While the City Slept (16 page)

The antiquated system was unable to tell Judge O’Malley what conditions Judge Gain had released Isaiah on, even though it would have been quite useful for Judge O’Malley to know that those conditions included compliance with mental health treatment and no new law violations. “We’re dealing with hundreds of people a week on a relatively limited amount of information,” Judge O’Malley said. “So that’s it.” (Judge Gain, who later would not be able to easily pull up details about Judge O’Malley’s interaction with Isaiah, told me in one letter, “Unfortunately, only in the movies and TV is the criminal justice system omniscient.”)

—

As Judge O’Malley peered into his insufficient computer screen, Isaiah’s public defender noted that Isaiah was a longtime resident of the area, that a family member was present, that Isaiah was currently on state welfare, and that he had a minimal conviction history. The public defender also told the court that Judge Gain had released Isaiah on his own recognizance, which was true, narrowly speaking, and he asked Judge O’Malley for the same treatment in this case.

Judge O’Malley thought for a moment, and then he spoke: “Like I said, it’s fortunate something—it didn’t deteriorate.” He perused Isaiah’s computer record some more. “Where do you live?” he asked. “Do you live with yourself?”

(“What I’m trying to do while I’m talking with people,” Judge O’Malley told me later, “I’m trying to get some connection with them. I’m trying to understand them, if you will.”)

“I live with the lady you see right there,” Isaiah said. He was referring to his aunt, Rachel Kalebu.

(“He appeared to be very articulate and grounded,” Judge O’Malley said later. “There’s no hostility in his tone or manner . . . His aunt was there vouching for him.”)

“Okay,” Judge O’Malley said to Isaiah. “And are you going to school? Or, what do you do?”

(“We’re not psychiatrists,” Judge O’Malley told me. He didn’t know, at this point, about Isaiah’s mental disorder. The computer system couldn’t tell him about it, and the charging documents didn’t mention it, focusing only on the part of the elephant they were concerned with, the confrontation with law enforcement.)

“I am not in school at the moment,” Isaiah told the judge. “But as soon as I have the financial means to, I will be.”

“Okay,” Judge O’Malley said. “Well. I’ll tell you what, I’ll release you on your personal recognizance.”

“Thank you very much.”

(“I think I made the best decision I could at the time,” Judge O’Malley later said. “Had I had additional information—we all can look back at many facets of our lives and say, ‘Wow, had I known this, I would have done this.’ That’s the uncertainty of life. This job, unfortunately, has an element of uncertainty and risk that you just sort of have to accept. We have more people in jail in the United States than just about any country in the world. We’re not going to be able to put all these people in jail, and statistically something like this can happen. Obviously, I feel sad, but I think the same with Judge Gain: he did the best job he possibly could under the circumstances.”)

At the hearing, Judge O’Malley then said to Isaiah, “You’re a smart guy, use your good sense.” He was still perusing Isaiah’s computer record. “What I see here is a pattern . . . It’s a pattern there that I hope you address before something happens that you can’t fix like today.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

—

An elderly, weak voice now rose from the courtroom, Rachel Kalebu’s voice. “Thank you, Your Honor. He’s my nephew. My nephew has bipolar.”

“I can’t hear you,” Judge O’Malley said.

Someone closer to Judge O’Malley said, “He has bipolar.”

“Ohhhh,” Judge O’Malley said. “Oh, okay.”

The limited history that Judge O’Malley was seeing on his computer screen now began to make a little more sense. Even so, he didn’t have any evidence that Isaiah was currently, at the present moment, a danger to himself or others, so there was no option to involuntarily commit him. “Couldn’t have done that,” Judge O’Malley said later. “There was nothing there. That was out of the question.” Also, Judge O’Malley believes that jail is “the worst place in the world” for people diagnosed as bipolar. “From what I’ve read in the literature, it intensifies their condition rather
than alleviates it, so they’re worse when they’re released,” he said. That in turn increases the chance they’ll end up right back in court, where, he believes, the cycle continues.

—

Judge O’Malley now asked Isaiah and his public defender to wait a moment. He still had a chance to reverse his earlier decision.

(“You have to make a decision every couple of minutes,” he told me later. “The prosecutors are all just saying, ‘Put ’em in jail.’ The defense lawyers are all just saying, ‘No, he’s fine.’” Helpful information is lacking. “It’s just an antiquated system,” Judge O’Malley said. “So, clearly, if one could improve the communication between these different spheres, or these different, like, kingdoms, that would be a huge step. Because information is really a critical aspect of it, I think.” However, easy communication between the kingdoms is not the reality. So he listens, reads at the same time, goes through the file, tries to figure out what happened. If he takes too long in doing this, he falls behind and the whole system backs up—a system that, because of budget cuts, has fewer people to keep it running at a time of increased need. “Even if you’re tired, or you’re hungry, or you’re thinking about your mortgage payment—it’s just all those people,” he said. “Until you see it . . .” He trailed off. His days frequently end with his arriving home, drained. “I just come home, and I go up to our—we have a big walk-in closet, I close the door, and I just lay on the floor for twenty minutes, half an hour,” Judge O’Malley said. “It’s just a place where it’s quiet.” Other times he goes running, and still other times, Judge O’Malley said, “I’ve just driven into the garage in the car, and I just stay in the car . . . You don’t want to be around people. You just don’t want to be around people. I have not met a judge that has not had that feeling.”)

Judge O’Malley took some time with this last encounter with Isaiah, though. He feels strongly that psychologically disturbed people need to be better handled by the criminal justice system, has pushed, without
success, to get a mental health court in his county that would allow more flexibility in dealing with disturbed people accused of misdemeanor crimes.

“Are you taking your medications?” Judge O’Malley asked Isaiah.

“Yes, Your Honor,” Isaiah said.

“I want to encourage you to take those medications,” Judge O’Malley said. “Because, I think what happens is, you know, not good things happen when you’re not doing that. And usually, a lot of times, people who suffer from that, from bipolarism, they don’t take the medi—they’re okay, and then they don’t take the medications, and then they, you know, their chemical composition changes in their brain, because they don’t take the medicine, and then they get back into behavior that, you know, like I said, fortunately—you know, you got tasered here.”

“Several times,” Isaiah said.

“Yeah,” Judge O’Malley said. “That’s pretty painful. Okay? So please just take that medicine, okay?”

“Okay.”

“All right, that’s our deal.”

—

The deal struck, Isaiah was free to go. Judge O’Malley said to Isaiah’s aunt, “Oh, I’m glad you told me that.” She told him how she’d had to call the crisis line because of Isaiah that past Sunday. She also said Isaiah was in treatment at Cascade Mental Health Care, perhaps because she didn’t know Isaiah had been skipping appointments. Isaiah was encouraged to keep going to treatment. He said nothing in response. “Thank you so much,” Isaiah’s aunt said.

“It’s okay,” Judge O’Malley replied. “It’s part of the job . . . Thank goodness you told me, because it doesn’t make sense.” He said Isaiah would be released from jail that evening, around 6:00.

“Take care of yourself,” Judge O’Malley told Isaiah’s aunt.

“I will, Your Honor,” she replied. “Thank you.”

The whole proceeding lasted about five minutes and thirty seconds, and then Judge O’Malley went on to the next hearing, a Mr. Butoric, who was charged with misdemeanor theft.

—

Court records indicate that when he was not at the hearing, Isaiah told jail medical staff treating him for Taser burns that his aunt was “delusional” and that he was scared for his own safety. “The medical staff did not obtain his prior mental health records,” Dr. Lymberis wrote, “and did not realize that his perception of both his aunt and his behavior with the police were grossly
abnormal.”

U
nfinished business related to the old theft and marijuana possession charges kept Isaiah in jail for six more days. Then, two days after Isaiah’s release his aunt, Rachel Kalebu, showed up in Pierce County Superior Court seeking a restraining order against her nephew. She asked that Isaiah be ordered to “take his medicine,” that he return her computer bag, and that he stop destroying her property, such as her dishes and her computer. “I am a prisoner in my own home,” she wrote. She said Isaiah was “defiant” and “disrespectful,” that he had “threatened to hurt me” and “to also hit me.” She told the court that she’d recently called a mental health crisis line. “They advised me to evict him,” she wrote, “and ask for restraining him.”

Instead of triggering intervention, Rachel Kalebu’s statements about Isaiah’s behavior, and her request for a restraining order going forward, triggered nothing but further isolation for Isaiah. With his aunt at her limit, Dr. Lymberis wrote, “Isaiah lost his last meaningful emotional attachment and support. By then everyone in the family agreed that the solution was to let the state take care of him. For Isaiah, this translated as: he was now discarded and no longer a member of his family. This situation proved to be a catastrophic development.”

The next day, Rachel and JJ were killed in the arson. Detectives in the area later reported to Seattle detectives that Isaiah, who had been sleeping in a wooded part of the neighborhood since his aunt kicked him out, had parked his bicycle near the crime scene, walked up, and was
watching with other onlookers when detectives recognized him and began asking some questions. He readily answered. Television footage shows Isaiah looking calm and wearing a mismatched tracksuit, black on top and red on bottom. Deborah, who also came to the scene, remembers Isaiah being strangely unfazed. “If I was living in a house that was burned to a crisp,” she said, “my reaction would be devastation. His reaction was, ‘Hey, guys, what’s going on?’ Your house is burned to a crisp, and you have no reaction? So, it kind of made me think, like, ‘Why?’” The police suspected Isaiah might have committed the arson, and when they interviewed him, they offered him mental health treatment. He refused, according to records. Later, detectives came to believe that J. J. Jones was struck in the head with a golf club before the house was set on fire. They found a Wilson 3 iron at the scene. Jones’s son, speaking to a detective, said that JJ had encouraged Rachel to kick Isaiah out of the house “several times.”

B
ecause Isaiah had been displaced by the fire, the Red Cross offered him a voucher to stay at the Western Inn, a cheap motel near Interstate 5 where rooms were $59 a night. The Red Cross also gave him a prepaid debit card to cover minimal food expenses. Isaiah stayed three nights at the Western Inn, and while he was there, a hotel manager said, he destroyed his room.

He checked out on July 13, 2009, and that day was back in Judge Gain’s courtroom for a pretrial hearing on the charges of threatening his mother and sister more than a year earlier. Eighteen months had passed since his mom had taken him to the house that held the financial services firm and then urged the police to take him to Harborview. Isaiah, for this appearance before Judge Gain, was wearing a black V-neck sweater over a collared shirt and tie. A deputy prosecuting attorney told Judge Gain about Isaiah’s recent charges in a neighboring county for obstruction and resisting arrest and alluded vaguely—because details were not in hand—to the fact that Isaiah had recently been investigated, but released, in connection with an arson. The deputy prosecutor admitted he could not immediately prove that Isaiah was violating the judge’s order to get treatment but expressed concern that the run-ins with law enforcement suggested Isaiah had become “unstable.” He asked for $50,000 bail. Judge Gain denied this request, noting that Isaiah had come to court as required.

“Although,” Judge Gain said, “I am concerned about all of this. So, I’m gonna set a review for approximately three weeks, and I’d like an update
from his mental health provider.” The date for the review: August 3, 2009. “Assuming that he’s complying with his medication and any other recommendations, that will be the end of it.”

—

Isaiah walked out of Judge Gain’s courtroom with his new public defender, Theresa Griffin, who was becoming scared of him.

Before Rachel Kalebu died in the fire, she had been calling Theresa Griffin at all hours, saying she was unable to control Isaiah, that he was just locking himself in his room. “I can’t help you with that,” Theresa Griffin had told her. “I don’t represent you. I represent him.” This was precisely the complaint from Isaiah’s family: no one seemed to represent them and their concerns. When Isaiah’s aunt went so far as to show up at the public defense headquarters in downtown Seattle looking for help, they called Theresa Griffin, and again Griffin told her to look elsewhere.

Then, when Isaiah’s aunt was killed in the arson, Griffin realized she was a potential witness in that case and because of this would have to withdraw as Isaiah’s attorney. “He was not happy about that,” Griffin said. She remembers riding in a courthouse elevator with Isaiah and trying to calm him, saying she knew he was upset. “He said, ‘No, I’m not upset. I’m outraged.’”

—

The next day, Isaiah showed up at his father’s downtown office building. His father had recently turned fifty-two. When security called asking if they should send Isaiah up, his father said no. He didn’t want that. Instead, he went down to the lobby, met his son, and walked to the nearby Rem Koolhaas–designed public library. “I had mixed feelings about seeing him,” Isaiah’s father said to Dr. Lymberis. “I was afraid he’ll set the dog on me and was looking for the camera of the library.” He had urged one of Isaiah’s public defenders to see that Isaiah was kept in jail rather than released. He’d also urged this public defender not to tell Isaiah about the request. Apparently, Isaiah found out. “I had never seen him so angry,” Isaiah’s father said. “He
was wearing dark glasses and kept questioning me: ‘Why did you tell the attorney to keep me in jail? Why? Why?’” Isaiah’s father replied, “I don’t think you are okay. In jail you are safe. We cannot make you take your medicine. I want you to be in a safe place where you can be managed, controlled.”

Isaiah’s response was short, direct, and furious: “Dad, things happen. Life is short. Mama Rachel died and you don’t know who will be next.”

Then he left.

—

Isaiah’s father, worried, talked to security in his office building. They suggested he call the police, which he did. He said the police told him they couldn’t do anything, because Isaiah hadn’t threatened him directly. He thought of hiding out somewhere but then determined, “I can’t run from my son.” So he took the only recourse he saw left to him. He prayed.

“That last time I saw him,” Isaiah’s father told Dr. Lymberis, “he was not my son. He was ready to explode. He was full of rage.”

—

It was a rage that had never been explored. To the extent it had been engaged by mental health professionals, the engagement was so sporadic it could barely be called such. It was instead more like topical ointment on a mortar wound or a Band-Aid on a fault line. Isaiah’s attitude toward treatment didn’t help, but Dr. Lymberis saw Isaiah’s encounter with his father as something different from outright rejection of all help. What she saw was one last attempt at doing something that might be ameliorative. “He sought out his father,” Dr. Lymberis wrote, “in a desperate attempt to find meaning and purpose as he was falling further into the pit of his illness.” He didn’t find that.

—

On Friday, July 17, 2009, as Teresa and Jennifer were preparing to spend a weekend together, Isaiah was again in Judge Gain’s courtroom, beneath the dropped ceiling and fluorescent lights, as Theresa Griffin formally
withdrew as his defense attorney. After that, she had a meeting with Judge Gain in his chambers at which, she said, she made it clear she thought Isaiah had killed his aunt. “I was very, very fearful for myself,” Griffin said. “He really liked me, and I really liked him, but he was really dangerous.” She thought Isaiah was schizophrenic, one more provisional diagnosis to add to the list. “I felt that he came with completely different personalities at different times and kind of came in and out of them,” Griffin said, “like a young man who was just starting to go into schizophrenia.” She added, “It was really sad that somebody didn’t help that kid.”

Griffin found it “shocking” that Judge Gain didn’t revoke Isaiah’s pretrial release after the Tacoma arson. “I just could not believe that the judge did not take him in,” she said. “Had he taken him in on Friday, that girl would be alive today.” Though Judge Gain sees “no benefit” in talking about the specifics of Isaiah’s case, his office said, in a letter to a newspaper eleven days after he last released Isaiah, that “it must be remembered that each one of us is presumed innocent when we are brought before the court.” This echoed what Judge Gain had said when first running for superior court in 1992: a judge has to balance community safety, individual rights, and the letter of the law. The letter from his office added that release decisions are “some of the most difficult decisions faced by judges.” As of that Friday, Isaiah had yet to be tried on the charges of threatening to kill his mother and sister and had not even been arrested in connection with the deaths of his aunt and J. J. Jones by arson. Judge Gain was also unaware that Isaiah had been noncompliant with his mental health treatment for at least the past seven months. “Many a judge will tell you that they see defendants every day who at some time will probably commit additional crimes,” Judge Gain said in a letter to me. “Which defendants, and the timing and severity of the crimes, the judge has no ability to discern.”

—

That Friday night, Isaiah was back riding a public bus through the distant suburbs. He’d made the long ride from Judge Gain’s courtroom, about
twenty miles south of Seattle, to the Bothell transit station, about twenty miles north of Seattle. It was around 9:00 p.m.

A man getting off the bus at the park-and-ride saw Isaiah, dog in tow, trying to steal his silver mountain bike, which had been locked to a park-and-ride fence.

“What makes you think you’re going to steal my bike?” the man asked Isaiah, according to a police report.

“I’m coming up,” Isaiah replied.

The man flagged down a police officer in a patrol car at the park-and-ride. While the man was doing this, Isaiah set the bike down and got on a bus, a familiar refuge. The officer told him to get off the bus and sit with Indo in a bus shelter. Isaiah complied.

At first, he denied trying to steal the bike. Then Isaiah told another officer, “Okay, I took it.” He was informed the case would be referred to King County prosecutors for a theft prosecution. The bike was noted to be worth $200. Then Isaiah was released at the scene.

—

It was late at night. He had nowhere to go. He’d destroyed his last home, a hotel room provided by the Red Cross. His aunt was dead, her house destroyed, too. His mother and sister now seemed to be his enemies. In any case, restraining orders barred him from their homes. His father wanted him jailed.

He slept in parks at times like this, his mother said. Or he rode the bus, like in high school, a thick clutch of multicolored transfers in his pocket. Of this period, Isaiah’s lawyers later wrote, “Isaiah wandered homeless for days, accompanied only by his dog and his delusions, until he encountered Teresa Butz and Jennifer
Hopper.”