The Logic of Chavis Carter’s “Suicide”

Lynching is not a new story in the United States. The practice from the first decades of the last century, when black citizens were hanged or burned by angry hordes of whites in the south, just seems to be taking on a new form today: Now law enforcement officers or security guards are performing the executions. There is a significant number of recent cases of victimized minorities, both men and women, ethnically or otherwise marginalized.

Kelly Thomas, a homeless, mentally ill person from Fullerton, Calif. was beaten to death by local police. Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old black student, was shot by a volunteer security guard in a neighborhood in Orlando, Fla. The victims of the Danziger bridge in cosmopolitan New Orleans were executed by at least five police officers in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. These are just some examples of criminal actions that resulted in lenient punishments, diluted in the halls of so-called justice, or by law enforcement impunity. Unfortunately there are many more.

On Saturday, July 28, on Haltom Street in Jonesboro, Ark., there was another extrajudicial execution following the same modus operandi — this time disguised as a “suicide.” However, even the local police chief, Michael Yates, reported the suicide to local press as one that was “bizarre” and “defies logic at first glance.”

The story is that Chavis Carter, according to the officers that detained him, shot himself in the head while he was locked inside the back of the patrol car with his hands cuffed behind his back. Carter and two others had been traveling in a pickup truck when they were pulled over, and Carter had been detained because he had a small amount of marijuana. The officers report that they searched him twice before placing him into the back of the patrol car, and both times found no weapons. He was searched once by Ron Marsh when the pickup truck was pulled over by the police and again by Keith Baggett before he was put into the back of the police car. Both police officers are under investigation.

The two friends traveling with Carter in the pickup truck were white and the police had let both of them go: an unnamed 17-year-old driver and 19-year-old Timothy Teal. The 21-year-old Carter was the only black. Police allege he did not give his real name and was wanted by police in Southaven, Miss., where he lives.

Almost simultaneous with this racist crime, another occurred with similar characteristics when Wade Michael Page — an Army veteran who had served in a psychological operations unit and was linked to white supremacy groups — opened fire in a Sikh temple and killed six people in Oak Creek, a suburb of Milwaukee. The FBI said it was an act of “domestic terrorism,” and Page was ultimately killed by a Special Forces police team officer.

Last Monday, continuing this line of intolerance, discrimination and violent racism, the Mosque headquarters of the Islamic Society of Joplin in Milwaukee was almost burned to the ground in the second suspicious fire in less than a month.

Chocking each of these events up to the work of a “lone assassin,” an agent acting on his own behalf, dilutes the guilt of a society that every day opens Pandora’s Box and expands its evils throughout the world with a state policy that multiplies victims and compounds the consequences of its wars, however direct or indirect.