Finally Some Good News
The one piece of good news I got during this period was that Milo Yiannopolous had been kicked off of FaceBook. At the very least, the information doxing me was no longer posted there. Still, I prayed. I talked to my madrina. I meditated. I prayed some more. Then, I buckled down and tried to focus on my summer renovation plans. Thank God for Ryan Dannar, my good friend since high school. He checked in on me during all of this. Sometimes he'd bring Wes Anderson movies, because I’m the only other person Ryan knows who wants to talk about them, and I wanted to talk about literally ANYTHING else but my problems. Ryan also helped me keep my spirits up by channeling our fear and anxiety into making art and listening to him play music. We kicked around ideas for getting our musician and artist friends together and putting on an event that would denounce the Yiannopolous charade. When the Yiannopoulis charade got canceled, we went back to watching The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Darjeeling Limited instead of producing the music event. Things started to change when the rains came later that May.
At first, it just seemed like we finally were getting some much-needed rain, even if that rain was real heavy. To me, it felt like some sort of torrential justice coming down. You see, I’d taken the time to learn where Chris Barnett lived and had property. Those areas were getting hit the hardest. The drive-bys had finally stopped, too. For the first few days, I felt better than I had in a month. After the first week, though, Tulsa County was rapidly floating over into Noah and the ark territory. That was concerning. After the second week of rain, my neighborhood was evacuated for ten days because the levees next to us were starting to seep in places. I’m a Hurricane Katrina survivor; you do not need to tell ME twice that the levees done gonna bust, cuz I’ll be gone after the first time you say it. That was terrifying. And that’s the problem with rain, I finally remembered: it falls on the just and the unjust alike.
After several weeks of rain and standing water, the floods receded. I eventually returned home without incident and went back to my regular life…of vigilance. My house, and some others on my street, were untouched by the floods. Tulsa had suffered plenty of floods and tornadoes before, but I don’t recall a time prior to this one where the reconstruction and recovery process got moving so fast. Or was so well-supported on the local levels. It took all summer, but most folks were more or less back to some level of normalcy before school started. Everybody except for Chris Barnett.
It was late in the summer when Chris Barnett finally attempted the murder that undid him. By that time, I had mostly put him and the whole mess out of my mind. I was getting ready for the new semester to start and planning my curriculum. Then one day, casually scrolling through my algorithmically neutral Google local news feed at lunch, I see a story about Chris Barnett. He had been arrested for shooting a process server who had come to serve papers on a two-million-dollar lawsuit. Somehow, within five minutes of my seeing that story, I got a phone call from Ms. W filling me in on the developments of the case.
Barnett’s life had begun to unravel after the rains. The flooding losses, along with a raft of abominable life choices, had bankrupted Barnett. He was fending off creditors and process servers. His parents had cut him off. His businesses had finally failed and were too far gone to be saved or salvaged. He was being evicted from his house. His husband was threatening to leave him. Finally, his last hope at income–those nuisance suits moving through the courts all over town–was lost when his amoral parasite of a law firm dropped him as a client for failure to pay.
As Barnett became increasingly desperate, his blogging became increasingly deranged and disturbing. He had started recording in grisly detail his plans to kidnap and murder the presidents of TU and TCC, and a few others he held grudges against. But the most terrifying post he made was the one in which he puckishly outlined his plans to “hypothetically” commit a mass shooting at TU Football game. Then, only a few days later, he shot a process server in the arm and claimed it was self-defense. The police did a cursory review of Barnett’s Google search history and found searches for phrases like “legally shoot a process server,” “self-defense shoot a process server,” and “can you legally shoot a process server?” Barnett was caught, dead-to rights, and arrested. Worse yet, this shooting had made Barnett’s “hypothetical” revenge fantasy look more like an actual domestic terrorist threat. Oklahoma already had one of those back in 1995, and another one back in 1921, and we did not want another. This was the angle that Ms. W decided to play next.
As soon as Barnett was arrested, Ms. W’s team had gotten their dossier to the DA and set up a meeting. Barnett spend the night in jail for the process server shooting, which gave the DA a day to get a warrant. They got it, and the resulting search recovered in the ballpark of 200 firearms–registered and not–from Barnett’s house while he was in jail. The next morning, Barnett was processed out for the shooting. To my understanding, he was immediately re-arrested and taken back to jail as soon as he got home. This time, representatives from the Oklahoma State Attorney’s office had come up to Tulsa for the arraignment. They told the judge that Barnett was a profoundly dangerous person and a serious flight risk, and that no amount of bail should be granted. The judge agreed. That is how Chris Barnett spent the next few months in jail awaiting trial.
I was saved, for the moment. Barnett was tried the following February and found guilty on the counts of felony assault and battery. With that, Barnett’s campaign against me crashed and burned. The judge sentenced Barnett to spend the next 32 years in jail and pay a $10,000 fine. If that was as saved as my bacon was going to get, I was happy to take it. That malicious records request would always be a mar on my record, I knew, but at least now Barnett’s website was getting taken down, so I wouldn’t be a simple Google Search away from disaster. The relief I felt was immense and sweet. It became a lot easier to focus on living my life, so I did. I put the entire mess out of my mind and went back to my pre-vigil life.
One night as I was wrapping up class, I overheard a very interesting conversation between two custodians who had come to clean the classroom after class. Mechelle and LaToya–not their real names–had been working at TCC for as long as I remember. I noticed that they always seemed to like to work together. Their banter always sort of reminded me of Statler and Waldorf from The Muppet Show.
“Oh My GOD,” LaToya said all of a sudden, “Did you hear about that crazy guy who shot that process server a while back?”
I dropped what I was doing and eavesdropped intently.
“What?” Mechelle asked. “...Uh, No.”
“That governor candidate guy,” LaToya continued, “Chris something–like Barette. He shot that guy, that process server?”
Mechelle stared blankly at LaToya.
“You really don’t know?” LaToya remarked. “Well, I overheard a student say that they recognized him from this campus. They said he saw him here with some other dude at night one time looking for a professor.”
“That’s some scary shit,” Mechlle replied, “That’s terrible!... Did anything happen?”
“No,” said LaToya with some disappointment. “Turns out, that professor doesn’t even have an office here.”
Being unable to stop myself any further from interjecting, I blurted out. “Yeah. I heard about that. I heard that the professor–they were an adjunct.” Both custodians looked at me for a few seconds while I looked at them. Then, they spoke at the same time:
“You know that professor?” asked LaToya.
“He didn’t even have an office?” asked Mechelle.
“No,” I explained, “they’re an adjunct. I’ve overheard students talking about the same thing all semester,” I cagily replied.
Looking up at me with an expression of disbelief on her face, Mechelle then asked, “Who sticks their neck out like that for a part-time job?”
Indeed. At the end of the day, I think the most ridiculous thing about this entire misadventure is that it happened to an impoverished adjunct without an office, yet the only thing that can possibly exonerate me in the public record is this fact.
But the bright side of it all is this: THE SHOW WAS CANCELED. This misadventure took place a little over a year before the failed 2020 Trump Rally in Tulsa. I have to wonder what might be different now if Trump had come to Tulsa and been greeted with the eager fascist bigots who Milo Yiannopoulos had meant to rile up. I am grateful we never got the chance to find out. My whole goal in teaching about the Greenwood Race Massacre in my writing class was to do my part in helping right a historic wrong. I like to think that I have been contributing to this goal in my own small way. Though to be honest, it also seems this misadventure helped prevent even more of that evil shit from happening in Tulsa again–for the time being.
