(On February 8th, 2016, APD Officer Geoffrey Freeman responded to a disturbance call in the northeast Austin neighborhood of 12000 Nature’s Bend. There Freeman encountered a naked, unarmed seventeen year old named David Joseph, exhibiting obvious signs of delirium. Without waiting for backup, Freeman aggressively confronted David with his firearm drawn, inciting David to sprint towards Freeman. Despite Officer Freeman’s commands to halt David continued to run. Freeman then opened fire, hitting David in the leg and chest. David died soon afterward due to his injuries. This journal marks the beginning of an ongoing project chronicling the story of David Joseph’s death as well as the aftermath of that incident.)
This is a picture of David Joseph.
As if seduced by cliche, my amateur instinct prompts me to begin his story by stating “David was your average Texas teenager.” Such a statement would not only be false, but excessively so. This is the portrait of an exceptional Texas teenager; a young man whose ability and charisma were only surpassed by his ambition. Even the title of “martyr” does not venerate his identity in any true respect. If anything, it should be a stinging reminder that our nation has lost the full voiced symphony of David’s character, leaving only its prelude as a glimpse of what could have been.
Although I make regular trips to visit David’s extended family in Austin, I never had the pleasure of meeting him myself. Much of what I know of David comes from the testimony of his friends and relatives. They recount a young man who loved discussing philosophy, who exemplified filial piety in a way that would make Confucius envious and whose broad, easy smile would cast away the misgivings of any who witnessed it. His smile in particular is mentioned foremost by nearly everyone who knew him. It is spoken of in personal interviews, written about in the local news and manifest in old family photos traded among the matriarchs. It is as if they all were witness to some great spectacle of nature, and discuss it in the way folks would recount a solar eclipse or meteor shower from years past.
David was seventeen years old when he was killed on February 8th of this year. His eighteenth birthday was only twenty days away. He had enrolled in a charter school for his senior year and was determined to make a success of himself upon reaching higher education. The thirst for success was a huge motivator in David’s life, whether in pursuing his education, building an unfaltering work ethic or training himself to be an exceptional athlete. Those who knew him took him at his word. Who would doubt one whose actions always repaid the debt of promises? David’s nickname was Pronto. When David said he was going to do something, rest assured whatever he had in mind was getting done.
David Joseph is not eulogized in this way alone. Like everyone, his life had its own variety of problems, mistakes, lies and regrets. He shared the experiences many his age discover while navigating through the wilds of Not-Quite-Adulthood; where newfound vices, evolving responsibilities and trial-and-error wisdom all lay in ambush. In this respect alone, David was the average teenager, with one caveat: he was the average Black teenager. On top of orienting himself in the adult world, David carried the burden many young Black males have forced upon them: judged by strangers with even stranger prejudices, labeled a “thug” so as not to break “The N-Word” taboo, given a slap over a fair shake by systematic racism, trapped in the pariah caste of a “classless society” and stricken with the gradual degradation of self esteem — a process symptomatic of all these other factors.
As the son of Haitian immigrants, he also carried the additional stigma of “foreignness.” This he wore with comfort, exemplifying what I have personally come to know as a powerful Haitian precept: commitment — to those around you, to the truth, to yourself. David’s commitment to his mother was the fuel that fed his unquenchable fire. Early on he set his path towards repaying her for the labor of raising him and his brothers tenfold. He dreamed of giving her an estate in Haiti where she could live in comfort, and then assuring that comfort till his dying breath. Yet there still never was such a native son of Texas as David. He excelled at football, loved his dog Sasha, preferred McDonald’s and pepperoni pizza to traditional Haitian dishes and even recorded his own brand of slow rolling, laid-back rap indigenous to this part of the country. If you would allow for a clumsy cooking metaphor, David was the proverbial apple pie rising out of America’s melting pot. He just happened to be a slice that spoke kreyòl.
Maybe at this point you have an image in your head of who David was. Maybe it’s a familiar image, someone you know. Maybe it’s too vague to get a clear idea, but you feel you’re familiar enough with this type of character to progress in the story. Maybe skepticism leads you to abstain from having an opnion of David at all.
I understand if there’s difficulty. I don’t think this brief biography is nearly enough. I think David Joseph’s story should be about 99.9% David Living His Life and 0.1% David Dying at the Hands of Geoffrey Freeman. But I don’t really know that 99.9%. That portion is locked away in the memories of those mourning him, and I can only catch a glance from the outside. For you it is no doubt worse, having David’s entire identity obfuscated through hearsay and my GED level prose. But like a philologist rendering history through the fragments of relics, it is important that you and I grasp what little remains of David’s story and start squeezing blood out the stone.
There are two important reasons for this. Both impact the greater effort in finding accountability for these killings.
Firstly, one of the hardest things to confront in this struggle (and really in any struggle) is the majority's temptation to say “Oh, that’s terrible” and be done with it. All Americans, and particularly White Americans, need to recognize each death as the death of one of their own. But the sad truth is that a large percentage of them simply won’t. They don’t want to. It’s not in close enough proximity to any part of their daily lives, at least as they perceive it. They might care about police militarization or civil rights, but they do not wince with pain or stand limp in shock at the news of another Black life taken this way. Not the way they would if it was their own brother, sister, father, mother or friend. Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile...all of these people have to be remembered for longer than a hashtag lasts. We can not mourn those we do not truly know, and we are so saturated with information that we bury our brothers and sisters in the potter’s field of our hearts. Instead, we must strive to make them known for the lives they lost, not just for the deaths they received.
Second, what allows a man like Geoffrey Freeman to kill a naked, unarmed seventeen year old? What possessed Philando Castile’s killer to use lethal force on a more than cooperative man obliging his commands? Diamond Reynold’s video has just begun to circulate as I finish writing this, bookending a day that began with Alton Sterling’s death in Baton Rouge (Ed. and as I’m proofreading this, the news of Delrawn Small’s killing is breaking). Besieged by emotion, I can not help but find a parallel to David’s death.
In Reynolds’s video, the officer is clearly disturbed; screaming and cursing throughout most of the footage. On the other hand Reynolds, despite having her child endangered and watching her boyfriend die in front of her, is remarkably placid as she narrates what is occurring. Both Reynolds and the officer are most likely full of fear and adrenaline at this point, so why then is his reaction the more tumultuous of the two?
My hypothesis is that the man who killed Castile was viewing reality through the same lens as Geoffrey Freeman was when he shot David. Neither saw the human being they were killing, only the silhouette of a criminal crafted by prejudice and stereotypes. When each officer pulled their firearm, neither was concerned with their soon-to-be victim’s identity, who they were or what their life was like. They did not think about the other pages of their victim’s story before deciding to hastily scribble in the last chapter. The officer who killed Castile did not see him as the friendly Catholic school chef with a laid back personality. Geoffrey Freeman did not see David in any of the ways his family and friends have described him to me. But once the bullets have found their mark, all of a sudden the truth materializes. Each officer immediately begins to act in a way very much like someone who realizes they fucked up bad and just murdered an innocent. So again we are confronted with the importance of dignifying one’s identity. To value the identity of a Philando Castile or a David Joseph is to protect them. To neglect their spirit is to neglect the duty of a protector.
The name David Joseph is not familiar to most in Texas, not even in Austin. When I tell people about his death, they often ask if there is anything they can do. I respond with what David’s mother told me: No, there is nothing you can do for David, because his life has already reached its end. Instead you should be looking for the next David Joseph, the next Sandra Bland, the next Philando Castile, protecting him or her from a society that siphons away the lives and identities of Black Americans without mercy. Value the identities of your neighbors, and in your hearts you will have the strength, power and knowledge to protect them.
And for myself I’ll add one final request: say the name David Joseph. Say it publicly and proudly. Say it with the affirmation that David was as symbolic an American as has ever been produced in this great country. Say it with the pious reverence reserved for martyrs and saints, for in our eyes he is all these things and much more. I know many of you already have every intention to see justice served for all Americans. I know many of you will testify to all who will listen, and even those who won’t, that Black lives matter. But please, when you do testify, say the name David Joseph. We must never forget what we have lost.
This is my first time writing within the DailyKos community. I am a longtime reader but new to any involvement at this level, so any comments or criticisms are much appreciated.