While the City Slept (23 page)

T
he hearing to hand down Isaiah’s sentence came a month and a half later, on August 12, 2011. Eleven days earlier, Isaiah’s twenty-sixth birthday. “This is a case of extreme, deliberate cruelty,” the prosecutor said at the outset. “Certainly one that cries out for an exceptional sentence.”

Before the sentence, though, the “victim impact statements.” Norbert senior had flown in from St. Louis to address the court. So had Teresa’s older brother Jim. “Your Honor,” Norbert senior began, “people in the courtroom, I—in my wildest dreams, I thought I would never have an experience like this, and I’ve had a lot of experiences in my life. But Teresa was the ninth gift from God out of eleven of our children, and to know her was to love her. I don’t mean to make a saint out of her because she had issues, as we all do in life, but she was a good student, an avid soccer player, and a catcher in grade school, high school, and in college, and she was just . . .” He talked about her childhood, her tough disposition, the place she made for herself in that large family. “She was really a blessing by God, and it’s one that Isaiah took from us, and he didn’t have a right to do that, but he did it, and we’re living with that,” Norbert senior said. “He took her life, but he couldn’t take her spirit and her soul. She still lives with us daily. We have a tree planted in our backyard; it’s called Teresa’s tree, and I watch it grow every day, and that’s a blessing.”

He spoke of how Teresa was always drawn to the underdog. He spoke of his own struggles with thoughts of revenge. “You can’t imagine,” he
said. “And I still don’t forgive him; I don’t excuse what he did.” He thanked “the community, Detective Duffy, the police force, the court system, the jurors that had to sit through this diabolical situation.”

Jim Butz spoke next. “It’s a strange providence that’s brought this whole group of human beings into a single room,” he said, “and there’s a lot of stories represented here.” Some of the jurors had shown up to watch. Carley and Carmen were there. Jennifer and her family were there. The media, on this day, observed from the empty jury box. Jim Butz spoke of Teresa’s “zealous sense of justice,” and he spoke directly to Isaiah, saying, “I don’t know you, and you don’t know me, and we’re just two human beings, and I don’t know your backstory.” He told Isaiah he felt no right to judge another person. “I don’t,” Jim Butz said. “I swear, I know that’s true. And I’m dead serious, I’ve prayed for you every single day since this happened.”

“Thank you very much,” Isaiah said.

“And I hope to see you in heaven. I’m serious.”

“I’ll be there.”

“And that’s all I’d like to say.”

“God bless,” said Isaiah.

—

Next to speak was Jennifer. She began facing Judge Hayden, her back to Isaiah. “I have thought a lot about what I would say today, and I tried on numerous occasions to write something down,” she said. “And the trouble that I have is that, one, I feel like I’ve said pretty much everything I had to say when I sat up there and told the story of what happened to us that night. But I knew that I couldn’t let today pass without doing a couple of things, and one was to show my gratitude, which I could not show that day, to you”—and here she was addressing Judge Hayden—“for being fair and listening and hearing me and everyone that day. And to everyone here, the media who left me alone, my friends, the jurors, everyone, for protecting me and surrounding me with love when I needed it the most.”

Then she turned to face Isaiah. “But I also knew that I couldn’t let today go by without again addressing you.” She spoke of how the things Teresa taught her, by example and word, had helped her to heal and get through. “I realized,” Jennifer said, “that there may be nothing I can say to you, because I did beg you for my life, and she begged you for her life. And I tried to show you our humanity, and any shred of goodness that I was hoping you could see, and it didn’t matter that day, so I can’t understand how it would matter today. But I do say to you that I do wish you peace, and I do not hate you, and I’m so sorry for whatever it is in your life that brought you to this.” She spoke of being glad that he wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone again. She said, “I wish I could say to you that I’ve not been broken. I actually wrote the words down on a piece of paper, that, ‘Yes, you took so much from me, but I am not broken.’ But pieces of me are and will always be. But I will fight every day of my life to be as whole as I can. That I promise you, and I promise everyone here. But I wish you no harm. I never wanted you put to death. I don’t seek revenge, I don’t want anything bad to happen to you in prison, nothing. I wish you peace every last day of your life. That’s all I have to say.”

—

“Who will present on behalf of the defense?” Judge Hayden asked.

“Mr. Kalebu chooses not to exercise his right to allocute, Your Honor,” said Brandes. “There’s not a lot that—as a defense team—that we can say. It’s been a difficult case, I think, for all parties. The court, your staff, the prosecutor, the defense team, the jurors, those who suffered through the events that happened that night, and all I can say is this: That we are in awe of the grace of Ms. Hopper and of the Butz family. We are saddened by the internal demons and delusions that Mr. Kalebu has struggled with, not just during the two years that we’ve known him, but for the few years leading up to this incident. We appreciate the voice that Ms. Hopper has given to women who have suffered from sexual violence and to people who have committed, loving relationships, no matter what they are. We
know what the sentence of this court will be. We’ll file our appeal and have the appellate court review that for any errors that may have occurred, and we wish that everyone go in peace.”

Judge Hayden then spoke of having been at a wedding the previous evening, “a marriage that should have been celebrated by Jennifer and Teresa, a marriage that, perhaps in the future, within her lifetime, will be possible within this state . . . I think within your lifetime, your next ceremony, whoever it’s with, may indeed be a marriage ceremony, and I would say to everyone gathered here that that would be a much more joyous occasion for everyone, where the tears could flow for good.”

—

Isaiah now interrupted the judge. His speech was back to a manic speed, so fast the words blurred together and the court reporter couldn’t keep up, writing, “All you people hoping we have gay marriage, do you realize that if we have gay marriage it’s going to make [indecipherable] really. See what’s going to happen is first we have gay marriage, then the polygamists are going to piggyback on that . . .”

“Mr. Kalebu,” Judge Hayden said, “you’ve had your chance to speak.”

“So we have gay marriage, and then we have polygamy. We have polygamy. All the Muslims who are polygamists are going to bring their five wives and 25 kids over here, and then, boom, it’s a charade of a country, just like that.”

In my notes, I wrote, “it’s a Sharia country, just like that,” but who knows what Isaiah actually said. It was hard to follow because it came out so fast. Afterward, Brandes said the outburst didn’t change her sense of the motivation for the crimes. “They were not motivated by antigay animus,” Brandes said. “We have specific reason to know that.” She did not elaborate.

Judge Hayden let Isaiah spin out, which didn’t take long, and then he asked, “Are you finished?” Isaiah said nothing.

The judge delivered his sentence. Because the mandatory minimum
for Isaiah’s crimes was life in prison without the possibility of parole, Judge Hayden conceded that the other parts of his punishment would be largely symbolic. “But,” he said, “in our system of justice symbols are important. What we do is important, and what we say is important. Jennifer Hopper and the family of Teresa Butz and, indeed, even members of the jury deserve to know that this defendant’s brutality and the horror of that evening warrants the maximum penalty that I can impose under the law.” He used Isaiah’s life expectancy—seventy-three years—to calculate the exceptional sentence, which came out to life without the possibility of parole, plus what amounted to two more life sentences beyond that. Isaiah also lost his right to vote and own a gun.

“Does that conclude this matter, Counsel?” Judge Hayden asked.

“Yes, Your Honor,” the prosecutor said.

“We’ll be at recess.”

—

Four days later, at a brief restitution hearing, Isaiah was ordered to pay a little over $40,000 for expenses incurred by the Butz family as a result of Teresa’s death. If he did work while in prison, it would be taken out of his paycheck. “I don’t want to go to prison!” Isaiah interjected at one point.

This was noted, but it made no difference.

A short time after the restitution hearing concluded, Isaiah was loaded into a special van with tinted windows and a steel cage inside. With him secured inside this cage, a driver took Isaiah up and over the crest of the Cascade Mountains, down the other side, across the dry flatlands of eastern Washington, across the wide Columbia River, and into Walla Walla, the city where Isaiah had briefly been in college not too many years earlier and where his old friend Kayla Manteghi had seen him and thought he’d seemed the same. The campus for that college is a ten-minute drive from the Washington State Penitentiary, which is located, through a dark bit of civic planning, at 1313 North Thirteenth
Avenue.

T
hree years later, on a spring evening in Seattle, Jennifer is at home decompressing, wearing a lightweight red hoodie and black slacks in an apartment many floors up from the street, an apartment with a secured front entry. She’s just spent the day speaking at a Seattle Police Department employee retreat on the topic of resilience, telling officers, supervisors, and 911 operators how she moved forward from the attacks and the trial. At one point during her talk, she referred to her attacker as “Mr. Kalebu,” and an officer raised his hand. He wanted to know how she could give him any honor, even a small honorific like “Mr.,” after what he’d done. How could she find any forgiveness?

It didn’t come all at once.

She recalls a picture. Maybe in the newspaper. Maybe on television. “I don’t really remember,” Jennifer said. “I just remember the image.” It was an image of Isaiah’s mother at the arraignment right after his arrest for the South Park attacks. She was leaning against a glass partition that separated courtroom visitors from participants, watching her son in handcuffs. “He was somebody’s child,” Jennifer said.

—

“As soon as I pictured him that young,” she continued, “and that vulnerable, it’s like I could see his humanity, and that led me to being able to be in the space of forgiveness.”

The space has specific meaning for her. “I heard somebody describe
forgiveness as restoring what there was before,” Jennifer said. “And that forgiveness didn’t mean that it was okay, or that there’s no responsibility, or that, like, ‘I forgive you, it’s okay that you did that to me.’ It’s more like you’re restoring the relationship to what it was before. And with him, the relationship that we would have had before is that we would have been strangers. And I would wish him what I would wish any stranger, which is pretty much that I hope they have a good life.” She would refer to any male stranger as “Mr.,” just out of decency, she explained to the officer who’d raised his hand at her talk.

—

“Someone also described to me,” she continued, “that when you forgive, you no longer allow what that person did to diminish you.” Her forgiveness, she makes clear, “has nothing to do with him. It has everything to do with me. He can no longer diminish me, inside of forgiveness.”

She doesn’t think about him a lot these days. “I really don’t,” she said. “And that gives me freedom. That’s massive freedom, considering what happened. And yeah, there were people who said to me, ‘Man, I hope he gets his own when he gets to prison.’ To me, that for sure doesn’t bring Teresa back. For sure, it doesn’t make me feel whole, and it just has me participating in the same kind of way that created the violence that had him hurt me. I’m not interested in that. I actually do hope he has whatever peace he can have in prison. I said it at the sentencing, and I mean it, and I probably mean it in an even deeper way now than I did then. Then, it was still the beginning.”

The sense of forgiveness continues to grow, as does her sense of what it does, and does not, encompass. Once, not long after the trial ended, she went to speak at a women’s prison, and an inmate asked her if she would accept an apology from Isaiah. She remembers telling the woman that she didn’t feel Isaiah was capable of doing that. “But,” she said, “if someone from the prison said, ‘Hey, he’s had this kind of transformation, and it would make a difference,’ I would. But it would be for him and not for me.”

—

Jennifer believes Isaiah is mentally ill. She also believes he knows right from wrong. She also knows this: “We didn’t do anything to him. It’s a crime of, like—we were accessible somehow. Like, with an open window. I still don’t believe that he stalked us out or anything. Who knows. But even then, we happened to be someplace that he saw us. And he said he’d go, and he didn’t . . . Very smart guy.”

She does still wonder if there was any antigay motivation to his violence. She wishes Brandes, his attorney, could say why she’s so certain antigay animus had nothing to do with Isaiah’s crimes. “Also,” Jennifer said, “it doesn’t matter. I remember at the trial, when he started that line of ‘God told me to do it . . .’ I was like, ‘Ask him why!’” She was whispering now. “‘Ask him why!’ In the back, I was like, ‘Ask him why!’”

She stopped whispering and continued, “Because there was a part of me that wanted him to say, ‘Because they were sinning,’ or something like that, and then suddenly”—she snapped her fingers—“we were turning it into something else. But, really, who cares? He got beyond life. So what are we gonna do, tack on ten more years because it was a hate crime? At this point, it was a violent crime. It was a violent crime against women. You can almost call that a hate crime sometimes. Rape just reads to me as a hate crime. There’s this, like, ‘You’re a woman, so by the very fact that you’re a woman I can overpower you and make you do what I want you to do.’ Which—there is some hatred there, that’s for sure. So I don’t know if it really would have been distinct.”

Some part of her would still like to know why he chose them.

“But then again, who cares?” she said. “There’s really nothing I would have changed about how we lived our
lives.”