Peter Houlahan’s Reap the Whirlwind: Violence, Race, Justice, and the Story of Sagon Penn recounts a historic 1985 crime that would irrevocably change Southern California. At its swirling center is Sagon Penn, a 23-year-old Black Buddhist, martial artist and community mentor who had never been in any legal trouble until two white patrol cops, Donovan Jacobs and Tom Riggs, followed a pickup truck carrying seven young Black men, some of them teenagers, up a dirt road.
The setting is a growing San Diego in flux. A progressive new police chief hoped to calm the city’s simmering racial tensions and address the disproportionate number of cops killed in the line of duty. Both crises came to a head when Jacobs incorrectly fingered the young men in the truck to be gang members—including the driver, Penn. An argument escalated into a brutal physical altercation, during which the cops reportedly used racial slurs. Within three minutes, Penn grabbed Riggs’ service weapon and fatally shot him. Then Penn shot both Jacobs and a civilian who was riding along with him, and fled the scene in a squad car.
Reap the Whirlwind’s novelistic narrative style delivers emotional weight as Houlahan, a master storyteller, plots out the cataclysmic event and its aftermath. Houlahan covers all angles, from skewed news reporting on the shooting to the inner workings of the judicial system to the messy interpersonal drama that followed Penn, whose psyche suffered devastating consequences. Though Penn is undoubtedly the focus of the book, Houlahan offers textured characterizations of significant players, like Penn’s lawyer, Milton Silverman Jr.; defense investigator Bob McDaniel; and Sara Pina-Ruiz, the only credible witness. When the story develops into a full-fledged courtroom drama, Houlahan remains an impartial, careful observer and rarely offers his own opinion, which allows readers to form their own conclusions and develop a personal investment in the case and those closest to it.
A topical, piercing story about how perspectives on law enforcement and innocence shift depending on who you are, Reap the Whirlwind shows how police brutality and racial profiling impact Black victims far beyond the actual incident—even when they make it out alive.
