While the City Slept (9 page)

I
saiah Kalebu, before he became much of anything at all, experienced a mother, a father, and the rhythms of the family they created. Beyond that close periphery, other forces nudging each of them in turn.

The father fled to Seattle in 1980, escaping civil war in the Republic of Uganda, a country not two decades out of colonial rule. He was twenty-three years old, adventurous and ambitious, and he rarely talked about the brutality he’d witnessed. When he did, he confided this: his own father had been shot dead, in front of him, by agents of the Idi Amin regime, and some of his family members raped as part of a campaign of violence that took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ugandans.

At a summer party in 1984, this man met a woman who was, like him, pressing on. The woman was a child of rape. She was African American. When she was three years old, a court took her from her mother’s home in Washington State, and within a few years she found herself in a foster home in Oregon. She reported being beaten there with extension cords and pots. When she was thirteen, an aunt found her. “Explained who I was,” the woman said, “and who she was, and how I got put into foster care and stuff.” The woman was returned to her mother’s house, where her mother pretended she was still an infant, bathing her, rocking her, wanting to sleep with her at night. She left as quickly as she could. At sixteen, the woman was pregnant with her first child. At twenty, she was at the summer party in Seattle, where she met the man from Uganda.

He was twenty-seven and seemed to her to be “very quiet, nice,
serious, educated, and going places.” By winter, she was pregnant with his child. Their son, Isaiah Kalebu, was born the first day of August in 1985.

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Isaiah behaved like an ordinary baby. He seemed happy and energetic, and records reflect a pregnancy and delivery that were, in the words of one examiner, “uneventful.”

His family of origin, as reports later called it, proved challenging. Isaiah’s father was not around for much of his infancy, having departed for California, where he was studying to be an electrical engineer, aiming to become a high-achieving professional like others in his family who had sought refuge in the United States. He did not expect visits from his newborn son or from his newborn son’s mother—this was not the arrangement. He visited them when he was back in Seattle on breaks from engineering school.

As a consequence, until he was six, Isaiah rarely saw his father and was effectively raised by a single mother who already had a daughter from her earlier pregnancy. The daughter, Deborah, was five years older than Isaiah, and Deborah’s father, too, was absent. The three of them lived—mother, daughter, son—in a series of small apartments in North Seattle, supported by work Isaiah’s mother found as a teacher’s aide and by help from Isaiah’s father when it came. One of the last North Seattle apartments they inhabited was on a quiet street lined with trees and Craftsman homes. The street slopes gently toward a public high school, a public pool, and a public ball field where, on a clear day, there is a direct view of the volcanic peak of Mount Rainier, framed by two of Seattle’s major hills, each sloping toward the other, overlapping in the flattening of distance.

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When Isaiah was two months old, he was brought to the emergency room at Children’s Hospital in North Seattle with what was determined
to be a “superficial burn” near one of his eyes. “I was smoking a cigarette,” his mother told me, “and I picked him up, and I had the cigarette in my mouth and I burnt him on his eye—on the corner of his eye. And they thought it was child abuse. But they found out that it was just a mere accident.” This is how the state came to have its first direct intervention in Isaiah’s life, at age two months. After an investigation, the State of Washington declared “patterns of parental supervision adequate” in Isaiah’s household. The case was closed.

When Isaiah was about three months old, his mother was called to identify the body of her own mother, whom she hadn’t seen in a long time. “She was going through her schizophrenia,” Isaiah’s mother said. The body floated in the frigid salt waters of the Salish Sea, at the current-swirled juncture where Puget Sound becomes the Strait of Juan de Fuca and then the Pacific. Eventually, the body washed up on San Juan Island, a short distance from Canada’s Vancouver Island, in “an unrecognizable condition,” according to records, and was buried in “a pauper’s grave.”

Isaiah’s mother believes a significant number of her maternal relatives lived with serious mental disorders. Her family tree is “replete with mental illness for at least four generations,” court records say, and she herself has endured chronic depression.

In 1987, when Isaiah was eighteen months old, his mother attempted suicide and was hospitalized. While she was recovering, Isaiah was taken in by his father’s sister, Rachel Kalebu, who lived to the south of the city. Isaiah’s half sister, Deborah, was taken in, too. Later, a report on Isaiah’s childhood would be ordered by a court, and it would say of this early episode of trauma and dislocation for Isaiah and Deborah, “It is not clear that anyone noticed what either child felt, or if there were any changes in their behavior.”

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Over the next two years, the young Isaiah, described in court records as “a sweet, thoughtful, and loving child,” was in the emergency room
frequently, often for ear infections. He had surgery on his tonsils and adenoids. Tubes were placed in his ears. He and Deborah returned to living with their mother after she returned from her hospitalization, and Isaiah’s father continued his occasional visits. By 1990, when Isaiah was five, his mother was pregnant again. That same year, Isaiah began kindergarten at a public school near the apartment.

When he was in first grade, his mother gave birth to her second daughter. Around the same time, Isaiah’s father, recently graduated from engineering school, began living with them. “Suddenly, in a matter of months, an infant and the father entered the family,” says the report on Isaiah’s childhood. It then repeated a refrain that runs through its findings: “There is no record or information by either parent as to how Isaiah reacted to any of these major events.”

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The report was written by Dr. Maria Lymberis, a psychoanalyst and forensic psychiatrist who teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a busy woman who, in her mid-seventies, still attends spin class four days a week and sees patients. Dr. Lymberis spins in part because, as she put it in her thick Greek accent, “modern science has proven there are only two ways to help neuronal regeneration. Your brain will produce new neurons if you learn new things, and if you do aerobic exercise.” She does both, in large quantities.

One result is her work in forensic psychiatry, which she became interested in through years of conducting investigations into psychiatrist-patient relationships gone wrong. In 2011, two decades after the five-year-old Isaiah started elementary school, Dr. Lymberis, in part because of her forensic experience, was hired by a Seattle court. Her task was to help determine whether any “mitigating” factors warranted authorities seeking life in prison for Isaiah, rather than the death penalty, as punishment for what he’d allegedly become, and done, as an adult.

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Dr. Lymberis scoured hospital, school, court, employment, and police records totaling thousands of pages. Many of these records are available to the public. Some of them are not. She read transcripts of interviews with Isaiah and his family of origin. She conducted her own interviews with his mother, father, and half sister, Deborah. What she found in Isaiah’s family was an environment that grew increasingly dysfunctional as he aged. His mother’s depression was “highly stigmatized” by his father, Dr. Lymberis wrote, and the developmental needs of the children were not effectively engaged by either parent, in part because both parents had “their own deficits in emotional self-regulation.”

Both parents have said trouble grew out of the collision of cultures from which Isaiah and his siblings were born: a refugee from Uganda trying to co-parent with a woman raised, in hard conditions, in the United States. “For their culture,” Dr. Lymberis wrote of Isaiah’s father and his family, “the task was survival by will power and hard work, and the goal was to successfully meet expectations for social success.” If a child was suffering, her findings and other court records suggest, Isaiah’s father believed it the child’s responsibility to become tougher. If a child was seen to be misbehaving, the punishment, from Isaiah’s father, was corporal. If Isaiah’s mother objected, as she often did, she too could be subject to violence from the father.

What exactly traces to culture and what to character is impossible to untangle. Isaiah’s father talked to Dr. Lymberis about his relationship with his son, but he refused to talk to the Seattle police (“Wouldn’t have anything to do with us,” Detective Duffy said) and was not seen at his son’s trial. He never responded to attempts at contact for this book. Still, this much is known: plenty of cross-cultural relationships present challenges, as do relationships of all sorts, and not all cross-cultural relationships produce the particular dysfunction of Isaiah’s family.

As Dr. Lymberis explored this particular dysfunction, she connected many of Isaiah’s parents’ issues to their unique needs, which left them with limited space for focus on other things. “Such limitations,” she wrote, “proved to be malignant for the psychological development of Isaiah, who was already psychologically very vulnerable.” He had been born to survivors of extreme adversity. They did not prove to be safe harbors for each other. As a consequence, he grew up amid his own extreme adversity.

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When Isaiah’s parents were married, in September 1992, Isaiah was seven years old, a voracious reader who enjoyed riding bikes and playing video games. His older half sister, Deborah, was twelve. At his parents’ ceremony, Isaiah was the ring bearer. Deborah cried, she reported, “because I knew it wasn’t going to work out. I had a bad feeling.”

This was not without cause. Four months earlier, Isaiah’s father had been arrested by the Seattle police, late on a Friday night, for domestic assault. Such arrests are today described as “murder prevention” in Seattle law enforcement circles, and generally this is meant to refer to the fact that domestic abusers, left unchecked, can end up killing their spouses. The phrase can be heard another way as well. Witnessing parental abuse and experiencing unchecked child abuse are both common experiences among people who, as adults, visit violence upon others.

It was Isaiah’s mother who had summoned the police in this instance, and she ultimately declined to press charges. But two decades later, she described the incident to a social worker, who wrote, “She got in-between the father and their son, Isaiah (then 7), because the father was trying to spank him with a stick. She states that Isaiah was just a little boy. The mother relates that she confronted the father at this time about hitting her daughter, Deborah, and told him never to do that again.”

When this same social worker spoke to Isaiah’s father, he confirmed the basic facts of the 1992 incident and expanded on his motivation. “He states that Isaiah ‘had bad manners,’” the social worker wrote, “and he
wanted to ‘spank him with a stick.’ The mother interfered with the father, and a fight ensued. The father states, ‘We got into a shoving match.’”

In the police report for the incident, Isaiah’s mother is described as having a bump on the back of her head. It was caused, she told the police, when Isaiah’s father pushed her and, falling, she hit her head on a door latch. It also describes Deborah saying she was pushed down by Isaiah’s father. Both mother and daughter declined medical attention. Isaiah’s father spent one night in jail, then returned home.

Incidents like this are what Dr. Lymberis referred to in her report as “a pattern of chronic, severe marital conflict” in the marriage of Isaiah’s parents. “Characteristically,” she wrote, the fights revolved around the way Isaiah’s father was disciplining Isaiah, “which included using physical beatings with ‘broomsticks, belts, and sticks.’” As Deborah put it, “I didn’t see a real father-son relationship.” As Isaiah’s mother put it, “He was rough on the kids . . . As far as dealing with the schools and playing with the kids and stuff, that didn’t happen.” She complained that her husband spent most of his time working, or fixing cars, and that when home he treated the children, and her, like servants.

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Reports of Isaiah’s first years in public elementary school show him performing decently, but with two or three weeks of absences each year. After his father returned from California to live with the family, they also note Isaiah becoming “more and more withdrawn, secretive, and non-compliant.” Isaiah had to change schools a number of times in the following years as his family moved out of the apartment on the quiet street in North Seattle and into two different suburbs south of the city. Around the same time, his mother had another child with Isaiah’s father. It was a boy, and he arrived when Isaiah was eight years old. Then, when Isaiah was ten, his parents purchased a house atop a wide hill called West Seattle, not far from where the hill rises up from South Park.

The house is a modest one-story bungalow with a finished basement,
a chimney, and a detached garage, set on a corner of Elmgrove Street, a street that also runs through South Park, two blocks north of South Rose. The hill that holds the home on Elmgrove, as well as the rest of West Seattle, is part of what geologists call a drumlin field. That is, a cluster of rises sculpted by advancing and retreating glaciers during the last ice age. The particular drumlin on which Isaiah now lived is so wide that its best views are not at its top but rather on its steeply sloping sides, and this is also true for a number of the other major hills in Seattle, where one likewise finds modest homes spread atop high flats that offer no particular vista. The house on Elmgrove was near a public elementary school and a large playfield and also near a cross street from which, looking north on a clear day, one can just make out the top of the Space Needle poking up above the running concrete and, above the needle, sky. Several blocks to the east, a park overlooking the Duwamish River valley.