The Heart Still Stands

Red Fawn Fallis found love and purpose on a Dakota prairie. She thought it would save her life. Instead, she went to prison.

By Elizabeth Flock

A statue of a pioneer family stands in front of the state capitol building in Bismarck, North Dakota. A mother cradles a baby, a son leans against a wagon wheel, and a father peers into the distance. The monument represents the settlers who built lives on the banks of the Missouri River after staking their claim to land occupied for centuries by the Mandan Indian tribe. The descendants of white pioneers now spend their days in Bismarck’s banks and office buildings, pool halls and bingo parlors, Chinese buffets and five-and-dimes. Americana is ubiquitous here. Many trucks and Harley-Davidsons cruising the city’s streets are emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes.

The Burleigh Morton County Detention Center, a concrete complex next to a field of heat-withered grass, flies the flag, too. On a July morning in 2018, I drove there to interview a prisoner whose story is uniquely American, though perhaps not in the way many North Dakotans like to think of the word. Her name is Red Fawn Fallis, and her 2016 arrest was the kind of dramatic incident that splashes across the media and is replaced just as quickly—a story of limited interest to most people, but a crisis for those affected by it. In Indian country, including much of North Dakota, this pattern is all too familiar.

Fallis is a member of the Oglala, one of seven bands of the Lakota Sioux. In photos that I’d seen she was striking, with a steady gaze, a sweep of black hair, and a closed-mouth smile that suggested she knew something others didn’t. A tattoo of a galloping horse covered the left side of her neck. At the jail, a clerk directed me to a back room, where a row of stiff plastic chairs faced what looked like pay phones with video screens. When one of the screens crackled on and Fallis’s face appeared, she looked different. She wore an orange jumpsuit and had tired, swollen eyes; she seemed worn out by the 21 months she’d spent in custody. When she spoke, her voice was soft but certain. She was sure of the story she wanted to tell.

I asked her to take me back to October 2016, to the day she was accused of firing a gun at a police officer. Instead, she began a few months earlier, when she met a man named Heath Harmon. As she said his name—Heath—her tongue stuck between her teeth for an instant, as if encountering a bone. Harmon had stopped Fallis short the moment she met him, with his clean-cut good looks and his offer to help as she and thousands of other protesters fought the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. She’d fallen in love—the foolhardy, let’s-not-wait kind, full of promises and gifts. “Flowers, the whole nine yards,” Fallis said. She shifted in her chair and continued. “I’ve always believed in love. I still do.”

There was no way to understand Fallis’s incarceration without first understanding her love for Harmon. And there was no way to understand that without going back even further, to the first love Fallis ever received.

Fallis was born tiny and early in 1979, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, a poor, windswept community in South Dakota. Her mother, an alcoholic, gave Fallis to a cousin, hoping the little girl would have a better life. The cousin was Troy Lynn Yellow Wood, a broad-shouldered woman with dark hair and a patch of silver. She had two children already and welcomed Fallis as her own.

Yellow Wood, who lived in Denver, was a force in the American Indian Movement, an activist group founded in 1968 to fight for indigenous rights. In its early days, AIM was dominated by men, but Yellow Wood made herself known. She had an open heart and an open home, a sturdy one-story brick house with extra room. She gave acquaintances money when they needed help getting on their feet and offered AIM activists and single mothers a place to crash. She lived like a single mother herself, in a relationship with a man who drove trucks and only came around every once in a while.

From an early age, Fallis was outgoing and mischievous. She liked playing pranks on her adoptive mother, doing impressions, and imitating scenes from movies. She developed a big heart like Yellow Wood’s. Once, she tried to collect winter coats for people in Ethiopia, until she learned that Ethiopia was a tropical country and people there didn’t often need coats.

Fallis accompanied Yellow Wood to important indigenous ceremonies, including the sweat lodge, or inipi, and the sun dance, a sacred, closely guarded ritual. The U.S. government had outlawed the dance in the late 19th century as part of a widespread effort to erase Native culture. The ritual wasn’t openly practiced until the passage of the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which guaranteed the right of Native people to express their beliefs.

Yellow Wood wanted Fallis to be connected to her ancestors’ traditions, including their spirit of defiance. The Oglala Lakota were the people of Crazy Horse, the legendary leader who helped his people win the Battle of the Little Bighorn—or the Battle of the Greasy Grass, as the Lakota call it—against the Seventh Cavalry, led by George Armstrong Custer, in 1876. (Crazy Horse was killed the next year, bayoneted in the back by a U.S. soldier.) Yellow Wood took Fallis to AIM events, where people delivered fiery speeches about broken treaties and failed government policies. Fallis grew up hearing about the dramatic 71-day standoff between Native activists and federal agents in 1973 at Wounded Knee. When she was just six, she marched at the front of an AIM rally in Denver attended by thousands of people. Sometimes her political awareness led to problems at school, like the time a teacher told her class that Christopher Columbus had discovered America and Fallis was sent to the principal’s office for insisting otherwise.

By the time Fallis was 14, she’d started seeing a counselor, a kindly, soft-spoken man who knew a lot about the challenges Native children often face—high rates of ADHD and fetal alcohol syndrome, for instance, but mostly trauma, the intergenerational kind that passes through families and communities as if they’re rows of dominoes. Fallis kept a dream journal and shared it with her counselor. Once, she dreamed that she was caught up in a swirling vortex, headed for destruction. She thought it represented the sad fact that all her friends were starting to use hard drugs and get into trouble. She understood why. Home life could be hard. For all her generosity, Yellow Wood was in an abusive relationship with a man who drank. She worked all day, and strangers cycled through her house. When Fallis was nine, she was abused in an incident she still can’t bear to talk about. The counselor believed it left her with post-traumatic stress disorder. Other Native kids whom Fallis knew faced similar struggles. “We couldn’t help but be interested by the streets,” she said.

Fallis fell for bad men. Her first boyfriend beat her. People said his spirit was tormented, and she broke it off. He killed his next girlfriend and himself, leaving Fallis to wonder if she could have done something to help or stop him. She began dating another man, wooed by his charisma, and learned that he was a member of a gang. Yellow Wood worried that he might kill Fallis; he’d already left her with bruises. Without a stable father figure or a good model of a romantic relationship, though, Fallis justified staying with him. “It helped me to say, ‘That stuff happens in relationships,’” she said.

One afternoon in 2003, Fallis and her boyfriend were driving to a 7-Eleven, and a car wouldn’t let them pass. According to a police statement, her boyfriend argued with the car’s driver, then pulled out a pistol and fired at him. The man was wounded, and Fallis pled guilty to being an accessory to a crime, a felony. She served 30 months on probation. The relationship ended.

Fallis then met a man with a hard-set jaw and closely shorn hair. They got married when Fallis was in her twenties. She was open with him, even telling him about the trauma she’d faced as a child, which felt like a heavy stone lodged deep inside her. The night after she shared the story, she dreamed that a friend took her away on horseback—they galloped off with stars at their heels. It inspired the tattoo on her neck.

Her husband turned out to be unpredictable, like the rest of the men in her life, and she left him. She wondered why the same thing kept happening to her. She didn’t want to be a woman who cycled through toxic relationships.

Then Fallis learned that Yellow Wood was dying of cancer. She set aside her troubled romantic life and moved in with her adoptive mother. She offered to look after Neiamiah, one of Yellow Wood’s great-grandsons, who was wild and playful like Fallis had been as a child. Yellow Wood stared death in the face and said that she wasn’t afraid.

Not long after Yellow Wood died in June 2016, a friend called Fallis and told her that people were protesting the construction of an oil pipeline in North Dakota. Fallis knew that if Yellow Wood were alive, she would have gone. Fallis threw some clothes in a bag and left within the hour. Family members would join her later. A double rainbow appeared behind her car as she drove north from Colorado, heading toward the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. It seemed like a sign.

Standing Rock is one of the largest reservations in America, covering roughly a million acres of land and straddling the border between the Dakotas. When Fallis arrived, she found people camped out on the vast prairie in tepees, sleeping bags, and tents. Their only neighbors were a herd of bison, their only view the Missouri River and the open sky. Their goal was to halt construction of the $3.8 billion pipeline, which would carry oil from the Bakken and Three Forks fields of North Dakota to central Illinois, a distance of some 1,200 miles.

To many Native Americans, the Dakota Access Pipeline was a nightmare foretold: An old Lakota prophecy had warned of a black snake that would enter the earth, poison its water, and destroy the world. Protesters feared that the pipeline would contaminate the water supply of the Standing Rock Sioux. Because it would traverse unceded land—territory that was never granted to the United States by treaty—it might also desecrate sacred sites, including ancient burial grounds.

Demonstrators were up against a conglomerate led by Energy Transfer Partners, a Dallas-based company worth tens of billions of dollars, as well as law enforcement and private security forces. When they first set up camp, in April 2016, the protesters had no visibility or political clout. What they lacked in might, however, they made up for with willpower. They demanded that the Army Corps of Engineers consult the Sioux before giving the final go-ahead for Energy Transfer Partners to break ground. The tribe filed suit against the Corps, asking for a temporary injunction that would stop the project. (A district court judge denied the motion.) Native youth started an online petition that attracted more than 150,000 signatures. A group of them ran 2,000 miles from North Dakota to Washington, D.C., to deliver the document to lawmakers.

Then Standing Rock went viral, evolving from a protest into a movement. Using the hashtag #NoDAPL, demonstrators calling themselves water protectors invited other Native Americans and their allies to North Dakota. Over the summer of 2016, the number of protesters exploded into the hundreds, then thousands; people bedded down in a network of camps that spun off from the original one. Participants streamed demonstrations on Facebook Live and other platforms. Celebrities including Leonardo DiCaprio and Rosario Dawson voiced their support for Standing Rock’s goals.

Spirituality was central to camp life. Native prayers were spoken at every meal. Protesters held pipe ceremonies and other rites to invoke divine protection of the Sioux’s water. Sweat lodges made of canvas and red willow branches popped up on the prairie.

When she first saw Fallis at camp, Phyllis Young, an AIM member and a leader at Standing Rock, was shocked. Young had been one of Yellow Wood’s close friends, and Fallis was her niece. (Among the Lakota, some familial relationships are chosen and considered at least as strong as a blood bond.) Young knew how much Fallis, then 37, had endured in her life. Fallis slipped a necklace of Yellow Wood’s over Young’s head. “She’s not here, so I’m here. I’m here to stand beside you,” Young recalled Fallis saying. The women hugged for a long time.

Young is a no-nonsense Native elder who often inspires deference in younger activists. Fallis, though, was comfortable making demands. She asked Young to help her procure supplies—Band-Aids and washcloths, for instance—for the children at camp. Fallis borrowed an ATV and became a fixture on the red four-wheeler, delivering packages and shuttling people to and from demonstrations. She also worked security, keeping an eye out for guns, alcohol, and drugs, which elders had banned at Standing Rock. “I learned how to rough it. I helped everywhere I could—in the kitchen, with donations, unloading firewood,” Fallis said. “Every night we went to sleep with the sound of prayers on the microphone, and every morning we woke up to them. At camp you carry that beauty within you.”

Life wasn’t trouble-free, particularly as the ranks of protesters swelled. Camp could be noisy, even chaotic. Respites were as hard to come by as showers. More worryingly, in the late summer police sent to monitor Standing Rock began to crack down on demonstrators. They arrested people on charges like criminal trespassing. Fallis used the ATV to transport injured water protectors away from encounters with cops.

One day, Fallis was put in plastic handcuffs and charged with disorderly conduct. She claimed that she was just pouring water onto dirt as part of a protest. When the police released her from custody, she went back to camp, where she felt newly vulnerable. Then Heath Harmon arrived.

The weather on the Great Plains can be extreme. Too hot, too dry, too windy, too wet. It was often that way at camp—too much of something. But Fallis and Harmon met under clear, sunny skies on August 17, 2016.

The previous day, Harmon’s brother, Chad, had married Phyllis Young’s daughter at the Morton County courthouse near Bismarck. To outsiders the match was an odd one, given that Chad was a police officer with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which was frequently at odds with AIM, and Young’s family was prominent in the movement. The ceremony was small and unadorned. Harmon, with the good looks and affability to suggest he didn’t mind being single at 44, served as a witness. Fallis, busy at camp, didn’t attend.

After the ceremony, the two families celebrated together at a restaurant, where Harmon talked with John Reyna, the bride’s brother, about hunting and the outdoors. Eventually, the conversation shifted to the pipeline. Everyone in Bismarck was talking about it. Harmon was taking college classes in preparation for working in the oil industry, and he had questions about the protests. Wouldn’t a pipeline create jobs and bolster the economy? Reyna, a tranquil, sturdily built man, invited Harmon to camp to see it for himself.

As Harmon drove south from Bismarck along Highway 1806, which follows the curves of the Missouri River, the city’s bland buildings and manicured lawns gave way to rolling hills and steep buttes. Eventually, the main resistance camp, Oceti Sakowin (Seven Council Fires), came into view: a sea of tepees, tents, cars, and people. Sage and sweetgrass burned. Horses pawed at the ground in makeshift pens. Signs reading “Mni Wiconi” (Water Is Life) were everywhere.

Shortly after his arrival, Harmon met Fallis. She was charmed by the newcomer. Harmon was trim and muscular. He kept his shirt neatly tucked into his khaki pants and wore glasses and a baseball cap, giving him the look of a young suburban dad. He wasn’t wearing a ring.

“Who are you?” Fallis asked, flirting a little.

Harmon told her he was also Native, raised on land that sat above rich oil reserves on the Fort Berthold Reservation in western North Dakota. He’d since moved to the Bismarck area, where he lived with his mother. Reservation roots, city upbringing—just like Fallis. She watched as Harmon made himself useful unloading firewood from a truck. “It was so nice that someone was willing to be helpful. Not just to me, but everybody,” she said.

That night she and Harmon went together to a concert at camp. Afterward they walked alone on the prairie. Like Fallis, Harmon understood how it felt when life didn’t go as planned: He’d been married and divorced. He’d had a drinking problem and was now sober. Unlike other men Fallis knew, he seemed to have matured from his experiences.

After their first encounter, Harmon began making regular trips from his home to camp. Fallis loved when he cracked up at her jokes and told her he liked her smile as much as her wit. He didn’t participate in the demonstrations against the pipeline, but he listened attentively when Fallis talked about why the fight mattered so much. He offered to bring her to the city to shower and do her laundry.

Fallis felt like she should resist his interest, worrying that it was too much too soon. But every time she backed off, according to several of her friends, Harmon would show up at camp with a gift: a beaded purse, boots, a sweater, a single rose. One friend remembered a day when Harmon played a wooden flute long used in Native courtship. It emitted a haunting sound. “I thought, OK, I have not heard a man play a flute in a really long time,” the friend said. “He was totally setting the bar for everyone.”

Most important to Fallis, Harmon won over her family. One of her aunts said that it was like she’d won the jackpot, because Harmon was so generous and kind. An uncle was overjoyed that she’d found someone who treated her with respect.

Fallis decided to let Harmon in. When he called her “baby,” she said it back. Soon they were sleeping in the same tent. One day, Fallis showed Phyllis Young a diamond ring on her finger. She said that she and Harmon were engaged. In a girlish, exuberant voice, Fallis announced, “Auntie, I’m in love.”

Not everyone was enamored with Harmon. Karen Antelope, a woman with salt-and-pepper hair and blue-lined eyes, didn’t trust him from the start. She and Fallis had met at camp when Fallis asked her for a cigarette. Fallis introduced herself and her heritage, hollering, “Lelelelele!”—a Lakota cry. “Gee, you’re a feisty Oglala aren’t you?” Antelope replied, laughing. The women became inseparable after that.

Antelope thought Fallis seemed insecure when Harmon was around. Harmon, meanwhile, clung to Fallis like a burr on a shoe. Antelope was suspicious of Harmon’s constant gift giving. After a friend joked that Harmon should give Fallis’s family horses and a saddle if the relationship was serious—an old Sioux custom—he came to camp with a beaver-pelt hat and high-back saddle for one of Fallis’s relatives.

Antelope grew more concerned about Harmon when he issued warnings. In September 2016, he began to tell Fallis that she was in danger. By then camp was swollen with people. A district court judge had recently denied the Sioux’s request to halt the pipeline project, and Energy Transfer Partners was preparing to start its work. Water protectors were taking more desperate measures: setting up road blockades, chaining themselves to construction machinery. Police came to demonstrations dressed in riot gear and made dozens of arrests. North Dakota’s governor activated the National Guard, and protesters could hear a surveillance helicopter buzzing overhead all day. In one dramatic incident, private security firms hired by Energy Transfer Partners deployed guard dogs and pepper spray on demonstrators, leading to several injuries. Security at camp was deteriorating, Harmon allegedly told Fallis. She needed to protect herself.

Fallis saw the change at camp as well as anyone. When she’d first arrived in August, she’d been friendly with the police, offering them tobacco and joking around. In September, she was arrested a second time while protesting. In her recollection, plastic handcuffs were pulled so tightly around her wrists that they went numb. She heard officers shouting at female protesters, telling them they were stupid for bringing children to camp. Fallis felt differently. This is how you teach your children to stand up for what’s right, she thought.

At Harmon’s urging, she agreed to move to a quieter part of camp, where one of her relatives had a trailer. Soon after, according to Fallis, Harmon began offering to help with the resistance. Until then he’d been a bystander, supporting Fallis from the wings. Now he seemed to want to get involved. Fallis found it strange when he suggested risky actions. One day, Harmon offered to drive Fallis and two friends on a reconnaissance trip along the pipeline’s planned path. Mia Sage Stevens, who was in the truck, remembered Harmon suggesting that the women tear up the flags that marked the route—the sort of behavior that might draw backlash from the police or private security. “He said we could do it at nighttime, and we just blew it off,” Stevens said.

Then came the suggestion that Fallis and her friends arm themselves. Karen Antelope remembered Harmon approaching her one day as she was repairing a fence and saying, “We gotta secure our territory here.” He offered to bring metal poles to bolster the fence—along with ammunition.

Harmon brought up the subject again, Antelope claimed, after she mentioned a security guard who’d raced around camp in a vehicle, scaring her. Antelope recalled Harmon suggesting that he provide her and Fallis with weapons. “It made me wonder why he was so gung ho with guns,” Antelope said.

Harmon’s radical turn worried Fallis, too. What was motivating him? He used to give her flowers and play love songs; now he showed up with items like a gas mask and a bulletproof vest, saying that she needed to protect herself. When Harmon first told her she should have a gun, she was unnerved.

“What are we going to do with guns here?” Fallis asked.

“You can bury them,” she remembered Harmon replying.

“I’m a felon. I can’t have guns around,” she said, referring to her 2003 conviction.

Antelope saw the new version of Harmon as pushy. He and Fallis “fought all the time, argued all the time,” Antelope said, “because she talked to everybody, many of them males, and he didn’t like that at all.” In a way, his behavior didn’t surprise Fallis: Of course their love had been too good to be true. Of course she hadn’t hit the romance jackpot. The progression of their relationship was typical of every bond she’d ever had with men. By October, Fallis was considering breaking things off.

She became more convinced that it might be time to move on as she got to know an activist and musician named Cempoalli Twenny, who’d dropped everything in Los Angeles, where he lived, to come to Standing Rock. Twenny wore a goatee and dreadlocks and made reggae-inflected music. He was a longtime advocate for Native rights and saw connections between the pipeline protests and other social struggles. He often played his guitar at camp, and he shared events from Standing Rock on social media.

Still, when Harmon’s birthday arrived in mid-October, Fallis tried to salvage what they had. She baked a cake and threw a party, but the mood at the gathering was tense. Around the same time, Fallis and Harmon fought at his mother’s home, a suburban split-level. Harmon’s brother, Chad, was there, and he chided Harmon for bringing Fallis to the house.

“Why don’t you tell her the real reason you’re at camp?” he asked.

When Fallis asked Harmon what his brother meant, he brushed her off. He said Chad was just accusing him of being at camp to “chase tail.” Fallis wondered if Harmon was telling the truth. She’d been taught never to lie. Lying was what the government did. It wasn’t something that should happen between lovers.

On October 27, Fallis went for an early dinner at a steakhouse with Harmon and his mother. She didn’t feel like having a good time. Things with Harmon were still rough, and it was Yellow Wood’s birthday, the first since her death. After the meal, Fallis checked her phone and saw worrying messages and posts. “No more excuses get to Standing Rock now,” one read. “The next seven generations are depending on you.”

Twenny, the musician Fallis admired, was live-streaming a demonstration that had just started at camp. “We’re being surrounded,” he said, turning the camera from his face to take in what was happening around him. Some 300 police officers had arrived wearing riot gear and carrying guns and batons. Armored vehicles rolled in behind them. They had instructions to clear out demonstrators along Highway 1806 who were directly in the pipeline’s path, which law enforcement considered a safety issue. “They have loaded guns, they have live ammunition,” Twenny said. “It’s time to rise up.… Pray hard, stand strong, this is ground zero, this is treaty land, this is our land.”

Fallis felt a sharp stab of guilt and panic as she scrolled through the news. The whole point of coming to Standing Rock was to honor her mother. Now, on the most critical day of the fight, she wasn’t there. She told Harmon they had to get to camp right away.

They sped south to Standing Rock and stopped at the trailer where they’d been staying. Fallis grabbed a fire extinguisher and gas mask in case fires broke out or the police used pepper spray. She put on a camouflage baseball cap, shouldered a backpack, and told Harmon she’d ride her ATV over to where the eviction was happening. Harmon agreed to drive a pickup and meet her there. Just before she left, Fallis later alleged, Harmon told her to take a large black and gray jacket. She was wearing a coat already, but he insisted that she needed another one to keep warm while zipping through the autumn chill on her four-wheeler.

As she rode, Fallis noticed that the coat felt lopsided. It was heavier on one side than the other. There was something in one of the pockets.

That something was Harmon’s Ruger LCR, a .38 Special revolver so compact that firearms websites regularly vote it among the best guns for concealed carry. It weighs about a pound when loaded. According to Fallis, she found the gun when she put her hand in the pocket. In a split-second decision, she decided to leave the weapon where it was, rather than dispose of it before encountering police.

By the time Fallis arrived, the battalion of officers had already swept through camp, shouting “Time’s up!” as they ripped tents from the ground and made arrests. A private guard, chased by protestors into a pond, stood in the water brandishing an assault rifle. Fallis could see that a barricade the water protectors had set up to prevent police from gaining ground was in flames. Someone told her that a demonstrator on a horse had been shot; it wasn’t clear if he’d been hit with rubber bullets or real ones. Fallis, who’d found it difficult to show emotion even when Yellow Wood died, began to cry. She looked around for Harmon but couldn’t find him.

What happened next was chaotic, and Fallis’s memory of it is hazy. So are the recollections of other people who were there. Several videos of the incident, shot by bystanders and police, are the best evidence of what occurred. Fallis dismounted her ATV and approached a row of police near the highway, shouting through her gas mask. The officers stood in position to block protesters. Six armored vehicles, some with doors open like wings, were parked nearby. The yellow prairie stretched into the distance. Fallis’s words are mostly inaudible in the videos, but her tone and body language make it clear that she’s angry. She later remembered shouting, “You should be ashamed of protecting the pipeline instead of the water.” She pointed accusingly at the police.

Other protestors sang traditional songs or lambasted the cops. Young, Fallis’s aunt, watched the standoff. Neither she nor Fallis saw Harmon arrive in his truck. He parked away from the scene and walked in a wide arc across the highway.

About three minutes after she began chastising police, Fallis turned away from them. An officer tackled her from behind. She fell to the ground, landing on her back. Heavily armed police tried to flip her over onto her stomach. Other officers moved in to surround the arrest, making it hard for bystanders to see what was going on. “I remember a scuffle,” Fallis told me. “My gas mask was pulled off.” Her mind turned to the revolver in her pocket. “I thought, Crap, I’m a felon, and I’m with a gun,” she recalled.

One video shows a protester asking why the police were using such force on a small woman. Fallis, five feet three inches and 135 pounds, tried to wriggle out from under the men’s weight. Officers pulled on her arms, struggling to get her wrists into plastic handcuffs. Fallis pulled back. She kicked her legs. She contorted her body.

Somewhere near the ground, there were three rapid sounds: pop, pop, pop. They came from Harmon’s revolver.

Police arrested more than 140 people that day. The charges filed by the state of North Dakota against Fallis were by far the most serious, including preventing arrest, carrying a concealed weapon, criminal conspiracy to endanger by fire, engaging in a riot, and attempted murder. On October 31, four days after the protest, Fallis called Harmon from the Burleigh Morton County Detention Center. It was the first of more than two dozen recorded calls between them.

“Hi,” Fallis greeted him uncertainly. She said that she hadn’t seen the news in lockup and didn’t know what people were saying about her. Quietly, Harmon told Fallis that she’d made headlines on the East Coast.

“Like world news?” Fallis asked, her voice rising in panic. “Like national news?”

“Yeah,” Harmon said. At least one story included her mugshot, an awful photo: face puffy, eyes half closed, hair a mess. Harmon joked that it looked like someone had beaten her up. Fallis let out a wild, uncomfortable laugh. When Harmon began reading the article to her, she sobered.

The story reported that she’d fired three shots at police deputies as they tried to move illegal occupiers off private land. It quoted Fallis telling officers afterward that they were lucky she hadn’t shot them. The man who’d tackled her, Thadius Schmit, a cop from South Dakota, said that he’d arrested Fallis for “being an instigator and acting disorderly.” Although no one was hurt when the gun went off, the state’s criminal complaint against Fallis alleged that she’d been trying to kill an officer.

“Oh, my God, they said that I shot at the cops?” Fallis asked Harmon. She was angry now. In her telling, the gun had gone off by accident in the struggle with officers. She couldn’t remember if her hand had been in her pocket or not. She’d been restrained on the ground when the gun fired—how could she have aimed at anyone? “They are so fucking full of shit,” she said.

Harmon tried to keep reading, but she interrupted him. “I’ve heard enough, I’m disgusted, I don’t care,” she said. “They’re just going to fucking make an example out of me.”

Harmon was silent. He said nothing about witnessing her arrest.

“You’re free to walk at any time,” Fallis told him. “I probably would.”

A voice announced over the line that their time was almost up.

“I love you,” Harmon said.

On November 9, Fallis called Harmon again. She was confused. That day she’d learned that she was facing an additional charge—theft of property—because Harmon had reported his revolver stolen the day after her arrest. He’d told police that the weapon had gone missing from his mother’s house sometime in the past few weeks.

“You know that charge I caught today made my shit like ten times worse,” Fallis said.

“I can imagine,” Harmon replied.

“I’m not going to take responsibility for something I didn’t do,” she said. “I don’t know how to feel. I’m, like, over here fucking, like, wanting to fucking die of a broken heart, because I don’t know what the fuck is real or what isn’t anymore.”

Harmon paused before answering. “I’ll make it right,” he said.

The next day, Fallis called Harmon again. She asked why he hadn’t retracted the theft report yet. She was no longer upset; she was furious. Harmon tried to calm her down and said he’d talk to the police soon.

“If you’re not going to fucking tell the truth, then I will, about everything,” Fallis told him.

“Hey, I’m telling you the truth,” Harmon said.

“If you’re not going to tell them the truth about me,” Fallis continued, “and the fact that I didn’t take that from you”—meaning the gun.

Harmon told her that he couldn’t discuss the gun over the phone for legal reasons.

“It’s not OK, because there’s a lot at stake here,” Fallis said through tears. “My life.”

The call cut off.

Over the next few days, Fallis phoned Harmon several more times. In some conversations, he told her that he was sorry and that he loved her. Fallis seemed to believe him. In others, she pressed him. Had he made the report to hurt her? Or to save his own skin when he realized that a gun licensed to him had gone off during the arrest? It didn’t make sense to her. Harmon was taciturn, occasionally reassuring Fallis.

In early December, after Fallis had been in jail for more than a month, Harmon finally met with law enforcement. He didn’t try to exonerate Fallis, however. Harmon said that he’d kept the gun at camp and Fallis had known exactly where it was. He said that she’d loaded up a backpack before driving her ATV to the raid and hadn’t wanted him to look inside. Harmon described Fallis as having an “attitude” the day of the eviction. He said that she’d talked about “going to see [her] mother.”

As for the gun being stolen, Harmon admitted that that was a lie. It wasn’t the only one he’d told in recent months. For most of his relationship with Fallis, Harmon had been working as a paid FBI informant.

Harmon became a confidential source in August 2016. According to documents obtained by Fallis’s lawyers and first reported by The Intercept, Harmon’s task was “to collect information regarding potential violence, weapons, and criminal activity” at Standing Rock. Over the course of two months, he met or spoke with FBI agents at least half a dozen times and reported to his handlers that he’d developed a “sub-source” named Red Fawn, who told him that Native elders were opposed to belligerent actions against the pipeline. On August 22, Harmon estimated that less than 5 percent of the people he’d encountered were “aggressive” and said that he’d seen no firearms, explosives, or fireworks at camp.

The previous week, Morton County sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier had stated publicly that his office had received reports of guns fired at Standing Rock. Water protectors maintained that this wasn’t true. Kirchmeier declined to comment for this story, but Cecily Fong, a spokesperson for the North Dakota Department of Emergency Services, told me that law enforcement had been concerned about potential violence, including “protesters trespassing, marauding around the countryside, killing livestock.” (Fong has since left the department. The North Dakota Stockmen’s Association has stated that it wasn’t aware of any connections between protesters and attacks on farm animals.)

Still, Harmon’s reports focused heavily on the issue of weapons, as though they might turn up if law enforcement willed them to. He mentioned guns to the FBI at least four separate times, though he never claimed to have actually seen one. He also talked about members of AIM, including Phyllis Young. In late August, Harmon said that he’d observed Young addressing protestors and that he’d learned the type of car she was said to drive. An FBI agent wrote in a report, “The CHS [confidential human source] has a family connection as well as direct access to Phyllis Young and her close family and is well-suited to continue coverage of her activities and involvement with the anti-pipeline movement.”

Three weeks before the police raid and Fallis’s arrest, the FBI took Harmon off the books as an informant. According to an unclassified document, Harmon requested termination. The reporting agent noted that he would recommend Harmon as a source again. The FBI paid him $2,000 for his services. (The bureau declined to comment for this story.)

Fallis learned of Harmon’s affiliation while she was in jail. After all the phone calls, all of Harmon’s pledges that he’d make things right, Fallis got the truth from her lawyers.

Her first reaction was denial. She loved Harmon, and he’d been an ally of the water protectors. She’d grown up hearing from Yellow Wood about the surveillance and infiltration tactics the FBI used in the 1960s and ’70s, when it kept close watch over AIM as part of Cointelpro, a project that targeted dissident groups across the country. Fallis also knew that the trauma caused by FBI activity could lead to paranoia. In 1975, an activist named Anna Mae Aquash had been murdered by other AIM members over rumors that she was an informant. (Yellow Wood was one of the last people to see Aquash alive, because Aquash was using her home as a safe house.) Was Fallis misunderstanding or making assumptions about what Harmon had done?

Soon, though, the hurtful, dizzying truth clicked in. A flood of troubling details—maybe signs that she’d missed—washed over Fallis. Harmon’s many evasions. The guns he wanted to bring her. That question from his brother: “Why don’t you tell her the real reason you’re at camp?”

Soon after Fallis learned he’d been an informant, Harmon came to the jail for a visit. He drove with one of Fallis’s aunts, a woman named Theresa Burns. When Burns was ushered in to see Fallis, Harmon was told he couldn’t come. Confused, Burns asked Fallis when they were face-to-face what was going on. Burns remembered Fallis saying she was “freaking out” because she’d just learned that Harmon worked for the FBI. She didn’t want him anywhere near her.

“I have to ride back with him,” Burns said. “I’m scared.”

“Auntie, how do you think I feel?” Fallis asked.

Burns claimed that, after the visit, she confronted Harmon in the car. She asked why he’d set up her niece. According to Burns, Harmon began to cry. “What did you do? Did you plant it on her?” Burns asked, referring to the gun. Harmon said no, and that he’d told the police things about Fallis when their questioning began to scare him. Burns’s head spun. She was a longtime AIM activist, but she’d never heard of anything like this.

She told Harmon that she believed he’d planted the gun. According to Burns, Harmon didn’t reply. She described the remainder of the ride as “chilling.”

Fallis’s other family and friends found out about Harmon soon after that. Karen Antelope was so upset, she couldn’t bring herself to watch the video of Fallis’s arrest. John Reyna felt both betrayed and responsible, because he was the one who’d invited Harmon to camp for the first time. Young, who’d seen men hurt Fallis before, felt only disdain. “He threw her to the wolves,” she said.

Fallis vowed never to see or speak to Harmon again. He was the one who needed help and prayers, she told herself. He’d taken money in exchange for lies and used a woman he claimed to love. She, on the other hand, was Oglala. As she’d once told Harmon in a phone conversation, “I’ll stand proud, like a buffalo. I’ll stand and face the storm.”

In late 2016, the federal government denied Energy Transfer Partners a permit to drill under the Missouri River, effectively stalling the pipeline until President Barack Obama left office. Around the same time, North Dakota dropped its case against Fallis to clear the way for federal charges, including civil disorder, possession of a firearm and ammunition by a convicted felon, and discharge of a firearm in relation to a felony crime of violence. The last charge carried a mandatory minimum sentence of ten years. The maximum penalty was life behind bars.

Fallis put on a good face. News of her predicament was spreading over social media into the wider #NoDAPL movement. Family and friends, with the help of other Standing Rock activists, launched a Free Red Fawn campaign, and some 30,000 people would eventually join its Facebook page. “I’ve been getting messages about a lot of you being concerned and worried,” Fallis wrote on her personal account in January 2017. “I wanted to let you know that I stand strong, I stay in prayer, and I never falter from my beliefs as a protector of all things sacred.”

Supporters held fundraisers in Denver and Los Angeles to help pay her legal fees. Celebrities, including actors Mark Ruffalo and Shailene Woodley, spoke out in support of Fallis. A petition on Change.org to drop all charges against her drew more than 20,000 signatures. Some of Fallis’s supporters tried to track down Harmon, without success. He was no longer living at his mother’s house outside Bismarck, and none of his old phone numbers worked. In lieu of confronting him in person, people dug up information: Harmon had once been arrested for criminal mischief. His alcoholism had led to four DUIs in seven years. He’d racked up charges for driving with a suspended license.

Supporters began referring to Fallis as a new Leonard Peltier, referencing the AIM activist sentenced in 1977 to two consecutive life terms for shooting federal agents on the Pine Ridge reservation, where Fallis was born. Many believed Peltier was framed, especially after journalist Peter Matthiessen published his 1983 book, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, which alleged government misconduct in the case. Bruce Ellison, Peltier’s lawyer, came out of semiretirement to defend Fallis. A white Jewish man from New York, Ellison had decades of experience with Native clients, and if there was one thing he’d learned in that time, it was that the government thought it could get away with more in Indian country. “I believe that Red Fawn was set up that day to be arrested as a water protector with a gun,” he told me. “Law enforcement had been screaming about that in court and in the media, that water protectors were armed and had explosives, and yet no one had been arrested with a gun.”

In the pretrial process throughout 2017, Fallis’s legal team argued that law enforcement had had no probable cause to arrest her, because she’d merely been exercising her First Amendment rights. They pointed out that the gun belonged to Harmon, as did the coat Fallis was wearing when she was restrained by police. (According to Harmon, the coat belonged to Fallis, and he didn’t tell her to wear it the day of her arrest.) Her lawyers said that she hadn’t intentionally pulled the revolver’s trigger; how it went off was a mystery.

The prosecution, meanwhile, argued that she had meant to fire the gun and that in doing so she’d endangered lives. Police officers present at her arrest wrote in reports that, after the gun went off, Fallis laughed and said things like “All pigs deserve to die” and “If I wanted to kill you, I would have shot you in the head.” Fallis described these accusations as “totally false.” If it sounded like she was laughing, it was only because she was gasping for air after her gas mask was yanked off.

Officers’ statements sometimes conflicted. One said that after the shots rang out, he took the gun from Fallis’s left hand. Another said he saw the gun seized from her right hand. A third said the gun was loose on the ground. Three videos—one taken by a security drone, one shot by a bystander, and another recorded by cops on the scene—do not show Fallis firing the weapon.

Ellison was concerned that the government wasn’t sharing everything it knew about Harmon. The FBI sometimes gave informants a long leash to lead people to commit crimes. Honeypot schemes weren’t unheard of. Ellison found it suspicious that law enforcement had included Fallis in a chart of #NoDAPL activists of concern, created nearly two months before her arrest and not long after she and Harmon met. Ellison didn’t think Harmon’s description of Fallis’s behavior and comments before the eviction raid could be trusted. Harmon had lied to authorities at least once, about the gun being stolen. What would stop him from doing so again?

Fallis’s family agreed. “Those intelligence agencies knew who Red Fawn was, they knew who her mother was, they knew who her family was, and they knew their connections to the American Indian Movement,” said Glenn Morris, Fallis’s uncle. He believed that law enforcement had tried to identify Standing Rock’s leadership in order to neutralize it.

As Fallis’s January 2018 trial approached, it was clear that potential jury members might not see the case that way. At least 91 percent of Bismarck’s population is white, and many residents were opposed to the #NoDAPL demonstrations. A survey from the National Jury Project showed that the vast majority of eligible residents had already decided that arrested water protectors were guilty. Non-Native people sometimes referred to the protests as “the event,” their voices dropping low when they said it. An owner of a country-music bar near Standing Rock told me that his white customers no longer went to the reservation’s casino. A neighbor of Harmon’s mother said that law enforcement had held their temper at camp, but she couldn’t say the same for the other side.

Fallis’s lawyers petitioned the court to move the trial out of state. A judge instead allowed a change of location to Fargo, three hours east of Bismarck. Fallis’s lawyers argued that the jury pool would be similar, and as the trial date approached, Fallis grew nervous. Since October 2017, she’d been in a halfway house. It was better than jail; she could see the outside world, at least. But what if a jury put her away for life? Fighting to prove her innocence, she worried, might not be worth that risk.

The prosecution offered her a plea deal in which her most serious charge—firing the gun—would be dropped if she took responsibility for possessing a weapon as a felon and for the civil disorder charge. The government would recommend no more than seven years in prison. On January 18, 2018, a few days before Fallis was due to appear in court to give the prosecution her answer, she signed out of the halfway house to attend an adult-education program. She never showed up in class. When she returned to the house, it was a half hour after she was due to return. Fallis went back to jail.

Her family learned that she’d skipped class to be with Cempoalli Twenny, the musician from Standing Rock. Since Fallis’s arrest, Twenny had been championing her cause, pledging on social media that he wouldn’t stop saying her name until she was free. He’d also begun calling her as often as he could. Unlike Harmon and other men Fallis had dated, Twenny didn’t shower her with compliments, gifts, or promises. He listened quietly when she spoke and reminded her that each day was a new day. If she got upset or angry, he told her to pray. “He’s brought me so much kindness and unconditional love,” Fallis told me.

Fallis had needed to talk about the plea deal with someone she trusted. She’d chosen Twenny. The following Monday, Fallis appeared in court. She’d come to the only decision that made sense to her. The judge asked if she pled guilty. A long silence followed. Finally, Fallis answered, “Yes.”

Fallis’s sentencing was scheduled for June 25, 2018, the anniversary of the Battle of the Greasy Grass. Per the plea agreement, the prosecutors recommended a cap of seven years in prison, but the judge could go higher. Fallis’s team thought she would get at least three to five years.

The day of the hearing, her supporters gathered at a downtown Bismarck hotel. From there they planned to go together to the courthouse. They were fidgety with anticipation. Fallis’s aunts and uncles came, along with her sisters and friends. Neiamiah, Yellow Wood’s great-grandson, wore a “Free Red Fawn” T-shirt that featured a photo of Fallis, her fist raised. Twenny stood in the back of the room wearing a denim vest with “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse” stitched onto it. He had a newly inked tattoo on his hand: Red Fawn’s name.

Ellison arrived with bad news. The judge in the case was sick, and sentencing would be delayed. Twenny made a video call to Fallis in jail. He handed the phone to Neiamiah, who said “I love you” in a whisper. “I love you,” Fallis whispered back. Neiamiah flipped the phone’s camera around to show her everyone who was there.

“I’m kind of all talked out,” Fallis told the crowd, then took a deep breath. “I’m an Oglala Sioux Lakota,” she continued. “So I’m born free, I live free, and I’ll die free.” She ended with the old Lakota cry—lelelele!—and much of the room joined in.

Fallis was sentenced a few weeks later, on July 11, 2018, in Bismarck’s federal courthouse. When she arrived, she was shackled at her wrists and dressed in a traditional ribbon skirt decorated with sunflowers, her mother’s favorite. The defense asked for leniency, pointing out that President Donald Trump had recently pardoned two white cattle ranchers in Oregon who’d set fires that spread to government land. It called four witnesses, a last-ditch attempt to sway the judge to hand down less prison time. A neurophysiologist testified that if Fallis had had her hand on the gun, she might have accidentally discharged it in a reactive grip response to how the officers had pulled on her arms. Fallis’s childhood psychologist, to whom she’d showed her dream journal, spoke of her history of trauma and domestic violence, which left her vulnerable to further abuse and manipulation. Glenn Morris testified that the case wasn’t just about Fallis—it was about her community, too. “It’s often not the big traumas that affect us. It’s the million everyday things,” Morris said. “Being ridiculed for her name because she’s a Native woman, and on Columbus Day. Being told there was a war and she lost and everyone else won and get over it. Well, she’s not going to get over it. She has this history in her heart and in her blood.”

Fallis had the opportunity to speak. “I came to North Dakota in August 2016 with a good heart and a good mind after watching my mom battle cancer and battle life,” she said. “After her death, I wanted to move forward in a positive light. I helped anyone at camp that I could. It started a new chapter. And then the circumstances of Heath Harmon.”

It was the only time his name was mentioned in the hearing. Fallis said that she wouldn’t be sitting in the courtroom that day if it weren’t for him.

Judge Daniel Hovland sighed as he surveyed the room. “I’m not going to go down the path of trying to determine Ms. Fallis’s intent in the midst of the chaos,” he said. He called her supporters’ campaign for her release “much ado about nothing.” Then he announced Fallis’s sentence: 57 months in federal prison, minus time served.

The prosecutors nodded, satisfied with the verdict. Ellison bowed his head, knowing it was the best he could expect.

By the time Fallis was sentenced, oil was already flowing through the Dakota Access Pipeline. Mere days after taking office in January 2017, Trump had signed an executive memorandum to move forward with the project. The Sioux asked a district court for a restraining order to block construction, but the request was denied. The Army Corps of Engineers never completed a full environmental review of the project. It was an undeniable defeat for the protestors.

At Standing Rock, many of the water protectors—freezing, angry, and exhausted—packed up and went home. Those who remained eventually burned what was left of camp. They hoped the tall fires, at least, would symbolize their defiance. Stragglers were forcibly removed by law enforcement, and by the summer of 2017, some protesters had reassembled at other pipeline fights in Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Louisiana.

Harmon moved on, too. For seven months while I reported this story, he was a ghost. Phone numbers were disconnected, an email address was inactive, and he seemed to have no presence on social media. His lawyer didn’t respond to any of my phone calls. Word that he’d left Bismarck and gotten a job in oil fields led to stops across North Dakota at derricks and workers’ camps, but no one seemed to know his name.

A public-records search got a hit in Billings, Montana, where Harmon had reported his address at an apartment complex. When I got to the city in the middle of winter, the snow was thick and deep, blanketing everything in an eerie quiet. Harmon no longer lived at the address I’d found. At the Billings Police Department, I learned that he had a record—not for a crime he’d committed, but for one he’d reported. In July 2018, a few days after Fallis was sentenced in North Dakota, Harmon had called the cops because he’d found a child wandering the streets with no parents around. The address for him listed on the report was different than the one online. It led me to a tan house with wind chimes and a box of dog food on the porch. No one answered the bell, and a neighbor told me that Harmon was long gone.

A few weeks later, out of the blue, Harmon called me. He talked slowly and was tentative at first. He told me he wanted to set the record straight. He was trying to start a new relationship, and the woman didn’t want to date him after reading the negative media coverage of his involvement with Fallis and the FBI. He called while on a long drive from Bismarck to Wyoming, where the woman lived and where he hoped to win her over. We talked for nearly two hours.

He told me about how he’d wanted to be a Navy SEAL but was discharged from the Army due to an injury, cutting his career short. He’d worked a host of jobs: as a carpenter, doing construction, in oil fields. When the pipeline protests started, he was interested in collecting intelligence for law enforcement because he “didn’t want anybody to get hurt.” He explained that he’d believed in the protestors’ cause but was worried about potential violence, so he’d asked his brother for a number to contact the FBI. (When reached by phone, Chad Harmon said he didn’t give his brother a phone number for the bureau and didn’t help him get the informant job.)

Confirming the contents of the FBI documents I’d read, Harmon described his assignment as looking out for firearms, drugs, and criminal behavior at camp. He denied suggesting that Fallis and her friends destroy flags along the pipeline’s path. He said that he and Fallis were attracted to each other but that the relationship was never romantic. He had excuses for each act that might be construed as expressing serious interest in her: The saddle wasn’t a gift symbolizing his commitment to Fallis, it was just something he wanted her grandfather to have. He’d always liked to play the traditional wooden flute. And the ring—the one that Fallis had told Phyllis Young signified her engagement—was just plastic.

Harmon also said that he’d never told Fallis he loved her. I pointed out that in the jail phone recordings, he says “I love you” multiple times. There was a long silence. I could hear rain and the windshield wipers on Harmon’s car. “Love is a broad, broad word,” he finally said. “I was caught up in the moment, and I didn’t really mean it.”

He claimed that he’d never used his relationship with Fallis to help his work as an informant, but he admitted that he’d talked to the FBI about her, warning agents of her family’s AIM connections. He said that he quit being a confidential source when it made him uneasy; the Standing Rock protesters wouldn’t look kindly on a snitch. As for the gun, Harmon said he’d brought it to camp to protect himself and Fallis.

“How did she get the gun on the day of the raid?” I asked.

Another long pause.

“I don’t know, grabbed it,” he eventually said. “She knew where it was. I didn’t see her take it, but after I heard the shooting I put two and two together.”

As for his shifting story about the gun, he told me he’d lied about the weapon being stolen because he was afraid of being blamed for the shooting. He felt no responsibility for Fallis being in prison—she’d brought that upon herself.

“I think she had that plan to kill a police officer,” he said.

Harmon saw himself as a victim of media coverage that portrayed him as a traitor to Fallis and his culture. He paused and sniffed, as if he were about to cry. “This follows me around,” he said, “and there’s nothing I can do about it.” Soon after, we hung up.

The next morning, Harmon called me again. His talk with the woman in Wyoming had gone well enough, and he wanted me to forget everything he’d said. He told me that he’d made a mistake in talking. “It’s been like a shit storm all the way around,” Harmon said. “My trust in anyone is zero now.”

After Fallis was sentenced, she was scheduled to move to FMC Carswell, a federal women’s prison in Fort Worth, Texas, that housed nearly two thousand inmates. When I talked to her before the transfer, she seemed upbeat. Fort Worth was far from her family and friends but also from Bismarck, and she was grateful for that. She’d heard that the prison held other indigenous inmates, and she was excited to meet them. She said that she’d maintain her traditions behind bars, the way Yellow Wood would have wanted her to. She was going to become fluent in the Lakota tongue. Maybe she’d try to write a book about the struggles of Native American women—specifically, how men so often treat them like objects. “All I can speak on is my truth,” she said.

She told me about the vivid dreams she’d been having, just like when she was a kid. In one, the first man she ever dated came back to apologize for abusing her. He and Fallis sat across from each other at a table, then Yellow Wood came in and told him it was time to go. “That was a really beautiful dream,” Fallis said. “That relationship shaped a lot of my life with men.”

Once Fallis got to Carswell, I wrote to her several times but didn’t hear back. The only person in regular touch with her was Twenny. He called her in prison almost daily. On his Facebook page, he wrote that each new day was one closer to her release. During a visit in December 2018, they talked through monitors for 45 minutes before Twenny had to leave.

Just before Fallis’s 40th birthday the following February, she was put in administrative segregation. Twenny told me that the move was due to a prison scuffle. I asked him if he was worried, and he gave a small laugh. “Well, she won,” he said.

He told me Fallis was a beautiful soul and that he was confident they’d be together when she was released, which was then 774 days away. He told me how much he loved her.

The Trigger Effect

In September 2017, a police officer shot and killed a queer college student in Atlanta. By the end of the year, several of the student’s friends had been arrested, and two were dead. What happened at Georgia Tech? 

By Hallie Lieberman

The 911 caller’s voice was calm, almost cheerful.

“Hey, I’m up at West Village,” the person said, referring to a cluster of buildings at the Georgia Institute of Technology, better known as Georgia Tech. “It looks like there’s somebody, like, skulking around outside. It looks like he’s got—he’s got a knife in his hand. I think he might have a gun on his hip.”

It was 11:17 p.m. on September 16, 2017, a humid Saturday night. The university had resumed classes for the fall semester less than a month prior. A report of a potential gunman on Georgia Tech’s campus, situated in the heart of Atlanta, triggered emergency texts and tweets urging students to find shelter. Campus police were dispatched to West Village, located less than a third of a mile from their headquarters, to assess the situation. Was there really an armed man? If so, did he intend to harm himself or someone else? In the era of school shootings, tragedy that feels at once familiar and devastating is always just a trigger pull away.

“It looks like he might be drunk or something,” the 911 caller said, trying to provide a clear picture of the suspicious man. “He’s got long blond hair, white T-shirt, jeans.”

The dispatcher repeated the description and noted it in his records. Then he asked for the caller’s name, in case the police needed it.

“Uh, sure,” the caller said. “Scott Schultz.”

At that moment, Cat Monden was dashing around West Village, searching for her best friend, Scout. A bespectacled computer-engineering major, Scout had shown up at Monden’s door earlier that night, a green and white shoebox in hand. “Consider it a belated birthday present,” Monden heard Scout say, before her friend shoved the box into her hands and walked away without another word.

After closing the door, Monden went back to the couch, where she and another friend had settled in for the night to watch television. Monden thought it odd that Scout would come and go so abruptly. Even odder was what was inside the shoebox—all of Scout’s Magic: The Gathering cards, bearing images of fantastical wizards, beasts, and weaponry. Any obsessive player of the game, which both Monden and Scout were, knows that the cards are expensive and can take years to collect. Giving them away is tantamount to announcing that you’ll never play again.

There was something else in the box—a note to Monden. It thanked her for being the best friend Scout had ever had.

Monden and Scout had found each other in Georgia Tech’s tightly knit community of LGBTQ students. Monden was a petite black transgender woman, and Scout was white, bisexual, intersex, and nonbinary—that is, gendered neither male nor female and using the pronouns they and them. Monden and Scout were involved in Georgia Tech’s Pride Alliance. By 2017, Scout was in their second year as president of the student advocacy group. Like many LGBTQ youth, Scout, who was 21, struggled with mental-health issues, including thoughts of suicide. Though they boasted a 3.9 GPA and the admiration of fellow students committed to progressive activism, Scout had tried to kill themself at least once before.

The note in the shoebox wasn’t explicit, but Monden recognized it as a cry for help. She sprang off the couch and ran out into the hallway, leaving her keys in the apartment as she went.

After descending the building’s main stairway, her first stop was Scout’s apartment, located on the first floor. Monden banged furiously on the door until she was greeted by a bewildered roommate. Together they went into Scout’s room; it was empty. Another roommate walked into the common area and asked what was going on. “We can’t find Scout,” Monden said.

The trio hurried out of the apartment, planning to search West Village and beyond, if necessary. They spotted blue lights bouncing off nearby walls—the beams of police cruisers’ emergency lights. A fellow student warned them away from Eighth Street, which ran in front of the housing complex. The cops were trying to deal with a guy who was walking in the road, carrying a knife.

Several officers from the Georgia Tech Police Department (GTPD) had shown up in response to the 911 call. They spotted the man described to dispatch walking shoeless in front of a parking deck adjacent to a Wing Zone franchise, popular among students craving late-night calories. The man moved slowly, as if dragging his bare feet across the pavement required real effort. His shoulders were hunched and his arms hung limply at his sides. In his right hand, he clutched a small multitool that included a screwdriver and a short blade.

“C’mon, man, drop the knife,” one of the officers shouted. The cops all had their weapons trained on the suspect.

“Shoot me,” the man replied, continuing his measured advance.

“Nobody wants to hurt you, man,” a cop said. “Drop the knife.”

The man seemed unsure what to do. For a few seconds, he sped up his pace. Then he froze before again moving slowly toward the officers. Some of them backed up, giving him room. They kept their guns raised.

By then, Monden was just down the street, watching from the sidewalk in horror. She knew the person the police were trying to subdue. It wasn’t a man—it was Scout.

“Speak,” an officer shouted. Scout was silent. The cops asked for a name. Nothing. The officers ordered Scout not to move. Scout didn’t listen.

Instead, Scout kept walking, getting within 20 feet of one of the cops, a 23-year-old named Tyler Beck. Students peered out of dorm windows, and Monden looked on helplessly. With his colleagues arrayed around him, Beck pulled the trigger of his gun. There was a flash of light, and then a bullet tore into Scout’s body. They fell face forward onto Eighth Street. A video of the moment, captured by an onlooker’s cell phone, shows Scout’s prone body through a veil of leaves hanging from one of the young trees lining the road.

Monden released a mournful, guttural scream. Scout’s roommates grabbed her arms to stop her from running toward her friend, afraid that she, too, would be shot. Monden broke free and bolted at the cops. One of them restrained her. “We should put cuffs on this girl,” she heard another officer say.

Perhaps because Scout’s roommates pleaded with them, insisting that she wasn’t a danger, the police decided not to detain Monden. An ambulance arrived to transport Scout to the hospital. Monden went back to her apartment to get a phone charger, then ran from car to car on Eighth Street, banging on windows and begging through tears for someone to drive her to the ER. Finally, she gave up and sprinted away, heading toward the hospital.

Soon after, a text alert went out to the Georgia Tech community: “There is no longer a threat to campus.”

Monden arrived at the hospital desperate for word of Scout’s condition. Other friends joined her in the ER waiting room, where they huddled together in disbelief. At one point, a stranger with dried blood caked on her shirt approached them. “What happened?” she asked, concern in her voice. “You kids look like somebody died.”

Monden and her friends weren’t sure if someone had, and the doctors wouldn’t tell them. Law enforcement and university administrators milled around the waiting room, but whatever they knew they kept to themselves. Scout’s parents were en route from Lilburn, Georgia, a 30-minute drive from Atlanta. As Scout’s next of kin, they would be updated first.

One by one, Scout’s friends went home to get some sleep, including Monden. By the time she woke up, before dawn, the news was spreading: Scout was dead.

A press release issued at 6:45 a.m. by Georgia Tech’s dean of students described a “sudden and tragic death.” It didn’t mention what had transpired on Eighth Street; it didn’t specify that Scout had been shot by campus police. “We have communicated directly and offered our support and deepest sympathies to Scout’s family,” the release concluded. “At times like these, we are reminded of the importance of coming together in support, understanding, and care for one another.” Two statements issued later the same day, including one from Georgia Tech’s president, G.P. “Bud” Peterson, also omitted salient details. One described Scout’s death as “the result of an incident.” (University officials declined to comment for this story.)

For anyone who knew Scout, the pieces of the puzzle quickly fell into place. Scout had left several notes, including the one in the shoebox. Videos from the confrontation at West Village showed Scout begging the police to shoot. Then there was the 911 call from a seemingly cool and collected bystander. Scout’s last name was Schultz, and Scott was their birth name, the one they’d used before coming out. Scout had placed the emergency call.

Within 48 hours of the shooting, Georgia Tech was engulfed in crisis. Ideological fissures about police brutality, free speech, and gender identity snaked through campus, similar to divisions appearing in communities throughout the United States. In 2017, at least 28 transgender or nonbinary people in the U.S. died in violent incidents; Scout was the third in September alone. Scout’s parents retained a lawyer. “Let’s face it,” their stepfather, Bill Schultz, told me. “I watched Black Lives Matter. This time it was my kid.” Many people at the university, however, felt differently. Scout “was acting as a danger to everyone in the proximity,” a commenter on the Reddit thread r/gatech wrote. “What is this person a victim of? Their own actions? Play stupid games. Win stupid prizes.”

Was Beck to blame for shooting a vulnerable student or commendable for making a tough call about a threat? How exactly should grieving students be allowed to respond to fatal violence? I set out to write this story not so much to answer these questions as to trace their impact, as well as the lingering trauma of Scout’s death. After a flurry of national coverage, the shooting faded from headlines. Yet at Georgia Tech, where I’m an instructor in gender studies and journalism, the event was only beginning to take its toll. LGBTQ students felt it most acutely, and each frustration, indignity, and misunderstanding they experienced added to the burden. For some of these young people, the weight became too intolerable to bear.

What follows is a story of aftermath—of a community forced to navigate the emotional wreckage wrought by a wave of shock, anger, and confusion. Within a few weeks of Scout’s death, several of their friends were arrested. Within three months, two were dead. Now, almost a year after the shooting, the official narrative of the event is still being written. But by whom?

Scout was born in 1995, in Rockville, Maryland, and raised by their mother, Lynne, for the first 18 months of their life. Scout was still a towheaded toddler when Lynne started corresponding online with a defense contractor and Vietnam veteran named Bill Schultz who lived in Southern California. Meeting a romantic interest on the internet was unusual in the late 1990s, but Bill was more comfortable with the virtual world than most people. He’d worked on the development of Darpanet, the precursor to the internet, and gotten his first email address in 1972. Bill and Lynne moved to Iowa together, where they married and had a second child. Scout took Bill’s last name.

Scout was precocious: funny, creative, and a math whiz. Friends of the Schultzes sometimes described Scout as “scary smart.” They were also a perfectionist, always in pursuit of straight A’s, perhaps as a way to maintain a sense of identity and stability as they bounced from school to school. New jobs and subsequent firings or layoffs took the Schultzes to Missouri then on to Kansas. At one point the family had so little money that they lived in a tent in a city park for two weeks. “I was actually relieved, in a way, when Scout got a B,” Lynne said, “so they could see that it’s not the end of the world.”

Scout faced an unusual array of health challenges, including ulcerative colitis and migraines. They also had an anatomical condition called hypospadias, in which the urethral opening is in an atypical position, usually on the underside of the penis. Doctors assured Scout’s mother that hypospadias was merely a urinary issue, but it can also be an indicator that a child is intersex.

As they matured, Scout became an unabashed nerd. They collected Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh cards and played Minecraft, Dungeons and Dragons, and Magic: The Gathering with friends. They also became obsessed with Latin. In high school, which they attended in Georgia after yet another family move, Scout became fluent in the classical language, using it in text messages and teaching their dog to sit on Latin command. Scout also began to experiment with gender presentation, donning flowing gowns and lipstick in school plays.

Scout got a scholarship to Georgia Tech and was so excited to attend that they started early, in the summer of 2014. In many ways, the school was a perfect fit. It has always taken pride in nurturing geeks, from gamers to mathletes. It lacks the party-school atmosphere of other state schools, including the University of Georgia, and only a quarter of its students are involved in Greek life. Students focus on academics almost to a fault. According to a recent university report, “Data from the 2011 National College Health Assessment revealed that 89.9 percent of Georgia Tech students reported they were ‘very stressed’ while the national rate was 52.9 percent.”  

Scout thrived academically, and they joined the Pride Alliance, a diverse group that for many members served as a kind of campus family. All students were welcome, no matter their race, gender identity, or sexual orientation, so long as they were committed to inclusion. Georgia Tech’s LGBTQ den mother was a black transgender woman named Kirby Jackson, who sported a short afro and rectangular glasses. She was protective, witty, kind, and candid. “Kirby was really the first person who reached out to me and said, ‘I want to make you feel safe here on campus,’” said Naiki Kaffezakis, a student who is transgender. Jackson founded a transgender support group called T+, which had lean beginnings. “She would sit in a room for a couple hours at a time on a weekly basis,” Kaffezakis said of Jackson, “just in case other people showed up and just in case other people needed support.”  

Through the Pride Alliance, Scout came under Jackson’s wing and met fellow LGBTQ students like Kaffezakis, a double major in nuclear engineering and physics. On National Coming Out Day, October 11, of their sophomore year, Scout announced their identity and orientation for the first time. They shaved a beard they’d worn for a while and wore brightly patterned clothing, glad to draw attention to themself.

Scout seemed so happy in their skin that their mom, Lynne, was stunned to get a call from Georgia Tech’s counseling center one day. “Your son tried to hang himself from his bunk bed with a belt,” Lynne recalled the person on the line saying. The belt had snapped; Scout wasn’t injured. Still, their loved ones had missed the signs that they were hurting.

According to a 2014 survey, 45 percent of trans and nonbinary people 18 to 24 have attempted suicide. By the time Scout tried to take their own life, Georgia Tech had identified that it had a suicide problem—and not just among LGBTQ students. According to a survey of students who use the university’s counseling center, the number “who have ever attempted suicide … has steadily increased from 5.9 percent (2014) to 7.1 percent (2015) to 8.5 percent (2016) to 9.5 percent (2017).”

Scout started seeing an on-site counselor, but their family quickly realized that the resources on campus were inadequate. There was just one counselor for roughly every 1,500 students and a cap on the number of sessions (16) that a student could access over their college career. Scout started taking medication and seeing caregivers off campus, covered by their parents’ insurance. “It seemed like Scout got better after a few months,” Lynne recalled.

Scout continued to earn good grades, was elected president of the Pride Alliance, and demonstrated an interest in social justice that extended beyond LGBTQ issues. They got involved with Black Lives Matter and joined a chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. They toyed with anarchist ideas. In the winter of 2017, not long after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Scout cofounded the Progressive Students Alliance (PSA). The group’s first action was marching against the introduction of House Bill 51, intended to prevent universities from preemptively investigating sexual-assault allegations on campus in Title IX hearings. Under the proposed law, suspected felonies, including assaults, would be referred to the local police. Believing that the bill would silence survivors by making them afraid to come forward, PSA students marched from Georgia Tech to the state capitol on March 3, 2017. A few weeks later, the senate tabled the bill.

For every one of Scout’s milestones there was a stressor. The Pride Alliance lost its dedicated space when the school repurposed it and other student groups’ offices for the Greek system to use. The development wasn’t unprecedented: Many of Georgia Tech’s campus groups don’t have offices, including some religious organizations. Still, the loss weighed on the group’s president. Scout “felt the Pride Alliance was more and more disrespected,” Bill Schultz said. “I think Scout took some of the blame for that on themself.” Scout moved the Pride Alliance’s materials into their dorm room. What wouldn’t fit they stowed in their parents’ garage.

Scout also grappled with the euphoria and pain of first love. At a party one night during their junior year, Scout met a slender student from Georgia State University, also located in Atlanta. Dallas Punja was the child of Pakistani immigrants and gender-queer. She was a devoted fan of the web comic Homestuck, about a computer game that accidentally destroys the earth, and the animated show Steven Universe. Scout also loved Steven Universe. The pair spent the party cuddling by a bonfire while Monden danced nearby. Before long, Scout and Punja were dating. Scout even brought Punja home to Lilburn, where Punja greeted Scout’s mom with fake yellow flowers because, she said, they would never die.

Punja wasn’t out to her family and struggled with depression and borderline personality disorder. She’d tried to kill herself twice by taking pills, and she’d once gone to a bridge intending to jump off, changing her mind only at the last moment. Scout tried to quell Punja’s self-loathing.

“feels like i’m repulsive,” Punja messaged Scout once.

“you are Not,” Scout responded. “you are beautiful and I love you sooo much.”

In another message, Scout said, “i’m very tense and anxious. together we can be the splendid combination, like peanut butter and jelly: depression and anxiety.”  

Like many young people’s relationships, the flame Scout and Punja shared burned bright and fast. During the summer before Scout’s senior year, they broke up. According to Kaffezakis, however, “Scout was still very much in love with Dallas.”

By the fall semester, the Pride Alliance had been working for almost a year with Tech Ends Suicide Together, a campaign to educate students about warning signs and encourage referrals to the counseling center. In a photo posted on Facebook in support of the initiative, a handful of Pride Alliance members cup their right hands into an O shape, signifying the goal of zero suicides on campus. Scout stands in the back of the group wearing a tie-dyed shirt, shoulder-length hair parted to one side, and a slight, inscrutable smile above a dimpled chin. Close by sits Cat Monden in a Pepsi T-shirt and black cap.

Unlike Scout’s parents, Monden’s father, with whom she’d lived during high school, hadn’t been wholly supportive when she’d told him she was transgender. He’d encouraged her to “try girls first” and refused to let her take hormones. College hadn’t made life easier, exactly; Monden still felt like an outsider. But the Pride Alliance was a home base and safe space, and Scout was her closest confidante. Whether playing fantasy games, decorating a float for Atlanta’s Pride parade, or talking about their dreams for the future, the two were inseparable.

As part of Tech Ends Suicide Together, Monden would have learned that people who want to kill themselves often start giving important possessions away. Nothing, though, could prepare her for receiving Scout’s Magic: The Gathering cards, then watching her best friend die in the street. Her thoughts turned to suicide, too, and she wasn’t alone. “It was almost like a weird game of chicken about who would go through with it first,” Monden said of her friends. “We were all feeling this way but trying to persevere.”

Georgia Tech set up emergency counseling sessions for students, but Monden said she was never contacted individually. “Nobody from Georgia Tech reached out,” said Bailey Becker, the friend Monden was hanging out with the night of the shooting. “That has been an ongoing theme.”

As media coverage of Scout’s death exploded, the Schultzes were troubled by a refrain they heard over and over. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) had been tasked with investigating the shooting, and in a much quoted statement released on Sunday, September 17, the day after the incident, it described Scout as “armed with a knife.” The phrase echoed through local news broadcasts, and in a headline The Chicago Tribune described Scout as a “knife-wielding” student. The Schultzes knew Scout wasn’t violent—not the type of person to carry a knife, much less threaten anyone with it. The evidence was in their favor: The only weapon recovered from the scene was Scout’s multitool, and its blade wasn’t extended.  

By Monday afternoon, less than 48 hours after the shooting, Scout’s parents decided to defend their child publicly. Along with their lawyer, L. Chris Stewart, who’d helped represent the family of Walter Scott, the black man shot eight times in the back by a police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, the Schultzes held a press conference. They were in the midst of a divorce but put up a united front. Bill, a tall, heavyset man with stooped shoulders and long brown hair gathered into a ponytail, wore a gray suit, orange button-down shirt, and wire-rim glasses. Lynne, her eyes moist, wore her strawberry-blond hair draped over her shoulders and the straps of her floral sundress. She looked a lot like Scout.

Stewart dramatically unsheathed a large knife and held it up for the press to see. This, he explained, was not what had been in Scout’s possession. Stewart then displayed a multitool like the one Scout had been holding. Next he unveiled a blown-up photograph of the actual tool, taken by a member of the media who’d seen it lying on the pavement where Scout fell.

Then the Schultzes spoke. Bill described “all the people on campus who loved and respected and adored Scout.” His voice seething with dismay, he asked why the police hadn’t tried harder to deescalate the situation. “Whatever happened, it shouldn’t have ended in a death,” Bill said. When Lynne got to the microphone, she seemed to weigh each word in her mouth, as if afraid of letting one slip out too quickly. “Scout had a very promising future, or would have,” she said. “He—I mean Scout,” Lynne continued, correcting her pronoun usage, “stood up for what they believed in. This is a really big loss for a lot of people.”

She stopped speaking and cast her eyes downward, searching. After a pause she whispered, “I don’t know what else to say.”

People grieved, together and alone. One of Scout’s roommates couldn’t bear to stay in her campus apartment, where everything from the posters on the wall to an alarm clock on a table reminded her of Scout. She slept on a friend’s couch instead. On social media, Dallas Punja, Scout’s ex-partner, wrote, “no one gives a fuck about trans people but trans people,” and “s//cout didn’t approve of me drinking this much but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ they’re dead! so!! who cares what they thought!!! they sure don’t think it anymore!!!!” Punja added, “#i can’t wait till I fucking pass out and stop having s/c/out thoughts.” A makeshift memorial appeared next to a tree on Eighth Street—pictures of Scout, a teddy bear wearing a Georgia Tech T-shirt, bouquets of flowers, cards with messages scrawled inside. “You’re a world changer,” one read. “Rest in Power.”

The PSA organized a campus vigil for Monday night, a few hours after the Schultzes’ press conference. The event was held at the Kessler Campanile, an outdoor amphitheater with a fountain featuring an 80-foot obelisk made of stacked steel discs. The event was supposed to be peaceful and respectful, but Matt Wolfsen, who cofounded the PSA with Scout, was nervous. He knew that Scout had friends in Atlanta’s anarchist and anti-fascist (antifa) circles, whose approach to resistance can be aggressive and who have lately become a nemesis of the political right. Wolfsen contacted some of them to request that, if they came to the vigil, they avoid violence. The people he spoke to assured him that they wouldn’t “be rowdy and rude to the people grieving,” Wolfsen later said, “but afterward, they could do whatever they wanted to do.” The police were worried, too. Public records obtained for this story show that the GTPD decided to send plainclothes officers to monitor the vigil and asked the Atlanta Police Department to have quick-reaction teams on standby.  

Who might be at the memorial wasn’t the only thing that was worrisome—so was what people knew about what had happened to Scout and how they were interpreting it. By Monday evening, several crucial pieces of information had become public. First was the fact that Scout hadn’t been wielding an exposed blade. Second, campus police carried guns and pepper spray but not Tasers, which the Schultzes’ lawyer described as “insane.” (Only 40 percent of campus police forces nationwide carry Tasers.) Third, Tyler Beck, the officer who’d killed Scout, hadn’t received training to navigate situations involving people in psychiatric crisis. Beck, who’d been on the force for 16 months and had gone on paid leave pending an investigation of the shooting, hadn’t completed the crisis-intervention training because it wasn’t mandatory.

People who believed Scout’s death was unjustified were infuriated and galvanized by what they saw as a perfect storm of institutional failures: Members of the GTPD were insufficiently trained and had used excessive force against a queer student suffering because of the campus’s deficient mental-health resources. Others in the Georgia Tech community felt like that reaction manipulated the facts to fit an agenda that demonized police and canonized minorities. “I fail to see a problem. They stopped a deranged lunatic from hurting people. That’s good work,” a commenter on r/gatech wrote. The bluntest view of all was that Scout was to blame for their own death, because what had happened was suicide by cop. “He approached police with a knife saying ‘shoot me,’” an r/gatech user wrote. “What part was undeserved?”

Frustration and accusations coursed through social media in the hours leading up to the vigil and spilled into the Kessler Campanile, where friends hung photos of Scout and distributed candles from plastic tubs. “Why did all of this happen? Why did Scout go down this route?” a student told the Associated Press as dusk settled over campus. “I’m angry,” another said, her voice tinged with disbelief. “I’m angry that the cops don’t have nonlethal ways to deal with things.” A third student said that watching the cell-phone video of Scout’s shooting, which had already been posted online, “induced a lot of panic in me.”  

About 500 people attended, including Scout’s friends and the Schultzes. Aby Parsons, the director of Georgia Tech’s LGBTQ resource center, was one of the speakers. “Scout was frustrated with how apathetic the Georgia Tech community could be when it came to issues of social justice,” Parsons told the crowd. “They felt that I, as administrator, was trying to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house, when they wanted to smash that house into pieces and build a new one.”

Her words seemed prophetically timed. As Parsons spoke, along the periphery of the vigil a group of protesters, many wearing bandanas over their faces and some armed with hammers and cans of paint and pepper spray, unfurled banners emblazoned with the anarchy symbol and slogans like “Defend LGBT+, End GTPD” and “End Police Violence → End Police.” Fliers circulated announcing, “There will be a march for those who wish to grieve and express their outrage in a collective capacity.” Officers on-site alerted their chief, who contacted the Atlanta police to tell them, according to a affidavit, that “there could be a destructive march occurring.”

Toward the end of the vigil, students lit their candles, turning the amphitheater into a twinkling semicircle. The melody of the Jackson 5’s “I’ll Be There” wafted through the air. Then there was silence, broken when a transgender student began shouting about the lack of mental-health care on campus. Other people joined her.

“Every single year I’ve known someone who has committed suicide,” one person said, according to the student newspaper.

“Why don’t GTPD carry Tasers?” another yelled.

“Why are they here at all?” someone answered.

Before long the yelling morphed into chants of “No justice, no peace, fuck the police” and “Cops, pigs, murderers.” That was when the Schultzes left. “We just weren’t in the mood to hear that stuff,” Lynne said. But many of Scout’s friends joined the chanting and, subsequently, the march. The PSA and Pride Alliance would later say that the demonstration was supposed to proceed to Scout’s memorial on Eighth Street. Instead, the crowd made its way from the campanile toward GTPD headquarters. Along the way they encountered police, but the protesters kept chanting, and some lit flares or beat on drums.

In a burst of adrenaline, Monden launched herself onto the hood of a police cruiser. She stood above the crowd in skinny jeans and a plaid shirt, listening to people scream in anger about Scout’s death. Her friends would later say that Monden caused no damage to the car—“it didn’t even have a scratch,” Kaffezakis told me—but the police claimed she jumped up and down on the hood and appeared to try to break the windshield by kicking it.

Two officers pulled Monden from the car down to the street. She wrestled free and took off running, moving so fast that she lost control of her limbs and fell flailing toward the pavement. The cops grabbed her, and Monden’s friends, including Punja, whose hair was dyed fluorescent pink, ran to her side. The police told people to stay back, and Punja retreated to the sidewalk. One of the cops put cuffs on Monden, who was belly down on the street, arms bent behind her back and a grimace on her face. Blood seeped from the officer’s scalp, through his short blond hair, and down his cheek. A protestor, another cop later stated in an affidavit, had hit the arresting officer in the head with a hammer.

“You murdered one of us!” shouted Kirby Jackson, the transgender activist. Jackson had transferred to GSU that fall for personal reasons but was in close touch with the Georgia Tech LGBTQ community that she’d helped nurture.

The cops led Monden to a cruiser. “Fuck you—you killed my best friend!” Monden screamed as she was placed in the back seat.

The police shut the door and drove her away. Nearby, another cop car was burning. Protesters had torched it, sending flames and smoke shooting into the night sky.

Monden was booked into the Fulton County Jail under her birth name, and charged with a felony for interfering with government property and a misdemeanor for inciting a riot. Later, after police reviewed video from the protest, Monden would be hit with additional misdemeanor charges.

“Yo, she has a cut on her side, she needs to go to the hospital,” Monden recalled the booking officer shouting to colleagues. Monden was bleeding from an injury to her torso, which she’d sustained when she tripped and fell at the protest. She took another ride in a cruiser to the same hospital where Scout had been declared dead. Police handcuffed her to a chair and a physician patched up the wound.

Once she was back at the jail, according to Monden, the intake officer took away her bra. “You’re a boy,” she remembered the cop saying. She was placed in handcuffs, then put in a holding area, where two male GBI agents arrived. It was the first time she’d spoken face-to-face with law enforcement about Scout’s death. After expressing what Monden described as “token sympathy” about Scout, the agents asked questions about her friend’s political affiliations. Monden felt like they were implying that Scout had been “some sort of terrorist.”

After the GBI agents left, Monden was ushered into another room, where she stood in front of a dull gray backdrop and stared straight ahead as a photographer snapped her mugshot. From there she went to a holding cell—alone at first, because the cops didn’t know whether to put her with male or female detainees. Eventually, a man joined her. He was one of two other people arrested at the protest.

Monden would spend two nights in jail, including a stint in a mental-health unit where, after being evaluated, she did her best to sleep as people screamed and banged on their cell windows and doors. When she finally appeared in court, looking weary in her navy blue jail garb, her bail was set at $20,000.

Headlines the morning after the protest described a peaceful vigil turned violent and a campus told to “shelter in place” for the second time in three days. Matt Wolfsen of the PSA posted a picture of the burned-out cop car on Facebook, writing underneath it, “Unacceptable. This isn’t the time to destroy. We must improve as a community out of love.” Many students liked the post, but Kirby Jackson commented, “Fuck you, Wolfsen.”

At a Waffle House near campus, some of Scout’s and Monden’s friends gathered around 1 a.m. to talk over greasy diner food. Wolfsen went, too, and tried to find common ground with the LGBTQ students. Where was the line between righteous anger and pointless violence? Who was allowed to draw it? Wolfsen was struck by the presence of Punja, whom he hadn’t met before that night. She seemed depleted, a shell of a person.

“Look what they’re doing to the trans community,” Wolfsen remembered Punja saying at one point. “Do I really want to live through this?”

“I’m not trans, so I don’t know what it’s like,” Wolfsen replied. “But this is rock bottom. It doesn’t get worse than the police just murdering someone in the street. Hold on—it will eventually get better.”

That night, Punja slept with a friend on either side of her. She didn’t want to be alone. For the next several days, she updated a Tumblr post titled “Since Scout I’ve Stayed At,” which contained a running list of bullet-pointed names.

At 11:30 a.m. Tuesday morning, Georgia Tech’s president, Bud Peterson, released his second statement since the shooting. Once again he didn’t mention the cause of Scout’s death, and he called for unity. Peterson blamed the scene at the police headquarters mostly on “outside agitators intent on disrupting” the vigil. “They certainly did not honor Scout’s memory nor represent our values,” Peterson insisted.

If he knew it, the president didn’t say that one of the people arrested was a Georgia Tech student, a friend of Scout’s and a witness to the shooting. (A statement issued later that afternoon identified Monden as a student.) Nor did he acknowledge that Scout, like many students, had social networks extending to other area colleges and groups. He invoked a phrase that, in the American South, is loaded with fraught meaning. Outside agitator harks back to the Civil Rights Movement, when critics used it to discredit Martin Luther King Jr.’s legitimacy as an organizer. King addressed the phrase in “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” penned in April 1963. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly,” King wrote. “Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”

Monden’s friends were baffled. In their view, Peterson seemed more concerned about the protest than the shooting. Their confusion turned to outrage when signs of support for Georgia Tech’s police began popping up around campus.

The messages were scribbled in colorful chalk on sidewalks and in marker on posters taped up in dorm windows. We Support GTPD. We ♥ GTPD. We Are One GT. The last slogan seemed to summarize Peterson’s latest public statement.

The student president of the university’s Marksmanship Club started a GoFundMe page for “GTPD Office Recovery.” The fundraiser described Scout’s death as a “tragic suicide,” blamed the Monday riot on “the arrival of violent protestors, many of whom are not even currently attending Georgia Tech,” and asked people to give what money they could to support campus police. “GTPD has always been kind to students, treating us far more as equals than subjects; many of them are Georgia Tech graduates themselves,” the page read. “Now, it’s our turn to give back to them.” The page’s goal was $10,000, which it exceeded by several hundred dollars. The same day, a GoFundMe campaign started for the campus counseling and LGBTQ resource centers. It raised just $150 of its $5,000 goal.

A student named Courtney Allen created a Facebook event encouraging people to “Thank a GTPD Officer.” Allen wrote, “Take some time out of your busy class schedule and thank a GTPD officer. Thank every one you pass. Thank one that you look up to. Go to the department [and] thank all of them. Do something to show that the Georgia Tech student body still loves, cares, and supports our police officers.” In an interview, Allen told me she wanted to show that “students do still love our officers, like we would our family members after a horrible, life-changing event.” Not everyone felt the same way. “The GTPD murdered a troubled young person in cold blood, and you want to thank them?” one commenter wrote on Allen’s event page. “How dare you!”

Scout was gone, Monden was in jail, and “the first fucking response was, We should show our support for GTPD,” Bailey Becker told me, recalling the mood on campus after the protest. “It’s like, God fucking damn it. I know why you’re saying that, but that doesn’t make it any less basically sickening for me to see.”

Among those who responded positively to the outpouring was Tyler Beck, through his attorney. “He very much regrets the situation he was faced with, he and the other officers,” Don English, general counsel with the Southern States Police Benevolent Association, said of his client. “He is very appreciative of the support he has received from the Georgia Tech community, including most of the students.” Beck’s personnel profile, which was made public in the days after the shooting, contained no black marks. A month before Scout’s death, Beck had received a letter of commendation for “quick thinking” in stopping someone from stealing food from a dining hall by shutting them inside a freezer and calling for backup.

With regard to the shooting, English noted in his statement, “I’ve not talked to one law enforcement professional who would disagree that the use of force was justified in the situation that confronted these officers.” Critics, though, pointed to a case from 2010 that complicated the notion that Beck had no choice but to fire a lethal weapon. According to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution story, a Georgia Tech alum named Kshitij Shrotri attacked postdoctoral research fellow Samer Tawfik, with whom he had a personal dispute, on campus using a samurai sword. By the time the GTPD showed up, Tawfik was lying on the floor covered in blood, and Shrotri was standing above him clutching the sword and yelling, “You will have to kill me!” Police officers drew their guns, aimed them at Shtrotri, and pleaded for him to drop the weapon. Shrotri didn’t, so a cop pepper-sprayed him, subduing the armed threat. Tawfik spent time in the hospital but survived. Shrotri was charged with aggravated assault.

Some of Scout’s and Monden’s friends scrambled to append the chalked “We Support GTPD” messages with the words “…and the LGBT community.” One student told the local NPR affiliate that the pro-police sentiment “is just making it a lot harder to even be here.” He continued, “I did not think it would be so bad and that people would lack so much empathy, or only have sympathy for a burnt car.” Punja wrote on social media, “I’m so fucking sure this is just a nightmare but I haven’t woken up yet!!!!!!!!” and “my EX was SHOT and KILLED by COPS hahahaha What the Fuck.”

Even Matt Wolfsen, who’d initially criticized the protest, felt that the tide of public opinion was taking a worrying turn. Instead of talking about “students hurting” and the campus “needing real systematic change,” Wolfsen later said, he mostly heard complaints about “these crazy people setting fire to cop cars, just causing trouble.” Anxious to change the conversation, he gathered members of the PSA and drew up a list of demands for the Georgia Tech administration: better mental-health care, greater police accountability, improved services and accommodations for LGBTQ people. The PSA planned to deliver the demands to Peterson and hold demonstrations to publicize them.

Meanwhile, Kirby Jackson participated in an as-told-to article with Yahoo News several days after the shooting. “There were many more armed cops than there were Scouts,” Jackson said. “I’m incredibly surprised that the cops couldn’t have wrestled Scout to the ground or found some non-lethal way of ending that situation.” Jackson also criticized the counseling options on campus, which she’d personally found lacking, and defended the protest. “The vigil was very nice—it was a candlelight thing, a very moving, symbolic gesture. It was something Scout would’ve hated, as Scout was much more the type for action,” Jackson said. “It turned into a march over to GTPD headquarters, and it was tense—there’s a lot of anger about how they treated Scout, plus anger at police in general across the country.”

Privately, Jackson worried about Monden’s arrest. How was she handling it? As a black trans woman, was she safe in a penal system not exactly known for protecting vulnerable minorities? (About 20 percent of trans people who’ve interacted with police have been harassed; the rate is 61 percent among black trans people.) “That’s classic Kirby—to worry about other people more than Kirby,” her mother, Angela Amar, told me. When she was little, Jackson would drop pennies on the ground just so other people could pick them up and have good luck.

Monden was released from jail on Thursday, September 21. After consulting with her family, she decided to spend a few days in a mental-health facility. She described the experience as a “whole lot of extremely limited freedoms and awful regimented meals—and cookies, really awful cookies. They were like Lorna Doones. Also, lots of visible crying and fights.”

Just before she entered the facility, Monden had received an email from Georgia Tech announcing that she was being considered for suspension “because of the existence of significant risk to the health and safety of the Institute community.” If she wished to “be heard on whether [her] presence on campus poses a danger,” she had less than 24 hours to contact the relevant campus authorities and set up an appointment. Occupied with the distress she was experiencing, Monden didn’t reply.

A few days later, Monden was released from the mental-health facility. According to school records, the university established through its IT department that the e-mail notifying Monden of the pending suspension had been opened, but that she had not requested an appeal. In a message on September 26, she was officially suspended from school. Monden was banned from campus, pending a hearing before Georgia Tech’s Office of Student Integrity.

Around the time Monden left jail, the GTPD posted on Instagram that it was still actively investigating the protest “in coordination with local, state, and federal law enforcement.” The department asked “anyone who has footage of the march, riot, or events directly preceding or following the violence to upload your video” and provided a link to Leedir, an “eyewitness platform” used by law enforcement in emergencies.

Soon after, the arrests began.

At GSU, police identified a black student who’d been near Monden when she was detained. According to court records, the student was charged with misdemeanors for inciting a riot, willful obstruction of law-enforcement officers, and wearing a mask, hood, or other device that concealed his face. The affidavit for the arrest noted that the student was “known to this Department by him being arrested at other protest”—a reference, seemingly, to a previous demonstration against the Georgia Board of Regents, the governing body of the state’s public universities, for its policies toward undocumented students.

In another instance, according to an arrest report, police at GSU, based on information shared by their GTPD counterparts, entered a classroom, escorted a student who was friends with Scout into a hallway, and asked if she had any weapons. She said no and was patted down, handcuffed, and taken to police headquarters, where she was charged with willful obstruction of law enforcement and inciting a riot. Rumors also circulated that students who weren’t accused of crimes but who had attended the vigil were being pulled out of class and questioned; in a statement for this story, GSU said that never happened.

By early October, a half-dozen people had been arrested. Among them was Kirby Jackson. A police officer called Jackson’s home one day to inform her that a warrant had been issued. Unnerved that other students had been pulled from classrooms and anxious to avoid a similar scene, Jackson turned herself in. She was charged with willful obstruction of law enforcement.

The arrests flew under the public radar. Many professors and students weren’t aware that they were happening, and few media outlets covered them. Page Pate, a local trial lawyer, told a radio reporter that the police’s methods were unusual. “There’s no ongoing crime,” Pate explained. He saw the arrests as sending a message “that you better be careful when you show up and protest at the school or about something that the school has done.” Through a spokesperson, Georgia Tech responded, “No one is being targeted because they protested.”  

Donald Downs, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Wisconsin and author of several books on free speech, told me, “I’ve read a lot of stuff on campus upheaval, but I have not run across any situations where there were arrests made inside classrooms and students questioned like that.” GTPD’s approach risked creating a “chilling effect on free speech,” said Clay Calvert, director of the Marion B. Brechner First Amendment Project at the University of Florida. “Students are less likely to [protest] if they know they are going to be yanked out of the classroom, embarrassed in front of their classmates.”

No one was more nervous about the arrests than Punja. She knew that her pink hair made her easily identifiable in protest footage. She grew anxious when she heard police sirens or saw flashing lights. “I’m not strong enough to go to jail,” Kaffezakis recalled Punja telling her. “I’m afraid of how my family is going to react.” Kaffezakis tried to reassure her friend that “this is not the end of the world.” Punja talked to Monden about killing herself but said she wouldn’t do it if Monden didn’t either—a suicide pact in reverse.

On Saturday, September 30, there was a home football game, a big social event on Georgia Tech’s campus. The team was playing the University of North Carolina, and like thousands of other students, Kaffezakis went to the stadium to watch. She was in the packed stands, checking her phone, when a friend told her to check out a worrying post on Punja’s Tumblr. Punja said she was at a gun show where “a guy asked me if i was here to attend or protest.” She added that the gun show “should really b stricter with the background checks; i’ve been involuntarily hospitalized like 3 times lmfao.”

Kaffezakis immediately dialed Punja’s phone number. A man answered and identified himself as a detective. “What’s going on? Why are you answering?” Kaffezakis asked, pushing through the stadium crowd so she could hear the detective clearly. He said that Kaffezakis would have to talk to Punja’s mother; then he hung up.

It took some time to get Punja’s mom on the phone. After being contacted by authorities, she’d sped to Johns Creek, a small city northeast of Atlanta where, after the gun show, Punja had driven, too. Punja had parked on the side of a road and, with a weapon purchased at the show, shot and killed herself. Law enforcement had spotted her car and identified Punja with ID recovered inside.

A memorial was organized off campus at Kweer Haus, a facility offering short-term housing for homeless LGBTQ people in Atlanta. The theme was pink, Punja’s favorite color. Pink candles and flower petals surrounded a framed picture of the deceased. Pink and silver balloons filled the room. At the end of the vigil, mourners went outside and released them. The orbs drifted above the trees of downtown Atlanta, catching the glow of streetlights. Eventually, they slipped from sight.

Before Punja’s suicide, the PSA had released a statement announcing that, if the Georgia Tech president’s office didn’t agree to implement the group’s demands, its members would march to his office and “engage in peaceful and non-violent demonstration, including but not limited to a ‘die-in.’” Students en masse would lay down on the ground “to represent the deaths that will result from a lack of mental health care.” The PSA’s demands included more funding for treatment, mandatory police training in crisis intervention, more gender-neutral bathrooms and gender-inclusive housing on campus, the reinstatement of the Pride Alliance’s office space, and the relocation of the LGBTQ resource center. For a little more than a year, it had been in a renovated storage room, with just enough space for the director’s desk and chair, as well as a couch.

The university didn’t publicly acknowledge the PSA’s statement, but two days later, Peterson made one of his own. In response to Scout’s death, Georgia Tech would be creating four “action teams” tasked with evaluating mental-health services, campus culture, LGBTQ issues, and public safety. They would make recommendations for change no later than November 1, 2017.

Behind the scenes, the administration was taking action of a different sort. When it was notified in advance of a planned demonstration at the campus’s student center, where professors and undergraduates would discuss the impact of Scout’s shooting, Peterson alerted the FBI and GBI, as well as state and city police. “After what happened Monday night,” Peterson later said in a meeting, indicating Scout’s vigil, “we didn’t know if we were going to have Charlotte or if we were going to have something that turned out to be a non-event.” He was referring to the widespread protests in North Carolina that had occurred in 2016, after police shot and killed a black man named Keith Lamont Scott. The governor of North Carolina had declared a state of emergency and deployed the state’s National Guard.

About 75 people gathered for the student-center protest on a Friday afternoon, and they were peaceful. They discussed feeling “fear, pain, frustration, deep sadness, [and] disappointment” since Scout’s death, according to a reporter who attended. Around 3 p.m., the demonstrators were alerted that the building was locking up early that day. It wasn’t a planned closure; the administration, it appeared, wanted them to leave the center.

Outside, a police helicopter hovered in the sky. This “is the kind of culture of fear that we’re talking about,” Anne Pollock, a participating professor, told a reporter. “They were very worried that antifa would take over our event or something like that.” Bailey Becker, who attended the gathering, told me that participants were afraid of getting arrested or worse. “All of us went to that protest with this fear,” Becker said. “Is this going to get someone else hurt? Is this benign action going to bring fire on somebody for doing something that they should be allowed to do without question?”

Georgia Tech officials acknowledged the protest in a statement but didn’t mention the decision to shut down the student center. “Since Monday’s activities,” the statement read, referring to the riot, “we’ve had an increased level of security on campus.”

A few days later, Matt Wolfsen was invited to a meeting with Peterson and two state legislators. By then the student government had pledged $500,000 to mental-health services, which the president’s office promised to match. The funds would be dispersed on a proposal-by-proposal basis. Peterson announced a separate $1 million endowment, established through the nonprofit Georgia Tech Foundation, for campus wellness and police training. Peterson also said that he was temporarily lifting the 16-session limit on counseling appointments. Some students pointed out that this wouldn’t address the fact that it often took weeks to secure a session—in fact, it risked making the backlog worse—or that people referred to the counseling center as suicidal often wound up at the Ridgeview Institute, a private psychiatric hospital, where expenses could balloon to nearly $1,000 a day.

Wolfsen had hoped to hear Peterson’s broader plans for improving health services, among other things on campus, when he met with the president and the two legislators at the Paul D. Coverdell Legislative Office Building, a white stone structure in downtown Atlanta. There, Wolfsen and another PSA student sat at a conference table across from representative Park Cannon, a queer black woman and the youngest Democrat in the state assembly. Mable Thomas, who’d served in the legislature on and off since the 1980s, sat at one end, Peterson at the other. The Georgia Tech president was the room’s center of gravity. Tall and patrician, with gray hair combed carefully to one side, Peterson is an engineer by training and the state’s highest-compensated public-college administrator.

The mood was tense. In a recording of the meeting obtained from one of the participants, Peterson responded to legislators’ concern about police preparedness for dealing with students in crisis; just 18 of the 85 officers on the campus force had received the appropriate training. Peterson also apologized for using the term “outside agitators” in his statement after the riot. “That carries a special connotation in the South, and I’ve been cautioned and apologize for the use,” he said. (Peterson, who hails from Kansas but has worked in the South for many years, has not publicly apologized for the usage.)

Cannon and Thomas peppered him with questions about the case against Monden and a perceived lack of sympathy shown by the university toward Scout’s family and friends. “There was almost [an effort] to marginalize it,” Thomas said of the shooting, “like, ‘Oh, [Scout] wanted to die.” She also remarked on how young Scout and the protesters were; most of them were under 25 and “immature as can be.” Her description echoed the only critical feedback in Tyler Beck’s police personnel file: “He is young and is still learning laws, policies, and criminal procedures.”

At one point, the legislators brought up the PSA’s proposed die-in. Wolfsen piped up, speaking to Peterson directly and thanking him for the steps, such as the action teams, that Georgia Tech was taking to address students’ concerns. “That’s been changed,” Wolfsen said of the die-in. “We hear you, and we’re very much appreciative of the efforts you’ve put forward. Going forward we want to make sure that this does result in long-term change. We are not going to be as aggressive anymore.”

Peterson responded, “Have you informed these representatives of your involvement and engagement with the people from off campus on the event Monday night? Have you disclosed that to them?”

Wolfsen was caught off guard. After the riot, he’d reached out to administrators to tell them that he’d personally asked anarchist and antifa factions to be nonviolent and was disappointed that they hadn’t obliged. Now, though, it seemed as if Peterson was suggesting that Wolfsen was trying to hide his contact with nonstudent protesters.

“Did you communicate with them before the event on Monday night?” Peterson demanded.

“Yes,” Wolfsen said. “I talked with them because I wanted them to be very clear about what they were doing.… It fell through, unfortunately. “

“Did you inform our public safety or anybody in the administration or staff at Georgia Tech that you were in communication with people off campus that were potentially violent?” Peterson asked.

The other PSA student jumped in. “It wasn’t that they said that they were going to do something violent,” she said. “It was that we asked them not to.”

“It would have been enormously helpful if we had been made aware,” Peterson said.

When the meeting ended, Wolfsen felt a nagging fear. What if the university thought he’d conspired to start the riot? Wolfsen contacted a lawyer and submitted a request under the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) for his student records.

On October 8, family and friends gathered in Tucker, Georgia, close to the Schultzes’ home in Lilburn, for Scout’s memorial. A picture of Scout protesting House Bill 51, waving a pride flag while walking down an Atlanta street, was set next to a podium and an array of vibrantly colored flowers. In lieu of gifts to the family, the Schultzes asked that people donate to two organizations benefiting LGBTQ youth: the Trevor Project, a national suicide hotline, and a thrift store in Atlanta that supported affordable housing. That Punja, the kindhearted kid who’d given her a plastic bouquet, was also dead made Lynne Schultz feel like she had to do more. She was too upset to deliver a speech, so she distributed fliers on which she’d printed information about resources for suicide prevention.

“We are joyful, angry, celebrating, and mournful. We’re proud and upset, disheartened but resolved,” the chaplain leading the service intoned. “Would the status and lives of secular, freethinking students, at Georgia Tech and elsewhere, be better served if Scout Schultz had lived to continue to work for that?… Yes. How much? We’ll never know.”

In a photograph from the service, Kirby Jackson, fresh off her arrest and awaiting a legal hearing, stands in front of a floral-patterned chair. Her arms hang at her sides, and her hands are clasped at her waist. Like Monden, who was also at the service, Jackson had been banned from the Georgia Tech campus, where she’d continued to spend a great deal of time since transferring to Georgia State and where many of her closest friends still attended classes. “Basically, she was cut off from her support network,” Kaffezakis told me.

Jackson stares directly into the camera, her gaze blank.

By mid-October, the media had mostly stopped covering the aftermath of Scout’s shooting. Without more rioting, there wasn’t obvious drama to focus on. The charges against Monden, Jackson, and the other people arrested would likely take months to work their way through the legal system. According to Georgia Tech policy, regardless of the charges against her, the university had 30 days after issuing her suspension notice to determine whether or not Monden could come back to school. Days turned into weeks. Thirty days passed. There hadn’t been a hearing, and Monden was still banned from campus. Before long, it was so late in the fall semester that there was no chance she could enroll for the spring. Monden would miss a full year of school. She moved in with her mom, who lived about nine miles from campus, and started working as a barista at a coffee shop.

Meanwhile, in early November, right on schedule, three of Peterson’s action teams submitted their recommendations. The ideas included increased money for counseling, new initiatives to diminish students’ stress, and the hiring of counselors with “extensive training in related areas such as gender and LGBTQIA studies.” But the fourth action group, focused on public safety, hadn’t yet convened because the investigation of the shooting hadn’t concluded. There was no timeline available for when that would happen.

Before Thanksgiving break, Matt Wolfsen got the result of his FERPA request. He was stunned to discover two binders thick with documentation; a third one arrived a few months later. Inside the binders was evidence that the university was tracking his movements. “Wolfsen travelled with a small contingent of students to Washington DC on July 31 to speak with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand [and] Congresswoman Maxine Waters’ staff regarding HB 51,” Steven Norris, the school’s assistant director of social media, wrote in an email to Georgia Tech’s office of communications. “Wolfsen is a registered member of the Democratic Socialists of America Group and is attending their national convention in August as an elected representative from Atlanta.” The administration also had eyes on Wolfsen’s social media, describing him as “one of the moderators of the FB group ‘Students Against House Bill 51.’”

On September 23, a week after Scout’s death, Norris had sent an email with the subject line “Weekend Monitoring.” He’d taken screen grabs of the PSA’s Twitter account, including a picture of a poster on campus reading “We demand the increase of current funding allocated to mental health on campus” and a tweet from Wolfsen describing the PSA’s demands of Peterson. The tweet, Norris wrote, “had received a fair amount of engagement this afternoon.” He added, “Thankfully many more mentions of football game and GT win have dominated conversation streams.”

The practice of colleges monitoring students’ social media is becoming more common. Some universities even pay private firms or purchase special technology to keep an eye on enrollees’ digital lives. Schools say that this tracking is necessary for campus safety and point to examples like a 2014 case in which a University of Georgia student was arrested after posting on the app Yik Yak that he was going to shoot up a building with an AK-47. Critics worry that targeted, sustained monitoring of certain students—those engaged in activism, for instance—could discourage free speech. “A reasonable person might say, instead of risking trouble, I’m going to shut up,” said Adam B. Steinbaugh, director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

In Wolfsen’s case, after he put some of his FERPA records online, Georgia Tech released a statement saying that it had “noticed” his posts because they either tagged or mentioned the university. The administration also pointed out that “he was never reprimanded or disciplined for anything he posted.” Still, the revelation about monitoring set some students, including Scout’s friends, on edge. They wondered if they were being watched and if they should leave Georgia Tech. “They can’t fire students,” Bailey Becker told me, “but they sure as hell can drive us off campus.”

There was a sense among Scout’s friends that if they could just get to the end of the semester, the situation might improve. They could take a break, go home, be with their families, grieve, recharge. In the spring, they’d have more energy and more distance from the shock of losing Scout and Punja.

Jackson, though, was struggling. Her mother, a self-described “eternal optimist,” reassured Jackson that she would get through this crisis. They would contest the legal charges against her and life would go on. “It was going to be rocky, but we were going to make it,” Angela Amar told me.

Jackson turned 24 on November 26. She went to New Orleans with family and friends to celebrate. At a birthday lunch, in keeping with her den-mother reputation, she told a younger female cousin who was getting bullied at school to call her anytime she needed to talk. Soon after, Jackson traveled back to Atlanta for final exams at GSU. She didn’t complete them: On December 6, Jackson shot and killed herself in her bedroom, located on the basement level of her mother’s house. She didn’t leave a note. Her obituary described her as “a gentle and sensitive spirit” and “a champion for the voiceless.” Jackson’s mother realized that the legal authorities weren’t aware of her daughter’s death when, well after the fact, a summons arrived in the mail ordering Jackson to appear in court regarding the charges brought against her following Scout’s vigil.

The day after her suicide, about a half-dozen of Jackson’s friends met at an off-campus apartment. One of them had invited a therapist to talk to the somber group. They shouldn’t blame themselves, the therapist told the young people who’d gathered, and they shouldn’t be afraid to ask for help and to look out for each other. But they’d been doing that already, the students thought, and all they had to show for it were three dead friends.

Monden became obsessed with a photograph posted on Facebook a few months prior. Taken at night under bright streetlights, the image shows a smiling Scout, hair draped over a white tank top and one arm wrapped around Punja, who’s wearing a black jacket and thick-framed glasses. Monden is on the other side of Punja, leaning into her, with bulky headphones slung around her neck. After Jackson’s death, Monden kept looking at the photo, thinking about how she was the only one in the picture still alive. Maybe it was her turn.

It should have been me, Monden thought, not Kirby.

I started teaching at Georgia Tech in January 2018, after the winter break. As a new arrival on campus, I wasn’t aware of a lot of what had transpired in the fall. I didn’t know, for instance, that Monden was still awaiting word on whether she’d ever be allowed to return to campus. On February 6, one of my students, who is nonbinary, asked me before class if they could make an announcement. It was about a vigil happening at 5:30 that afternoon. I obliged, and the student stood before their classmates to share the CliffsNotes version of Monden’s story, which her friends hoped would conclude after an upcoming hearing before the Office of Student Integrity. The student had fliers, which were placed on a table at the front of the room for anyone who was interested. On one side were the pertinent details about the vigil—time, place, and so on. On the other was an impassioned message:

OSI and GT administration has violated the following rights:

Right to an expedited trial

Right to clear and timely communication

Right to the least restrictive punishment

Right to innocence until proven guilty

Will you be the next target?

Out of curiosity, I attended the vigil. It took place near the Ovation Statue, lovingly referred to by students as the Ice Cream Statue because it looks like a swirl of soft serve. About 30 people were there, including several LGBTQ students. Someone offered me a sign to hold that said “Black Trans Lives Matter.” Was Cat black? I wondered, immediately regretting that I didn’t know the answer to a basic question about a student intimately tied to a campus tragedy. I was struck by how committed the gathered students were to Monden’s case. By contrast, the wider campus seemed to have moved on from Scout’s shooting and the subsequent unrest, just over five months after it had transpired. I wanted to understand why this empathy gap existed.

I interviewed students, submitted records requests, and read all the news and social-media coverage of the shooting that I could find. I talked to family and friends about Scout and Punja and Jackson, learning who they were in life and what their deaths had meant to the people who knew them best. I tracked updates from Peterson’s action teams, including a proposal to establish a new and improved LGBTQ resource center, which would open in the fall of 2018. Students told me that, on some issues, they’d pushed the university to follow through. Based on an action-team recommendation, for instance, buildings were  supposed to have gender-neutral bathrooms available, but the process of installing signs designating the facilities had been slow. At least one student contacted the director of residential life for help; the director put in a work order, and within two weeks more signs had gone up.

One student-led initiative involved digging directly into the wounds left by Scout’s killing. Kaffezakis, with the help of the LGBTQ resource center, contacted the GTPD and offered to train officers on trans awareness and inclusion. The police accepted, and Kaffezakis convinced several of her trans friends, including her partner, to go to GTPD headquarters for six sessions. “For a lot of people there, it was super uncomfortable,” Kaffezakis said, “but there was sort of an acknowledgement that it was something that we had to do.”

For the first 90 minutes of training, Aby Parsons of the LGBTQ resource center discoursed on terminology and bias to about a dozen officers. At one point, Parsons handed officers a series of printed words affixed with Velcro and asked them to stick the items on a board in one of two columns. The words included slurs used against trans people and acronyms like MTF (male to female); the columns were labeled “green light” (acceptable) and “red light” (unacceptable).

The last half-hour was more unscripted. Kaffezakis and the other trans students stood in front of the room to answer questions. “How can we make trans students feel safe?” one officer asked. “Why do we need to use gender-neutral pronouns?” another wondered. “There were a lot of heartwarming parts,” Kaffezakis recalled, and officers who were “very clearly engaged.”

But some seemed unfocused, even annoyed. At one point, a cop asked, “Why do y’all not trust us?”

The obvious response was Scout’s killing, but Kaffezakis decided to go further than that. It wasn’t the GTPD specifically that trans students didn’t trust, she said, it was law enforcement everywhere. She detailed survey research done by the Solutions Not Punishment Collaborative, an Atlanta-based black transgender and queer organization, which in 2016 found that after calling the police for help, more than a third of the trans women of color interviewed wound up being arrested. Eighty percent of respondents had been stopped by police, and about half of those stopped had been questioned on suspicion of prostitution. “Everything that happened with Scout’s shooting,” Kaffezakis concluded, “centered GTPD within that perspective and those expectations.”

When she finished talking, the room was quiet. She hoped it was a signal of sympathy.

In December 2017, according to public records, the GBI handed the findings from its investigation of Scout’s shooting over to the Atlanta district attorney’s office for review. The Schultzes said that they’d been told it could be two years before they know who, if anyone, would be held accountable for their child’s death. Among the items in the DA’s possession are Scout’s suicide notes. The Schultzes said that they haven’t had a chance to read them and won’t be able to until the DA is done with them. The DA declined to comment for this story, citing its policy of not talking about ongoing investigations.

I was eager to talk to university officials to get their perspective on the case, the protests and arrests, and the changes proposed on campus. As any academic knows, committees and recommendations don’t necessarily translate into action; too often, semesters pass with little more than updates on measures that have been forthcoming for what feels like years. I reached out to several decision-makers, including Peterson and the GTPD chief, and was told by each person or their assistant to contact Lance Wallace in communications. Aby Parsons at the LGBTQ resource center didn’t reply to my inquiries. Even the counseling center, which I’d visited hoping to talk to someone about the general topic of mental health on campus, wouldn’t comment. While I waited to be told no, I spotted a bowl of rubber yellow bracelets with #JacketsEndingSuicide printed on them in white lettering and pamphlets about “surviving after suicide loss.”

I contacted Lance Wallace but didn’t hear back, so I decided to drop by his office. The communications building is situated next to Bobby Dodd Stadium, where Georgia Tech’s football team plays its home games; a large picture window in the entryway offers a sweeping view of the pristine green field. I climbed the stairs to Wallace’s office, where the door was ajar. “I’ve looked at the website she’s writing for,” I heard a voice say. “She’s trying to tell as dramatic a story as possible, the facts be damned.”

It took me a moment to realize that Wallace was on the phone and that he was probably talking about me. I waited a few seconds, then knocked. “One minute,” he called out. Wallace ended his call with “Bye, chief.”

When he emerged from his office, he looked and acted the part of a PR professional: polite, charming, and sharply dressed in a suit and tie. He couldn’t answer any questions, Wallace said, because there were still legal matters in process. His office, though, could get me a statement. When I conveyed that I wanted as much information as possible in order to write a balanced story, he smiled. “Absolutely, and it makes perfect sense,” Wallace said. “It’s not that we’re just kicking you to the curb and saying, No, don’t talk to her.”

A few days later, Wallace’s office sent me his statement on Scout’s shooting. “While the case remains under review by appropriate state agencies, Georgia Tech is not in a position to grant interviews on the case,” it read, “and no Georgia Tech employees will do interviews on the topic.”

It’s easy to dismiss what a university does or doesn’t say about its business—to say nothing of attempts to get answers out of them—as unworthy of coverage in the face of bigger, more sensational news stories. Yet how universities act matters, because they’re entrusted with the care of young people and with shaping their worldviews. Public institutions like Georgia Tech and GSU are also accountable to taxpayers.

More urgently, campuses have become microcosms of America’s divided political culture. They’re battlegrounds for disputes over free speech, personal identity, policing, and other pressing social issues. Fringe political groups and actors, some of them affiliated with the far right, stir up controversy and court potential members at colleges and universities, while so-called watchdog organizations like the conservative group Campus Reform scour the web for trolling fodder. A July 2018 Campus Reform article, for example, mocked the University of Wisconsin, Madison, for allowing a student to submit a bias incident report in 2016 for “being forced to choose male or female when completing forms/paperwork.”

Higher education is also on the front lines of a volatile debate over civil disobedience in the face of perceived injustice, waged in earnest since President Donald Trump’s election and amid increased scrutiny of America’s enduring legacy of white supremacy. In August 2018, as the fall semester began at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, protestors tore down a longstanding Confederate monument, eliciting praise from liberal circles and condemnation from many conservative ones. Ultimately, the state’s highest education authorities came down on the side of the right. The chair and president of the UNC system released a joint statement describing the statue’s dismantling as “unacceptable, dangerous, and incomprehensible. We are a nation of laws—and mob rule and the intentional destruction of public property will not be tolerated.” The statement did not mention the statue’s history, including stymied efforts to have it legally removed and a dedication speech in 1913 at which a Confederate veteran praised his fellow men in gray for defending the “welfare of the Anglo Saxon race” and bragged about how he once “horse-whip[ped] a Negro wench” about 100 yards from where the statue stood. As with Georgia Tech’s comments about Scout’s shooting, context was everything—and it was lacking.

Meanwhile, the Georgia legislature, following a model set by several other states and championed in conservative circles, passed a law in the spring of 2018, ostensibly intended to protect First Amendment freedoms on campuses by mandating that public institutions enact “content-neutral” policies regarding speeches, demonstrations, and other “expressive activities.” Yet the law also requires that schools sanction students who “disrupt or interfere with the functioning of the institution or classroom instruction.” In other words, students who protest campus events or school business—who, say, heckle a speaker they find offensive or stage a die-in at the president’s office—now run the risk of being punished.

The Georgia Tech administration was eager for campus life to return to normal after Scout’s death. For some students, however, normal was the problem. Scout’s friends wanted their pain to matter. “Bud Peterson and Georgia Tech are failing the students,” a third-year biomedical-engineering major said on a local news broadcast shortly after the shooting. “The thing is, if we return to the status quo, more people are going to keep hurting. People are hurting right now at Georgia Tech.”

I thought of those people when, through an open-records request, I received documents from Georgia’s Peace Officer Standards and Training Council. I wanted to know Tyler Beck’s status, since little had been heard from or about him since immediately after the shooting; I’d reached out to Beck but never heard back. The documents gave me some answers: As of July 2018, Beck was “actively employed in law enforcement” at GTPD. Since shooting Scout, he’d completed 126 hours of training, including crisis intervention. Meanwhile, the campus-safety action team still hadn’t convened; the website for Peterson’s office said that information about the group was “coming soon.”

In July, the GTPD hosted a going-away party for its interim deputy chief. In a photo from the on-campus event, posted to the department’s Facebook page, a man who appears to be Beck leans against a doorframe, a close-lipped smile above his square jaw. He wears a badge, a polo shirt and khakis, and what looks like a firearm strapped to his belt.  

Beck isn’t the only person at the scene of Scout’s death who has since returned to Georgia Tech. In the middle of the spring 2018 semester, the OSI decided to revoke Monden’s suspension. It was too late to register for spring classes, but she could come back for the summer term.

As Atlanta slipped into months of ceaseless mugginess, Monden re-enrolled in classes in literature and communications. Georgia Tech is relatively quiet in the summer, but Monden never felt alone. For the first few days of classes, she told me, police officers followed her around. Eventually, she stopped noticing them, or maybe they stopped tracking her. Still, she occasionally spotted students giving her suspicious looks. When she introduced herself in conversations, people sometimes replied incredulously, “Are you that Cat?”

She kept a low profile and focused on the present, perhaps because what would come after the summer wasn’t entirely up to her. Monden wanted to graduate and become a video-game designer, but her charges were still pending; if convicted, she could face a maximum sentence of up to five years in prison. Prisons are notoriously dangerous places for trans people, who endure a disproportionate risk of sexual violence behind bars, and the Trump administration recently rolled back a federal policy mandating that inmates be housed according to their gender identity and not their biological sex. In my conversations with her, Monden seemed averse to talking about the possibility of spending time locked up.

On the morning of August 13, a week before the start of Georgia Tech’s fall semester, Monden appeared in courtroom 4A of the Superior Court of Fulton County. She wore a striped shirt and black dress pants, and her hair was fashioned into short dreads. Family and friends were present, including several LGBTQ students. One of them kept an arm tightly wrapped around Monden’s shoulders as the group waited for the hearing to begin.

Monden was appearing with the two other people arrested at the march following Scout’s vigil. Monden’s codefendants pleaded guilty and received five years’ probation, as well as a fine. “If you interfere with a cop, you’re going to get beat up,” Judge Henry Newkirk told the newly convicted criminals, both of whom were white men. “If you hit me, and I’m a cop, I better have two other cops to help me whip you.”

Monden’s lawyer, meanwhile, took a different approach. After noting Monden’s return to Georgia Tech over the summer, he successfully negotiated for pretrial intervention, which meant that after completing certain court-appointed activities—the specifics of which weren’t logged in the public record and which Monden didn’t want to discuss—his client could petition for the court to reject her case entirely. It wasn’t an outright acquittal or dismissal, but if she obeyed the terms of the deal, Monden would at least avoid a felony conviction.

As for the context in which the events before the court took place, Newkirk acknowledged that “it’s a very unfortunate incident whenever someone is killed, especially by the police.” However, he added that there are “good shots” and bad. “From what I can see, the ones that aren’t [good] usually get indicted,” the judge said.

That her day in court was anti-climactic was in keeping with how life had come to feel for Monden in the months after Scout’s death. At first, she told me, she was angry—so much so that everything she experienced became a blur. But then she grew weary. Even with the threat of jail gone, she didn’t feel much like being an activist anymore. “A lot of people around me are trying to make the best of things,” Monden said. “I’m trying to get through life.”

For the queer community at Georgia Tech, the new school year is full of uncertainty. The revamped LGBTQ resource center proposed by one of Peterson’s action teams opened the first week of classes, a reminder that, in Bailey Becker’s words, “We’re here and fucking vibrant.” At the same time, Becker told me that the Pride Alliance is timid, always wondering when planning activities what Georgia Tech’s administration will think and weighing whether “we can get in trouble for this, because it’s political and we’re political.” The group, Becker added, can sometimes feel like a place “where activism goes to die.” Some of Becker’s LGBTQ friends have considered transferring from Georgia Tech but have stopped short because they “want something from the school that’s not lasting trauma.”

The mood is a far cry from where the Pride Alliance was one year ago. On a sunny summer day in 2017, Scout sat behind a folding table on the Tech Green, the heart of campus. They wore a floral T-shirt and sucked on a lollipop, pulled from a glass jar that passersby were encouraged to rummage through for their favorite flavors. If they didn’t want a lollipop, Starbursts were available, too.

The table was draped with a rainbow flag and offered pamphlets about LGBTQ pride. This was recruitment for the Pride Alliance, and Scout was the group’s ambassador. “Always fun to greet the incoming first-years and get a glance at the folks who make up the future of the organization,” they later wrote on Facebook, capping the message with a smiley-face emoji.

In a picture taken at the event, Scout appears confident. They’d donned a rainbow-colored Dr. Seuss hat, which had flopped to one side. Another student was wearing a trans-pride flag around their shoulders like a cape, and Scout had decided to add a cape to their own ensemble—the rainbow one from the table. They looked like a queer superhero.