First part of this series: link.
I did not make another entry in that journal until three days later….
7 March 1992
The trial is over; the deliberations are over. We the jury returned a verdict of guilty of armed robbery, guilty of two counts of first degree murder (felony).
We went out afterwards, 9 of us out of the 16, for pizza and beer. Afterwards, on the train ride home, I was overcome by lassitude; sinking into a state of —- letting inertia keep me from moving on. One has to be completely dedicated, utterly disciplined, in order to accomplish anything. That of course is not possible. And one would like to let go of ambition and drive, and let go and relax and sit and watch while letting go of action. But to do that is to allow death to overcome. Strife is the constant.
The man being tried was twenty or so, a slight black youth. The crime was what the legal profession calls a “joint venture,” that is, a gang or group of people together, armed with two knives between the four of them (although we were only allowed to know of one knife), roughed up one young man named Jessie McKie, held him while punching and kicking him and while one of them cut his face twice with a knife then stabbed him three times in the chest, two of the stabs almost simultaneous, a double thrust to the heart that severed a rib on the way in. They took his jacket and left him on a snowbank. They turned to someone who had been walking with McKie, one Rigoberto Carrion, and stabbed him, punched and kicked him, pushing him against a chain-link fence so hard that they rubbed skin off his buttocks through his jeans, and left him staggering down the street leaving behind him drops of blood. He died a week later in the hospital: brain-dead, so the doctor turned off the respirator. Jessie McKie died in the snow, they were unable to revive him in the hospital.
The photographs of the bodies in situ were horrific. As were the photographs taken during the autopsies. Senseless. No perceptible motive for the crimes. Enough said for now.
I wrote nothing further about the trial in that journal; indeed, I stopped writing in that journal soon afterwards, and there are still thirty-nine blank pages left.