Morgue (5 page)

After more than sixteen hours, the jury reached its verdict: George Zimmerman was not guilty of any crime in the shooting of Trayvon Martin.

He walked away from the courthouse a free man, but likely to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder.

An acquittal isn't always absolution.

*   *   *

Even now, it's difficult for many people to hear this, but the question of Trayvon Martin's death was not a miscarriage of justice, but rather a painfully perfect example of justice itself. Our system worked as it was intended. Questions were asked, scenarios explored, theories argued. It is simply the nature of any homicide—justifiable or not—that there will be winners and losers when the question must be settled.

Forensic evidence is the bedrock of justice. It doesn't change its story or misremember what it saw. It doesn't cower when a mob gathers on the courthouse steps. It doesn't run away or go silent out of fear. It tells us honestly and candidly what we need to know, even when we want it to say something else. We must only have the wisdom to be able to see it and to interpret it honestly.

So it was with Trayvon Martin.

Like so many words that have been twisted beyond recognition by politicians, pundits, and other modern-day logrollers, “justice” does not equal satisfaction or punishment. It should be a fair investigation of the facts and a reasonable, impartial conclusion, but for some people it is revenge. Trayvon Martin got justice, but his loved ones will never be truly satisfied. So it is, too, with the loved ones of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, or Freddie Gray in Baltimore chanting, “No Justice, No Peace,” and promising to agitate until their killers are punished. What if vengeance isn't warranted?

Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, people leapt to their conclusions before the facts were known. They saw the entire unfolding tragedy through the defective prisms of their own biases and an increasingly dogmatic media.

We weren't there. None of us saw a neighborhood-watch volunteer shoot an unarmed black teenager to death in the drizzling shadows of a Florida night in 2012. And despite the glare of media frenzy that followed, the facts grew murkier as a nation chose sides by what it imagined, not what it knew. We debated feverishly what nobody saw.

Every lynch mob begins with an assumption and a quick conclusion. We should certainly know by now, after so many crimes, that starting with an assumption and closing the case too quickly is deadly.

While many people made George Zimmerman's case about black and white, it was anything but black and white.

The real problem wasn't injustice, but an unfortunate series of ordinary human faults that led to a fatal overreaction by both men. Trayvon Martin didn't need to die. A white guy misjudged the behavior of a black teenager, who misjudged the behavior of the white guy. They profiled each other. They saw each other as a threat. And both were wrong.

In the end, I can't see into their hearts. This homicide question was settled, but the bigger questions about humanity are going to take a little longer.

 

‹ TWO ›

The “Why” Incision

My earliest memory is of death.

And from that day forward, death was never more intimate with me. I have kept death at a respectful distance. It became a job that I did in a brightly lighted room, not a wound that required darkness to heal. For someone whose very living comes from other people dying, who understands death better than most men understand their wives, and who knows he must eventually experience it himself, I seldom let it touch me.

And the few times it did, nobody knew.

*   *   *

One of the pleasures of childhood is that you feel something more than you understand it. There are great gaps in my conscious memories, events I can't recall entirely but that come back in emotional fragments. So there are many things in my childhood I can't explain, stuff that just stuck without much contemplation.

Here's one thing that stuck: I always wanted to be a doctor. Even in grammar school, when the other boys dreamed of being firefighters, cowboys, or detectives, I wanted only to be a doctor. I never had a discussion with myself or anyone else about it, never considered anything else. My parents never suggested I become a doctor, but I think they assumed I would, too. Not a single day passed when I thought I'd do anything else. It was a feeling, not a conscious decision. I just assumed I would be a doctor. Before I even knew what a future was, I knew what I'd be doing in it. And that was that.

Maybe it was in my DNA. My father was a doctor, my maternal grandfather was a doctor, and since the 1600s, all the men on my mother's side—with one exception—were doctors. (The lone black sheep was a magistrate.)

Both of my parents were first-generation Americans, the children of Italian immigrants who came here from Naples early in the twentieth century for better lives. My grandparents weren't fleeing poverty or hopelessness; they were educated, cultured people who nevertheless saw the opportunity and possibility that America offered. They brought the same traditions of hard work, adaptability, and risk for reward. And maybe above all, they were driven by a willingness to be uncomfortable.

My father's father, Vincenzo Di Maio, arrived in 1911 aboard the French-flagged steamer SS
Venezia
from Naples. He had fifty dollars in his pocket—the minimum—and the Ellis Island clerk noted a scar on his forehead. He was an Italian opera tenor who had enjoyed a modestly successful musical career onstage, in recordings, and maybe even one early movie (now lost) before he opened a music shop in Italian Harlem, where he sold pianos, phonographs, old-time music rolls, and records, and repaired any musical machines that came in the door. Vincenzo's wife, the former Marianna Ciccarelli, was a midwife who was popular among the young immigrant
gestantes.
She died of tuberculosis the year I was born, only fifty-three, so I never knew her.

Domenico Di Maio—Dominick, to everybody—was born in 1913 in Vincenzo and Marianna's Hester Street apartment on the Lower East Side. Marianna was a strong Italian mother and played the dominant role in my father's life. Her English was never good, so she drafted her eight-year-old son—my father—to deal with bankers she didn't trust. My father adored her.

My mother's father, Pasquale de Caprariis, came to America already a doctor in 1901, but he didn't come for his career. He left Italy for love. Not long after he landed at Ellis Island, he married a twenty-six-year-old Italian nurse named Carmela Mostacciuolo. His mother had wanted him to marry an upper-class woman, but Pasquale defied her. Disinherited, he came to America with Carmela, married her, opened a medical office in Manhattan, and started seeing patients in his home in Brooklyn, too.

Among his patients was the wife of Francesco Ioele, aka Frankie Yale, Brooklyn's most feared mob boss during Prohibition. Yale, who gave young Alphonse Capone and Albert Anastasia their first jobs, frequently complained to my grandfather that modern kids had grown too disrespectful and violent. (This is especially funny when you consider that Frankie Yale's most trusted enforcer was a guy named Willie “Two-Knife” Altieri because his trademark was killing his victims with two knives.) After Yale was assassinated in 1928 (possibly on Capone's orders), thousands of onlookers—maybe including my grandfather—watched a blocks-long cortege carry his $15,000 silver casket to one of the most lavish gangland funerals in crime history.

During the Depression, my grandfather was sometimes paid in eggs, vegetables, and chickens by sick Brooklynites who had no money. As a child, listening to stories about him, I always knew that when I became a doctor I, too, could survive on the meat and produce that my patients would bring to my house.

And Dr. Pasquale de Caprariis's Brooklyn house is where Italia Alfonsina Violetta de Caprariis was delivered by her father in 1912, a year and a day before her future husband was born.

Dominick Di Maio and Violet de Caprariis met as freshmen at Long Island University in 1930. They dated for a few years before getting engaged, a betrothal that stretched out for seven years in the Depression. They usually joined Sunday dinners after church at Vincenzo and Marianna's house, chaperoned by my mother's older sister.

After college, still in the smothering grip of the Great Depression, my father went to medical school at Marquette University in Milwaukee, where he became a clinical pathologist in 1940.

And my mother did something even more extraordinary: She attended law school at St. John's University. The quiet truth was that she loved history and wanted to attend graduate school at Columbia to become a college professor, but the federal government would pay for her graduate school only if she studied law. In 1939, she was one of only four women in her graduating class.

When Dominick and Violet married in June 1940, my mother never truly practiced law again. In those days, young Italian wives were expected to bear children and be the glue that kept a family together—even if she had a law degree. But my mother wasn't especially passionate about law anyway. It had just been a way to get her education. She'd draw up occasional legal papers for family and neighbors, but after she married, she never really earned much money from law. That hadn't been her goal. She preferred reading history books, which she did voraciously for the rest of her life.

Almost eleven months later, I was born in my doctor-grandfather's Brooklyn home, my father and grandfather attending. I was delivered by a lawyer into the waiting hands of a doctor. A good omen.

During the war, as I learned to toddle, my father served as a Navy doctor in US Maritime Service stations all over the New York City metropolitan area. One unexpected benefit: Within days after the war ended, I developed a terrible middle-ear infection. I was among the first American civilians to receive a new antibiotic called penicillin—which up to that point went only to soldiers. It cured me.

After the war, my father turned his prolific energies to his career and raising a family in Brooklyn.

Here's another thing that just stuck: My earliest memory is of seeing my grandmother Carmela, my mother's mother, lying dead on the dining room table. In the soft pastel colors of an old vision, I recall entering a room through a many-paned door. The table was in the center of the room, and she lay there during her wake, still. I walked up to the table and just knew she was dead, although I can't fathom how I knew what death was. I remember nothing else, not a funeral, not anyone else's sadness.

And I remember nothing before that day. I was only about five years old, and I didn't understand death or wakes or funerals or forever. I knew only that I'd never seen my grandmother on top of the table, and never so still. I don't remember being sad. It is just a snapshot that lodged in my young memory, and its only meaning is what I give it today, some seventy years later.

But I might have known even then not to cry.

*   *   *

The Brooklyn of my childhood is not the Brooklyn of modern culture, real or imagined. Race friction hadn't yet taken center stage, the Dodgers were a touchstone, and crime wasn't rampant. The borough was a mix of middle- and working-class families. Doctors and lawyers were neighbors of shopkeepers, dockworkers, and bus drivers. Our next-door neighbor on Fourth Street drove a truck.

But neighbors weren't our main network. Family was much closer, much bigger, and more reliable. I had an aunt and uncle on the same block, and all but one of my relatives lived in Brooklyn—I had an uncle in Long Island. We gathered on most holidays. For us, “family” was a real living thing you could touch, and it could touch you. Dominick and Violet Di Maio's kids were raised to honor our family, to not embarrass, disappoint, hurt, or dishonor it.

Like most Italians in that place and time, we were strict Roman Catholics. We all attended church together every Sunday, although my mother attended Mass at St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church two or three times a week. She was devout enough to give one daughter the name of her patron saint, St. Thérèse Martin. On my mother's bedside table was a small ceramic statue of the Blessed Mother, but on her bureau was a much large figure of St. Thérèse Martin, a gift from my father, who every October 3—St. Thérèse's day in the Catholic Church until recently—gave Violet a red rose.

I was expected to keep the sacraments and go to confession, but religion wasn't a driving or conspicuous force in our house. I grew up believing in destiny and fate, in a kind of ultimate justice, and in life beyond. For me, death is proof that we have souls. I see humans as an ear of corn, with an outer, disposable husk and an inner core of kernels—the seeds of life itself. When I see a dead body, it is just a husk. The soul is gone.

I don't autopsy people. I autopsy bodies. A person is something alive and vibrant and different. Bodies are just what they leave behind.

People are naturally curious about my job (and about anyone who works with the dead). Somebody once asked me about the body of a woman who in life had been beautiful. Had she been beautiful, too, in death?

“No,” I replied. “I have never seen a beautiful body, just a lifeless thing that looks like a person but isn't. The beautiful part is gone.”

*   *   *

We lived in a three-story house built on our tree-lined street in 1930. The yard wasn't really big enough for children to play in—or for much of anything else—but we had the street, which was a more fascinating playground anyway.

Outside, children led different lives from their parents. I grew up in those primitive days when children were sent out in the morning to play, came home for lunch, and sent back out into the world until supper. And after dinner, on summer nights, you were usually free until the streetlights blinked on. Like other kids, I played stickball in the street, pitched cards, rode my bike, and got into the usual little-boy mischief.