This occurred sometime after I arrived here in Washington state. Some local citizens were fascinated by the story of a local black teen, DeShawn Johnson. Truthfully, he fascinated some and irked others.
Over the years he broke into businesses after hours simply to feed and amuse himself. Occasionally, he broke into people’s homes while they were unoccupied, staying there like Goldilocks; this entailed eating food from their refrigerators and soaking in hot baths. He preferred to stay on the run, so he stole vehicles… a lot of them. In fact, he lived here but ‘travelled’ all over the country precisely this way; he maintained this for two years.
I’ll admit that he got on my nerves. However, to get the full effect, we should get the full history from the beginning.
DeShawn had a troubled childhood
His neighbors believed he was neglected or abused; they therefore called Child Protective Services several times. Additionally, his father used drugs and served time in prison while DeShawn was a toddler, and subsequently walked out on his family after an argument at a family barbecue. This happened when he was twelve.
DeShawn’s mother alleges that he started to act up when he was in first grade; she claims there was “something off” about her own son. At age seven he started to break into homes to get provisions, like blankets, food, and water. By age 12, he had his first conviction for stolen property; by age 13, he had three more convictions. He was in and out of detention centers and community service after each juvenile conviction. Finally upon the police finding a neighbor’s camcorder in his home, they sentenced him to a three-year sentence at a halfway house, which he naturally fled.
He struggled with a number of conditions; they diagnosed him with depression, attention deficit disorder and intermittent explosive disorder. Still most people who struggle with these conditions abide by the law.
This was ‘childhood’.
He stole practically anything
DeShawn is suspected of committing around 100 thefts in Washington, Idaho, and Canada alone. This included bicycles, cars, speedboats, basically anything that moved. At first, he stole what he needed to survive (again because he fled his sentence), but eventually his loot increases in cash and property.
The local sheriffs tell accounts of his often breaking into homes just to soak in a hot bath and eat ice cream from the freezer. Once he even used a home-owner’s computer and credit card to order bear mace and night vision goggles; valued at over $6500. This alone was more than any of my first three cars.
By the age of 19, he was suspected of vehicle thefts that spanned Idaho, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois. The FBI eventually placed a $10,000 bounty for information leading to his arrest.
The capture
Less than a week after that FBI bounty is announced, the authorities finally catch up with him. DeShawn is captured in the Bahamas. That’s correct; he steals his way from the Pacific Northwest into the Caribbean. In this particular case, he’s in a 44-foot power boat which he naturally stole. Immediately before capture, he throws a laptop into the water and holds a gun to his own head. He hopes threatening to kill himself would help him escape capture; it does not.
Before his capture, DeShawn was headed to Cuba and eventually to the Turks and Caicos Islands to throw the authorities off his trail. His mother admits that she hoped that he would flee to a country that did not have an extradition treaty with the United States.
DeShawn taunted and mocked the authorities
He left photos of himself in cameras at crime scenes. He also drew chalk outlines of footprints at crime scenes. DeShawn did this to taunt the authorities. He practically dared them to catch him, and he legitimately evaded them for two years.
In e-mails and phone calls from prison, he referred to his local sheriff as the ‘king swine,’ called prosecutors who handled his case ‘fools’, and referred to news reporters as ‘vermin’.
His conviction and sentencing
After all that hoopla, the authorities finally extradite him back to Washington, convict and sentence him. Let’s consider the long history of criminal activity from the age of twelve; how long and how many crimes before you try him as an adult? Let’s think about how he not only evaded authorities but taunted them with clues and photographs. Finally, let’s take into account all the property damage, the stolen vehicles, the invaded homes, etc., which totaled over a hundred thousand of dollars.
For all that he got a six-and-a-half-year prison sentence; that’s it. I found that to be abnormally low. In fact, it was insultingly low. I know many who maintained that he was a troubled teen, and we need to be compassionate. We had shown compassion for years. Quantify how many stints in juvenile detention add up to ‘compassion’; is it 2, 4, or 7? He definitely obliterated that line; it was now time for accountability.
Yet there is more to this story
I lied. All of the above is accurate about DeShawn. Except for two facts, two facts that should not have any bearing on this case, no difference on his conviction nor sentencing. First, his name is not DeShawn Johnson. Second, he is not black. His real name is Colton Harris Moore, also known as The Barefoot Bandit.
Did you feel his original conviction and sentence was appropriate (not excessive lenient) when you heard it on the news, and he was white? Did that change when you read this account as a black teen? Isn’t that interesting?
Colton had a cult-following; at one point he had about 75,000 Facebook fans. They wept when he was captured; were you among them? Superior Court Judge Vickie Churchill stated, “This case is a tragedy in many ways, but it’s a triumph of the human spirit in other ways.” She further described his childhood as a “mind numbing absence of hope.” People asked for leniency on his behalf. They offered him movie deals; he signed one for $1.3 million. They offered him book deals. He garnered a lot of sympathy. How many of these would be true if literally everything else was the same except that he was black?
I understand that we’ll inevitably be on different ends of the spectrum on a case-by-case basis; much of this is based on ‘gut feel’. That said, I will ask each of us to reflect upon this simple though unsettling question, how much does the pigmentation of a person’s skin contribute to this ‘gut feel’? Is it the one factor that will pivot you from leniency to accountability? This too is a form of White Privilege.