The Nicsperiment Is Obsessed With a Dead Girl

On September 27, 2016, as I drove home from my office job in Baton Rouge, I got a phone call from my wife. "Something's going on," she said.
I live in Glynn, Louisiana, a place where there is never anything going on. One time somebody wrecked their crop-duster. That was quite a year.
I drove through the last few sugar cane fields, cane looming eight feet tall in the burgeoning autumn, and pulled up to the T-junction where our post-office, open two hours a day, sits next to the railroad tracks. To the right, the highway led to a blockade of police cars. To the left, the post office, full of news vans, with Baton Rouge investigative reporter, Chris Nakamoto, straightening his tie in the parking lot. 500 feet from my house. I took a left, drove for ten seconds, then took a right into my driveway.
"Put on the news," I said to my wife and son, over the sound of police sirens passing by.
A familiar sight, Chris Nakamoto, his voice nearly audible from my front yard, said there'd been a shocking double-murder and suicide in sleepy south Louisiana hamlet, Glynn, Louisiana. The victims: West Baton Rouge Sheriff's Deputy, Donna LeBlanc, 42, and her daughter, Carli Jo, 20, killed by neighbor, Gregory Phillips, 29, who then turned the gun upon himself.
The network flashed pictures of the victims. Donna was the first female to work her way up from dispatcher to the sheriff's deputy position in West Baton Rouge parish. Her daughter, Carli Jo, was a former Brusly High softball standout, and was working on an Animal Sciences degree at LSU. Local authorities cried on camera while describing the incident.

Carli on the mound

I've lived in Glynn for more than 31 years of my life (the only other place being Baton Rouge, for six), and I've never heard of anyone being assaulted, much less murdered. This is a tiny Pointe Coupee Parish agricultural village, with a population barely over 600. We've had a few drug arrests...that's it.
Apparently, there was some ongoing hostility between the LeBlancs' and Phillips. On the afternoon of 09/27/16, Phillips drove across the street to the Leblanc's house. Only Carli and her nine-year-old sister were home. Carli went outside, but very astutely locked her sister in the house. Some sort of argument apparently took place, which was escalated when Donna pulled up in her car. Phillips went back to his truck for his assault rifle, Donna LeBlanc pulled out her service weapon, and a firefight ensued. Donna was shot dead, and Phillips then turned his weapon on Carli, murdering her in cold blood. He then went to the door, attempting to get to the younger sister, but due to Carli locking it, he could not get inside. At that point, Phillips turned the assault rifle on himself, and committed suicide. The nine-year old then called 911.
The day after the crime, I took my usual morning jog. At that time, I had a long run, four miles, and my normal run, two miles. I did my normal run, wondering if there would still be a police presence. Years before, when I mapped out jogging routes, I found a point exactly a mile from my house, where I could turn around and be sure I'd run two miles total. That morning, as I reached the driveway where I usually turned around, I was shocked to see it covered in police tape. This was the LeBlanc household. I had been turning around in their driveway, hearing their dog bark for years.
Several things then came to mind. I remembered encountering Carli once and exchanging stranger-to-stranger smiles, as she was pulling out of her driveway. I remembered doing the same with Donna. But that wasn't all.
Suddenly, things became more complicated.

* * * 

On July 28, 2014, on a clear night, the power in Glynn went out. My family and I had no idea why we'd lose electricity on such a calm night. Turns out, it was Carli Jo.
The next day, I heard from my dad that a girl had gotten into a bad car accident near Rougon elementary, a school a mile from my house in the opposite direction of the LeBlanc's house. When I drove to work that morning, crews were cutting away tree debris, and working on the electricity pole. I saw a few days later that the person in the car accident was local softball standout, Carli Jo LeBlanc. From what my dad said, she was ejected from the vehicle into some nearby bushes, and emergency crews had to search for quite a while to find her. I said a quick prayer, like we all do when something doesn't directly effect us, then completely forgot about her.
Meanwhile, Carli was going through this.

Unconscious after the accident

Before surgery

Highway ephemera

A couples of months later, Carli Jo was in the news again. Apparently, a reporter was investigating possible mismanagement of donated funds for Carli's recovery by her mother, Donna LeBlanc. That investigative reporter: Chris Nakamoto. Nothing seemed to come of this investigation.
Carli Jo receieved severe injuries in the car accident, suffering brain damage, and was blinded in one eye. Her dreams and life were irrevocably altered. However, as a longtime animal lover, she was still determined to become a veterinarian, and despite her many physical difficulties and constant pain, enrolled at LSU, starting classes in the spring of 2015.
While I forgot about Carli, Gregory Phillips presence in my life was constant. For years, at all hours of the night, on any given night, rapid-fire gunshots and explosions rang through the still Glynn air. Phillips, according to most people I've spoken to, owned a machine gun. The rat-a-tat-tat went on for hours some times. Phillips fired it, along with many other weapons, into the field behind his house.

Gregory Phillips

The bombs, however, were worse. Phillips seemed to love to set off his improvised explosive devices as late as possible, and the resulting rumble often woke me up in the middle of the night. In a news story about the crime, neighbors complained about the same. Phillips was also reported to struggle with mental illness, and to have had several previous run-ins with the law. I don't hear gunfire and bombs going off in the middle of the night anymore.

*     *     *

South Louisiana, and in particular, the Baton Rouge area, which technically encompasses both West Baton Rouge Parish, and Pointe Coupee, doesn't often experience national trends. The recession of 2008 barely hit here...our unemployment rate and economy were already in the tank to begin with. I've heard since I was a kid about the Summer of Sam, the eventful 1977 summer where New York City was terrorized by a serial killer, suffered a blackout, reeled from bankruptcy and layoffs and fires, capped off by a New York Yankees World Series Win.
That kind of summer for Baton Rouge, Louisiana, took place in 2016.
It all started on July 5, with the police shooting of Alton Sterling. The shooting set off a national uproar and a rash of civil rights protests throughout the city, with hundreds arrested. The atmosphere grew uglier and uglier, culminating in the July 17 murder of three police officers by Gavin Eugene Long. Just when it seemed like things couldn't get any worse, the clouds moved in. The rain began August 11, and never seemed to stop. 13 people died, over 146,000 homes were damaged, and costs attributed to the flood approached 15 billion. The national media, after setting up camp for the hot-button issues that reflected negatively on our community, were completely absent during the flood. To add insult to injury, the next year, when Hurricane Harvey flooded much of East Texas, the national news media praised the Cajun Navy, a makeshift, ragtag South Louisiana boat rescue collective, for their part in rescues, often mentioning their formation and work after Hurricane Katrina...and completely neglecting to comment on their work in their own backyards the year before. The great psychic wounds the Baton Rouge area endured that summer were lasting, free of a sports-championship-like catharsis, and seemed to reflect on a larger scale, for the first time in quite a while, the things going on in the rest of the country, all of course leading to the election of our current President. It was just after the end of this horrific summer that Carli was murdered.

The Cajun Navy during the great Baton Rogue floods of 2016

With so many people having to rebuild their lives after their homes were destroyed, and with everything else going on with race relations, police relations, and the seismic national political events, the sudden and shocking violence in Glynn registered and then immediately left the news cycle, outside of in the local community, which honored Carli by retiring her jersey, and is currently attempting to honor her mother by naming a stretch of highway after her. On a personal level, that fall, with the encouragement of loved ones, I finally sought professional help for my own struggles with mental illness, and most every crazy thing going on in the world kind of faded into the background for awhile, especially after I suffered my own near-life-ending Glynn, Louisiana car accident the next summer.

I was in that thing

However, at some point, Carli's face started popping into my head. I had a few nightmares where I was there to see what happened. I googled Carli's name and noticed that her family had left her twitter account public. I couldn't help my curiosity.
Carli Jo's twitter account was updated fairly regularly for four years, up until five months before the end of her life. I don't know what happened in those last five months. The final post seems to be a reference to softball, as Carli Jo was apparently volunteering to help out some younger players. The second to last tweet is a humorous shot at the ever-present Chris Nakamoto, who had just been detained and handcuffed while in White Castle, Lousiana.
The rest of the tweets are a study in contrasts, revealing someone who was, like most of the human race, quite complicated. For someone outside of the region, her views on race will likely seem a little rough around the edges. I've no doubt that the time she was spending at LSU would have slowly worn that roughness away. It surely did for me. Carli leaned conservative (admittedly, this writer, as most Nicsperiment readers have intuited, does not), as many out here do, but she also seemed to think people should be free to be themselves. Her humor was dark and salty, but she seemed to be religious. She hunted, but like most hunters (admittedly, this writer, as most Nicsperiment readers may not have intuited, proudly has "Duck Hunter" inscribed in his high school class ring, and would do it again in a heartbeat), had incredible empathy for animals (hence her career trajectory). Her love for animals shines through more than anything, in post after post. Some tweets, like this quote from her father about gun control, are quite haunting.

Kerry LeBlanc's facebook post, re-tweeted by Carli

If someone went door-to-door down this entire stretch of highway to the Mississippi River levee, they'd be hard-pressed to find a household without a gun. Like Carli's twitter, this is a place of contradictions.
When I read through these tweets, I see some typical aspects of girls I grew up with out here, like the hill of references to drinking going way back beyond the legal drinking age...which Carli died a week shy of reaching. Then, I see that she seemed to be an avid reader, and also appeared to enjoy poetry. As likely the only English major to come out of Pointe Coupee parish since Ernest Gaines, I can count the amount of people I've actually seen reading a book out here on one hand. Carli also showed a rare wit, and seems to have suffered few fools. A text exchange she rather hilariously posted on June 6, 2012, shows someone foolishly picking a physical fight with her, then wisely backing down. It's clear she was tough as nails. "Jo," after all, was just a nickname. Her real middle name was "Marie."

Getting her hair done after the accident, around one of the scars

However, the end result of looking at Carli's twitter is quite heartbreaking, for two major reasons. The first is that it becomes clear just how much hardship she fought through her entire life. After a softball season where she essentially pitched video game numbers (26-1, a .095 ERA, 237 strikeouts, MVP, and a state title!), it seems she had some shoulder issues, and eventually had to have surgery. Almost immediately after the surgery, she got into the car accident. She fought and struggled to get her life and dreams back, got into LSU, and successfully began her quest to become a veterinarian, only to lose her life, just as she was getting started.
The second is the way her twitter illustrates just how life stops once one dies. That may sound silly, but the twitter account makes that finality resoundingly clear. Carli grew and grew as a person, underwent major life changes, and was embarking on a new stage. She seemed to have shed several friends who could not handle the difficulties she was undergoing, her appearance had changed with both maturity, and due to the accident, and her identity seemed to be evolving, as she spent more time on campus, working on her degree, and toward her career.

Carli in the year before her death

And then boom. Over. It ends in media res. Life was happening, and then it wasn't. Visit her twitter without looking at the dates, and it's as if Carli is going to go to class tomorrow, keep working through her pain, fantasize about getting another dog, and throw out some hardscrabble wisdom.
But she isn't. She's dead. She'll do nothing else on this plane of existence. If there's anything to learn here, it's that any day could be your last. The greatest cliche. Until it happens.

Posted by Carli on March 12, 2015

Things left uncompleted. When I think about my own death, that's certainly something on my mind, like a TV show knitting new threads, then getting cancelled. Finish that season, and everything is left hanging. All that buildup and preparation never paid off, but on an infinite scale...infinite because it's a soul leaving the Earth. And yet, just like every show that followed Friends on Thursday night was cancelled and promptly replaced by something else, we'll all be replaced, as well. People remember us for a little while, and then move on. Damn, that was some sophomoric musing.

*     *     *

In this day and age, while everyone's curated biographies are already digitally available on any social media site, endings are less resolved. Someone who died in a car accident may have posted their breakfast that morning. Everyone knows for a fact that they didn't have lunch that day, won't get to have that wedding they'd been planning, will never have children. Carli Jo LeBlanc will never get married, never have children. She's just gone. And yet, here I am, scrolling through her Twitter, yet again.

Pictures 1, 3-6, 9,10, and 12 taken from Carli Jo LeBlanc's twitter account
Picture 2 taken from the West Side Journal
Pictures 7, 8, and 11 taken from The Baton Rogue Advocate