1. “I Hated Fire Watch” “I Hated Fire Watch”
BY NIGHTFALL ON MAY 30, 2020, Jake Gardner was inside his nightclub in Omaha’s Old Market district. He had two pistols and a shotgun. One of his regular bartenders soon joined him.

The night before, a Black Lives Matter protest in the streets of Omaha had turned ugly. Police and protesters had skirmished, and there’d been arrests. Some businesses had been damaged. Now a second night of unrest had exploded, and the crowds of protesters were descending on Omaha’s downtown. Bricks and Molotov cocktails were being heaved at buildings and at police, and officers in riot gear had responded with tear gas.

Gardner, thirty-eight, had moved to Omaha with his family when he was in middle school. He’d enlisted in the Marines straight out of high school, and won a fistful of medals and combat ribbons as part of one of the very first U.S. Marine Corps units to invade Iraq in 2003.

Gardner had returned from the war to Omaha and made a success of himself running one of the city’s more popular downtown nightclubs. For years, the club had been known as The Hive, named after a song by a popular band out of Omaha, 311. The bar was located on the northern edge of the Old Market, a historic district of cobblestone streets and converted warehouses that had been transformed into a revitalized neighborhood of clubs and restaurants, carriage rides and street performers.

In the last year, though, Gardner had reinvented The Hive, turning it and an adjacent space on Harney Street into The Gatsby, a cocktail bar tricked out to evoke the Roaring Twenties. But the swank of The Gatsby hid what amounted to serious financial troubles for Gardner: he’d been involved in a dispute stemming from a bid to expand into a nearby property and his legal bills were bleeding money from The Gatsby. Worse, the club had been shuttered for weeks amid the global coronavirus pandemic, compounding Gardner’s troubles.

With a reopening scheduled for the following week, Gardner by May 30 had stocked his bar full of high-end liquor, some $90,000 in prospective gross profits. The liquor was, in truth, his single most important financial asset.

The protests in Omaha had been ignited by a harrowing national scandal that had been captured on video and broadcast to the world—the killing days earlier of a Black man, George Floyd, by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. With Floyd on the ground during an attempted arrest, the cop had kneeled on the Black man’s neck for close to ten minutes, slowly asphyxiating him. The killing, caught on video by a bystander, triggered nationwide fury, as cities from Atlanta to Portland were convulsed by protests and vandalism.

Omaha, a city of half a million people on the Missouri River, is the hometown of both Warren Buffett and Malcolm X. It is a place of deep-pocketed philanthropy and entrenched segregation in its schools and in its neighborhoods. The Catholic priest Father Edward Flanagan in 1917 founded the famous Boys Town orphanage in Omaha, and fifty years later the Black Panthers set up an office in town, as well. Known as America’s biggest small town, Omaha also has an overlooked history of lynchings and race riots. But in a reliably red state, whose Republican Party would pledge its allegiance to Donald Trump, Omaha has come to beat with a faint but durable blue Democratic heart. Both the Jesuit school Creighton University and the University of Nebraska Omaha help give the city a liberal character. Omaha went for Barack Obama in 2008, and again for Joe Biden in 2020.

Gardner—barely five seven with brown eyes, his brown hair worn to his shoulders and a showman’s smile on his face—had for years been something of a known personality in Omaha. The local papers had done feature stories on him and his rise as a nightclub owner in the ever-more-popular Old Market. The Hive had hosted reggae and salsa nights, and Gardner had once attracted notice for an inspired election day promotion: Show you voted, and you got a free drink. Didn’t matter who you pulled the lever for.

But Gardner had also been a lightning rod on matters of race and gender. He’d provoked a public outcry over crude remarks he’d made concerning the issue of his bar’s bathroom facilities, and whether they adequately served the city’s transgender community. Some of the city’s LGBTQ advocates never forgave him. The Hive’s strict door policy—no hats, no baggy pants, no facial tattoos—had come to be regarded by some as transparently racist. Gardner had also worked on Donald Trump’s surprising run for president, and for a while he’d had a cardboard cutout of Trump set up inside his nightclub.

Gardner was no fan of the Black Lives Matter movement. Online, he’d once called it a terrorist organization, one he thought regarded all whites as racists and that was more interested in creating mayhem in America’s streets than seeing bad cops punished or real criminal justice reforms instituted. The remark had provoked plenty of blowback, cementing in some people’s minds the sense that Gardner’s establishments were unwelcoming places for people of color.

On the night of May 30, Omaha Scanner, an online breaking-news outlet, allowed Gardner, holed up inside The Gatsby, to monitor the events unfolding on the streets of Omaha. By 9:00 p.m., protesters were abandoning the scene of the night’s initial standoff with police—the intersection of Dodge Street and 72nd Street, Omaha’s informal public square—and had made it downtown. Windows at the Douglas County Courthouse, where a Black man named Will Brown had been infamously lynched one hundred years earlier, had been busted out and graffiti painted on the building’s walls. The city’s cherished Orpheum Theater, just blocks away from Gardner’s nightclub, was under assault, as well.

Gardner used his cell phone to text a former Marine and one of his best friends.

“I know this may come as a surprise, but I fucking hated fire watch,” Gardner wrote. “Irony is getting out of the Marines to start a company so you are your own boss, then sitting on fire watch all night. Fuck me.”

“Fire watch” is a military term for guard duty. Marines eager for combat and adventure tend to hate it—forced to log long hours at night doing something that, while essential to one’s unit’s safety, most often feels like killing time. Still, the Marine Corps takes the duty dead seriously, and spells out the dozen or so requirements for performing fire watch properly:

When on duty as a guard or sentry, you are in charge of your area and have the authority to stop and question any rank who seeks to pass your area; Walk your post in a military manner, keeping always on the alert and observing everything that takes place within sight or hearing; Stay observant with keen attention to details; It is easy to get complacent after many hours on duty—especially if you have not had many people to deal with; But your ability to pay attention to your surroundings will save your life and others; Report all violations of orders you have been instructed to enforce; Be especially watchful at night; Challenge all persons on or near your post, and to allow no one to pass without proper authority. Stay vigilant; Quit your post only when properly relieved.

Harney Street, where Gardner’s club was located, is a wide boulevard, with three lanes for cars and another for bikes. When Gardner was first scouting locations to open his place in the Old Market, he had walked the district’s streets with a hand clicker, determining and recording the spots with the greatest foot traffic. Harney Street had won out.

Nearing 10:00 p.m., Gardner got a text from a Marine buddy in town who had been following Omaha Scanner, too. The ex-Marine had been a recruiter in Omaha, and Gardner, once enlisted himself, had been one of the recruiter’s best advocates for identifying new prospects. Gardner struck him as both a natural patriot and a persuasive pitchman. The former recruiter and his wife had patronized Gardner’s bars over the years, and they were looking forward to going again to The Gatsby when it reopened in the coming days. Now he wrote to Gardner, saying things on the streets were looking “squirrelly.” And he fell back on Marine lingo to ask if Gardner wanted him to come get him.

“I asked if he wanted a hot extract,” the Marine said.

“No,” Gardner wrote back. “I’m good.”

The protests ignited by George Floyd’s killing grew to be more than just the latest angry reaction to an outrageous police killing. It felt more like a genuine moment of national reckoning. Donald Trump, who had all but sided with white supremacists after the infamous and deadly 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was seeking a second term. The COVID pandemic had already begun to take a disproportionate toll among the nation’s people of color. Much of the country, then, was out of patience, and motivated like rarely before to take a stand. The notion of defunding the nation’s police departments, once a fringe idea, now seemed to many necessary and overdue.

In the days after Floyd’s death, hundreds of cities across the country erupted in anger and violence. Curfews were imposed in two hundred of those cities; thousands of arrests were made; some estimates of the damage to property ran to $2 billion.

One of the young protesters making his way along Harney Street was a twenty-two-year-old African American man, James Scurlock. Named for his father, Scurlock was one of more than two dozen siblings, including stepbrothers and stepsisters, blood siblings and informally adopted others, who spent all or parts of their upbringing in North Omaha, the Black and mostly poor corner of Omaha.

“Our own little Detroit,” said A. D. Swolley, one of Scurlock’s older brothers.

Scurlock had been born in the ambulance racing his mother to the delivery room at the hospital, what would become a funny story about a boy later known for his zest for life and appetite for adventure.

James H. Scurlock Sr. said life for the family could at times be hard.

“Poverty? Yes,” he said. “Did my kids miss a meal? No.”

The sprawling family had maintained an extraordinary bond over many years. They were fiercely loyal to one another, whether they shared the same set of parents or not.

“Most of us didn’t need to have friends,” said one of Scurlock’s sisters, Qwenyona Evans. “We had each other.”

There had, however, been a nomadic quality to Scurlock’s childhood. For a while, he and a number of his siblings lived with their grandmother in Denver. He spent time in a homeless shelter with his mother in Norfolk, Nebraska, which once upon a time had been a thriving meatpacking town two hours outside Omaha. When in Omaha, Scurlock attended local schools, at least one of them a magnet school for kids interested in science, and he stayed with a shifting set of mixed households. Family and teachers thought Scurlock had the makings of a promising student—naturally bright, creative, taken with music.

Scurlock had kept an end-of-school-year note from his fourth-grade teacher.

“I will truly miss that cute little smile of yours,” the teacher wrote. “I admire your mathematical ability. Don’t forget to read this summer. Smile. Never give up.”

“Grades were never a problem,” Swolley said of James. “The neighborhood was the problem.”

At sixteen, Scurlock’s father said, James had rebelled against his father’s strictness and run off to Norfolk. Swolley said he and others were concerned about James, but they did not think he was in danger.

They were wrong. James would get locked up, and sentenced to three to five years in a juvenile correctional facility. Two other arrests would follow after his release.

“He had a good, good heart,” Marissa Mitchell, a sister, said of James. “But that good heart found itself in some bad places.”

On the night of May 30, Scurlock eventually found himself inside the offices of an architecture firm on Harney Street. The windows had been shattered, and Scurlock and a friend, Tucker Randall, were trashing the desks and chairs and computers on the office’s ground floor. Just past 10:30, Scurlock and his friend emerged from the office, and darted off down Harney Street.

They were exactly one block from Jake Gardner’s club, The Gatsby.