Justin’s gravesite. Courtesy of author’s collection
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”
—MATTHEW 5:9
Just off Officer Justin Winebrenner Memorial Highway—a stretch of U.S. Route 224 between Barberton and Akron, Ohio—is a tranquil sprawling green field with a strikingly tall cross, visible from every vantage point. The sounds of birds chirping and the quiet serenity seem to belie the field’s purpose: it is a burial ground.
Justin’s gravesite. Courtesy of author’s collection
Through the winding, hilly paths and among the thousands of tombstones, one black granite memorial with blazing gold lettering stands out among the rest. While most of the grave sites display a flower or two, Justin Winebrenner’s abounds with tokens of admiration.
Yellow flowers, a “Happy Easter” basket, and a glittery black and blue wreath. A Great Lakes Brewing Company beer bottle and an overturned shot glass. Coins scattered upon the base and soaring blue lights—they all sit below those fateful but beautifully inscribed words from John 15:13: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
It is the resting place of a son who lies in eternal rest next to his mother and grandparents. If you stop by Justin’s grave on any given day, you might find more than just inanimate tributes, though. You might very well encounter a group of young men having a beer with their fallen friend. A family sprawled out on a blanket having a picnic or flying a kite. Or you might even see an angelic little girl laying a donut on the grave of her father.
For there lies a hero whose light was extinguished far too soon.
It was a dreary November day. A snowy, icy 20-degree chill pierced Akron, perhaps reflecting the mood of the town. Nearly three thousand people sat silently in the James A. Rhodes Arena, wiping tears from their eyes as they commemorated the life and legacy of thirty-two-year-old Justin Winebrenner. Although men and women of all races and backgrounds filled the audience, there was only one color they saw today: blue.
Justin’s godfather and uncle, Charles Parson, stood just above the American flag–draped coffin and read several notes that he had written in Justin’s voice—to Justin’s father, Rob; his sister, Kelly; his fiancée, Tiffany; his little girl’s mother, Alyse; and his four-year-old daughter, Charlee.1
To Charlee: “I’m sorry I had to leave you. I love you. You’re my little Cherry Blossom princess and I am proud of all that you are becoming. My life shall miss sitting on the edge of your bed, wiping away the tears of your first broken heart, watching you graduate from high school and walking you down the aisle on your wedding day . . . I will not be far from you. I am now your guardian angel and I will listen to you anytime you look up in the air.”2
At the end of the memorial service, Justin’s family exited the arena as the sound of bagpipes filled the overcast skies. Justin’s father, Rob, held his sweet granddaughter, Charlee. Wrapped in her black puffy coat and with her brown hair drawn back by a blue bow headband, Charlee clutched her teddy bear—the teddy bear that she had not put down since her father’s passing. She was the picture of innocence facing injustice far too soon.
As the patriotic coffin carrying Justin’s body emerged from the arena, Rob, joined by two lines of police officers, stood in salute.
“What are you doing?” Charlee whispered to her grandfather.
“We’re saluting your dad,” Rob quietly told her.
The young girl raised her hand to her head in imitation of the saluting officers and saluted her fallen father for the first and last time.
Although the weather was snowy and uninviting, thousands of residents lined the streets with their hands on their hearts. Standing along Main Street, some held American flags; others held babies. New life clashing with life extinguished. Hand-painted signs displayed messages like “We will never forget!” and “Thank You.” On Rosewood Avenue, blue duct tape formed the number 1301—Justin’s Akron Police Department number—on the side of a black pickup truck.
The spontaneous show of support was visible from Rob’s vehicle. As Rob looked out over the sea of people, he held on to the window. “He was trying to touch all those people that were there . . . [P]eople couldn’t see inside, but we could see out . . . [I]f he could’ve shook every hand that went by, he would have,” Crystal, Rob’s girlfriend, told me as she fought back tears.
Just one day earlier, Rob had done just that: shaken thousands of hands during Justin’s six-hour wake. “My hand was swollen . . . I would shake [everyone’s] hands . . . The first thousand wasn’t so bad; the next thousand was much more difficult. But I thought . . . ‘I’ve got to do this. These people are here.’ ”
Officer Justin Winebrenner. Courtesy of Akron Police Department
As the Winebrenners rode down Waterloo Road, two fire department cranes arched toward one another and joined to display an American flag above the entrance of Holy Cross cemetery. Officers on horseback guarded the cemetery’s gates, which were swung wide-open in preparation for Justin’s arrival. The once sprawling green landscape was now covered in powdery snow, but the towering brown cross stood tall nonetheless.
The narrow, circuitous roads to Section 22, Plot 1795, were dotted with leafless trees and lined with K-9 officers standing at salute as their dogs barked to greet the entrants. As the Winebrenners arrived at Justin’s gravesite, they were unaware that they had entered the graveyard before the final car of the processional had even exited Rhodes Arena five miles back.3
For Rob and his daughter, Kelly, this second grim visit to Holy Cross Cemetery came far too soon. Five years earlier, the Winebrenners had sorrowfully laid their fifty-year-old wife and mother, Lori, to rest after a grueling battle with ovarian cancer. Now they said farewell to their only son and brother as well.
The police radioed that final announcement: “All cars, car 24. Number 1301 is out of service. We now have a moment of silence for our fallen officer Justin R. Winebrenner.” It was the end of watch.
For the Winebrenners, heroism ran in the family, and Justin was no exception. Rob was a police officer. His son, Justin, was a police officer. Several Winebrenners dedicated their lives to protecting their community. Rob’s father, Robert Sr., was a decorated U.S. Army veteran. He had earned a Bronze Star in World War II for his heroism in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge. Robert Sr.’s unit was under heavy machine gun and tank fire. Undeterred, Robert charged within one hundred yards of enemy guns and shot back for five hours, permitting the 289th Infantry to complete its mission.4
Robert Sr. worked until he was eighty-eight years old and never liked to talk about the war. “There’s so many that didn’t come home from the military. Why do they want to honor me?” he would say to his son. Robert Sr. instilled the values of hard work and humility into his family, values that his grandson, Justin, no doubt inherited.
During Justin’s seven years in the Akron Police Department, he rescued a man from a burning car. “He never even thought twice. There wasn’t hesitation,” his fiancée, Tiffany, told me. “The police chief said one time that there are two kinds of men when a situation arises: the ones that run toward it, and the ones that run away from it. And he [Justin] was definitely the one that was always going straight in it. All the way. No second guesses.”
When Justin heard about a four-year-old boy’s stolen four-wheeler, he collected donations around town. Justin purchased a brand-new four-wheeler, picked it up in his truck, and surprised the little boy with a shiny new replacement. “Things you don’t have to do and weren’t expected to do . . . he would go out of his way to make sure they were done,” Tiffany recalled.
Justin was not only kind, he was also immensely talented. After driving a golf ball four hundred yards and completing Firestone South, Hole 16—“the Monster”—in three shots, Rob laughingly told Justin, “There’s something about you. I haven’t figured it out yet.”
Justin’s last buck. Courtesy of author’s collection
“He was good at everything growing up,” Kelly chimed in with a smile.
“There wasn’t a sport he didn’t like . . . He played football. He played basketball . . . but soccer was [his love],” Rob noted. He attended every Browns game as a proud season ticket holder, adorned in his number 33 custom-made “Crime Dawg” jersey. In addition to sports, he was an avid outdoorsman and meticulous about his hunting equipment. “I wasn’t allowed to go with him because I used hair products,” which would scare away the deer, chuckled Rob.
Taking a more somber tone, Rob continued: “He unfortunately got his deer that Saturday and shot it with an arrow . . . Got it home. Went out that night. And tragedy happened.”
Motioning toward the back door of a log cabin, Rob and Kelly pointed at a six-point buck hanging above a framed folded flag and a plaque that read “In loving memory of Officer Justin Winebrenner. There is no greater love than this: That a man would lay down his life, for the sake of his friends.”
“He was not supposed to be there,” Tiffany said. “[But] he called early Saturday morning to say he shot a buck and would be back.”5
When Justin returned to Akron, he and his fiancée attended a fund-raiser for the Ellet Raiders Youth Football Team along with several other off duty police officers. After the fund-raiser, an announcement was made that attendees were welcome to continue the night at Papa Don’s, a local restaurant and pub that Tiffany owned. Pulling in beneath the Papa Don’s sign, displaying an affable looking gray-haired man in a light-blue shirt and the words “Rotisserie Ribs & Chicken—Steaks—Spirits,” Justin and Tiffany made one final stop before ending their night.
Justin moseyed into the redbrick building he frequented and the bar lit up. Hugs. High fives. The life of the community had arrived.
As the couple chatted with friends, a woman came up to Tiffany and alerted her that an unruly man by the jukebox was harassing her. “I have a boyfriend,” the girl had said, rebuffing his advances. “I don’t care. I have a .40,” he warned.
As Tiffany inquired about the situation, the man who claimed to have a gun, Kenan Ivery, approached her and the patron—yelling, angry, and loud. Tiffany asked him to please move to the end of the bar, and for five minutes she attempted to defuse the situation. Ivery refused to calm down and grew increasingly obstinate. Tiffany had no choice but to ask him to leave.
Recognizing Ivery from the fund-raiser, Tiffany said, “We have had a great evening to help raise money for a good cause in which your son was a part of, and I wish we could have ended this evening on a good note.”
“I don’t need cops or anyone else to pay for my kids,” Kenan scoffed just before he exited Papa Don’s.6
The problem had been successfully resolved, or so Tiffany thought.
That Kenan had a long history with law enforcement should come as no surprise. He had been booked at the county jail nearly a dozen times and gone to prison on three separate occasions.7 In 2011, as the police approached his car in a McDonald’s parking lot, Kenan put his gold Buick in reverse, slammed on the gas, and almost struck an officer, who had to dive out of the way to narrowly avoided being hit.8 After finally yielding to law enforcement, officers searched Kenan’s car and discovered a joint and nearly $40,000 in cash. At Kenan’s home, they found a loaded Uzi submachine gun—an illegal automatic rifle—along with tools for making crack.9
Kenan’s 2011 run-in with the law was the latest in a series. He spent three years in prison after a 2007 arrest for possessing 42.8 grams of crack.10 He went to prison for another year in 2002 for a similar conviction, and he had a host of misdemeanors for resisting arrest and failure to obey police officers, among other things.11 Despite an extensive history of criminal activity, Kenan was released early from the two-year prison sentence resulting from his 2011 conviction.12
With no sign of having reformed, Kenan’s involvement in future criminal activity was a matter of when, not if, and on the night of November 15, 2015, at 1:52 a.m., Kenan’s actions had fatal consequences.
Kenan left Papa Don’s only to return eight minutes later, this time with a gun. “He was angry and wanted to shoot somebody,” said Rob. “He kept saying ‘I’ve got a .40.’ No one knew what that meant until later when he came back with a .40 caliber.”
When Kenan reentered the bar, Tiffany immediately approached him, and Kenan quipped “I’m not alone anymore” as he clutched his gun.13 Tiffany asked Justin for help because “that’s what he does. He protects and serves,” she explained.14
Justin, unarmed and off duty, tried to get Kenan to leave. Others joined in the effort but, rather than leaving, Kenan began to shoot. According to one eyewitness, Winebrenner “went for the gun. It popped and everyone else moved and tried to go out the back exit.”15 Winebrenner succeeded in pushing Kenan out the front door, but he took two bullets through his torso in the process.
Amid the chaos, Tiffany ran to assist a wounded patron, but an employee urged her to come outside. “By the look on her face, I knew something had happened to Justin,” Tiffany testified.16 She saw Justin’s motionless body on the ground in the parking lot and knelt beside him. “He wasn’t really moving. I told him that I loved him and that he saved my life and that he had to stay strong for his daughter Charlee and that help was on the way.”17
Having shot five people, Kenan fled the scene. Tiffany shared the bar’s surveillance footage with the police to see which way Kenan had fled as emergency medical services transported Justin to Akron City Hospital.18 Knowing time was of the essence, K-9 officer Jeff Edsall set out with his dog, Bronson, to find Kenan.19 Meticulously wading through brush, Bronson eventually picked up a scent. Edsall and several others followed Bronson alongside the highway. A cruiser shed insufficient light on a pitch-black open field while Edsall and Bronson searched the area. Suddenly, Edsall heard on his radio: “Stop right where you’re at. There’s someone to the right of you.”20 He froze, slowly turned to the right, and illuminated the area with his flashlight. All he saw was the outline of a male figure.
“Show me your hands! Show me your hands!” he yelled. Other officers began to shout the order as well. The individual was lying facedown in a field of tall grass twenty yards away. When the suspect did not comply, Edsall ordered Bronson to subdue him. Bronson ran toward the subject and bit the back of the man’s leg. Still not compliant, Bronson held on as the officers swarmed the suspect.
It was Kenan Ivery.
As the Akron Police Department swiftly apprehended Kenan, Rob got the dreaded 2:00 a.m. phone call instructing him to come to Akron City Hospital. He arrived to find twenty police officers with their heads down as he and his family were ushered to the family room. “When you’ve been a police officer, you know what’s going to come next . . . It was like a ton of bricks hitting you in the face.” And then came those words no father ever wants to hear: “Your son is dead.”21
Ten months later—just weeks before the one-year anniversary of Justin’s passing—the Winebrenners faced the gut-wrenching task of facing their son’s killer in court. Charged with eighteen counts ranging from felony murder to tampering with evidence and faced with damning video evidence and eyewitness accounts, Kenan still pled not guilty.22
The grueling trial, which spanned more than two weeks, “felt like forever,” according to Tiffany. “Unfortunately, it was defined to us hundreds of times in a courtroom really what happened after [Kenan] got outside the door,” Rob recalled. “The guy actually gripped two hands around his gun and looked at [Justin] and shot and killed him.”
As Rob shared these horrifying details with me, I couldn’t help but think of Justin’s six-year-old daughter, Charlee. Running up to me with a huge smile on her face, Charlee presented me with a rainbow picture of a cat she had colored, next to the words “Thank You.” This pure and wide-eyed young girl was left with mere memories of her father. Her future life—her senior prom, her wedding, her father-daughter dance, the birth of her children—would happen without Justin present. But she is nevertheless left knowing her father was a hero in every sense of the word.
The picture Charlee drew for me. Courtesy of author’s collection
Justin lost his life to save many others. “He went toward that threat . . . and forced this man with the gun out the door . . . By forcing this man out of the door and the pub, he lost his life,” explained Chief James Nice at Justin’s funeral.
Kenan, during his testimony, falsely claimed that he began shooting that night at Papa Don’s in self-defense—a baseless claim that the jury ultimately rejected when they found Kenan guilty of aggravated murder.23 The Winebrenner family sought the death penalty to make Kenan realize the life-changing consequences of his actions. “He knew Justin was a policeman, and he never accepted that responsibility . . . [Y]ou [Kenan] never said ‘This was my fault,’ ” Rob stated. But he could not evade responsibility entirely. During the sentencing hearing, Kenan finally offered a last-ditch show of remorse.24 Nonetheless, the killer was sentenced to life in prison with no chance for parole, and the judge confidently told Kenan, “You will die in prison. You wreaked havoc and chaos when you marched back into that bar believing you were disrespected.”25
In an emotional and moving victim impact statement, Rob addressed his son’s killer directly: “To Kenan, I hope that someday you accept accountability and responsibility for what happened . . . [Y]ou are responsible for ruining a good family. We will get back up. We will survive. We will move on, but you did a lot of damage. While I may forgive you, that is basically so I can move on myself . . .”26
Kenan, outfitted in an orange jumpsuit, sat with his head down. He briefly looked at Rob when he heard the words, “Finally, I want you to know that as a parent.” Kenan put his head back down as Rob concluded: “I am content standing here a proud father of a hero that is no longer with us. Knowing the last good deed that Justin did as a police officer was getting you off the streets forever.”
Two days after Justin died, Rob was asked how he could cope with such an unspeakable loss. “By believing in God, that makes it more accepting. I can believe his mother’s in heaven and welcoming him,” he said.27
Tucked away in a charming family-built log cabin in the heart of Wadsworth, Ohio, and seated at a long wooden table surrounded by Justin’s closest family and friends, I asked Rob about his faith. “I lost faith when my wife died,” he admitted candidly. “I told my wife nothing would ever happen to her as long as she was with me. As a policeman, I was her protector . . . we slept at night knowing that nothing was ever going to happen to her.”
But Rob ultimately wasn’t able to protect her. For two years Rob and his wife battled her ovarian cancer together. After six different combinations of chemotherapy over the two years, the doctor finally said it was time to prepare for hospice care.
“Am I going to die?” Lori asked Rob.
“I don’t know. Not if I can help it,” Rob responded.
Rob had a strong faith in God. He prayed every night and would think to himself, Our faith says you’re going to make it through this. Rob told me, “Other people didn’t see it, but I saw it. I said, ‘Come on, we’re going to beat this.’ ”
During her last seventy-two hours, the Winebrenners attended a concert, where Lori took to the stage amid roaring applause. Weak and fatigued, death was quickly approaching, but Lori held on just a few hours longer. She didn’t want to pass on Justin’s birthday. In the early hours of July 23, 2009, Lori left this world for the next.
“When she died, I became very angry with God,” Rob admitted to me. “Very angry. Even called him names . . . [saying], ‘You know what, I don’t need you in my life.’ ”
With the Winebrenners and friends at their cabin in Wadsworth, Ohio. Courtesy of author’s collection
Nine months later, God brought Crystal—Rob’s girlfriend of seven years now—into his life. Crystal prayed for Rob, and he soon realized that he was physically deteriorating without God in his life. “I thought if I don’t forgive God . . . I’m going to self-destruct . . . I got back to where I was in a very strong relationship [with God],” he explained.
Fast-forward five years, and his only son was taken in a senseless act. “I got very angry again . . . How can you let this happen? This was the kid that I nurtured from a baby,” Rob said. “I retired and he became a policeman. He was everything I wanted. I lived through him. And God took that from me.”
This time, though, Rob realized right away that he was again physically declining without God in his life. His blood pressure was up. He stayed sick. Rob turned back to faith.
“His mother wanted him worse than I did,” Rob said. Rob even did the unthinkable when he said he forgave Kenan. “Everyone looked at me like ‘You’re crazy. Why would you forgive?’ But faith says forgive and you can live with yourself . . . I can’t change it.”
Crystal recalled, “He was sad . . . but never acted vengeful. It just showed how their family was raised and what they believe.” She paused. “I watch Joyce Meyer.”
“I love Joyce Meyer!” I interjected.
“I tape her every day,” Crystal went on. “There was a pastor who lost his wife and he said, ‘Lord, help me do this right . . . I’m representing you but yet my wife just died. I want to be angry . . . but help me do this right.’ ”
Upon hearing the sermon, Crystal and Rob started crying. “That reminds me of you,” Crystal said to Rob. “Sitting through the trial and hearing these horrible things . . . you just stood tall.”
And perhaps Rob stood tall because God never really left the Winebrenners. He shows himself in the subtlest of ways.
Kelly, Justin’s sister, looked out the back window of her Wadsworth, Ohio, log cabin one day to find a striking blue and black butterfly perched on her deck. Hurriedly grabbing her phone, Kelly quickly snapped a picture. A few months later she attended a retreat for the families of fallen officers hundreds of miles away in Missouri. Just before Kelly participated in her first event, she noticed something sitting on the bench: a blue and black butterfly. “Like, the same butterfly!” she exclaimed.
The blue butterfly on Kelly’s finger. Courtesy of Kelly Winebrenner
The following day at the retreat offered a new experience for Kelly: skeet shooting. She had never shot or even touched a gun. In fact, Justin was supposed to take her to the shooting range, but they never got that opportunity.
“It was a big day,” she said.
As Kelly drew the rifle in front of her, poised and ready to shoot for the very first time, her friends yelled, “Stop and look down!” A blue and black butterfly had landed on her foot. “Don’t move! Don’t move!” her friends said, marveling at the sight. After a few minutes of admiring the friendly creature, Kelly finally shot her gun.
As the loud bang of the rifle reverberated around her woody surroundings, she gazed down in bewilderment to find that the glistening butterfly had never left her foot. In fact, it remained with her the entire time she shot.
“I walked all the way back real carefully, and it stayed on my foot the entire time,” Kelly remembered. “And then it let me pick it up and stood on my hand. And then I moved it all over and it wouldn’t leave. This beautiful blue and black butterfly.”
It was as if Justin had found a way to take his little sister shooting after all. “I needed him there, and there he was,” Kelly said, smiling.
The blue and black butterfly even made its way to Rob at a separate retreat in Arkansas. “I’m just sitting there and this blue butterfly just comes down and lands on the railing right next to me.” He quickly snapped a picture and sent it to his daughter. Rob says, after the passing of his wife, “You tend to notice more things. You see bluebirds now. I would see cardinals everywhere, but now I see blue jays in the tree where the cardinals were at. I thought, ‘That’s weird. I’ve never seen blue jays before.’
The blue butterfly on Kelly’s shoe. Courtesy of Kelly Winebrenner
“Whether that’s a sign or not”—Rob pauses for a brief moment before confidently announcing—“faith.”
Justin was murdered ten days before the Ferguson, Missouri, grand jury announced its decision not to charge Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown. The decision was met with very memorable violent reactions. Buildings were set ablaze and the sound of gunfire blazed across America’s television screens, even though President Obama’s own Justice Department later concluded in a quietly released memo, “It was not unreasonable for Wilson to fire on Brown . . .”28 Justin’s death, meanwhile, garnered no national headlines or cable news coverage.
Regarding this disparity, Rob said, “Nobody got crazy . . . nobody stood up for my family and started screaming and breaking things . . . Not that that’s what I want, but all this is happening elsewhere; it would be immediate if it was reversed.”
Rob was pointing out a hard, cold truth.
There was a 10 percent increase in officer deaths in 2016.29 Sixty-four officers were shot and killed last year, twenty-one of them callously ambushed. Ask yourself: How many can you name?
For many reading this, the answer is probably none. That is because when an officer is killed, his or her story rarely makes national headlines. The broader public does not pause to take notice. Their sacrifice is not appropriately honored. You rarely see the valiant portrayals of officers like Justin Winebrenner; instead, officers as a whole are demonized.
A May 2017 FBI report acknowledges this. The study analyzed fifty police killings and attempted to understand the motives of the killers. In a section titled “Assailant Study—Mindsets and Behavior,” the study exposed this mischaracterization of officers: “It appears that immediately following the incidents, assailants were exposed to a singular narrative by news organizations and social media of police misconduct and wrongdoing.”30
It was in reaction to this unfair media narrative that I mentioned Justin Winebrenner during a December 2014 appearance I made on The O’Reilly Factor. That is how I came to know this family: through an attempt to elevate a hero amid a slew of negative police coverage.
A pointed Facebook post on Rob’s page (from an unattributed source) states, “ ‘When did we become the enemy?’ For centuries the sheepdog has protected the flock. Standing guard, on the lookout, and ready at a split second notice for the evil to arrive and prey upon those that have the luxury of forgetting that the evil does exist.”31
In support of this, one of his friends replied with the telling revelation that she once displayed the so-called thin blue line flag: a black and white American flag with a blue stripe through the middle, representing the thin blue line of police officers that guard between civilized society and anarchy. When people told her they were “offended,” Rob’s friend removed the commemorative flag and gave it to someone in law enforcement.
Whether due to media bias or our forty-fourth president “leading the chorus in slandering and maligning the character and the integrity and the service and the sacrifice of our nation’s law enforcement officers,” in the words of Sheriff David Clarke, one thing is for sure: our courageous officers have been forgotten.32
In Rob’s victim impact statement, he isolated two reasons for the seemingly ever-present violence we see almost daily: a godless society and a lack of respect.
“Our laws are based on God’s laws,” he said. “God was in our courtroom. In fact, his name was mentioned several times. Unfortunately, we are becoming a godless society.”
Rob remembers giving a lesson to a classroom full of students years ago. On the way out he merely said, “Have a good weekend. God bless!” Shortly after, he was called down to the principal’s office and warned that he could not say “God.” He hadn’t even realized he said it in his quick and casual good-bye to the students. “We have so many influences in our school, and I don’t think God is a negative one personally,” he told me.
The second problem is respect. “Kids are not taught respect in the family. We show little respect for teachers and authority in the schools. Therefore, we will have little or no respect for police or authority on the streets. This is what led us to where we are today. We need respect,” Rob proclaimed in his statement.
As for politics, Rob said, “I wish everybody would just not be so political, fix things, and not have to worry about Republicans and Democrats . . . [There’s] so much fighting.”
Justin’s story, like the stories of so many other police officers, was overlooked by our national leaders. Perhaps that is why so many of our men and women in blue voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Just one day after the election, Michele McPhee wrote in the Boston Globe, “The vote that didn’t show up in the polls, the secret groundswell of support that stunned the media establishment and the pundits and those who proudly stood with her [Hillary Clinton], was not about race or gender or ethnicity. It was about blue.”33
But for Rob, the answer was never government but a societal shift toward mutual respect and understanding. The solution can only be found in the American people opening up their hearts, coming together, and seeing past the obstacles that divide us.
Two years have passed since Justin’s murder, and for Rob the pain is still real. Describing his daily reality, Rob said, “I don’t know when I’m going to fall over. I really don’t . . . [T]he fact that sometimes I still reach for my phone and try to call him. His number’s still in my phone. Maybe I haven’t 100 percent accepted everything.”
For Charlee, the passing of her father is a daily reality. “Now [Charlee] will have to learn to do things without her dad,” Rob told the courtroom during his victim impact statement.
“She couldn’t invite him to her preschool class this year the day they had donuts with Dad. All the other kids were there with their dads. I went in his place. I felt her pain. After we went to the cemetery and visited her dad where he lays next to his mother. Together we talked. We prayed. She left him with a donut. That made her feel a little better.”34
And then there was Charlee’s first day of kindergarten. “She had to start her first day of kindergarten without her dad. I went in his place. Along with her mother and other family members and a host of fifty law enforcement officers across the county.”35
But even though Justin has passed, he is still very much alive.
He’s alive in the toasts his friends routinely make in his honor, raising Justin’s favorite drink into the air. He’s alive in the “You should be here” poster with his picture that’s affixed to his friend’s camper during Country Fest. He’s alive in the three hundred feet of blue rope light that covers Papa Don’s. He’s alive in the “Crime Dawg” jerseys his family wears to the Brown games and the blue “1301” bracelets that several friends vow never to take off. And he’s alive in the seven thousand blazing blue lights his father has worked tirelessly to place on porches throughout the community. In fact, Justin is alive right here as I write this passage under the glow of a blue light bulb that Rob gave me in Justin’s memory.
“The blue lights make you smile,” said Justin’s best friend, Joel. “They make you smile because you think of Justin.” Charlee’s mother, Alyse, said her daughter “counts them all the time. There’s one. That’s two. That’s three!”
This past November, the community hosted an event titled “A Night to Remember” at the Fraternal Order of Police, Akron Lodge 7, to commemorate the two-year anniversary of Justin’s passing. Far from being a tearful reminder of loss, the anniversary was a joyful celebration of life. Beer. Music. Guitars. Smiles. There was hope, not despair. Joy, not sadness.
Crowded around a campfire, the community lit white Chinese lanterns and released them into the night sky. Several years earlier Rob had performed the very same tribute for his wife.
Now it was Justin’s turn.
Hundreds of glistening lanterns pierced the darkness as the sound of bagpipes playing “Amazing Grace” ascended to the heavens. Rob’s shirt displayed that perfectly suited second Bible verse inscribed on Justin’s tombstone: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.”
