On a spring afternoon in Brooklyn in 1993, four teen-agers from Crown Heights tried to steal a new off-road bicycle from a man named Allyn Winslow on a hill in Prospect Park. Winslow resisted and pedalled away, and one of the boys shot him twice with a .22-calibre pistol. One of the bullets hit his heart, and at the bottom of the hill he fell off his bicycle and died.
I remember this case. Frazier wrote about it in his elegy “To Mr. Winslow” (The New Yorker, November 29, 1993; included in his great 2005 collection Gone to New York), in which, over a period of days, weeks and months, he visits and revisits the spot where Winslow died, noting the gradual disappearance of the many markers (“Timberland shoe box with a bouquet of flowers in it, and a glass wine carafe with more flowers”; American flag; “a blue-and-white striped ribbon, a ceramic pipe, a bike rider’s reflector badge in the image of a peace sign”; “a cross made of wood, bound with red ribbon and draped with a string of purple glass beads”; to name just a few) that people had placed there in tribute. The last paragraph begins, “Just now – a bright, chilly, fall day – I went by the place again,” and ends,
At first, I could find no trace of the memorial at all: grass and clover have reclaimed the bared dirt. I got down on one knee, muddying my pants. Finally, I found a wooden stake broken off about half an inch above the ground: the base of the memorial cross, probably – the only sign of the unmeasured sorrows that converge here.
The memorials faded away. But Frazier didn't forget. Twenty-eight years later, in “Guns Down,” he rescues Allyn Winslow from oblivion.
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