On July 28, 2015, Bresha Meadows, then 14 years old, was taken into custody after allegedly shooting her abusive father while he slept. The gun Bresha allegedly used was one that her father, Jonathan Meadows had used repeatedly to threaten the family in the past. Bresha’s case is a tragic example of the choreographed disasters and routines of planned abandonment that constitute law and order. Bresha did everything she could to get herself and family away from her father: she ran away twice, she told her aunt, Martina Latessa, a domestic violence detective with the Cleveland Police Department, and she told Child Services. Bresha’s case underscores how law and order is enforced through normalized lapses of legally encoded and/or socially accepted ideals like freedom, rights, justice, due process, bodily autonomy, and self-determination – in other words, zones of ethical absence.1 Ethical absence is the historically accrued contradiction between the putative rights afforded to modern subjects, and the “state-sanctioned of extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”