Losing Jon: A Teen's Tragic Death, A Police Cover-Up, A Community's Fight for Justice, by David Parrish (Citadel Press, $16.95 pb, 256 pp, 2020) Available at the Howard County, MD, Public libraries. Review by Skye Anderson.
Riveting! A 24-Hour Book
Ah, I finally got my hands on Losing Jon and I'm so glad I did! Taking place in the town we have lived in for more than 30* years, this book (and the Laura Lippman book, Wilde Lake** were ones I couldn't wait to read. Of course, like any book set in your city, some place names will be familiar as well as some people, even if it's fiction (Lippman), but some won't. The cover itself is striking enough to grab your attention and not let go.
Not Fiction
Losing Jon is not fiction. Rather, it is the account of a young person's short life and the ensuing search for the truth surrounding his death, written by a close family friend, David Parrish. Jon was a twin, a former high school athlete: the author was his baseball coach of several years, so Parrish knew Jon well and cared enough about him and his family to attempt for several years to ferret out the truth. Was Jon's death really a suicide as the county police were so quick to label it, or was it a cover-up by corrupt police officers in small-town America?
A Planned Community
The narrative takes place in an affluent neighborhood (Stevens Forest) in an affluent village (Oakland Mills) in an affluent town (Columbia) in an affluent county (Howard) in America - but that didn't stop bad things from happening. Who the bad guys actually were, if any, however, is still up for grabs.
It started with a motel party that became too raucous. Police were called and ended up physically subduing some of the kids, arresting them for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. After a night in jail and in the ensuing three months, some of the young men thought they were being followed by one particular officer, along with other strange and unsettling incidents.
Then, early one weekday morning (May 4, 1990), joggers found a boy's body hanging from the backstop at a local high school. The police were quick to label it a suicide but that didn't sit well with the family or friends of Jon Bowie. And, to add insult to injury, there were too many things the police could not or would not explain, even after calling in the FBI, but only temporarily.
Follow the amateur investigation that kept coming back to certain county police officers and then perhaps you can figure it out. The author couldn't. And the reviewer couldn't, either.
Reviews
Reviews comment on the abruptness of the book's ending in an unsatisfactory manner, but isn't that true for many things in life that gradually or quickly fade away with no satisfactory explanation? Other reviewers dislike the incredible number of characters, both named and unnamed, but that can be explained by remembering that this is not fiction in which the author can control the number of characters. In addition, the wise author chose to identify only the most important people by name so as to not confuse the reader even more with irrelevant information.
And other reviewers mention that David Parrish brought himself into the narrative too much, but keep in mind that he played an active part in the investigation at the request of the family whom he knew well.
We are fortunate to have the book written by a technical writer, who actually spent several pages explaining just what a backstop is, for readers who are not baseball fans.
Final Recommendation
Read this book! You will remember it for a long time. After all, that is the mark of a good book!
-------------------------------------------
*We moved to Columbia, Maryland, less than a month after Jon's death but our lives centered around a nearby military installation and jobs in Washington, DC. Columbia is a bedroom community of more than 100,000 people, about midway between Baltimore and Washington. Without a newspaper, TV or radio station, few residents not personally involved remembered this incident (though it did happen more than 30 years ago).
**
No comments:
Post a Comment