Keyshun
Portrait with Zachary Maxwell Stertz
Description: A young teen in an FBI jacket is standing on an empty dark street next to an industrial building. He holds a flashlight in one hand and a magnifying glass in another. A yellow tape running across the road says, “Crime Scene Do Not Cross”.
Portrait with Zachary Maxwell Stertz
“My granny would describe me as smart. My granny always tells me right from wrong. She says the consequences of bad actions and the outcomes of good ones. My mom, she would describe me probably as somebody that ain’t gonna give up. My best friend, he would describe me as a jokester. He’s my closest friend. I’ve been with him since I was like seven years old, maybe even younger. He actually lived away from me. Because he wanted to be outside with me, his mom decided to move over by us because his grandma lives on the block. Me, him, I got some other cousins that live on my block. It’s just like a family block basically.
In my neighborhood, the positive is, I see people with their kids playing outside. The game where you shoot the ball at a can? That’s my favorite game when it’s summer. I like basketball, too. The negative is like, the adults acting like they kids, arguing all the time. You just look at them like, how old are you?
How people see boys of color… well, me and my friends will be walking down the street, and somebody will see us through the window, they’ll be looking like, they be up to no good. That’s the first thing that will come to their head. And I guarantee that. We don’t even be — we just be walking just for fun. I remember this man. He called the police on us one time ‘cause we was running through the alley. We was having a race, and he thought we was doing something else. I don’t know what he thought we was doing, but he called the police on us. I feel that he should actually know something before he try to react to it. If he didn’t think — key word, you can’t think you know what this person is doing. You got to know for sure. Like, confirm it.
My dream is to become an investigator. Me and my friend plan on both working for the FBI. We watch all the investigator shows on TV. And when somebody gets shot on the street, and their body laying down, we like looking at it and investigating that stuff. A lot of people are scared of it. But me, I’m not scared of it.
Going to funerals made me interested in that - just seeing people’s bodies - it wasn’t weird to me. I don’t think of them any differently. I just think of them as how I always thought of them. When I’m there, I want to investigate them, see more about them, their life story and stuff. And it be like this dead person is or has been through some stuff. I imagine finding people - like the person that has killed them, and they’re on the run or whatever, and we have to find them. I like finding clues, getting me closer to finding that person, like fingerprints and stuff. That’s what I think about.
I think people see me as like a goofball with a squeaky voice. I don’t want them to see me as that. It will be different if they actually see me, and I’m doing something with my life.”
Milwaukee, 2019