Kenzo Dix liked to leap into his mother’s arms. She would say “Hup,” he would run toward her and jump, and she would catch him, a bundle of smiles.
When Kenzo got too big for this game, at age ten or eleven, he was allowed one last leap as his father, Griffin Dix, took a picture. “We photographed him doing his last ‘hup,’ ” said his mother, Lynn, from the witness stand, as the image was displayed in court.
Who Killed Kenzo?: The Loss of a Son and the Ongoing Battle for Gun Safety by Griffin Dix
Woodhall Press, 386 pages
Publication date: October 3, 2023
On May 29, 1994, Kenzo, age fifteen, was at the home of his good friend Mark in Berkeley, California, when Mark, fourteen, decided to show off his father’s Beretta pistol. He removed the magazine, not realizing there was a bullet in the chamber. When he pulled the trigger, the bullet passed through Kenzo’s shoulder and into his heart. He died shortly thereafter.
It was a shattering event. Kenzo, a bright and loving child, lost his chance to grow into adulthood. His older brother, Kalani, lost his best friend. Griffin and Lynn’s grief-soaked marriage fell apart. Mark, who never meant to hurt anyone, was stamped with unimaginable guilt.
“Kenzo’s death yanked open a door to a room full of questions about agency, cause, and responsibility,” writes Griffin in Who Killed Kenzo? He began to wonder: “Was Kenzo’s death just a bizarre accident, or could it somehow have been prevented—and, if so, by whom?”
There was plenty of blame to go around. Mark’s father should never have left his gun, a Beretta 92, where his teenage son could get at it. Mark should never have treated the gun as a toy and pulled the trigger. But as Griffin and Lynn absorbed what had occurred, they came to realize that part of the blame belonged to Beretta.
Beretta USA, the subsidiary of an Italian-based gunmaker, had failed to clearly inform buyers of the gun that killed Kenzo that a bullet could remain in the chamber after the clip was removed. It did not clearly show when there was a bullet in the chamber. And there was no internal lock to prevent unauthorized users from firing the weapon.
In 1998, Griffin and Lynn launched what would be a years-long legal fight, contending that the gun that killed their son was defective, meaning Beretta was obligated under California law to make fixes. Their lawyers would argue that while Mark and his father had made mistakes, their actions were “extremely foreseeable.” Between 1980 and 1993, the year Mark’s father bought the Beretta, there were 22,263 unintentional gun deaths in the United States, the book reports.
Much of the book is a blow-by-blow account of the case, Dix v. Beretta, rendered from Griffin’s intensely interested perspective. We see how the justice system hinges on what jurors are allowed to know and what they may mistakenly believe. (The verdict from one trial of the case was thrown out due to jury misconduct.) We see the machinations of the lawyers for Beretta, which fiercely resisted making its products safer. Gun designer Seth Bredbury casually admitted in court, “I know that some people will be killed because of decisions that I have made.”
Who Killed Kenzo? tells a nitty-gritty tale about the fight against gun violence, in which every victory is hard-won and incomplete.
Beretta insisted the requested safety improvements were unnecessary and undoable. Yet over time, due to the efforts of people including Griffin Dix, who is co-chair of the Oakland/Alameda County Chapter of Brady United Against Gun Violence (and, during the last several years, a frequent contributor to The Progressive’s op-ed project), many of these improvements have been made. It turns out they weren’t undoable after all. Moreover, there is evidence that these changes are saving lives. But this happened only because of outside pressure—from lawsuits, state governments, and even gun buyers who actually prefer safer weapons.
Who Killed Kenzo? tells a nitty-gritty tale about the fight against gun violence, in which every victory is hard-won and incomplete. Progress is incremental, at best. And, every year, there are more family members of firearms victims looking to help curb the nation’s gun carnage. Griffin Dix’s book, dedicated to Lynn and Kalani, is a tribute to that struggle and to families across the land.