A Reckoning in Springfield

Photographs by Carol Guzy

He kept going over the details.

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“I run this route every day, like clockwork,” the trucker was saying, heading west to where he had first seen the man on the side of the highway.

Now it was a Sunday morning, his day off, and Jack Buhring was driving his mother’s minivan, retracing the route, trying to make sense of what had happened less than a week before. His girlfriend, Renee Claytor, was in the passenger seat, studying him, then looking out the window. His mother, Diana Buhring, was in the back. “It wasn’t your fault,” she kept saying, and “Jack, do you think you’re still in shock?” But her son was not really listening.

“Mondays—that’s usually my long day,” he continued. Up at 1:30 a.m., shower, coffee, and by 2 a.m. he’d be pulling out of the mobile-home park in Chillicothe, the southern-Ohio town where he had grown up, gotten his first job hauling garbage, his second job driving cross-country, and the one he had now, hauling powdered concrete hardener in a Kenworth T800. Fairborn to Westerville, Westerville to Fairborn, repeat. Two loops, paid per load, no health insurance, and a recliner where he fell asleep most evenings. Those were the basics of Jack Buhring’s 41-year-old life, and just after eight that Monday morning, August 31, he had reached his favorite part of the route, a westbound stretch of highway running through miles of cornfields and wildflowers near Springfield, a small city that he passed each day, and whose recent troubles had barely registered as a series of memes and headlines that he’d mostly tried to avoid.

“We’re getting closer,” he said now, passing the fields. “We’re coming up on it.”

He’d been in the right lane, he said, when he’d noticed a car rolling to a stop on the right shoulder. As he flipped on his left turn signal to move out of the way, he’d seen a man getting out of the car, who was then walking toward his trunk, who was then continuing on against traffic, then running—then diving out in front of him.

[Read: The northern passage]

“Right here,” Jack said as he drove over black tire marks curving left across all three lanes. “See, I locked it down right here. You can see where I swerved. See? I started to signal and—it just happened so fast.”

Renee and Diana glanced back at the marks. Jack continued: An SUV and another truck behind him had swerved to a stop. The other trucker had helped Jack out of the cab, which had somehow been jammed shut, and checked on the man, who had been caught under Jack’s truck. Jack, who was not physically injured, had called 911 and told the dispatcher that a man had jumped in front of him, and—“Oh my God. I killed him.”

Waiting on state troopers, he had looked around and seen a black device about 20 feet from his truck. He realized that it was an ankle monitor, smashed and blinking red.

“I started trying to put two and two together,” he said now, continuing west on the highway. “I said, ‘I hope he’s not a troubled kid, down on his luck, in trouble with the cops.’ That’s the first thing that come through my mind.” Then the state troopers had arrived, and after a while, one of them told Jack that it was a young Haitian man from Springfield.

At that point, Jack didn’t understand the full significance of what the trooper had said. He was shaking and sweating in the middle of the highway. He called his boss to tell him what had happened. He sat in a trooper’s car and gave his report. He cleared a drug test. Then he started asking questions that the troopers could not immediately answer. He wanted to know the young man’s name. He wanted to know if he had kids. He wanted to know anything about him.

Carol Guzy
A truck on I-70 in Ohio passes mile marker 66, where Pierre Damas Bel died when he walked into traffic.

When he got home later that afternoon, Renee told Jack what she was hearing on the news, a story that would soon become another defining moment in the Trump administration’s mass-deportation campaign. More and more, Americans going about their regular lives were witnessing black SUVs roaming parking lots and gas stations, neighbors and colleagues disappearing, and sometimes ICE agents grabbing, tackling, or even shooting people, forcing a thousand quiet reckonings with what the country has become. This time the violence was being investigated as a suicide, the witness was Jack, and the reckoning began as Renee told him the young man’s name, Pierre Damas Bel.

He was 20, and had arrived legally in the United States in March 2024 and been granted something called Temporary Protective Status, or TPS, due to dangerous conditions in Haiti. He had joined his family in Springfield, where roughly 15,000 Haitians had settled in recent years. He had just graduated from high school, where he’d been a standout student, soccer player, and member of the Junior ROTC program. He’d enrolled at Wright State University, half an hour from Springfield, and wanted to study neuroscience. The news coverage mentioned that the Trump administration had revoked TPS for approximately 350,000 Haitian nationals living in the U.S., which Jack remembered hearing something about. And that in recent weeks, ICE had started ordering Haitians in Springfield to check in at field offices, where they were being fitted with ankle monitors, which Jack had not known about.

By the next day, he’d heard that Bel’s father, Ronal Bel, who declined to be interviewed for this story, had put out a statement saying that “after my son was outfitted with this ankle monitor, he felt like he was treated like an animal.” Ronal wrote that his son had told him that classmates had bullied him because of the ankle monitor and that he felt “humiliated,” and that he’d called moments before his death to tell his father that he was not “feeling okay.” Jack heard that politicians and activists, including a Springfield pastor named Carl Ruby, were blaming the Trump administration for what happened. “It’s our immigration policy that took his life,” Ruby had told reporters.

Jack thought about that. He was a lifelong Democrat who had voted for Trump for the first time in 2024, reasoning that things weren’t getting better, so why not try something different. He’d supported what Trump had said about deporting undocumented immigrants convicted of crimes, but none of what he was learning now sounded like that.

Carol Guzy
Carl Ruby, the pastor at Central Christian Church in Springfield, comforts Ronal Bel on the day that his son died.

He began searching for more details about the young man he was now calling Pierre. He found his social-media pages. Here was Pierre in a blue suit receiving an award from a local business group. Here he was smiling in his JROTC uniform. Here he was at an award ceremony for Texas Roadhouse, where he’d worked as a waiter, and playing on a soccer field. And here was the photo of Pierre’s left leg, the bulky black monitor clamped around his ankle, the red light glowing above a shiny black-and-white wingtip. “I came to this country to pursue my education,” the caption read. “Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg,” he said, “carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience.”

“I mean, Pierre would have been a model citizen,” Jack said now, driving Renee and his mom toward another part of the route that he needed to see. “He had so much going for him. I think there’s more to the story than they’re saying.”

He said he knew there was more because of how the state troopers had described what happened in their preliminary report. It said that Pierre had “walked” into traffic, whereas Jack had told them that “he ran at me like a damn football player.” He kept replaying the moment.

“I didn’t see him until the last minute—when I got up to him, it was just timed perfectly,” he said. “That’s what I’m saying. That’s what don’t make any sense.”

“It was a coincidence,” Renee said.

“Maybe it was, but it was just all timed too perfectly,” Jack continued. “You’d have to be in my shoes to see that. But I keep on thinking about it.”

Renee kept telling him that he was rationalizing. That he was traumatized. But in the days after Pierre’s death, Jack had kept going. He reviewed what he knew about Haiti, which was gangs, killings, and corruption. The only Haitian Jack knew was a girl Renee’s aunt and uncle had adopted as a baby when they were missionaries over there. They had told him what it was like.

He reviewed what he knew about the Haitians in Springfield, which had mostly come from his mother, via a friend of hers who lived there, and had little good to say; Jack had seen a video she’d circulated purporting to show Haitians eating cats and dogs. Diana had called her up after everything happened, and her friend had sworn that Pierre had waited on her at Texas Roadhouse the weekend before. The friend said she recognized him from the photos. She told Diana that she and her husband had ordered two salads, and when the waiter she assumed was Pierre brought only one salad, she told him that they’d ordered two; she said that he had smiled and said something in a language she did not understand. Diana still wondered about what he’d said. She told Jack that she was worried about him, that Haitians in Springfield were angry. That everybody in the country seemed to be angry, including her.

“My son could have died,” she said now. “A whole bunch of lives could have been taken. And that’s another thing—”

“No,” Renee said, attempting to preempt what she knew was coming.

“That’s why I think this is a statement—some kind of statement,” Diana continued.

“It’s not a statement,” Renee said.

“It is. Look how it’s blowing out,” Diana said, referring to all the news and the vitriol toward the Trump administration.

“No,” Renee said.

But Diana, who had spent years working as a nurse in Ohio prisons, continued. She said her experience had taught her to think “outside the box,” and she offered a theory that none of the investigating authorities had suggested. She believed that what happened could have been more than a suicide, that Pierre could have been “almost like a suicide bomber,” attempting to send a political message. She said she believed that this could start happening more often.

“I’ve seen stuff on the internet too—like, someone said, ‘You should be thinking of the truck driver too,’ and someone commented, ‘Oh, fuck that truck driver,’” Diana said.

Carol Guzy for The Atlantic
Bel had recently graduated from high school, where he’d been a soccer player and member of Junior ROTC.

She had been worried enough to contact Carl Ruby, the pastor in Springfield, to hear more about the situation there. He had told her that Haitians had been losing their jobs since Trump revoked their legal status, and were terrified of being sent back to Haiti, where deportees were being targeted because gangs assumed they had money. He told her they found the ankle monitors humiliating. He also told her that he had been with Pierre’s father the night his son died and had gone with him to view his son’s body. He said that the family had no animosity toward her or Jack, and that they understood he had done everything in his power to avoid the collision. Ruby, who told me that it was a “really good talk,” told Diana that he was sorry for what her son had been through, and invited them both to come to one of the vigils that had been happening almost every night since Pierre’s death. Diana had asked Ruby to pass on their condolences to the family, but she did not think it was a good idea to show up. Jack had thought about going; some part of him wanted to go.

“I feel really bad for the family,” he said now, getting closer to the stop on his route that he wanted to see. “I just don’t want to take the chance for the safety of my family. I mean, he jumped out in front of me. But I still killed their son.”

“You feel guilty about it,” Renee said.

“I feel guilty,” Jack said.

“I hate to say it, but there’s a lot of animosity against, just, white people,” Diana said. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s not our belief, Diana,” Renee said.

“I put my pistol out, just in case—you never know,” Jack said.

He exited the highway in Westerville, the stop on the route where he delivers concrete powder twice a day, and drove over to a complex of metal chutes and silos. Right after everything happened, he had been talking with a friend who found out that Westerville had an ICE field office that Pierre had visited, and now Jack put the address into Google Maps and navigated over to a brick building 1.7 miles away.

He tried to imagine Pierre getting fitted with the ankle monitor and, in the weeks before his death, showing up at the field office and pleading to get it taken off. Jack imagined this happening right down the street from where he was going about his job.

“It was so close,” he said, looking at the building. “It don’t make sense in my mind. I’m trying to come up with a reason.”

Renee told him it was just a coincidence.

“It could be a coincidence, it could,” he said. “Maybe my intuition is telling me something.”

He wondered whether Pierre might have noticed his truck as he drove through Westerville. “My truck is 23 years old—it’s not something you see on the road every day. I think, at some point, we’d get off at the same exit and get on at the same exit,” he said, turning back onto the highway.

He started replaying everything that had happened. Seeing the car, seeing Pierre get out, seeing Pierre run toward his truck. And then he recalled another detail about that moment.

“He made eye contact,” Jack said now.

“He was looking at your truck, not you,” Renee said.

“Renee, he made eye contact,” Jack said. “He looked me dead in the eyes.”

They headed toward home. Chillicothe was an hour from Springfield, but to Jack what was happening there felt closer now.

Since ICE operations began in early August, locals have witnessed agents in unmarked SUVs with dark windows detain people at apartment complexes, strip-mall parking lots, gas stations, a car wash, and frequently during traffic stops. At least 74 people, nearly all Haitians, almost none with criminal convictions, have been detained so far, according to lawyers and local activists. Dozens more, they said, have been fitted with ankle monitors, including pregnant women and elderly people.

Carol Guzy
Monsanto Maler, who came to the U.S. from Haiti in 2023, became emotional and fell to the ground after receiving an ankle monitor at an ICE check-in in Blue Ash, Ohio, in August.

When I visited in early September, much of the Haitian community was in hiding. Families were getting food delivered to their homes, attending church services online. Haitian activists told me that some people had spoken of suicide as an alternative to deportation. At the vigils for Pierre, the people who showed up included his high-school teachers, his soccer coaches and teammates, waiters from Texas Roadhouse, and others who described themselves as neighbors, including a man who told a crowd one night that Pierre’s death was “a failing of broader policy, but I will always bear the guilt that there is more that I could have done and we could have done.”

What is happening has been transformative for some people, including Carl Ruby. His congregation, Central Christian Church, has been actively supporting the Haitian community since 2024, when Vice President Vance and others started spreading the false stories about Haitians eating cats and dogs. On the Monday night after Pierre’s death, Ruby told me, he’d sat with Ronal Bel as he talked to reporters with a stoicism that Ruby could not fathom, then followed him into a closet, where Ronal broke down. A few days later, when Ruby accompanied him to a local funeral home, he watched as Ronal walked circles around the table where his son’s body lay and repeated, “You have been a good son.” At one point, Ronal took off his shirt and waved it over his son’s body, which Ruby understood as a ritual that meant “I want my spirit to go with you. I’m not abandoning you.”

Viles Dorsainvil, the executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, who has been spending time with Ronal, told me, “He’s still having questions, and it’s hard for him to accept if he’s living in this reality.”

Yesterday, Ronal Bel sat in the front row at St. John Missionary Baptist Church for his son’s funeral. He asked a family friend to read his recollections of his first-born son, who had grown up in the port city of Aux Cayes, along the southern coast of Haiti. “I feel like I have lost everything,” the friend read. “I just cannot sleep” and “When someone opens the front door, I have the sense that it is him, coming home.”

Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, who has taken multiple humanitarian trips to Haiti and has criticized Trump’s effort to deport Haitians as “a mistake,” was among those in the pews, sitting alongside Haitians and other people from Springfield and beyond.

Addressing the crowd, Dorsainvil said that Ronal Bel had come to the U.S. after surviving a massacre in Haiti, and that his son’s life is “part of a larger human story. ” He said that the mourning “extends beyond one family.” Ruby spoke of the different circles of people affected by Pierre’s death—those closest to him, neighbors in Springfield who want Haitian families to know that “you are a blessing and not a burden to this community,” and another group, those who are “curious and just want to reach a better understanding of what happened to Damas. Some, even though they don’t know your family and are not part of this community, want you to know that they share your grief.”

Carol Guzy for The Atlantic
Students and staff honor Bel at Wright State University, where he had just started college, on September 8.

In the two weeks before the funeral, Jack had gone back to work. He returned to his regular route, avoiding the right lane as he passed through the stretch of cornfields and wildflowers. One Saturday morning, he and Renee were at his mother’s house in Chillicothe, still trying to piece things together.

“Maybe you just felt like he made eye contact,” Renee was saying to him.

“I know he did. I don’t know why,” Jack said.

“I think you were affected by this more than you want to admit,” Renee said, and then Jack mentioned that the other truck driver, the one who had pried him from his cab, had called him. He and the man, John Hallings, had exchanged phone numbers at the scene that day and had been talking off and on since then, Hallings told me. He was a trained emergency responder and had a medical kit in his truck. He had gotten out of his cab with gloves on, kneeled in front of Jack’s truck, and checked for Pierre’s pulse, which was gone.

“He went straight to that boy,” Jack said. “He said it kind of messed him up. He’s not doing so hot.”

Hallings had told Jack that he’d gotten extremely depressed thinking about Pierre, and then extremely angry thinking that he could have killed more people than just himself, and thinking about immigrants taking jobs in the trucking industry, bringing down wages. Then, a few days after that, he had broken down crying.

“He said he was kind of worried about me,” Jack said, checking his phone for any more details about Pierre.

“You shouldn’t look so much,” Renee said.

“But, Renee, I care,” Jack said.

He said that the more he learned about Pierre, the more he was beginning to understand. He’d recently found out, for instance, that Pierre had been a kind of leader in his family. Besides bringing in money, those who knew him had talked about how he was the one in his family who spoke the best English, who could fill out forms, make phone calls, and otherwise help his family manage their lives in Springfield.

“I think he just had a lot piled on his shoulders,” Jack said. He himself had been caring for an ailing father for the past 15 years, bathing him, helping him recover after two strokes. “I’d say the boy was stressed. I’d say he’d probably had enough.”

“I wish I would have known him, because I would have taken him in,” Diana said at one point. “I got a spare room.”

“I think a lot of people would have helped him,” Jack said.

He had kept thinking about the ankle monitor, to the point that he went online one night to find out more about the devices.

“His was a dinosaur—it was big,” Jack said.

“My sister’s ex had one,” Renee said.

“Pierre’s was ginormous,” Jack said, calling up a photo of one on his phone.

[Read: A reverse Ellis Island]

He had tried to imagine how Pierre had felt walking around with it on, attempting to play soccer, and he had learned something else about the ICE monitor that really bothered him, which was that Pierre had to keep it charged himself.

“And if he let it go dead, he gets in trouble. I mean, it’s a joke,” Jack said. “I mean, come on, you got a decorated kid, a full-time student, playing soccer, and they’re going to do that shit to him? I think he just probably felt defeated. He put all that effort in, and he wasn’t getting anywhere. And being from a Third World country too? We don’t know what those people walk in day-to-day.”

“I’m not trying to sound mean or anything, but we can’t take care of everybody,” Diana said. 

“Well, we wouldn’t have had to take care of Pierre. Pierre was doing what he was supposed to do,” Jack said. “We did not do right by him.”

He was beginning to believe that the Trump administration was “a joke,” and that the Democrats were no better. “Everything is broken,” Jack said.

He started going over it all again. The morning that began so normally. The cornfields and wildflowers. A young Haitian man named Pierre Damas Bel whose troubles had become his own.

He kept imagining Pierre looking him dead in the eyes.

“He was hurting,” Jack said.

He recalled the moment right after that.

“If I had just swerved a little sooner,” he said. “I wish I could’ve done more to keep that truck off him.”

And the moment right after that.

“I felt a big thump, and I knew it was him,” he said. “I could feel it all.”

Renee reached for his hand, knowing that he was feeling it still.

“I’m good, I’m good,” the truck driver said.

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, you can call or text 988, or visit 988lifeline.org for more resources.

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