While the City Slept (25 page)

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Jennifer’s grandmother passed away in March 2013 at the age of ninety-seven. A year later, on the first anniversary of her death, a ruling arrived from the Washington State Court of Appeals regarding a request Isaiah Kalebu had made for a new trial. His appeal was paid for by the state because he was indigent and facing a life sentence, and he had argued, through his publicly funded attorney, that his rights had been trampled in Judge Hayden’s courtroom. Isaiah’s request for a new trial was denied; he appealed to the Washington State Supreme Court, and five months later that court declined his petition for review. The high court’s decision came on August 5, 2014, a few days after Isaiah’s twenty-ninth birthday. Two months later, in the pill line, he passed the note that got him sent to solitary and then to Clallam Bay.

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JoAnn Wuitschick, like other jurors, sometimes finds herself wondering what Isaiah’s day to day is like in prison. Is he getting his medication? Has he had any more suicide attempts? “He’s there for the rest of his life,” she said. “And then what?” She thinks, “What a waste. What a waste.”

Deborah, though she hasn’t felt ready to try to visit, continues to wonder all kinds of things about her brother. She thinks of Jennifer often, too. “I can only imagine what she goes through on the daily,” Deborah said. She feels certain there need to be reforms in how people like her brother are handled and, though she doesn’t wish her family’s pain on anyone else, finds herself wishing others could feel what she feels, believes they would agree with her then, would know, like her, that something must change. “No one’s gonna feel that way until they actually feel it,” Deborah said to me. “Go through it. And that’s why I deal with you. No one understands.”

Deborah told me she has followed, with frustration and sadness, news of violence committed by other disturbed individuals who seem to
have slipped through the cracks. JoAnn Wuitschick has, too, in particular a stabbing in downtown Seattle in 2013 in which a disturbed man from California used a knife to attack a couple heading home from a Seattle Sounders game. He first cut the wife and then, when her husband moved to protect her, stabbed her husband to death. The murdered man was an English professor at the local community college Jennifer attended after she moved back to Seattle from New York. The following year, a young man with a history of serious psychological disturbance and access to a gun shot three students at a Seattle college, killing one of them. For his first court appearance, he wore a green suicide smock and had Brandes as his public defender.

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Deborah also spoke about the pain Isaiah’s father carried with him from the brutality he’d witnessed as a young man in Uganda. “That would affect anybody,” Deborah said. “But at the same time, I believe in breaking cycles, and healing, and getting over it, and not using it as an excuse to hinder the rest of your life, where you take it out on your children and then on your children’s children. I think there’s a point where you say, ‘Okay, I’m gonna use my situation to make me better.’ Or help someone else that’s been through it. I don’t believe in people who use issues as an excuse. It may sound harsh to others, but to me—like, the situation with my brother. It hurts the hell out of me. I didn’t just lose Isaiah. Meaning, the victims weren’t the only ones killed.” (This was an inexact way of stating it, because both victims were not in fact killed, only Teresa. But it echoed something Jennifer often said, without noticing, during our interviews, referring to that night as the night “when he killed us.”) Deborah continued, tallying up the losses: “I lost Isaiah. Mama Rachel’s gone. JJ’s gone. . . . And, honestly, I don’t know if I’m here half the time. But I have to keep going, because I have my children to live for, I have my mother to be strong for, I have my little brother and sister to be strong for. They’re in college, and I want them to succeed and not worry about
this.” She told me she hadn’t been sleeping well since the trial ended. At the time she said this, it had been almost two years since the trial ended.

Isaiah’s mother told me she, too, couldn’t sleep after Isaiah was sentenced. She stayed inside her house for three months straight, had to take all of Isaiah’s pictures down. “And then I cry all the time,” she said. “It still affects me to this day. If I see a young man that looks half like Isaiah, I think it’s him, and I just start crying. It’s just ridiculous.”

Like Theresa Griffin, Deborah had a bad feeling when she heard what had happened in South Park that summer of 2009—a feeling connected to Isaiah. She wishes her brother would talk to her more about that crime. She also wishes he’d talk more about the arson that killed her aunt Rachel and J. J. Jones, which is still technically an open case in Tacoma. She told me, “I wanna know: What the fuck happened?” In her day to day, Deborah draws inspiration from what she watched Jennifer say and do in court. “I said then, ‘If she can do this, and she can be strong enough to share it—and was actually in the moment, and seen all this, and seen her love die—I can do it,’” Deborah said. “‘I can do this little bit, and be strong for my mom and my family and everybody else.’ She is why I do what I do all day. ’Cause that was so sad. And to know that somebody that I’ve known since birth may have been the one—is being said to be the one who did this—I felt just as much at fault.” Deborah has wondered if she played too rough with Isaiah, or teased him too much, or had any inadvertent hand in how he developed. “I want to say, ‘Sorry, sorry,’ over and over again, and apologize,” Deborah said. “But I can’t bring back nothing for her. I can’t erase those memories. And that’s why I can’t sleep at night . . .”

She has worried that her mother might think her a traitor for sharing all of this publicly. “But maybe that’s the problem,” Deborah said. “If everybody’s keeping it private, there’s no change. It’s gonna keep happening. But I want it to stop.” And then, “Always know, Eli, I love my brother Isaiah Kalebu as much as the first time I ever seen him. I love him, I love him, I love him. And Mom loves him.”

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Perhaps someone inside the prison system has now developed a firm sense of what’s disturbing Isaiah. It seems likely, however, that what Dr. Margaret Dean, the psychiatrist from Western State Hospital, said in the winter of 2010 remains grimly relevant. “It’s really not a matter of getting the diagnosis right,” she told Judge Hayden during one of Isaiah’s competency hearings. “It’s a matter of looking at the relevant capacities.” Now that Isaiah, in part based on this outlook, has been deemed competent enough to be tried and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, the Washington State prison system can run ahead with one of his old diagnoses, or come up with a new one, and it can try to medicate him if that’s thought necessary. But like the rest of the justice system, the prison system does not have the capacity, or the mission, to do much in terms of extended therapeutic interventions. It’s really not a matter of sitting and working with the man to get him into a better state of mind.

As Dr. Dean also noted on the stand, it is true that even in the most therapeutic of environments there can be challenges in getting to diagnoses that feel correct. She spoke of how she was trained by Dr. Allen Frances, who helped create the fourth edition of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
designed to be the most complete inventory possible of all recognized (and billable) mental disturbances, and she told the court this training made her “a bit of a stickler” for by-the-book diagnoses, though at the same time she acknowledged the book’s shortcomings, including a certain amount of arbitrariness. Her mentor, Dr. Frances, has gone further with his own sense of the book’s shortcomings, evolving over time into a loud critic of the
DSM
. A year after Dr. Dean’s testimony, in a letter to the
New York Times,
he lamented a situation that had “gotten out of hand,” producing a sprawling diagnostic regime corrupted by pharmaceutical companies focused on marketing to the worried well.
“Meanwhile,” Dr. Frances wrote, “we are neglecting the severely ill who can be accurately diagnosed and effectively treated. State budgets for mental health have been slashed, radically reducing access to care for people who most need medicine and are likely to benefit from it.” This situation—an abundance of drugs and diagnoses for the worried well, a shortage for the desperate and destitute—was described by Dr. Frances as an “absurd misallocation of resources.”

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The Washington State Department of Corrections doesn’t calculate costs per day for individual prisoners. Some prisoners are more expensive. Some prisoners are less expensive. It all depends on an individual prisoner’s needs and behavior. But the department will say that the average daily cost for someone being held at the state penitentiary in Walla Walla is $114. At the newer Clallam Bay Corrections Center, where Isaiah is now, the average daily cost per prisoner is $110.

Records suggest Isaiah has been a more-expensive-than-average prisoner. But take just the average prisoner costs and multiply them by the years involved. Isaiah is serving life without the possibility of parole. He was sent to the Walla Walla state penitentiary at the age of twenty-six. He was sent on to Clallam Bay at age twenty-nine. If he remains at Clallam Bay until age seventy-three, which is his life expectancy according to Judge Hayden’s calculations, then Isaiah’s prison incarceration alone will cost the State of Washington more than $1,850,000. That’s assuming he only costs the average amount, and that’s not counting the costs already incurred by King County for keeping Isaiah in jail for nearly two years while awaiting his rape and murder trial. The county estimates those costs at $114,519. It’s also not counting the costs of Isaiah’s pretrial evaluations at Western State Hospital, which cannot be disclosed because of privacy laws, or the costs of his multiple trips to Harborview while in custody.

The public also paid to prosecute Isaiah (nearly $550,000), and to
defend him (more than $702,000), and to allow him a lawyer to appeal his guilty verdict (more than $16,700). The true cost of Isaiah’s crimes is not calculable, of course, but the grand total set to land on the public bill: well over $3 million.

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If Isaiah’s crimes could have been prevented through early psychiatric intervention, it could well have saved the public money. This is why advocates continue to argue that it’s shortsighted and self-defeating for political leaders to continually cut, and perpetually underfund, public mental health programs in this country while much more easily approving funds for things like new prisons. Simply having had a few counseling sessions during his parents’ divorce proceedings, as was recommended by the Family Court social worker, might have changed the course of events for Isaiah. Those sessions would not have cost $3 million. In fact, Isaiah could have seen a counselor every day, from the first sign of concern in his childhood to the day he was sent away for life, for far less than $3 million.

Or, because we are not yet able to predict which of our children will become violent as adults, and may never be, that $3 million could have been used to provide seven struggling young people, including Isaiah, with once-a-week counseling over the same period. This is a core idea behind the so-called social safety net. Catch those in need, not knowing which of them, without help, will become much more destructive in the future and much more expensive to the rest of society.

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The law can also be a catchment for those sliding toward violence, and during those chaotic summer months that left the adult Isaiah wandering homeless—“accompanied only by his dog and his delusions,” as his public defenders put it, “until he encountered Teresa Butz and Jennifer Hopper”—the existence of one particular type of law might have helped. The best example of this type of law is in New York State, which in 1999
passed Kendra’s Law in response to a murder committed by a disturbed man who had a long history of violence and was off his medications. It was named after the man’s victim, Kendra Webdale.

This law says that if an adult has been diagnosed with a mental illness, and that adult is likely to create unsafe situations without supervision,
and
that adult has a history of noncompliance with treatment that has been connected to previous hospitalizations or violence—all descriptions that arguably applied to Isaiah in the summer of 2009—then this adult can be ordered by a court into outpatient commitment. Which, in New York, is essentially community treatment with close supervision, plus immediate consequences for treatment noncompliance (among those consequences, potentially, involuntary commitment).

Uniquely, the New York law also commits the state to funding better community treatment, so that people can be prevented from deteriorating in the first place, when possible, and then, when necessary, effectively handled through outpatient commitment. This system has been described as a sort of mutual involuntary commitment—the state committed to better mental health care, the individual committed to better mental health—and it has proven, so far, to be a money saver for New York taxpayers. Bouncing people around to various parts of the system, and then eventually incarcerating them, is, it turns out, more expensive.

Brian Stettin, policy director at the Treatment Advocacy Center, said that by the time Rachel Kalebu filed for a restraining order against her nephew in the summer of 2009, there would have been a “slam dunk” case for triggering Kendra’s Law. That is, provided Washington State had such a law on the books, which it did not. Stettin added that Isaiah’s case has disturbingly familiar elements. “It’s Andrew Goldstein, the guy who pushed Kendra Webdale onto the subway tracks,” he said. “It’s what we hear again and again. It’s somebody who’s a ticking time bomb.”

Cracks like the ones Isaiah slipped through exist all over the United States, where the norm is underfunded mental health systems and a crazy quilt of local policies applying to people in Isaiah’s situation. Measures like
Kendra’s Law remain a rarity, in part because of understandable resistance to the government’s having too much power to force psychological treatment based on predicted future behavior (rather than on obvious, in-the-present-moment behavior that creates an incontrovertible “danger to self or others”). Yet had Washington State been better able to respond to Isaiah’s pressing needs—for counseling as a young man, for intervention as an adult—the cost-conscious public might have had the opportunity it regularly tells pollsters it’s seeking, the opportunity for government to spend less. More important, three families, and the wide circles of humanity they intersected with, might have been spared tremendous anguish.