Baby D stands a little over three feet tall and pulls the fake trigger of an orange plastic gun three times over his younger brother’s forty-pound “lifeless” body.
Remember when daddy died? The Gilbert kids do, even though they weren’t there to see it. Baby D, christened Darren Gilbert, and his sister and two brothers take turns positioning themselves on their backs, reenacting the last “scene” of their father’s life on their tan carpet. “Pop pop pop!” yells five-year-old Darren.
According to author David Kinchin of Supporting Children With Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, children who suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress may reenact a traumatic event through role-play.
Violent behavior and lifestyle has become more appealing to the boys since the death of their father over four years ago. Knowing their father’s death involved guns, Ray and Baby D have become infatuated with them. For the boys, guns, money, and the likes of 50 Cent outline the influences in their life and community.
In the Gilberts’ hometown of Oakland the homicide rate averages about one hundred per year.
According to Cynthia Monahan, author of Children and Trauma, the violent crimes children in these areas are exposed to—stabbings,
murders, or rapes—become “routine realities” in their lives, likening their neighborhoods to war zones.
Bonner recalls waking up at two o’clock in the morning to sounds of a man cussing out a woman coming from her oldest son’s room. Her two sons, sporting silver dollar-sign “diamond” chains, are focused on the television, clutching the silver-gray joysticks of their Play Station Two. Engrossed in the game Grand Theft Auto, the boys take turns
playing a pimp who is holding a MAC-10 gun and slapping his prostitutes as they car jack a red Corvette. The level of violence each boy finds
appealing is not innate, but rather it springs from the well of major influences in their lives, most notably the death of their father.
It was the middle of the afternoon and five year-old Ray played catch with his dad, Ray “Pistol” Gilbert, in the family’s driveway. Later, as the afternoon sun began to set, Pistol hopped into the cream-colored van belonging to his long-time friend to take a ride and enjoy the nice weather. Early in the cool evening, hours after Pistol left, Tiffany Bonner, his childhood sweetheart and mother of his four children, felt uneasy. She continued to tend to the children and the the house until she received a call informing her that Pistol had been shot.
Bonner attempted several unsuccessful phone calls to Oakland Highland Hospital’s emergency room looking for information his status.
“I tried to push the worst out of my
mind and focus on him being okay,” she says. Minutes later she received a call with loud commotion and screams flooding the background, and reality oushed denial to the side. He had died.
Bonner dropped the pink Hello Kitty telephone and fell to the living room floor. The indescribable hurt and pain spread quickly to her four little children. Today Ray, Darren, Darrion, and Destinee carry inside of them an empty feeling and the void of losing “the world’s best dad.”
Such a deep feeling of loss may cause children to withdraw from their normal interests in life. Kinchin explains in his book that children of primary age may demonstrate “regression in school performance [and] school refusal”.
Ray, who attended Manzanita Elementary School and enjoyed sports and writing as a kindergartner, soon lost complete interest in both. Bonner transferred Ray to another school, hoping things would improve.
In the middle of Allendale Elementary School’s second quarter, Ray’s behavior escalated. After losing the battle of fighting with his mom to get up for school, he packed his Spiderman backpack with a folder of unfinished homework and something for Show-and-Tell. He’d grabbed his uncle’s five-inch silver pocketknife, found on top of the television. He later used it to threaten the life of a classmate on the school’s playground.
This type of aggressive and violent behavior is almost certain to
happen in children who not only face trauma but who grow up in violent communities.
For the Gilbert boys, to live by the gun and die by the gun takes no effect. Nor does it seem to register as danger.