Marshall Sosby

Maple City Dispatch: stories from the former “Fence Capital of the World,” Adrian, MI

by Nathaniel Berry

It is hard now to write anything that isn’t propaganda, it is hard to say anything that isn’t a scream. When I lived in Adrian, the town had its share of Fascists, and our high school had plenty of Nazi kids. Some of these were just edge-lords cribbing from 4Chan, children whose ideology would evaporate as soon as the libidinal need to shock subsided. There were others, though, and they got their ideology in the cradle.

Marshall Sosby, who was a year younger than me, was understood to be one of those committed Nazis whose beliefs were cultivated by his parents. He was a scrawny kid, close-cropped hair prematurely thinning, it is said, from abuse he suffered at home. He has all the hallmarks a gleeful audience looks for in a teenage murderer—he was a loner, he dressed in black, he had an Xbox live account. I sat next to him in History class, Martin told me. Everyone knew he was a Nazi. We mostly talked about paintball.

His father was an Army Veteran who rode with the Lord’s Legion of the Christian Motorcycle Association. Marshall’s mother emigrated from Germany in 1990, and the two were married when she was 19. Marshall was born that year, and—according to his grandparents, his defense attorney—he witnessed, among other things, his father hold a machete to his mother’s neck when he was four. He ran away a few times as a teenager, but there was nowhere to go where he could stay for long. In July of 2008, Marshall took his father’s gun and murdered both his parents.

My mom killed my dad with my dad’s pistol, Marshall told 911. It’s in my mom’s hand but she died. Bordering on indifference, the dispatcher asked for details. She shot herself in the back of the head, Marshall said.  Police were not convinced, and they developed a different story—Marshall ambushed his parents and shot them in cold-blood. Execution-style, Martin told me. No remorse, a detective told the Toledo NBC affiliate. None whatsoever.

Sometimes, his murders are understood to be premeditated. People who knew Marshall through school or Xbox Live remembered to authorities him detailing such a plan countless times. Marshall says he blacked out before he killed his dad, although sometimes he says he blacked out only between the killings. It is a sad fact that children who witness domestic violence often end up blaming the victim of the violence as much as the perpetrator, and that clearly seems to have been working either consciously or unconsciously in Marshall’s mind. Despite the abuse and the blackouts, two psychologists declined to declare him unfit to stand trial. 

Motive is a mystery for many corners of the internet. The most widespread theory is that his parents confiscated Marshall’s cell phone for two weeks, and Marshall killed as an extension of millennial entitlement. Sometimes the cell-phone is an Xbox 360—the object doesn’t matter as long as it’s something newfangled, and poisonously technical. Something tells me he’s an online gamer, a poster writes on a forum dedicated to complaining about kids these days. Sometimes Marshall has an ex-girlfriend who committed suicide. This is thought to have precipitated his downward spiral, although this piece of scintillation is not remembered by anyone I know.

A narrative that engages with the abuse that Marshall suffered, or the poisonous ideology that he was raised with, isn’t part of the fun on sites like these. Because Marshall pled guilty, his motives never needed to be established in a court, or entered into the record. Old murders are hauled out and dusted off because we want them to mean something, to be synecdoche for some salient social dynamic. The lack of concrete information in Marshall’s case allows it to be bent into whatever shape is useful.

They didn’t mention anything about how his parents were Nazis, Martin told me. He’d watched some wretched True-Crime documentary about the Sosby case that has since been scrubbed from the internet. Which is a pretty big fucking deal.

He was in love with Alison, Martin said, the only Jewish girl in Adrian High School.

I thought he was in love with Sarah, I said, referring to the other only Jewish girl in Adrian High School.

I’d first heard about Marshall from Sarah. They’d gone to Saint Joseph’s together, the private Kindergarten-8th Grade Catholic school. She saw Marshall draw Swastikas in the upper corners of his notebook pages. When he got caught by the teacher, he switched to partial Swastikas. Marshall being a Nazi was a strange non-sequitur. Nazis weren’t real then; a Nazi was something you killed without remorse in a video game, so he might as well have told everybody he was a Zombie. That he was a Nazi who was in love with one or two of Adrian’s only Jewish people seemed like nothing more than ironic filigree.

His received ideology told him the world was one way, his heart told him it was another. He had, as many people do, the choice between rebelling against his received beliefs, or crushing down his feelings under the weight of his parents’ propaganda. Unable to resolve the contradiction, he chose annihilation—theirs, his own. He got a life sentence for his mother, 35 years for killing his dad.

There are more Nazis in Adrian now. Perhaps not more than average for any American town: there are more Nazis everywhere. Fascism creeps in on the margins of a society that doesn’t take care of people, just as violence crept into the life of young Marshall, who deserved better than a system that didn’t seem to give a fuck what kind of home he rested his head in at night. Fascism preys upon the margins of our society. It raises mean people, creates cruel households like the one Marshall grew up in—where authority must be asserted with violence. They want us out of their way so they can rule their homes as petty tyrants; they will not stop until their children are orphans.