Under the Bridge (34 page)

Below the photographs of a beautiful child, fresh daffodils lay with petals loose and frail, emerging from the stems so long and green.

Suman wore a thin white veil over her hair, a black jacket; her eyes were very red, and all who observed her would later use words to describe her, words like
grace and dignity.

Through a spokesman at a press conference earlier, she stunned many
of the townspeople by offering, publicly, her sympathy to the families of the accused. “The Virks have no feelings of vengeance or animosity toward any of these people, neither the accused or their families.”

Sitting at the memorial, Amy did not yet know that the diary she had given Reena was both discarded and rescued. She thought now only of the gifts exchanged. The ring Reena had given her “because you've helped me so much.” The diary she'd given Reena because “it's important for you to have a voice in all this.” Now, help and a voice seemed abstract concepts, both futile and given too late, taken away. What mattered now were stories.

There were so many stories. The stories made her head spin. There were stories in the newspaper of the “awkward misfit.” There were the stories told to detectives of “some Indian chick,” of “Rhea,” of “Trina,” of “Elly McBride.” There were stories in the autopsy report, stories of bruises and footprints on a skull, and a body literally crushed. There were stories in the Bible told now by the Jehovah's Witness elder. There were stories of an ordinary night turned terrible, soon after the lights in the sky blazed and broke from a falling satellite.

But the story of the memorial seemed wrong and untrue to Amy, for no one spoke of Reena as she had known her, and she wished she could have stood up there, told the strangers of a young girl who was so young, who didn't know the ways of the world. Yet she was emerging, as if she no longer wanted to melt into the walls behind her, as if she was ready to be. Amy would have said Reena was determined; she was not awkward or shy, not anymore. True, she didn't belong anywhere, not really. She didn't belong in the traditional world of her grandparents or in the modern world of thugs and contrived sexiness. She didn't belong with the strict and severe JWs, because she was fourteen and wanted birthday parties and rebellion, and she wanted to celebrate. But she was trying to be a girl who would belong somewhere, not yet, but soon.

Reena told stories in the last year of her life that surely were untrue. Stories of probation officers and pimps, stories of romance with boys named Nick and Jack and Dan, stories of a girl named Josephine who really painted on her eyebrows and was not so pretty with her makeup off. But were these stories, Amy wondered, any different from the stories in the songs all the kids loved? Invented tales of mayhem and lovers,
boastful braggings that earned that most elusive quality: something they all called respect.

There were girls who teased her, girls who stole from her, girls she wanted to be.

“Why do you lie?” a teacher once asked her.

“Sometimes I have to lie to get people to like me,” Reena had replied.

After the memorial Amy thought,
There are all these stories now, and there will just be more stories about Reena. The stories at the trial The stories in magazines.
The truth in these stories would hopefully surface and shimmer, borne forward like the pieces of glass Reena discovered in the sand.

More memorials would follow, for Reena was now everyone's daughter. In the park she had loved as a child, a petition was signed by many who vowed to honor “nonviolence.”

“Reena's death is a wake-up call,” said the chairwoman of the Greater Victoria School Board, “a wake-up call that we must listen to in order to honor her memory.”

Shoreline students presented roses to Reena's mother. Among these students were Tara and Syreeta. John Bond, in the background, observed the presence of Syreeta, cynically. “Now there's a person who could have helped us,” he scoffed. Mrs. Virk hugged Syreeta, and thanked her for this gift. But her stoic composure could not be possibly maintained at the private funeral.

“My baby, my baby, don't do this to my baby,” she screamed as the coffin moved toward a rather dark place of flames. She tried to throw herself on the coffin, to hold her daughter, but she was pulled back and the casket receded into the place for burning.

F
IRST TO APPEAR
before their judge were the six girls who had been under the bridge. The media invented the moniker for these girls: “The Shoreline Six.” The name was slightly erroneous, as only three of the girls had attended Shoreline. Yet the name suggested some romantic troupe of rebels, and truth be told, the name was rather catchy.

If the townspeople were hoping the assault trial would be cathartic and sensational, their hopes were dashed, for the trial was cursory and quick, and the convictions of all six girls seemed from the start a fait accompli.

Mayland McKimm, Mayas lawyer, was neither surprised nor pleased that the assault trial took place less than three months after the arrests. Neither was he surprised nor pleased that the Crown hired a special prosecutor from Vancouver, a “big gun” lawyer named James Wesley Williams.

“In this case, society needed an answer immediately, and they needed to put closure on it. There's a huge social value to that. Everyone knew the odds for any of the girls walking out free were zero. In a case of this magnitude, the state has all the machinery in place. Those girls were hooped. Those girls were doomed. Even before we went to trial, I wanted to say: ‘There is no way you're walking out of here.' There was just no way.”

The Crown had changed the charge from aggravated assault to assault causing bodily harm after reviewing the evidence. This seemed a more appropriate charge for the punches and kicks that had felled Reena Virk. Perhaps because of the lesser charge, perhaps knowing they were doomed, Josephine, Dusty, and Laila all pleaded guilty.

Maya, Willow, and Eve chose to plead not guilty, and their trial would last for only three days. The girls' names could not be printed since a law called the Young Offenders Act prevented the identification of any minor under the age of eighteen. The public never got a chance
to see the faces of the supposed savages, and though sketch artists attended the trial, the portraits they drew appeared in the newspapers as girls, literally, rendered unrecognizable with blank faces.

The public never heard their voices, their stories, their explanations.

Judge Filmer listened to the youth of View Royal during the course of the trial. He heard witnesses
speak somewhat reluctantly of seeing their former schoolmates and friends surround Reena Virk “in a semicircle” and pummel and kick and punch the girl until she “was bruised up pretty bad.” Judge Filmer heard as well of the bragging during the week after the night of the Russian satellite, when the girls boasted of “kicking the shit out of some girl.”

The prosecutor, James Wesley Williams, a former police officer, was a stern, imposing, and convincing teller of the tale. He stripped away all the talk of love and beauty and jealousy, of bitch fights and likes and Omigods and maybe, yeah, whatever, something. Told in his austere manner, the events under the bridge nonetheless made for a dreadful and disturbing narrative. After the teen witnesses spoke—haltingly, reluctantly, with mumbles and slang—he made a forceful and clear summary of his case. “Reena Virk was a young girl who appears to have a certain social awkwardness about her and may not have been enormously well accepted by others. The evidence shows that Reena Virk was essentially trapped, with persons surrounding her, and that she was there struck and kicked a number of times. She was not able to extricate herself from that predicament and she was struck a significant number of times and effectively covered herself up and cried out for the others to stop hitting her.”

Away from the courtroom and out of his black robe, James Wesley Williams was less formal when speaking of the attack. “It was a nasty bit of business. They swarmed her. Can you imagine the insane cruelty? It's breathtaking.”

James Wesley Williams often reflected on the difference between those who were violent and those who were not criminal. He himself believed the factor that allowed some to cross the line was, simply, conscience. For conscience allowed you to stop yourself from harming others—it “acts as a brake upon your conduct.”

During the trial, as he was able to establish, with little theatrics and
even less doubt, there had been no brake in action on the night when the Furies released themselves like so many pairs of dark wings beating.

The day before Valentine's Day, Judge Filmer returned with his verdict. He found all three accused girls guilty. He spoke less of the beating and more of the aftermath when the girls grabbed Reena's knapsack and ran with it to the parking lot of the Comfort Inn. This gesture seemed to him to reveal the real reason for the savagery.

“Why did Laila take Reena's bag? Was it a theft or a robbery? I do not think so. I think she took it because she had what adults know as a ‘color of right,' a belief that there was something in the bag that did not belong to Reena Virk and that somehow in this rather bizarre scenario, these young people felt that they had the right to do what they did to get the object that was in Reena's bag. Her perfume was in that bag and a diary or journal was in that bag. We hear nothing more of the journal, nor do we hear anything more of the pajamas. But we do hear that someone rather casually or cavalierly broke or dropped the bottle of perfume.

“The inferences that I choose to draw from this particular narrative, if I can call it that, is this: that what occurred that evening was some form of punishment. The punishment was aimed clearly at Reena Virk. It was based on something some of this group believed her to be responsible for and that in fact the book or the diary was to be recovered in the process.”

Josephine was the one who had reason to search for “a book or diary.” As James Williams had stated in his opening, Reena used the book to call friends of Josephine's and make statements that were “defamatory or untrue,” and this caused Bell “to remark that she was angry and she intended to cause harm to Reena Virk.” Thus, the judge sentenced Josephine to one year, the harshest sentence possible, and a sentence also handed to Dusty. Maya, Laila, and Willow received sentences of six months, while Eve received only sixty days, for as far as anyone could establish, she had only slapped Reena Virk once or twice, and she seemed, to the courts and the psychiatrists, the girl most remorseful and least culpable.

Hearing of her sentence, Josephine was outraged. She did not mind so much that the judge had spoken of her “bizarre mafia fantasies” and announced to the world that she “has displayed all the elements of sociopathic conduct.” No, what enraged her was the sentence of a year. “A
year?” she raged. “I got a year for one shot. I only gave Reena one shot and everyone else kicked the shit out of her. That's nice. A year, for one fucking shot! Reena was fine when I left. She only had a black eye. If it hadn't gone to a murder, I probably would have gotten a month, maybe, not even. They would have looked at me and said, ‘Oh, first offense. It's serious, but it's not that serious.' I would have gone on probation, but that's about it. And instead, because of all the media and all of that, I get fucked around. That judge is smoking crack!”

Maya and Willow and Eve held hands and cried when their verdict of guilty was read aloud.

Mayland McKimm read to the court of Maya's “atrocious” family background in the hopes the judge would grant her leniency. “Your Honor is aware that Maya was present when her father was murdered during the course of a prolonged beating and that she was then abducted by the culprits of that crime and kept out of contact with the police or any authorities for some five or six days. Your Honor will notice that I have filed a letter from a detective, which talks about the little girl that he found at the age of six, devastated and traumatized, having been locked in the basement of a drug house for a period of time. Her mother is in court today, that's her adoptive mother, Ms. Belle Longet, and she has been extraordinarily supportive through the process. She feels now that her child has seen the inside of a jail, that she sees the hardening process taking place, because that's how you survive in a youth detention center. If we increase the jail sentence, Maya will simply harden more. We have jailed a number of young people in this matter who were the more serious instigators. They were the people who had the problem with Ms. Virk, and they're the people who led her to her untimely demise. We're at a crossroads here. She can go to the Youth Detention Centre and become brilliantly tough, or the court can show some compassion and allow some latitude for her to deal with the issues before her.”

The judge listened attentively, and then sentenced Maya to serve her full time in youth custody.

Josephine returned to “juvie.” Kelly, released on bail, was back in View Royal, under house arrest. Alone, Josephine suffered indignities. She could not watch MuchMusic, the Canadian version of MTV. Dean
Melanson, the Director of Programs, explains: “We didn't think the videos were giving the right message. With rap music, it's all ‘ho,' ‘bitch.' We're trying to change attitudes.” Certain magazines were also banned, in particular those that “depict females in a non-positive way.” The list of contraband magazines read as follows:
The Source, Vibe, Details, Glamour, FHM, Maxim,
and
Low Rider.

Josephine, one evening, ate her dinner of grilled ham and cheese, split peas, and fries, and then went to the games room where she could play Super Nintendo and Donkey Kong. Above the raucous machines, there was a reproduction of a Van Gogh.