Across the country in recent months, variations of the chant “No justice, no peace” have united Americans frustrated by a seemingly unshakable pattern of violent deaths of black boys and men. It was among the phrases that were shouted in Missouri last winter, along with “Hands up, don’t shoot,” when a grand jury declined to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, a white man who fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager. “No justice, no peace” was heard again in the streets of New York after a grand jury declined to charge a police officer caught on video fatally choking Eric Garner, an unarmed black man in Staten Island. There, the mantra became “I can’t breathe”—the words Garner uttered 11 times before dying.
It’s worth wondering: Is there ever really justice, and does it bring peace? The case of Jordan Davis may provide an answer.
Davis’ case made headlines as the “loud music” shooting in Jacksonville, Florida. On Nov. 23, 2012, the day after Thanksgiving, 17-year-old Jordan and three of his friends pulled into a gas station in an SUV while playing music, according to court records. Michael Dunn and his fiancée were there too, on their way back from his son’s wedding. She went inside to grab a bottle of wine and chips before they headed back to the hotel, where their new puppy was waiting. Dunn would later say in court that he called the loud music “rap crap” that night, but his fiancée testified that he called it “thug music.” Whatever the tune, whatever the epithet, while the driver of Davis’ car and Dunn’s fiancée were inside the minimart, an argument broke out in that parking lot. Dunn told the teenagers to turn it down, and from the backseat, Jordan—every ounce the teenager—defiantly told his buddy to turn it up. After more heated words were exchanged, Dunn drew a gun from his glove compartment and opened fire, emptying 10 rounds into the SUV the teens were in. Jordan died in that backseat.
It took nearly two years of court dates, a mistrial, and protests in the streets before Dunn was convicted of first-degree murder in Jordan’s death, and in Oct. 2014, he was sentenced to life without parole. Justice was served. But there has been little peace for those who have survived him.
After years of being embroiled in the day-to-day demands of courtrooms, press inquiries, and the difficulty of public scrutiny that she endured in an effort to see her son’s killer convicted, Jordan’s mother, Lucia McBath, is finally feeling the grief of losing her son.
“Right after the verdict, I gave myself permission to kind of breathe. I gave myself permission to slow down, to just kind of soak in what had happened these last two years and really to grieve, to really begin grieving,” McBath told TakePart.
When the trial was happening, McBath was still working as a flight attendant with Delta. Her bosses reworked her schedule and her coworkers donated their vacation days so she could fly from Atlanta to Jacksonville a minimum of twice a month for hearings—often sitting alongside Jordan’s father, Ron Davis, in the courtroom. After 30 years of working for the airline, she retired in Jan. 2014, because she realized that the trial, the appearances she was making to talk about gun violence, and the support she was giving other survivors had slowly become her life.
“I can no longer go back to what I was doing before—it has been, just, moving forward, nonstop,” McBath said. This month, she and Jordan’s father went to the Sundance Film Festival in support of the documentary about Jordan’s death, 3 1/2 Minutes. (Full disclosure: TakePart’s parent company, Participant Media, partnered with The Filmmaker Fund/Motto Pictures and produced the documentary in association with Lakehouse Films and Actual Films.)
During those trips to Jacksonville, she stayed with close friends and relatives, who would meet her at the airport where they “would pick me up and love on me because I would be so exhausted,” McBath said. There was little rest in the anxious time between her son’s death and his killer’s conviction. She struggled to appear strong in court—she called on God and angels to help her through it. When it was over, there was justice but no peace.
In the months since the verdict, in the Atlanta home of Lucia McBath, there’s one room she can’t bring herself to enter some days: the room Jordan lived in before he moved to Jacksonville in 2011 to live with his dad while she dealt with her second bout of breast cancer. The house was quieter after he left, but the quiet has grown since the conviction of his killer.
“I would get dressed and get my clothes on and just mope around the house, and there were days when every time I would walk into Jordan’s room, I would just go open the door, and I would just stand there and sigh in pain,” McBath said, “and then just close the door because I couldn’t go in there.”
When you consider the unrelenting nature of senseless gun violence in America today and the fundamental lack of justice so many of the survivors must cope with, some might say that McBath and Ron Davis are the lucky ones. Their son’s killer was found, arrested, and convicted. Few cases are so clean.
Ron Davis says he knows his family is luckier in that way than the many members of the unhappy club they’ve joined—against their will and best interest, Jordan Davis’ parents have entered a network of families who have lost loved ones to violence.
Their membership isn’t just an unspoken reality. Last year, Ron Davis met with at least a dozen other bereaved fathers through an event organized by the Trayvon Martin Foundation—they met, they talked, and they grew close in their unique struggle to reconcile their truths, to rebuild lives after losses that have been public and painful.
Since then, Ron Davis has grown close to a number of grieving parents, including Franclot Graham, the father of Ramarley Graham—the Bronx 18-year-old who was fatally shot in his home by a New York police officer in Feb. 2012. In that case, a grand jury indicted the officer who killed the teen. But that indictment was eventuallydismissed on a technicality, and a new grand jury found no reason to charge the officer.
That’s a fact that Ron Davis struggles with—his son was killed by a civilian, and his son’s killer is behind bars. Davis sees a lot of differences between the way his son’s case was handled and the cases of others.
“In our case, we had the grand jury come back within 48 hours for a first-degree murder charge. To look at the Mike Brown case or even the Eric Garner case, the grand jury—they didn’t come back for like three or four months,” Ron Davis told TakePart. “The prosecutors in those cases—they don’t even want to arrest the policemen when it happens; they just put them on leave. When this happened to my son, Michael Dunn was arrested immediately, and so there were huge differences.”
Jordan Davis also didn’t have a weapon and didn’t have any drugs or alcohol in his vicinity or in his system. By all accounts, he was a clean-cut kid who crossed an angry man.
“We got justice,” Davis said, but he added it’s “not that we got justice because a case was so much [different than others].... It was basically because it was not a law enforcement person that killed my son, number one. And number two is Jordan Davis wasn’t doing anything wrong, and he didn’t have anything in his system.”
In that order.
Sometimes, Ron says, his phone rings in the middle of the night, and he looks to see if it’s one of the dads he’s met in the circle of fathers. It usually is, and he always answers—he wouldn’t be able to sleep if he didn’t answer.
McBath and Ron Davis divorced in 1999, and they have been grieving their son’s death separately for the most part and rebuilding his legacy separately by operating their own charities for scholarships in their son’s honor.
Through tears and sobs, McBath says her unwavering Christian faith has helped her through the sorrow of her son’s death. She becomes breathless when she talks about this test of faith and says that even with Jordan’s death “there is blessing, complete blessing in everything that has happened.”
As a mother, McBath said she wanted her son to be “used for God’s purpose,” and that prayer was answered when her son died and she was launched into the efforts for better gun restrictions. She now works as the national spokesperson for Every Town for Gun Safety and has taken on a leadership role as their faith and community outreach organizer.
“I guess this is a calling on my life now, and I have a choice. I don’t have to do it, but I’m not going to turn my back on what’s happening in the country. I’m not gonna turn my back on all those people that have died and all those families that had no recourse and nobody knows who their loved ones are, they don’t have any names—no faces,” McBath said.
Turning to the tenets of biblical texts, McBath says we’re supposed to be our brother’s keepers, to love others in our communities and care about basic civil and human rights and freedoms.
“You’re supposed to care about that, and I am so sorry that I didn’t care more before Jordan died. Anytime I heard about anyone killed and being murdered or people being murdered, all I did was cry, and I just said, ‘I’ll pray for them. I’ll pray for them.’ Because in the back of my mind, I didn’t really think it would happen,” McBath said.
Now that the worst has happened?
“I’m not gonna be one of those people that just prays about it and say, ‘Oh, how terrible it is,’ ” McBath said. “I’m not gonna do that because that’s not enough. It’s not enough.”
