Gulfport, Mississippi, enters the book through Dante Evans’s life in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: a fourteen-year-old living with his abusive father in a FEMA trailer. The city is not merely a location for the shooting that brought Dante before the courts; it is the setting for the family violence and unheeded warnings that later shaped the legal account of his case.

Setting and Family Circumstances

After Hurricane Katrina, Dante lived in Gulfport with a father who had twice nearly killed Dante’s mother. Dante had repeatedly told school officials about the abuse, but no one intervened. The trailer places the case within the concrete circumstances of his home life: the violence was not an isolated event first revealed in court, but a danger he had already tried to bring to adults’ attention.

The Shooting and Its Context

Dante shot his father while the man slept in a chair. The book presents that act alongside the history of abuse and Dante’s earlier report of it, rather than treating the shooting as an event detached from its circumstances. In his oral argument before the Mississippi Supreme Court, Bryan Stevenson discussed Dante’s previous diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder following his father’s attempted murder of his mother.

Legal Significance

The trial court had refused to allow the PTSD evidence to be introduced. The Mississippi Supreme Court emphasized that refusal and granted Dante a new trial. Gulfport therefore remains central to the case as the home setting behind the evidence: the abuse, Dante’s efforts to report it, and the trauma diagnosis all informed the appellate argument and the court’s decision to reopen his case.