Read While the City Slept Online
Authors: Eli Sanders
While the City Slept
VIKING
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2016 by Eli Sanders
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Portions of this book appeared in different form as “While South Park Slept,” “The Mind of Kalebu,” “The Bravest Woman in Seattle,” “Behind the Guilty Verdict,” and other works by Eli Sanders published in
The Stranger
.
Excerpt from “It’s a Hard Life Wherever You Go,” words and music by Nanci Griffith. Copyright © 1989 Irving Music, Inc., and Ponder Heart Music. All rights controlled and administered by Irving Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.
ISBN 978-1-101-63467-7
Version_1
For survivors, living and in memory
ONTENTS
ROLOGUE
South Rose
Street
O
n old maps, the Duwamish River bends like discarded ribbon as it passes through a valley on the southern end of this city, winding across land that was once marshes and tribal fishing villages and then emptying into the salt water of Elliott Bay. Melt from nearby mountains carved this path, rich with salmon that fed the Duwamish Indians in the years before their last unfettered chief, Si’ahl, learned his name would be hammered by white settlers into the name of a new American city: Seattle. Not long afterward, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers showed up and spent a few years straightening and deepening the Duwamish for the purposes of large-scale commerce. Now the river looks more like a ribbon pulled taut.
Heavy industry lines its sides, dingy barges fill its moorings, and its last five miles have been declared a federal Superfund mega-site, so thick with PCBs, mercury, and arsenic that eating anything that lingers here is inadvisable. This is Seattle’s only river. At what’s been called its dirty mouth sits a mammoth artificial island built from dredged Duwamish silt: flat, paved over, and planted with tall orange cranes for unloading shipping containers at the international port. Upriver, toward the other end of the Superfund stretch, is a shallow bend that seems an homage to an earlier time, and tucked in the crook of this bend, across from a former Boeing plant where World War II bomber production helped begin the river’s fouling, is the neighborhood of South Park.
In the summer of 2009, the best way to reach South Park’s main strip
of taquerías and tire shops was by crossing an ailing drawbridge over this bend in the Duwamish. The decks of the bridge swelled in summer heat so that opening and closing became impossible. Its two halves, and their identical brick watchmen’s houses, were drifting in opposite directions. Its support pilings failed to find solid purchase beneath the toxic river-bottom muck. As a consequence, the South Park Bridge ranked as one of the least safe spans in the state.
Near the riverbank where one of the bridge decks descended into the neighborhood, on the wall of a bar called the County Line, a hand-lettered sign urging downtown politicians to do something other than the stated plan, which was to close the bridge and let residents find other ways into the neighborhood. The back route, for example, along a highway that, like the Duwamish, faintly bends as it passes by.
—
The land between the damaged river and the rushing highway is equal to about one square mile, a confined space steeped from its first platting in cycles of need and neglect. In the years after the Duwamish people were dispossessed, and around the time the river was being straightened, this land was farmed by Italian and Japanese immigrants who cleared the camas plants and seeded its soil with radishes, spinach, peas, and mustard greens. In search of a venue for selling their produce, these farmers helped build the Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle. In need of a bridge across the Duwamish to help get their vegetables to town, and in need of electricity and fresh drinking water, too, they petitioned to be annexed by the young city and in 1907 got their wish. South Park became part of Seattle’s southern edge, and a rotting trolley bridge linking it to the other side of the river was torn down, replaced by a new bridge built from timber trestles and a plank deck. It didn’t hold up long.
In 1931, another attempt at connection: the steel-beamed South Park drawbridge. Owing to time, inattention to upkeep on the part of
downtown power brokers, and an earthquake that rattled its crumbling concrete at the start of the new century, this bridge presented by 2009 a dangerously decayed visage, demoralizing and perfectly aligned with the economic moment, all busted potential and uneven openings.
Closure without remedy was not acceptable to South Park’s four thousand residents, by now mostly Hispanic and mostly not speaking English at home. But their demand for a new bridge was a hard one to meet the year after a financial crash, the city budget tapped out, more people than usual showing up at the river with fishing rods, hungry, casting next to warning signs posted in Spanish, Laotian, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Russian. Complicating matters, a new bridge was not the residents’ only demand.
The people of South Park lived, for the most part, on a core of tree-shaded streets, many of them dead-ending at the river, or the highway, or the circumference of fenced lots that otherwise hemmed in the neighborhood, lots holding businesses like Cain Bolt & Gasket or Sound Propeller Services, lots that, when they didn’t contain elemental companies in low industrial buildings, tended to hold giant spools of marine-grade rope, ship winches, metal buoys, all of it detritus washed up from the nearby port. On one inland corner of the neighborhood was something referred to by city signage as a “transfer station,” a delicate way of saying city dump. No one was asking for extravagant changes to this environment. The odors from the dump, the scents of creosote drifting in off the water, the taste of ammonia blowing through cement factory fences, the howl of jets on descent toward the airport, so close that conversations below had to pause—such things came with the territory. But people who made their homes here did feel that in addition to a new bridge they deserved more police to patrol their roads, some of which appeared to be crumbling back into dirt, and better lighting so that fewer night shadows would be on offer along the main avenues, inviting unpredictable characters who trudged up from the ragged vegetation along the riverbank or
wandered in from the budget motels and homeless encampments of the surrounding industrial netherland. It was hoped as well that better sewage and drainage pipes might someday stem the flooding that swamped many South Park basements when rains came down heavy, sending rats and spiders scurrying for higher ground.
All of this would likely have to wait and, if history was any guide, might well be forgotten amid demands from other neighborhoods that were not majority Hispanic, and working class, and from a trammeled river delta. It had always gone this way. So people in South Park had learned to counter inevitable disappointment with reeled-in expectations. With patience, too, when possible, sometimes helped along by a measured pleasure at the way South Park’s neglect, in a familiar paradox, made the neighborhood. Made it one of Seattle’s most diverse communities. Made its homes a bargain during the boom years. Made its food affordable and filling. Made it clear to those living along the botanically named residential streets—Thistle, Elmgrove, Rose—that they should not expect outsiders rushing in to make things better, that instead the mix of languages and ethnicities within this one square mile would have to get by on their own. Which meant together.
Meant, in practice, that an English-speaking white woman in South Park would mow her Chinese neighbor’s parking strip and he would give her green beans from his garden, neither able to speak a language understood by the other, both frequenting the Hispanic grocer, all doing what was needed to get by, and to work on time. For the most part, on most days, this was how it went, a majority of residents abiding by an unspoken rule that to live in this place was to be implicitly drafted into doing what one could to make sure everyone made it through. In exchange, one probably wouldn’t be bothered for petty things that might cause trouble in other neighborhoods, such as placing wet laundry to dry on a chain-link fence or hanging it in the trees across from the Cesar Chavez Village housing projects, damp socks joining the leaves in obscuring a view of the distant downtown high-rises.
—
That summer of 2009 it was unusually warm. Kids played late into the evening on the field outside the South Park Community Center, where dirt from the baseball diamond kicks into dust filtering last light. Men in white undershirts leaned against the wall outside Juan Colorado restaurant. Brisk business was done at Loretta’s, a bar with a Ping-Pong table and a refurbished Airstream trailer for patrons to sit in out back.
In the middle of July, on one particularly hot night, well after the ball field had cleared and not long after Loretta’s and Juan Colorado had served last call, Jennifer Dawson-Lutz could be found standing silently in the bathroom of her narrow, one-story house. It was a house wrapped in white siding that evoked wooden slats, and it was set on a block of similarly compact homes, a block where South Rose Street dead-ends near the ball field, a custom metal fabrication factory, and a stretch of freeway that bisects the neighborhood. She had just put her newborn daughter back down to sleep after a 3:00 a.m. feeding and then, before going back to bed herself, had tiptoed into the bathroom, keeping the light off so as not to wake her daughter. Outside, she heard the sound of breaking glass.
Her daughter was seventeen days old, and she herself was still recovering from a cesarean section. But she climbed onto the edge of her bathtub so she could peer out her bathroom window. Across the street and down the block was a small red house that happened to be well lit by a streetlamp. Jennifer Dawson-Lutz heard a scream. She saw a person who appeared to be falling out the window. She noticed a white curtain billowing through the window. Her mind, trying to make sense of this, suggested that someone was trying to break into the home, which she knew was shared by two women. One of them had purchased it a few years earlier; the other had moved in more recently. Both were attractive and outgoing, in their thirties, with smiles that stuck in memories, and they could regularly be seen gardening together in the front yard, or walking to Loretta’s, or chatting with people they bumped into along the sidewalk.
Jennifer Dawson-Lutz went to wake her husband. She dialed 911, something she’d never done before. She got a recorded message and was on hold for what felt like a long time.
—
Up the block, where South Rose Street intersects with Eighth Avenue South, Israel Rodriguez was watching his eighteenth birthday party wind down. His actual birthday had come three days earlier, but the celebration was postponed in order to take advantage of a fast-arriving Saturday night. Now it was 3:00 a.m. on the Sunday after that Saturday night. Israel stood on the sidewalk outside his family’s home, lit a cigarette, and smoked it near the spot where roots of a large maple tree had cracked and raised the concrete on a scale not normally seen in a city accustomed to sidewalks rearranged by tree roots. Here, the whorled roots had created a small mountain of vaulting cement whose peak passersby were forced to ascend and then descend. As Israel pulled on the cigarette, he, too, heard glass breaking. The sound seemed to come from the direction of the dead end on South Rose Street, and his mind identified it as a window being smashed. Israel found this odd for the neighborhood. He decided to head over to see what was happening.
—
About halfway down the block, he spotted a woman in the middle of the street. “She was white and wasn’t wearing nothing,” Israel would later tell a courtroom. The woman was screaming for help.
Israel ran back to his house. In the basement, Sara Miranda-Nino, his twenty-one-year-old cousin, was on her cell phone arguing with an ex-boyfriend. Israel told her to call 911, and then he and Sara ran down South Rose Street together.
Israel’s eleven-year-old sister, Mariah, followed. So did a young neighborhood friend named Diana Ramirez, whose father was once Israel’s
boxing coach. Diana was fourteen and lived on South Rose Street just across from the red house.
—
Jennifer Dawson-Lutz, watching out her front window, saw them all run past. She told her husband, “Go outside, go outside, help.” Then she heard one of the kids saying, “Get back, somebody’s been stabbed.” “And that’s when I told my husband, ‘Stay inside.’”
By this time, Israel and his cousin Sara could see there were two women in the street. One screaming for help. The other on the pavement. This woman, too, was without clothes, and Israel could see wounds on her.
He told Mariah and Diana to get out of there. Diana didn’t listen. She knew the women who lived in the red house. Didn’t know their names, but knew them by sight. They would wave to her as they were going about their days or as they were heading to and from work at their downtown jobs, and Diana would smile and wave back, say hi. Now one of the women was running in and out of the cone of streetlamp light, pounding on a neighbor’s door to no avail, coming right up to Diana, looking at her, saying, “Help me.” She was holding her neck. It was bleeding.
“I took off my sweatshirt,” Diana would later testify. “I wrapped it around her neck to stop the bleeding. Then I ran inside my house to get towels and paper towels.”
Sara recognized the women, too. “I seen them,” she said on the witness stand, “but never conversated with them. They were just two women that always got involved with the community. I remember seeing them around when South Park had its festivals.”
Now Sara was with the woman who was lying in the street. Her name was Teresa Butz, and the red house belonged to her. The woman calling for help, Diana’s sweatshirt to her neck, was Teresa’s fiancée, Jennifer Hopper.
Sara knelt. She held Teresa’s head in her lap. She spoke to a 911
operator through tears, terrified, and she spoke to Teresa, too, telling her, “Please wake up, ma’am. Ma’am, wake up! Please wake up, ma’am!”
She took off her shirt and tried to wipe the blood away. She wanted to see where Teresa’s major wounds were, apply pressure. It was difficult. “The bleeding wouldn’t stop,” she said.
—
There were no police officers in South Park when the calls began coming in from South Rose Street, but the neighborhood did have a fire station. It had been there for more than a hundred years and after a few relocations was now situated near the red house. “Listen to me,” a 911 operator told Sara, trying to calm her. “There’s a fire station less than two blocks away from you. They’re going to come and help her right away. They’re like two blocks away, okay?”
Sara heard this and told Teresa, “Keep breathing. The ambulance is coming. Please keep breathing.”
—
The first officer to respond was Thomas Berg. He was driving up a steep hill that leads out of the valley that holds South Park when his patrol car radio advised him, “Stabbing on South Rose.” He made a U-turn, headlights sweeping across high grass on the side of the road, and, with his siren off so as not to tip the perpetrator, sped down the hill. It was 3:09 a.m.