( D I S ) I N V E S T E D
The Downward Spiral
In Lieu of Systemic Solutions, the Community Comes Together to Heal Story and photos by Chris Bowling
This is the FORTH installment in “The Downward Spiral:” a series from The Reader about The Dow nward Sp Omaha’s meniral tal health and criminal justice systems. SEE THE ONLINE TABLE OF CONTENTS ON PAGE 4 FOR A LINK TO AN OPED COLUMN ON THE SERIES. Janu ary
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stories, vigils, political grandstanding — but eventually it blows over and life moves on for victims like Manning, whether they’re ready or not.
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or the past several months, The Reader has investigated how systems in Omaha and Nebraska have blurred the lines between mental instability and criminality. For our final story, we examine how Omahans are looking to their communities to find peace and healing. These solutions range from restorative justice to peer-to-peer counseling. None of these is a panacea — someone struggling with a serious mental illness and multiple incarcerations doesn’t just need a support group. But we thought these small, hopeful stories show there are ways we can help one another, and that as bad as things get, they can still get better.
Healing through Restorative Justice When Tabatha Manning saw his face, emotion took over. Confusion. Pain. Anger.
Shakur Abdullah leads a class on restorative justice at the Omaha Correctional Center. Memories flooded back. Breakfast on a cold Wednesday morning on Jan. 15, 2014. A loud pop. Manning’s 5-year-old daughter standing up, her head tilted backward, blood gushing from where the bullet tore through her neck. The man sitting in the church pew in October 2018 didn’t kill Payton Benson, Manning’s daughter, but he was part of the gang shooting that caught Payton in the crossfire. The shooter, 22 at the time, spent three years in prison for first-degree conspiracy to commit murder. After losing her daughter, Manning, 41, couldn’t work, cook or hardly bathe. The shooting and screaming replayed in her mind. Manning pushed herself and her four other kids to go to therapy.
ning’s anger cooled. She told her story. The man in the church pew, whose name Manning asked The Reader not to publish to protect his privacy, told his. The fight started over a pair of shoes and ended in 15 gunshots. “Him telling me everything that happened unexpectedly relieved me of all of the guilt. I walked out feeling so much lighter,” she said. “Knowing that there was nothing that I could have done to stop it or change it at that point, knowing that he was taking accountability for killing her. His body language was huge. He was scared. He was terrified.” Months later, when she woke up on the anniversary of Payton’s death, Manning took a deep breath, exhaled smoothly and started to weep.
But nothing resonated like the apology she got inside that church.
“I started crying tears of joy,” Manning said through tears, “because I could breathe again.”
After a few minutes of sitting with him in the church, Man-
Gun violence generates a lot of attention at first — news
A 2018 report in the American Journal of Community Psychology found people in highcrime areas are more than twice as likely to meet the threshold for moderate depression or diagnoses of post traumatic stress disorder. Residents in crime “hot spots” are also more likely to be poor people of color. “It changed my perspective in a way that I didn’t see the trauma that everyone else had on their faces when I went out in North Omaha,” said Manning, who at the time of Payton’s death lived on 45th and Bedford streets. “I could see the hurt caused by incidents like what I went through.” It’s very hard for each side, or the community, to move forward, Manning said, unless people who’ve caused pain and the people they’ve hurt heal together. The conversation Manning had is called a victim offender dialogue — an old concept that can reduce victims’ depression and trauma triggers as well as offenders’ anger, shame and self-blame, according to a 2020 report that studied these dialogues in Colorado. But they’re not for everyone. Research from Canada showed between 40% and 50% of victims, who must initiate and control the whole process, want to meet their offenders, and the
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