While the City Slept (22 page)

And then human civilization, which did not stop this from happening, which did not even know this was happening, slowly returned, slowly wrapped itself back around the women, layer by insufficient layer.

Jennifer saw Israel Rodriguez running toward them. “He just ran,” she told the court. She saw Sara Miranda-Nino leaning over Teresa. She saw Diana Ramirez take off a sweatshirt and hand it to her. “I just grabbed her sweatshirt and held it up to my neck,” Jennifer said. She told a young man to call her mom on his cell phone and tell her mom she loved her. “And the next thing I remember at this point is an officer coming up to me and kind of abruptly telling me to stop screaming.” It was Officer Berg, trying to secure the area so that the firemen and paramedics, waiting down the block, could rush in, blue smocked and white gloved, and try to help whomever they could. “I remember they came to me,” Jennifer said, “and they didn’t go to her, and I was like, ‘Go to her! Go to her!’” Other firemen and medics would go to Teresa, but it would be too late.

The ambulance holding Jennifer would leave, lights and sirens, for Harborview. The canine unit would come to track the man’s scent. An emergency room physician would swab Jennifer for evidence and, for a time, with her best interests in mind, withhold from her the information that Teresa had been killed. Officer Woo would do the same. The coroner would take custody of Teresa’s body, and in the hospital Detective Duffy would put her hand on Jennifer’s arm and tell her the truth, take her statement, tell her to start from the beginning. The crime lab would process the evidence: fingerprints on the dresser and the bathtub, a bloody footprint
on a piece of paper, DNA in and on the bodies of Teresa and Jennifer. Four days of running down leads, and then Detective Duffy would call Jennifer at Sundecker’s in St. Louis, overlooking the Mississippi River, underneath the Martin Luther King Bridge, tell her, “We have him.”

King County prosecutors, public defenders, and a judge would be assigned to the case. Jurors would be selected. The component pieces of this effort to be civilized, even toward those accused of defying the demands of civilization, would fall into place.

And then Jennifer would testify, relive and recount it all, bear witness and bare her pain for the hope of justice.

Before all of this, though, the firemen and paramedics who tried to get Jennifer to sit down on South Rose Street, to stop her screaming so they could help. She would not sit down and stop her screaming. Not after what happened. Not after all that silence. Not anymore.

A part of her knew Teresa’s fate. Still, she shouted into the night. Even if Teresa couldn’t hear her anymore, maybe someone would hear: “I love you, Teresa! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!
Fight!”

T
he prosecutor reached the end of his questions. Brandes, Isaiah’s public defender, rose to cross-examine Jennifer. She began by checking and reconfirming certain details, mostly about the knives, what they looked like. Then she explored the attempts Jennifer and Teresa had made to, in Brandes’s wording, “humanize” themselves to the man who was attacking them. This done, Brandes attempted to humanize their attacker, her client.

“You’ve described some very hard actions that you had to suffer through, and some callousness from this man,” Brandes said. “But there were times when he wasn’t entirely callous.”

“I don’t believe that,” Jennifer said.

“Well, how about when he let you give Teresa the water?”

“So she can better use her mouth on him? I don’t see that as not being callous.”

“And there were times when he petted or stroked you?”

“How is it not callous to stroke a rape victim who doesn’t want to be stroked? That’s not kindness. That was probably the worst part for me.”

“Well, I am certainly not suggesting it was a kindness to you.”

Brandes moved on.

The rest of her questions focused mainly on which had happened first: the slashing and stabbing with the knife or the physical resistance. Jennifer explained, again, that the cutting with the knife came first. Then,
when they began to resist, he took them into the other bedroom to get a second knife.

“This is when he says, ‘Get up’?” Brandes asked.

“Yes.”

“Takes you to another room, gets the knife, everything moves really quickly.”

“Yes.”

“And that’s when he cut your throat?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t have any other questions.”

—

“Members of the jury,” Judge Hayden said, “I have some things to handle with counsel for the afternoon in this matter and, therefore, I’m going to give you a break for the afternoon. I don’t think any of you will be too upset by having the afternoon off. So, you’re free to go home. Tomorrow’s Friday, right? We’re not back in session until Monday. So you’ve got some time to decompress.”

—

After the judge released the jury for the afternoon, JoAnn Wuitschick went for a walk along a beach in North Seattle, a beach that, though she did not know it, sits directly below a hill that held one of the apartments in which Isaiah spent his early years. She figured it was probably against the rules to write about what she was experiencing in her journal, so these walks along the Salish Sea had become her outlet. “Just walked,” she said. “Thought, ‘Wow.’ That’s all I could think. And just cried. In my head, I was just telling her, ‘Keep your head high, honey. You’re going to be fine.’ She just seemed like, to her core, a strong person, an amazing woman.”

At home at night, in her fourth-floor condo, JoAnn had begun, for the first time, locking the sliding glass door to her balcony. She was living alone then and knew her fear was irrational, one of the quiet ripples from
the crime. “I mean, nobody could get up to my balcony unless they rappelled down from the roof,” JoAnn said. Still, she began standing empty wine bottles flush against her front door, too, so that if someone opened it at night she’d be awakened.

—

That Sunday evening, as the jurors and lawyers were getting ready to head back to court, Norbert Leo Butz was in New York, seated in an unusual spot for him, the audience of a theater. The Tony Award for best actor in a musical was announced, and it went to him, for his portrayal of the dogged FBI agent in
Catch Me If You Can
. As he accepted it, he suggested the trial was with him, too. “This is for my father, who I based this character on,” Norbert said, “and for my sister. I love you, Teresa. We remember you every night.”

—

That Monday morning, the juror who’d once talked about having a cart and working as a repairman called in to say he’d been up all night, sick, and couldn’t appear. He was excused from jury service. The jury box was now down to fifteen people.

More witnesses for the prosecution were called that week. Doctors, the medical examiner, a state crime lab employee. On Tuesday, while watching the trial remotely from the floor above, Isaiah swallowed a small pencil. He was taken to Harborview, then brought back so proceedings could continue. During the trial’s third week, when Detective Duffy and other witnesses for the prosecution were testifying, Isaiah was again taken to Harborview and returned. This time reasons were not specified.

—

On the Monday of the fourth week of testimony, Isaiah’s mother took the stand, as did the bus driver who spotted Isaiah near Magnuson Park and Officer Leon Towne, who’d arrested Isaiah. Then, that afternoon, with the
prosecution ready to rest, Isaiah’s lawyers informed the court of something that seemed to surprise them, too: Isaiah wished to testify in his own defense.

“If he wants to do this,” Schwartz said, “he’s calling himself to the witness stand. His counsel have no questions for him.”

The defense team had long ago announced that it intended to call no witnesses and instead just pursue the strategy of “general denial,” which, Schwartz had reminded jurors during voir dire, is a perfectly legitimate defense at a criminal trial, where the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt lies entirely on the prosecution.

Outside the presence of the jury, elaborate preparations were now made to provide Isaiah with his right to testify. The courtroom was reconfigured so that Isaiah could sit not on the witness stand but at a table across the room from the jury. This would shield from jurors the fact that he would be sitting in a restraint chair, his hands covered by white mittens meant to immobilize them, a Taser-like device, called a Band-It, strapped to his forearm so that jail guards could remotely shock him into submission if he became uncontrollable.

Isaiah arrived for his testimony wearing a canary-yellow dress shirt and slacks and was sworn in on a Bible, as he’d requested. He’d also requested that he be allowed to wear a black judge’s robe. That request had been denied. So had his lawyer’s last-minute request for another competency evaluation. In denying that request, Judge Hayden said, “I abide by my view that much of his behavior is volitional in nature and his own strategy, however unusual that strategy may be.”

—

The jury was brought in. The state rested. And now, for the first time, the jury saw the defendant in the case. The palms of JoAnn Wuitschick’s hands began to sweat. “My mouth dropped open,” said Debra Young, another juror.

Judge Hayden had already ruled that Isaiah had to testify in a question-
and-answer format, not a monologue. So, even though Schwartz had said Isaiah’s attorneys had no questions for him, Brandes now asked Isaiah what he wanted to be asked. She gave the address of the red house on South Rose Street and asked him, “Mr. Kalebu, do you know anything about the events that occurred in the early morning hours of July 19, 2009?”

“I was there,” Isaiah replied. “And I was told by my God, and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to attack my enemies. I did so. I followed the instructions by God.”

—

Brandes now asked another question, though it was unclear whether it was a question Isaiah wanted asked: “Mr. Kalebu, have you ever been diagnosed as having a mental illness?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I have been diagnosed several times.”

A prosecutor objected. Brandes said the information was within bounds. The jury was sent out so the lawyers could argue further.

“He can testify as to his state of mind,” Judge Hayden said. “But I don’t think he can diagnose himself with anything.”

Technically speaking, however, Isaiah hadn’t actually diagnosed himself with anything. He’d just stated what was true: He’d been diagnosed by others.

After more discussion, Judge Hayden clarified that Isaiah could offer his own opinion of his mental health but not a diagnosis, which would require expert testimony. In other words, Isaiah would be allowed to say the one thing he’d so often refused to say. As Judge Hayden put it, “I will allow him to tell the jury he thinks he’s mentally ill.”

“Let me see if he wishes to proceed,” Brandes replied.

They were at a familiar impasse, though it was not an impasse that would be familiar to anyone seeing Isaiah for the first time at this trial. Without revealing anything, Brandes signaled for the jury to be brought back in.

Isaiah’s last statement was stricken from the record. Jurors would
be allowed to consider his admission that he was at the scene of the crime but not his discussion of his past mental health diagnoses. Now Brandes had an opportunity to ask Isaiah for his own opinion of his mental health, if he indeed wanted her to ask the question.

Apparently, he did not.

“No further questions,” Brandes said.

—

Isaiah was now boxed in, once again, by his resistance to accepting his disturbance. At the table where he was seated, something appeared to be happening. Debra Young saw Brandes push away from her client in her rolling desk chair. The prosecutor asked that the jurors be sent out again, and they were.

“I heard Velcro,” Brandes said once the jurors were gone. Isaiah had been trying to take off the restraint mittens, had succeeded in getting his hand out of one. “He was trying to remove the Band-It,” said a jail officer. “It is secure now.”

Next moves were discussed, as was the heat in the courtroom. “A lot of people in here,” Judge Hayden said. His bailiff said she’d inquired about getting it cooled down.

It was agreed Isaiah would leave now and return to watching the trial remotely from an upper floor. Brandes then argued that based on what had occurred, the jury should be given the option to find Isaiah not guilty by reason of insanity. It was far too late in the proceedings to begin pursuing an insanity defense, Judge Hayden ruled. The law did not allow such things. In any case, it was a defense Isaiah had not wanted to pursue. The jury was brought back in, the judge went through the jury instructions with them, and then closing arguments began.

“U
nspeakable acts were committed against two unsuspecting women who wouldn’t have hurt anybody,” the prosecutor said. He urged the jurors to convict Isaiah on all counts. Schwartz, when it was his turn, rose and said, “These are undoubtedly two very, very brave women, with courage someone like myself cannot measure.” Then he tried to poke a few holes in the prosecution’s case, casting the DNA evidence, for example, as riddled with uncertainties. (A prosecutor, in rebuttal, noted that DNA evidence had only a “one in 13 quintillion” chance of being wrong. “That’s 18 zeroes,” he said.) Schwartz also warned the jury that reaching this decision was the most important thing they’d ever do in their lives—“other than raising a child.”

It was now time for deliberations to begin, but first the alternate jurors were revealed and excused. JoAnn Wuitschick, it turned out, was one. She was hugely disappointed. “Because I take great notes,” she said. Also, she wanted the closure of moving toward a verdict with the rest of them.

—

The jury room was behind a thick wooden door in the back of Judge Hayden’s courtroom, and it was tiny. “Crappy chairs, small quarters,” Debra Young said. “The bathroom was right there, so it’s like you go into the bathroom and I felt obligated to turn on the water so people couldn’t hear me peeing.” As the twelve jurors piled in, Isaiah’s testimony was still
fresh in several minds and was provoking divergent reactions, similar to the way his words and actions had provoked divergent reactions among so many already. “I felt like he was faking,” said Jamie Dellaringa, the Costco employee. “I felt like he already planned exactly what to say to make himself sound crazy.” Debra Young felt something different. “Something wasn’t right,” she said. “It was weird. What he said was weird. Something wasn’t right with him.”

Still, as had been the case for many years, the law was not concerned with exactly what was right or wrong with Isaiah. “We were asked whether he did something or not,” said Dan Butler, another juror. “We weren’t asked why.”

—

They didn’t do much that first afternoon, because it was nearing the end of the day. The next morning, a Thursday, they began with a basic question: Was Isaiah there that night or not? It took almost the whole day to answer, in part because one man on the jury held out for quite some time. As he did, he spoke of how he himself had once been misidentified, suspected of being a terrorist at an airport. What finally brought everyone around was the accumulation of evidence they had with them in the jury room and the difficulty in arguing with it: the knives, the fingerprints, the crime-scene photographs, their juror’s notebooks filled with what they’d written down during testimony. At one point, Jamie Dellaringa pulled Isaiah’s pants out of an evidence bag, turned them inside out, and noticed there was blood on the inside of them. When Isaiah put his pants back on that night, she came to believe, he’d had Jennifer and Teresa’s blood all over him.

By the end of the day, they’d all come to the same conclusion. Isaiah was there. “If there was any hope of getting the guy off for not guilty, that would have been the only way to do it,” Dan Butler said. “Once that was determined, there was no question.” He was there, and if he was, they all agreed, then he was the one who committed the crimes.

Though determining why was not part of their task, it was hard not to wonder. Michelle Abercrombie theorized it was a consequence of Isaiah’s need for control. The crime itself, she saw, was all about control, and she believed that he became more violent as the reactions of Jennifer and Teresa to what Isaiah was doing began to get too far out of his control. “He had to be in control,” she said.

—

The next morning, the question of premeditation came up. It was the second day of deliberations, a Friday. “That was the hardest one for a lot of us,” said Jamie Dellaringa. “Did he mean it? Was it his plan?”

“I don’t know what his intention was going in the house,” said Michelle Abercrombie. “It could have just been burglary, because he was watching them sleep.” She imagined him standing there after rifling through their purses and tossing them on the kitchen floor. Perhaps his first interest had simply been money, and then, looking around, he’d noticed a large kitchen knife. “If he had gone in there with the intent to murder them, I think he would have just murdered them,” she said.

At 11:18 that morning, the jurors sent a written question to Judge Hayden, asking him to clarify how long it takes to form premeditation. He told them to read their jury instructions. The instructions said, “Premeditated means thought over before hand . . . The law requires some time, however long or short, in which a design to kill is deliberately formed.” Like others, Jamie Dellaringa had assumed premeditation would be something that involved months, or weeks, or maybe days of planning. “But it’s not,” she said. In the understanding she and others on the jury developed, it’s that a person thinks about doing something, and then that thing is done. “He stabbed both of them once,” she said. “They didn’t die. And then he did it again and again and again and again. At that point, he knows what he’s doing and he is planning. He’s trying to kill them. He is thinking about it.” It took them only a few more hours, with a lunch break included, to unanimously reach their final decision.

—

On the afternoon of Friday, July 1, 2011, nearly four weeks after the trial began, eighteen days before the second anniversary of Teresa’s death, and two days after deliberations started, the jury announced its verdict in
State of Washington v. Isaiah Kalebu:
Guilty on all counts. Guilty of aggravated, premeditated murder in the first degree, for the killing of Teresa Butz, which the jury found was committed “in the course of, in furtherance of, or in immediate flight from” the first-degree rape of Teresa Butz. Guilty of felony murder, for the killing of Teresa Butz. Guilty of first-degree attempted murder, for the premeditated attempted murder of Jennifer Hopper. Guilty of rape in the first degree, for the rape of Jennifer Hopper. Guilty of burglary in the first degree, for crawling through an open window in the couple’s bathroom in the early morning hours of July 19, 2009.

All of these crimes, the jury found, were committed with a deadly weapon and with sexual motivation or deliberate cruelty.

“Everybody was tired and exhausted and kind of emotionally traumatized,” Dan Butler said. He was also relieved: “My role was done.”

—

Jennifer was in the courtroom as the verdict was delivered, and she cried, as did many of the jurors and much of the crowd that had gathered. “It’s been a long road together,” Judge Hayden told the jury. “I saw a lot of anguish. But you made it through the process, and I want to thank you. Deeply. Thank you for having gone through it with us when most folks, when presented with the opportunity to do this, would have said, ‘I can’t do it.’”

He offered certificates of jury service, which he acknowledged, to laughs from them and the rest of the room, “don’t mean much.” He offered the jurors counseling, which some later took him up on. All jurors declined, through the bailiff, the opportunity to talk with members of the media. They just wanted to go home.