ABOUT THE COLUMNIST
Gracie Bonds Staples is an award-winning journalist who has been writing for daily newspapers since 1979, when she graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi. She joined The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2000 after stints at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Sacramento Bee, Raleigh Times and two Mississippi dailies. Staples was recently promoted to Senior Features Enterprise Writer. Look for her columns Thursdays and Saturdays in Living and alternating Sundays in Metro.
By all accounts, it took Michael Dunn 3 ½ minutes from the time he arrived at a Jacksonville, Fla., gas station to become so agitated by the loud music blaring from the SUV beside him that he decided to callously fire upon a group of unarmed teens.
By the time his rage subsided, he'd fired 10 shots into the car. Three of the teens were unharmed. One of them, Jordan Davis, wasn't so lucky. He died there. Seventeen forever.
I wish I could say that the fact that Dunn is white and the teens he shot at are black doesn’t matter, but that simply isn’t the case.
Michael Dunn thought those kids were “thugs”; that the music blaring from their stereo was “thug” music. Which is to say that the history of young black men as criminal predators spawns such wrath against them in Dunn that it relieved him of any responsibility for his action.
Dunn said so himself.
“I’m the victim that’s being blamed,” he would tell his fiancee later while he was in jail. “No wonder people are afraid to make them pick up their pants. Where are their dads?”
For months after the deadly shooting, we heard every ugly detail of those few minutes unravel just like Dunn’s life, just like the arguments against more gun control, just like the logic propping up Florida’s stand your ground law.
Now we get to see it all in an equally moving documentary from British filmmaker Marc Silver. It’s titled “3 ½ Minutes, Ten Bullets,” and has already won a Special Jury Award for Social Impact at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival and Audience Award for Best Documentary at the RiverRun International Film Festival.
It will send chills through you, make you want to holler.
The film opens for a weeklong run here beginning July 3 at the Landmark Theatres Midtown Art Cinema, 931 Monroe Drive, Atlanta.
In just 98 minutes, Silver chronicles the 2012 death of Jordan Davis, a well-mannered former Marietta teenager out with three of his buddies on Black Friday. After a day of shopping, the teens roll up to the Gate gas station as teens will do, rocking to rap music. Dunn pulls in minutes later with his fiancee, who’s been with him at his son’s wedding. He asks the teens to turn the music down and an argument ensues. Dunn draws his gun and shoots into the teens’ SUV 10 times.
Three of the bullets hit Jordan, and the rest of us are left wondering how one goes from watching his son marry the love of his life, enjoying the woman he intends to marry to being so angry over loud rap music that you fire upon four unarmed teens without flinching.
We know how that narrative ends because the murder and legal proceedings were covered extensively. Dunn’s attorneys argued he felt threatened, that he saw guns in the teens’ car. Of course none were found and Dunn’s fiancee testified he never mentioned seeing any to her.
“She stood her ground and told the truth,” Jordan’s mother, Lucy McBath, would say later. “She was the key witness who could testify against him and she did.”
But the jury convicted Dunn only on the three lesser charges involving the dead teen's friends. It would take a second trial to convict him of Jordan's murder. Dunn is now serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
Silver said he wanted to give audiences the chance to reach their own conclusion about Dunn’s guilt or innocence or whether Jordan had a gun or not.
He pulls that off masterfully by cutting between two main narrative threads: the trial itself and what was unfolding outside the courtroom.
Ironically, it is Dunn himself who provides a chilling portrait of racism in America today.
Age 45 at the time of the shooting and living a very comfortable life, he looks and sounds like a regular, middle-aged guy. But through Dunn’s phone calls with his fiancee, the film gradually uncovers a deep racial bias that manifests in part in his absolute conviction of his own innocence.
“His fear of Jordan was inspired by that bias, rather than the fact that Jordan actually had a gun,” Silver says. “Dunn believed that he was a victim and that Jordan was responsible for his own death. In fact, Dunn went as far as to say he potentially saved someone else’s life by killing Jordan. He was so blind to his own racism that I felt he became a metaphor for how the U.S. is far from being a ‘post-racial society.’”
It took McBath and Jordan's father, Ron Davis, months before they agreed to let Silver tell their story. I'm glad they did.
"It actually turned out better than what I expected," McBath said. "I'm very pleased that we were able to show America who Jordan and the boys were. They were good kids being typical teenagers."
During closing arguments, the prosecuting attorney said something I will never forget.
He said, “To the living we owe respect but to the dead we owe the truth.”
Without question “3 ½ minutes, 10 Bullets” delivers that truth.
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