Living in the Shadow of a Killer [Editorial]

Last week, 29 year old Duke grad student Abhijit Mahato was murdered during a robbery. Murder is always a tragedy of the highest order, and people who even knew the victim slightly will always say things like “Oh, I just saw him yesterday… he was such a good guy, how could this happen?” and they’re right in those emotions. But what if you know the murderer? Or at least sort of know the murderer because you lived right next door to him?

I don’t really know Stephen Oates all that well. He lived next door to me with his mom, his brother and his sister. He, his friend William Smith– who is also implicated in the murder– and William’s little brother broke into my house in the spring and stole a Playstation 2, an Xbox 360, a guitar and a bunch of video games. I had never had my house broken into and it was a dirty feeling, knowing people were prowling around your house while no one was home, picking things that aren’t theirs and putting them in a backpack to take to the pawn shop. Especially since I had invited them in on a couple of occasions shortly after me and my wife and my best friend moved in. They were curious, I guess maybe we seemed like cool people or something and they wanted to see our cats and our guinea pigs and play on the Playstation, but it didn’t occur to me that they would later come back to steal shit.

It didn’t take long for Oates and Smith to get arrested for the break-in. The Durham cops didn’t do a whole lot, pretty much all of the investigating was done by me and my roommate. Not having any initial suspicions, I went next door first thing the next morning to ask him or his mom if he knew anything or saw anything. Immediately, his mom told me that she knew it was her son, Stephen. She said that she had kicked him out of the house and he had come back to break into her house and steal from her and his little brother and he already had a warrant out for that so she gave me permission to “do what I needed to do”. With this information, me and my roommate hit up several pawn shops in the area until we found the one where our stuff was and it wasn’t long before the cops got their signatures on the pawn shop receipts and paired them with the ID’ing of the stolen goods in the shop to make an arrest of the two men.

Oates and Smith only served 2 and a half months for the break-in, even though they were already on parole and had a break-in at Stephen’s mom’s house to contend with as well. When Stephen and William got out of jail, I would see them walking down the street smoking cigarettes or hanging out in the front yard of the Oates house. I was never afraid of them– to me they were just sad kids who wanted to be something they weren’t– a gangster, a thug, a criminal etc, but they were just stupid kids with too much time on their hands. When they got out, I let them know that if I ever saw any of them in my yard for any reason, I was going to personally crush their skulls. I wasn’t happy about the break-in and I wasn’t happy that they were back in my neighborhood after just 2 months.

Now that they’re facing charges of murder and a string of armed robberies, how do I feel about it? I feel myself both happy to see them behind bars, most likely for a very, very long time but at the same time I feel very sad that in order for that to happen, there’s one less brilliant mind in the world. For the Mahato family, I feel a very deep sense of loss. Watching local news anywhere in this country can make you cold and cynical with a murder a week somewhere in your state. But when you know the victim, or if you know the killer, it makes it a very different story. Oates and Smith are accused murderers and for that they deserve to never see the light of day again, but as I troll local news sites, I find myself coming to the defense of them against assumptions people have against Black people, against teenagers and against the city of Durham.

Right now on the local ABC affiliate site, there’s this comment someone posted in response to the story:

“Wow… A Durham hood rat killed this poor guy. Who would have guessed?”

For one, just because he’s Black and he lives in Durham doesn’t make him a “Hood Rat”. The neighborhood I live in isn’t any million dollar home gated community, but it’s far from the hood or the ghetto. Most people, if they could see the inside of his mom’s house would be shocked. It’s a duplex, but it’s a pretty damn nice one, certainly way better than mine. His mom obviously had spent a lot of time keeping the house clean and beautiful and upscale. Murderers don’t all come from run down shacks with roaches and rats climbing the walls. See that picture at the top of this article? That’s my neighborhood. That’s Stephen Oates’ neighborhood. Notice the lack of crack dealers and homeless people and gangsters running drive-by shootings. This is the house that Oates lived in. It’s way nicer than mine.

I have no idea what his mom does for a living and with 2 kids and a 19 year old who is running around being crazy can’t be easy, but as far as I could tell, she did a decent job. And for all its quirks, I’ve rather come to like Durham. It’s a real city, with real people where real things like this happen. Only outside of Durham, in whiter cities like Raleigh and Cary, the assumption is that Durham is a festering cesspool of murder, rape and drive-bys. There are bad parts, just like any other city, but it’s not this post-apocalyptic wasteland that others outside the city seem to think.

So I find myself wanting to get in touch with the parents of the slain student and tell them I’m sorry. Not personally, because obviously there’s nothing I could have done, but sorry because of the sadness that I feel that their son was taken from them not by anonymous soulless monsters, but real people– real kids, real stupid, with real problems that started on something they couldn’t stop and Abhijit Mahato just happened to accidentally get in the way. Sorry that in the city of Durham they only got a slap on the hand for several felonies. Sorry that the reason their son is no longer on this Earth is because of someone from my neighborhood.

There’s a gray cloud over my street today, both figuratively and literally. This neighborhood is filled with kids of every color and every weekend the cul-de-sac is filled with them, playing football and riding bikes, but on this Saturday, it’s quiet. There’s no children out in the street drawing with chalk, no bicycles, nobody on their porch or walking their dogs. Even with the bad people behind bars, the whole situation is a little unnerving. The one person in my neighborhood who I’ve talked to about this is rightfully furious that this kind of thing could happen and a little shaken up that there was a killer living so close by. Everyone has to wonder– why this college kid and not me? Why this bright young engineering student? It could have been anyone. Everyone in the neighborhood knew that Stephen was a bad seed, but I doubt that anyone could have foreseen that it would end in murder– robberies maybe, but not murder.

In time, this neighborhood will heal and once again the cul-de-sac will be filled with kids, and the police cars will stop showing up at random times and I’ll get a knock on the door again with children selling me candy bars for a school fundraiser, but until that time, the surrealness of living in the shadow of a killer seems to hang heavy over the whole neighborhood and all we can do is grieve for the loss of life and the loss of innocence.

When tragedies strike, it’s natural for those on the outside to talk about issues of the broader scope– gun control, race relations, poverty and such that in reality don’t have a damn thing to do with anything except that trying to make sense of it makes you feel better and I know because I do the same thing. Hell, I went to school for a degree in sociology, which is exactly that same crap. Thankfully my current career path has nothing to do with sociology. But while it’s natural for people to try to come to terms with something like this, it’s easy to say “Oh well he was Black and he was from Durham so it’s not my problem” or to assume that taking away people’s guns or having more social programs could have prevented it, when it wouldn’t have. In the wake of the VT massacre, the media was drowning in hot-headed opinions on gun control, video game violence and campus security, thinking that by somehow taking away rights that this could be prevented. Sometimes crazy people do crazy things and all the outreach or metal detectors or police patrols in the world can’t do anything about it. Sometimes all you can do is mourn and try to understand as best as you can and get on with living life.

Oh and for the record, in defense of Durham… when I lived in Raleigh, which is often seen as the far better half of the Raleigh/Durham area, I was living in a pretty nice neighborhood and witnessed the following:

-Some random crackhead jump out in front of my car
-An escaped nuthouse inmate tried to set my neighbor’s house on fire
-Some guy that burned his house down when his pot plant grow lights caught on fire
-A SWAT team busting into a house across the street because it was being used to manufacture crack-cocaine

And so far in Durham, having a killer live next door and a break-in was it. So take that, Raleigh!