‘You have to see it in context’: a survivor explores the backstory to a Mother’s Day mass shooting | New Orleans
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To many people in the US and even around the world who followed its aftermath, the story of 2013 Mother’s day pictures in New Orleans — which injured 20 people at one of the city’s vaunted Second Line parades — is simple.
Drug-dealing siblings embroiled in a turf war fired indiscriminately into the crowd, fatally wounding a local writer and cultural activist— Deborah ‘Big Red’ Cotton – who died four years later.
Another shooting victim, the Nation’s environment correspondent, Mark Hertsgaard, revealed an infinitely more layered reality when he revisited the case, including the teenager he ultimately sent to prison for the rest of his life: Akane Scott. And a major moment of that reality dates back to when Scott was beaten nearly to death when he was one year old by his mother’s boyfriend, who was then fatally shot in retaliation by Akane’s older siblings, as Hertsgaard tells in his new book Big Red’s Mercy: The Shooting of Deborah Cotton and the History of Race in America.
Hertsgaard, in a recent interview with the Guardian, spoke plainly about how there was limited empathy from some of his fellow victims — as well as the authorities who prosecuted Akain and his older brother Sean Scott in connection with the Mother’s Day shooting — about the traumatic childhood episode that the author revealed. And Herstgaard, who was shot in the leg that day, said he didn’t judge them.
But, echoing a view he attributed to Cotton, who famously empathized with Akane Scott in public while decrying how the US criminal circuit denied him rehabilitation or opportunity, Hertsgaard noted: “You have to see where things come from. You have to see it in context. And until we see it in context, in that fuller context, we’re never going to fix it.”
Akane was two months shy of his two-year-old, living with his mother and her boyfriend – both victims of the crack epidemic in the US – when one night he couldn’t stop crying. While his mother, Gladys, was out, her boyfriend became enraged by the toddler’s incessant sobbing, so he hit the baby repeatedly.
An aunt of Akane’s recalled how boyfriend Kenneth Allen hung Akane in a sling carrier on the back of the door “like you’d hang a dress, and he hit that baby with a stick so bad he broke his ribs and his arm,” according to Hertsgaard.
Gladys Scott took her child to the hospital after returning to find him screaming for no apparent reason. The hospital put the baby in a full body cast after x-rays and diagnostics. Meanwhile, the police arrested the mother on the spot for child endangerment.
Things only got worse from there. Two of Akane’s siblings witnessed Allen’s abuse of him and told two of their older brothers who lived across town. Craig Scott, 18, and Michael Scott, 20, immediately rushed to the scene of the beating, exchanged angry words with Allen, shot him in the head and killed him.
The Scotts ended up with life sentences in the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary, colloquially known as Angola. Akane and the rest of Gladys Scott’s children were scattered among various other family members.
It is no exaggeration to say that Akein bears the scars of the beating in the shooting he admitted to having carried out on Sunday, May 12, 2013, at second line parade honoring Mother’s Day. In internationally broadcast surveillance footage, which shows him using his right hand to fire a gun into the crowd as the parade winds through the city’s seventh arrondissement, the then 19-year-old’s outstretched left forearm is bent at an unnatural angle .
“This twist was because baby Akane’s broken left arm had never healed properly after he left the hospital, and the family didn’t have the money to fix the problem,” Hertsgaard wrote in Big Red’s Mercy, which Pegasus Publishers released on May 7 .
Akane and Shawn eventually pleaded guilty to their roles in the Mother’s Day shooting, which they said was aimed at a particular rival and was intended to boost the reputation of a heroin-dealing gang led by another of their brothers.
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In addition to Akain’s life sentence, which at age 30 he is serving in a federal prison in Texas, Sean received 40 years in prison. Sean Scott is being held at a federal prison in central Louisiana and the 35-year-old is due out in June 2047.
The Scotts weren’t just victims of strangers, said Hertsgaard, who was visiting from out of town and befriended Cotton after they were both struck in a mass shooting that drew headlines across much of the English-speaking world.
Unbeknownst to them, the Scotts also wounded their own nephew, 10 years old at the time, the second time the boy had been shot in his short life, as Hertsgaard notes in one of the many almost incomprehensible circumstances documented in his A book.
Hertsgaard’s book takes pains to portray these facts as a collective failure of the environment that created Scott—not just something personal to them. She links their fate to the history of the city, which was once the largest slave market in the US – and the country’s inability to face or come to terms with that past, according to Hertsgaard and Cotton.
For Hertsgaard, one of the federal law enforcement agents who investigated the Mother’s Day shooting — and, coincidentally, who grew up on the grounds of a Louisiana prison in Angola — perhaps said it best when he was informed of the life-changing beating that Akane suffered so early in his life.
“When you dig deep into someone like … Akane Scott and see how they grew up, you kind of understand how they came out the way they did,” Joe Frank of the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives told Hertsgaard. “If you grow up surrounded by violence from the time you first walk and talk, what are you going to do when you grow up?”
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