Who Killed Garrett Phillips? (2019)

This two-part three-hour HBO documentary from producer/director Liz Garbus (The Farm: Angola, USA; I’ll Be Gone in the Dark; Love, Marilyn) presents a murder mystery wrapped in law enforcement mistakes and bad faith. The movie lets its subjects speak for themselves through their words and actions. It never has to say a word about racism because we see it unfolding in front of us. It involves the murder of a 12-year-old boy in a small town in upstate New York and the subsequent single-minded focus on the town’s Black high school soccer coach. In the year or so before the murder the coach had been involved with the mother of the boy, Garrett Phillips. She is a white woman and her previous boyfriend, a policeman, did not like the relationship. The coach and the woman had broken up so recently that it still wasn’t clear whether they might not be able to patch it up. There are lots of unexplained gaps in this picture. The relationship of the coach and the boy is one. There are only glancing allusions that they did not get along. The reasons for the breakup are also unclear, though it sounds like racist social pressure was part of it. The mother evidently never wanted to cooperate with these filmmakers, so we never hear her version of anything. We never learn where she or the other son were on the day of the murder. That day, in the afternoon, people heard unusual sounds coming from the second-story apartment where the murder took place, including a neighbor who shared a wall and called 911. At first a lot of people seemed to think it was other kids in some kind of incident that went out of control, but police quickly focused on the soccer coach. He is not a bad suspect as these things go, but the evidence is ambiguous, circumstantial, and often strained. No other lines of investigation were ever seriously followed. The closer the evidence is looked at the less likely it appears to be the coach, but that doesn’t stop police and an overzealous prosecutor (later sanctioned for abuses in this and other cases) from systematically destroying the coach’s life with harassment and innuendo. It’s an object lesson, a cautionary tale, for Black people thinking of moving to white towns even still in the 21st century, no matter how well liked they may seem to be. And it’s another story of raw white fear and aggression. Who Killed Garrett Phillips? details the murder and investigation and then follows along with the attempt to pin it on the coach in court. It’s intense, dramatic, and harrowing, hard to watch as any dispassionate depiction of injustice can be. Definitely worth a look if you don’t mind getting helplessly angry about law enforcement excesses.