Patrick Lamont Robinson

Patrick Lamont Robinson was known by his name first—by the sound of it spoken by people who cared about him, by the way it might have been called across a room, written on a message, saved in a phone. He was 30, a Black man from St. Louis, Missouri, and what we have here is not the full record of how he died, but the stark fact that he did.

A death like this leaves a particular kind of silence behind it. Not the quiet of an empty street, but the sudden absence that shows up everywhere: ...