Waldorf News

After his wife was killed, a widower reflects on what needs to change: ‘It’s the guns’

By Adam Theron-Lee Rensch

After John Trevillion’s wife was killed in Chicago, he felt anger over the senselessness of inaction on gun control reforms

I was sitting at the front window of Rogers Park Social, a bar on the north side of Chicago, when the gunshots rang out – a dozen, at least, in a disjointed, chaotic pattern.

“That sounded like fireworks,” I heard someone murmur.

Outside, people began to sprint past the window. Some ran inside the bar. In a matter of seconds, on that early Friday evening in October, a stomach-churning recognition swept through the room.

“Everyone away from the door!” the bartender shouted. He raised his arm and gestured to another worker, pulling an imaginary trigger with his finger. People stood and moved away from the entrance.

Without thinking, I hurried outside and turned in the direction opposite people running. Twenty feet away, a man without his shirt on was kneeling over a woman. Another man, who I would later learn was her husband, was on his knees beside them.

The man looked down at his wife, a terrified expression on his face. The shirtless man pressed his hands firmly to the woman’s head, blood seeping out from under his fingers and down her face.

Movies or television shows never teach you how blood really looks, a color and consistency somewhere between corn syrup and motor oil. They don’t warn you about the sounds a dying person makes. They don’t prepare you for the adrenaline, the immobilizing sense of urgency that rises from your stomach.

Cynthia and John Trevillion. Photograph: John Trevillion

I reached for my phone to call 911 and realized I’d left it inside. A young woman shouted for towels. Others began to appear, and the husband shouted, “Step back.” Or maybe, “Give us room.” Either way, he did not want us there.

The police arrived and taped off the block. The woman was taken away, and people emerged from the bar and lit cigarettes, discussing the possibilities of what had happened. Someone suggested it was a kid on a bike; someone else, a gang initiation.

The woman who was shot and killed that night was a 64-year-old teacher named Cynthia Trevillion. She was not the intended target of this drive-by shooting, but as often happens, the spray of bullets did not go where they were meant to go.

Trevillion was one of 16 people killed in Chicago that week, and one of 670 by the end of 2017. Over 90% of these deaths were committed with a firearm.

‘It was unspeakable’

Within a few seconds of the shooting, John Trevillion knew his wife’s injuries were fatal. Time seemed to expand. What felt like 20 minutes, waiting for the ambulance to arrive, Trevillion would later learn was only four.

“It was agony,” he says, “knowing that with every second Cynthia’s life was ebbing from her.”

It has been about a month since the shooting, and Trevillion, a 69-year-old teacher and head of faculty at the Chicago Waldorf school, is sitting in the dining room of his and his wife’s Rogers Park apartment.

Trevillion is warm and friendly with a deep, comforting voice. In addition to teaching, he writes the lyrics to science-based musicals that are performed by Waldorf students around the world. He speaks eloquently, choosing his words with care. Every so often his voice falters. His grief is still raw.

“I try not relive it,” he says. “It doesn’t do me any good, and it doesn’t do Cynthia any good.”

On that warm October night, the couple were on their way to visit friends for dinner. It was close to 6.30pm. As they made their way to the subway stop, they turned up Glenwood Avenue.

The street was busy, as it often is. They passed the bar, where I was reading inside, and a few moments later, a black SUV stopped at the corner of Morse and Glenwood. Someone inside opened fire on a group of teenagers on the corner, hitting none of them.

At the sound of gunfire, Trevillion dropped to the ground. His wife was hit in the head and the neck. The entire incident only lasted a few seconds, but that was all that was needed for Trevillion’s life to change.

“I just thought,” says Trevillion of the first few after days after the shooting, “this couldn’t possibly be true. It was unspeakable.”

Trevillion has yet to return to that block on Glenwood – one of his favorites – because the memories of those last moments are not what he wants to keep of his wife.

From pain to anger

Trevillion met his wife in Detroit in 1987.

“We met on a blind date at a Tigers game,” Trevillion says. “So, baseball has been kind of an enduring, bonding element in our marriage.” After 16 years in Detroit, they moved to Chicago, transitioning “seamlessly” from Tigers fans to Cubs fans. They chose the apartment Trevillion and I are sitting in because it was close to the lake, the train and the Waldorf school where they taught.

Each day, the couple walked together to and from the school where Cynthia Trevillion offered educational support, helping kids overcome obstacles to learning. When she wasn’t teaching, her life revolved around her love for cooking. She biked, gardened as much as she could, and appreciated Chicago’s landscape.

“It’s something she enjoyed because she likes to bike,” Trevillion says. “She likes flat terrain.”

He often slips into the present tense when he speaks of his wife, as though his grammar has yet to accept this new world without her. But the reminders are there: the paperwork required for social security, the dinners unprepared by her.

“The outpouring of love has been overwhelming,” he says. “I’ve received messages from Waldorf schools on six continents. Here in Chicago, there seemed to be a brief opening before we returned to business as usual.”

The “brief opening” Trevillion mentions is a moment of collective outrage that could have been used to address the problem of gun violence. With the words “business as usual”, Trevillion’s pain shifts to anger about our nation’s gun culture.

Gwendolyn Frantz, 17, of Kensington, Maryland, stands in front of the White House during a student protest for gun control. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

“Like many Americans,” he says. “I grew up in a time when there was a more commonsense attitude to gun laws and gun ownership. These attitudes were more or less held in common, and there wasn’t this extreme, partisan, loud, well-funded minority” – by which he means gun lobbyists – “that has seemingly hijacked this whole issue.”

Trevillion’s hands tremble, gently rattling our coffee mugs on the table.

He describes feeling outraged when, after the Las Vegas shooting, Bill O’Reilly described mass shootings as the “price of freedom”. It is a feeling that has only amplified since his wife’s death.

The longer people accept these shootings as a normal part of life, Trevillion insists, failing to combat the arguments put forth by those opposed to gun legislation, the more likely it will seem that the only solution to preventing these kinds of tragedies is more guns.

“It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he says. “You can see the ship of common sense receding over the horizon.”

A city in distress

The arguments Trevillion is referencing have become so familiar they are predictable.

The most popular, and widely accepted, is that mental illness is responsible for mass shootings. The real problem, Trump was quick to emphasize after the Texas church shooting in 2017 and the last week’s Florida high school shooting, has nothing to do with guns, but with mental health.

The problem with this argument is that it raises the question: anyone who murders a dozen people indiscriminately will seem “crazy”, so instead of offering a cause for violence this rhetoric merely reaffirms the senselessness of the act. It places the burden on people to change, rather than our laws and our cultural attitudes – to say nothing of our access to affordable healthcare. Most importantly, it neglects to mention that people with mental illness are  of violent crime than perpetrators.

These are the relevant statistics: of the roughly 35,000 Americans that will die this year by gun, two-thirds of these will be suicides. The remaining third will be homicides and accidents.

Mass shootings, despite their coverage, will only account for a small fraction of all gun deaths. Most homicides, like Trevillion’s, simply cannot be explained by mental illness.

As Trevillion was told by the police, his wife’s death was indisputably related to gang violence. But his anger is less directed toward the gang members themselves than at the senselessness of it all, and especially the guns.

“Gangs are a phenomenon that have been with us perhaps for millennia,” he says, adding that “the difference today is the guns.”

Police investigate the scene of a homicide in Chicago. The city recorded 3,500 victims of gun violence in 2017. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Conservative politicians and pundits argue that gun control doesn’t work, that people will find a way to get them regardless and point to Chicago, saying even though it has with some of strictest gun control laws it is plagued by gun violence.

Chicago did, at one point, have very strict gun control laws, but it doesn’t any more. Even if it still did, guns could be purchased in nearby suburbs. Indiana, where guns are readily available, is only a 40-minute drive away. Federal gun legislation affects all communities, regardless of their local laws.

“I can’t lay all the blame at the doorstep of Congress,” Trevillion says. “But my deepest anger is reserved for those deep-pocketed agents who have their political representatives to speak on their behalf. I see it as the hijacking of common sense.”

Chicago does have its unique problems, of course. Multiple times Trevillion refers to it as a “city in distress”, and he’s right: According to the Chicago Tribune, which documents city violence closely, there were almost 4,400 victims of gun violence in 2016, and little more than 3,500 in 2017.

But these statistics only tell one part of the picture. Despite being one of the most diverse cities in the country, it is one of the most segregated. Most gun violence here occurs in poorer neighborhoods ravaged by neoliberal policies that have defunded public programs and closed schools. These are almost exclusively on the south and west sides, where far fewer white people live.

What this translates to is a city where the victims are disproportionately poor and non-white. Roughly 75% of victims are African American. Another 17% are Hispanic. Less than 3% are white.

Trevillion was white, which means that in one sense her death was unusual for our city. In a broader sense, however, it was absolutely normal: the same day she was shot, 13 October 2017, there were 164 other shooting incidents across America. Sixty-seven people were injured; 32 people were killed.

The possibility of a collective act

The actual numbers are tricky to pinpoint, but most estimates suggest there are almost as many guns as there are people. Aside from background checks and other small measures that do very little to prevent violence, many people are still resistant to serious gun legislation.

It hasn’t always been this way. Looking at Gallup’s poll numbers over time, Trevillion’s memory of growing up in a time of commonsense gun legislation doesn’t seem so distant. As recently as 1990, nearly 80% of Americans wanted stricter gun control laws. A surprising 40% of Americans were even in favor of eliminating all handguns, except for police.

These numbers have shifted over the last few decades, for reasons such as the influence of politicians and well-funded lobbyists. Some of it, I suspect, is also a sad reaction to the rise of mass and spree shootings, which were extremely uncommon until the 1980s.

Unfortunately, data that would prove or disprove this is lacking, in part due to a ban on studying the causes and effects of gun violence. However, according to one Pew poll, 67% of people list “protection” as the primary reason for gun ownership.

Rather than engaging in the causes of gun violence, conservative politicians and pundits focus on the problematic lives of the shooters they can use to make excuses. They mute outrage by insisting we shouldn’t “politicize” a tragedy. They send thoughts and prayers.

To Trevillion, however, there is reason to imagine this inaction can change. His anger has not totally ceded ground to cynicism, and he believes mass shooting gun deaths create the possibility for a “deed”, or a collective act.

The upcoming march, organized by the teenagers victimized by the Florida shooting, offers us an image of such a deed. The question remains as to how it will affect policy.

Walking home from Trevillion’s after our conversation, I walked up the block where Cynthia Trevillion was shot. At the corner of Morse and Glenwood is a makeshift memorial: candles, and signs on the door of an empty storefront. It will eventually be taken down, replaced with a large “For Lease” sign.

Those in the neighborhood who knew her – neighbors, colleagues, students – built the memorial so they could remember her.

But also, so everyone else would, too.

From theguardian.com