On April 1, he heard the gunshots.
He found Marvin in the bedroom—bleeding from the chest and shoulder, alive but gravely injured.
Frankie dropped to his knees. He cradled his brother.
What Marvin Gaye may or may not have said in those final moments before he lost consciousness is something Frankie later addressed in a memoir. According to Frankie’s account—set down in his book years after the event—Marvin told him something along the lines of: “I got what I wanted. I couldn’t do it myself, so I made him do it.”
This is a haunting thing to be told about the death of your brother. And it is important to be clear about what this account is and what it is not.
Frankie Gaye’s memoir is a memoir—a personal recollection, written years after the events described, by a man who was in acute shock and grief on the day it happened. Memoir recollections of traumatic events are not the equivalent of contemporaneous documentation. They are sincere expressions of what the author believes happened or what they experienced, filtered through years of memory, grief, and the process of making sense of the senseless.
Whether Marvin Gaye said these words, or words substantially similar to these words, in the minutes after being shot—whether he was physically capable of speech, whether the account is accurate, whether it has been shaped over the years by Frankie’s own need to understand what happened—cannot be determined by examining the historical record.