There are more Eric Nelsons than we can count, and right now there are more young people heading in that direction than we're showing an interest in helping. It is still easier to get drugs or a gun or a prison record than it is to get a job and needed social services. So long as that is the case we will sometimes hear about the Eric Nelsons of the world, but many more will die anonymously and under terrible circumstances. Despite these deaths, the numbers of these young people will increase, and they will be seen as threats to what we take to be "social order." The first response to that perceived threat will be heavy-handed. It always is.
This is a photo of Eric Nelson from the Polk County, Florida Sheriff's Office. It has been retouched by someone so that you cannot see the "F*** Cops" tattoo on Mr. Nelson's forehead. Eric Nelson died or was killed while in custody at the South County Jail in Frostproof, Florida on Friday, December 23. According to media reports, Mr. Nelson was found in possession of a baggie of methamphetamine and syringes, and he admitted to officers that he used the needles to “shoot meth.” He was arrested and charged with possession of methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia. Once in custody he was put in a cell by himself and then placed on suicide watch. Someone with some power in this situation believed that Eric Nelson was high and believed him when he said that he had not eaten for five days. A determination may have been made to move Eric Nelson to a medical dorm.
At some point Mr. Nelson and three or four deputies engaged in a physical altercation. Someone noted that he had extraordinary strength. Mr. Nelson then died under questionable circumstances at a local hospital.
The media accounts that I have read of what happened to Eric Nelson have so far relied entirely on what the police have to say happened. These accounts provide some context for Mr. Nelson death by headlining that he had a "F*** Cops" facial tattoo and a lengthy arrest record that included 16 total criminal charges, including 12 felonies and four misdemeanors, and five felony convictions. If you don't get the picture, the media and police seem to be saying, here's a photograph of a junkie that any decent person might cross the street to avoid. And how do you think law enforcement officers are likely to respond to a repeat offender with that facial ink anyway? Case closed. Forget about the reported discrepancies. Let's move on.
I want to unpack this just a bit. Eric Nelson was 46 years old at the time of his death. Nothing tells us that he had a family or friends or a work history, although he likely did. Nothing tells us how he came to have that tattoo or what it meant to him. And what did his other tats signify?
I got my first tattoo at a time when tattoos were not fashionable and when facial ink was illegal in most places. Over the past 43 years tattooing has emerged from a dark place and has become something more than a fad and something more than respectable. But among the many people who I know with ink there are class, ethnic, and racial differences, and their tattoos document those differences. Eric Nelson went further than acceptable fashionable tattoos, and even further than most jailhouse ink, and made sure that the world saw some pain and a past if anyone bothered to look. But look at his eyes. That is not the practiced Charles Manson stare or what we see on the Live PD or Cops reality tv shows.
I can imagine Eric Nelson growing up in some small southern town or small city, the kid from the wrong side of the tracks who had survived plenty of abuse by the time he was entering his teens. Frostproof has a few thousand people in it, with about 15% of those people living in poverty. It does have some good fishing, though. He was likely on his own early. It wasn't "gateway drugs" that got him to meth so much as it was familiar gateway social conditions. He probably tried to find love and lost. He may have some kids somewhere. I can see him practicing chords on a guitar. There was anger. There was the survival instinct of using others, opportunism, thinking of the world as a jungle in which he had to hunt while he was being hunted. He knew the role of predator, but he also knew what it felt like to be the prey. There were attempts to stop using, or at least there was a vague vision of a life somewhere up ahead that did not include meth and violence. He was living the kind of life that Merle Haggard and some other country singers have taken as their inspiration for a few songs. That and death metal commercialized his suffering.
I can imagine this and insert my own thoughts and values into this story because I have known so many people whose story that is. As I said above, if this is not Eric Nelson's story then it is someone else's. I can see the kid from rural Missouri who taught me how to make biscuits and gravy and who had drug habit at 14 years of age, a young man who I worked with in Michigan who had roots in Appalachia and who was making every wrong choice that he could, and many prison inmates who I have known who had been scamming so long that they cold no longer tell the scams from reality. I share some of this story, but I have known many people who lived and died that story. The Sean Penn-Christopher Walken-Mary Stuart Masterson film "At Closer Range" captures this quite well. The Mountain Eagle and the Coalfield Progress newspapers, both published in Central Appalachia, carry weekly reports of arrests for meth, heroin, fentanyl, and other drugs, and behind each one of those arrests is a person on a roller coaster.
The Eric Nelsons of the world arise from sets of particular conditions, and those conditions are becoming more widespread, and more difficult to survive, as addiction is regarded as a moral failure instead of as a disease or disorder, so long as the lock-'em-up crowd is in charge, so long as employers refuse to hire people with histories of incarceration and substance abuse disorders, so long as helping the Eric Nelsons of our world is criminalized and social supports remain unavailable, and so long as we do not have mass movements that bring poor whites and people of color communities together around a common program that puts people before profits.
The violence that overtakes the Eric Nelsons, and that threatens to swamp all of us, takes the forms that it does because someone profits from it. There are smugglers and dealers, but there is also a legal pharmaceutical industry with billions of dollars to spend on flooding communities with addictive drugs and buying off insurance and healthcare companies and doctors. There is a for-profit prison-industrial complex that depends on crime for long-term profits. The people at the tops of these pyramids buy influence and have a stake in us victimizing one another. This is much less about the moral shortcomings of people with substance abuse disorders and social permissiveness and much more about the greed and avarice of corporations, politicians, law enforcement, and the health insurance and corporate medical sectors.
Closer to home and our daily lives, we do not make room for the kind of race, gender, and class struggles that lead to recovering ourselves as authentic persons who become capable of forgiving and loving. It is those struggles, and not the random violence of the dispossessed and disaffected, that ultimately threatens the system we live in. That system provokes violence by encouraging social alienation and then responds to criminalized alienation with violence. A mass movement that seeks social justice and that speaks from the standpoints of recovery, authenticity, and seasoned audacity flips that script and disarms the system.
A human being died in a jail cell last Friday. He was someone's son. We lost someone on December 23. We lost one of us.
I hope that somewhere there are people mourning Eric Nelson's passing and that he will get something better than an unmarked grave. I hope that we will some day see a movement that will question and protest every police and jailhouse death and find alternatives to prisons. If I can picture something of the path that led to Eric's Nelson's final and worst night on earth, I can also picture him in God's loving embrace, in a place where he and his victims and his abusers and torturers "bow and to bend..(and) will not be asham'd, (for) to turn, to turn will be our delight, till by turning, turning we come round right" as an old hymn had it.
Something inside of me doesn't want to stop there. In that loving embrace, I believe, there is the capacity for human beings to set things right. Stop the flow of drugs. Cure the sickness of addiction. Stop the violence. Get everyone housing and honest work. Rethink incarceration and policing. Build and rebuild communities. Work some real justice and accountability in. Build bridges, not walls.
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