900
block of Worden Street, Grand Rapids, MI, January 27, 2026.
“The
man charged in the killings of a Grand Rapids mom and her two teenage sons was
found competent to stand trial on Tuesday." WZZM, March
24, 2026
by Ron Riekki
 |
| Photos: Victims Michael Kilpatrick, 13 (right), Jacqueline Neill (middle) and Cameron Kilpatrick, 15 (left). |
“Since
the only thing we can be sure of is the abyss”
—Christine
Stephens-Krieger,
“What’s
Important”
“—Only
the monstrous anger”
—Wilfred
Owen,
“Anthem
for Doomed Youth”
A golf course pulls my attention, the perfection
of the day, golfers growing around every hole.
I drive to another mass shooting, transported
with each block slowly getting lower and lower
on the socioeconomic scale, as if it was designed
that way. It was designed that way. I
park in
front of the home where—according to online—
a “family annihilation” occurred. That
phrase.
My God. The news reports the mass shooter
moved into his fiancée’s home; less than a week
later, after he was texted that she wanted him
to leave, he killed her, then went into her sons’
bedroom and killed them in their beds.
Because
she wanted him to leave. ‘Family
annihilation.’
The nausea of that term. I think of John
Donne’s
holy sonnets: Death, be not proud.
These are
unholy moments, unholy poems. A Mom, killed,
because she asked him to leave. They met on
Tinder. What a bizarre name for a dating
site?
A combustible, flammable, funeral-pyre word.
One son, 13. The other son, 15. The
man who
killed her called her “Bunny.” He went by
the nickname “Charlie Brown.” Killed in cold
blood. Could you imagine witnessing that?
And next door to the house where it happened
is another house. And on the screened porch,
a woman sits: “Tiffany.” I ask if she’d be
OK
with talking about what happened. She’s not
OK, but will talk. Looks troubled.
“Sad,” she
says, “Sad.” She adds, “It’s sad and
disturbing.”
Says, “This street has a label.” Kids play
across the street. The house that the
murders
happened looks grey, old, tired. Tiffany
says
she didn’t cry when she found out. “I was in
the bathroom, getting ready for work when
I heard the gunshots.” She says she thought
it was ICE, didn’t report it, saying she thought
it was police, can’t report the police to the
police.
She says she found out what happened when she
got to work. She’s dressed in purple scrubs,
says she’s a “caregiver.” She’s kinder maybe
than any person I’ve spoken to yet. A
softness.
This caregiver next to a house with multiple
murders. She says she feels safe, even now.
“I feel safe wherever I go.” She adds, “You
just never know.” I ask for solutions.
A one-
word answer: “Education.” I ask for more
info. “There’s nothing here,” she says, says
“You have to go far to get to anything.”
I talk to her through a screen. I’ve talked
to so many people at these mass shootings
through screens, so many gas-station clerks
behind bulletproof glass and screens, telling
me they don’t want to talk. Tiffany is
talkative,
open, hope-filled, where you can feel it, but,
also, stoic-calm. Her appearance reminds me
of Tiffany Haddish, a similar smile. On
the door, a sign: PLEASE DELIVER
PACKAGES INSIDE THE PORCH.
“The kids need mentors that look like them.”
I talk about incarceration and how mentors
can be absent with almost 400,000 black men
incarcerated. That’s more than the entire
population of Cleveland. Off to the side,
I hear a voice. It’s her daughter
“Stephanie”
who I didn’t even notice, so still. She says
we need to talk about prisons. I ask what
about them. It’s quiet. There’s so
much
to say. I ask what we do. “I pray
about it,”
Tiffany says. She says, “It’s sad to look
at the house.” The house is right there.
Not yards, not feet. Inches. Right
there.
“She had a rose garden,” Tiffany says.
That sinks in. The humanity of it. How
this woman was gentle with the earth.
I think of going in back to see it, but
never do. We talk about being sick and
tired. The disease of exhaustion that is
the gun problem in the U.S. I say that,
really, it’s impressive, how much we’ve
mastered creating a violent world. There
are so many things that have to be in place
to have this many shootings, like America
is manufacturing this problem, which it is,
with its ten million firearms made per year.
Gun sales go up after mass shootings. I
want to throw up when I think about it.
I mention how many of these mass shootings
are poor young black men killing poor young
black men and Tiffany says, “I want to argue
that.” She says the shooters aren’t black.
I ask her if the shooter next door was black.
He was. The fiancée, white. Her
children,
white. The shooter, 44. I say it’s not
typical,
but it’s also Grand Rapids, explain that when
I go to inner-city mass shootings, it tends to
be blacks killing blacks. “Gangs,” she says.
“Yes,” I say. I ask if the issue is gangs,
but she talks about domestic violence,
which, truth be told, is what this is. It’s
as if the city itself is distinctive. The
gang-
related mass shootings of Flint, Saginaw,
Detroit, Muskegon. And the white male
mass shooter in Grand Blanc. And this
interpersonal violence of Grand Rapids.
The cities themselves part of the narrative.
Tiffany talks about “the violent system”
of America. Her daughter adds that it’s
a “mental health” problem. It’s true.
It’s a secret of the mental health field,
but there are retention-based programs
where therapists are rewarded for having
high retention rates. Who has low retention?
Patients who are people of color, poor,
men, the disabled, those with deep trauma.
Who has high retention? Wealthier white
female abled patients. So therapist who see
disabled poor black males can have their
hours reduced, punished for seeing those
clients. And those who serve wealthy white
female abled clients can get rewarded with
more clients. Loop. I spoke with a
therapist
at University of Michigan where I asked
about the lack of training with therapists
in terms of healing childhood sexual trauma
(CST), a complaint I heard talking to a circle of
black men in Detroit, and the U of M
therapist told me the problem isn’t that
therapists aren’t trained in CST, he said
it’s that therapists aren’t trained in trauma
at all, that they avoid it. It helps with
your
retention. What’s the cost?
Everything.
“We need to talk about it more,” Stephanie
says. “Why are we cutting funding?”
Tiffany says the problem is “weak men”
who “can’t accept rejection,” says, “You
just destroyed three lives and numerous
other family members.” She says this
to the house next door, as if the house
next door is anthropomorphized. They
talk about how they’re both single, don’t
have interest in dating. “They were driving
me crazy,” she says, “so I left.” She talks
about loneliness. Her daughter does too.
I’m lonely as well. I don’t say this.
Perhaps it’s safer to be lonely. Tiffany
says she’s too busy with her own goals.
Her daughter talks about her dreams
of becoming an engineer. I talk to her
about Michigan Reconnect, how you can
get a free Associate’s in Michigan. She
looks excited. I tell her about the Go Blue
Guarantee, how you can also get a free
Bachelor’s in Michigan. Then I tell her
it gets better, that you can also get a free
PhD at multiple universities in Michigan
if you have the grades. She tells me she
didn’t know this. Their cat comes up
and looks at me, a dirty look, a look of
You better not mess with us.
I say this
to Tiffany and Stephanie. They say
it’s their “guard cat,” that his name is
“Jason.” “Named after Jason Voorhees,
from Friday the 13th. We
laugh. The cat
doesn’t, slowly strolls away from me.
There’s a crash inside the home, like a dish
falling. Tiffany goes inside. I hear
this
little young voice yell, “She hit me!”
