Shawn N Fields

Shawn Fields, 43, a Black man from St. Louis, Missouri, died in October 2016, leaving behind a trail of questions that public-facing records do little to answer. In the few online notices that exist, his passing is marked more by the quiet finality of a date than by any explanation of what brought that date about.

What’s striking, reading what’s available, is how little daylight there is between his life and the public record of his death. The online obituary information identifies h ...