Hector Vasquez

On April 1, 1984, the day before his 45th birthday, Marvin Gaye was shot twice in the chest by his own father, with a gun Marvin had given him for Christmas. When police asked the father if he loved his son, he said, "Let's say I didn't dislike him." Marvin sang "What's Going On" and "Sexual Healing," and in 2015 a jury ordered the makers of "Blurred Lines" to pay his family $7.4 million for copying one of his songs. In the video below the two of them sit side by side on a porch, laughing, in one of the rare clips of them together. The father explains why he refused to pray for Marvin to make the Detroit Lions in 1970. He couldn't stand to picture "my boy on a stretcher." By 1984 Marvin had moved back into his parents' house in Los Angeles. He was using cocaine and was sure someone wanted him dead, so he had given his father a .38 revolver for protection. That Sunday his parents argued about a missing insurance letter. Marvin went after his father and beat him, and a few minutes later the father came back with the gun while his mother Alberta watched. Seven months later his lawyer told a Los Angeles judge that Marvin was "the aggressor and the provocateur" and showed booking photos of the father's bruises. Doctors had also removed a walnut-sized tumor from the father's brain after his arrest. The judge suspended a six-year prison sentence and gave him five years of probation, after about 80 days he had spent in jail. Then he said on the record that Marvin "provoked this incident. And it was all his fault." The father sat through it in tinted glasses and barely moved his head. When he was allowed to speak, he said, "I love him right now. And I'm paying a price for it too." He never went back to prison and died in 1998, at 84. Was it a frightened old man defending himself, or a father who had waited years to do it?