My fourth day of work:
Still unsure where most courtrooms and offices are, riding to the lobby to meet the kid who is delivering lunch for a deliberating jury. There is one other occupant, a young woman in a business suit with an attaché case. The elevator stops and she greets another young woman who steps in, similarly dressed.
“Hey, how are you?”
“Great! I just got a rape and kidnapping knocked down to unlawful imprisonment.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. Thank God I had a brand-new A.D.A. who didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. My guy was guilty as sin. No way I thought he was walking out of that room.”
The elevator doors open. They give each other a high-five and walk off in different directions.
Last month:
Riding down to get a cup of coffee. Two women and a toddler on the elevator with me. The women stand silently and the toddler cries. One of the women looks down suddenly and screams, “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!”
The little boy looks like he’s been struck open-handed, and is immediately quiet.
“He’s just hungry,” the other woman says.
“I know,” the first woman says. She looks down at the child. “We gonna go get dollar pizza,” she says to him. He is looking at the elevator floor.
After several seconds of silence, the first woman says, “I pray Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus; pray that lady can’t identify him.”
“Thought he said he wasn’t there,” the second woman says.
“He wasn’t,” the first woman replies. “Fuckin’ cops lie. Besides,” she adds as the doors open, “he say it was dark and she old.”
Both women laugh as they walk away.
I am reminded of my first few years on this job when I worked in uniform, searching members of the public as they entered the building. I was shocked at the number of young women with infants, and remarked about it one day to an old-timer.
“Twenty years from now,” he said, taking a slow drag on his cigarette, “I’ll be long gone and you’ll be searching those kids.”
He retired seven years ago, and died a year later, and those infants are in their early twenties now. The ones that haven’t already been killed are coming through my doors, and the only thing that feels different is that you can’t smoke in the building anymore.
In March 2006, two high-profile cases were heard on the same day. One was the arraignment of Darryl Littlejohn, a nightclub bouncer accused of the torture and murder of a young woman named Imette St. Guillen, who had been drinking at the bar where he worked. That case had dominated the tabloid headlines and local news shows for weeks following her death. The other was the trial of two men, Troy Hendrix and Kayson Pearson, for the rape, torture, and murder of another young woman, Romona Moore.
Although Ms. Moore’s murder occurred almost three years before Ms. St. Guillen’s, it had only recently become famous. During their trial, her killers attempted to escape from the courtroom, using plastic knives to stab one of the defense attorneys and making a grab for a court officer’s gun. They were unsuccessful, but their efforts gave Romona Moore something that being abducted, raped, and murdered hadn’t provided: attention.
Though Romona Moore and Imette St. Guillen shared tragically short lives and sickening deaths, their backgrounds were quite different.
Imette St. Guillen was American-born, from Boston, living on Manhattan’s west side and attending graduate school.
Romona Moore was black, poor, and an immigrant. She was East Flatbush by way of Guyana, rather than Williamsburg by way of a trust fund, so even her Brooklyn pedigree was not newsworthy. There had been some notice granted due to her family’s grassroots campaign to locate her while she was missing. But as news items go, the discovery of her dead body was just a blip on the radar.
On the day of Darryl Littlejohn’s arraignment in one part of the courthouse, a jury in another part returned a guilty verdict in the Romona Moore case, convicting the murderers Troy Hendrix and Kayson Pearson.
I was standing in front of the building, waiting to meet a friend for lunch, when Romona Moore’s mother, Elle Carmichael, stepped outside with a few family members and friends. Dozens of reporters and cameramen surrounded her, calling out questions and requests for comments.
Ms. Carmichael composed herself, then spoke. She talked about her relief that the verdict had been what it was, and about her anger and frustration with the police department and the media. She sounded angry and frustrated; she sounded tired, although calm and resolved. She had been through an ordeal that few of us will ever have to endure, and finally, at the end of it, someone was paying attention to her daughter.
While she was speaking, the family of Imette St. Guillen emerged from the building. Almost every reporter immediately turned and walked away from Elle Carmichael. Her voice faltered a bit as she watched the parade of microphones and bobbing cameras moving away from her. Then she continued, concluding her statement to the four or five journalists who remained. When she finished, they too were gone in a flash, eager to catch up to their colleagues. Ms. Carmichael and her family were alone on the sidewalk.
I will never forget the look on Elle Carmichael’s face when she felt that, finally, her daughter was getting the notice she deserved. And I will never forget the look on her face when that moment ended. Sometimes the snapshots will break your heart.
No roses for Bubbeh
by Reed Farrel Coleman
Coney Island
I once wrote that there were certain comforts to middle age. That just surviving till forty imbues you with a sort of weary serenity. You don’t sweat the small things quite so much. You’ve survived acne, probably marriage, maybe kids, and surely jobs you’ve hated. You realize that neither the loss of love nor your hair is apt to be fatal and that the kind of panic you felt every day in high school was now a distant, almost fond memory.
There is another aspect of middle age, however, that is of no comfort at alclass="underline" things fade. As your eyes lose focus, so too does your memory. You can no longer recite the entire roster of the ’69 Jets or recall which games Art Shamsky started in the ’69 World Series. For that matter, you have trouble remembering kids on your block or who your seventh grade history teacher was. Until forty, your memory is like a vivid and complete jigsaw puzzle. About ten years later, pieces have gone missing. You scramble to replace them. Those replacements you do find are never quite as vivid. Others are lost forever.
Some things in a man’s life must not fade: the feel of his newborn children in his arms, his first Little League home run, his first taste of a woman. There is pain too that must not be forgotten: the agonizingly slow death of his mother, for example, or the murder of a nameless stranger.
For most of my early life, criminals were just a colorful part of Coleman family lore. The gangster, murderer, and world-class sociopath, Dutch Schultz, né Arthur Flegenheimer — a maniac who made even a homicidal lunatic like Ben “Bugsy” Siegel seem judicious — had a wicked crush on my bubbeh (that’s Yiddish for grandmother). Apparently, my grandfather, my zaydeh, whose blue eyes I inherited, owned a small grocery store in Hell’s Kitchen when they first came over from the old country. Back then, Hell’s Kitchen was part of Dutch Schultz’s territory and he ruled with an iron fist. Every business — Jewish-owned or not — was forced to pay heavy protection money. But because Dutch was so smitten by my bubbeh, he never made my zaydeh pay up. For a time, the story goes, Dutch sent roses to my grandmother every day.