April 1996 Column: Death of a 'Decent Boy'

It used to be popular a few  years back to denote derision by uttering a
phrase or word while accompanying the remark with finger gestures suggesting
quotation marks around the word, and thus turning the meaning upside down.
The gestures were usually accompanied by some sort of ironic facial
arrangement, or at very least, a smirk. This practice was known as air
quotes. For example, one might say, "This meat loaf is "-finger brackets-"
good," when, of course the intention was to say, "This is the worst meat
loaf I ever tasted."  (Nowadays, either because of the evolution or
devolution of society, we have short-handed this even more, so that the
practitioner of irony doesn't have to lift either eyebrow or finger, and we
simply say, "This meat loaf is good-NOT!") Like so many other parts of
language, punctuation has been twisted and chivvied so much in the last
decade that we are living now in an Alice-in-Wonderland world, where, as
Humpty Dumpty told Alice, "When I use a word it means just what I choose it
to mean-neither more or less." In the silly world of children's fables, this
is acceptable, in real life, it is a bit more sinister; more Aldous Huxley's
Brave New World with its Newspeak than Carroll's doggerel. I was reminded of
the practice of air quotes recently, when a reader in Virginia sent two
newspaper clippings. The Dec. 14, 1995 Free Lance-Star of Fredericksburg,
carried a headline which ran, "'Sweet' woman kills intruder who was athlete,
'decent boy'." The three words in single quotes, 'sweet' and 'decent boy,'
were used that way, as is correct in proper usage, and consistent with
newspaper stylebooks, because they were direct quotes from people. In the
case of 'sweet,' by the woman in question's neighbor, and in the 'decent boy'
instance, by the man's (as it turned out, he was 22 years old) mother. But
as I read the Associated Press story, datelined Charlottesville, I was left
wondering if this wasn't a case of visual air quotes, and if so, why both
subjects were the equal objects of irony.
As the story unfolds, Edith Rae, 75, shot and killed Charles "Tank" Awkard
Jr. in her rural Albemarle County home as he tried to break into her house
at 5 a.m. on a Saturday morning. Rae and her visiting daughter were awakened
by banging on their door, and a man who said he had wrecked his car and
needed to phone a friend. Declining to let him in, the women offered to make
the call for him, but as they went to do so, he pried open a storm door and
was trying to open another. As Rae called 911, the man smashed the glass on
some French doors and reached inside to unlock the door. Rae loaded a single
shot shotgun and issued a warning, but the man replied that he also had a
gun. He continued to try to enter the house, and Rae fired, killing him. When
police arrived, they determined that Awkard had given Rae and her daughter a
false name, and that his undamaged car was parked 100 yards from Rae's house.
Friends and relatives of both Rae and Awkard were interviewed for the story.
Dora Clements, a neighbor of Rae's said, "She wouldn't hurt a flea. She would
have helped him. It [the shooting] had to be something she had to do."
But Awkard's family contended that he was not trying to break in. Police,
said Corey Carter, Awkard's cousin, "have handled it rather casually. The
issue is whether it was justified. If it is justified we need to find out
everything. Her statement is all they had."  This quote of Carter's was
used as a bold-faced "pull quote" in the story, positioned just under the
headline in the three column story. (The pull quote is a device used to
highlight information in a story and make it jump out at the reader. Its
positioning in this story, just beneath the headline with the single quotes
around Sweet and Decent boy, suggests, however unintentionally, that there
was something less than justifiable about the shooting.) The story mentions
that police were awaiting an autopsy to determine if Awkard was using drugs
or alcohol, and that he had a previous arrest for trespassing in 1994, which
resulted in a fine (never paid) and a 10-day suspended sentence. It is a
popular journalistic device to get people to talk about a story's subject,
because it provides the reader with details that humanize the subject. It is
true, however, that no matter how heinous the crime, a halfway decent
reporter can always find someone to say that Ted Bundy was "charming," or
that Jeffrey Dahlmer was "quiet," without an ounce of irony. I don't dispute
that it is possible to present different sides of your character to different
people, I just wonder why the press finds it so necessary to "humanize"
everyone. In this instance, a 75-year-old woman appeared to have followed a
pretty sophisticated response to a terrifying middle-of-the night scenario:
she correctly offered to make the call for her visitor rather than let him
in, she called authorities when the threat escalated, and she warned the
intruder she was armed and prepared to respond. What more could have Edith
Rae done, or what could she have done differently so that Awkard's family was
left with nothing to say to imply that she had acted rashly or dangerously?
What disturbs me about the presentation is the implication that there was
another course of action open to Edith Rae and her daughter. That, in order
to justify her actions, it was necessary to find folks who would swear that
she was "sweet." No situation is the same as another, but having myself once
been awakened in the middle of the night by an intruder, I felt a certain
kinship with Ms. Rae. In my case, the intruder chose not to advance, and left
before the police arrived (and they arrived swiftly, in just under five
minutes). No shots were fired, no one was hurt, the only damage done was to
the back door, and only a small amount of property was taken. I will admit to
you that my response was the result of rehearsal, at least mentally. I had
thought about what I would do if someone broke in, and, I have thought about
it with many variations: what if no one else had been home? What if I had
been downstairs instead of upstairs? What if the intruder had been between me
and the phone? Between me and a loved one? Between me and cover, or a
firearm? To this day, I am somewhat amazed that I followed my rehearsed plan
in what seemed like a completely disorienting lifetime, but was in fact,
only several seconds, or a few minutes. It is a very sad commentary that we
have to rehearse at all, and that we would hestitate to admit it, lest others
think that instead of "sweet" we were, say, "paranoid" or possessed of a
"bunker mentality." But I would much rather have rehearsed for a drama that
never played out, than to have found myself totally without resources when
the event occurred. I do not know whether Ms. Rae did this same kind of
rehearsing, or whether in her seventy-five years of life she never had a
moment's thought of a What If scene like she encountered. But I am glad she
had the wit and courage to survive the attack. The police who responded in
my case did a thorough job of investigating, but found no one, and no sign
of anyone. "Kids," was what they said, with apologetic shrugs. And "kids" it
may have been; they or he (or, I suppose, she) would probably have found
someone in their life to praise them, to offer praise along the lines of
"decent boy," on behalf of the housebreakers, had he\she\they been
apprehended. My story had a happy ending. I was happy that the reader who
sent the clipping on Edith Rae had sent the Jan. 6, 1996 follow-up story in
the Free Lance-Star as well. (Sometimes we get clippings that only start the
story. And we are left to speculate on the outcome.) In this additional AP
filing, the headline read, "Woman justified in killing intruder." The
five-paragraph story recounted the events of Dec. 9 involving the Rae
household, and said the police had received autopsy reports and completed
their investigation. Charles Awkard Jr. had a high concentration of cocaine
in his body at the time he was shot; his car was fully operational, and he
had given Ms. Rae and her daughter a false name and phone number to call
when he asked for-note my use of quotation marks here-"help." The whole
scenario presented-the classic stranger with a broken down car, might lead
other people to put literal or figurative quotation marks around the
story-after all, does this kind of thing really happen? Of course the answer
is, is does. And regardless of the pejoratives or praise used about the
people involved, it is instructive to note that happy endings are only
written by those who are prepared.

Peggy Tartaro,
Executive Editor