The Collective(30)
“I thought the collective was a game,” I whisper.
But did I? Or did I just believe that it was possibly a game? So I could take comfort in that and . . . On the main chat page, a member called 6267 is venting her rage over the loss of her teenage son, shot dead by a woman who claimed self-defense and got away with it. My son was learning disabled, she’s just typed. He knocked on her door to ask directions, and she killed him. Ours is a “stand your ground” state and she said he was trying to break in. He wasn’t. He was lost. He never hurt anyone. Her attorney called my dead son “dangerous” in the courtroom, in front of me. In front of his grandmother.
2223 is the first to respond. I know her story. Her teenage daughter was one of many girls lured into “working” for a fifty-year-old billionaire who had promised her a modeling career. Her first “photo shoot,” 2223 had told us, was in his Mercedes, on a desolate road in Rockaway Beach, twenty miles away from the New York City studio where the fourteen-year-old thought she was going. She was drugged throughout it. There was no crew or photographer.
2223 has never mentioned the billionaire’s name, but I know it. We all do. He was big in the news five or six years ago, accused of running a child sex ring but convicted on much lesser charges—attempting to solicit a minor, as I recall—by a friendly DA. He served a few months in a Club Fed, then went back to his Long Island mansion and his hedge fund business, telling the world that he’d “simply befriended the wrong people” and he just wanted to “lead a quiet life.”
Meanwhile, 2223’s daughter got addicted to drugs, lost thirty pounds, pulled out most of her hair, and jumped out of a twenty-story window.
In a just world, 2223 tells 6267, you could put that murderer’s own gun in her mouth and pull the trigger. In front of her lawyer. Call them both dangerous, because they are.
More numbers join in, agreeing and commiserating, and I’m struck by how many of us there are here, on this one page in the depths of the dark web. It must be one of the most common things in the world—losing your child to a murderer who continues to thrive.
Before I fully realize it, I’m typing too. I read my comment after I’ve posted it and it feels as though it was written not by me but by us, this thing I’m a part of. I want to beat her to death for killing your son, I’ve just typed. I want to break every bone in her body.
I don’t remember typing it.
I’m thinking now about what 0001 told me several days ago, about there being safety and power in numbers, how the poor and disenfranchised can find strength as a large group. She mentioned the military, but doesn’t this concept also apply to cults? Are we being brainwashed? Am I?
This is real. It’s not group therapy or role-play, and I should care about that. I do care about that. 0001 has all but admitted that the group killed Ashley Shawger, and they’ve probably killed many, many more. And yet, here I am. I haven’t left the group, I haven’t told the police, and I know I won’t. I can’t. Why? What is wrong with me?
I think back to my private chat with 0001—how she’d gone silent at the mention of my therapist, then switched lanes, insisting Shawger’s death was somehow justified. How do you think the mother of Richard Ashley Shawger’s victim feels when she hears about what a “lifesaver” he was? The specificity of that sentence. The mother. The singular victim. Shawger’s full name.
She wants me to look it up.
“Richard Ashley Shawger.” I say the name out loud as I type it into my search engine, along with “kill” and “victim.”
The search takes me all the way back to 1990. To news reports of a nineteen-year-old named Nathan Langford, shot dead by a hunter.
An accident. That’s the way most of the archived news stories I find describe the death of Nathan Langford of Havenkill, New York, who was killed by twenty-five-year-old Richard A. Shawger, of Cairo, New York, in the upstate town of Roxbury. The two young men had been acquaintances, Nathan a former classmate of Richard’s cousin. They’d gone into the woods to camp out and hunt deer with half a dozen other young men, and Shawger had accidentally shot Langford, mistaking him for a deer. It was all very tragic, according to all of those quoted. An awful miscalculation but all too possible within those dense woods. Richard Shawger was young. He was contrite. No justice could be found in sentencing him to any jail time.
One lengthy article in the Buffalo News included the judge’s brief speech from Shawger’s sentencing, in which he’d described the shooting as “a tragedy, nearly as painful for Richard Shawger and his family as it is for the Langfords.”
“Why should yet another young life be ruined?” the judge said after letting Shawger off with a ten-thousand-dollar fine and a year of community service. “This young man has suffered enough for his mistake. He’s clearly traumatized by it.”
Involuntary manslaughter. No jail time. Not a single day.
For someone so traumatized by a hunting accident in his youth, Ashley Shawger had certainly made an odd career choice—not to mention the hunting trips he continued to take, right up until his alleged suicide. That photograph I saw of him and his friends posed around the deer carcass, rifles resting against their sides like drunken prom dates, beer cans raised high . . . According to the caption, it was taken just this past August.
I had a bad tequila night when I was twenty and I still can’t stomach a margarita. Ashley Shawger killed one of his friends while hunting at roughly the same age, yet look at him. Living it up with a dead deer, or as he might have called it, a big juicy buck.