Anthony Gillespie was as near to a model citizen as you can get. He was an Air Force veteran, a former martial arts teacher, and a family man who put his wife and children above all else. I was fortunate enough to become part of that family for a while, until it was broken apart in the most violent of ways.
My first job was working at the local newspaper in Sault Ste. Marie. Tony was the circulation manager, and he hired me as a 15 year old in the summer of 1993. My father was in the Coast Guard, and would be stationed in Florida for a couple of years, before my mother would divorce him. Tony was the major male role-model in my life during my high school years, and I couldn’t have asked for better. He was a loving man, and somehow managed to be a cool guy and a great father at the same time. I’ll never forget the days spent at his house playing hockey and fighting games on the playstation with him and his boys. He thought of me as one of his sons, and I thought of him as a father, his sons my brothers. His house was a 2nd home and family to me, a place I was always welcome.
Another man who I worked with at the newspaper was named Nathan Hanna. He was a kindly, large bear of a man, and he’d often give me rides home from work. He had a young daughter who was the apple of his eye (cliche appropriate in this case). He was more or less the stereotypical friendly northern Michigander.
Well, as often happens, I graduated high school, and went off to college in Ann Arbor. I still stayed in touch, and visited whenever I made my way back up to ‘the Soo’. I even went back and worked at the newspaper over my first Christmas break, and my first summer vacation from college.
Seven years ago today, news of a terrible sort was made at the newspaper. Several employees witnessed Nathan striding through the building carrying a shotgun. Now, you have to understand that in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, this isn’t looked at as a strange thing; he was probably just going to show off his new purchase to a friend of his. Tragically, this was not the case.
In the middle of that otherwise normal workday, Nathan walked right up to Tony’s desk, pulled the shotgun up and fired, taking Tony’s head almost clean off with the first shot. He fired again anyway just for safe measure.
Nathan would eventually be caught by the police after a couple weeks of hiding, and almost a year later, be handed a life sentence to prison.
All of this is public record; you can read it in the newspapers. But what the newspapers say is only part of the story. They will say that the motive of the killing was unknown; that Nathan Hanna was an unstable man. I guess that is probably true in hindsight, but he hid it well. Those of us who are more intimate with this case, know a darker side of the tale.
What you won’t read in the papers is that he was also a devout Christian, and in the days leading up to the killing, he spent a lot of time reading his bible. And his interpretation of the bible led him to believe that Anthony Gillespie was the Anti-Christ. So he purchased a pump-action shotgun, and ended his life, in order to save mankind. You can’t make this shit up.
The pain inflicted on the Gillespie family and on me is indescribable. I still think about him all the time, and sometimes wake up in the middle of the night after having a dream where he is still there for me. But as in all tragedy and tough times, I learned something important. And I am constantly reminded of it to this day. When I see the talking heads on TV say, “Not enough Muslims have apologized for or condemned the latest terrorist attacks”, or something akin to that, I am infuriated. I yell at the TV. I wish I could just take them, shove them up against a wall, and make them understand. I do NOT go on their talk shows, or call into their news shows, and demand that all Christians apologize for this radical Christian fundamentalist FUCK taking my surrogate father from me. I don’t petition my congressman to have Christians’ rights limited. I don’t call my police department and tell them to be on the lookout for crucifix wearing lunatics. I don’t make the mistake of judging an entire religion based on a radical sect of it.
So they had damn well better stop doing it too.
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This is the front page article that I saw the next day. The full story is here.
This is the dedication that ran in the Sault Evening News the following Tuesday.
