Author: News Polite

HOUSTON — The trouble started with an argument between two drivers merging in slow traffic after an Astros baseball game last summer. It ended with two gunshots, fired from a moving Buick and exploding through the glass of a fleeing Ford pickup truck.

The bullets missed the truck’s driver, Paul Castro, but one — just one — struck his teenage son, David, who sat in the passenger seat. As Mr. Castro drove to get help, a 911 operator told him to apply pressure to the wound at the back of his son’s head. But David did not make it.

The random pointlessness of the killing shocked Houston. But it was one of dozens of similar incidents across the country over the past year amid an explosion of shootings and killings attributed to rage on the road.

These eruptions of sudden violence — a man in Tulsa, Okla., firing repeatedly after an argument at a red light; a Georgia driver shot while on a family road trip — are not unique to any part of America, among a population that is increasingly on edge and carrying guns. But they have been perhaps most pronounced on the roads of Texas.

“In the past, people curse one another, throw up the finger and keep moving,” Mayor Sylvester Turner of Houston said in an interview. “Now instead of throwing up the finger, they’re pulling out the gun and shooting.”

As more motorists seemed to be firing guns last year, the Dallas Police Department began tracking road rage shootings for the first time. The results were alarming: 45 people wounded, 11 killed.

In Austin last year, the police recorded 160 episodes of drivers pointing or firing a gun; this year, there have been 15 road rage shootings, with three people struck. (Two others were stabbed in altercations stemming from road rage.)

The prevalence of such violence, not just in Texas but around the country, suggests a cultural commonality, an extreme example of deteriorating behavior that has also flared on airplanes and in stores. It is as if the pandemic and the nation’s sour mood have left people forgetting how to act in public at the same time as they were buying millions more weapons.

“It’s the same sort of ball of wax: People getting frustrated, feeling strained and acting out toward others,” said Charis E. Kubrin, a criminologist at the University of California, Irvine. “One thing that we do know is that there has been a huge rise in gun sales,” she added.

Last month, a woman driving with her dog shot and wounded another motorist in Oklahoma City. In Miami, a man fired 11 shots from his car on Interstate 95 in what he has said was self-defense. A Los Angeles couple is set to stand trial for firing into a car during morning rush hour last year, killing a 6-year-old boy on his way to kindergarten.

Criminologists cautioned that any theory of motivation behind road rage shootings is hampered by a lack of data. Most police departments do not keep statistics on road rage episodes, in part because it is not itself a crime category. There is no federal database.

Arizona has tried to get a rough approximation of the number of road rage incidents, adding a box for “possible road rage” to the form filled out by police officers for car crashes in 2018. The data showed an increase in such incidents in 2021 compared with the previous two years, according to Alberto Gutier, the director of the Arizona Governor’s Office of Highway Safety.

“It’s going crazy,” he said of road rage. “People are so stupid.”

But, he added, the state does not track the number of episodes that end up in gunfire.

For its report on an increase in road rage shootings, the gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety relied on the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that compiles data from government sources and media reports. The group found that more than 500 people had been injured or killed in reported road rage shootings last year, up from fewer than 300 in 2019.

“The story that it’s telling is a definite and really worrying increase in incidents of road rage involving a gun,” said Sarah Burd-Sharps, the senior director of research at Everytown for Gun Safety. “Only in this country is someone shot and injured or killed every 17 hours in a road rage incident.”

Texas accounted for a quarter of the fatal shootings last year that were documented in the study, with 33 people killed in road rage shootings in the state, up from 18 in 2019.

Among them was David Castro, the 17-year-old who died in Houston in July. David played percussion in his high school marching band, wanted to study engineering in college and hoped to get his driver’s license by the end of the summer.

“I was going over lessons with him as we drove,” his father said in an interview, recalling a conversation with David before the shooting as they hit heavy traffic after the Astros game downtown. David’s 14-year-old brother was also in the car.

After letting several cars merge into his lane, Mr. Castro began to pull forward in his pickup. That is when a white Buick attempted to edge into the lane, he said. Neither yielded ground; eventually the two cars were touching. There was a “verbal altercation,” according to a court record.

A police officer directing traffic told Mr. Castro to let the Buick in. “So I let him in,” he said. “David was nervous. But I was like, whatever that was, it’s over.”

But it wasn’t.

On the highway, the Buick started flashing its lights and honking, Mr. Castro said. “I tried to get away and he stayed right behind me,” Mr. Castro said. As he took a turnaround lane under a highway, he heard two shots. The rear window shattered. David, seated in the passenger seat, was struck in the back of the head.

“I just started screaming. And he kept chasing us,” Mr. Castro said. “This was not a road rage incident — this was a grown man who took the life of a child because his feelings got hurt.”

The police eventually made an arrest in the case, charging Gerald Wayne Williams, 35, with murder. Mr. Williams has since been released on bond. “I can’t think of anything more tragic,” a lawyer for Mr. Williams, Casey Keirnan, said of the killing. But, he said, “my client denies that he is the person who shot him.”

The case drew widespread attention in Texas, as did another in Houston involving a 9-year-old girl, Ashanti Grant, who was shot and seriously wounded in February while riding with her family to a grocery store.

“It is unique to this moment,” Mr. Turner said. “I’m a native Houstonian. I’m in my seventh year as mayor. We have just not had it to the point where it has been a noticeable event, except in the last year.”

Mr. Turner said that a string of deadly cases had prompted the city to take steps to reconfigure its traffic cameras to preserve recordings, to eventually help catch roadway shooters.

In Texas, drivers have been allowed to carry firearms without a license in their cars since 2007, a law known as the Texas Motorist Protection Act. A new measure, enacted last year, allows most Texans to carry a handgun in public without a license.

Online, there are videos and trainings that offer tips for carrying and using a gun inside of a car.

Jacob Paulsen, who teaches an online course called “vehicle firearm tactics,” said that escaping should always be the driver’s aim. “Your primary objective is your own survival,” Mr. Paulsen said. “If your primary objective is to punish someone else, or to make sure that other person is in jail or gets justice, those are not good mind-sets.”

The guns used in road rage episodes in Dallas are often legally owned, said Detective Christina Smith of the Dallas Police Department, who investigates such shootings. “But having a legal firearm, you still have a responsibility for what you do with that,” she added.

The cases pose problems for the police because they almost always occur between strangers, on roadways without cameras. “The few that I have been able to find and actually arrest, it boils down to disrespect,” Detective Smith said. “When you reduce it at its core, the reasons are silly.”

The police in Dallas have been compiling a running report on road rage episodes, with data on the time and place of each reported incident as well as whether it involved a gun. They found that events tend to cluster in the afternoon.

“It seems to be happening around rush hour, in traffic, when people are going home,” said Maj. Mark Villarreal, who is helping lead an effort by the police in Dallas this year to crack down on aggressive driving. “It’s happenstance. It’s a crime of passion.”

That makes each case difficult to solve, said Lt. Kyle Cones of the Houston Police Department. Most escalate from a routine indignity, he said.

“I read every report that comes across, and every actual specific maneuver that they said led to it is they say they got cut off,” the lieutenant said.

That was the case, he said, in the shooting of Ashanti, who was placed in a medically induced coma. “It was a cut-off type deal,” he said.

As gunfire erupted, Lieutenant Cones said, Ashanti’s family members in the car got low. But Ashanti, who was watching a video with headphones on, did not.

Mr. Castro, David’s father, said having a gun in the car only made such tragedies more likely.

“What I want people to do,” he said, “is talk to their husband, talk to their brother, talk to their son, and say, ‘Do you really need a loaded weapon in the cab of your vehicle?’”

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

LONDON — Ingrid Pollard, a pioneering Black female photographer, and Veronica Ryan, a Black sculptor who found widespread recognition in her 60s, are among the nominees for this year’s Turner Prize, the prestigious British visual arts award.

The four-strong shortlist was announced on Tuesday in an online news conference at Tate Liverpool, an art museum in northern England.

Heather Phillipson, who has presented several high-profile public artworks in Britain, was also nominated. In 2020, she installed “The End” in Trafalgar Square, London, a work that included a 31-foot statue of a dollop of whipped cream, with a fly on it.

The fourth artist on the list was Sin Wai Kin, a nonbinary artist born in Toronto.

Pollard, 69, who was born in Guyana before moving to Britain as a child, has been getting attention since the 1980s for her work exploring Black life, including its relationship to rural environments. Christine Eyene, an art historian and one of the judges for this year’s prize, said at the news conference that Pollard’s work, had “for decades uncovered stories and histories hidden in plain site.”

Ryan, 66, makes sculptures of seeds, pods and fruit, as well as assemblages from sewn and crocheted bright fabrics. She told The Guardian newspaper last year that for a long time her art was “not really making enough money to pay the rent” but that her career had recently flourished, including with commissions for major public art. She is featured in this year’s Whitney Biennial in New York.

Phillipson, 43, has had major exhibitions at Tate Britain, in London, and at the Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, in northern England. Sin Wai Kin, 31, is known for films and performances that mix genres including traditional Chinese opera and drag shows.

The Turner Prize, founded in 1984, has been one of the international art world’s major awards, with past winners, such as Damien Hirst and Steve McQueen, going on to become global stars. But the prize has long been contentious in Britain, with newspaper critics often complaining that the nominated artists were too obscure or that their work was more activism than art.

Last year, Array Collective, a group of 11 artists that attends political protests in Northern Ireland while holding homemade props and humorous banners, took the prize. In 2019, the prize was won by all four shortlisted artists, including the Colombian artist Oscar Murillo, after they issued a statement saying that their highly political work was “incompatible with the competition format.”

This year’s winner, to be chosen by a six-member jury, will be announced at a ceremony on Dec. 7. A free exhibition of works by the four nominees will run at Tate Liverpool from Oct. 20 through Mar. 19.

Covid outbreaks in elite circles in Washington, D.C., and on Broadway have received a lot of media attention in recent days, but they appear to be only one part of a broader regional rise in infections: States in the Northeast are now reporting an uptick in cases.

Last week, this newsletter covered what seemed like a mystery at the time: Covid cases were not broadly rising across the U.S. despite the emergence of the BA.2 subvariant of Omicron. But the Northeast’s continued increase has driven a new round of concerns, with nationwide cases up 10 percent over the past two weeks.

What is less clear is whether the regional rise will amount to a much larger Covid surge. “There’s definitely something coming,” William Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard, told me. “But depending on all the moving parts it might be a ripple relative to previous waves.”

So far, recorded cases are up slightly, standing at about 6 percent of where they were during the peak of the Omicron wave in the Northeast. (More cases are probably going undetected, as more people use at-home tests without reporting them to public health officials.)

Hospitalizations are also relatively low in most Northeastern states, and deaths are actually down. Both lag behind cases, typically by weeks. “So it could be too early to see a rise,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Brown University, told me.

But some experts believe an increase in hospitalizations should have started showing up in at least some places, based on how previous waves played out. “This is something of a head scratcher,” said Robert Wachter, chair of the medicine department at the University of California, San Francisco. “It makes me think that the prior relationship between cases and hospitalizations may not be holding, which would be very good news.”

Covid uncertainty

Any wave would have to contend with recently built-up immunity, both from the vaccines and the Omicron surge that infected potentially 45 percent of Americans this winter.

Not all regional outbreaks grow into national ones. Around this time last year, the Alpha variant struck hard in Michigan and Minnesota but ultimately fizzled out. Experts still do not really know why — another example of how much we still do not understand about Covid (an issue we have covered in this newsletter).

Still, we do know that BA.2 is spreading rapidly, now making up the vast majority of U.S. Covid cases. Experts worry that could lead to a spike, as it has in other parts of the world.

Britain and other European countries, which have often been ahead of the U.S. in Covid waves, saw a recent surge in Covid cases, fueled by BA.2. But that increase is receding and did not lead to a sharp rise in deaths in Europe.

We do not know what that means for the U.S., which has sometimes seen bigger waves than parts of Europe — but not always. As has been true since the start of the pandemic, a lot of uncertainty surrounds Covid.

What we do know

For all of Covid’s unpredictability, we do know some things can help prevent or mitigate another big surge.

The first is vaccination. To the extent that built-up immunity is keeping another wave at bay, more vaccine-induced immunity can help. “The most serious consequences will, as ever, be mostly determined by how many people are vaccinated/boosted,” Hanage said in an email.

New treatments can help, too. Some are already available: The drug Evusheld can help prevent a Covid infection, particularly for immunocompromised people. And the antiviral medication Paxlovid helps treat infections. (Here’s a guide for where to get it.) More treatments are in the works, such as a drug called sabizabulin aimed at treating critically ill people.

Public policy and individual measures, like masking and social distancing, can help, too. Yesterday, Philadelphia announced it was reinstating its indoor mask mandate. Some universities have done so, as well, including American and Georgetown in Washington, D.C., and Columbia in New York City.

But in much of the U.S., policymakers and the general public seem less willing than before to take such steps. As Katherine Wu wrote in The Atlantic, America may be looking at its first “so what?” wave — “a surge it cares to neither measure nor respond to.”

“I’m guessing we’ll be performing a natural experiment — seeing what happens when a significant uptick in cases doesn’t lead to a significant change in behavior or policies,” Wachter told me.

The bottom line

We do not know whether the Northeast’s uptick in cases will translate to a major Covid wave. But there are steps we can all take to help prevent an increase from becoming something bigger.

Related: The Times wants to hear about your experience with antiviral Covid pills.

THE LATEST NEWS

State of the War

• Russia is moving thousands of troops, and hundreds of military vehicles, into position for an assault on the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.

• The next phase of the war will look different, and that could help Russia, experts say.

• After meeting with Vladimir Putin, Austria’s chancellor said he feared Russia would intensify the brutality of its attacks.

• Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, said “tens of thousands are dead” in the besieged southern city of Mariupol.

More on Ukraine

A hit classroom comedy

Tonight, ABC will air the season finale of the sitcom “Abbott Elementary,” one of the breakout hits of the TV season, which follows a group of scrappy teachers in an underfunded Philadelphia public school.

“Abbott” is a mockumentary-style workplace comedy that “would have fit in on any NBC must-see-TV lineup of the ’00s,” James Poniewozik writes in a review. Like “Ted Lasso,” another recent sitcom hit, part of the show’s appeal is its wholesome sensibility.

Beyond the levity, the show also confronts the realities of the American education system. In one episode, a well-connected teacher smuggles in Philadelphia Eagles-branded rugs from the team’s stadium after the school refuses to replace the classrooms’ ruined ones. In another, the teachers make TikTok videos of their run-down facilities in hopes that the online masses will donate school supplies.

The show manages to be a timely comedy, a homage to teachers and a love letter to Philadelphia, all at once. “I think a lot of people are enjoying having something that is light and nuanced,” the show’s creator and star Quinta Brunson told The Times. “‘Abbott’ came at the right time.”— Ashley Wu, a Morning graphics editor

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — As Sri Lankans waited hours in line for fuel, sweated through the springtime heat during daily power cuts, and watched the value of their incomes erode, the president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, blamed forces beyond his control.

“This crisis was not created by me,” he said in an address last month, urging the nation to “have faith” in his actions.

Tens of thousands of protesters are now swarming the streets of the capital, Colombo, and clashing with security forces outside the ruling family’s official residences. They are running low on essential goods and patience — and demanding that the president step down.

Sri Lanka was supposed to be a postwar success story, a fast-developing economy committed to healing after decades of conflict. Instead, it is the latest democratic nation backsliding into authoritarianism, under the misguided policies of a ruler who critics say is more focused on protecting his family’s political dynasty than the country’s fledgling institutions and economy.

To ensure his family’s political future, Mr. Rajapaksa, 72, has undermined the criminal justice system, jailed dissenters and quashed the opposition. He has drastically expanded his presidential powers, stocking the government with his relatives, fellow military men and right-wing monks aligned with his law-and-order mind-set.

It has left the country ill-equipped to deal with a growing economic and debt crisis. Its coffers are all but drained after the island nation was closed to tourists for much of the coronavirus pandemic and after a series of policy missteps. And on Tuesday, the government said it was suspending payments on its international debt, a signal that economic conditions could get worse.

Now, Sri Lanka is trying to conserve cash for emergency supplies of fuel and other basic goods. The fertile country that produces some of the world’s most sought-after tea is facing widespread food insecurity. And protesters are filling the streets of Colombo, many of them young professionals who had taken for granted that they would have steady electricity and internet service, access to imported coffee and cars, as well as a promising future.

Shathurshan Jayantharaj’s fleet of delivery trucks came to a halt when diesel supplies dwindled. Mr. Jayantharaj, 25, has been protesting in Colombo nearly every day against what he sees as the incompetence of the Rajapaksa-dominated government.

“We might have achieved a lot, but we are losing it all right now,” he said. “This family does not know what it is doing, and they’re taking us all down with them.”

Campaigning for office in 2019, Mr. Rajapaksa promised to restore safety and solvency to a country still reeling after more than 250 people were killed in a series of suicide bombings on Easter Sunday that year. His wartime record gave him credibility.

As defense secretary when his brother, Mahinda Rajapaksa, was president, he and his family were hailed for ending the country’s civil war in 2009 and for creating an economy that became a model for other nations seeking to rebuild. He benefited from the public outrage over evidence that the government at the time had ignored warnings about the terrorist attacks.

Mr. Rajapaksa won in a landslide election.

The atmosphere in Sri Lanka almost immediately shifted. The lead detective for the Criminal Investigations Department, or C.I.D., which had been spearheading investigations into the Rajapaksas, fled to Switzerland. Prominent journalists, diplomats and other security officials rushed to leave.

Their fears were not unwarranted. Mr. Rajapaksa has expanded the use of an antiterror law that the European Union and United Nations say has led to “consistent and well-founded allegations” of human rights abuses to jail hundreds of people.

Hejaaz Hizbullah, a prominent Muslim human rights lawyer who challenged Mahinda Rajapaksa’s power grab during a constitutional crisis in 2018, was among them, jailed on charges of hate speech.

After more than a year and a half, Mr. Hizbullah, who denies the charges, received bail in February. He wants to speak for those he says are unfairly incarcerated under the terror law, but fears retaliation.

“I’m an accused and it’s stifling,” he said.

Mr. Rajapaksa also established a Presidential Commission of Inquiry, a tool that critics say has been used to reverse court judgments, pardon political allies and shield the family from allegations of wartime atrocities.

Shani Abeysakara, the C.I.D. director who worked on the handful of human rights cases that made headway under the previous president, has found himself before the commission more than 40 times.

In Mr. Rajapaksa’s first month in office, Mr. Abeysakara was demoted to the personal assistant of a provincial police chief. He was later arrested and jailed on charges of fabricating evidence in the case of a former high-ranking police official close to Gotabaya Rajapaksa who was convicted of murdering a businessman.

The police official was acquitted of the charges last March.

Mr. Rajapaksa has also centralized power in the president’s office, giving himself the ability to appoint and dismiss ministers, preside over formerly independent commissions and set economic policy with few checks and balances.

He used his newfound powers to turn the Sri Lankan government into something resembling a family firm, appointing his three brothers to the most plum ministerial posts: Mahinda as prime minister, Chamal as minister of defense, and Basil as finance minister.

When Basil Rajapaksa took the post, Sri Lanka’s economy was already highly leveraged with dollar-denominated debt. It was also running low on dollars to buy essential imports, such as medicine and fuel.

Despite the challenges, the new government cut taxes and started printing money, hoping to generate local industry. Instead, people spent the extra cash importing cars and other foreign goods. Then, when the pandemic hit, Sri Lanka’s two prime sources of dollars — tourism and remittances from Sri Lankans living abroad — collapsed.

In order to save dollars, the government started banning imports.

In April 2021, the Rajapakas declared that Sri Lanka would immediately shift to organic farming, imposing an import ban on fertilizer.

The shock — and the condemnation — were swift.

“There is a saying that a famine comes after an epidemic,” said Muditha Perera, a rice growers’ association president. “However, the famine which is going to occur was invited by the government and not a natural one. This government has deliberately destroyed the country’s agriculture.”

The government has received donations from China of rice, a Sri Lankan staple, and paid a premium to import additional supplies of it from Myanmar.

Basil Rajapaksa acknowledged that the country was “facing a dangerous foreign exchange crisis,” but he ignored economists’ pleas to seek help from the International Monetary Fund. He also refused to answer questions about the country’s balance sheet with members of Sri Lanka’s Parliament, including those from the ruling coalition.

As the Sri Lankan currency, the rupee, continued to plunge, the government tried to cap the rising expense of its debt by pegging its currency to the dollar. But that only created a parallel black market where the rupee was worth about two-thirds of the official exchange rate.

The Rajapaksa government finally bowed to pressure to let the Sri Lanka rupee float, and it quickly sank. Not even Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s announcement last month that his government was in talks with the I.M.F. for a bailout has helped it recover.

Sri Lanka’s finance ministry on Thursday suspended payments on about $7 billion in debt, to bondholders, institutions and countries that have lent the country money. Warning of a potential default, the country is trying to negotiate with creditors, and will have trouble borrowing until an I.M.F. agreement is reached.

“We are getting paid the same as we did before, but everything costs a lot more now,” said 28-year-old Lozaine Pereira, a freelance filmmaker who was among a noisy crowd pushing against the barricades at a protest outside the prime minister’s residence this month. “Just living day to day has become a struggle.”

As the protests gain steam across the country, the Rajapaksas are increasingly vulnerable.

Many of the president’s relatives resigned en masse from their government posts last week, in a seeming effort to appease the protesters. But the demonstrators have continued to gather, setting up tents and portable latrines along an oceanside park in Colombo in preparation for the long haul.

The Rajapaksas’ usual hard-line tactics — denouncing opponents and jailing critics — are proving less effective against a spontaneous wave of discontent among a public that is harder to silence.

“The same people who voted him into power are on the streets asking him to get out,” said Brandon Ingram, a creative director at an ad agency in Colombo who has joined the protests. “So, is he going to leave?”

Aanya Wipulasena and Skandha Gunasekara contributed reporting.