(Editor’s note: This is the 83rd entry in The Rap Sheet’s “Story Behind the Story” series. Today’s essay comes from N. Lombardi Jr. [the “N” is for Nicholas]. He has spent more than half of his life in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, working as a groundwater geologist, and speaks five languages. In 1997, while visiting the Lao People’s Democratic Republic [aka Laos], Lombardi says he witnessed “the remnants of a secret war that had been waged for nine years, among which were children wounded from leftover cluster bombs.” Driven by that experience, he spent the next eight years working on his first novel, The Plain of Jars
. He still maintains a Web site featuring content spanning most aspects of that novel. 
He also has a page on Goodreads. Today, Lombardi lives in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and he has a new novel, Justice Gone, that was released last week. He writes about that book’s background below.)
I can’t recall exactly how I came across this story: a homeless man beaten to death by police. What struck me about the incident were a number of notable details. For one, the man was Caucasian, and I had already been conditioned by the news media to think that African Americans were the chief victims of police actions involving excessive force. Secondly, the unfortunate individual was not a violent thug or a hardened criminal, but a rather frail person whose only offence was that he was an eyesore. Shirtless, with an unkempt beard, his crime was loitering. And of course, the manner of his death—being pummeled to death—stands notoriously apart from the usual police shootings.
Eventually, I came across a series of YouTube videos that documented this event. There was a recording taken from a closed-circuit TV camera at the adjacent bus stop showing the beating, a silent witness to a brutal act. Even more appalling to me than the impending assault, was the exchange of two of the officers with the victim, a harrowing display of sadistic provocation. There are many versions of the video, but one of the more informative examples can be found
here.
In addition, videos of street protests decrying such police violence illustrated the collective shock of a small town. The town was Fullerton, California;
the man was Kelly Thomas. The year was 2011.
An Internet search yielded more videos, more articles, more stories chronicling the event. They covered the press conference held by the victim’s father, the grand jury indictments of the police officers involved, and the officers’ eventual trial, during which—astonishingly—those men were acquitted. The fact that they were indicted and brought to trial at all was a precedent—up to that time no police officer had ever been prosecuted for excessive force in the history of Orange County, a tradition that likely gave the accused officers a sense of impunity when they were partaking in their vicious act.
This incident was the seed from which my new novel,
Justice Gone (Roundfire), sprouted. While the real-life victim had mental health issues, namely schizophrenia, the character in my story is a disturbed war veteran, coping with a different kind of psycho-emotional disability. Both men, however, were members of America’s homeless population. A large percentage of that population today could be considered as refugees from the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981, which Ronald Reagan signed into law, ending community mental health programs
established by President Jimmy Carter. It began a process of eliminating the federal government’s role in mental health care. Initially, funding was cut by 30 percent. By 1985, it had been slashed by almost 90 percent. The result was that prisons took the place of mental health facilities, and any intention of saving money was negated by the costs of a swelling U.S. prison population. The fact that those monies were diverted to big business entities running this country’s prison system only added to the controversy.
In my research on the homeless, I found out some shocking facts: that an average of 3.5 million Americans now live on the streets. Thirty-five percent of the homeless population is made up of families with children—the fastest-growing segment of that population. Twenty-three percent of the homeless are U.S. military veterans and another 25 percent are children under the age of 18. While large cities may provide better services, small towns can’t afford to take care of these people without some help from the federal government, and neither can they withstand the social and economic
impact of their presence.
Documenting Kelly Thomas’ sad slide into homelessness.
Making my character in
Justice Gone a veteran also raises awareness of the consequences of war, and the importation into this country of a specific type of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), one that should be addressed by the Veteran's Administration. The VA’s efforts to tackle this problem to date seem half-hearted, mainly due to a lack of resources. The obvious question is, why should that be?
Despite all of these serious undercurrents,
Justice Gone, as a piece of commercial fiction, is meant to entertain. The novel takes the form as a whodunit that culminates in a courtroom drama, and ends with a chilling finale. In the novel’s version of events, the police officers, after grand jury proceedings to placate the public, never get indicted. The town council’s reluctance to deal with the matter forcibly illustrates the political and economic dynamics within a small town, the leadership of which prefers to sweep the whole thing under the rug. The tension between the public and local leaders dominates the first part of my novel, until, in an act of vigilante justice, three of the accused officers are assassinated by a sniper.
Now, public pressure is deflected in a new direction: public safety. The cold-hearted and frighteningly professional manner in which the officers
were executed means there’s a dangerous killer out there somewhere, and the fact that the bus station video of the police beating was uploaded to the Internet means that anyone who saw it might be suspect. The desperation of law-enforcement authorities to find this individual leads them to suspect the victim’s wartime buddy, an African-American vet suffering from PTSD. Unfortunately, his whereabouts are unknown: he took off after the killing of his friend. The manhunt that ensues forms the second part of my story.
Deeply entangled in this mix of chaos and melodrama is Dr. Tessa Thorpe, a caring and committed psychological counselor who has had both men under her care. Having gone through the trauma of losing her first patient, then participating in the public demonstrations and giving evidence to the grand
jury, she anxiously tries to avert a second tragedy. She and her colleagues frantically search for Donald Darfield, the missing vet, in the hopes of finding him before the police do. In a dramatic confrontation between Darfield and law enforcement at a remote mountain cabin, she risks her own life to make sure Darfield is brought back alive.
What follows is a publicity-loaded trial that attracts nationwide media attention. And another major character is introduced, an aging blind defense lawyer named Nathaniel Bodine, a figure based on a real-life blind lawyer that appears in John Grisham’s 2006 true-crime book,
The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town.
This third part of the novel supplies a detailed look at the American justice system, from arraignment and bail-bond hearing to the announcement of the verdict. Included is a chapter dedicated to the jury’s deliberation, a drama reminiscent of Reginald Rose’s
Twelve Angry Men, and indeed I did I watch the
film version for inspiration.
(Left) A Fullerton protest against Thomas’ treatment.
Once again, I uncovered some disturbing facts over the course of my research. In New Jersey, as an example, 38 percent of the people now incarcerated are those who couldn’t meet their bail bond. The overwhelming majority of them are guilty of municipal violations—unpaid parking tickets,
driving with a suspended license, a few sticks of marijuana … none of whom pose a threat. I also learned the strategic role of demographics when picking a
jury, how prosecutors will go to any and all lengths to keep African Americans off of juries, since they tend to be sympathetic to the downtrodden and the
underdogs (i.e., the defendant).
Because
Justice Done is a commercial mystery whodunit, and not a post-modernist rumination on the equivocality of life, the killer must be found and identified, which occurs at the end of the book.
In addition to the social issues surrounding this story, and the nuances of courtroom proceedings with their implications for justice, the behavior of the news media is frequently injected, portraying reporters and editors for the most part as voyeuristic and manipulative. Everything combined
should add up to a broad appeal for those following current events, which was exactly my objective. The first two novels I wrote,
The Plain of Jars (2013) and
Journey Towards a Falling Sun (2014), were cross-cultural adventure novels set in Laos and Kenya, respectively, but they did not sell well, perhaps because their appeal was somewhat limited. With
Justice Gone, I wanted to do something of an opposite nature. Whether I succeeded or not should soon be known.
