While the City Slept (11 page)

The year before she met Isaiah’s father, she told me, she was attacked by a man who offered her a ride to help her find her schizophrenic mother and Deborah, who had gone out together and were missing. “He just put the knife to my throat,” she said, “and then he made me have oral sex with him, and then he raped me in his bedroom.” He set the knife on the bed near him during the rape, and she put her hand on it a few times, thought about using it, “but didn’t want to kill nobody,” she said, “so I just kept putting it down and got through it.” She thinks Isaiah might have been about fifteen years old when she told him this. “It made him mad where he just destroyed his room,” she said.

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Around this time, Isaiah was expelled from the Adventist academy for showing a small knife to a prospective student visiting the campus. Afterward, he was homeschooled for six months. It was 2001. In late February, an earthquake near the state capital of Olympia shook the entire region, a release of built-up pressure from ongoing, unseen friction beneath the
surface, the same rattling that pushed the South Park Bridge further toward the need for intervention, an intervention that, in the end, did not come quickly enough. “That summer,” Dr. Lymberis wrote, “his father took him on an extended trip to Uganda. Isaiah was very impressed with the way his father and family lived, especially that they had servants and that the people looked up to the U.S.”

This is the longest period of father-son time noted in any available record of Isaiah’s relationship with his father, and Isaiah returned motivated to reenter high school. He was sent to another Adventist academy, this one in Kirkland, another Seattle suburb distant from his parents’ home, though in the opposite direction, to the northeast. It was not a boarding school, so Isaiah often rode the public bus from the poorer southern end of the city to this well-to-do enclave on the other side of the two floating bridges that span Lake Washington, bridges that connect to neighborhoods where people like Bill Gates reside. Off an exit near the end of one of these bridges, and up a road that winds through evergreen trees, are the low beige buildings of Puget Sound Adventist Academy. Kayla Manteghi, having left Auburn after eighth grade for this school, remembers rekindling her friendship with Isaiah when he arrived. He promised to protect her from guys at school who were treating her badly, “always looked out for me,” she said. Yearbook pictures from Puget Sound Adventist show Isaiah, now a junior, dunking a basketball in front of onlookers, smiling in a class picture wearing a sweater with a loose turtleneck, standing with a group at a formal dance, dressed in a suit. The pictures also suggest this school was similar in racial makeup to the Adventist academy in Auburn. Isaiah’s class was small, only nineteen people in all, and in the yearbook pictures he is shown amid mostly white faces.

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That winter, a few months after he turned sixteen, Isaiah was home for Thanksgiving break when, late on the evening of Thanksgiving, his father, then forty-four years old, called the Seattle police. When officers arrived
at the house on Elmgrove, Isaiah’s father told them he’d been arguing with Isaiah over Isaiah’s “eating whatever he wants without regard for anyone else in the house.” Specifically, he was mad that Isaiah drank too much eggnog. Isaiah’s mother said her husband threw the remaining eggnog in Isaiah’s face. Then the fight escalated, with Isaiah’s father telling his son to get out of the house. Isaiah’s mother “got betwixt her son and husband,” the police report says, trying to prevent anyone from leaving. In response, Isaiah’s father pushed his wife and asked Isaiah, “What are you going to do, beat me up?”

Isaiah was no longer a scrawny kid. He is described in this police report as six inches taller than his father, six feet one to his father’s five feet seven. In his high school yearbook photographs, he appears well built, with broad shoulders and a strong chest.

In response to his father’s question about whether he was going to beat him up, Isaiah replied directly, “Yes.”

Father and son then pushed each other, the shoving match ending when Isaiah’s father changed course and called the police. Isaiah was arrested, spent the night in juvenile detention, and was released. Likewise, his father was arrested, spent the night in the King County Jail, and was released. Neither pursued charges against the other.

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A few months passed, and then the police were called again, this time by Puget Sound Adventist Academy in Kirkland, where there had been an altercation between Isaiah and another male student. “The episode started,” Dr. Lymberis wrote, “because the other student would not stop crying over his mother being in the hospital.” The student now works as a mental health professional in California, and he remembers the encounter. Like Isaiah, he had transferred to Puget Sound Adventist Academy because of problems at his previous school. Like Isaiah, he had challenges at home, his revolving around a mother living with multiple sclerosis. “Basically, I grew up with my mother slowly deteriorating,” the former classmate said. “I was
very emotionally vulnerable.” He didn’t know Isaiah well when the fight began, didn’t know anything at all about Isaiah’s family background. They were just two near strangers who found themselves at odds inside the student lounge that day. He remembers Isaiah saying something about his mother, though he doesn’t remember what it was exactly, and he doesn’t remember much after that.

Likely, he said, Isaiah’s comment had something to do with his crying over his mother’s hospitalization for MS. Isaiah was not one to outwardly express emotion over such things, although he, too, had a mother who had been repeatedly hospitalized. “In all of the records I reviewed,” Dr. Lymberis wrote, “there is hardly any record that Isaiah ever expressed feelings about the chronic conflict and violence in his family, about the physical beatings by his father or his mother’s depression and suicide attempts, or about other aspects of his traumatic and difficult childhood.” All that Isaiah outwardly expressed was a powerful instinct to protect his mother from his father, an increasing frustration at his circumstances, and a tightly compressed, building rage.

Whatever Isaiah said that day, the other student responded by throwing a pillow at him. “And then,” the former classmate of Isaiah’s said, “I basically started walking toward him. Isaiah got up off the couch, started walking toward me, and that’s all I remember. The next thing I remember is my PE teacher standing above me.” Isaiah’s classmate was coming to, after being knocked out by Isaiah. “He got me good,” the former classmate said. “It was like a one-hitter type of deal.”

The principal at the time, Doug White, said it took a while to calm Isaiah down. “It was hard getting him under control, I think,” White said. “He was very emotionally upset and mad.” Kathy Fridlund, then the school’s development director, remembers calling 911 and then feeling upset when Isaiah was led away in handcuffs. She thought that was beyond what was required. So did others on campus. She shared a picture she took of Isaiah playing baseball during a student-faculty field day, his face intent, bat in swing. “Just total determination to connect with
the ball,” she said. She also recalls Isaiah, upon his return to school after the arrest, offering an apology to the student he knocked out.

Told what was going on with Isaiah at the time of the fight, that former classmate of his said, “I can sympathize with him . . . That’s difficult to hear.” At the time, however, it was not sufficiently heard by anyone, and nothing more was done about the fight. “It is of note,” Dr. Lymberis wrote, “that the records show that when the vice principal tried to contact Isaiah’s parents numerous times, none of them responded.”

The student whom Isaiah hit declined to pursue any charges, having seen the fight as “consensual,” a consequence of two young men headed toward hurting each other, each arriving at his destination without interference or self-
correction.

B
y now, the state had intervened in Isaiah’s troubled family life in three distinct ways over sixteen years. It had deemed his parental supervision “adequate” after he was brought, at two months of age, to the emergency room with a burn near his eye from his mother’s cigarette. It had expressed concern, in the form of repeated attempts at intervention by Isaiah’s public elementary and middle school teachers, but none of those attempts at intervention had been successful. Finally, the state had appeared at Isaiah’s homes and at his private Adventist school in Kirkland, in the form of summoned police officers, for incidents of domestic violence and for the fight Isaiah had with another student. There had been repeated nights in jail for Isaiah’s father and, once, a Thanksgiving night in juvenile detention for Isaiah. But none of these incidents ever resulted in anyone’s pursuing formal charges in court. Now, slowly, in the sixteenth year of Isaiah’s life, the path to the social worker began.

The social worker’s relatively brief investigation was conducted under court order and was brought about by a further deterioration in the relationship between Isaiah’s parents. In May 2002—as Jennifer was moving on from her breakup with Ann in New York City, as Teresa was settling into her new condo in Renton—Isaiah’s father filed for a restraining order against Isaiah’s mother, describing a turbulent marriage in which “we have been keeping and sleeping in separate bedrooms for the last six years.” In other words, since Isaiah was ten years old. Isaiah’s father
complained that late on a recent Wednesday night his wife had come into his bedroom in the basement of the house on Elmgrove Street while he was reading and asked him, “Why have you been ignoring me?” He told her it was to avoid fighting. “This,” he wrote, “went on into a critical discussion of my views, beliefs, and parenting style. We talked about compromise, and I told her that certain principles, I could not compromise. At this point she was getting quite agitated . . . She said I was destroying the family and would not get what I wanted.”

He suggested they end the discussion, according to his typewritten account. She expressed more anger and then left. “I locked my door,” Isaiah’s father wrote, “and tried to go to sleep.” About twenty minutes later, he wrote, his wife came to his door wanting to continue the conversation and, when he would not, “decided to bash the door in. She came in and continued to yell at me, telling me to come out of from under the blanket and finish the fight, she claimed, I had started. She poked and prodded to provoke me to get up. Due to previous similar occurrences, I was scared of many things. I covered myself and concentrated on keeping myself calm to avoid getting into a physical exchange. After about 10 minutes with no response from me, she quieted down, went out of the room, and stood just outside the door. She stayed there for another 10 or 15 minutes with an occasional verbal assault and then she went back upstairs.” The previous week, Isaiah’s father wrote, there had been another dispute, this one over whether his wife had made dinner for him. “She accused me of wanting to have everybody become my servant,” he said. Isaiah’s father claimed his wife “generally intimidates and threatens the kids if they follow my view if and when it differs from hers.” He said she had a “deep rooted anger management problem” and that she was abusing alcohol and drugs, including “strong prescription pain medications (Soma, Vicodin, etc.).” He wanted his wife kept out of their house and his workplace by court order for over a year, and he wanted custody of the three children still in the house: Isaiah, his younger sister, and his younger brother. Isaiah’s father wrote, “Please help!”

He filed this request at 3:27 on a Friday afternoon. Within less than ninety minutes, the court denied it and dismissed the case without setting any hearing. Isaiah’s father had said a lot of things in his filing, but none of them established clear evidence of domestic violence against him by his wife. At that point, the arrest records connected to Isaiah’s father suggested the opposite might be true.

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That summer, Isaiah turned seventeen. Two weeks after his birthday, the police again arrived at his family’s home in West Seattle, this time late on a Thursday night, in response to a hang-up 911 call. They found Isaiah’s father with three lacerations on the left side of his neck. There were also scratches in his beard line, on the right side of his face, and on the top of his left hand. They found Isaiah’s mother with an abrasion on the back of her left shoulder and a scratch on the top of her head, “and ligature (cord) marks were observed in her wrists.”

The police spent two hours at the home on Elmgrove Street, listening to Isaiah’s mother and father give accounts of what happened. Their stories overlapped significantly but differed as to who was the instigator of each round of violence. The father, listed in the police report as five feet seven and 180 pounds, said it was instigated by the mother, who was listed as five feet eight and 130 pounds. In the end, the police arrested both of them and took them to cool off in jail. Once out, both headed to court for restraining orders and a divorce, producing filings full of recriminations that detailed years of marital violence, coercive control, and cruelty.

Each accused the other of manipulating the truth to gain advantage. Isaiah’s father said the most recent fight began, like the previous one, with his wife’s coming into his room in the basement. “She got into the bed and we chatted for a little while, and I went back to my reading,” he wrote. “After about five minutes she said she was bursting to tell me something. I asked her to go ahead and tell me. She expressed her disappointment in that here she was, a beautiful woman laying in bed with me
and I was ignoring her. I tried to explain that I liked to read to unwind before going to sleep. That I did not want to be with her as I was very tired and just wanted to go to sleep. She was silent, then after a little while she got up and left. A little while later she came back down and demanded an explanation. She quickly became belligerent and combative. She slapped me across the face and scratched or cut my neck with some object in several places, like she wanted to puncture a vein. I thought she was going to kill me. She continued to hit me and kick me. I laid back down hoping she would calm down and go back upstairs. But she just continued on with a verbal attack.” He went to bandage his neck, he said, and his wife continued berating him, threatening to get relatives to come and hurt him, threatening to keep him from sleeping that night. When he picked up the phone to call the police, he said, “she snatched the phone out of my hand and threw it against the wall.” In his telling, he tried to use another phone, and she broke that one, too. He tried to crawl out of a window, and she went outside to confront him there. He crawled back in, left through the front door, and went to their 1986 Chevrolet Astro van. She got in the van with him. He drove to a corner store and called the police from a pay phone, and when she realized he’d gotten through to the police, she drove away in their van, leaving him there. He said that in the past she had used “knives, hammers, stereo speakers, and any loose object available” to harm him and that she once got “mad about something” and pushed his desk computer onto the floor.

Isaiah’s mother agreed the fight began with her climbing into her husband’s bed uninvited. “I don’t see any problem getting in bed with my own husband,” she told a judge at a hearing that was recorded on old cassette tapes. In a narrative of the incident that she filed, she wrote in longhand, “I went in and laid down beside him and waiting for a few moments before saying anything. I then ask him, ‘Why are you ignoring me?’ He responded by saying, ‘I don’t have to stop reading just because you are here. You don’t sleep with me on a regular basis. Leave me alone.’ I got upset and left the
room crying. I came back and ask, ‘Why do you treat me like this? Why are you so mean all the time?’ He responded by getting up yelling at me, and he then got in my face and head-butted me. I push him away and said, ‘Don’t you head-butt me again.’ He did it a second time at that time. I grabbed his neck with my right hand and held on, telling him, ‘I told you not to do that to me.’ We struggled and he ended up pushing me down on the bed and bending my legs upward towards my neck. I push him off somehow. He grabbed me, slamming me into the laundry room cabinet where I got a hole in my back. I broke free and went for the phone, telling him I’m going to call my brothers. How would he like it if a man does to him what he is doing to me?” She couldn’t reach anyone on the phone. She started pulling his clothes out of the closet, telling him to just get out. “He refused. I then went to call the police. He grabbed the phone and threw it against the wall of his bedroom. I ran to the downstairs office phone. He pulled the phone cord from the ceiling. I went upstairs to call and he pulled the cord from the wall. He then wrapped the cord around my arms in front and left.” She added that after a judge kicked her husband out of the house in response to the incident, her husband had the phone disconnected. “All bill and bank statements are in his name,” she wrote. “I don’t have access to anything—a big form of the control I have suffered over the 18 years of being with this man.”

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In court, each expressed worry that the other would respond in anger to the revelations and requests for intervention. Isaiah’s mother expressed a particular concern that her husband would take the children to Africa. In response, the court ordered that he surrender their passports.

Isaiah’s father moved to a motel and then to the Tacoma home of his sister, Rachel Kalebu. He began listing a post office box as his address in court documents. He stopped paying the mortgage on the family home in West Seattle, which was then foreclosed on, causing Isaiah’s mother to
move to an apartment with the children. Court records suggest this apartment was in a complex of buildings that look out on a large embankment holding up the western end of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport’s runways, a grimy place set between the airport and the same highway that hems in South Park.

Around this time, something called Family Court got involved in the dispute between Isaiah’s parents. It’s a department of King County Superior Court designed to assist families going through difficult proceedings and, in doing so, perhaps save on court costs—and, by extension, taxpayer money—while better protecting the interests of children. Family Court was asked to investigate the domestic violence allegations coming from each of Isaiah’s parents and, after that, to recommend a course of action to the judge handling their divorce. A social worker was assigned to help in the investigating.

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The social worker’s report, which was completed in October 2002, noted that Isaiah’s father complained to her at least five times about his wife’s “bitching” and that he also admitted to being arrested twice for incidents involving Isaiah. “This behavior,” the social worker wrote, “appears to indicate a lack of empathy on the part of the father toward his children, in addition to a lack of consideration for the mother’s wishes. These behaviors, viewed in totality, are indicative of a pattern of control and violence that exemplifies domestic violence.” She recommended that Isaiah’s father “complete a domestic violence treatment program, and a respectful parenting course.” She suggested that Isaiah’s mother “would benefit from mental health counseling to assist her in learning how to remove herself from violent situations rather than respond in an aggressive manner.” Finally, she singled out Isaiah, then just over two months past his seventeenth birthday, for special consideration. “It appears that the oldest son has endured a great deal of the father’s abusive behavior,” the social worker wrote. “This son would also benefit from mental health counseling in
order to help him deal with the experiences he has endured at the hands of his father.” This never happened.

“A major missed opportunity,” wrote Dr. Lymberis.

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Had someone tried, at public expense, to get Isaiah into mental health counseling, it’s possible the system itself would have missed the opportunity, too. “A patchwork relic” is how a presidential commission, established just a few months before this social worker’s suggestion, described the nation’s mental health apparatus. In any event, the opportunity was missed, and the legal battle between Isaiah’s parents dragged on, in a local court system that, like others around the nation, was itself suffering from neglect.

A major issue was inadequate funding. Soon, current and former Washington State Supreme Court justices would launch a campaign for more money called Justice in Jeopardy. This campaign would have the misfortune of arriving a few years before the Great Recession.

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In the fight between Isaiah’s parents, Isaiah’s father began asking Family Court to reconsider its negative assessment of him. “Is that too much for a male to ask?” he said, through a lawyer, in one filing. He also complained that his wife’s demands for child support were too great, and as evidence of this he said Isaiah had recently been sent home from his private high school “for lack of funds.” Other records show that Isaiah, having left the Kirkland academy and returned to Auburn Adventist for his senior year of high school, ended up living in the school’s dorms for a time but wasn’t allowed to attend classes because of his parents’ lack of payment. “Isaiah’s education should not be used as a bargaining chip for more income,” Isaiah’s father wrote. “If the respondent really cares about his education, she should get a job, even part time, and send her contribution directly to the school, like the rest of us do.” Whichever parent
was actually using Isaiah’s education as a bargaining chip, the immediate result was more turbulence for Isaiah.

Isaiah’s mother filed income statements showing minimal resources and filed notes from her doctor supporting her contention that she was in no position to work. “My physical condition has now deteriorated to the point that I will need additional surgery on my back,” she wrote. “I am now physically unable to perform any substantial gainful activity. My only job skill is working in a pre-school.” She said she could no longer lift more than two pounds or stand or walk for extended periods, which made it impossible for her to work at a preschool. She said she was presently driving a van that had to be started with a wrench due to disrepair and that her husband’s claims of physical victimization were absurd. “Petitioner is a large, threatening man and I find it amazing that he is suddenly scared of a woman who he has aggressively attacked and beaten over the years,” she wrote.