Drive-By
A Work of Nonfiction
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Although the dreadful toll of random violence is often reported, rarely do we glimpse the human element behind it. News reports keep the tally of homicides, but as the occurrence of such violence increases, so does its facelessness.
Drive-by shootings are almost definitively anonymous, there are no fingerprints, no fibers, no hairs, nor any other telltale clues typical of most crime scenes. There is usually no hard evidence beyond ballistics and a car description so generic it is virtually useless.
In Drive-By, Gary Rivlin penetrates the anonymity of one such incident and creates an extraordinary portrait of the people entangled in it. He takes us behind the headlines, and through bold investigative reporting, finds the individuals so often left out of the story. In this real-life narrative, we meet the teens who, on Sunday, the eighth of July, were involved in a scuffle over a bicycle, and on the ninth became murderers and victims. By presenting the story of this murder in human terms, Rivlin challenges the stereotypes and indifference that allow the problem of inner-city violence to escalate.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
On July 9, 1990, three teenagers killed a 13-year-old boy and wounded two others in a drive-by shooting in Oakland, California. The shooter, Tony (Fat 'Tone) Davis, was accompanied by John Jones III and Aaron Estill. The shooting was the aftermath of an incident the day before, when a bicycle Junebug had borrowed was stolen and he was set upon by a gang of younger boys, one carrying a length of pipe; the shooting victim, however, had not been in that gang. Here Rivlin (Fire on the Prairie) presents a full picture of the families of the three killers, all now in prison for various terms, and the Oakland ghetto during the 1980s and early '90s. All three teens came from broken families, were involved in drug trafficking and hoped for better lives. But the economy of the city was a shambles, their schools were inadequate and, in the absence of parental guidance, the force of peer pressure was insurmountable. Unlike many youthful murderers, the three were remorseful. Rivlin gives human faces to juvenile offenders who are often portrayed as stereotypes.
