The Shooting
A boy is killed, and a documentary by two young men in Brooklyn gets real
The idea for the documentary came sometime after Terrence Fisher’s brother was shot. Terrence, who is nineteen, lives in the Louis Armstrong housing project in Brooklyn and attends a television production program for teenagers called Pro-TV, at the Downtown Community Television Center in Manhattan. One day in May last year Terrence showed up for class shaking. He said his brother had been shot accidentally in a random argument, and that the bullet had traveled through his neck and lodged in his back. Later, after Terrence heard that his brother would be okay, his instructor, Mami Kuwano, said, “This seems like a big problem in your neighborhood. Why don’t you make a documentary about it?” That’s how it started.
Terrence and another student, Daniel Howard, had been filming for several months when the second shooting occurred. This incident was front-page news, and most of the leads went like this one, from Newsday on January 25:
A police officer patrolling a Bedford-Stuyvesant housing project early yesterday morning shot and killed an unarmed 18-year-old man as he headed with friends to a party, a shooting for which Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said “there appears to be no justification.”
News reports explained that Officer Richard Neri was checking the roof of the Louis Armstrong houses just after midnight when he opened the door and was apparently startled by Timothy Stansbury in the stairwell. Several articles mentioned Terrence, who had been standing behind Timothy when Neri fired from four feet away. Timothy and Terence and another friend fled together down five flights of stairs, their descent traced by a thin trail of blood seeping from Timothy’s chest. He collapsed in the entranceway. Terrence hid in a third-floor apartment while the police called an ambulance that took Timothy to Woodhull Hospital, where he died before sunrise.
Six months later, in July, Terrence, Daniel, and Kuwano were fine-tuning a short “work-in-progress” video, which included material from before and after the shooting. Terrence watched his own long, lean frame on the screen, speaking with terse eloquence about gun violence, or skillfully negotiating an interview with a wary cluster of guys on a roof. When the film shifted to a darkened apartment, in which the onscreen Terrence sat slumped over a table on the day after the shooting, Terrence got up, muttered something about it being “freezing that day,” and left. For the rest of that afternoon, Daniel focused on stitching together the film’s two distinct halves: a penetrating view of gun violence in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the aftermath of Timothy’s death. As he wrote titles and tweaked transitions, the neighborhood’s response to the shooting unfolded and retracted on screen, over and over again.
In its rare perspective and difficult development, the film reflects the vantage point of the two students. Since Timothy’s death, Terrence has drifted away from the project and returned to it repeatedly. The film, which still lacks a name, has also left a deep imprint on Daniel, a sunny but quiet young man whose steady efforts are nudging it toward completion. Kuwano hopes that it will be screened publicly in September.
The work in progress capped the Pro-TV graduation on July 8, a noisy, heart-warming evening attended by family, friends, DCTV staff, and donors. An accomplished speaker, Daniel stood out even among a graduating class whose members are almost all bound for college with scholarships. The emcee made special mention of Daniel’s plans: a degree in mass communications at Claflin University in South Carolina, and a four-year summer internship with the local NBC affiliate. Daniel gave a little skip as he was honored for his short video, State of Mind: Living in the Projects.
Terrence hadn’t wanted to watch the work-in-progress at the graduation, but he sat to the side of the stage and looked at the screen over his shoulder, only lowering his eyes once or twice. Afterward, there were a lot of questions, and Terrence answered them with the same intense charisma that he displays on camera. A man asked him what he planned to do next, and he said he was thinking about going into the music industry, but intends to finish the film. “I want to let the world see,” he said. “I want them to feel my pain and see what happened.”Another man asked, “How many people do you know who have been shot in your neighborhood?” “Eight,” Terrence said, without pausing. “What about you?” the man asked Daniel. “I would have to say, only three,” Daniel said.
When Daniel Howard started at Pro-TV two years ago, he was small, almost skinny. He rarely talked or looked people in the eye. He hadn’t wanted to join the program, but his mother knew she “had to get him into something.” Linda Howard is a nurse, with the sort of warm, mellow voice that you want all nurses to have. She lives in a “pretty rough project” and always worried she’d lose Daniel to the street. As he avoided the guys who cut school or joined gangs, he became increasingly introverted. “He needed some form of self-expression,” she says. “I just felt that he had so much within him that he needed to get out.”
Jon Alpert, DCTV’s co-director and an award-winning documentary filmmaker, says the change began when Daniel won a prize at the Hamptons International Film Festival for State of Mind. “It became a project for myself,” Daniel says, “the idea that you could show someone living in the projects and trying to survive.” His next film, Jai Yen: Cool Heart, chronicled the forty-two days Daniel spent in Laos with Where There Be Dragons, a nonprofit organization. The video begins in his Brooklyn housing project, permeated with concrete and brick. The shift to the lime-green rice fields and gray skies of rural Laos was as jarring for Daniel as it is for the viewer. He stayed in villages with no electricity; the nights were “pitch black and the sky was all lit up and dark purple and full of stars.” He’d never encountered such quietness in Brooklyn. When it became unnerving he would open up his camera lens and play State of Mind.
The many festival awards Daniel won for both films nourished his confidence, but didn’t make a media career seem tangible. He felt the Army offered the safest route to a college degree. His mother wasn’t sure about television. “We sat down and had a conversation about it being a viable career for a young black male coming from the ’hood,” she says. “My biggest fear was, is this a pipe dream for him, or can he sustain it?”
During an editing session, Kuwano teased Daniel about a wobbly camera shot. Daniel paused the video, halting some local residents who were marching in one of the protests that followed Timothy’s death. “You try marching twenty blocks and trying to film people,” he said. He looked at the angry, confused faces on the screen frozen against a glacial blue sky. “It was so cold,” he said. “I was really tired, I felt like I wanted to vomit. Terrence felt it, too. I wasn’t even walking at the pace of the people marching, I was jogging, to stay ahead.” Still, shooting and editing the film fused Daniel’s interest in documentaries with ambition. “Terrence’s film really put me on track,” he says. “I feel like I’m working on a documentary that can change people’s stereotypes.”
The newspaper coverage of Timothy Stansbury’s death was striking for the way that all the stories seized on identical details, as if straining for the same familiar narrative. Newsday and the New York Daily News both headlined double-page spreads with Timothy’s grandmother’s claim that he was the “best boy on the block,” and every reporter found someone who said Timothy was going to make something of his life. Sometimes this tale of interrupted promise swung on pitifully threadbare evidence. Most stories played up his job at a local McDonald’s — one noted that he “liked being on the register.” This is not to say that the reporters did a bad job, simply that the constraints of daily journalism encourage certain formulas. “Under deadline and under pressure, you come up with this short story,” said David Krajicek, a former crime bureau chief for the Daily News and author of Scooped! Media Miss Real Story on Crime While Chasing Sex, Sleaze and Celebrities. “It’s a caricature, but for a daily newspaper, that’s about all you can get.”
Terrence and Daniel’s documentary seems likely to vault these conventions. “In terms of content and reporting, this is going to stomp anybody,” Alpert of DCTV says. This is partly a result of access, partly of style. The Pro-TV students and the professional TV crews filmed similar moments, but the students thrust the viewer into the story while the mannered news stories hold us at a distance. The work-in-progress video entered kitchens and living rooms, the camera jammed up against doorways or searching shocked faces, not just for sound bites but for protracted scenes of grief and confusion. In contrast, as the Timothy Stansbury story faded, news programs whittled their footage into oddly unpopulated montages, shedding Timothy’s family and favoring desolate shots of the housing project where he lived. NY1 eventually pared the story down to a still shot of the rooftop, barren except for little heaps of dirty snow; and a slow pan toward the red metal door and the gaping, shadowed stairwell.
Daniel’s achievements have a narrative pull that most journalists would find hard to resist: the reassuring tale of the bright kid who makes it out of the ghetto, quelling our unease about the others who don’t. The last time I interviewed him was a rainy Friday afternoon, and he would start his NBC internship the next Monday. He’d been editing footage that he, Terrence, and another student had shot the previous day. “Before this, I didn’t feel like I had any power to change my environment,” he told me. “Before, I didn’t feel like I had a voice. Now I know I have a voice.” He had an old military hat perched jauntily on his head, and he seemed to be in one of those exuberant moods when it feels like the facts of your life are arranging themselves into a story you can be proud of.
Terrence’s future is less certain. He was reluctant to discuss the film. But he seems determined to make some sense of the problems eroding his community. “Terrence has stuck with this, despite numerous opportunities to quit,” Alpert says. Finishing the film will determine “whether he wants to be a victim or a victor.”
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