Chapter 31

In the absence of clear answers, Kotlowitz considers the ripple effects of Eric McGinness’s death on a few specific people in the linked communities.

After the body was found, Jeff Richards, a young veterinarian and a St. Joseph city commissioner, sat in on a task force with Lieutenant Reeves. The experience was motivating—though he agreed with Reeves’s investigation tactics, he was disheartened by the public communication. In response, he ran for mayor and was elected. Once in office, he made a rare effort to repair the relationship between the two towns, inviting Benton Harbor residents and officials to actively participate in St. Joseph’s activities and personally attending events in Benton Harbor.

Mayor Richards’s hope, he notes, is preventing another dividing incident like what happened to Eric McGinness and allowing his lasting memory to foster something positive. Others in the community remember him well, too: Bennie Bowers, Ruth’s brother and Eric’s uncle, founded a gang awareness program and now works with the youth of Benton Harbor to foster community engagement and unity. Jane Austin, a young mother who knew Eric from The Club, named her young son after him.

The charges against Marv Fiedler were downgraded, and he was sentenced to six months of house arrest and 120 hours of community service. Benton Harbor police, primed for rage at the reduced charges, were surprised when nothing happened. There was a sense, Kotlowitz notes, that justice had been served.

When asked for an interview to include in the book, Dennis Wiley sent back a terse response criticizing Kotlowitz’s motivations, as well as his piece in the Wall Street Journal. The reception from Steve Pepple, the editor of the regional Herald-Palladium, was much more open, acknowledging that immense work that needs to be done to right the racial wrongs of the area.

A white tumbler at Bobbie Nadus’s gym candidly admits that Eric was her first Black friend, and his friendship helped her examine and abandon some old prejudices. Carolyn Graves, an activist in Benton Harbor with three children, carries the case with her, too: “If I don’t have to go across the bridge,” she asserts, “I don’t.”

Chapter 32

Kotlowitz closes the narrative with a canoe trip down the St. Joseph River, reflecting on the ambiguity of this case six years after the death of Eric McGinness and what progress has—and hasn’t—been made on racism in the United States in that time. If he is asked what happened to Eric now, he realizes, he doesn’t have much of an answer. It would be easy, he muses, to sum it up glibly as a story where the truth doesn’t matter as much as the impact.

But here, Kotlowitz notes, the truth is still crucial, especially to Eric’s family, and he still fantasizes about finding somebody who saw something. This is especially true since he is still left thinking about one nagging possibility: Thornton’s story, that Eric had been murdered by a boy from The Club, had been discounted because a body can’t “drift upstream.” But having spent some time on the river in the years since Eric’s death, Kotlowitz has come to realize something—that in the right conditions, with a certain wind pattern, it may well have.