Do right by X, Indy.

Turn in his killer.

By Rebecca Townsend

Hoosier Citizen

INDIANAPOLIS — The young boy’s body lay cold in the casket. No life. Spirit elsewhere, bits glowing in the hearts of the mortals gathered in the Stuart Mortuary chapel for his funeral, but most now inhabiting the celestial heavens beyond their grasp.

“Forever 17,” said his mother as she looked upon the lifeless face before the casket closed forever.

We all looked for the last time. And the visceral pain just gnawed at our stomachs. While many of us trust God’s greater plans, we all felt the injustice as we stared into that young face, which could not stare back and would never again smile in the way for which its owner, Xavier Fairley, was known.

I don’t know if I ever said more than two words to Xavier (X, as I knew him), but I knew his smile. He’d been a guest in my house many times as a friend of my daughter. He would make her laugh and be a good listener and friend. She was sad when he moved to Arizona and happy when he returned. I can picture him smiling on Facetime with her many times when I’d pop into her room for a word.

Oh, Xavier! How can this be? What happened?

This happened at a party? There are witnesses? WTF? Who are these so-called friends that you were partying with? What is their story? They won’t pay respects to your family by helping authorities arrest the killer?

We’re all sitting there today wondering about what justice looks like.

We know what it doesn’t look like.

It doesn’t look like another troubled kid feeling tough and righteous by taking out another life in a vigilante frenzy.

Those in the crowd with some experience exhorted us to trust the Lord when he says “vengeance is mine.”

We turned to Jesus’ words in Matthew 24: “…Because of the increase in wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved. …Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come.”

Minister Carlton Amos (if I’m reading the program correctly), an Black man in his sixties, laid it bare: He’d lost his brother, his grandson, his nephew … more. He is so tired of the cycle he knows so well. He once hated himself for what he did to others and others for what they did to him. He couldn’t turn himself around, but in learning to lean on a power greater than himself, he found some footing.

He remembers picking up his grandson after he’d been locked up at a facility for getting into some trouble. His grandson told him how he’d used his incarceration as an opportunity for self reflection and prayer. The kid said he’s planned to try to turn his life around. One week after returning to Arsenal High School, he’d been in a fight. “I’m trying to change,” his grandpa recalled him saying. “But they just won’t let me.”

He was dead within the week.

Indy, we have to be the change. Right here. Right now. For X. And for all the brothers and sisters, the daughters and sons that are falling all around us. We have to change for our country. For our world. We must be that fabled City on Hill, shining as a beacon of human progress and enlightenment.

If not us, then who? If not now, then when?

People know who killed X. He was killed at a party, for heaven’s sake. All evidence condemning the killer needs to be turned in to the authorities – or someone trusted who is capable of dealing with the authorities – pronto.

Please contact Indy Homicide Detective Doug Swails at 317-327-3475 or douglas.swails@indy.gov with any information that could help catch Xavier’s killer.

Please don’t be a stereotype, a caricature, another statistic. Please be human. Human of the evolved type. Not the eye-for-an-eye type, the old-school model hellbent on an eternal loop of head-on collision with a wide scatter-shot pattern of collateral damage. This communal trauma continues to grow with each minute we remain plugged-in to this reality in which we continue to wake.

We must change the channel. The vibe. The frequency.

*    *    *

X, your funeral was gut wrenching. Any time spent truly contemplating this kind of loss is gutting.

Overnight in Indy, my husband tells me, we’ve had 7 more shootings in five places across the city. Five males. Two females.

We have nothing if we lose faith in the hope of brighter days.

While life remains, we must find ways to smile, laugh and dance. We must do these things to lift our spirits so that we can soldier on and muster the best performance we can for the days we have left. We must fight the good fight. And feel around us the army of angels who we’ve lost along the way encouraging us. Please learn the lessons offered by the legions of lives prematurely laid down. 

Learn to feel … we must feel … even as the numbness threatens to deaden our troubled minds. 

When it rains on a funeral, I feel like God is crying. Like nature joins in the mourning. In the grief. It rained all weekend in Indianapolis. Spirit lives in the water. It flows in, among, around us. And it waters flowers.

Stop. Smell the roses.