‘You have to see it in context’: a survivor explores the backstory to a Mother’s Day mass shooting
To many across the US and even around the world who followed its aftermath, the story of the 2013 Mother’s Day shooting in New Orleans – which injured 20 people at one of the city’s vaunted second-line parades – is a simple one.
Siblings who dealt drugs and were locked in a feud over territory indiscriminately fired into a crowd, mortally wounding one local writer and cultural advocate – Deborah “Big Red” Cotton – who died four years later.
Yet another of the shooting’s victims, the Nation’s environment correspondent, Mark Hertsgaard, uncovered an infinitely more layered reality when he re-explored the case, including the teenager whom it ultimately sent to prison for the rest of his life: Akein Scott. And a seminal moment of that reality dates back to when Scott was beaten nearly to death when he was one year old by his mother’s boyfriend, who was then fatally shot in retaliation by Akein’s older siblings, as Hertsgaard recounts in his new book Big Red’s Mercy: The Shooting of Deborah Cotton and a Story of Race in America.
Hertsgaard, in a recent interview with the Guardian, spoke plainly about how there was limited empathy from some of his fellow victims – as well as the authorities who prosecuted Akein and his older brother Shawn Scott in connection with the Mother’s Day shooting – over the traumatic childhood episode the author uncovered. And Herstgaard, who was shot in the leg that day, said he did not judge them.
But, echoing a viewpoint he attributes to Cotton, who famously offered empathy to Akein Scott in public while condemning how the US’s revolving-door criminal justice system withheld him from rehabilitation and opportunity, Hertsgaad remarked: “You have to see where things came from. You have to see it in context. And until we do see it in context, in that fuller context, we’re never going to fix it.”
Akein was two months away from turning two, living with his mother and her boyfriend – both of whom had fallen prey to the US’s crack epidemic – when he couldn’t stop crying one night. While his mother, Gladys, was out, her boyfriend became enraged at the toddler’s incessant sobs, so he struck the baby repeatedly.
An aunt of Akein recalled how the boyfriend, Kenneth Allen, hung Akein up in a sling carrier off the back of a door “like you would hang up a dress, and he hit that baby with a stick so bad, he broke his ribs and arm”, according to Hertsgaard.
Gladys Scott took her child to the hospital after she returned and found him shrieking for no obvious reason. The hospital enveloped the baby in a full body cast after X-raying and diagnosing him. Meanwhile, police arrested the mother on the spot for child endangerment.
Things only worsened from there.