
24:06
Speaker 2: who could at least theoretically have lived if they had
24:09
Speaker 2: gotten medical attention sooner. The ratio of killed instantly to
24:13
Speaker 2: dead on arrival was essentially one to one. Then Gundluck
24:18
Speaker 2: and Hankey looked at the victims of black murderers. What
24:22
Speaker 2: was their ratio? It wasn't one to one. It was
24:26
Speaker 2: way out of whack. There were many, many more victims
24:29
Speaker 2: who died on the way to the hospital, and also
24:32
Speaker 2: a far higher percentage who died at some point after
24:35
Speaker 2: being admitted. What the studies suggested was that a big
24:39
Speaker 2: chunk of the difference in homicide rates between blacks and
24:42
Speaker 2: whites in Alabama had to do with the quality of
24:45
Speaker 2: healthcare given to their victims, not the violent tendencies of
24:49
Speaker 2: the people who attacked them. Here's the key conclusion. Although
24:56
Speaker 2: this is by no means a definitive study of the issue,
24:59
Speaker 2: the strength of the findings is striking. The Tutwiler prison
25:03
Speaker 2: data suggested that almost one fourth of the African American
25:08
Speaker 2: female killer might not have been in prison for the
25:11
Speaker 2: killing had their victims received the same transportation and medical
25:16
Speaker 2: care as their Caucasian counterparts. The study covered four hundred
25:22
Speaker 2: and sixty eight African American murderers at Tutwiler, So that's
25:26
Speaker 2: one hundred and thirteen people who wouldn't have been convicted
25:30
Speaker 2: for homicide if their victims had received the same medical
25:33
Speaker 2: attention as white people. They had been convicted on lesser
25:37
Speaker 2: charges like aggravated assault, they wouldn't be murderers. And at
25:42
Speaker 2: the very end of the paper, Gunblock and Hankey give
25:44
Speaker 2: us a little hint of what they think was going
25:47
Speaker 2: on in Alabama. One anecdote related by a female inmate
25:52
Speaker 2: at Tutwiller Prison is particularly revealing. I'm reading from the
25:56
Speaker 2: final paragraph of the study. Having seriously wounded a male
26:00
Speaker 2: in an argument, she drove him to the doctor's house.
26:04
Speaker 2: At that time, she was advised by the maid that
26:06
Speaker 2: the doctor was having dinner and could not be disturbed.
26:10
Speaker 2: The man died. The assailant and victim were African American,
26:14
Speaker 2: the doctor was Caucasian. Hanke and Gunluck presented an early
26:21
Speaker 2: version of their paper at the American Society of Criminology
26:24
Speaker 2: meeting in Phoenix in the summer of nineteen ninety three,
26:27
Speaker 2: and while Gunluck was putting the finishing touches on the paper,
26:31
Speaker 2: Brandon Young moved into his house in Montgomery.
26:52
Speaker 3: He was really a good guy. He was really smart,
26:58
Speaker 3: barely educated. Used a lot of words a bit wrong
27:04
Speaker 3: definition wise, because he had he was sort of working,
27:09
Speaker 3: I'm building his own vocabulary and that kind of stuff
27:12
Speaker 3: without the direction of teachers and such. He was very likable.
27:17
Speaker 3: He was very much for defending the down and out
27:22
Speaker 3: and that kind of kind of thing. He was. He
27:28
Speaker 3: was a very likable and even from an adults perspective,
27:33
Speaker 3: respectable person, even though he was a street gangster.
27:37
Speaker 2: How did Brandon me before he before he moved in
27:40
Speaker 2: with you? How did he survive on the streets?
27:44
Speaker 3: Never really told us. I don't know whether he was
27:47
Speaker 3: involved with selling drugs or not. If he was doing that,
27:51
Speaker 3: he wouldn't have told me. But he he never asked
28:00
Speaker 3: for money. He seemed he seemed to kind of know
28:06
Speaker 3: when we were kind of working toward pushing him to
28:12
Speaker 3: go ahead and work toward be where we could get
28:14
Speaker 3: him lined up where he could go to college and
28:16
Speaker 3: stuff before he was killed. But obviously that ended that
28:22
Speaker 3: he passed a ged uh that's the high school diploma
28:28
Speaker 3: equital time, so you know, and he actually did absolutely
28:33
Speaker 3: no studying for it or any of that other kind
28:36
Speaker 3: of stuff, and he just went in and took it
28:38
Speaker 3: and he plashed it with fine colors. You know. He
28:40
Speaker 3: was smart. He knew stuff, and I'm not sure how
28:49
Speaker 3: he picked up some of it stuff, but he would
28:52
Speaker 3: regularly read books. And if we could have gotten me
28:57
Speaker 3: on a route going through college and stuff, he would
29:01
Speaker 3: have turned into a very solid person. I'm I'm very
29:04
Speaker 3: sure he he had a strong streak aning of caring
29:12
Speaker 3: for people. Noah, I thought about him a lot back then,
29:28
Speaker 3: but I haven't lately, said.
29:32
Speaker 2: Brendan wanted out of the gang world, so he went
29:35
Speaker 2: to stay at a log cabin the Gunlocks owned forty
29:37
Speaker 2: five minutes or so north of Montgomery in the town
29:40
Speaker 2: of Nota Saga in Macon County. They thought he'd be
29:44
Speaker 2: safe there, and that's where he was with three of
29:47
Speaker 2: the other teenagers the gun Lucks had taken in on
29:50
Speaker 2: the night of August twenty third, nineteen ninety four. It
29:54
Speaker 2: was a few hours after midnight. Brendan heard a noise outside.
29:58
Speaker 2: He went to check.
30:00
Speaker 3: He put the other kids in a place that thing
30:05
Speaker 3: would be safe. There's a log house that has a
30:08
Speaker 3: suck up floor, which was the bedroom, and he had them,
30:14
Speaker 3: and the bedroom area essentially has no windows or other
30:17
Speaker 3: such things because the roof of the house is a
30:20
Speaker 3: ceiling in the bedroom area. And he got them upstairs
30:25
Speaker 3: and told them to get under the bed. When he
30:29
Speaker 3: first found out what was going on, and he stayed
30:32
Speaker 3: downstairs to try to figure out what he could do
30:35
Speaker 3: and that kind of stuff.
30:37
Speaker 2: There were four people waiting outside. They had a shotgun.
30:41
Speaker 2: They saw Brandon through the window an open fire. I'm
30:51
Speaker 2: reading now from the account of the crime a few
30:53
Speaker 2: days later in the Montgomery Advertiser. Neither Brandon's friends nor
30:59
Speaker 2: the adults who cared for him can give a specific
31:01
Speaker 2: reason for his slaying. They say that some of the
31:04
Speaker 2: suspects used to be his friends, even fellow gang members.
31:08
Speaker 2: Maybe they were angree He was trying to free himself
31:10
Speaker 2: from them, to make a better life for himself. His
31:14
Speaker 2: friends looked up to him. We used to say that
31:18
Speaker 2: he was Peter Pan and they were the lost Boys,
31:21
Speaker 2: said his fifteen year old girlfriend, who asked not to
31:24
Speaker 2: be named for her own safety. Brandon was everybody's hero.
31:30
Speaker 2: He was my hero. Brandon was in love with the
31:33
Speaker 2: words respect and honor. He didn't do dry bys because
31:38
Speaker 2: he said, if you want to fight, fight like a man.
31:43
Speaker 2: In an interview this week before Thursday's arrest, the fifteen
31:46
Speaker 2: year old girlfriend was guarded when she talked about the Knight.
31:49
Speaker 2: Brandon died fraile and blue eyed. Her bright red nail
31:53
Speaker 2: polished chipped. She wore a gold chain with a heart
31:57
Speaker 2: shaped locket and a boy's ring. While everyone else had lunch,
32:01
Speaker 2: she sipped a coke and smoked cigarettes. We were going
32:05
Speaker 2: to go to Auburn, she said. We were going to
32:08
Speaker 2: get married. So Gunlock goes back and adds a paragraph
32:13
Speaker 2: to their article. Not a changed the main body of
32:16
Speaker 2: the text, because Brandon Young wasn't a female inmate at
32:20
Speaker 2: Tutwater Prison. So it was a footnote, because a footnote
32:25
Speaker 2: is where you put things that don't quite fit but
32:27
Speaker 2: are still important to the story. Wait, so take me
32:32
Speaker 2: back to that night, so you're it's it's in the
32:35
Speaker 2: wee hours of the morning. You're in Montgomery and you
32:39
Speaker 2: get a phone call. Yeah, it was one of the
32:42
Speaker 2: kids in the house, and so you jumped in your car,
32:45
Speaker 2: jumped in the car, broke the space limit.
32:48
Speaker 3: Got there. I usually break the space limit, but it
32:51
Speaker 3: broke it more when I was going there, and I
32:54
Speaker 3: got there before the ambulance did.
32:57
Speaker 2: He was coming from Montgomery over forty miles away. The
33:01
Speaker 2: ambulance was coming from Tuskegee six miles away. He got
33:06
Speaker 2: there before the ambulance. The ambulance guy shows up, and
33:12
Speaker 2: did you confront him about why it took so long?
33:15
Speaker 3: I wasn't in any mood for confronting or other such things.
33:21
Speaker 2: He just asked the ambulance driver simply, where have you been?
33:25
Speaker 2: And the ambulance driver said, most of the calls out
33:28
Speaker 2: here are for blacks. We didn't know Brandon was white.
33:33
Speaker 3: What he was trying to do when he was telling
33:37
Speaker 3: me about this was trying to tell me how to
33:41
Speaker 3: behave as a white guy in Alabama. You let him
33:47
Speaker 3: know when you're asking for services, if you're.
33:49
Speaker 4: Quiet, it's.
33:53
Speaker 3: It's just, you know, the racism is so deep and
34:01
Speaker 3: pervasive that there's all kinds of subtle not really you know,
34:07
Speaker 3: taught the kids, but not really talk about kinds of things.
34:14
Speaker 3: And since I didn't grow up in Alabama, I didn't
34:16
Speaker 3: have that training.
34:18
Speaker 1: Yeah.
34:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, did you when he said that, do you remember
34:26
Speaker 2: how you reacted?
34:30
Speaker 3: I don't remember. I was just I was just kind
34:36
Speaker 3: of astonished and down at h and you know, they
34:41
Speaker 3: were still in the process of taking the body it way,
34:44
Speaker 3: so it wasn't It wasn't kind of thing where there
34:47
Speaker 3: was a lot of time to do things and think
34:53
Speaker 3: about it. But he was just trying to pass on
34:55
Speaker 3: to me the kind of information I should have to
34:58
Speaker 3: survive as a white guy at the benefit of racism
35:01
Speaker 3: in Alabama.
35:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, so he was.
35:06
Speaker 3: He was.
35:07
Speaker 2: He wasn't apologetic or indignity was He was just kind.
35:12
Speaker 3: Of trying to be helpful, trying to be help trying
35:15
Speaker 3: to teach me what I should have known.
35:17
Speaker 2: Yeah. Gunduck called his footnote a dedication to Brendan Young.
35:27
Speaker 2: I wanted to hear him read it.
35:30
Speaker 3: At three or two am on September the twenty third,
35:34
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety four, a little over a month after doctor
35:38
Speaker 3: HANKI and I submitted this article to the Journal of
35:41
Speaker 3: Criminal Justice. A death following the pattern described in this article.
35:47
Speaker 3: Little Stuckholm Jay Brandon, young age seventeen, was shot in
35:53
Speaker 3: the back with a twelve gay shotgun and killed in
35:56
Speaker 3: my house in a predominantly black part of Rulemaking County, Alabama.
36:03
Speaker 3: He bled to death while the ambuletce took over one
36:05
Speaker 3: hour to make the sixth trip from their station to
36:11
Speaker 3: our house. I want to recognize Brandon's good works. Brandon
36:16
Speaker 3: lived on the street for several years, and society did
36:20
Speaker 3: not approve of much of what he did to survive.
36:23
Speaker 3: Despite the street life, Brandon had the strength and the
36:28
Speaker 3: resolve to protect and care for other abused children he
36:31
Speaker 3: met on the streets. This good work has not been recognized. Also,
36:37
Speaker 3: in the early hours of September twenty three, nineteen ninety four,
36:42
Speaker 3: three killers attempted to kill everyone in our house. As
36:46
Speaker 3: they attacked, Brandon put his life on the line. He
36:50
Speaker 3: was murdered, but his actions saved three other young lives.
36:56
Speaker 3: I missed Brandon, and I know that he would have
36:59
Speaker 3: made many lives better if he had lived.
37:20
Speaker 2: Our revisionist history Gun series was produced by Jacob Smith, Bend,
37:25
Speaker 2: daph Haffrey, Kiara Powell, Tally Emlin, and Leemn gistoo. We
37:30
Speaker 2: were edited by Peter Clowney and Julia Barton. Fact checking
37:34
Speaker 2: by Arthur Gomberts and Kashelle Williams, original scoring by Luisquira,
37:39
Speaker 2: mastering by FLONN Williams, Engineering by Nina Lawrence. I'm Malcolm Glapwell.
38:03
Speaker 2: You may have noticed there are two different dates given
38:05
Speaker 2: for Brandon Young's death. August twenty third, nineteen ninety four
38:10
Speaker 2: is the correct date. There was an error in Gundlock's
38:13
Speaker 2: original paper.