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The Aftermath

By September of 2006, two ex-cons – Ray Joseph Dandridge and Ricky Javon Gray, both 28 – had been convicted of the murders of the Harvey family. Poor, uneducated, and recently released from prison, the two had hooked up in late 2005 and decided to pursue a vaguely defined criminal path to easy street. On the morning of January 1, 2006 they had been cruising neighborhoods in a van, looking for a house to rob, when they spotted the door Bryan Harvey had left ajar. Their accounts of what transpired next answered questions about the crime, but did little to satisfy anyone’s need to know, at a human level, why the slayings occurred. The simple truth was that Dandridge and Gray might have picked any house that morning. They didn’t know the Harveys and had no vendetta against them – they were simply obstacles in the way of what they wanted.

There can be grim satisfaction in learning the motive behind a terrible crime. Traumatized by a senseless act it’s only human to seek sense in it. Crimes of passion, conspiracy, or insanity provide bleak comfort to survivors because they imply someone died for a cause, as part of a plot, or at the hands of a maniac. There was no such comfort for those grieving the Harveys: everything about their killers seemed haphazard, almost arbitrary. By the time they were apprehended they had murdered nine people (including Gray’s wife) by gun, knife, beating, strangling, or suffocation and nearly killed a tenth (who survived the assault but lost use of an arm) – all during simple burglaries. Neither was insane by any common or clinical standard, just profoundly coldhearted. Dandridge was sentenced to life in prison; Gray was sentenced to death.

“There’s folks out there so dead to the world they’d slit your throat for a quarter,” a street person once said to me when I was a social worker in Chicago. How and why that loss of humanity occurs, what crushes the spirit and warps the souls of once full human beings, is a vast question that’s beyond the scope of this essay (as are critical but complex issues of economics and race).

One more image: Gray showed little emotion during his trial until his mother testified during its penalty phase. Frail and in tears, she described a childhood of neglect and abuse for her son (much mocked by some observers and media) while holding a photo of him as a boy dressed in a sailor suit. Gray wept during her testimony. That moment (and photo) haunted me. It still does. Because we all start as the equivalent of that boy in a sailor suit – innocent, unspoiled, brimming with potential, needing only love, nurturing, and opportunity to grow into something worthwhile. When that process is corrupted, when those basic needs aren’t met and something monstrous is produced instead, it’s a tragedy almost always compounded by further tragedies.

The Rest

I was very concerned about putting the song out, as I really didn’t want it to hurt anyone or cause anyone who knew and loved the Harveys to be hurt by it. I would never want to be callous about such a thing. I played the song for my Richmond friends in private, and almost every one told me they found the song to be comforting and beautiful. Even the one exception told me that, while he would personally skip the song because it was just too much – he had a child who was friends with the Harveys’ oldest child – he thought it should go on the album.
– Patterson Hood

I think you have to be hopeful about life when you have a child. I think you owe it to them.
– Bryan Harvey

I first heard “Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife” in 2008, just months after moving away from Richmond, where I lived from 1999 to 2007. Relocating there after some life upheavals, I attended grad school at Virginia Commonwealth University (Kathryn Harvey’s alma mater), and worked as a painter, writer, and teacher before getting married and moving to Chicago. I didn’t know the Harveys personally but had artist, writer, and musician friends who did. I knew Bryan’s music from his old bands, and was a frequent shopper at World of Mirth – where I once shyly asked Kathryn (who was lithe and lovely – “beautiful” in fact) if I could paint a mural (she turned me down). My future wife and I visited the shop on our first date, taking pictures of each other in front of the fun house mirrors outside the entrance. For these and other reasons, their deaths hit me hard. So did the song.

I have no children. I lost my first wife – the life partner with whom I’d planned a family – to cancer less than a year after we bought our first house. I moved to Richmond in early bereavement, because my brother and his wife lived there, with no plans beyond starting my life over. My sister-in-law was pregnant and gave birth to their first child just weeks after my wife took her last breath. I have joyful memories of us spread out on a bed, tickling, playing with, and adoring my baby niece – this awesome proof that life’s cycle goes on even when our hearts seem broken beyond repair. All my life I assumed that someday I’d experience, with a life partner and our children, the moment of familial peace “Daughters” describes so tenderly. That this wasn’t to be, and that cherished memories of my niece (or lazy mornings in bed with my new wife – our beloved dogs licking our faces) must suffice, was a bitter if instructive pill.

Since childhood I’ve had rescue fantasies. Once a superhero enthusiast, I used to fervently wish, even pray, that I’d be given special powers to right wrongs and save people in desperate situations. To this day, when my mind wanders, I sometimes find myself outsmarting fate to prevent tragedies. I don’t think this has much to do with ego: rather, I suspect, there are some incidents (usually intimate in scale, because larger ones are harder to relate to) so terrible it’s simply difficult to live knowing that they happened. So, like Patterson Hood, I imagine a happier ending to assuage my grief and restore my faith in life and my fellows. His is a glimpsed afterlife reunion; mine, an alternate reality of just-in-time intervention.

In daydreams, I’ve warned Robert Kennedy to steer clear of the Ambassador Hotel and urged Martin Luther King to avoid motel balconies in Memphis. I’ve hidden in pantries, closets, and crawl spaces in order to ambush and disarm assailants at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Sandy Hook. And I’ve fought for the Harveys’ lives – with fists, weapons, or simple foreknowledge, imagining myself back at World of Mirth, not asking Kathryn about murals, but trying mightily to convince her I have psychic powers and that she and her family must spend New Year’s Day anywhere but at home.

In more realistic, fully conscious moments I focus on underlying “core” issues – throwing myself into politics or advocating education as a proactive means to prevent the creation of human monsters and the tragedies they leave in their wake. Sometimes this seems hopeless and I succumb to despair. Maybe then the best any of us can do is hold our loved ones close – literally or figuratively – on whatever oasis allows us to bask safely in each other’s joy and love.

For the Harveys. And for the kid in the sailor suit, everywhere.

Special thanks to Patterson Hood.