On June 10, 2005, an act of violence would end one life and irreversibly alter another. On that night, Phillip Gillins, who was set to walk in graduation the same day, was assaulted near Hodgepodge on East 13th Avenue after an altercation that began at Taylor’s Bar and Grill. Later, Darrell Sky Walker would turn himself into police after the Lane County District Attorney issued a warrant for his arrest.
Allow me, for the moment, to wallow in my own bias: It doesn’t surprise me that this attack happened at Taylor’s, a bar known for its cretinous throng of sub-humanoids. Over the summer, I spent an inordinate amount of time at Taylor’s, a sin for which I do not expect absolution. I saw the sign, hoisted high above Taylor’s doors, written in the blood of a nubile freshman, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here … plus dollar wells.” Buoyed by the promise of dollar wells, I mustered all the strength I could and entered this impenitent den of fratocracy.
Taylor’s is the only bar at which I have been threatened. On the first occasion, a tall man approached my group of friends and said we were acting like cokeheads. We were bemused, to say the least. A verbal altercation ensued. “How much money do you think I make? What do you think I drive?” He held up his car keys in front of our faces and jingled them. It was, in a word, surreal. Later we would run into him again, at which point he made fun of my Pumas and told me that his shoes cost $160 and were filled not with air, but gas.
On the second occasion, a friend and I were standing by Taylor’s pool tables after consuming a number of drinks. My friend accidentally stepped into someone who was attempting to navigate the teeming mass of backwards-baseball-capped, Ambercrombie-bedecked patrons. “Why did you step on my shoes, man?” he screamed almost immediately. “Is it because I’m black?”
Of course, it wasn’t because he was black. At a certain point – usually around your fifth or sixth Long Island – things become pear-shaped and molecules turn into giant asteroids, throwing you off your axis. It took five minutes to convince him that our terrible transgression of stumbling forward at the wrong time was not, in fact, an entreaty to fisticuffs and certainly wasn’t racially motivated.
There are some places where the creeps congregate – where tempers flare, and the slightest provocation or misunderstanding can send someone to violence. And we often don’t think about it, but one punch can lead to death.
Sometimes these confrontations become amusing stories, or tales of machismo. But in Gillins’ case it led to death. The fact of the matter is that no one really knows what transpired that night, except for the people were there. And one of them is dead.
According to the story told by Gillins’ friend, Anthony Boulis, who was there that night, Sky Walker and his friends elbowed past Gillins. Offended by the contact, Gillins apparently called one of Sky Walker’s friends a “whigger.” The confrontation escalated outside of Hodgepodge, at which point someone punched Gillins in the face, sending him to the pavement. It is highly possible that Sky Walker delivered the fatal blow, seeing as how he was found guilty. But the evidence is scant and is based on unreliable eyewitness accounts. I do not believe that the district attorney did not prove beyond a shadow of doubt that Sky Walker was the sole individual responsible for Gillins’ death.
Call this Rashomon on the Willamette. Different witnesses, none of them reliable, have different takes on the situation. In some versions of the story, Sky Walker’s friend, Bryan “J.D.” Beall, bragged about the punch that he delivered immediately following the confrontation.
The fact that Sky Walker is black adds the element of racial injustice to the case. The NAACP issued a statement over the summer, and more recently Sky Walker stated that he believed the jury convicted him based on his race.
Turning this into a racial issue however, is counterproductive. Turning this into an issue concerning Budweiser-swilling, undersexed goons-gone-violent is also counterproductive. We come into a circumstance like this harboring a number of assumptions and biases, including mine, borne of my first-hand experience at Taylor’s. But they are meaningless.
Turning this into a race issue, as some are inclined to do, doesn’t address any of the facts – except the fact that Sky Walker is black and his friends are white. But, that isn’t actually important at all.
The district attorney and police may have conducted a flawed investigation. If that’s true, then it’s time to unearth the truth and convince people that Sky Walker does not deserve the jail sentence he received. If we begin projecting our own biases, assumptions and unfounded theories, then we merely add to the mindless cacophonic prattle – like the jibber-jabbering damned, drinking their watery Jack and cokes at Taylor’s.
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The Darrell Sky Walker case: Consider the circumstances
Daily Emerald
October 5, 2006
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