The Killing of Roger Fortson

The NRA celebrates while a black airman killed for owning a gun is laid to rest.

Lots of global news today. The president of Iran was probably possibly assassinated. Bibi Netanyahu seems to want to follow the war in Gaza with Israeli military occupation of the strip. Trump is kidding not-kidding kidding about a third term.

In all of this, it’s easy to lose track of a single death. Which is why I want to talk about Roger Fortson.

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Close-up of police body camera (Shutterstock)

1. Bad Shoot

On May 3, Roger Fortson, a 23-year-old senior airman, was in his home in Fort Walton Beach, Florida.

A little before 4:30 in the afternoon, a deputy from the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Department arrived at Fortson’s apartment complex in response to a disturbance call. Upon arrival, a woman told the deputy that she believed she heard yelling and “a slap” from unit 1401, but couldn’t be sure that that’s where the sounds originated from.

In unit 1401, Airman Fortson was alone and was having a FaceTime call with his girlfriend, discussing their plans for the weekend.

The deputy walked up to unit 1401, knocked, and identified himself as law enforcement. Fortson answered the door holding a pistol, which was lowered and at his side. The deputy said the words “step back” and then immediately shot Fortson six times. On the bodycam footage, the sheriff’s deputy only verbally instructs Fortson to drop his gun after Fortson is on the ground and the gun is no longer in his hand.

Fortson’s funeral was this past weekend. Here are some scenes from it courtesy of Military Times:

Fortson’s face and upper body were visible in his Air Force uniform, with an American flag draped over the lower half of the coffin. After viewing the body, many mourners paused to hug one another.

“As you can see from the sea of Air Force blue, I am not alone in my admiration of Senior Airman Fortson,” Col. Patrick Dierig told mourners, referring to the rows of airmen who took up nearly an entire section of the sprawling church.

“We would like to take credit for making him great, but the truth is that he was great before he came to us,” said Dierig, who commands the 1st Special Operations Wing at Hurlburt Air Force Base in Florida, where Fortson was stationed. . . .

The Rev. Jamal Bryant opened his eulogy with a story about how civil rights icon Medgar Evers joined the Army during World War II even though he and other Black American service members were fighting for freedoms abroad that they didn’t enjoy at home.

The 1963 killing of Evers, a Mississippi NAACP leader who was gunned down by a white supremacist, “showed all of America that you can wear a uniform and the uniform won’t protect you, that regrettably sometimes the skin you wear is more of a magnet to opposition than the uniform that you bear,” Bryant said. “Because in America, before people see you as a veteran, as an airman in the United States Air Force, they’ll see you as a Black man.” . . .

“We’ve got to call it what it is: It was murder,” Bryant said. “He died of stone cold murder. And somebody has got to be held accountable. Roger was better to America than America was to Roger.”

Florida’s Department of Law Enforcement is currently investigating the shooting.

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2. Guns

There are a few things going on in this story. The first is the tragedy.

Fortson seems to have been genuinely beloved by his comrades. He had served in warzones. He was just 23, with an entire life ahead of him.

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The second is the bad policing.

The deputy was responding to a possible disturbance call in broad daylight. There was no first-hand knowledge—no witness had seen a disturbance taking place. The woman the deputy spoke to upon arriving at the apartment complex specifically said that she could not be sure what apartment the noises had come from. And the noises she reported did not include gunshots.

Because of all that uncertainty, the deputy should have been alert, but not on a hair trigger when he approached unit 1401. And when Fortson opened the door, the deputy should have processed a number of signals: That Forton’s weapon was pointed at the ground. That Fortson was not flushed or agitated, as he might have been had he been in the middle of a disturbance. That there were no sounds of other persons emanating from the apartment.

Taking in this information, the deputy should have then verbally commanded Fortson to drop his weapon.

The deputy’s failure to manage this situation may or may not be criminal—I don’t know how the Florida statutes are written. But criminality aside, it was a catastrophic failure of law enforcement professionalism.

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The third is America’s gun problem.

What good is the Second Amendment if you can be in your home, peacefully existing, and using a firearm exactly as intended for personal protection—and still be shot dead by police?

In a rational world, we’d do at least one of the following:

• Restrict gun ownership. Or,

• Restrict the laws on how and when guns can be carried. Or,

• Demand much more circumspection and caution from law enforcement, because they exist in world where citizens are legally entitled to possess and use firearms.

Instead, we have a system in which:

• Gun proliferation is the norm.

• The trend is towards more permissive carry laws.

• And militarized police are on a hair trigger and are unlikely to be held accountable.

Our societal inability to make hard political choices has resulted in the worst of all worlds. And in the worst of all worlds, the game theory answer is that you should shoot first and deal with the possible legal fallout second.

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Finally: Guns aren’t really about guns. They’re about the culture war.

The NRA held its annual convention on the same weekend that Roger Fortson’s family laid him to rest. You would think that people invested in the gun rights of law abiding citizens would have made a big deal about Fortson’s killing. After all, he was an active duty airman. He had been trained in the use of firearms. He had used his firearm exactly as he had been taught. And the police had killed him.

I did not watch all of the festivities from tip to tail, but I did not hear any mention of Fortson. (If I’m wrong, put a link in the comments and I’ll update this story with it.)

Likewise, you would have thought that the NRA would be angry about Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s pardon of Daniel Perry. We talked about Perry on Friday: He murdered Garrett Foster, another Air Force veteran, because Foster was legally and responsibly exercising his Second Amendment rights. A jury found Perry guilty of murder and held him responsible. Then Abbott stepped in and set him free.

The NRA should be apoplectic about these two cases, which declare open season on people legally carrying and responsibly using firearms.

In a rational world, the NRA would see Garrett Foster and Roger Fortson as two incredibly important test cases for Second Amendment rights.

Of course, that’s not how the NRA sees any of this. It views the Garrett Foster shoot as righteous because Foster was a Black Lives Matter sympathizer. And it would prefer to ignore Fortson’s death because? Well, possibly because it is completely beholden to law enforcement.

But also possibly because Fortson is black.

Of course, we’ve known all of this since the killing of Philando Castile in 2016.

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3. Big Sky

A Harper’s dispatch from Elysium:

I found myself digging a trench in the snow to avoid sliding down the icy hill where a ranch hand named Maddie was standing. She and her boyfriend worked at a local ranch but lived in Bozeman, about forty-five miles northeast, in an apartment owned by their boss. Maddie didn’t care for Big Sky. The objects of her disdain were all around us: the ski-town elite, mixed into the crowd but easy to spot in their high-end Western wear, the women in wide-brim hats with feathers in the band and the men in tight Wranglers and designer boots. Off in the distance jutted a prominent, long-dormant volcano: Lone Mountain, home to Big Sky Resort, one of North America’s largest ski destinations.

“I hate it here,” she told me.

It’s a familiar sentiment these days in Montana, one of the country’s fastest-growing states. You often hear it in shorthand—in Bozeman’s nickname “Boz Angeles,” for the influx of Californians, or in the popular anecdotes, like the one about a duck hunter ticketed for trespassing on land where he had hunted since childhood, recently purchased by millionaires. “You’ll overhear them talking about how they’re coming on vacation from San Francisco or L.A.,” a Big Sky ski-lift operator told me of the newcomers. “And then they come out here, like, ‘This is my favorite place to come—I love wearing my cowboy hat, my cowboy boots.’ ” . . .

And Big Sky stands apart for other reasons. The obvious distinction is the Yellowstone Club, a private resort hidden in the mountains above the community that Justin Farrell, a professor of sociology at Yale and the author of Billionaire Wilderness, has described as “the pinnacle, or inevitable telos, of the trajectory of extreme wealth concentration in the United States.” The club is one of the most exclusive institutions on the planet. Guards watch its gates, and Google Street View doesn’t show its streets. It has its own ski mountain, a fire department, and a restaurant overseen by a celebrity chef; people who have worked inside describe thirteen-thousand-square-foot homes and sharkskin bar tops. The club’s members reportedly include Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, and Warren Buffett. As of 2019, new members put down a $400,000 deposit and paid about $44,000 in annual fees, according to Mansion Global. Those with the means can buy property on the club’s land, and sources note that sale prices can be well north of $20 million. Current and former employees insisted on anonymity, fearing retaliation from an institution that employs a private security force.

In recent years, CrossHarbor Capital Partners, the private-equity firm that owns the Yellowstone Club, has emerged from behind the club’s walls and directed its financial might at the broader Big Sky area. Through Lone Mountain Land Company, the developer it owns and uses to conduct local business, CrossHarbor owns at least thirty properties, worth about $135 million, in what people regard as Big Sky’s downtown area, according to a Harper’s Magazine analysis of publicly available Montana property data; it also owns hundreds of acres, including all the undeveloped residential and commercial land in the same sector. It is also one of the area’s prominent landlords, with hundreds of housing units for community members. Big Sky is unincorporated, with no mayor, no city council, few of the representative bodies that a standard local government would provide. Instead, over decades, a patchwork of hundreds of homeowners’ associations (HOAs), special districts, volunteer boards, and nonprofits—notably the Yellowstone Club Community Foundation—has come together to manage the community. That didn’t matter so much years ago, when Big Sky was a sleepy hamlet. But today, the median home price is more than $2.5 million. And CrossHarbor, via its local affiliates like Lone Mountain, stepped into this regulatory void, gaining increased power by virtue of its financial portfolio. Farrell put it bluntly. “Big Sky is a strange town,” he told me, “in the sense that it’s not really a town.”

Read the whole thing.