The black man had big plans for his future. The white man was trying to run a bar.
The black man boasted he wanted to have 18 kids and make a rap album as great as his idol, Kevin Gates.
The white man had a dog named LeBron and campaigned for Donald Trump.
This black man and this white man crossed paths on May 30 in downtown Omaha, Neb. in front of The Hive and The Gatsby bars. The windows had been busted out by looters, who thought the death of George Floyd gave them special privileges.
Bar owner and Iraqi War veteran Jake Gardner, 38, tried to hold off the mob with his 68-year-old dad by his side. His dad had already been knocked down once.
James Scurlock, 22, was with his cousins and friends. Earlier in the evening, he was caught on video with others entering an architecture firm, where they destroyed several computer monitors, a desk phone and some drywall.
His brother Nick Harden later explained it away to The Guardian: “He was probably in the heat of the moment. Felt some type of power fighting for what he believes in.”
Or maybe it was related to the residue of meth and cocaine found in Scurlock’s urine.
In front of The Hive and The Gatsby bars, Scurlock and his crowd moved towards Gardner and his dad.
Even when Gardner let them know he had a gun, Scurlock’s group pressed forward. In a video someone can be heard saying, “He’s got a gun,” but it sounds more like an observation than a fearful cry.
Then a man and a woman jumped on Gardner from behind and brought him down, and he fired two warning shots. Those two assailants ran off. As Gardner started to get up, Scurlock jumped on his back and got him in a chokehold.
Gardner could be heard yelling “get off me” three times before switching the gun to his left hand and firing over his shoulder towards Scurlock, killing him.
After reviewing videos and witness accounts, Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine determined Gardner shot in self-defense and declined to charge him. But in the summer of Black Lives Matter, the mob demanded its way. They wanted a grand jury and a special prosecutor.
Kleine caved in. A special prosecutor named Fred Franklin, who is black, took over. He set up a line for tipsters to call in with any information – including social media posts. The grand jury, whose members are still unknown, came back last week with indictments for manslaughter and three other felonies.
According to the Omaha World-Herald, Franklin said last week that the charges stemmed in part from incriminating statements Gardner had made in texts and Facebook messages.
(On the day of the riot, Gardner – a former Marine – wrote on Facebook: “Just when you think, ‘What else could 2020 throw at me?’ Then you have to pull 48 hours of military style firewatch.”)
Franklin also cited surveillance tapes from inside Gardner’s bar. However, that surveillance video has no audio, and the attacks occurred outside the bar.
“Power of social media proven after the senseless murder of James Scurlock in Omaha, Nebraska,” gloated The Steeple Times.
When the indictments came down, Gardner – who had been receiving death threats and had lost the lease on his bars – was in Northern California. Because of the wildfires, it was arranged for him to fly out of Portland, Ore. this past Sunday and return to Omaha.
While Scurlock’s family had quickly raised $40,000 towards his funeral (later the amount grew to more than $275,000), attempts to raise money for Gardner’s defense through a GoFundMe account were quickly shut down by protests that he was a white supremacist and a murderer. It barely reached $100.
When a friend tried again to create a second funding site, a Black Lives Matter activist group contacted his place of employment and made demands.
Friends said the indictments hit Gardner hard. His attorneys tried to reassure him that he would prevail at trial, that there would be jurors who would see for themselves that Gardner had been attacked and was defending himself.
But Gardner had seen just how rigged the system is.
While Scurlock’s family worked the media like pros, calling him by the harmless-sounding nickname “Juju” and presenting him as a legend in the making, Gardner was dissected. He was condemned for an old Facebook post saying that transgender women shouldn’t use the women’s restroom unless they have their “appendage” removed. A cousin, who said she had a doctorate in sociology, testified before the Nebraska state legislature that Gardner’s family used “the N-word.”
This past weekend, instead of flying from Portland to Omaha to turn himself in, Gardner stood outside a medical clinic in Hillsboro, Ore. and shot himself to death. Watch this brief news clip of Gardner being interviewed in Washington, D.C. where he came for Trump’s inauguration: https://youtu.be/i6c5TBcQBuo
Notice how soft-spoken and reasonable he sounds. He welcomes the Women’s March.
“Everybody just wants to be heard…,” Gardner says. “You can’t tell anybody what they are entitled to feel.”
He smiles slightly when he mentions the dirty looks he gets, since both he and his dog are wearing Trump-related gear.
“They have the right to speak their mind…,” Gardner says.
Now imagine this man’s grief so deep that he put a gun to his head.
In covering Gardner’s suicide, the mainstream media showed where they placed their sympathies. NPR and The New York Times posted photos of homemade memorials – for Scurlock.
Gardner’s attorneys, Stu Dornan and Tom Monaghan, told the Omaha World-Herald that the bottom line was that he had lost his bars and his livelihood (the landlord ended his lease after the shooting). Now he was about to lose his freedom.
Numerous stories quoted Scurlock’s family attorney, a black state senator named Justin Wayne, that they were still processing what Gardner’s suicide “means for their fight for justice in the case.” (Translation: How are they going to get a settlement from a dead white man? Undoubtedly they are hoping his estate will turn up something they can get their hands on.)
If you go back and look at the entirety of the news coverage on the Omaha shooting, Gardner didn’t stand a chance in the summer of Black Lives Matter. He had the wrong skin color to be considered a victim.
A classic example of how to turn a thuggish rioter like Scurlock into a hero was a lengthy profile in The Guardian. Scurlock was portrayed as trying to stop an active shooter – Gardner – as if a man has no reason to defend himself.
While The Guardian referred to Gardner’s “checkered history” with law enforcement, which included a reckless driving nine years ago and theft and disorderly conduct seven years ago, the news site barely mentioned Scurlock’s history of violent crime including armed robberies and a home invasion robbery (his dad dismissed the latter crime as being mixed up with the wrong crowd). In describing his own prison record when Scurlock was a child, The Guardian let the father get away with saying he “caught a felony” as if he’d caught a cold.
Despite the dad’s and The Guardian’s efforts to portray “Juju” Scurlock as a great guy, less than a year ago he was convicted of assault and battery; this past spring he was back in jail for third-degree domestic assault.
The Guardian story veers off into a lengthy description of white supremacy and Nebraska’s whiteness. It could have been lifted from any story about Portland, Ore.
Is this to be America’s fate: In order to make amends for racial injustice in previous centuries, the 21st Century will now be devoted to a different kind of lynch mob.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
Related:
Turning Police Into Uber Drivers
From the Archives:
I hadn’t heard about this man. In the YouTube link he seems like a kind fellow. The story in the Omaha paper includes vicious comments. People comparing him to Hitler because he killed himself.
I have to question if he chose a medical facility so whoever found him would be someone used to the site of blood.
This has been the meanest summer I can remember.
Condolences to the man’s father.
Guess Mr. Scurlock won’t be having 18 kids. He had a family of 22 siblings. Maybe part of his problem. Liked to stand in front of the mirror and sing he was a great man. This is what passes for a hero in some neighborhoods.
That expression “caught a felony” has been around a long time. Our prisons are full of men with weak immune systems.
@Retd. teacher…
You wrote:: “This has been the meanest summer I can remember”
This! For crying out loud THIS!
I have a job where I still interact with actual humans face-to-face. For those of you who don’t have such a job, I’ll fill you in::::… PEOPLE ARE PISSED OFF!!!
Why? Covid? Trump? RBG? Specifics don’t matter, it’s the medium of transference that does.
It ultimately matters that angry people look to demagogues to assuage their worst impulses… likely through the same sources that made them angry in the first place.
More and more people feel like the system is not going to address their grievances whether those grievances be the “that guy is being harassed by police” or “the police aren’t harassing that guy enough”.
The hero of the future will be the hacker who writes the code to shut down all social media. May he or she be plotting their crime as I type.
Matt, you once wrote that “Cops don’t primarily deal with crime, they deal with public disorder.” I think about that every time I “attend” (now via Zoom) a police oversight meeting.
Few of the police watch-doggers interact with actual humans, at least not the unpleasant kind who cause public disorder. I’ve noticed that increasingly some public employees — librarians, teachers, office employees — have embraced the virtual workplace. No risk of public disorder, except some snarky comments online that they can delete.
The news media could help enlighten all sides in any of the crises we are living through now. Instead, the news media reinforce biases and stereotypes — often through social media. The news media will condemn the Trump campaign for how it uses Facebook, then turn around and ask listeners/readers to “like us on Facebook.” The news media will allow topics trending on Twitter to set the daily news agenda. The news media will embrace influencers on Instagram as immediate experts.
I’m sorry you have to deal face-to-face with so much meanness. You can take pride in knowing it’s becoming a lost art. It used to be called people skills.
You’re in the middle of things. I don’t think it was this bad when I was working. I was not forced to teach something like this “1619 project” receiving so much publicity.
A few months ago I had a falling out with someone I thought was a friend. I told her to pretend I was Scalia and she was Ginsburg. I received no more replies.
I’ve done news diets and social media diets. If it helps, I feel a little envious of you being in the thick of it. I miss being tested.
Ah, public disorder. I’m familiar with that. A trend I’ve noticed which has gone unremarked is that of armed security guards.
I’m leaving the work and perhaps returning to tech writing because in part I wont take a job that admits I might have to shoot to death some of the clientele.
I am astonished at this regularization of non-badged armed men and woman. I completely understand the need: in the last few weeks of my job I was challenged with a 3′ foot axe and with knives twice: one folding, one fixed.
I responded to a Facebook post of a woman asking if violence in Portland was as bad as the media portrayed it to be. Well, yes. But not in the way that you think.
Antifa/BLM are ugly and violent outfits to be sure, but it is the booming tribes of drug zombies, street lunatics, and bladed layabouts that make me nervous. That and the fact that the cops can’t respond effectively when they are on hold for rioters. Or, because they know it’s simply not worth the paperwork in this catch and release jurisdiction.
And, I know Ms. Coulter is seen as a great evil, but….
https://www.takimag.com/article/innocent-until-proven-trump-supporter/
Well put, Larry: “I won’t take a job that admits I might have to shoot to death some of the clientele.”
I had no idea that arming private security guards was a trend. Locally the big story in that regard was the disarming of security guards at PSU. I don’t know if PSU security sees as many potentially dangerous loons as you do. I know that pre-COVID there were a lot of thefts and problems with nonstudents passed out/sleeping in some of the campus buildings. Bladed layabouts, possibly?
What is troubling is the sympathy lavished on the thugs. It’s not even nice to call them thugs. The standard posture presented in the media is that the people who are disturbing the peace, vandalizing, stealing and assaulting have their reasons and need to be respected. The police are cast as enemies if they fight back. What do we do if we reach a point where nobody is willing to fight back?
The Coulter piece was heartfelt. She’s right that in defending himself Jake Gardner was treated like a black man trying to sit at a Southern lunch counter in the mid-20th Century.
And especially this: “Sadly, President Trump never said a word about his polite, cheerful supporter.”
The still call it “the grauniad”
for a reason though it is no longer because of the typos.
The Guardian probably didn’t have that many more typos than other newspapers that had “bulldog editions” in the hot type days. The San Francisco Chronicle used to be notorious for its typos, which were cleaned up for the later editions.
It sounds like The Guardian long ago embraced the nickname.
I left my job or rather it left me. However, the cynosure of modern absurdity for me was when a dope fiend charged me with a fire (or camp) axe, twice. Actually, it was corporate response that went more or less full Orwell.
In my report I noted that a dope fiend had charged me with a fire axe, twice. The reply it aroused made no comment about the man’s axe enthusiasm and my unarmed self.
The CEO who somehow had become privy to security emails made me take a course in contemporary language usage so that I might achieve the non-offensive, at least text-wise.
Let’s hope that CEO is forced to live his own politics, kind of like Rommelmann.
I don’t understand how we have become such a nation of wimps. Even corporations are cowed and forced to take a knee.
https://ricochet.com/807643/ap-stylebook-institutionalizes-gaslighting/
Rommelman on the long and perhaps futile path to her own redemption:
https://reason.com/2020/10/02/the-conservative-trans-woman-who-went-undercover-with-antifa-in-portland/
The book I reference below isn’t without many irritations, but it does make clear much of what drives today’s animating new ideology of intersectionality and why it has such power over unformed or poorly formed minds.
I believe that the author is correct in his focus on this fungal virtue.
https://reason.com/2019/06/17/robby-soaves-new-book-panic-attack-young-radicals-in-the-age-of-trump-hits-stores-tomorrow/
This determination to disguise the falsity of the prevailing “thinking” that OKs the endless rioting and witch hunting – this unnatural hunger to force people to embrace lies out loud is Victorian in its earnestness and insane in its demands.
Something more must be out there. How has madness taken over nearly every Western institution? Just today Webster’s changed a definition seemingly in support of Klobuchar’s interrogation of the judicial nominee:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/10/webster-changes-preference-meaning-after-dems-attack-acbs-use-of-sexual-preference/
And both twitter and Facebook blocked the transmittal of an important Biden story.
Somehow, I believe this summing up by VDH links to the inexplicable pressures that drove Jake Gardner to suicide:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/the-fragments-of-a-civilization/