BREAK IT UP
When the phone rang at 7 a.m. on a January morning in 2010, Eric Butler learned that his sister had just been murdered.
He had four sisters—“I’m the only boy in a sea of girls”—and 29-year-old Lanell was eight years younger than him. She’d also fled New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, to Florida. There she met a man, “the most popular young guy on the block. This cat was a drug dealer. And I guess he was good at it. Because he made a lot of money. But he became controlling, really, really fast. He started to hit her. And one night she said she was going to leave him. So he beat her up pretty good. And the kids are there.” Lanell had six children. “After he beat her up and he’s in this drunken stupor, he rapes her. When he goes to bed, she sneaks out of the house. She MapQuests her way back to New Orleans.” This was before GPS navigation was common, “so she had to get like a physical printout. And he wakes up and realizes that she’s gone. Looks on the computer and he can see where.”
Lanell drove her children to the home of one of her sisters. “She’s got it all planned out. She’s going to register the kids into the elementary school, which is right across the street from my sister’s apartment complex.”
“He knew the address. He just stands right outside. And he spots her walking the kids to school.” Lanell saw him, panicked, saw a driver outside the complex, and forced herself into the car’s passenger seat, screaming, “This guy is trying to kill me!” It was too late. “He shoots her in the face, in front of the kids.”
When Eric got the call, he’d just moved from a job as a mediator for neighborhood and gang disputes to doing restorative justice in the Oakland, California, school system. Although we normally think of restorative justice as an alternative to prison sentences, schools are also exploring how to resolve conflicts between kids without expulsions and arrests or violent encounters with security guards or school resource officers (i.e., cops stationed in schools). The idea is to intervene before student conflicts crescendo into violence, instead of the standard approach of doling out punishment. The argument for this change has taken on new urgency as school districts across the country have canceled contracts with police departments in the wake of George Floyd’s killing and the subsequent nationwide wave of protests.
But for Eric, the news of his sister’s murder pushed all his training out of his mind. “I never felt the urge for revenge like I did in that moment. It felt so personal.”
Eric is a sturdy, compact man with diamond stud earrings, his closely cropped hair and beard flecked with gray. He usually wears a baseball cap and always has some Louisiana in his voice. You can still imagine him, even at 46, throwing off tacklers as a star running back who eventually spent two years with the Indianapolis Colts’ practice squad.
His youth was stormy. His mother adopted Lanell and another child of a cousin who’d died; she
