Don't be a hero.
You hear that line a lot in movies, sometimes from a wife or girlfriend, maybe from a partner or a best friend. It's usually a fraught line, delivered like a prayer. Usually the audience expects that whoever is receiving the advice will, at the appropriate time, ignore it.
Because that's how movies are. They aren't made about prudent people who stay in their lane and do their job.
But life isn't a movie, and "don't be a hero" is unquestionably a reasonable thing to say. Police officers remind one another to be careful out there, that there's no shame in making getting to the end of watch alive a priority.
We don't know what would have happened had Shawn Mckeough Jr. not done what he did. Maybe the boy in the panda mask and the boy in the black hoodie would have just robbed the place, taken whatever cash was in the till, whatever they could have gotten off the people they had ordered to lie down on the floor, and gone on their way into the night. Maybe they'd have netted a couple hundred dollars and some credit cards.
Maybe they would have gotten away, having traumatized a few folks by waving around their guns. Maybe it would have amounted to a couple of column inches of police beat news.
It didn't happen that way.
You can't know a dead man from the posts on his social media page. But you can get a sense of what people who knew him thought about him, you can glean some details. You can see a remarkable pre-digital photograph of a shirtless, spectacled little boy of 4 or so swinging at a pinata surrounded by other kids and a few adults at what we might imagine was a neighborhood party. We can see a clip of a high school soccer player effortlessly shouldering an opposing player out of the way and stealing the ball from him. A young man dancing goofy to the Black Eyed Peas. We can start to recognize the signature curl of a smile, note a banty physical confidence, see something of the undersized slot receiver in Shawn Mckeough Jr., a New Englander, a Red Sox and Patriots fan.
I have boots older than that kid ever got to be.
Five years ago, Shawn was in high school, in a place called Westbrook, a suburb of Portland, the most populous city in Maine. About 67,000 people live in Portland, which makes it slightly more populous than North Little Rock, which is where Shawn died shortly before midnight on March 15, on the floor of a gas station convenience store.
He'd been to dinner with his girlfriend, Sarah Terrano, and another couple earlier that evening. Shawn had known Sarah since high school; they were celebrating three years together. They had just adopted a couple of puppies. They were planning on buying a house together. They'd lived in South Korea and Germany together. They had been in Arkansas since December.
Shawn was a Senior Airman, an E-4, serving as an aerial delivery operations specialist for the 19th Logistics Readiness Squadron at Little Rock Air Force Base. His military salary paid him between $25,000 and $30,000 a year; less than $16 an hour.
"He wanted to serve our country with every part of him," Sarah tells a television reporter back home in Maine.
After they got back from dinner, they decided to go out to get some beer. So they called a Uber, piled in the car and rode to the Valero Big Red convenience store. Sarah stayed in the car to talk to the driver while Shawn and the other couple went inside the store.
Sarah saw a flash of color--of red--outside the store. She saw the boys in the masks. She thought they were kids messing around. She saw them go inside the store. She saw them draw their weapons. She saw that they weren't playing. She knew what Shawn would do--she didn't have any doubt what he would do--but she thought it anyway: Don't be a hero.
She saw her friends get down on the floor. She saw Shawn move and one of the boys go down. She heard a shot and didn't see Shawn anymore.
She didn't really see the boys run out. She fought open the car door and ran inside. She didn't think about whether that was a reasonable thing to do; she was going to try to help him, she was going to be with him. And she was.
Maybe you heard that story, maybe you were outraged. Maybe you saw the photographs of the young men who were arrested for his murder and shook your head at the waste.
I don't want to think about them right now. There will be time to consider how and why we continue to produce such violent desperation in our country, and what we ought to do to curb its manufacture and mitigate future heartbreak. We all know we live in a world where such things are possible, where on a random night good people might be threatened and killed for the plastic and the paper in their pockets.
"He saved a lot of lives that night," Sarah says through tears on the screen I'm staring at.
It is entirely possible that he did.
Sometimes you perceive a wildness in another; an instability and an absence of empathy. When things start to slide sideways you might sense that acting is the only course left to you. Or you might give yourself over to the caprice of unhinged, scared and stupid kids waving guns around.
There's a moment when you have to decide, when you might calculate that acquiescence will buy you only a few more cowering seconds. Shawn was there, he made his judgment, he did precisely what he thought he ought to do.
And he might have saved some people's lives.
Don't be a hero?
Some people can't help it.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
Read more at
www.blooddirtangels.com
Editorial on 03/24/2019