Charlottesville’s first homicide of the year hit close to home. Jarvis Brown, 22, worked at The Crossroads at O-Hill dining hall. Charlottesville Police found his body on the 2500 block of Woodland Drive, roughly two miles south of Central Grounds, around 3:15 a.m. Oct. 17. He died of a single gunshot wound. His daughter, Shayleigh, turned two the day before he died.
In the past few years, University students have had too much experience dealing with death. Shelley Goldsmith, Casey Schulman and Tom Gilliam are just a few people whose deaths shook our community. The student response to those deaths was significant. We held vigils and wondered how something so terrible could have happened. Implicit in our distress was the thought: it could have been me. We saw ourselves in the students we tragically lost.
Brown’s friends, family and co-workers describe him as a devoted father and a hard worker. Students who remember him say that he was a nice guy. Yet we seem uncertain about how to respond to Brown’s death.
The University strives for a community that brings together students, faculty and staff. It seems, however, that what we have in practice is a set of sub-communities. Students feel a degree of solidarity with other students, even people they don’t know. This solidarity does not seem to extend so much to faculty. Nor does it extend to most staff members (Newcomb’s much-loved Ms. Kathy is a notable exception). The fact that Aramark hires most dining hall employees presents another barrier. Most of the people who serve our food are not direct hires. Their presence is mediated through an external company. So they seem still more detached from the University.
The slaying of someone who was part of our community — who was a fixture in the daily lives of many students — has elicited a muted response. The tragic accidents that claimed the lives of several student peers made us wonder: What would my family and friends do if that happened to me? When it comes to Brown’s murder, however, we acknowledge the tragedy but do not absorb it. We are unable to put ourselves in Brown’s shoes. We reserve our shock and pain for the events that befall fellow students: people who we think are like us.
The silence that has followed Brown’s death suggests two problems, which are connected. First is a problem of deficient empathy. Brown’s life differed from the lives that many students lead. He had a daughter, and had to contend with all the responsibility that comes with being a parent and holding down a job. But in other ways he was a peer as much as Schulman, Goldsmith or Gilliam was. He was a happy 22-year-old who drew smiley faces on Sbarro pizza boxes. He was like us. Our willingness to see Brown as someone alien, someone detached from our concerns, points to a failure of imagination.
Second is an ongoing problem at the University: the enduring disconnect between students and workers. Part of the reason why we have not adequately taken stock of Brown’s brutal death is because of persistent divides between students and the people who work in our dining halls and other facilities. We see two rarely overlapping communities when we should see one.
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