Edgar Awards Countdown: The Lost Sons of Omaha
the one about the killing of a Black Lives Matter protestor
In the weeks leading up to the Edgar Awards ceremony, I’ll be reading and and reviewing the six books nominated for the “Fact Crime” category. This is the sixth and final installment! You can read about the Polly Klaas kidnapping here, cryptobros here, the Murdaugh case here, Roaring ‘20s corruption here, and investigative genetic genealogy and the Golden State Killer here. The awards will be announced May 1st!
NB: I address aspects of the account that Sexton withholds until well into the book, so if you’d rather not know all the elements of the story upfront, perhaps skip the first paragraph.
Friends, of this nominee I was not a huge fan. Which is too bad, because if you’d asked me which of the six nominated books covered subject matter that I found most urgent, compelling, and significant, it would have been this one. Joe Sexton’s The Lost Sons of Omaha: Two Young Men in an American Tragedy aims to tell an exhaustive, balanced, and culturally and politically contextualized story of how the lives of Jake Gardner, a white Marine veteran and Omaha bar owner, and James Scurlock, a Black man protesting police violence, collided, resulting in Scurlock’s death by Gardner’s firearm in the summer of 2020. In my opinion, Sexton misses the mark, not in his presentation of the facts of the night and its tragic aftermath for both the Gardner and Scurlock families, but in his failure to own or even recognize his authorial focus and the book’s argument. Sexton’s account, though sensitive to and informed by Scurlock’s life as a young father, is, to my mind, more directly concerned with proving that the community’s accusations of a pattern of racism and transphobia on Gardner’s part, largely published on and disseminated through social media, were not only false, but directly led to his indictment by grand jury and subsequent death by suicide. And I think this failure matters.
Careful readers of newsletter subtitles will note that I framed my description of this book’s subject in a way that centered the political context and implications of Scurlock’s death. It makes a difference that I chose to put the emphasis where I did in introducing this review, and probably tells you something not untrue about my own political commitments and sympathies. I think Sexton does the same thing by opening with Gardner’s account and perspective of the night of the shooting—it shapes the book that we are first presented with his version of events (which are disputed). It doesn’t detract from his discussion of the genesis of the 2020 BLM protests, the racist history of Omaha, or his treatment of Scurlock’s life and family. But it does indicate a point of view aligned with Gardner that the rest of the book maintains. For example, one of the inciting incidents of the conflict involves Gardner’s father falling to the ground in a scrum of protestors. Sexton uses the following verbs to describe the fall: “been sent crashing”, “flattened”, “flattening” (twice), “floored,” and mentions his age twice (69) and that he was a cancer survivor. For another example, he tends to pose questions that are matters of interpretation and then answer them in Gardner’s favor:
Had Gardner emerged [from his bar during the protest] still thirsting to use deadly force on someone, anyone? Or was he judging just how badly his bar had been damaged? The video from the bar shows Gardner standing around talking with others in the street outside his bar, and at least once talking on his phone. There is no indication he was looking to shoot anyone.
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with having a defined and directed point of view! Even one that I might not completely endorse! Barbara Rae-Venter was unapologetically pro-investigative genetic genealogy in her nominated text, and me, I’m not so sure! But I appreciated her straightforward statement of argument. She was not pretending to “both sides” it, and that was to the book’s benefit. Sexton seems uninterested in examining or articulating his own sympathies, and it makes the writing feel muddy and disjointed. If the book were entirely about how combat veterans living with PTSD are overlooked and under-treated, particularly in our gun-saturated culture, and how that can lead to tragic and avoidable instances of violence and self-harm in politically charged situations, I think it would have been much more successful.
Also, and this is a strange critique from me, I don’t think Sexton’s introduction of himself and his history as a writer, coming where it does in the middle of the book, works. I do agree that, especially as a white man from Brooklyn writing about a racialized killing in Nebraska, it’s important to locate yourself in relation to your subject matter. But for me, it was too long and too late. If Sexton was going to make himself a prominent character in this account, which he does, I think it should have happened at the beginning of the book, so we know up front that the authorial presence will be a guiding one. (For a master class in how to do this, see John Hersey’s authorial exposition in The Algiers Motel Incident, which I quote at length in this newsletter.)
I think writing about the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests is going to be some of the strongest and most illuminating of any genre as we include and adapt the rough drafts of history found on Twitter (it was still Twitter then!), Instagram, and interviews into book-length studies of the movement. There is also much to be explored and explained about how social media can and has warped the way we critically engage with the world. Unfortunately, The Lost Sons of Omaha does too little by trying to do too much.
Read if you like: ignoring my lukewarm reviews
Great review — I loved the last line so much, I laughed out loud.