Before I fully realize it, I’m typing too. I read my comment after I’ve posted it and it feels as though it was written not by me but by us, this thing I’m a part of. I want to beat her to death for killing your son, I’ve just typed. I want to break every bone in her body.
I don’t remember typing it.
I’m thinking now about what 0001 told me several days ago, about there being safety and power in numbers, how the poor and disenfranchised can find strength as a large group. She mentioned the military, but doesn’t this concept also apply to cults? Are we being brainwashed? Am I?
This is real. It’s not group therapy or role-play, and I should care about that. I do care about that. 0001 has all but admitted that the group killed Ashley Shawger, and they’ve probably killed many, many more. And yet, here I am. I haven’t left the group, I haven’t told the police, and I know I won’t. I can’t. Why? What is wrong with me?
I think back to my private chat with 0001—how she’d gone silent at the mention of my therapist, then switched lanes, insisting Shawger’s death was somehow justified. How do you think the mother of Richard Ashley Shawger’s victim feels when she hears about what a “lifesaver” he was? The specificity of that sentence. The mother. The singular victim. Shawger’s full name.
She wants me to look it up.
“Richard Ashley Shawger.” I say the name out loud as I type it into my search engine, along with “kill” and “victim.”
The search takes me all the way back to 1990. To news reports of a nineteen-year-old named Nathan Langford, shot dead by a hunter.
An accident. That’s the way most of the archived news stories I find describe the death of Nathan Langford of Havenkill, New York, who was killed by twenty-five-year-old Richard A. Shawger, of Cairo, New York, in the upstate town of Roxbury. The two young men had been acquaintances, Nathan a former classmate of Richard’s cousin. They’d gone into the woods to camp out and hunt deer with half a dozen other young men, and Shawger had accidentally shot Langford, mistaking him for a deer. It was all very tragic, according to all of those quoted. An awful miscalculation but all too possible within those dense woods. Richard Shawger was young. He was contrite. No justice could be found in sentencing him to any jail time.
One lengthy article in the Buffalo News included the judge’s brief speech from Shawger’s sentencing, in which he’d described the shooting as “a tragedy, nearly as painful for Richard Shawger and his family as it is for the Langfords.”
“Why should yet another young life be ruined?” the judge said after letting Shawger off with a ten-thousand-dollar fine and a year of community service. “This young man has suffered enough for his mistake. He’s clearly traumatized by it.”
Involuntary manslaughter. No jail time. Not a single day.
For someone so traumatized by a hunting accident in his youth, Ashley Shawger had certainly made an odd career choice—not to mention the hunting trips he continued to take, right up until his alleged suicide. That photograph I saw of him and his friends posed around the deer carcass, rifles resting against their sides like drunken prom dates, beer cans raised high . . . According to the caption, it was taken just this past August.
I had a bad tequila night when I was twenty and I still can’t stomach a margarita. Ashley Shawger killed one of his friends while hunting at roughly the same age, yet look at him. Living it up with a dead deer, or as he might have called it, a big juicy buck.
How do you think the mother of Richard Ashley Shawger’s victim feels . . .
I look for more articles about the sentencing until, finally, in the one from the Roxbury paper, I find a picture of the Langford family. In the photo, they’re leaving the courthouse, the mother held upright by two men, one her age, the other much younger and taller and wearing an army dress uniform. I read the caption: Lionel Langford, who read a statement at the sentencing, was accompanied by his wife, Violet, and their older son, Corporal Thomas Langford, twenty-four. The mother’s eyes are closed. She looks as frail as a crushed leaf.