“When you shut out the pain, you shut out everything else,” said Nick, one of the people in the tent with Joshua Pfenning when the 35-year-old man sustained a fatal gunshot wound to the head. Nick was reading from a book of quotes that he had collected during the Occupy Burlington encampment at City Hall Park. “That’s pretty relevant to what happened to Josh,” said another man, who heard the shot at around 2 p.m. Thursday from his tent.
It appears that the wound was self-inflicted, although it is not clear whether the shot was fired accidentally or as an intentional suicide. There were four men in the tent at the time and a considerable amount of alcohol had been consumed.
“Josh had been drinking whiskey since early in the morning,” said one witness, and by 2 p.m., he and the others were intoxicated, according to several witnesses. At some point, Pfenning produced a gun and demonstrated how to break it down and put it back together. One man described the gun as a military issue 45 caliber.
Pfenning pointed the reassembled gun at one of the other people in the tent, according to a witness. He then turned it on himself and forced one of his companion’s hands around the gun, but the man pulled away “just in time,” he said, and heard Pfenning, gun to his own head, say, “Watch this,” and pull the trigger.
“From the look of surprise on Josh’s face, you could see he wasn’t expecting it to go off,” said one eyewitness. “He was messing around,” said another. “I’d like to believe it was an accident.”But he acknowledged that suicide was possible.
The next day, some of the witnesses gathered in the park, a usually pleasant spot behind City Hall where the town hold farmers’ markets and other festive events.
It’s also a place where the city’s population of homeless and street people gather. For the last week or so, though, dozens of bright tents and a large blue tarp teepee crowded together on the grass. Now empty, the fabric fluttered in the cold early winter wind as leaves — the same bright yellow as encircling ribbons of police tape — blew like confetti. Some of the people who had witnessed the death gathered in the still open side of the park, attached to the place by bonds of shock, anger, sorrow and a need for the solace of community and companionship. And some, after a night at the Unitarian Church, had nowhere else to go.
Two of the witnesses to the fatal shot were wary of talking. They swung between belligerence and tears. They were torn between needing to tell the horrific tale and wanting to control the story and protect their companion’s reputation. Everyone had kind words for Pfenning: generous, cool, decent, kind, and all emphasized, really funny. But his friends also described him as damaged and alcoholic. “He was troubled, like a lot of people,” said another man also named Josh who heard the shot from his nearby tent and first thought it was a firecracker. Handsome, with clear green eyes, he is intelligent and well spoken. His father is an academic and his family believes, as does Josh himself, that he has not lived up to his potential. “I am an alcoholic,” he says, “and actually although you can’t tell, I am drunk now.”
Some of the people who had been occupying City Hall Park were impassioned and articulate advocates who saw themselves as representing the 99% for whom the American dream is seen as ungraspable. Others like Pfenning and his companions were the clear and desperate losers in a system under which the distribution of wealth, privilege, and hope had left them behind. “You know the system is broken when a vet is homeless with a two-year-old child,” said one man. Although the Burlington Free Press reported that Pfenning spent only two weeks in boot camp, his companions believed that he had served in the Gulf War, and described him as a veteran “probably with PTSD,” said one.
But Iraq war vet or not, Pfenning was among society’s wounded. Although not ideological, “(Pfenning) was political in that he embodies perfectly the systems that are failing,” said Jamie Jackson a 20-year-old University of Vermont student and pre-school teacher who has been active in the Occupy Burlington.
As the day waned, street and homeless people, old friends and allies, gravitated to the park. They cried and hugged, some were impaired by grief and shock, others by more tangible substances.
Anthony, his voice rough and his face grim, sat on a cold bench. He had been camping in the park, he says. He has cancer, his insurance has run out, and he is unable to get needed treatment for his Hodgkins. And like some who found shelter and community within the Occupy movement, he has a chemical dependence and few expectations for successful treatment.
As the afternoon wind picks up, the police allow Joel back to the tent where he watched Pfenning begin to die. Joel disassembles the frail ribs of the tent that lie like a collapsed insect in the still green grass. He holds Pfenning’s headband and wonders what to do with it. He finds a plastic bag in which to store the stained dark green strip of fleece.
Angry and saddened by the death, Anthony says the tragedy has changed him. “Josh would give anything to anyone. My perspective is different now,” he says. “This is a sacred place. It will never again be just City Hall Park.
