While the City Slept (10 page)

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During the moves and school changes that brought Isaiah to the house on Elmgrove, his teachers had registered certain concerns. At one elementary school, they described him as “very active” and “difficult to settle down.” Deborah remembers noticing this about her brother, too. She and others in the family chalked it up to his just being a boy. The school did not. It made contact with Isaiah’s mother more than ten times, sent daily reports home, tried a variety of interventions. “There was no major improvement in Isaiah,” Dr. Lymberis wrote, “and he never got any help.” She believes his behavior troubles at school represented only “the tip of the iceberg” of what he was dealing with. She also believes his experiences at home were magnified by the fact that he was quite intelligent and therefore well able to comprehend the gulf between what was and what could be.

Isaiah’s family knew he was very smart. They would say, “Oh, you’ve been here before,” conveying something akin to the idea of an old soul. This was one reason they never saw any legitimacy in the concerns expressed by schoolteachers about Isaiah’s performance. Deborah said Isaiah showed his
intense curiosity not just by reading everything he could get his hands on but also by watching educational programming on television and taking in “anything electronic, anything about planes.” He wasn’t violent as a child or during his adolescence, his mother said. “He didn’t get in trouble,” she told me. “He didn’t steal, he didn’t do drugs, he didn’t do anything that would cause him to be picked up by the police.” Dr. Lymberis found no sign of “conduct disorder,” a persistent character trait that is believed by some to arise in childhood and inexorably worsen, in adulthood, into antisocial personality disorder or sociopathic behavior.

Isaiah liked to ride his bike. He liked to play basketball. At the same time, he was shy. He needed glasses for reading, but at school he wouldn’t wear them because other kids made fun. Instead, he hid them. “Isaiah was bullied at school quite a bit,” his mother said. “He was in his own world. He didn’t communicate with the other kids, and so they bullied him.”

He was scrawny back then and not well able to fight back. “There were these two girls who were twins,” his mother said, “and they would just constantly torment him . . . They would call him skinny, ugly, black—because Isaiah had a darker skin complexion, like his father. They were just awful.” When Isaiah told his mother about this, she went to his school and confronted the twins, who she believes felt superior to Isaiah in part because they were lighter-skinned African American women, like herself. After she confronted them, Isaiah’s mother said, “they stopped messing with him.”

By 1994, Isaiah’s teacher was worried about “academic progress in all areas” and described him as “not organized.” The teacher said Isaiah “often times arrives at school very angry” and that he “gets in trouble at recess and on the bus” and “is very aggressive.” He was around nine years old. Alerted by the school that teachers believed Isaiah had ADD, his parents ignored the idea. “We didn’t believe that’s what was going on with him,” his mother said. “He never had any kind of learning disability. He was teaching me stuff I didn’t know . . . Isaiah taught me math. He knows the map of the world before I did. He’s very intelligent.”

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That same year, Isaiah’s mother showed up in an emergency room with stab wounds to her leg. She told doctors she had stabbed herself, out of anger, because of her husband’s abuse, which she found demeaning and humiliating, particularly because it was happening in front of their children. Dr. Lymberis, based on her investigation, wrote that Isaiah’s mother went to the ER because Isaiah’s father “threw her down the basement stairs and stabbed her two times in the leg. This violence started over Isaiah having a hard time doing his homework.” She said Isaiah’s mother “was seen five times for accidental stab wounds,” was diagnosed with major depression, and was referred for counseling. Isaiah’s mother told me, “I don’t want to get into that one, but I didn’t stab myself.” She added that it wasn’t Isaiah who stabbed her. Then she said, “I told them I did it. I just didn’t want to cause more problems than there already was.”

Soon after this, Isaiah’s mother became suicidal again. “I had given up,” she said, “because I was tired of the way I was being treated.” She was in the ER for that, too, as well as for problems with her back that ended up requiring multiple surgeries and narcotic pain medication, including Vicodin, Soma, and, eventually, methadone. Around this time, one teacher at Isaiah’s school described him as “bright-eyed, fun-loving, and well-mannered,” while another described him as “quite a puzzling student to me, so capable and yet so elusive.” Isaiah soon left that school and soon left another school, too. By fifth grade, a teacher wrote—“quite prophetically,” Dr. Lymberis noted—that Isaiah’s challenges urgently needed to be addressed before it was too late. He’d been tardy and absent a lot, seemed easily frustrated and unable to concentrate. Perhaps trying to reach Isaiah’s parents by first agreeing with their assessment of his intelligence, this teacher wrote, “Isaiah’s diverse abilities have become obvious. But his frustrations are something that must be addressed. His intelligence and abilities are not in question, but his ADD has increased his frustrations and, of course, affect his self-concept along with socialization endeavors. We
must talk to consider these aspects for Isaiah’s sake, before he ‘turns off’ completely and we’ll lose a very special young man.” The note was written in 1995. Isaiah was ten years old. His parents did not engage the plea.

That same year, the Seattle police were called to their home on Elmgrove Street because of an assault in which Isaiah was described as the victim. More detailed records of that incident have since been destroyed by the Seattle police as part of their regular purging of old records.

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By 1997, Isaiah was at yet another school, where testing found him learning disabled and eligible for special education services, with problems using written language and math. Isaiah’s mother recalls being summoned at some point for a conference about Isaiah’s abilities, which she couldn’t believe. She said she made Isaiah write an apology note to his teachers on the spot and that they were amazed by his fluency and ease of expression. “He said, ‘Mom, these teachers are so stupid, they think that I can’t read or write, so if they want to believe it, let them believe it.’”

What was not expressed verbally, at least as far as any available school records indicate, was what Isaiah was witnessing at home. His mother’s back troubles continued, and worsened, requiring a series of spinal fusions that left her to walk hunched over and led to her permanent use of narcotic pain medication, which was supervised by her doctor to prevent abuse. “She has been through hell and back,” Deborah said. The reports of domestic violence continued as well. In 1997, Isaiah’s mother told the social worker, her husband attacked her in the living room. “I was having problems with my back,” Isaiah’s mother told me. “And he knew it, and he just kicked my feet from under me, and I fell on my back on the floor, and he got on top of me and was bending my legs up to my neck, knowing it was hurting, and that’s when Isaiah intervened, and he pushed his father off me—pushed him across the room. He was protecting me.”

That fight began, Isaiah’s mother said, because Isaiah’s father told her to stay in her place. She responded by asking, “What place is that?”
She stood in one part of the room. “Here?” She moved a few feet away. “Here?” In response, she said, he attacked.

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Records created by the social worker show Isaiah’s mother describing a similar incident in 2001. “She states that the father got mad at her,” the social worker wrote. “She states that the father then kicked her legs, sat on her, and punched her in the back. She relates that the father attempts to hurt her back because he knows that she suffers back pain from previous injuries.” Medical reports support the mother’s account, the social worker wrote, quoting from a primary care provider’s records: “Most recent attack was on Saturday night, 7-21-01, when he punched her in the lower back, sat on her while she was lying on her stomach, and also stepped with his boot on her right thigh.” The doctor noted tenderness in Isaiah’s mother’s back, neck, shoulder, and thighs; contusions on her thigh, back, and arms; and swelling on her right thigh.

She described another loss of footing around this time, this one less literal. Isaiah’s father was the sole breadwinner in the family because her back injuries were becoming a disability that kept her from working, and so access to money had become another battleground. “The mother relates that the father has always controlled the finances,” the social worker wrote. “She relates that the father has three checking accounts and her name is not on any of them. She states that the father gives her $60 a week and tells her to buy groceries for five people.”

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Isaiah’s father was a Seventh-Day Adventist, a religion brought to Uganda by missionaries, and this faith was another thing he turned to for assistance. A core fear for him, Dr. Lymberis wrote, was that Isaiah would “become like his mother.” Trying to prevent this, he used “discipline, threats, and control,” and when that didn’t work to his satisfaction, he tried religion.

When Isaiah was twelve, he was sent to a Seventh-Day Adventist
school near Auburn, in the valley southeast of Seattle. He finished eighth grade there and then was sent to Auburn Adventist Academy, the boarding school next door. “Dad caught him smoking a cigarette and sent him off,” Deborah said. “Kinda drastic, huh?” Auburn’s civic motto is “More Than You Imagined,” and Auburn Adventist Academy is located near the Green River, farther upriver than the spot where Teresa would come to buy a condo, miles from where the river becomes the Duwamish. A mural at the main entrance to the school describes its surroundings: pastureland, evergreen trees, soft purple light falling on a close Mount Rainier at sunset. The grounds of the academy are surrounded by a black metal fence, and its one-story tan-brick buildings are arranged around a grassy quad. There’s a hangar-like gym with a half-dome roof of corrugated metal. Nearby, a small runway owned by the school, which offers some pilot training to its students.

The approach to the academy is notably less pastoral than the academy itself: mobile home parks, an Air Route Traffic Control Center run by the Federal Aviation Administration, stretches of Muckleshoot Indian Reservation land on which casino signs flash, pawnshops with names like Cash America. When Isaiah first arrived in this landscape as an eighth grader, he’d become friends with Kayla Manteghi. “He was really sweet,” she said. “Very nice.” Kayla also remembers a dry sense of humor that took her a while to figure out. “He would crack jokes,” she said, “but not smile.”

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At home, Deborah had been one of the people Isaiah would come to with new things he’d learned while reading in his room in the basement, or watching lectures on the University of Washington’s cable channel, or nature programs on the Discovery Channel. Sometimes she’d be with friends and brush her little brother off. “I feel so bad,” Deborah said. “I would be like, ‘Yeah, leave him alone, he’s crazy. He’s a weirdo.’ He would say weird stuff, but it wouldn’t be
weird
stuff. It would be, like, things he learned on TV. He’ll just come talk to you about it.” Politics. The abilities of
swordfish. For Deborah and her friends, it was way off topic. “Don’t nobody care,” Deborah recalled herself saying. “We’re just trying to hang out.”

She told her friends, “Oh, that’s just my brother.”

And, to her brother, “Isaiah, get out!”

Now he was gone, off to the boarding school in Auburn. Around the same time, Deborah moved out. “I left home at seventeen,” she said. “Never went back.”

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Boarding school was difficult for Isaiah. “You have to understand,” Deborah said, “he’s one of maybe five black people in this whole Adventist school, which—he has to live there on top of it—and all kinds of things going on. I know for a fact he went through hell. As an adult, I would ask him, ‘How was school when you went there?’ And he would say, ‘If you only knew the things I went through.’ But he would never tell me in detail.” His English teacher, Mary Kobberstad, said he was “quiet, reserved” and “had a difficult time fitting in.” She remembers him bringing up the challenge of being one of the few nonwhite people at Auburn Adventist. “He sometimes pulled the race card on us a little bit,” she said.

Isaiah’s mother said she wasn’t listed as a contact on the school paperwork, just Isaiah’s father and his father’s sister, Rachel Kalebu. The school principal at the time, Keith Hallam, recalls Rachel as a prominent figure in Isaiah’s life. “A mother’s love in an aunt’s heart is what I saw,” Hallam said. Court records reflect the absence of Isaiah’s mother on school forms and say this “effectively cut Isaiah’s mother out of not only Isaiah’s day-to-day life” but also “any knowledge of her son’s academic progress.” Still, Isaiah’s mother said, she went to the school regularly to bring Isaiah clean clothes and give him money, and he would come home to stay with his parents on weekends.

At the home on Elmgrove Street, even with their son away most of the time, “the parents continued to fight over Isaiah,” Dr. Lymberis wrote. “The mother and Isaiah wanted him to return home, but the father
continued to refuse.” At one point, Isaiah’s mother said, they went to marriage counseling, and Isaiah’s father “told the counselor right in front of me that we would have to get a divorce, or else one of us would end up dead. And that scared me. And it scared the counselor.” She said they had separate sessions after that.

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Isaiah’s mother doesn’t remember exactly when, but sometime in these years Isaiah asked her why she cried so often. She decided to tell him something she had kept from him, something that made it hard for her to believe, years later, that Isaiah had committed the crime for which he was put on trial. A child of rape, Isaiah’s mother now told her son that in her teenage years she herself survived a rape. “I was raped at knifepoint,” she said. “And Isaiah knew all this, and it disturbed him desperately. It bothered him badly.”