Waiting for justice

They rendezvoused in the parking lot of Gold Country Casino, the last place Marc Thompson, a 25-year-old Chico State student and skilled poker player, was seen alive.

Trudy Duisenberg was directing a documentary about Marc’s life. His father, Lawrence Thompson, started his car and drove east as she followed.

They were headed toward the clearing where his son had been found killed, his car set ablaze in the remote foothills just off Oro-Quincy Highway about 28 miles east of Oroville. Then they hit a roadblock. Both lanes of the highway had been washed out about two miles from their destination. Dead end.

“The road [was] gone,” Duisenberg told the CN&R. “Literally gone.”

Thompson jumped out of his car, struck with emotion. Duisenberg’s cameraman followed suit. Roll film.

“If you live up here and you murdered my son, good luck getting home,” Thompson says in the opening scenes of Duisenberg’s Obligated to the Truth: The Story of Murdered Student Activist Marc Thompson. “There’s a big ol’ hole in this ground right here. It’s the most craziest thing I’ve ever seen …. They killed my son two miles from up here for no reason. There was no reason to kill that kid. He was going to Chico State. His whole life was ahead of him.”

The film, which will be screened next Saturday in Chico (see infobox), has been 2 1/2 years in the making. The 73-year-old filmmaker said she didn’t set out to solve the murder case, which has gone cold with no identified suspects five years after Marc’s Sept. 3, 2014, death. Instead, she aimed to paint a portrait of his life as an equal justice advocate, exploring the traumatic toll his unresolved killing has taken on his friends, peers and family.

“I’m just motivated by us all becoming so numb to these … violent, unexplainable deaths that just rain down on us,” said Duisenberg, noting that Marc, a black man, was killed at a time when the country was gripped by demonstrations following the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a Ferguson, Mo., police officer. “Each of those stats is a precious life, and they just flutter away. I thought, I don’t think it’s right. I thought, If we knew some of these stories, it would bring some awareness.”

The 72-minute documentary focuses less on the investigatory details of Marc’s killing than on how his life affected others. Duisenberg does, however, reveal one previously unreported fact: He suffered multiple gunshot wounds to his head and torso.

Duisenberg said she believes Marc was playing poker at Gold Country Casino and someone took offense to his presence. She said he was “unapologetically” black, witting, and likely winning.

“I think Marc was taken away to the woods because he was playing poker while he was black,” she told the CN&R.

Duisenberg told the CN&R that the Butte County Sheriff’s Office, which is investigating the death, neither participated in the documentary nor provided an update on the case. The lack of cooperation, she said, was surprising. Family members in the film express their frustration with investigators, questioning whether leads provided to them were followed up on in a timely manner and whether the case would be handled differently had Marc not been black.

“Being born and raised in Butte County, I had no confidence that they were going to do anything,” Thompson says in the film. “Zero confidence.”

Sheriff Kory Honea told the CN&R he had considered providing a statement for the documentary expressing his desire to solve the case and acknowledging the family’s frustrations with the investigation. Ultimately, Honea said, he decided against it, feeling any statement that did not specifically address concerns or frustrations would only exacerbate them.

The murder case remains open, he said, and detectives have continually evaluated evidence to determine whether new or different technologies could be used to find the killer or killers.

“I have been assured that the detectives assigned to the case have done their best to follow up on the leads provided by family, friends and other sources,” the sheriff said.

Marc is remembered in the film by way of somber and tearful testimonies. He was a well-liked and -respected student activist who was passionate about social justice issues. He was studying sociology and psychology at the time of his death and served as an Associated Students commissioner of multicultural affairs.

In the documentary, Duisenberg interviews former Chico State President Paul Zingg, who recalled his first meeting with Marc. He was a new student at the school, Zingg said, and he walked into the president’s office with a question.

“People tell me I should meet you. Why do you think that’s the case?” Marc reportedly asked.

“Maybe because they think you can help me and I can help you,” Zingg replied.

That was the beginning of a three-year relationship, which Zingg described in the documentary as intense in a positive way. “I always felt that Marc was aware of not only the necessity of truth telling,” Zingg says, “but the obligation to tell the truth.”

There is power in telling Marc’s story, and power in witnessing it, Duisenberg told the CN&R. Viewers, she said, may walk away from the film feeling inspired by how he lived his life. They also may gain an appreciation of how the effects of violence ripple from person to person, community to community.

“We have to just face it,” she said. “It was just such a horrible act that people needed to be reminded.”