Today Is The Anniversary of My Little Brother’s Murder

The lessons we learn

My little brother died nine years ago today.

The moment is burned into my brain. I’ll remember the phone call long after Alzheimers has robbed me of more recent memories.

It was mid-morning. I was facilitating a small team towards a deeper understanding of what we might do to improve our jobs. As geeky as it sounds, we were exploring ways to make work more meaningful… all as part of a globe-spanning meet-up on the topic.

We had only a few minutes left before our group took its turn on the international stage. The young people would volunteer a single recommendation about how to improve work. Time is an effective forcing function, but true understanding takes many ticks of the clock and real life experience.

It was then that I noticed the call on my phone.

It was the second I had received from Meg that morning. Unusual. With time ticking away, I stepped out of the meeting to take the call.

As the line connected, I heard my sister-in-law quietly crying, “JP’s been shot. I can’t believe it.”

Her voice struggled to make sounds, “He’s gone.”

I could hardly process what I had heard, “Are you sure, Meg?”

She answered through tears, “They called and drove me to the MED… I saw his body. He’s gone.”

The air left my lungs as if it were communing with his last breath. I had to tell myself that I was still alive. I had to breathe.

We strive to make death meaningful. To draw lessons from it.

Some insist, rightfully so, that we should take meaning from the life well-lived. It should not be the death, even a particularly violent one, that inspires us.

It is hard, though.

We see life more clearly through the prism of death.

Vicente, his partner, said that JP spoke calmly to the fifteen-year-old holding a gun to his head:

“Take anything you want. I’ve got a wife and two kids at home. Today’s my seven-year-old’s birthday.

Just don’t hurt us.”

The only job that Meg thought JP had that day was to pick up candles for his son’s birthday party. Prentice was turning seven. Their young son had awakened early and could barely sit down for breakfast.

Once he made it through the school day, Prentice would go to Chuck E. Cheese for his birthday party. Games and pizza. Ice cream and cake. Winning tickets to claim prizes and candy.

What could be better?

Eighteen months before, JP had quit his seven-day-a-week job to take care of our Dad. Dad had beaten prostate cancer, but the lung cancer had been declared Stage-4.

After weeks of doctor visits and JP’s schedule — leave the house at 7am, back in time to miss dinner, early phone calls, late phone calls, calls at any hour and every day of the week — Meg had declared,

“That job makes you unhappy, and it’s not going to change. We’ve moved into a cheaper house and I’ve got work now. If you don’t quit that job I’m going to quit you!”

Meg was right.

Six months after JP quit, Dad was still alive and my brother was “Happy JP” again. We had one of the best vacations ever in their little house, playing with our kids, the chickens, and the toys in the backyard.

Over his last months, Dad had a great time with the grandkids. He was, thankfully, pretty healthy. So much so that we were shocked when his body abruptly gave up.

On the day that JP died, Meg didn’t even know he had been drumming up work. He had taken on one home remodeling project but assured Meg that it was just a side job.

That morning he was visiting a house a few blocks from where Dad had lived in Memphis. The bushes were overgrown in front, but the house would be fine after a small renovation. JP planned on giving the owner a quote for the work next week.

Vicente says they were inside the house when two kids with masks and guns walked up to them. One took the money from Vicente’s wallet. The taller one held his gun on JP.

After JP handed over his wallet, iPad, and phone, Vicente was told to, “Turn your head!”

The kid had the idea that if Vicente didn’t witness the moment the trigger was pulled, there would be no one to connect the murder to him.

The fact that Vicente heard the shot, saw the boys run away, and found JP on the ground with his life gushing out of his neck seemed like enough evidence of a crime.

It was certainly sufficient to signal the passing of a life.

Prentice knew something was wrong when Meg picked him up early from school that day, “Why aren’t I having my party, Momma?”

“Prentice, Daddy has had an accident, and we can’t see him in the hospital. We have to wait to hug him in Heaven.”

Over the coming weeks and months, there were a host of questions asked very openly about JP’s lost life:

• Why would a fifteen-year-old kill someone they had never met before?
• Why was it so easy for children to obtain guns?
• What education system would allow kids to check themselves out of school on a Friday morning?
• Why would the justice system not restrain a person who had accumulated dozens of charges against them before they could drive?
• In a city with more than twenty murders per month, why would Memphis rally around a white man murdered by a black boy?
• What is wrong with our country?

I’ve heard folks declare all sorts of lessons in an effort to answer those questions. I take away two.

The first is big:

We’ve got a lot of work to do in our jobs, our communities, and our homes.

The second is simple:

Hug the people you love. Every day.

JP, I miss you, buddy.

J. Andrew Shelley distills work and life into stories that offer a worthwhile lesson or two. To be completely honest, he’s happy with even one good lesson.

He has spent much of his life in startups that did good but were never sold for much more than half a billion dollars. No matter his fancy titles, he was not cut into the real action. He watched the champagne popping from afar and has decided that those sorts of things taste a little stuffy, anyway.

American Butterfly tells the story of America’s Culture War through the lens of a Southern family suffering a great loss. It is an homage to a brother, too.