Gone Boy
A Father's Search for the Truth in His Son's Murder
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
On December 14, 1992, Gregory Gibson’s eighteen-year-old son Galen was murdered, shot in the doorway of his college library by a fellow student gone berserk. The killer was jailed for life, but for Gibson the tragedy was still unfolding. The morning of the shooting, he learned, college officials had intercepted but not stopped a box of ammunition addressed to the murderer. They were also anonymously warned of the intended killing but failed to call the police. After years of frustrated attempts to find peace, Gibson woke one morning to a terrible vision of his own rage and helplessness. He knew he had to do something before he destroyed himself, and he resolved to discover and document the forces that led to Galen’s death.
Gone Boy follows Gibson as he visits the gun seller, as well as detectives, lawyers, psychiatrists, politicians, and college bureaucrats— a cast of characters as vivid as those in a Raymond Chandler mystery. Hailed by the New York Times and others for its evocative style and courage in confronting guns, violence, and manhood in America today, this wrenching memoir speaks in the voice of a man struggling to turn grief and rage into acceptance and understanding.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The recent rash of school shootings makes Gibson's heartbreaking book as timely as it is good. Shortly before Christmas in 1992, an alienated, angry student named Wayne Lo went on a shooting rampage at Simon's Rock College in western Massachusetts, wounding four people and killing two, one of whom was Gibson's 18-year-old son, Galen. While grieving, Gibson embarked on what he calls a "walkabout," a search for the truth about his son's death: "I would concentrate on the details, the facts, and trust that their greater meaning would emerge, of its own accord, in the end. It never occurred to me to doubt that there was a greater meaning." At first, there was Lo's trial to occupy him, followed by a civil suit against the college. Gibson writes honestly about the rage that consumed him for the first few years after Galen's death. In a remarkable chapter, he describes a conversation with Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, which owns Simon's Rock, in which he realized that assigning blame would serve no practical or spiritual purpose. Not that human fallibility didn't play a huge role in Galen's death: Gibson makes a compelling argument that Simon's Rock administrators had more than enough warning signs to prevent the tragedy. Lo's high-school teachers knew he was troubled. So did his college teachers. And his college friends and administrators knew he had a gun and ammunition. What makes this book special, and what distinguishes it from the blizzard of 30-second explanations and 800-word op-ed pieces on teen violence, is the way in which Gibson transcends his rage and becomes capable of mounting a searching, informative and ultimately deeply moving exploration into the combination of causality and randomness that surrounds his son's death.
