While the City Slept (24 page)

A
fter the fall of 2011, when Isaiah arrived at the state penitentiary in Walla Walla, years passed with no one visiting him.

He remained in touch with the outside world, however. Isaiah’s mother told me she’d written to him early in his prison term and that he’d written ten or twelve letters back to her. She said he’d also called her on the phone. “I did say to Isaiah, a few times, I said, ‘I’m so sorry, Isaiah, that you’re in there. I wish you weren’t in there,’” his mother told me. “And he said, ‘You should be sorry.’” That stopped her short.

“I don’t understand why he says that to me,” she said. “I think he’s blaming me for something, but I’m not quite sure what it is. Whether it’s because I allowed him to go live with his aunt and he’s blaming me—I don’t know what it is . . .”

She continues to believe her son is schizophrenic. “I’m not sure what bipolar is,” she said. “But the stuff I saw through Isaiah was the exact same things I saw through my mother, my cousins, my brother, relatives of mine.”

—

Seeking some form of interview, I wrote half a dozen letters to Isaiah between the summer of 2013 and the end of 2014. I told him I was working on this book. I asked for his side of things, proposed a visit, asked him to write to me at a P.O. box that I rented for the possibility of a letter from him, asked him to call the number of a cheap cell phone I bought for the
potential of a call from him. I sent him a small amount of money for his prison postage and phone accounts, enough that there would be no obstacle to his reaching out if he desired.

As I waited for some response, Deborah told me she’d heard, through her mother, that Isaiah had been up and down. “He’s getting worse,” Deborah said in one of our earlier conversations. “He needs to be in a facility where they can medicate his ass.” She said Isaiah had been talking, in phone calls home, about government plots and FBI work. The state prison system won’t release records related to Isaiah’s mental health because of medical privacy concerns, but the records that can be released suggest a continued reluctance about medication. In December 2011, just a couple of months after he arrived at Walla Walla, a prison guard spotted a pill on Isaiah’s cell desk. The explanation: “Saving it for later.”

Prison records also suggest Isaiah spent considerable time in the section of the Walla Walla penitentiary used for housing mentally ill offenders. Those same records chronicle Isaiah’s infractions, for things like having a “filthy” cell and refusing to clean it (to which he pleaded “not entirely guilty”) and trading the halal meal he requested for another inmate’s kosher meal (to which he pleaded “guilty”). He initially refused to do prison work or get involved in prison education programs, with a report from November 2013 reading, “Offender spends all his time in his cell watching television, only coming out to eat.”

His mother sent him that television, and this particular report recommended Isaiah lose his TV privileges for ten days as punishment for a cell that was, again, “filthy.” Isaiah tried to contest the punishment at a prison hearing, blaming the prison vents for always blowing dirt and debris in, thwarting his cleaning efforts. He was punished nonetheless. By the end of 2014, his infractions numbered about a dozen and appeared to ebb and flow in unpredictable cycles. What that might mean, if anything, is unclear.

“He has never been treated,” Dr. Lymberis said of the situation, angry,
exclaiming, “He has never been treated. He continues not to be treated. It’s not a new thing. This case illustrates our societal problem.”

It has been estimated that between 20 and 30 percent of Washington State’s prison population is mentally ill, which is about average for this country, and the Washington State Legislature not long ago appropriated millions of dollars to build a new facility at Walla Walla to keep up with the state’s rising number of inmates.

—

A little over three years after he arrived at Walla Walla, on the morning of October 6, 2014, Isaiah did something that led to a change in his surroundings. According to state penitentiary records, Isaiah “came up to the pill line, handed Nurse Scott a piece of paper, and asked for a band aid.” When the nurse asked Isaiah what the paper was about, he told Nurse Scott to turn it over. On the back was a handwritten note that included lines like “You are beautiful,” “Seeing you is the best part of my day,” and “I wish there was a way I could spend more time with you.” In response, “Nurse Scott informed the inmate he couldn’t be doing stuff like that and handed him a band aid. Inmate said ok and walked away.”

Isaiah’s note was “uncomfortable and threatening” to the nurse, the records say, and as a consequence he was cited for, and found guilty of, sexual harassment. He spent time in “isolation,” the prison’s term for solitary confinement. “They put him in the hole,” said his mother, who wishes her son could be confined to a mental hospital rather than a prison. Records show that Isaiah’s mother called Walla Walla several times during this period expressing concern, wondering when her son would be released from solitary, hoping prison officials were remembering to give him his mental health medication. “Explained she can be told very little info due to privacy laws,” a note in the records states, “but assured her son is safe and well.”

Then, in December 2014, because his sexual harassment infraction made him ineligible to remain in the mental health units in Walla Walla,
Isaiah was transferred back across the Cascade Mountains to the Clallam Bay Corrections Center. It’s a smaller, newer facility that sits on the northern edge of the Olympic Peninsula, in a wooded area near the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Across the strait is Canada’s Vancouver Island and, to the northeast, San Juan Island, where the body of Isaiah’s schizophrenic maternal grandmother reportedly washed up when he was an infant. Clallam Bay has the ability to hold “maximum security” prisoners, but Isaiah’s status when he arrived there was somewhat lower: “close custody.”

—

Isaiah never responded to any of my letters. But shortly after his transfer to Clallam Bay, I learned that prisoners in Washington State have access to e-mail. I sent him a message, and a week later, on February 12, 2015, a reply from Isaiah arrived in my in-box:

Eli I refuse to speak with you until I have digested what you have written about me good and bad. After I that I may consider speaking with you, maybe. I suggest you send me a comprehensive sample of your work emphasizing your covrage of my alleged “crimes,” arrest, incarceration in county jail and mental institutions, trial and subsequent confinement within D.O.C. Also include anything you have written about my so-called “victims.”

I have heard you have won a Pulitzer Prize writing about my “crimes” and “victims” Congratulations please include information about the Pulitzer Prize such as eligibility requirements, amount of competition, awards assoicatied with said prize including information about your award ceremony, and a transcript of you acceptance speach if there was one.

Well Eli since you’re writing a book about me it’s a safe bet that this e-mail will find it’s way into that book. A direct firsthand quotation from Kalebu, must be like water in the desert huh.

—

I wrote back to Isaiah. I expressed polite gratitude for his reply, and I sent links to materials I thought might satisfy his request. He responded that he couldn’t open any links, “as I do not have access to the internet only this limited excuese for e-mail.” He suggested I send paper copies of the materials, “through snail-mail” and also “through a lawyer for confidentiality purposes.” I did as he suggested, but as of this writing, five months after he last communicated with me, I have received no further word from Isaiah.

He remains in touch with his mother and Deborah, however. In June 2015, his mother told me she’d had a phone conversation with him and that, while not admitting any guilt for the crimes against Jennifer and Teresa, Isaiah had expressed to her some sorrow for what occurred, calling Jennifer “nice” and saying, “I wish nothing had happened to her or Teresa.” Around the same time, Deborah told me she’d just become comfortable hearing Isaiah’s voice over the phone again, more than three years after he was sent to prison, and that in conversation he’d expressed to her some sadness at Rachel Kalebu’s death. “He cries about it,” Deborah told me. “He’s hurt about it. He talks about how much he misses her. He’s like ‘I hate that Mamma Rachel’s died.’ I know my brother’s in pain.”

Perhaps these are things he would say only to his mother and Deborah. Like others, the last interaction I had with Isaiah conveyed the impression of a man in a demanding, unrepentant, and unreflective place, diagnosis a mystery, underlying issues unknown, sentence
unending.

The
River

F
or four years, the neighborhood of South Park went without its drawbridge over the Duwamish. At first, the old bridge just sat there, abandoned, condemned for safety reasons, alternate routes required to get to Loretta’s or the community center baseball diamond. Voters in King County had rejected raising taxes for a replacement, and when President Obama and Congress released billions in federal stimulus funds to help stem the Great Recession and promote infrastructure improvements, the South Park Bridge project was initially passed over. Instead, funds went first to downtown Seattle, to fix highway approaches near Amazon’s growing world headquarters and a biotech hub constructed on land bought and sold by Microsoft’s cofounder Paul Allen. It had always gone this way.

Eventually, funding did come, $34 million from a later round of stimulus that, when combined with other sources of money, was enough to replace the weary span. The old drawbridge was torn down, some of its worn gears saved so they could be incorporated, decoratively, into the new one. Coffer dams were built in the Duwamish muck so that new, firmer footings could be sunk, and atop these new footings a brand-new bridge, much like the old one but sturdier, began to take shape. Its steel girders were welded together in Montana and then trucked to the Duwamish River valley, where they were lifted into place by cranes floating on barges. Steel deck gratings came from Pittsburgh, the rail for the pedestrian walkway from Tacoma. The concrete supporting the new watchtowers—and
holding up the new approaches, and creating the new footings—was sent from a factory just downstream.

To raise its run-down decks, the old bridge had relied upon two mammoth mechanisms stored inside cavernous chambers beneath its approaches. These flawed mechanisms had been held in place by gravity, gears loaded with staggering weight and grinding back, forth, open, closed, across fixed paths arranged like toothed railway tracks. Everything had to stay in alignment, or nothing worked, and over time, due to inattention and the bridge’s own vulnerabilities, everything had not stayed in alignment. For the new bridge, weight was taken off the gears and instead focused on a rolling trunnion, a spinning steel core capable of rotating back, forth, open, closed, while not being ground down by its burden. This different way is not invulnerable. But it can be rattled, by earthquakes or other disturbances, and still function.

—

In the summer of 2014, the new South Park drawbridge opened. A deep crowd filled the west approach, people wearing Sikh turbans and Seahawks hats and bicycle helmets and saris. Near the front, a towering African American man in shades and a construction hard hat with the American flag painted on it. He was standing close to a woman who’d run the beer garden at the old bridge’s funeral, which was a grand affair featuring a black casket bearing the phrase “died of neglect” and a parade of last drives across the condemned structure. Speeches marking the new bridge’s arrival mixed Spanish and English and came from a U.S. senator, a congressman, the mayor, and the county executive who, years earlier, painted a pledge on the side of the old County Line Bar and Grill—now closed and demolished—promising to do everything in his power to rebuild the connection to the other bank of the Duwamish. Tribal elders offered prayers, and at the appointed moment fireworks shot from the tops of the open spans, which then descended, restoring the neighborhood’s best link to the
rest of the river valley and, through it, the city beyond. Within a short time, a woman with elaborate thigh tattoos was roller-skating across in a car lane as lesbian couples walked their kids along the bridge sidewalks.

In the neighborhood, better sewage and drainage pipes were scheduled to be installed, a measure intended to cut down on the basement flooding. A brand-new city dump facility kept odors more contained. From downtown, new pledges to reduce the upstream pollution that flows into the Duwamish, and from the Environmental Protection Agency, after a record number of public comments, a commitment to spend $342 million, over almost two decades, in an effort to rid the Superfund stretch of 90 percent of its pollutants. The money will come from responsible parties—Boeing, King County, the City of Seattle, the port—but it will be wasted if upstream pollution is not halted, and the EPA admits that even in the best-case scenario the river may never be safe to eat from again without caution.

Overall, though, the direction appears as it should be, or at least as promised by an imperfect system that, particularly when it is in euphoric overdrive, tends to lack insight into its destructive potentials, its predictable cycles of manic highs and desperate lows, the fact that someone is always going to lose.

—

Israel Rodriguez was not at the opening ceremony for the bridge. He had graduated from Chief Sealth International High School, named, at a time of less concern for correct pronunciation, after Chief Si’ahl. A $5,000 scholarship helped him attend community college until the money ran out, and then he moved to Kent, a working-class city south of Seattle, and began a job at the Oh Boy! Oberto sausage factory. “I’m trying to go back to college,” he told me in the spring of 2014. “Now I got kids, though, so.” No one ever told Israel about the result of the trial at which he testified, and he never asked, though he had wondered and was interested to learn. He feels good about what he did that night and remains in occasional
touch with Diana Ramirez and Sara Miranda-Nino. The house they all ran toward—the house that, afterward, was found to contain the address sign Teresa stole off her childhood home in St. Louis, as well as a framed picture of the
Delta Queen
steamboat—still sits there on South Rose Street. It’s now painted a new color.

—

Detective David Duty is retired from policing, but Detective Dana Duffy continues to work cases, continues to add to her cubicle’s wall of the dead. She’s out of the basement apartment now and sharing a town house with a new boyfriend, a fellow law enforcement officer whom she got to know after the South Park investigation was complete. “We met at a trooper-shot-in-the-head scene,” Detective Duffy said. She won an award for her work on the South Park attacks, “this really beautiful, kind of, glass award,” she said. It read, “Detective Duffy, South Park Homicide.” “Or something—I don’t remember, because I immediately took my award and gave it to Jen. If anybody deserves it, it’s her.” The two of them still see each other from time to time, though Detective Duffy lets Jennifer pick the times. “I’m still the detective who had to go through all that gory shit with her,” Detective Duffy said. “So I just know that we have our special place, and I do what I do, and she’s out there.”

Judge Gain is still at the Regional Justice Center in Kent, still seeing a huge number of defendants each day, still of the opinion that there is “no benefit” to his commenting directly on his dealings with Isaiah. At the same time, in his last letter to me, Judge Gain wrote, “I wish you luck in your endeavor. Hopefully, it will focus attention on the prevention of tragedy in the future.” In 2014, Judge O’Malley retired after twelve years on the bench, his hopes of bringing a mental health court to Tacoma unrealized, the scarce resources that frustrated him still scarce. “Unless society is willing to make the commitment to examine this and take corrective action—and that means spending some money—what’s gonna change?” he asked. “What’s gonna change? And that is tragic.”

—

Judge Hayden retired in 2013, at the age of sixty-five, and counts the trial of Isaiah Kalebu among his most memorable in twenty-one years on the bench. The King County Courthouse where he worked for so long is now being restored, when possible, to its pre-“modern” grandeur, a function of its historic landmark status. But Judge Hayden lives a hundred miles away and spends his retired days thinking about other things while out in his woodworking shed, or riding his bike, or heading for ski slopes. He still hopes Jennifer finds someone to marry, especially considering that gay marriage became legal in Washington State in the fall of 2012, just over three years after Teresa and Jennifer had planned to have their illegal wedding and it instead turned into a memorial. “She, quite literally, was the best witness I’ve seen on the stand in my career,” Judge Hayden said. Ramona Brandes, Isaiah’s public defender, said exactly the same thing. After the trial, both she and Michael Schwartz, Isaiah’s other public defender, continued their work representing people who can’t afford attorneys (though Schwartz, in 2015, was appointed as a superior court judge in the county that holds Tacoma). In a statement Schwartz and Brandes filed with the trial court before Isaiah’s sentencing, they’d warned that “systemic flaws in the state’s method of dealing with the mentally ill still present a looming threat.”

Theresa Griffin has also continued her public defense work. She’s one of the people who heard news of what had happened in South Park that summer of 2009 and got an uneasy feeling connected to Isaiah, her former client. “I just kind of knew,” she said.

—

Jennifer is not married, but she’s had a couple of serious relationships since the attacks. One night, a woman she was dating, a volleyball coach, took her to a game north of Seattle, and the two of them ended up in a sideline conversation with a man who turned out to be Officer Ernest
DeBella, the second responder to the calls from South Park that night in 2009. When Officer DeBella realized who Jennifer was, he seemed to have difficulty talking to her, had to excuse himself. Before that, though, he told Jennifer he wished he’d been in the neighborhood earlier that night. Maybe he could have seen Isaiah running away from the scene of the crime and caught him right then.

Norbert Leo Butz is still acting and singing, sober many years now. He calls Teresa his “spiritual sponsor,” drew on her courage to get himself to the point where he could admit to his family that he had a problem with alcohol and drugs, that he wanted to stop but couldn’t. “Once you can say that and mean it, you’re on the way to getting clean,” he said. “That was the gift she gave me. Next to my wife and kids, it’s the most precious thing anyone has ever given me.”

In the summer of 2013, he put on a well-received cabaret show called
Girls, Girls, Girls,
a tribute to the women in his life, including Teresa. That same summer, not long before the fourth anniversary of Teresa’s death, Jennifer flew from Seattle to New York to see Norbert’s show and, at the end of it, got up onstage with him to sing “Proud Mary,” a song set on steamboats and the Mississippi River. The two of them had performed the song before, in the spring of that year in St. Louis, at a benefit concert arranged by Teresa’s lifelong friends Rachel and Jean. Money from the St. Louis show went to a nonprofit all of them have created to help survivors of sexual violence through music therapy.

The idea arose from what they all instinctively did after Teresa’s death. They sang at her funeral, at her memorial in Seattle, with each other. They explained it to themselves and others with a quotation from the poet Heinrich Heine: “Where words leave off, music begins.” At a friend’s house, and then at a professional studio, they recorded an album over four days and sold it where they could, generating seed money for what they call the Angel Band Project. On the album they made, Norbert Leo Butz and Jennifer both cover Patty Griffin songs.

—

In April 2014, at Seattle’s Neptune Theatre, just off “the Ave” where Jennifer’s mom once sold beaded necklaces, the Angel Band held a second fund-raising concert. Norbert, Jennifer, and Jean were all there. The singer Brandi Carlile was there, too, having launched something called the Fight the Fear Campaign after reading about the South Park attacks. Her campaign is “inspired by the life and loss of Teresa Butz,” and it’s meant to help young women learn how to prevent sexual assault. At the Neptune concert, Carlile performed a duet with Jennifer and, in front of the large audience, told her, “On my best day, you could sing me under the table.” Susan Bardsley, Jennifer’s old vocal coach from high school, later came onstage to sing in a background choir for one of the final songs. Norbert senior was there in the audience. So were Jennifer’s mom and Carley Zepeda and JoAnn Wuitschick, who no longer keeps a trip wire of empty wine bottles in front of her condo door at night.

—

Back in St. Louis, Teresa’s old boat mate John Schuler. He eventually followed her out of the closet and now lives with his longtime boyfriend. “Teresa and I always kind of had this relationship where she forged forward, and I was always kind of behind,” John said. “I worked on that boat a year and a half, two years, before I acted on my—before I had my first gay affair. Which, I can tell you, the guy sitting down on that couch downstairs is the same person.”

Teresa’s tree, the one Norbert senior spoke of in court before Isaiah’s sentencing, is a weeping cherry tree that still grows in the backyard of the Butz family home. “It’s kind of like Teresa’s personality,” Dolly said. “Going in every direction, but looking beautiful, too.” Norbert senior is no longer there to keep daily watch over the tree, however. He passed away in May 2015 at the age of eighty, surrounded by family, and was
buried in a military cemetery on the banks of the Mississippi River. Dolly still keeps an eye on the tree, and on Teresa’s grave. It sits on a gently sloping hill at a cemetery not far from the insurance office that Norbert senior used to go to, well into his retirement years, to make himself useful to his sons Steve and Mike, who now run the business. In the winter, Teresa’s older brother Tim has seen Clydesdales run by in a field below the cemetery, part of the stable of horses Anheuser-Busch keeps nearby for commercials. In the spring and summer, he hears the crack of the bat from neighboring ball fields. Her gravestone is simple, flat against the earth, shaded by a tree. “Teresa Ann Butz, Oct. 19, 1969–July 19, 2009.”

—

Jennifer now lives with her mother, Marcia, their cohabitation begun after Vance, the man who helped get Marcia off methadone cold turkey and who attended every day of the trial, passed away from bone cancer not long after the verdict was handed down. “We get along really well,” Marcia said, “and I feel like it’s an opportunity for me to give to her. To do what I didn’t do back then . . . I don’t think I was there enough—present—for Jen at some times.” Those times seem distant and foreign to Marcia now, but still, she said, “I wish it never happened . . . I forgive myself, but I still think, ‘Oh my God, you did that?’” Now their life together works. “I think I’m pretty easy to live with,” Marcia said. “I try to help her and try to make her life a little bit easier, and she does the same for me. I think we have a good rhythm going, and we each have our space, and I know when to give her space, and vice versa. It’s fun.” In this life as roommates, Jennifer finds herself drawing inspiration from her mother, who at this point has had far more sober years than addicted years, more purposeful years than drifting years. “Put this in the book,” Jennifer said to me one evening at the condo they share. “I’m tremendously proud of her. And it is entirely possible that I would not have known that something else was possible, on the other side of what happened to me, if I hadn’t seen her be dark in her life.”