Justice Denied

L
aShawn Tompkins saw the sole white woman, a nun, huddled under her umbrella in the pouring rain as he turned the decrepit Windstar van off Rainier Avenue South onto Church Street. The cracked rubber on the wiper blade wasn’t doing much to clear the windshield. Through puddled raindrops he caught only the barest glimpse of an anxious white face illuminated in the yellowish haze of a feeble rain-washed streetlight. His headlights flashed briefly on the gold-embossed lettering of the book she carried.

LaShawn didn’t have to read the words printed there to recognize the book for what it was—the Holy Bible. It wasn’t uncommon for fearless missionaries of many denominations to venture into this part of Seattle’s central district to spread the
word about their particular brand of salvation, but it was unusual for one to do so alone. LaShawn suspected that the nun’s proselytizing companion or companions were merely out of sight somewhere, knocking on doors or chatting in someone’s living room.

Not his mother’s, though, LaShawn thought fiercely. Whoever these heathen-seeking women were, they had no business dragging their skinny white butts (he was teaching himself to weed the profanity out of his words, so he didn’t even
think
the word “asses”) out here where they didn’t belong. And where it wasn’t safe. Didn’t they know their Bibles or their skimpy little
Watchtower
magazines would be zero defense against random violence or against the stray bullets likely to culminate any number of drug deals gone bad? Maybe they were counting on God to protect them.

“Well, good luck with that,” LaShawn muttered under his breath as he pulled into the short driveway of his mother’s south Seattle cottage.

LaShawn was both a neighborhood pioneer and a survivor. As a juvenile he had been one of the original gangbangers who had helped turn the quiet of Church Street into a deadly drug-dealing no-man’s-land. Most of the kids LaShawn had grown up with were either deceased or in prison by now. The fact that his mother still lived there—the fact that Etta Mae Tompkins refused to live anywhere else—was one of God’s little practical jokes. It was like He was saying, “See what you did, Shawny? You planted them weeds and now you gotta watch your momma live in that garden.”

Zipping up his bright yellow King Street Mission windbreaker, LaShawn stepped out of the dented van into a wholesale downpour. This wasn’t the usual dry drizzle—the gentle and
ever-present rain—for which Seattle is famous. No, this was a warm, heavy spring rain, the kind the weathermen liked to call a Pineapple Express. If the heavy precipitation prematurely melted the mountain snowpack, there might well be a water shortage the next summer. Another one of God’s little jokes. If He sent too much rain in March, Etta Mae’s flowers would thirst to death the following August.

LaShawn glanced up the street. The nun was still there, standing on the corner. Where were her buddies? Or was she maybe waiting for a ride to come collect her?
Fair enough,
LaShawn muttered under his breath.
Long as you don’t come nosin’ around here.

If one of them tried knocking on Etta Mae’s door, LaShawn would be there to send her packing. Etta Mae Tompkins may have been LaShawn’s mother, but she was also the most godly woman he had ever known, bar none. She didn’t need some busybody white lady coming around door-to-door and telling her what she should or shouldn’t believe.

Ducking his head against the rain, LaShawn hurried up onto the porch. He came here twice a day, morning and night. So far Brother Mark had been good enough to let LaShawn use the shelter’s van for these filial visits to care for his ailing mother. Unfortunately, the situation at the shelter seemed to be going downhill fast. LaShawn didn’t know how much longer he would be at the mission, to say nothing of having access to the van. But for now he was still able to come by each morning to make sure Etta Mae was up and around and to fix her breakfast. During the day Meals-on-Wheels dropped off packets of fairly decent, already prepared food. In the evenings LaShawn came by again to make sure Etta Mae actually ate it.

The floor of the porch was firm and dry under his step.
When he turned the knob, the solid core door swung easily open inside the jamb. The sturdy door and its well-made frame were also LaShawn’s doing—or, perhaps, the Lord’s, depending on your point of view. LaShawn had hired the contractors and had overseen the work, but it was his money—the out-of-court settlement won by LaShawn’s lawyers in his wrongful-imprisonment suit—that had paid the bills for all that construction.

Considering that seven years had been erroneously deducted from LaShawn’s life, the settlement wasn’t much, but it was enough that he could have bought Etta Mae a nice place somewhere else. The problem was, she hadn’t wanted to leave. She loved the neighborhood and her old familiar house. So LaShawn had fixed the place up for her as well as he was able. It wasn’t one of those
Extreme Makeover
things like they did on TV, but it was enough to get the job done—enough to make the place livable and comfortable.

And now that the job was finished, LaShawn was relieved to see that Etta Mae’s house didn’t look all that different from the other houses on the street. Had the place been too upscale, it would have been nothing more than a magnet for roaming gangbangers looking for something to steal. No, the cosmetic changes were subtle and understated.

New vinyl siding had replaced sagging clapboard. The rickety porch had been rebuilt with a wheelchair ramp added off to one side. Insulation had been blown inside what had once been skimpy, insulation-free walls. Dangerously old wiring and questionable plumbing had been replaced, and the whole thing was covered with a brand-new standing-seam metal roof. Interior doorways had been widened enough to accommodate a wheelchair if and when the time came that Etta Mae might need one
rather than her sturdy walker, and the bathroom had been fitted out with one of those easily accessible step-in bathtubs LaShawn had read about in
Guideposts.

Why had LaShawn done all that? Because Etta Mae deserved it, that’s why. Because all the while he’d been hell-bent on the wrong path, she’d believed in him and kept on praying for him anyway. Those seven long years he’d been stuck on death row she’d never missed a single month of visiting him. No matter what, she’d found a way to make the grueling six-hundred-mile round-trip journey from Seattle to Walla Walla, rising early enough on her one day off to catch the Sisters of Charity van that took prisoners’ family members back and forth across the state. On those Saturdays she’d be there at the window in the visitors’ room smiling at him and telling him how much she loved him and that God hadn’t forsaken him. And now that Etta Mae’s health was failing due to a combination of diabetes and congestive heart failure, LaShawn wasn’t going to forsake her, either.

He believed with all his heart that Etta Mae was the only reason he was free. She was the one who had begged and cajoled until someone from the Innocence Project had finally taken an interest in his case. She was the one who had pleaded with them to reexamine his trial and the evidence, including the exculpatory DNA evidence, previously concealed by the DA’s office, that had eventually exonerated him of the brutal rape and murder for which he had been convicted.

Somehow, in the process of saving her son’s life, Etta Mae had succeeded in saving his soul as well. Her unshakable belief had been strong enough for both of them. He had still been on death row when someone from the jail ministry had come to see him, bringing him the Good Word that Jesus had died for his sins.
And for the first time ever LaShawn had been ready to listen and to turn his sorry life around. And when the miracle had finally happened, when God had sprung wide his prison doors and LaShawn Tompkins had walked out of Walla Walla a free man, he was also a changed man—a thankful and believing one.

His lawyers had won the settlement for him, but by the time the money came to him LaShawn had dedicated his life to doing the Lord’s work. Rather than taking the money for himself, he had spent it on his mother. As for LaShawn? He lived full-time at the King Street Mission, devoting his days and nights to bringing God’s Holy Word to the hopeless people he met there—to troubled, angry people using drugs and booze to mask their anger and pain—people not so different from the one LaShawn Tompkins had been not so very long ago.

“Shawny?” Etta Mae called over the blaring TV news. “Is that you?”

“It’s me, Momma. Come to make sure you eat your supper.”

“Well, come on in, then. Don’t just stand there where I can’t see your face.”

Hanging his dripping jacket on the coat rack, LaShawn kicked off his Nikes and stepped into Etta Mae’s pristine living room. The volume on the TV set was so loud that it was nothing short of miraculous that she had heard the door open and close. LaShawn knew about his mother’s worsening vision problems, but this was something else they needed to discuss—the possibility of Etta Mae’s having her hearing checked. LaShawn didn’t hold out much hope on that score. The first time he had brought up the subject, it hadn’t gone well.

“What did Meals-on-Wheels bring you today?” he asked.

“Mac and cheese and green beans,” Etta Mae replied. “At least
that’s what that nice Mr. Dawson said when he was putting it in the fridge. I do like their mac and cheese. Not as good as mine, but then I don’t have to fix it, do I.”

He went over to where she sat and kissed the top of her head. Her hair was still wiry and springy, but he was surprised by how thin it was. And how gray. He was pleased to see that she was wearing her button, the emergency alert necklace he had bought for her. That way, if she needed help all she had to do was press one button to be connected to an emergency operator.

“I’ll go heat up that mac and cheese,” he said. “You want to eat it here or in the kitchen?”

“That depends,” she said. “Will you eat some, too?”

LaShawn shook his head. “You know better than that, Momma. Those Meals-on-Wheels are for
old
people. I ain’t that old.”

“Then I shouldn’t eat them, either.” Etta Mae sniffed. “You’re only as old as you think you are.”

“I’ll eat at the mission,” he assured her. “The nice ladies in the kitchen know that I’m over here feeding you, so they hold back a little something for me.”

“Well,” Etta Mae said. “In that case, since you won’t join me, I could just as well eat on a tray here in the living room.”

Out in the kitchen—also built to be wheelchair-friendly—LaShawn put the macaroni and cheese into the microwave and began counting out the evening’s supply of pills. With morning and evening visits from him, they were making this work, but at some point there would be another decision to be made. LaShawn was hoping to hold that one off as long as possible. Etta Mae had told him that she’d rather die than go live in one of those awful assisted-living homes, and he knew she meant it.

He put the pills, silverware, and a napkin on the tray along with a bottle of Snapple. He was waiting for the microwave to finish reheating the food when the doorbell rang. “You stay where you are, Momma,” he called. “I’ll get it.”

Expecting to find a missionary on his mother’s doorstep, an annoyed LaShawn hurried to the door ready to send whoever it was packing. As he flung the door wide open, the first bullet, muffled by a silencer, caught him full in the gut. He never saw it coming. As he fell, the second bullet scored a direct hit on his heart. He was dead before he ever hit the surface of his mother’s newly Pergoed floor.

“Shawny?” his mother called a little later. “What was that noise? And I feel a breeze. Did you leave the front door open?”

A good five minutes after that, Etta Mae Tompkins used her emergency alert button for the very first time.

“Good evening, Mrs. Tompkins,” a disembodied voice called from somewhere behind her. “How can we help you?”

It took a moment for Etta Mae to realize it was the emergency operator speaking to her from the box in the living room. “My son!” Etta Mae wailed brokenly. “My poor baby son Shawny is dead. Somebody’s murdered him. They shot him right here in my front door!”

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