The Story of My Cousin's State-Approved Murder

The George Zimmerman trial and story of Trayvon Martin’s tragic death have brought up painful memories of the death of my cousin.  While the most sensational elements of the Trayvon Martin situation were not present with my cousin, there is a parallel that exists between their deaths that has compelled me to write about that terrible time in my life.  ***As a warning before you read on, I tend to deal with disorder by describing unpleasant details in a manner-of-fact, graphic manner.

Late June of 2008, the summer before I finished graduate school, I married the love of my life, my boyfriend of five and a half years.  The wedding was an absolute blast, and the week-long honeymoon at an all-inclusive resort in Mexico was amazing.  I have never been happier at any point in my life.  I was at an emotional high point, from which I would unfortunately soon come crashing down.

Five days after returning home from my honeymoon, I was awakened by my phone ringing at 8am.  When I saw it was my parents’ home number calling, I immediately registered a modicum of concern, as my mother would not have called me at that time under normal circumstances.  I picked up the phone, and my father said, “Charlotte.”  I immediately knew something was wrong, as my dad never calls me, he just always takes the phone from my mom when he wants to talk to me.  My grandmother was living with my parents at the time and was about to go into assisted living, so I braced myself to hear him say that Granny was dead. 

“Something very bad has happened,” he said.  “Your cousin Craig has been stabbed to death.”  My head just started spinning.  I jumped on the internet to find any information I could about what was going on.  I found a brief local news report about a triple stabbing with one fatality at a home about three miles down the road from where I lived at the time on James Island.  I numbly made arrangements with my dad about my parents and brothers staying at my house for the funeral, still in a state of disbelief.  My uncle (my mom's brother, the youngest of three) lived less than a mile from us, so my husband and I went over to his house around mid-day. 

I had never seen my uncle in the state he was in on that day.  He is one the most fun-loving people that I know, always laughing and having a grand time, but when we arrived, he was slumped over in his favorite chair looking absolutely defeated.  He stood up to give me a hug, but he felt like dead weight on my shoulders, like gravity was somehow affecting him more than usual.

The details were sketchy, and days went by without us having the whole story.  Apparently some of the survivors were so fucked up on drugs and alcohol that it was hard to get the story out at first, so we had to plow on with little information and no sense of what had happened.  The one thing we did know, though, was that his killer had been arrested at the time police arrived on scene and would remain in jail for 14 days pending his bond hearing.  That knowledge gave us what little comfort we could glean from the situation.

Craig was killed late on a Wednesday night, and thanks to the fact that my uncle was longtime friends with the coroner, we were able to have his body released in time to have the wake on Friday night, on the 4th of July.  That wake is to this day the single most awful experience of my life. 

First of all, on Friday afternoon, I had to fulfill my (apparently) official duty of creating picture collage poster boards for family funerals, with the help of my mom, her sister, and one of my other cousins.  Since this is SC we're talking about, when we were checking out at the different stores to get the poster supplies and print out the pictures of Craig, all of the sales reps cheerfully wished us a happy 4th of July holiday.  It took quite an effort to not respond by saying we were on the way to a wake for my 20 year old cousin who had just been stabbed to death.

I arrived at the wake an hour before it officially started as I had been directed, and I was admittedly horrified to discover it was an open-casket viewing.  I do not understand that tradition, so I positioned myself out of sight of the visibly decomposing body that used to be my cousin.  Not long after people started arriving, Craig’s mother (who moved out and was divorced from my uncle when Craig was five) repeatedly ran to a trash can right beside me and dry heaved.

The thing that really got me, though, was the dozens of boys in their late teens and early twenties, in button-up shirts not completely buttoned, with their sleeves rolled up, crying their eyes out.  Just absolutely bawling.  My cousin grew up near the beach and was entrenched in the local surfing community, and my uncle is a Vice President for an iconic company headquartered in Charleston, so there were hundreds of people affected by Craig's death.  I had never witnessed anything like it.  I (predictably) came down with a migraine and had to leave an hour before the wake was supposed to end.

We finally got what I guess is the full story from the local newspaper a few weeks later.  Craig had this on-again, off-again girlfriend who, according to his friends, had cheated on him many times (reading the comment section of his obituary actually made me me feel worse because of the many awful claims about this girl, none of which I have any idea of the veracity).  Anyway, he had left something in her car, and so he called her to find out where she was so he could come to her and get it back.  She happened to be at the home of a friend of hers who was also an ex-boyfriend, along with his brother and two friends.  This 19 year old kid and his 17 year old brother lived by themselves in a half-million dollar house near the beach.  Craig came over with his friend, and while he was retrieving the items from the car, the kid apparently came out on the porch and started taunting Craig, claiming to be hooking up with Craig’s girlfriend (imagine a 19 year old boy talking trash to the 20 year old boy who is currently dating his ex-girlfriend). 

Craig ran up and chased the kid into his house and punched him.  What Craig did not know is this kid had a crack problem, and had already been arrested a dozen times on drug and alcohol charges, and his brother had been arrested for distribution of crack cocaine and forgery.  Because of that, the kid was paranoid and carried a knife, which he then pulled out and quickly stabbed my cousin twice in the chest, severing his aorta. Craig stumbled down the front stairs of the house and bled out in the front yard.  Craig’s friend jumped in to try to defend him, and ended up being stabbed to the point he was nearly disemboweled but survived after about 23 hours of surgery.  The fight was so close-quartered that the girlfriend ended up with superficial stab wounds to her arms.

A few weeks later, I was supposed to be going to my first day of class for my last semester of grad school when I picked up the local newspaper.  On the front page was a story about how the charges were being dropped against my cousin’s killer, outlining how the situation was protected under the Castle Doctrine.  The statute in SC states that if you are in your home, and you believe someone has the intention to do you bodily harm, you have the right to use deadly force.  Ergo, my cousin throwing a punch was cause for justifiable homicide.  Due process was served, and yet we had absolutely no justice, nor any sense of closure.  As you might well imagine, I didn't make it to class that day.

Laws like the Castle Doctrine and Stand Your Ground are terrible things.  I don't believe my cousin's killer deserved the death penalty, but he did deserve to be punished for his actions.  I can only hope that living with the guilt from the knowledge that he killed someone who was loved very much and by many people is serving as a type of punishment for him.

As bad as the situation was for my family, though, it has to be so much worse for Trayvon Martin’s family with the national media spectacle that this trial has become.  Hearing about my family on the local crime report was one of the most terrible experiences of my life; I can’t even imagine what it would have been like if the story had been plastered all over the national news.  While the lack of closure was extremely difficult, not having a trial did allow my family to start moving on with our lives in ways that would not have been possible had the situation been dragged out over the course of years through the circus of a trial.  I just hope the Martin family gets the justice that escaped my family.