Gang Mom (11 page)

“So tell me what happened that night,” Michaud asked Brown casually. He had changed into his “Pink Floyd” T-shirt, the one he liked to use during interrogations. If he felt more casual, then the suspect would, too, and begin to trust him. And he’d put him in the soft interrogation room that looked like a living room, with muted lighting, sofa and coffee table.

An old cop named Fred, whom he considered to be his mentor, had taught Michaud to be patient during questioning. Fred always reminded him that suspects hated silence. “Just work the suspect,” Fred would say. “Sooner or later they’ll talk.”

So Michaud did as his mentor had taught him. He chatted lightly with Elstad, making sure to leave a lot of silence, which Elstad happily filled in. Quickly, proudly, he admitted to being responsible for Aaron’s death. It was the gang code of honor to take responsibility for their actions, especially when such actions were to enforce gang unity and honor, as they were, he claimed, in this case.

“Aaron was killed because he snitched to the cops about the knifing of the Blessing kid.”

“Really?”

Silence.

“Yeah, and that like caused you guys to revoke Beau’s parole and you sent him back to MacLaren.”

“So?”

The silence filled the room until Elstad confessed, “We had to get Aaron for that.”

“Did Mary Thompson put you up to it?” Michaud asked.

“No way,” Elstad retorted. “I did it on my own. With Joe.”

In the hard interrogation room down the hall, Brown was giving a similar story to Rainey.

“Beau took swipes at the kid and cut his stomach at the Grocery Cart,” Brown recalled. “Then Aaron opened his mouth. We had to get him.”

“We.” Despite the fact that he hadn’t done anything but provide moral support, Brown was prouder of their “accomplishment”—snuffing out Aaron’s life—than the shooter.

“Would you show us how it happened?”

“Sure.”

While Elstad remained in custody, Rainey, Michaud, Raynor and two other officers, with Crazy Joe Brown in tow, set off for the Iturra house to reenact the murder. Once there, Michaud got down on the bloodstained mattress that Aaron had once occupied, with Raynor playing the girlfriend. Brown arranged the tableau exactly as it was that night, then paced back to the door and, using his hand like a kid would, made believe it was a pistol and leveled it at Michaud’s head.

“Boom!” he shouted.

Michaud rose up slowly, the way Brown said that Aaron did, then tumbled down.

Outside, Brown retraced the steps he took with Elstad as they retreated to Elstad’s house. He spoke in matter-of-fact terms about what they had done, exhibiting no guilt whatsoever.

Later that night, they all stood by the banks of the river and he showed them where Mary was waiting in her truck while he threw the murder weapon and the remaining bullets into the raging water. Michaud looked around at the darkness, at the young boy who would soon be a convicted murderer and thought about the woman who was sitting comfortably in her house back in the city, the woman he believed was responsible for this death, a woman who was getting away with murder.

He should have felt cold, what with the wet fall breeze coming in off the river. Instead, he felt unusually warm and had to open his jacket to cool off.

NINE

“Hey, did you hear, the Crips killed Iturra?”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah, it’s all over town.”

And it was. The members of the 74 Hoover Crips, Lisa and Beau, Lennie and Wayde, all of them, had been emboldened by their killing of Aaron Iturra and were bragging about it to the members of the Eugene gang community. The death only served to give them greater status in the gang world.

During the fall of 1994, if you were a Eugene resident and your car was stolen, chances are it was a Crip. House burglarized? Crips. Your kid buying drugs? Crips. Certainly they were not responsible for all of the city’s crime, but they had a hand in a good portion of it and they were running unchecked because only Michaud suspected how active they really were. To stop them meant stopping Mary.

There was a rash of drive-by shootings for which the 74 Hoover Crips took the credit. Even their own were not free from retribution.

When it got back to the gang that
Cameron Slade
might be prepared to help the cops out, a couple of the
homies
[gang members] drove by his house and pegged a couple of shots inside. No one was hurt, but Cameron got the message.

While only three days had passed since the murder, things were pretty much the same as before at Mary’s house, except that there was a new excitement. Aaron’s death had energized everyone.
Sam Warthan
, who wasn’t a gang member but came over to visit frequently, noticed it when he dropped by one day to say “hi” to Beau. They wound up horsing around, discussing a business deal when Beau warned, “You’d better not screw around with us, because look what happened to Aaron Iturra.”

Mary, who’d been listening in the next room, came in and added, “And they’ll never convict me because my homies will protect me.”

Another time, Mary said to Larry “Truth” Martin, “Beau would be proud of me because of what happened to Aaron.” All through this period, the gang were plotting their crimes, discussing them on the phone, and still the police could not touch them. They began to feel a sense of invulnerability, of impunity.

Most, if not all, of the gang members were dropouts, ne’er-do-wells. They wouldn’t get up until late morning and they would plan their activities for one, two, three o’clock in the morning. They’d be out all night, high on drugs, committing crimes.

The gang had become their reason for being, the gang had become the entity they owed their allegiance to, the gang had become their mother and father and lover. They felt the power and respect that gang membership gave them and vowed not to give it up.

The boy watched from the banks of the river as the police divers dressed in black, form-fitting scuba gear walked into the water and disappeared below the surface. They seemed to be looking for something, but since he had been raised by his father not to interfere in someone else’s affairs, he kept fishing and minded his own business. Besides, getting supper was more important than anything the cops were doing.

The boy was fishing off the banks of the river a hundred yards down from where the cops were. It had been a quiet morning, with no bites, when he heard one of the cops spring out from the water and yell, “I found them!”

What the cop had found were the bullets that Brown had thrown into the river. Despite that exciting find, which would help the forensics of the case considerably, there was still no gun.

A few minutes later, the boy felt something tugging on his line. “I got something!” he said out loud to no one in particular. He began reeling it in, and felt the strong tug continue on the line.
Boy, it’s a big one
, he thought. And it was.

A .38 caliber Smith and Wesson revolver with four-inch barrel and a brown handle that Eugene forensic specialists would later identify as the gun Jim Elstad had used to murder Aaron Iturra.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 7, 1994

It was a perfect fall day at Lane Memorial Cemetery, brisk, sunny, full of tears at the graveside. Aaron Iturra lay in his open coffin, wearing the new clothes his sister Tina had picked out for the occasion.

On his chest were three tribal eagle feathers, symbolizing maturity, wisdom and strength. Mourners walked by, dropping in remembrances, looking at the pristine visage of a teenage boy cut down in his prime. Holding her baby, Angel Elstad walked by and remembered a conversation not too long before over at Mary’s.

“I want Aaron killed,” Mary had said.

Angel was struck by her matter-of-fact tone. “Aaron sent Beau back to MacLaren and he has to pay for it.” At first, the gang members didn’t know whether to take Mary seriously. But Angel knew it was real that night she heard the shot, when Jim came back to their house afterwards, and then walked over to Mary’s to tell her he had done as she’d asked.

When Cameron Slade looked at Aaron’s lifeless face, he thought about the times the gang would be meeting and talking about Aaron and Beau and it would be Mary who would bring up capping Aaron and the rest of them would say they would do it.

Linda Miller
remembered seeing Mary with a gun and, during the time Mary had it in her possession, hearing her say “This is the gun that’s going to take care of the problem.” To Linda, Cameron and Angel, it was clear exactly what she meant.

Another time at Mary’s house, Linda saw a list of five names printed on plain white paper. When she asked Mary who was on the list, Mary said, “These are the ones who ‘dissed’ Beau and they are going to be killed.” Aaron’s was the first name on the list.

Watching as Aaron’s coffin was closed and lowered into his grave, Janyce’s tear-filled eyes looked up long enough to scan the crowd. No matter how hard she looked, she could not find Mary Thompson. She just couldn’t figure it out. Mary had been Aaron’s friend, his confidante, and now, today, when he needed her most, she had deserted him. One of the last times Aaron had talked about Mary, he had been visibly upset.

“Mom, it’s really scary over there, ’cause Mary is gaining control and power over these kids,” Aaron had told her.

“Have you discussed this with her?”

“No. She keeps yelling at me for not taking care of Beau. She called me a liar. She said I was trying to get Beau into trouble by saying that he was running around with the same old gang kids.”

“I can’t understand—”

“What can I say? What can I
do
?” Aaron shouted, throwing his hands up in disgust.

“You’re not responsible, Aaron,” Janyce answered.

Janyce knew from what Aaron had told her, and from her daughter Tina, who had visited Mary once or twice, that Mary Thompson was a generous woman. She opened her house to troubled kids, some of whom had no place to live. But the turnaround almost seemed like, like …
they owed her
. For her putting herself out for them, they owed her. It was bizarre, Janyce thought.

She turned back to the grave.

A Baptist minister gave the final benedictions. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust …” The minister’s voice trailed off and in Janyce’s mind, it was two weeks before Aaron’s death. Aaron was in the kitchen, where the phone was, and he picked it up on the first ring. Janyce was in the living room, reading the paper.

“Yeah, hi, Mary,” said Aaron, clearly not pleased that she was calling.

He listened for a moment and then said, “Well, whatever!”

More silence, then, “Do what you gotta do, whatever! I’m gonna do what I gotta do!”

Janyce recalled that he was screaming at Mary, because she was giving him a hard time about testifying against Beau. Finally, he shouted, “Do whatever ya gotta do” again and hung up.

Then she remembered the Sunday night of Aaron’s death. He had come home late that afternoon and was sitting in the kitchen with Tina while Janyce prepared dinner. After dinner, homemade spaghetti and meat sauce, they went out into the living room to relax.

“Hey, Mom, you’ll never believe this.”

“What?” said Janyce.

“Wayde Hudson and Jim Elstad are gonna take the big guy down.”

“Who’s ‘the big guy’?” Janyce asked, puzzled.

“Well, I am,” said Aaron. “They were bragging about what they were gonna do to some guys at school. Cameron Slade and Larry Martin.”

“You mean ‘Mr. Preppie’ is gonna get ya?” said Janyce, laughing and referring to Elstad by the nickname she had given him. “There’s no way those two kids are gonna beat you up.”

Aaron stopped and thought about that for a moment and then answered, “I may be big and I may be strong, but a knife and a bullet can take me down in a minute.”

And then they kind of laughed about it. Why not?
It just never entered my mind that anything like this would really happen
, Janyce thought,
and I don’t think it entered Aaron’s mind either
.

Looking up, she saw her husband. He was the father of the surviving children, a man who had left Janyce and his kids. He comes for the funeral only, looking like the grieving father who had been part of Aaron’s life.
What a phony
, Janyce thought. One of her kids whispered to her before they got to the cemetery, “Mom, Dad never cared that much when Aaron was alive!”

As the minister finished his prayers, Jim Michaud carefully watched each and every mourner as the crowd melted away to their cars. He, too, was looking for Mary, and yet, she was nowhere to be found.

Justice has a way of being lenient, even in the case of murderers. Especially murderers. And though Assistant District Attorney Steve Skelton could probably have made a case against Jim Elstad and Joe Brown for premeditated murder, there really was no point.

Skelton knew that even if he got a conviction, they would never be executed. The United States might have an imperfect legal system, but one thing it didn’t do was condemn kids to the death chamber, regardless of their crimes.

Most death penalty cases take years before the appeals are exhausted and cost the taxpayers millions of dollars. It cost less to imprison someone for life. In the case of Elstad and Brown, Skelton carefully evaluated the evidence and decided it was not a murder one case. After a quick plea bargain agreement with the boys’ attorneys, a deal was reached: they would each plead to lesser murder charges and be sentenced accordingly.

It was early November and a chill was in the air. The Pacific Northwest has moderate temperatures all year round, but when November comes, things seem to get particularly colder, the rain wetter, the sunlight more diffuse.

On November 7, 1994, Joe Brown entered a guilty plea to murder in the second degree. Four days later, on November 11, Elstad also entered a plea of guilty to the crime of murder two. They would be sentenced on separate dates.

DECEMBER 6, 1994

It was 8:30 in the morning, time for Joe Brown to get his judgment. But before he did, Oregon law, like that of many states, allowed the victim’s family to address the court before sentencing. And Janyce Iturra had a lot to say to the boy who had participated in her son’s murder.