There are some years people would like wiped from history—and who can blame them? Who can blame the newly sober for pretending now that the excesses of progressive reign from 2018 to 2024 never happened? Who can blame them for thinking those who were canceled, even wrongly canceled, still probably deserved it a little bit? It’s important to just move on and forget, to stop nitpicking. It was mostly right. Because if an entire wealthy, elite college town became convinced, let’s say, that white middle schoolers hung nooses to intimidate black teachers and students, if those children were smeared by the leaders of the school and the community, if protests were organized, and if a family had to leave town, there must have been at least a kernel of truth. It’s too destabilizing if it was entirely a lie. It’s too threatening.
In the proper telling of those years of progressive rage, there were no real victims at all. But of course there were victims. Here for the first time, parents of a boy from Evanston, Illinois, who were caught in a national maelstrom speak to Frannie Block about what happened when a conspiracy against their son became too big to fail. —Nellie Bowles
“Every Friday the 13th, I’m reminded of it.”
Mike Klotz is not a superstitious man. But he acknowledges that the event that turned his life upside down happened on the unluckiest day of the year.
It was May 2022, a cool and overcast spring morning in Evanston, Illinois. Klotz can’t recall his 12-year-old son leaving the house—it was just a normal day—but he said the sixth grader would have walked, as usual, to Haven Middle School, accompanied by his 13-year-old brother.
According to staff members who were in the building that day, the atmosphere at Haven was tense—a group of students was staging a protest about the transfer of a few popular teachers.
But things were often tense at Haven, a school notorious for its violence, and where nearly 30 percent of students are considered low income. One teacher who worked there at the time—but has since left—told me that he “didn’t feel safe in the building.” He constantly feared “verbal and physical assault,” and “knew if something had happened to me, I wouldn’t be protected by the district.”
“We wouldn’t walk the hallways in between class periods because it was unsafe,” he told me. “That’s how bad it was.”
Klotz himself had spent two and a half years working as a special education teacher at Haven, but he said he resigned in early January 2022 because he no longer felt safe as a teacher there. But his own kids had to keep attending this school, he said, “because we really didn’t have much of a choice.” It’s not like they could have afforded private school, if they’d even wanted to send their kids somewhere else. “We are a household of public servants and moved to Evanston for the schools,” he told me.
Then came that Friday the 13th. By lunchtime, what had begun as a peaceful protest devolved into what one teacher described to me as “an absolute mob scene.” Inside the school, seventh and eighth graders were running through the hallways, slamming locker doors shut, and chanting “Fuck Latting,” referring to Haven’s principal, Christopher Latting. Someone called the police.
Klotz’s son wasn’t involved in any of this. He was outside, in the schoolyard, with the rest of the sixth grade.
But what happened in the schoolyard over the next several minutes would disrupt his family, subject them to a witch hunt, and ultimately force them to move out of town, Klotz told me.
Here’s how he tells the story:
