Blame is shared for that tragic driveway shooting
Politicians' dark threats and exaggerations are inciting fear and violence
Do we blame only a “sour” old man for the shooting of an innocent young woman? Or are others inciting such incidents by their careless words? (Photo by William Isted on Unsplash)
Up a dirt road deep in the woods about an hour north of our place, two carloads of young people searching for a friends’ party got lost one night last spring and wound up, with another friend on a motorbike, in a stranger’s driveway. As they backed up to leave, the homeowner – described in a newspaper account later as “a sour character who did not like visitors” – emerged from his house up the hill and fired his shotgun twice. The second shot pierced the car and struck 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis, a former competitive cheerleader and honor student, who was sitting in the front seat next to her high school sweetheart. The terrified young people floored the accelerator and raced from the scene, desperate to find a cell signal so they could call 911. Kaylin died beside the road a few miles away.
This week, a jury deliberated just two hours before convicting the shooter, Kevin Monahan, 66, of second-degree murder. They didn’t buy his story that he had thought he was under siege, but fired once to start a conversation with his intruders, and that the gun then discharged accidentally the second time. He faces up to life in prison.
Maybe you’ve heard about the crime. It drew national media coverage, often quoting people who were stunned that somebody could be killed simply for wandering into the wrong driveway. “I can’t imagine that this is something that someone who is my neighbor is capable of,” Monahan’s nearest neighbor told The New York Times. “I don’t know what brings someone to that level.”1
Maybe we ought to give that question another look. Maybe, if we’re being completely honest, the tragedy isn’t so surprising. We live in a time of hostility and suspicion, with powerful voices encouraging Americans to feel threatened and to view the legal system as corrupt – which might lead people susceptible to such suggestions to think that they need to take matters into their own hands. Amid the rancor and resentment that is being thrust upon us, we’re at risk of being awash in the kind of senseless violence that led to Kaylin Gillis’s death.
We’ve always had to cope with grouchy old men, of course. As a young reporter in the Long Island suburbs, I wrote about a cantankerous elderly guy who fired a shotgun loaded with salt toward some kids who had taunted him for weeks, apparently because he was a scruffy immigrant with a strange accent. Luckily, the shot only skimmed the flesh of one 12-year-old. But beyond such isolated incidents involving antisocial individuals, there now lurk some disturbing trends suggesting that violent anger could emerge as a national virus – with the encouragement of people who ought to be instead counseling calm.
A quarter of American adults say they live in fear of being attacked in their own homes, according to a poll commissioned by NPR two years ago.2 And at the end of last year, a Gallup poll found that 77 percent of Americans believe the crime rate is rising. They’re both wrong: Home invasion crimes are rare, and FBI crime data comparing the third quarter of 2023 with the same period the year before found that violent crime dropped 8 percent and property crime fell by 6.3 percent – to its lowest level since 1961. Yet the Gallup survey showed that 92% of Republicans, 78% of independents and 58% of Democrats believe crime is on the increase.3
That partisan split is hardly surprising, since Donald Trump is viewed credibly by most Republicans – and since he and his apostles have for years been showering the nation with exaggerated fear of crime. After his dark 2016 inaugural speech depicting a dire view of “American carnage,” he similarly warned in 2020, “No one will be safe in Biden’s America.” Statistics are no match for story, though; the reality of dropping crime rates is overwhelmed in the public consciousness by the chilling rhetoric of cynical politicians, backed with the distorted view of American life offered by the Republican party’s propaganda arm, Fox News.
Trump knows what he is doing, and he always tells us directly. So there’s no doubt that he is banking on fear and anxiety to motivate voters. In a 2016 interview with Bob Woodward and Robert Costas of The Washington Post, he noted, “Real power is – I don’t even want to use the word – fear.” Fearful Americans, he believes, will once again heed the promise of his 2016 acceptance speech – “I alone can change it” – and will return him to power. With the eager support of his partisans, he is instilling fear in Americans, consequences be damned.4
Arguably the most irrational fear gripping Americans is that arising from the flood of immigrants crossing our southern border. Whatever else you may think about immigration policy, the migrants are not, in fact, drug-toting rapists, as Trump suggested in his 2016 campaign announcement. In fact, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020 found that undocumented immigrants in Texas were half as likely as U.S.-born citizens to be arrested for violent crimes or drug offenses, and less than a quarter as likely to be arrested for property crimes.5 Cities with high rates of undocumented residents – like San Diego, El Paso and Brownsville – tend to have low rates of both violent crime and property crime. All three of those cities have lower homicide rates than Des Moines.6
But that reality doesn’t square with the fear-inducing message of the Trump campaign. Hiking anxiety about the horde at the border is the strongest tactic of the Trump re-election campaign, which is why Trump sent a message to Republicans on Capitol Hill this week that he wants them to back away from bipartisan negotiations on border security legislation. He called the emerging proposal — which, of course, he hasn’t seen — “meaningless” and “another Gift to the Radical Left Democrats.” For a campaign, after all, a solution isn’t as useful as a crisis. (Tragically, Republicans in Congress are linking a border deal to military aid to Ukraine, which means securing western Europe from Vladimir Putin’s aggression is also at risk from Trump’s attempt to blow up the border security negotiations.)7
Meanwhile, fear of crime and the disruption of lives has fueled record gun ownership in a nation that has for years already had more guns than people. Four out of 10 Americans live in a household with a gun, and they’re not hunters: almost three-quarters of gun owners cite “personal protection” as a reason.8 There’s this, too: About 10 percent of all households in the country, some 15 million Americans, are now involved in “prepping.” That is, they are preparing for what some survivalists call a “SHTF event” – you can figure out the acronym, right? – when they might need to take matters into their own hands to survive.9
The anxiety that is encouraged by right-wing politicians finds ready ears especially in rural America, and it’s no wonder. Rural areas lag the rest of the nation in economic productivity and population growth, and the increasing demand for an educated workforce in the 21st century doesn’t square with the self-reliance that has typically been a point of pride in the countryside. Signs of a decline of the rural lifestyle are clear: suburban big box retailers and fast-food joints have knocked out small-town stores and coffee shops, and generations of federal agriculture policy favoring efficiency and corporate farm ownership have caused a collapse of family farms across the country. 10 Driving through the tiny hamlets of Upstate, seeing the once-neat homes decaying and often abandoned, is heart-breaking.
Ironically, rural areas that vote heavily Republican have been disproportionately damaged by the growing concentration of wealth that has been encouraged by recent Republican administrations. The results are profound, even beyond the addiction crisis that is now out of control. Healthcare, elder care and child care are hard to find in rural areas. The economic development that has rebuilt so many cities is harder to come by in the countryside, where volunteer local governments aren’t adept at negotiating bureaucratic grant programs. Limited population density leaves individual rural communities without the political clout of cities. Sometimes people move to the country to get away from other people, only to then feel left behind.
The Upstate New York town where Kaylin Gillis was shot, Hebron, is a mix of rolling farmland and heavily wooded hills between New York’s Adirondack Mountains and the Green Mountains of Vermont. It is in the congressional district of Elise Stefanik, who pivoted from Trump critic to his most ardent backer and now is said to be near the top of his shortlist as a running mate. There’s no town center in Hebron, nor is there a local school, but there is a volunteer fire company, and there are three active churches for the 1,700-odd residents whose homes dot the countryside. The town’s official web site claims that Hebron hasn’t changed much in the past hundred years. It also brags that “the area possesses the type of friendliness and stability that is so hard to find in today’s urban-oriented society.”
Maybe that’s true for some. It wasn’t so for the kids looking for a party in the dark last spring. Of course, it would be wrong to blame the death of Kaylin Gillis on unfriendliness in one rural town. After all, she is hardly the only victim killed by someone pulling a trigger on a stranger.
Two days before Kevin Monahan shot Kaylin Gillis, 16-year-old Ralph Yarl went to pick up his little brother in Kansas City, and rang the wrong doorbell. Andrew Lester, 84, told police that he thought he was under attack by a tall Black man – Lester is white, Yarl is a 5 foot 8 Black youth – so he pulled out his .32-caliber pistol and fired within seconds. Miraculously, Yarl survived.11
Three days after Kaylin was shot, two members of a competitive cheer team were shot in a small Texas city when one of them accidentally got into the wrong car in a supermarket parking lot, thinking the car was her friend’s. Both cheerleaders survived, though one was seriously injured.
Nor were those shootings just quirks in an odd season. Last month, Terry Turner, 67, of Caldwell County, Texas, was sentenced to serve six months in jail for killing Adil Dhoughli, a 31-year-old Moroccan immigrant who made the mistake of pulling his car into Turner’s driveway in 2021. When Doughli backed out and drove away, Turner gave chase and shot him with a handgun.12
What sort of a nation breeds such suspicion and fear that innocent mistakes – a wrong driveway entered, a wrong doorbell run, a wrong car door opened – can be fatal? No, it’s not fair to blame the shootings on cynical politicians, exactly: The shooters, not anybody else, are responsible for pulling the triggers. But if you don’t think the mood of the nation is contributing to the fear that drives such incidents, raising the potential for more violence and despair — and if you don’t notice that some politicians are eager to create a dark cloud over America to advance their personal ambitions — then you’re closing your eyes to reality. Many more lives are at stake and, yes, we know where the threat lies.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/nyregion/kaylin-gillis-ny-shooting.html
https://www.npr.org/2022/09/08/1120099696/americans-fear-attacked-neighborhood-poll
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/people-think-crime-rate-up-actually-down-rcna129585
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trumps-use-of-fear-and-anxiety-to-motivate-his-voters/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/undocumented-immigrants-are-half-as-likely-to-be-arrested-for-violent-crimes-as-u-s-born-citizens/
https://law.stanford.edu/2017/01/30/crime-immigration-and-refugees-a-qa-with-criminal-law-expert-professor-david-alan-sklansky/
https://apnews.com/article/congress-border-security-ukraine-trump-a8601ec6629ddc5b769028ca99ad9879
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/09/13/key-facts-about-americans-and-guns/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/preppers-60-minutes-2022-11-06/
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/path-rural-resilience-america/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/04/20/shootings-wrong-place-yarl-gillis-cheerleaders/
https://www.kvue.com/article/news/crime/man-sentenced-deadly-shooting-texas-driveway-2021-martindale/269-ad92fdd7-aae1-466b-9049-56d16047231c
DOWNLOAD OR LISTEN NOW: MORE FROM THE UPSTATE AMERICAN
IF YOU’RE A READER who wants to hear more of Rex Smith’s views, check www.wamc.org for his weekly on-air commentary aired by Northeast Public Radio. Here’s a link to the latest essay. And if your interest is specific to American media, you can download the podcast of The Media Project, the 30-minute nationally-syndicated discussion that Rex leads each week on current issues in journalism. In the states where Northeast Public Radio is heard, the program airs at 3 p.m. each Friday, and is rebroadcast at 6 p.m. Sunday. You can tune in live, too, at www.wamc.org. It has been called “a half-hour of talk about finding and telling the truth.” It’s often worth your time!
NEWSCLIPS FROM THE UPSTATES
Dispatches from our common ground *
Wherein each week we look around what we call the nation’s Upstates — those places just a bit removed from the center of things — to find illuminating news and intriguing viewpoints, which you might not otherwise see.
This week, we share reporting published here:
Battle Creek, Mich. (Battle Creek Enquirer, battlecreekenquirer.com)
West Palm Beach, Fla. (Palm Beach Post, palmbeachpost.com)
Stockton, Calif. (The Stockton Record, recordnet.com)
NOTE: The complete “Newsclips from the Upstates” section, and The Upstate American Midweek Extra Edition, which is sent to email boxes most Wednesdays, are available only to paid subscribers. Thanks for your support!
MICHIGAN
Religious group takes over shelter
During the pandemic, the Battle Creek Community Foundation led local leaders in setting up a shelter for a growing population of people without homes in Battle Creek, a small city known as the birthplace of the American cereal industry — where one-fifth of the population now lives below the federal poverty line and the crime rate is among the highest in the nation. Last year, according to reporting by Greyson Steele in The Battle Creek Enquirer, the shelter provided housing for more than 400 people and served 19,000 meals. Now the operation of the facility is being transferred to Kingdom Builders Worldwide, a ministry founded by an Oxford-educated Pentecostal minister, Tino W. Smith, that already operates a 67,000-square-foot community center in a former junior high school. Operators say it will continue to be a “low-barrier shelter,” meaning that it accommodates human needs without sobriety or work requirements; many shelters operated by religious organizations are instead “high-barrier.” The Battle Creek shelter is still in search of long-term funding.
FLORIDA
County moves to restrict giant rigs from area
Straddling the highly-developed eastern part of Palm Beach County and the rural west, The Acreage was originally envisioned as a home for grove workers. Now the semi-rural character of the growing community is threatened, some residents say, by the high density of semi trucks that rumble through the community to a large commercial truck parking area there. Mike Diamond reports in The Palm Beach Post that the county commission has reversed its preliminary vote that would have allowed each of the more than 30,000 lots there to have two 80,000-pound tractor-trailers. After the preliminary approval last month, residents complained that it would have been unsafe to allow thousands of heavy trucks on the community’s unimproved roads, which are already crowded. Trucking companies say real estate agents initially welcomed them there, and some local politicians said imposing a lower weight limit would be unfair to business interests. Left undecided was what to do about an apparent critical shortage of parking areas for big trucks in south Florida.
CALIFORNIA
Man faces deportation to a country he has never known
In The Stockton Record, Hannah Workman reports on the threat of deportation facing Thy Tuy, 40, who was brought to America as a 1-year-old by a family fleeing the murderous Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. While the rest of his family became American citizens, Tuy wasn’t able to do so. After a robbery turned into a kidnapping, he spent 16 years in prison, where he turned his life around. But after being released from parole supervision, he was called into the federal immigration office for failing to properly sign his name on a check-in form — and was detained in advance of a planned deportation to Cambodia. It’s a story that is often repeated in America, and one worth considering. “If he's able to come out of the rehabilitation programs and use what he's learned for good, I feel like he should be given a chance to use what he learned out here and give back to the community,” Tuy’s girlfriend said. “Part of our mistakes is our growth."
-REX SMITH
I enjoy the carefully reasoned quality of these articles. Logical, cerebral--the opposite of the senseless raging of some politicians and some of those who listen to them.
Could be your best column ever.