As We Forgive

In a small Georgia town, mercy seasons justice

It was a day he would have spent in celebration. October 5, 2022, marked Craig DeWitt’s birth. Little did he know, when he woke up that morning, that it would also mark his son’s death.

Elijah DeWitt, 18, was shot dead in the parking lot of a Dave & Buster’s outside of the Sugarloaf Mills Mall in Lawrenceville, Georgia. The two young suspects fled the scene, leaving Elijah’s girlfriend behind to scream over his body as he silently mouthed his last word: “Help.”

Elijah cuts a striking figure in photos like the one above, where he poses in full football gear. He was a rising star, headed for a promising career. His solemn, chiseled face is almost too handsome, like it’s not quite real. In a few photos, he is with his girlfriend, an equally blonde, equally impossible beauty.

Hardly any photos have been released of the shooters, except one casual outdoor shot apiece. Both young men are black. Like Elijah, they strike unsmiling poses. One has a mask hanging off his ear. The other has his head slightly cocked, his lips a little twisted.

For now, we can only guess what passed between these three boys in the parking lot. It’s been said that they knew each other, which suggests any number of possibilities, any number of things that could have risen to the surface and boiled over in a hot flash of bullets. Anyone who’s taught high school boys can imagine this. But it would only be guessing, for now.

Two days later, Elijah’s father had something to say to the boys who killed his son: “We don’t know the kids, we don’t know their background, we don’t know their story. They’re forgiven, from me.” Elijah’s girlfriend added that Elijah would have forgiven them. “He said life moves on, it's sad, but you got to pick back up, and you can’t be mad at anybody.” The community rallied around the family with prayers, support, and a candlelight vigil. It prompted Craig to reflect, bittersweetly, that “If you could have a tragedy like this somewhere, I’d say this is it. Come here to have that one because it has just been an amazing community.”

Of course, because this is 2022, it wasn’t long before the Internet had Opinions.

One exchange was kicked off by this angry viral tweet, from some guy named Jake: “This kid’s body isn’t even cold yet, and the parents and girlfriend are already falling all over themselves to forgive the murderers and move on? No righteous anger? What a pathetic, broken culture this is.”

Radio host Erick Erickson responded that the reaction seemed to him “the epitome of Christianity.” Jake came back and observed that they seemed to have “differing views on the epitome of Christianity.” It wasn’t quite clear what does epitomize Christianity, for Jake.

This exchange was in turn picked up by Pedro Gonzalez, a known alt-right character who spends his spare time squinting at Jewish physiognomy. Pedro also has Opinions: “There is a disease of the mind that afflicts white people like Erick Erickson that makes them think it would be honorable to wash the feet of the murderers of their children especially if they are not white. It is beyond pathetic and deserves nothing but contempt and disgust.”

Such Opinions write themselves, of course. And if we’re honest, if we’re really honest, looking from Elijah’s picture, to the killers, to Elijah, many of us might have certain passing thoughts that we would elect not to share out loud, unless we were with people we could absolutely trust.

The boys are very quiet in their first court appearance since the shooting. They stand as violent repeat offenders, to be held without bond. The second one subtly smirks and shakes his head as the first is described as a “flight risk,” a “danger to the community.” The middle-aged white man behind glass is gracious and polite to a fault as he professionally runs through his list of questions. “Does your family or someone know you’re here, sir? Do you have an attorney or not?” He calls them “Mr. Bryan,” “Mr. Richardson.” As the first boy sits and the second boy rises, he repeats the question, “You have four felony charges. Do you know what those are?” The boy shifts his eyes away and nods with a barely audible, “I do.”

One does wonder what their stories are. The first boy wears an Army shirt, the same one he wears in the casual photo now circulating. He speaks up louder than the other, more cooperatively. He mentions both a mom and a dad, so we at least know there is some kind of father figure with some kind of presence in his life. Then the second boy mumbles so inaudibly we can barely catch anything about anything, including his family. Which one pulled a gun? One wonders. Which one pulled the trigger?

They couldn’t seem more different from the young black man who appeared before a court in a very different capacity three years ago, to embrace and forgive the white policewoman who had killed his brother in a tragic manslaughter. The world watched in awe as Brandt Jean put his arms around Amber Guyger, after earnestly saying he hoped she was sorry and would “give her life to Christ.”

There were Opinions then, too. Except they came from the opposite side.

Again, we must be honest: It is a hard thing to forgive any kind of killing, but some killings are harder to forgive than others. It must have been hard for Brandt Jean to embrace a woman whose cowardice and incompetence were a disgrace to her uniform, and for which the price was his brother’s life. Yet Guyger was also a vulnerable figure. Perhaps it was hard to sympathize with her, but it wasn’t too hard to pity her as her prosecutor relentlessly hemmed her in. She was poor. She was plain. She was, after all, a woman, in tears. In young Jean’s embrace, there was not only the bridging of the divide between black and white, but also the chivalrous condescension of strong male to weak female.

Perhaps a closer analogy is the forgiveness extended from the families of the Charleston church shooting victims to their white killer, Dylann Roof. A forgiveness which, like Craig DeWitt’s, was shockingly near-instantaneous. And, like DeWitt’s, it was taken for weakness. Perhaps for a pathetic, half-apologetic man or woman, one would dare to extend forgiveness. But for a cold-blooded killer, while he is yet cold-blooded?

We recoil from today’s Opinion-havers, from the Pedro Gonzalezes of the world. We thank God we’re not like them. The decent thing to do is to praise DeWitt, not pile on a grieving father. But somewhere in the back of our minds, that little voice is asking, “But did he have to, though? I mean really, ‘We don’t know their stories’? Really?”

The answer is no. Of course not. Of course he didn’t have to. If he had to, it would not be mercy. If he had to, it could not season justice.

In YouTube comments, another Opinion-haver opines, “Christianity has so profoundly distorted morality that parents are forgiving thugs who slaughtered their son.”

One could fairly ask in that case why it is that we also find examples of such forgiveness even outside the Christian church, in for instance this case of a young Muslim man whose father forgave and embraced the killer. Though not quite as powerful as the embrace between Brandt Jean and Amber Guyger, it still packs its own punch. Yet this father is not a Christian. Where, then, does the impulse come from for him? He might point to a particular peaceful verse in the Koran. Some of us might uneasily think about certain other less peaceful verses in the same book, which are expressly supposed to supersede the more peaceful.

So how does this work, really? Does one need instructions from a book to forgive? Will any book do, if one’s heart is in the right place?

For a clue to these answers I tend to turn, maybe surprisingly, to the book of Ecclesiastes, and most especially to this verse in Chapter 3: “He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.” In some translations, “the world” is rendered as “eternity.”

The Christian has this, as does the Jew, as does the Muslim, as does the man who believes nothing. And accordingly, in any of them one could find this impulse, this grace. I remember once sitting at an in-person lecture while the Mengele twin experiment survivor Eva Kor described how she had arrived at her own philosophy of forgiveness. She had lost whatever religious faith she had. Still, she forgave.

Any good man can forgive. But it is only the Christian who can explain why. And it is only the Christian who has a place to turn when he must cry out to someone, “I forgive, help my unforgiveness.” Like Corrie ten Boom, when she found she could not in her own power forgive the Nazi prison guard who had tormented her sister. It was then that she turned to a power not her own. She did not need to feel forgiveness, she realized. She needed only to choose it, and trust in God to do the rest.

May we never have to choose so terribly. May it never be asked of us to do what Corrie ten Boom did, what the Charleston church did, what Brandt Jean and Craig DeWitt have done. Still, may these examples be ours to consider, to marvel at, and in our own small way, to follow after.