While the City Slept (17 page)

S
eattle’s main courthouse was built nearly one hundred years ago, out of granite pulled from quarries north of the city and marble shipped from Alaska. Five stories high, wrapped in decorative Ionic columns and other motifs of ancient authority, it was a beaux arts declaration dropped into a state not thirty years old. When its doors opened to the public, the Duwamish River had just been straightened.

The city grew. Courthouse floors were added, six of them piled atop the original five at the dawn of the Great Depression, cheaply, all wooden windows and gray brick. Later, a towering attic was set atop those six additional floors and, inside this attic, a jail where inmates waited behind three-story arching windows with mountain views, guarded by copper eagles along the roof’s cornice. Also inside this attic, a bakery, the source of inmate-made bread and enticing smells that wafted downward into the courthouse until a time when the jail became too small and was relocated, its former top-floor cells transformed into offices for elected officials, the bakery closed.

In the 1960s, the look of the courthouse was deemed out of step with “modern” architecture and an intervention conducted. Marble wainscoting was ripped out and replaced with concrete panels. Ornate hanging lamps in the shape of acorns were replaced by economical, tubular fluorescents. The original grand entrance became a loading dock. The Olmsted-inspired park the grand entrance had opened onto became neglected. On the courthouse exterior, aluminum walls were hung in vertical stripes
over rows of windows on the eastern and western facades, the intent being to create a more sophisticated look while dampening traffic noise and moderating courtroom temperatures by limiting sunlight. Some of these aims accomplished, the aluminum walls then aged into a dismal, streaked brown. In 2001, the earthquake. It caused so many things to go wrong in the courthouse that the need for a seismic upgrade, long ignored, was un-ignored. The foundation was re-poured. Shock absorbers were laid throughout the structure, in the form of X-ing braces that can be seen cutting through the views of many windows not covered in aluminum.

The sum of it all, on approach from the street, is deranged, an aesthetic that shifts repeatedly, often within a few square feet, from ancient to “modern” to braced-against-calamity, a hall of justice doubling as a monument to the way insane outcomes can be created slowly, over time. Around the perimeter, scavenging seagulls and desperate citizens wander the park that fed the grand entrance before the grand entrance became the loading dock, and people in the throes of legal argument file in and out of two newer, less-grand entrances, one of which, after the financial collapse of 2008, had to be frequently closed because of budget constraints.

—

In the lobby, a charcoal-drawn mural spans several walls and evokes a different perception of time than the building’s exterior, a perception in which history doesn’t weather and fade, and therefore no excavation of the past need be conducted to understand the present. Instead, all happens at once. There is place—the hills and waters and rivers of King County—and in this place exists, simultaneously, all that it has experienced: the land verdant and denuded, longhouses and skyscrapers, the courthouse in its many incarnations, the Duwamish, the white settlers, Chief Si’ahl, weary loggers, dirty miners, the lumbering B-17, laden cargo ships, marching unions, Bill Gates hunched over a boxy desktop computer, antiglobalization protesters, and, in the center of the central panel, Martin Luther King
Jr., who, in 2005, by legislative order, became the namesake of this county, replacing the original namesake, William Rufus King, a slave owner and, briefly, before his death after a few weeks in office, vice president of the United States under Franklin Pierce. The mural’s artist calls his technique “memory drawing.”

—

In the spring of 2011, a special summons issued from this courthouse to residents of King County, part of the drive to impanel a jury in the matter of
State of Washington v. Isaiah Kalebu
. Three thousand summonses went out, an unusually high number, because it was believed it would be difficult to find people who hadn’t heard what Isaiah was accused of doing in South Park on July 19, 2009.

It was also believed, correctly, that a large number of those receiving summonses would beg off. On April 25, 2011, Judge Michael C. Hayden, a sturdy man then in his nineteenth year on the bench, called his eighth-floor courtroom to order so that he, two King County prosecutors, and two public defenders could go through what Judge Hayden described as “the very voluminous written and electronic hardship requests we got.” Judge Hayden was sixty-two at the time, born in North Carolina and raised in northern Virginia by a father who was a newspaperman. At Dartmouth, he majored in psychology and political science. He also met a woman he intended to marry, and five days after graduation they moved to Seattle together. Her family had lived in Washington since before it was a state, her great-grandfather having worked as an early superior court judge and, before that, as a lawyer whose private practice was interrupted by the Great Seattle Fire of 1889. “Had to save all his law papers by rolling them down a stairwell in a rolltop desk,” Judge Hayden said. That desk is now in a local museum. In Seattle, Judge Hayden’s wife found work as a teacher. He worked as a service manager in a camera store and then decided to go to law school. Spent sixteen years in private practice defending major automakers like Ford and Chrysler and then grew tired
of that work. “The billable hours,” he said, “the headaches.” He liked to ski, but in the early 1990s “I did a somersault that I did not intend to do on the ski hill. Landed on the back of my head, and I contused my spinal cord pretty high. At C-3, 4. And I was paralyzed from the neck down for some period of time and thought that I was paralyzed for life. But I had a recovery that no one could explain. The doc said, ‘I don’t know why you survived the accident. I don’t know why, a year later, you could walk. I don’t know why you can ski again. But you can.’ And once I recovered, I thought, ‘You know, if I can survive that, and come back, what’s the little obstacle of changing career paths?’”

His wife kept saying she’d be a teacher even if no one was paying her. Being a judge seemed as if it might be that kind of work for him, so in 1992 he ran for and won an open seat on the superior court bench. “Not a landslide by any stretch,” Judge Hayden said. But he was never once challenged for his seat afterward.

—

The hardship requests Judge Hayden and the lawyers were reviewing on this day came from people who, not even having set foot in the courthouse in connection with
State of Washington v. Isaiah Kalebu,
had written to say they couldn’t serve, a cross section of personal misfortune and the pressing business of life. An eighty-three-year-old woman with hypertension, hypothyroidism, and an adrenal mass was excused, along with a large number of other people whose doctors attested to maladies including heart conditions, upcoming surgeries, incontinence, dementia, fibromyalgia, and MRSA. “How is she still alive?” asked a prosecutor, after reading one potential juror’s list of ailments.

It took days to go through each and every hardship request. There were people with cancer and people caring for people with cancer. People reporting Alzheimer’s, ALS, kidney failure, brain injury. “High blood pressure, asthma, anxiety,” Judge Hayden said during one marathon session. “Let her go.” Presented with the case of a man who reported deafness and
memory loss, Judge Hayden empathized: “My wife says the same thing about me.” That man was excused. For someone reporting sleep apnea, he offered, “Might suggest that juror come in right now. We could cure any sleep problems.” For a person with difficulty sitting: “I can appreciate that.”

There were financial hardships, too, for people whose jobs wouldn’t pay them during a lengthy trial and who couldn’t get by on the $10 a day, plus mileage, that King County offers its jurors as compensation. It’s an amount criticized as insufficient by a succession of Washington State Supreme Court chief justices, an amount Judge Hayden finds “embarrassing.” Equally embarrassing, he said, is when jurors are asked to consider donating their $10 a day back to the court to help fund child care at the Regional Justice Center in Kent. One potential juror expressing financial hardship on this day was a man who worked on hourly wages for Chase Bank. “Chase Bank has plenty of money right now,” Judge Hayden said, and it was true: the bank had recently swallowed up Washington Mutual, a locally grown behemoth that inflated with the boom and then imploded with the crash. “But it doesn’t mean he does.” The Chase employee was excused. A person working for McDonald’s was excused for similar reasons. A human resources worker at a local community college was excused for needing to manage upcoming layoffs. Then there were the previously scheduled commitments: a European cruise, a honeymoon in the Dominican Republic, the birth of a baby. One man was excused for being dead. One woman was excused for being the mother of a murder victim. A doctor at Harborview was excused. An army reservist was excused. A number of full-time college students were excused. A teacher was excused after reporting being the only person able to lead a school’s upcoming dissection of fetal pigs.

Still, when the remaining jurors arrived at the courthouse for the beginning of in-person examinations, it was a tight fit. “This court was not set up with the facilities, the technology, in order to bring in this large number of jurors,” Judge Hayden explained to a crowd of citizens that included employees from well-financed, spaciously headquartered
local companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Boeing. “So, we’ve been doing the best we can.” He apologized for the long line getting through courthouse security. He explained he was about to give an introductory talk to all the potential jurors presently in the courtroom, as well as to other potential jurors watching by video feed from the first-floor jury assembly room. On another floor, four other courtrooms filled with potential jurors waiting for Judge Hayden to deliver the exact same speech to them later.

“Without your service,” Judge Hayden began, “our system of justice would quickly grind to a halt.” He quoted Thomas Jefferson. He outlined how the idea of juries for accused criminals came to be embedded in the Sixth Amendment. He told of recently hosting a group of lawyers and judges from the former Soviet republic of Georgia and their interest in this practice. “For them, the jury system and our system of justice is a dream,” he said. “For us, it’s a reality, but it’s a reality that we have to guard on a daily basis in order to protect what we should never take for granted. You’re here in that tradition.”

Judge Hayden then told the potential jurors that after filling out an initial questionnaire, everyone would reconvene for a process called voir dire. “I’ve heard various interpretations of that French term,” Judge Hayden said. “It may mean to speak from the heart.”

—

Among those listening to him was JoAnn Wuitschick, a human resources consultant for the University of Washington. She was forty-six at the time. “I remember vividly getting this summons,” JoAnn said. The language struck her: “You have been chosen . . .” Not long after Judge Hayden’s speech, she read the questionnaire’s vague description of what happened in South Park that night in 2009. Nothing sounded familiar. “In 2009,” she said, “my mom had been re-diagnosed with breast cancer. Stage 4. It was very serious. My focus was completely inwards, and toward her.”

Michelle Abercrombie, then thirty-six and a staffing manager at a
Seattle software company, hadn’t been tracking the news in the summer of 2009, either. “I just don’t pay attention to any of the stuff that’s on TV,” she said. “Which I guess could be good, because sometimes media isn’t always correct.”

Likewise with Jamie Dellaringa, then forty-three and doing business analytics for Costco. She had no problem filling out the questionnaire. “It was so easy for me,” she said, “because I am not a TV person. I do not watch the news. I don’t want to know about the news. I try to keep it out of my life because it’s always bad.” She figures that if she ever needs to know about something urgently, “someone’s gonna tell me about it.”

Also listening to Judge Hayden, and also headed for the jury box: A former preschool teacher. A health-care administrator. A retired Boeing engineer. An employee at the state’s Department of Health and Human Services. A computer programmer for Microsoft. An electronic products developer who was a veteran of several small start-ups. A marketing manager for a local community college. A security systems salesman. An administrator for professors working on pulmonary research. And an army veteran who explained his job this way: “I have a cart. Like, I build wheelchair ramps for senior apartments and stuff. I repair the roofs, et cetera.” Asked whether serving on a long trial would be a financial hardship for him, the man said, “Probably knock me off a few bucks, but I’d be doing my civic duty, I
guess.”

A
year and nine months had passed between Isaiah’s arrest for the South Park attacks, as they had come to be known, and this sifting of potential jurors. During much of that time, the mystery of his mental state preoccupied his lawyers, prosecutors, and Judge Hayden. It continued to elude easy grasp. Numerous pretrial hearings and motions tangled with the question of what, exactly, possessed this young man who, now twenty-five years old and having no means to pay the $10 million bail, was passing time in a jail two blocks uphill from the courthouse.

An underlying dynamic for these discussions was set early, by Isaiah himself. It was the same dynamic that had vexed his family, the police, Harborview, and Judge Gain. It was the challenge of a man who does not want to be seen as having challenges, who manipulates for advantage, who suffers severe discomforts yet seeks to create discomfort in others, who deals with distress and disintegration by reaching for ever more forceful means of control, and who harbors, beneath all of these attempts at coping and containment, a chilling rage that erupts when they fail.

Only a few months after Isaiah was arrested, a hearing was called because he was at odds with one of his public defenders. He was facing the death penalty, so his attorneys had been working on a “mitigation report,” the process that led to the hiring of Dr. Lymberis. Isaiah didn’t like how things were going. He told Judge Hayden he wanted public defender Michael Schwartz to be removed from the case, in part because Isaiah
had come to mistrust Schwartz. One issue was that Schwartz kept pushing for Isaiah to be examined by Dr. Lymberis, and Isaiah kept resisting. “It has gotten to the point where he simply does not want to communicate with me any further about the case,” Schwartz told the court. Schwartz also suggested there was “an underlying issue here having to do with Mr. Kalebu’s mental health status.”

Judge Hayden made it clear to Isaiah that the choice of defense attorney was not entirely his to make, because he was being defended at public expense. He also explained that Isaiah would not necessarily get a better lawyer if Schwartz, a capable and experienced defense attorney, were excused. Judge Hayden addressed Isaiah as “sir” as he outlined what was in Isaiah’s control and what was not in Isaiah’s control. He said, “I’d hate to see you give up a very seasoned trial lawyer who is experienced, and very good at what he does, and then have the Office of Public Defense appoint you another one, and you look back with some remorse. You know, buyer’s remorse. I traded something in, I traded the car in, I find out I like the old one better than the new one.”

With this, Isaiah changed course but not tone. “I’m prepared to go forward,” he announced. “Provided my expectations are met, I will not have an issue with Mr. Schwartz . . . But if my issues continue, we’ll return and have to do this again.”

This became a constant refrain in Isaiah’s relationship with his trial, this way of relating in which he was constantly trying to flip the power dynamics of the courtroom, attempting to run the proceedings, attempting to run his defense team in directions contrary to their advice (and, sometimes, in directions contrary to his own previous declarations). He refused to accept that others might know better, kept trying to turn a losing hand into a winning hand. He seemed a captive of his own grandiosity, paranoia, and shifting mood, though he did not see it this way. As he would tell Dr. Lymberis when he eventually assented to an examination with her, and as he’d already suggested to Judge Gain back in 2008, “It is always me against the world, and I’m not going to lose.”

At times, Isaiah’s grandiosity and paranoia faded, but even then the instinct to manipulate remained. It seemed near foundational. Perhaps it was a foundation laid early. Perhaps it had become a final defense, a last means by which he was not going to lose, even if his manipulative strategies, in the context of a courtroom, ended up creating confusing situations for everyone, particularly those seeing him for the first time.

Judge Hayden continued, praising Isaiah’s lucidity, perhaps testing whether deference could pay behavioral dividends. “You certainly appear intelligent and thoughtful,” the judge said after Isaiah had withdrawn his request to fire Schwartz. Then Judge Hayden checked in on something he’d heard from the jail about Isaiah’s not being willing to come to court for this hearing, a hearing Isaiah himself had triggered. “An outright lie,” Isaiah said. “I will come to court. I have no intention of not coming to court.”

—

A few months passed, and Isaiah was back in front of Judge Hayden, wanting to fire Schwartz again. Judge Hayden cleared the courtroom so that Isaiah could explain the situation. Things were dragging on too long, Isaiah said.

In jail, in advance of this hearing, Isaiah had made himself familiar with the Rules of Professional Conduct for attorneys. About two years earlier, when he’d been sent to Western State Hospital by Judge Gain and was feeling dissatisfied with his public defender, something similar had occurred. Then he’d demanded rule books, Western State reported, “so that he could see what the rules were and where they were written.” Now he was arguing to Judge Hayden that his attorneys weren’t keeping him well enough apprised of developments in his case. Later, he would tell a psychiatric examiner that he could hear his attorney’s thoughts. On this day, he apparently could not. On this day, Isaiah felt he needed to read all the information that was being gathered as part of the mitigation report, felt he was not being told what people were saying about him. His lawyers argued otherwise to Judge Hayden, detailing very regular contacts with Isaiah. “I do
disagree with Mr. Kalebu that he has not been kept informed,” Schwartz told the judge. “But I think, oftentimes, when we do inform him of things, I don’t believe that he actually processes that in a normal fashion.”

—

Isaiah had at this point been in the King County Jail for six months and had attempted suicide several times. At first, the jail prescribed him lithium, following the treatment recommendations from his time at Western State in 2008, treatment recommendations that Isaiah had never complied with for very long. In the King County Jail, Isaiah continued to resist medication, hoarding his lithium pills in a makeshift cloth sack tied to his scrotum rather than swallowing them. Eventually, the jail psychiatrist, Dr. Brian Waiblinger, came to the opinion that Isaiah wasn’t bipolar at all.

This opinion was not shared by the majority of psychiatrists who would ultimately come to examine Isaiah, but Dr. Waiblinger felt he wasn’t seeing any signs of mania or depression in Isaiah, even absent lithium. Instead, Dr. Waiblinger saw Isaiah as severely narcissistic, impulsive, and a great challenge to engage. A lawyer for the jail likewise described Isaiah as “a very difficult patient to treat” because of his intelligence and manipulative manner. Directly quoting Dr. Waiblinger, this lawyer would tell Judge Hayden, “Mr. Kalebu has really bad affective instability. This is also known as lability, where your mood changes a lot.” Dr. Waiblinger noted that affective instability can often be mistaken for bipolar disorder. Of course, this would mean the reverse could be true as well.

In line with this diagnosis of “really bad affective instability,” Dr. Waiblinger stopped trying to give Isaiah lithium. Instead, for “relational problems,” Dr. Waiblinger prescribed him buspirone, an antianxiety medication.

None of this came up at the closed hearing at which Isaiah was attempting, again, to fire Schwartz. It would come up much later in the proceedings. And Schwartz, for his part, didn’t offer any specific diagnosis
for Isaiah, though he did tell Judge Hayden that Isaiah’s mental disturbance was a “major reason for the delays” that Isaiah was presently complaining about. Schwartz also told Judge Hayden, “This case has significant overtones of, perhaps, a mental health defense.”

—

“May I speak, please?” Isaiah asked.

“You may in a moment,” Judge Hayden said.

When that moment came, Isaiah complained, again, that he and Mr. Schwartz were “not on the same page” about the effort to have him examined by Dr. Lymberis. “I had requested that I did not want this continued any further,” Isaiah said. “I did not want the expert. I did not want to proceed in that direction.”

Judge Hayden explained to Isaiah that if no mitigating materials were presented to the King County prosecutor, the prosecutor might well go ahead and seek the death penalty.

“I’m okay with that,” Isaiah said.

To this part of Isaiah, on this day, delays were apparently worse than death. An examination by a psychiatrist was apparently worse than death. A mental health defense was apparently worse than death.

Judge Hayden said he was not prepared to let Isaiah fire his lawyers or make a decision contrary to their advice. “Whenever any society decides that they may exact the death penalty on someone, it becomes a societal issue, becomes a justice issue,” he told Isaiah. “We can’t do it and not be careful about it.”

Isaiah said, “I don’t have confidence in the attorney.”

“Well, I do,” Judge Hayden said.

An end to the argument reached, some paperwork was handed around the courtroom in order to officially allow more time for preparation of the mitigation report. “I’m not signing shit,” Isaiah said. Nevertheless, the examination with Dr. Lymberis went ahead a month later. She sat with
Isaiah for a total of nine hours over two days. It was the longest any psychiatrist had ever spent with Isaiah one-on-one.

—

When Dr. Lymberis met with him, his hands and feet were shackled, and one of his attorneys and a jail guard were present. “He sat across from me,” she wrote, “was courteous and well-mannered throughout. He engaged with full eye contact. Initially, his affect was somewhat constrained, though appropriate. He was alert, oriented, and on the whole, outwardly cooperative. He is intelligent and articulate, with no obvious speech or language problems.”

Dr. Lymberis diagnosed Isaiah as bipolar, “with a history of both manic and depressive episodes with recurrent chronic suicidality and several serious attempts.” She also saw him having a “mixed character disorder with Borderline and Narcissistic features.” She noted as well a history of head injuries, “from accidents and beatings,” although she also noted there was no evidence of Isaiah’s having any neurological impairment and that the jail neurology wing had recently checked and found nothing wrong with him.

In her report, Dr. Lymberis detailed Isaiah’s “history of persistent childhood and adolescent adversity,” his depressed mother and her suicide attempts, his parents’ chronic, severe marital conflict, the chronic family violence and jail time for both parents, his repeated moves throughout childhood and through his teenage years, his separation from his father in childhood, his separation from his family in adolescence. She noted that during her meetings with Isaiah, he told her his marijuana use hadn’t affected his thinking. Rather, he said, it “gave me a different perspective.” He wouldn’t talk to Dr. Lymberis about sex or about the events that led to his being taken to Harborview in 2008, but he did deny having any delusions and told her he’d been resisting medication because he didn’t need medication. “He tried to maintain a willful, controlled stance,”
she wrote. He described one of his coping strategies this way: “I choose not to remember. There is no point. Save brain capacity.” But he added, “They say you remember in your subconscious.”

As their time together continued, Isaiah’s control began to come apart. “It was at the end of meeting with him when his thinking became more disorganized,” Dr. Lymberis wrote. “Overtly delusional, tangential, with loose associations, paranoia, and grandiosity.” He said he’d worked for the government chasing sex offenders and specified to Dr. Lymberis that he’d been focusing on “sex crimes against minors.” He said his aunt, Rachel Kalebu, knew about a U.S. plot to infect Africans with HIV, that it had all been covered up, and that the U.S. government was now monitoring him because of this. His statements and his thinking became rigid, his ideas only jaggedly connected. “I talked shit about the government,” he told Dr. Lymberis. “I said we should have a revolution. America, all it needs is a spark and it’ll go off. Shoot at the government makes people violent. There are more people than police. I read the Unabomber’s manifesto. America is a violent country. They are arrogant. We are now the bad guys, we are torturing people. I say tortured people should be released and that is what happened. I predicted Fort Hood. I’m for what suits me best. Everything is for sale. Experience is the best teacher. You should not trust anyone.” He continued, “Grand inquisition and trauma. The government is used to control minds . . . They used mind control on me. I fought it successfully but I don’t want to talk about it.”

Dr. Lymberis described this as “a demonstration of his psychotic, disorganized, fragmented and defective function. He is using very primitive psychological defenses to keep himself from total decompensation. His sense of self is very damaged. His grandiosity serves to keep him from total disintegration. His judgment and reality testing are impaired. He has no insight into his illness and is consciously trying to appear sane.” In fact, she wrote, “he had told his attorney that his goal during his meetings with me was to be proven sane.”

Soon afterward, Dr. Lymberis’s report was delivered to the King County prosecutor, Dan Satterberg. Citing input from Jennifer Hopper, who had privately told the prosecutor she was opposed to the death penalty, and from Norbert and Dolly Butz, who privately told the prosecutor to use his best judgment, and also citing Isaiah’s “documented history of mental illness,” the prosecutor decided not to seek Isaiah’s death.