Politics Archives - Page 2 of 4 - The Atavist Magazine (2024)

Red Fawn Fallis found love and purpose on a Dakota prairie. She thought it would save her life. Instead, she went to prison.

By Elizabeth Flock

A statue of a pioneer family stands in front of the state capitol building in Bismarck, North Dakota. A mother cradles a baby, a son leans against a wagon wheel, and a father peers into the distance. The monument represents the settlers who built lives on the banks of the Missouri River after staking their claim to land occupied for centuries by the Mandan Indian tribe. The descendants of white pioneers now spend their days in Bismarck’s banks and office buildings, pool halls and bingo parlors, Chinese buffets and five-and-dimes. Americana is ubiquitous here. Many trucks and Harley-Davidsons cruising the city’s streets are emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes.

The Burleigh Morton County Detention Center, a concrete complex next to a field of heat-withered grass, flies the flag, too. On a July morning in 2018, I drove there to interview a prisoner whose story is uniquely American, though perhaps not in the way many North Dakotans like to think of the word. Her name is Red Fawn Fallis, and her 2016 arrest was the kind of dramatic incident that splashes across the media and is replaced just as quickly—a story of limited interest to most people, but a crisis for those affected by it. In Indian country, including much of North Dakota, this pattern is all too familiar.

Fallis is a member of the Oglala, one of seven bands of the Lakota Sioux. In photos that I’d seen she was striking, with a steady gaze, a sweep of black hair, and a closed-mouth smile that suggested she knew something others didn’t. A tattoo of a galloping horse covered the left side of her neck. At the jail, a clerk directed me to a back room, where a row of stiff plastic chairs faced what looked like pay phones with video screens. When one of the screens crackled on and Fallis’s face appeared, she looked different. She wore an orange jumpsuit and had tired, swollen eyes; she seemed worn out by the 21 months she’d spent in custody. When she spoke, her voice was soft but certain. She was sure of the story she wanted to tell.

I asked her to take me back to October 2016, to the day she was accused of firing a gun at a police officer. Instead, she began a few months earlier, when she met a man named Heath Harmon. As she said his name—Heath—her tongue stuck between her teeth for an instant, as if encountering a bone. Harmon had stopped Fallis short the moment she met him, with his clean-cut good looks and his offer to help as she and thousands of other protesters fought the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. She’d fallen in love—the foolhardy, let’s-not-wait kind, full of promises and gifts. “Flowers, the whole nine yards,” Fallis said. She shifted in her chair and continued. “I’ve always believed in love. I still do.”

There was no way to understand Fallis’s incarceration without first understanding her love for Harmon. And there was no way to understand that without going back even further, to the first love Fallis ever received.

Fallis was born tiny and early in 1979, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, a poor, windswept community in South Dakota. Her mother, an alcoholic, gave Fallis to a cousin, hoping the little girl would have a better life. The cousin was Troy Lynn Yellow Wood, a broad-shouldered woman with dark hair and a patch of silver. She had two children already and welcomed Fallis as her own.

Yellow Wood, who lived in Denver, was a force in the American Indian Movement, an activist group founded in 1968 to fight for indigenous rights. In its early days, AIM was dominated by men, but Yellow Wood made herself known. She had an open heart and an open home, a sturdy one-story brick house with extra room. She gave acquaintances money when they needed help getting on their feet and offered AIM activists and single mothers a place to crash. She lived like a single mother herself, in a relationship with a man who drove trucks and only came around every once in a while.

From an early age, Fallis was outgoing and mischievous. She liked playing pranks on her adoptive mother, doing impressions, and imitating scenes from movies. She developed a big heart like Yellow Wood’s. Once, she tried to collect winter coats for people in Ethiopia, until she learned that Ethiopia was a tropical country and people there didn’t often need coats.

Fallis accompanied Yellow Wood to important indigenous ceremonies, including the sweat lodge, or inipi, and the sun dance, a sacred, closely guarded ritual. The U.S. government had outlawed the dance in the late 19th century as part of a widespread effort to erase Native culture. The ritual wasn’t openly practiced until the passage of the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which guaranteed the right of Native people to express their beliefs.

Yellow Wood wanted Fallis to be connected to her ancestors’ traditions, including their spirit of defiance. The Oglala Lakota were the people of Crazy Horse, the legendary leader who helped his people win the Battle of the Little Bighorn—or the Battle of the Greasy Grass, as the Lakota call it—against the Seventh Cavalry, led by George Armstrong Custer, in 1876. (Crazy Horse was killed the next year, bayoneted in the back by a U.S. soldier.) Yellow Wood took Fallis to AIM events, where people delivered fiery speeches about broken treaties and failed government policies. Fallis grew up hearing about the dramatic 71-day standoff between Native activists and federal agents in 1973 at Wounded Knee. When she was just six, she marched at the front of an AIM rally in Denver attended by thousands of people. Sometimes her political awareness led to problems at school, like the time a teacher told her class that Christopher Columbus had discovered America and Fallis was sent to the principal’s office for insisting otherwise.

By the time Fallis was 14, she’d started seeing a counselor, a kindly, soft-spoken man who knew a lot about the challenges Native children often face—high rates of ADHD and fetal alcohol syndrome, for instance, but mostly trauma, the intergenerational kind that passes through families and communities as if they’re rows of dominoes. Fallis kept a dream journal and shared it with her counselor. Once, she dreamed that she was caught up in a swirling vortex, headed for destruction. She thought it represented the sad fact that all her friends were starting to use hard drugs and get into trouble. She understood why. Home life could be hard. For all her generosity, Yellow Wood was in an abusive relationship with a man who drank. She worked all day, and strangers cycled through her house. When Fallis was nine, she was abused in an incident she still can’t bear to talk about. The counselor believed it left her with post-traumatic stress disorder. Other Native kids whom Fallis knew faced similar struggles. “We couldn’t help but be interested by the streets,” she said.

Fallis fell for bad men. Her first boyfriend beat her. People said his spirit was tormented, and she broke it off. He killed his next girlfriend and himself, leaving Fallis to wonder if she could have done something to help or stop him. She began dating another man, wooed by his charisma, and learned that he was a member of a gang. Yellow Wood worried that he might kill Fallis; he’d already left her with bruises. Without a stable father figure or a good model of a romantic relationship, though, Fallis justified staying with him. “It helped me to say, ‘That stuff happens in relationships,’” she said.

One afternoon in 2003, Fallis and her boyfriend were driving to a 7-Eleven, and a car wouldn’t let them pass. According to a police statement, her boyfriend argued with the car’s driver, then pulled out a pistol and fired at him. The man was wounded, and Fallis pled guilty to being an accessory to a crime, a felony. She served 30 months on probation. The relationship ended.

Fallis then met a man with a hard-set jaw and closely shorn hair. They got married when Fallis was in her twenties. She was open with him, even telling him about the trauma she’d faced as a child, which felt like a heavy stone lodged deep inside her. The night after she shared the story, she dreamed that a friend took her away on horseback—they galloped off with stars at their heels. It inspired the tattoo on her neck.

Her husband turned out to be unpredictable, like the rest of the men in her life, and she left him. She wondered why the same thing kept happening to her. She didn’t want to be a woman who cycled through toxic relationships.

Then Fallis learned that Yellow Wood was dying of cancer. She set aside her troubled romantic life and moved in with her adoptive mother. She offered to look after Neiamiah, one of Yellow Wood’s great-grandsons, who was wild and playful like Fallis had been as a child. Yellow Wood stared death in the face and said that she wasn’t afraid.

Not long after Yellow Wood died in June 2016, a friend called Fallis and told her that people were protesting the construction of an oil pipeline in North Dakota. Fallis knew that if Yellow Wood were alive, she would have gone. Fallis threw some clothes in a bag and left within the hour. Family members would join her later. A double rainbow appeared behind her car as she drove north from Colorado, heading toward the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. It seemed like a sign.

Standing Rock is one of the largest reservations in America, covering roughly a million acres of land and straddling the border between the Dakotas. When Fallis arrived, she found people camped out on the vast prairie in tepees, sleeping bags, and tents. Their only neighbors were a herd of bison, their only view the Missouri River and the open sky. Their goal was to halt construction of the $3.8 billion pipeline, which would carry oil from the Bakken and Three Forks fields of North Dakota to central Illinois, a distance of some 1,200 miles.

To many Native Americans, the Dakota Access Pipeline was a nightmare foretold: An old Lakota prophecy had warned of a black snake that would enter the earth, poison its water, and destroy the world. Protesters feared that the pipeline would contaminate the water supply of the Standing Rock Sioux. Because it would traverse unceded land—territory that was never granted to the United States by treaty—it might also desecrate sacred sites, including ancient burial grounds.

Demonstrators were up against a conglomerate led by Energy Transfer Partners, a Dallas-based company worth tens of billions of dollars, as well as law enforcement and private security forces. When they first set up camp, in April 2016, the protesters had no visibility or political clout. What they lacked in might, however, they made up for with willpower. They demanded that the Army Corps of Engineers consult the Sioux before giving the final go-ahead for Energy Transfer Partners to break ground. The tribe filed suit against the Corps, asking for a temporary injunction that would stop the project. (A district court judge denied the motion.) Native youth started an online petition that attracted more than 150,000 signatures. A group of them ran 2,000 miles from North Dakota to Washington, D.C., to deliver the document to lawmakers.

Then Standing Rock went viral, evolving from a protest into a movement. Using the hashtag #NoDAPL, demonstrators calling themselves water protectors invited other Native Americans and their allies to North Dakota. Over the summer of 2016, the number of protesters exploded into the hundreds, then thousands; people bedded down in a network of camps that spun off from the original one. Participants streamed demonstrations on Facebook Live and other platforms. Celebrities including Leonardo DiCaprio and Rosario Dawson voiced their support for Standing Rock’s goals.

Spirituality was central to camp life. Native prayers were spoken at every meal. Protesters held pipe ceremonies and other rites to invoke divine protection of the Sioux’s water. Sweat lodges made of canvas and red willow branches popped up on the prairie.

When she first saw Fallis at camp, Phyllis Young, an AIM member and a leader at Standing Rock, was shocked. Young had been one of Yellow Wood’s close friends, and Fallis was her niece. (Among the Lakota, some familial relationships are chosen and considered at least as strong as a blood bond.) Young knew how much Fallis, then 37, had endured in her life. Fallis slipped a necklace of Yellow Wood’s over Young’s head. “She’s not here, so I’m here. I’m here to stand beside you,” Young recalled Fallis saying. The women hugged for a long time.

Young is a no-nonsense Native elder who often inspires deference in younger activists. Fallis, though, was comfortable making demands. She asked Young to help her procure supplies—Band-Aids and washcloths, for instance—for the children at camp. Fallis borrowed an ATV and became a fixture on the red four-wheeler, delivering packages and shuttling people to and from demonstrations. She also worked security, keeping an eye out for guns, alcohol, and drugs, which elders had banned at Standing Rock. “I learned how to rough it. I helped everywhere I could—in the kitchen, with donations, unloading firewood,” Fallis said. “Every night we went to sleep with the sound of prayers on the microphone, and every morning we woke up to them. At camp you carry that beauty within you.”

Life wasn’t trouble-free, particularly as the ranks of protesters swelled. Camp could be noisy, even chaotic. Respites were as hard to come by as showers. More worryingly, in the late summer police sent to monitor Standing Rock began to crack down on demonstrators. They arrested people on charges like criminal trespassing. Fallis used the ATV to transport injured water protectors away from encounters with cops.

One day, Fallis was put in plastic handcuffs and charged with disorderly conduct. She claimed that she was just pouring water onto dirt as part of a protest. When the police released her from custody, she went back to camp, where she felt newly vulnerable. Then Heath Harmon arrived.

The weather on the Great Plains can be extreme. Too hot, too dry, too windy, too wet. It was often that way at camp—too much of something. But Fallis and Harmon met under clear, sunny skies on August 17, 2016.

The previous day, Harmon’s brother, Chad, had married Phyllis Young’s daughter at the Morton County courthouse near Bismarck. To outsiders the match was an odd one, given that Chad was a police officer with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which was frequently at odds with AIM, and Young’s family was prominent in the movement. The ceremony was small and unadorned. Harmon, with the good looks and affability to suggest he didn’t mind being single at 44, served as a witness. Fallis, busy at camp, didn’t attend.

After the ceremony, the two families celebrated together at a restaurant, where Harmon talked with John Reyna, the bride’s brother, about hunting and the outdoors. Eventually, the conversation shifted to the pipeline. Everyone in Bismarck was talking about it. Harmon was taking college classes in preparation for working in the oil industry, and he had questions about the protests. Wouldn’t a pipeline create jobs and bolster the economy? Reyna, a tranquil, sturdily built man, invited Harmon to camp to see it for himself.

As Harmon drove south from Bismarck along Highway 1806, which follows the curves of the Missouri River, the city’s bland buildings and manicured lawns gave way to rolling hills and steep buttes. Eventually, the main resistance camp, Oceti Sakowin (Seven Council Fires), came into view: a sea of tepees, tents, cars, and people. Sage and sweetgrass burned. Horses pawed at the ground in makeshift pens. Signs reading “Mni Wiconi” (Water Is Life) were everywhere.

Shortly after his arrival, Harmon met Fallis. She was charmed by the newcomer. Harmon was trim and muscular. He kept his shirt neatly tucked into his khaki pants and wore glasses and a baseball cap, giving him the look of a young suburban dad. He wasn’t wearing a ring.

“Who are you?” Fallis asked, flirting a little.

Harmon told her he was also Native, raised on land that sat above rich oil reserves on the Fort Berthold Reservation in western North Dakota. He’d since moved to the Bismarck area, where he lived with his mother. Reservation roots, city upbringing—just like Fallis. She watched as Harmon made himself useful unloading firewood from a truck. “It was so nice that someone was willing to be helpful. Not just to me, but everybody,” she said.

That night she and Harmon went together to a concert at camp. Afterward they walked alone on the prairie. Like Fallis, Harmon understood how it felt when life didn’t go as planned: He’d been married and divorced. He’d had a drinking problem and was now sober. Unlike other men Fallis knew, he seemed to have matured from his experiences.

After their first encounter, Harmon began making regular trips from his home to camp. Fallis loved when he cracked up at her jokes and told her he liked her smile as much as her wit. He didn’t participate in the demonstrations against the pipeline, but he listened attentively when Fallis talked about why the fight mattered so much. He offered to bring her to the city to shower and do her laundry.

Fallis felt like she should resist his interest, worrying that it was too much too soon. But every time she backed off, according to several of her friends, Harmon would show up at camp with a gift: a beaded purse, boots, a sweater, a single rose. One friend remembered a day when Harmon played a wooden flute long used in Native courtship. It emitted a haunting sound. “I thought, OK, I have not heard a man play a flute in a really long time,” the friend said. “He was totally setting the bar for everyone.”

Most important to Fallis, Harmon won over her family. One of her aunts said that it was like she’d won the jackpot, because Harmon was so generous and kind. An uncle was overjoyed that she’d found someone who treated her with respect.

Fallis decided to let Harmon in. When he called her “baby,” she said it back. Soon they were sleeping in the same tent. One day, Fallis showed Phyllis Young a diamond ring on her finger. She said that she and Harmon were engaged. In a girlish, exuberant voice, Fallis announced, “Auntie, I’m in love.”

Not everyone was enamored with Harmon. Karen Antelope, a woman with salt-and-pepper hair and blue-lined eyes, didn’t trust him from the start. She and Fallis had met at camp when Fallis asked her for a cigarette. Fallis introduced herself and her heritage, hollering, “Lelelelele!”—a Lakota cry. “Gee, you’re a feisty Oglala aren’t you?” Antelope replied, laughing. The women became inseparable after that.

Antelope thought Fallis seemed insecure when Harmon was around. Harmon, meanwhile, clung to Fallis like a burr on a shoe. Antelope was suspicious of Harmon’s constant gift giving. After a friend joked that Harmon should give Fallis’s family horses and a saddle if the relationship was serious—an old Sioux custom—he came to camp with a beaver-pelt hat and high-back saddle for one of Fallis’s relatives.

Antelope grew more concerned about Harmon when he issued warnings. In September 2016, he began to tell Fallis that she was in danger. By then camp was swollen with people. A district court judge had recently denied the Sioux’s request to halt the pipeline project, and Energy Transfer Partners was preparing to start its work. Water protectors were taking more desperate measures: setting up road blockades, chaining themselves to construction machinery. Police came to demonstrations dressed in riot gear and made dozens of arrests. North Dakota’s governor activated the National Guard, and protesters could hear a surveillance helicopter buzzing overhead all day. In one dramatic incident, private security firms hired by Energy Transfer Partners deployed guard dogs and pepper spray on demonstrators, leading to several injuries. Security at camp was deteriorating, Harmon allegedly told Fallis. She needed to protect herself.

Fallis saw the change at camp as well as anyone. When she’d first arrived in August, she’d been friendly with the police, offering them tobacco and joking around. In September, she was arrested a second time while protesting. In her recollection, plastic handcuffs were pulled so tightly around her wrists that they went numb. She heard officers shouting at female protesters, telling them they were stupid for bringing children to camp. Fallis felt differently. This is how you teach your children to stand up for what’s right, she thought.

At Harmon’s urging, she agreed to move to a quieter part of camp, where one of her relatives had a trailer. Soon after, according to Fallis, Harmon began offering to help with the resistance. Until then he’d been a bystander, supporting Fallis from the wings. Now he seemed to want to get involved. Fallis found it strange when he suggested risky actions. One day, Harmon offered to drive Fallis and two friends on a reconnaissance trip along the pipeline’s planned path. Mia Sage Stevens, who was in the truck, remembered Harmon suggesting that the women tear up the flags that marked the route—the sort of behavior that might draw backlash from the police or private security. “He said we could do it at nighttime, and we just blew it off,” Stevens said.

Then came the suggestion that Fallis and her friends arm themselves. Karen Antelope remembered Harmon approaching her one day as she was repairing a fence and saying, “We gotta secure our territory here.” He offered to bring metal poles to bolster the fence—along with ammunition.

Harmon brought up the subject again, Antelope claimed, after she mentioned a security guard who’d raced around camp in a vehicle, scaring her. Antelope recalled Harmon suggesting that he provide her and Fallis with weapons. “It made me wonder why he was so gung ho with guns,” Antelope said.

Harmon’s radical turn worried Fallis, too. What was motivating him? He used to give her flowers and play love songs; now he showed up with items like a gas mask and a bulletproof vest, saying that she needed to protect herself. When Harmon first told her she should have a gun, she was unnerved.

“What are we going to do with guns here?” Fallis asked.

“You can bury them,” she remembered Harmon replying.

“I’m a felon. I can’t have guns around,” she said, referring to her 2003 conviction.

Antelope saw the new version of Harmon as pushy. He and Fallis “fought all the time, argued all the time,” Antelope said, “because she talked to everybody, many of them males, and he didn’t like that at all.” In a way, his behavior didn’t surprise Fallis: Of course their love had been too good to be true. Of course she hadn’t hit the romance jackpot. The progression of their relationship was typical of every bond she’d ever had with men. By October, Fallis was considering breaking things off.

She became more convinced that it might be time to move on as she got to know an activist and musician named Cempoalli Twenny, who’d dropped everything in Los Angeles, where he lived, to come to Standing Rock. Twenny wore a goatee and dreadlocks and made reggae-inflected music. He was a longtime advocate for Native rights and saw connections between the pipeline protests and other social struggles. He often played his guitar at camp, and he shared events from Standing Rock on social media.

Still, when Harmon’s birthday arrived in mid-October, Fallis tried to salvage what they had. She baked a cake and threw a party, but the mood at the gathering was tense. Around the same time, Fallis and Harmon fought at his mother’s home, a suburban split-level. Harmon’s brother, Chad, was there, and he chided Harmon for bringing Fallis to the house.

“Why don’t you tell her the real reason you’re at camp?” he asked.

When Fallis asked Harmon what his brother meant, he brushed her off. He said Chad was just accusing him of being at camp to “chase tail.” Fallis wondered if Harmon was telling the truth. She’d been taught never to lie. Lying was what the government did. It wasn’t something that should happen between lovers.

On October 27, Fallis went for an early dinner at a steakhouse with Harmon and his mother. She didn’t feel like having a good time. Things with Harmon were still rough, and it was Yellow Wood’s birthday, the first since her death. After the meal, Fallis checked her phone and saw worrying messages and posts. “No more excuses get to Standing Rock now,” one read. “The next seven generations are depending on you.”

Twenny, the musician Fallis admired, was live-streaming a demonstration that had just started at camp. “We’re being surrounded,” he said, turning the camera from his face to take in what was happening around him. Some 300 police officers had arrived wearing riot gear and carrying guns and batons. Armored vehicles rolled in behind them. They had instructions to clear out demonstrators along Highway 1806 who were directly in the pipeline’s path, which law enforcement considered a safety issue. “They have loaded guns, they have live ammunition,” Twenny said. “It’s time to rise up.… Pray hard, stand strong, this is ground zero, this is treaty land, this is our land.”

Fallis felt a sharp stab of guilt and panic as she scrolled through the news. The whole point of coming to Standing Rock was to honor her mother. Now, on the most critical day of the fight, she wasn’t there. She told Harmon they had to get to camp right away.

They sped south to Standing Rock and stopped at the trailer where they’d been staying. Fallis grabbed a fire extinguisher and gas mask in case fires broke out or the police used pepper spray. She put on a camouflage baseball cap, shouldered a backpack, and told Harmon she’d ride her ATV over to where the eviction was happening. Harmon agreed to drive a pickup and meet her there. Just before she left, Fallis later alleged, Harmon told her to take a large black and gray jacket. She was wearing a coat already, but he insisted that she needed another one to keep warm while zipping through the autumn chill on her four-wheeler.

As she rode, Fallis noticed that the coat felt lopsided. It was heavier on one side than the other. There was something in one of the pockets.

That something was Harmon’s Ruger LCR, a .38 Special revolver so compact that firearms websites regularly vote it among the best guns for concealed carry. It weighs about a pound when loaded. According to Fallis, she found the gun when she put her hand in the pocket. In a split-second decision, she decided to leave the weapon where it was, rather than dispose of it before encountering police.

By the time Fallis arrived, the battalion of officers had already swept through camp, shouting “Time’s up!” as they ripped tents from the ground and made arrests. A private guard, chased by protestors into a pond, stood in the water brandishing an assault rifle. Fallis could see that a barricade the water protectors had set up to prevent police from gaining ground was in flames. Someone told her that a demonstrator on a horse had been shot; it wasn’t clear if he’d been hit with rubber bullets or real ones. Fallis, who’d found it difficult to show emotion even when Yellow Wood died, began to cry. She looked around for Harmon but couldn’t find him.

What happened next was chaotic, and Fallis’s memory of it is hazy. So are the recollections of other people who were there. Several videos of the incident, shot by bystanders and police, are the best evidence of what occurred. Fallis dismounted her ATV and approached a row of police near the highway, shouting through her gas mask. The officers stood in position to block protesters. Six armored vehicles, some with doors open like wings, were parked nearby. The yellow prairie stretched into the distance. Fallis’s words are mostly inaudible in the videos, but her tone and body language make it clear that she’s angry. She later remembered shouting, “You should be ashamed of protecting the pipeline instead of the water.” She pointed accusingly at the police.

Other protestors sang traditional songs or lambasted the cops. Young, Fallis’s aunt, watched the standoff. Neither she nor Fallis saw Harmon arrive in his truck. He parked away from the scene and walked in a wide arc across the highway.

About three minutes after she began chastising police, Fallis turned away from them. An officer tackled her from behind. She fell to the ground, landing on her back. Heavily armed police tried to flip her over onto her stomach. Other officers moved in to surround the arrest, making it hard for bystanders to see what was going on. “I remember a scuffle,” Fallis told me. “My gas mask was pulled off.” Her mind turned to the revolver in her pocket. “I thought, Crap, I’m a felon, and I’m with a gun,” she recalled.

One video shows a protester asking why the police were using such force on a small woman. Fallis, five feet three inches and 135 pounds, tried to wriggle out from under the men’s weight. Officers pulled on her arms, struggling to get her wrists into plastic handcuffs. Fallis pulled back. She kicked her legs. She contorted her body.

Somewhere near the ground, there were three rapid sounds: pop, pop, pop. They came from Harmon’s revolver.

Police arrested more than 140 people that day. The charges filed by the state of North Dakota against Fallis were by far the most serious, including preventing arrest, carrying a concealed weapon, criminal conspiracy to endanger by fire, engaging in a riot, and attempted murder. On October 31, four days after the protest, Fallis called Harmon from the Burleigh Morton County Detention Center. It was the first of more than two dozen recorded calls between them.

“Hi,” Fallis greeted him uncertainly. She said that she hadn’t seen the news in lockup and didn’t know what people were saying about her. Quietly, Harmon told Fallis that she’d made headlines on the East Coast.

“Like world news?” Fallis asked, her voice rising in panic. “Like national news?”

“Yeah,” Harmon said. At least one story included her mugshot, an awful photo: face puffy, eyes half closed, hair a mess. Harmon joked that it looked like someone had beaten her up. Fallis let out a wild, uncomfortable laugh. When Harmon began reading the article to her, she sobered.

The story reported that she’d fired three shots at police deputies as they tried to move illegal occupiers off private land. It quoted Fallis telling officers afterward that they were lucky she hadn’t shot them. The man who’d tackled her, Thadius Schmit, a cop from South Dakota, said that he’d arrested Fallis for “being an instigator and acting disorderly.” Although no one was hurt when the gun went off, the state’s criminal complaint against Fallis alleged that she’d been trying to kill an officer.

“Oh, my God, they said that I shot at the cops?” Fallis asked Harmon. She was angry now. In her telling, the gun had gone off by accident in the struggle with officers. She couldn’t remember if her hand had been in her pocket or not. She’d been restrained on the ground when the gun fired—how could she have aimed at anyone? “They are so fucking full of shit,” she said.

Harmon tried to keep reading, but she interrupted him. “I’ve heard enough, I’m disgusted, I don’t care,” she said. “They’re just going to fucking make an example out of me.”

Harmon was silent. He said nothing about witnessing her arrest.

“You’re free to walk at any time,” Fallis told him. “I probably would.”

A voice announced over the line that their time was almost up.

“I love you,” Harmon said.

On November 9, Fallis called Harmon again. She was confused. That day she’d learned that she was facing an additional charge—theft of property—because Harmon had reported his revolver stolen the day after her arrest. He’d told police that the weapon had gone missing from his mother’s house sometime in the past few weeks.

“You know that charge I caught today made my shit like ten times worse,” Fallis said.

“I can imagine,” Harmon replied.

“I’m not going to take responsibility for something I didn’t do,” she said. “I don’t know how to feel. I’m, like, over here fucking, like, wanting to fucking die of a broken heart, because I don’t know what the fuck is real or what isn’t anymore.”

Harmon paused before answering. “I’ll make it right,” he said.

The next day, Fallis called Harmon again. She asked why he hadn’t retracted the theft report yet. She was no longer upset; she was furious. Harmon tried to calm her down and said he’d talk to the police soon.

“If you’re not going to fucking tell the truth, then I will, about everything,” Fallis told him.

“Hey, I’m telling you the truth,” Harmon said.

“If you’re not going to tell them the truth about me,” Fallis continued, “and the fact that I didn’t take that from you”—meaning the gun.

Harmon told her that he couldn’t discuss the gun over the phone for legal reasons.

“It’s not OK, because there’s a lot at stake here,” Fallis said through tears. “My life.”

The call cut off.

Over the next few days, Fallis phoned Harmon several more times. In some conversations, he told her that he was sorry and that he loved her. Fallis seemed to believe him. In others, she pressed him. Had he made the report to hurt her? Or to save his own skin when he realized that a gun licensed to him had gone off during the arrest? It didn’t make sense to her. Harmon was taciturn, occasionally reassuring Fallis.

In early December, after Fallis had been in jail for more than a month, Harmon finally met with law enforcement. He didn’t try to exonerate Fallis, however. Harmon said that he’d kept the gun at camp and Fallis had known exactly where it was. He said that she’d loaded up a backpack before driving her ATV to the raid and hadn’t wanted him to look inside. Harmon described Fallis as having an “attitude” the day of the eviction. He said that she’d talked about “going to see [her] mother.”

As for the gun being stolen, Harmon admitted that that was a lie. It wasn’t the only one he’d told in recent months. For most of his relationship with Fallis, Harmon had been working as a paid FBI informant.

Harmon became a confidential source in August 2016. According to documents obtained by Fallis’s lawyers and first reported by The Intercept, Harmon’s task was “to collect information regarding potential violence, weapons, and criminal activity” at Standing Rock. Over the course of two months, he met or spoke with FBI agents at least half a dozen times and reported to his handlers that he’d developed a “sub-source” named Red Fawn, who told him that Native elders were opposed to belligerent actions against the pipeline. On August 22, Harmon estimated that less than 5 percent of the people he’d encountered were “aggressive” and said that he’d seen no firearms, explosives, or fireworks at camp.

The previous week, Morton County sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier had stated publicly that his office had received reports of guns fired at Standing Rock. Water protectors maintained that this wasn’t true. Kirchmeier declined to comment for this story, but Cecily Fong, a spokesperson for the North Dakota Department of Emergency Services, told me that law enforcement had been concerned about potential violence, including “protesters trespassing, marauding around the countryside, killing livestock.” (Fong has since left the department. The North Dakota Stockmen’s Association has stated that it wasn’t aware of any connections between protesters and attacks on farm animals.)

Still, Harmon’s reports focused heavily on the issue of weapons, as though they might turn up if law enforcement willed them to. He mentioned guns to the FBI at least four separate times, though he never claimed to have actually seen one. He also talked about members of AIM, including Phyllis Young. In late August, Harmon said that he’d observed Young addressing protestors and that he’d learned the type of car she was said to drive. An FBI agent wrote in a report, “The CHS [confidential human source] has a family connection as well as direct access to Phyllis Young and her close family and is well-suited to continue coverage of her activities and involvement with the anti-pipeline movement.”

Three weeks before the police raid and Fallis’s arrest, the FBI took Harmon off the books as an informant. According to an unclassified document, Harmon requested termination. The reporting agent noted that he would recommend Harmon as a source again. The FBI paid him $2,000 for his services. (The bureau declined to comment for this story.)

Fallis learned of Harmon’s affiliation while she was in jail. After all the phone calls, all of Harmon’s pledges that he’d make things right, Fallis got the truth from her lawyers.

Her first reaction was denial. She loved Harmon, and he’d been an ally of the water protectors. She’d grown up hearing from Yellow Wood about the surveillance and infiltration tactics the FBI used in the 1960s and ’70s, when it kept close watch over AIM as part of Cointelpro, a project that targeted dissident groups across the country. Fallis also knew that the trauma caused by FBI activity could lead to paranoia. In 1975, an activist named Anna Mae Aquash had been murdered by other AIM members over rumors that she was an informant. (Yellow Wood was one of the last people to see Aquash alive, because Aquash was using her home as a safe house.) Was Fallis misunderstanding or making assumptions about what Harmon had done?

Soon, though, the hurtful, dizzying truth clicked in. A flood of troubling details—maybe signs that she’d missed—washed over Fallis. Harmon’s many evasions. The guns he wanted to bring her. That question from his brother: “Why don’t you tell her the real reason you’re at camp?”

Soon after Fallis learned he’d been an informant, Harmon came to the jail for a visit. He drove with one of Fallis’s aunts, a woman named Theresa Burns. When Burns was ushered in to see Fallis, Harmon was told he couldn’t come. Confused, Burns asked Fallis when they were face-to-face what was going on. Burns remembered Fallis saying she was “freaking out” because she’d just learned that Harmon worked for the FBI. She didn’t want him anywhere near her.

“I have to ride back with him,” Burns said. “I’m scared.”

“Auntie, how do you think I feel?” Fallis asked.

Burns claimed that, after the visit, she confronted Harmon in the car. She asked why he’d set up her niece. According to Burns, Harmon began to cry. “What did you do? Did you plant it on her?” Burns asked, referring to the gun. Harmon said no, and that he’d told the police things about Fallis when their questioning began to scare him. Burns’s head spun. She was a longtime AIM activist, but she’d never heard of anything like this.

She told Harmon that she believed he’d planted the gun. According to Burns, Harmon didn’t reply. She described the remainder of the ride as “chilling.”

Fallis’s other family and friends found out about Harmon soon after that. Karen Antelope was so upset, she couldn’t bring herself to watch the video of Fallis’s arrest. John Reyna felt both betrayed and responsible, because he was the one who’d invited Harmon to camp for the first time. Young, who’d seen men hurt Fallis before, felt only disdain. “He threw her to the wolves,” she said.

Fallis vowed never to see or speak to Harmon again. He was the one who needed help and prayers, she told herself. He’d taken money in exchange for lies and used a woman he claimed to love. She, on the other hand, was Oglala. As she’d once told Harmon in a phone conversation, “I’ll stand proud, like a buffalo. I’ll stand and face the storm.”

In late 2016, the federal government denied Energy Transfer Partners a permit to drill under the Missouri River, effectively stalling the pipeline until President Barack Obama left office. Around the same time, North Dakota dropped its case against Fallis to clear the way for federal charges, including civil disorder, possession of a firearm and ammunition by a convicted felon, and discharge of a firearm in relation to a felony crime of violence. The last charge carried a mandatory minimum sentence of ten years. The maximum penalty was life behind bars.

Fallis put on a good face. News of her predicament was spreading over social media into the wider #NoDAPL movement. Family and friends, with the help of other Standing Rock activists, launched a Free Red Fawn campaign, and some 30,000 people would eventually join its Facebook page. “I’ve been getting messages about a lot of you being concerned and worried,” Fallis wrote on her personal account in January 2017. “I wanted to let you know that I stand strong, I stay in prayer, and I never falter from my beliefs as a protector of all things sacred.”

Supporters held fundraisers in Denver and Los Angeles to help pay her legal fees. Celebrities, including actors Mark Ruffalo and Shailene Woodley, spoke out in support of Fallis. A petition on Change.org to drop all charges against her drew more than 20,000 signatures. Some of Fallis’s supporters tried to track down Harmon, without success. He was no longer living at his mother’s house outside Bismarck, and none of his old phone numbers worked. In lieu of confronting him in person, people dug up information: Harmon had once been arrested for criminal mischief. His alcoholism had led to four DUIs in seven years. He’d racked up charges for driving with a suspended license.

Supporters began referring to Fallis as a new Leonard Peltier, referencing the AIM activist sentenced in 1977 to two consecutive life terms for shooting federal agents on the Pine Ridge reservation, where Fallis was born. Many believed Peltier was framed, especially after journalist Peter Matthiessen published his 1983 book, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, which alleged government misconduct in the case. Bruce Ellison, Peltier’s lawyer, came out of semiretirement to defend Fallis. A white Jewish man from New York, Ellison had decades of experience with Native clients, and if there was one thing he’d learned in that time, it was that the government thought it could get away with more in Indian country. “I believe that Red Fawn was set up that day to be arrested as a water protector with a gun,” he told me. “Law enforcement had been screaming about that in court and in the media, that water protectors were armed and had explosives, and yet no one had been arrested with a gun.”

In the pretrial process throughout 2017, Fallis’s legal team argued that law enforcement had had no probable cause to arrest her, because she’d merely been exercising her First Amendment rights. They pointed out that the gun belonged to Harmon, as did the coat Fallis was wearing when she was restrained by police. (According to Harmon, the coat belonged to Fallis, and he didn’t tell her to wear it the day of her arrest.) Her lawyers said that she hadn’t intentionally pulled the revolver’s trigger; how it went off was a mystery.

The prosecution, meanwhile, argued that she had meant to fire the gun and that in doing so she’d endangered lives. Police officers present at her arrest wrote in reports that, after the gun went off, Fallis laughed and said things like “All pigs deserve to die” and “If I wanted to kill you, I would have shot you in the head.” Fallis described these accusations as “totally false.” If it sounded like she was laughing, it was only because she was gasping for air after her gas mask was yanked off.

Officers’ statements sometimes conflicted. One said that after the shots rang out, he took the gun from Fallis’s left hand. Another said he saw the gun seized from her right hand. A third said the gun was loose on the ground. Three videos—one taken by a security drone, one shot by a bystander, and another recorded by cops on the scene—do not show Fallis firing the weapon.

Ellison was concerned that the government wasn’t sharing everything it knew about Harmon. The FBI sometimes gave informants a long leash to lead people to commit crimes. Honeypot schemes weren’t unheard of. Ellison found it suspicious that law enforcement had included Fallis in a chart of #NoDAPL activists of concern, created nearly two months before her arrest and not long after she and Harmon met. Ellison didn’t think Harmon’s description of Fallis’s behavior and comments before the eviction raid could be trusted. Harmon had lied to authorities at least once, about the gun being stolen. What would stop him from doing so again?

Fallis’s family agreed. “Those intelligence agencies knew who Red Fawn was, they knew who her mother was, they knew who her family was, and they knew their connections to the American Indian Movement,” said Glenn Morris, Fallis’s uncle. He believed that law enforcement had tried to identify Standing Rock’s leadership in order to neutralize it.

As Fallis’s January 2018 trial approached, it was clear that potential jury members might not see the case that way. At least 91 percent of Bismarck’s population is white, and many residents were opposed to the #NoDAPL demonstrations. A survey from the National Jury Project showed that the vast majority of eligible residents had already decided that arrested water protectors were guilty. Non-Native people sometimes referred to the protests as “the event,” their voices dropping low when they said it. An owner of a country-music bar near Standing Rock told me that his white customers no longer went to the reservation’s casino. A neighbor of Harmon’s mother said that law enforcement had held their temper at camp, but she couldn’t say the same for the other side.

Fallis’s lawyers petitioned the court to move the trial out of state. A judge instead allowed a change of location to Fargo, three hours east of Bismarck. Fallis’s lawyers argued that the jury pool would be similar, and as the trial date approached, Fallis grew nervous. Since October 2017, she’d been in a halfway house. It was better than jail; she could see the outside world, at least. But what if a jury put her away for life? Fighting to prove her innocence, she worried, might not be worth that risk.

The prosecution offered her a plea deal in which her most serious charge—firing the gun—would be dropped if she took responsibility for possessing a weapon as a felon and for the civil disorder charge. The government would recommend no more than seven years in prison. On January 18, 2018, a few days before Fallis was due to appear in court to give the prosecution her answer, she signed out of the halfway house to attend an adult-education program. She never showed up in class. When she returned to the house, it was a half hour after she was due to return. Fallis went back to jail.

Her family learned that she’d skipped class to be with Cempoalli Twenny, the musician from Standing Rock. Since Fallis’s arrest, Twenny had been championing her cause, pledging on social media that he wouldn’t stop saying her name until she was free. He’d also begun calling her as often as he could. Unlike Harmon and other men Fallis had dated, Twenny didn’t shower her with compliments, gifts, or promises. He listened quietly when she spoke and reminded her that each day was a new day. If she got upset or angry, he told her to pray. “He’s brought me so much kindness and unconditional love,” Fallis told me.

Fallis had needed to talk about the plea deal with someone she trusted. She’d chosen Twenny. The following Monday, Fallis appeared in court. She’d come to the only decision that made sense to her. The judge asked if she pled guilty. A long silence followed. Finally, Fallis answered, “Yes.”

Fallis’s sentencing was scheduled for June 25, 2018, the anniversary of the Battle of the Greasy Grass. Per the plea agreement, the prosecutors recommended a cap of seven years in prison, but the judge could go higher. Fallis’s team thought she would get at least three to five years.

The day of the hearing, her supporters gathered at a downtown Bismarck hotel. From there they planned to go together to the courthouse. They were fidgety with anticipation. Fallis’s aunts and uncles came, along with her sisters and friends. Neiamiah, Yellow Wood’s great-grandson, wore a “Free Red Fawn” T-shirt that featured a photo of Fallis, her fist raised. Twenny stood in the back of the room wearing a denim vest with “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse” stitched onto it. He had a newly inked tattoo on his hand: Red Fawn’s name.

Ellison arrived with bad news. The judge in the case was sick, and sentencing would be delayed. Twenny made a video call to Fallis in jail. He handed the phone to Neiamiah, who said “I love you” in a whisper. “I love you,” Fallis whispered back. Neiamiah flipped the phone’s camera around to show her everyone who was there.

“I’m kind of all talked out,” Fallis told the crowd, then took a deep breath. “I’m an Oglala Sioux Lakota,” she continued. “So I’m born free, I live free, and I’ll die free.” She ended with the old Lakota cry—lelelele!—and much of the room joined in.

Fallis was sentenced a few weeks later, on July 11, 2018, in Bismarck’s federal courthouse. When she arrived, she was shackled at her wrists and dressed in a traditional ribbon skirt decorated with sunflowers, her mother’s favorite. The defense asked for leniency, pointing out that President Donald Trump had recently pardoned two white cattle ranchers in Oregon who’d set fires that spread to government land. It called four witnesses, a last-ditch attempt to sway the judge to hand down less prison time. A neurophysiologist testified that if Fallis had had her hand on the gun, she might have accidentally discharged it in a reactive grip response to how the officers had pulled on her arms. Fallis’s childhood psychologist, to whom she’d showed her dream journal, spoke of her history of trauma and domestic violence, which left her vulnerable to further abuse and manipulation. Glenn Morris testified that the case wasn’t just about Fallis—it was about her community, too. “It’s often not the big traumas that affect us. It’s the million everyday things,” Morris said. “Being ridiculed for her name because she’s a Native woman, and on Columbus Day. Being told there was a war and she lost and everyone else won and get over it. Well, she’s not going to get over it. She has this history in her heart and in her blood.”

Fallis had the opportunity to speak. “I came to North Dakota in August 2016 with a good heart and a good mind after watching my mom battle cancer and battle life,” she said. “After her death, I wanted to move forward in a positive light. I helped anyone at camp that I could. It started a new chapter. And then the circumstances of Heath Harmon.”

It was the only time his name was mentioned in the hearing. Fallis said that she wouldn’t be sitting in the courtroom that day if it weren’t for him.

Judge Daniel Hovland sighed as he surveyed the room. “I’m not going to go down the path of trying to determine Ms. Fallis’s intent in the midst of the chaos,” he said. He called her supporters’ campaign for her release “much ado about nothing.” Then he announced Fallis’s sentence: 57 months in federal prison, minus time served.

The prosecutors nodded, satisfied with the verdict. Ellison bowed his head, knowing it was the best he could expect.

By the time Fallis was sentenced, oil was already flowing through the Dakota Access Pipeline. Mere days after taking office in January 2017, Trump had signed an executive memorandum to move forward with the project. The Sioux asked a district court for a restraining order to block construction, but the request was denied. The Army Corps of Engineers never completed a full environmental review of the project. It was an undeniable defeat for the protestors.

At Standing Rock, many of the water protectors—freezing, angry, and exhausted—packed up and went home. Those who remained eventually burned what was left of camp. They hoped the tall fires, at least, would symbolize their defiance. Stragglers were forcibly removed by law enforcement, and by the summer of 2017, some protesters had reassembled at other pipeline fights in Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Louisiana.

Harmon moved on, too. For seven months while I reported this story, he was a ghost. Phone numbers were disconnected, an email address was inactive, and he seemed to have no presence on social media. His lawyer didn’t respond to any of my phone calls. Word that he’d left Bismarck and gotten a job in oil fields led to stops across North Dakota at derricks and workers’ camps, but no one seemed to know his name.

A public-records search got a hit in Billings, Montana, where Harmon had reported his address at an apartment complex. When I got to the city in the middle of winter, the snow was thick and deep, blanketing everything in an eerie quiet. Harmon no longer lived at the address I’d found. At the Billings Police Department, I learned that he had a record—not for a crime he’d committed, but for one he’d reported. In July 2018, a few days after Fallis was sentenced in North Dakota, Harmon had called the cops because he’d found a child wandering the streets with no parents around. The address for him listed on the report was different than the one online. It led me to a tan house with wind chimes and a box of dog food on the porch. No one answered the bell, and a neighbor told me that Harmon was long gone.

A few weeks later, out of the blue, Harmon called me. He talked slowly and was tentative at first. He told me he wanted to set the record straight. He was trying to start a new relationship, and the woman didn’t want to date him after reading the negative media coverage of his involvement with Fallis and the FBI. He called while on a long drive from Bismarck to Wyoming, where the woman lived and where he hoped to win her over. We talked for nearly two hours.

He told me about how he’d wanted to be a Navy SEAL but was discharged from the Army due to an injury, cutting his career short. He’d worked a host of jobs: as a carpenter, doing construction, in oil fields. When the pipeline protests started, he was interested in collecting intelligence for law enforcement because he “didn’t want anybody to get hurt.” He explained that he’d believed in the protestors’ cause but was worried about potential violence, so he’d asked his brother for a number to contact the FBI. (When reached by phone, Chad Harmon said he didn’t give his brother a phone number for the bureau and didn’t help him get the informant job.)

Confirming the contents of the FBI documents I’d read, Harmon described his assignment as looking out for firearms, drugs, and criminal behavior at camp. He denied suggesting that Fallis and her friends destroy flags along the pipeline’s path. He said that he and Fallis were attracted to each other but that the relationship was never romantic. He had excuses for each act that might be construed as expressing serious interest in her: The saddle wasn’t a gift symbolizing his commitment to Fallis, it was just something he wanted her grandfather to have. He’d always liked to play the traditional wooden flute. And the ring—the one that Fallis had told Phyllis Young signified her engagement—was just plastic.

Harmon also said that he’d never told Fallis he loved her. I pointed out that in the jail phone recordings, he says “I love you” multiple times. There was a long silence. I could hear rain and the windshield wipers on Harmon’s car. “Love is a broad, broad word,” he finally said. “I was caught up in the moment, and I didn’t really mean it.”

He claimed that he’d never used his relationship with Fallis to help his work as an informant, but he admitted that he’d talked to the FBI about her, warning agents of her family’s AIM connections. He said that he quit being a confidential source when it made him uneasy; the Standing Rock protesters wouldn’t look kindly on a snitch. As for the gun, Harmon said he’d brought it to camp to protect himself and Fallis.

“How did she get the gun on the day of the raid?” I asked.

Another long pause.

“I don’t know, grabbed it,” he eventually said. “She knew where it was. I didn’t see her take it, but after I heard the shooting I put two and two together.”

As for his shifting story about the gun, he told me he’d lied about the weapon being stolen because he was afraid of being blamed for the shooting. He felt no responsibility for Fallis being in prison—she’d brought that upon herself.

“I think she had that plan to kill a police officer,” he said.

Harmon saw himself as a victim of media coverage that portrayed him as a traitor to Fallis and his culture. He paused and sniffed, as if he were about to cry. “This follows me around,” he said, “and there’s nothing I can do about it.” Soon after, we hung up.

The next morning, Harmon called me again. His talk with the woman in Wyoming had gone well enough, and he wanted me to forget everything he’d said. He told me that he’d made a mistake in talking. “It’s been like a shit storm all the way around,” Harmon said. “My trust in anyone is zero now.”

After Fallis was sentenced, she was scheduled to move to FMC Carswell, a federal women’s prison in Fort Worth, Texas, that housed nearly two thousand inmates. When I talked to her before the transfer, she seemed upbeat. Fort Worth was far from her family and friends but also from Bismarck, and she was grateful for that. She’d heard that the prison held other indigenous inmates, and she was excited to meet them. She said that she’d maintain her traditions behind bars, the way Yellow Wood would have wanted her to. She was going to become fluent in the Lakota tongue. Maybe she’d try to write a book about the struggles of Native American women—specifically, how men so often treat them like objects. “All I can speak on is my truth,” she said.

She told me about the vivid dreams she’d been having, just like when she was a kid. In one, the first man she ever dated came back to apologize for abusing her. He and Fallis sat across from each other at a table, then Yellow Wood came in and told him it was time to go. “That was a really beautiful dream,” Fallis said. “That relationship shaped a lot of my life with men.”

Once Fallis got to Carswell, I wrote to her several times but didn’t hear back. The only person in regular touch with her was Twenny. He called her in prison almost daily. On his Facebook page, he wrote that each new day was one closer to her release. During a visit in December 2018, they talked through monitors for 45 minutes before Twenny had to leave.

Just before Fallis’s 40th birthday the following February, she was put in administrative segregation. Twenny told me that the move was due to a prison scuffle. I asked him if he was worried, and he gave a small laugh. “Well, she won,” he said.

He told me Fallis was a beautiful soul and that he was confident they’d be together when she was released, which was then 774 days away. He told me how much he loved her.

A car crash inKentucky left a 13-year-old girl dead. A Sudanese refugee was charged with her killing. Could anyone get justice?

Margaret Redmond Whitehead

On the morning of May 23, 2015, on a highway in Scott County, Kentucky, two cars kissed and then pitched off the road.

The black Toyota Tacoma pickup was headed west on its way to a youth volleyball game. Emily Sams, 13 years old, with long brown hair and large, soft eyes, was perched in the back seat. She wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. Her father, Jeff, was driving. Her mother, Shella, was riding shotgun.

The other car, also going west, was a blue Toyota Camry. A refugee from Sudan named Mohamed Abdallah was driving. A willowy man with fine features in his early thirties, Abdallah and a friend, Mohammed Tom, were on their way from Baltimore to Louisville, where a community of Masalit—the men’s ethnic group, from the Darfur region of Sudan—had invited them to attend a meeting. It was at least a nine-hour trip, and Abdallah had been driving through the night to make the morning appointment.

At approximately 7:05 a.m., Abdallah’s sedan went into a yaw on I-64 West, moving forward and sideways at the same time. The car slid across the asphalt, leaving its lane and making contact with the Samses’ truck. Metal bit metal, and both drivers lost control of their vehicles.

Abdallah’s Camry spun down the side of the road until it hit a leafy thicket. After the car came to a halt, Tom pulled Abdallah through the driver-side door to safety. Abdallah stumbled toward the wrecked black pickup. Its front right side was caved in. Shella was still in her seat, and one of her legs looked unnaturally crooked. Behind the wheel, Jeff asked for his daughter. With no sign of a third person in the truck, Abdallah searched the debris.

He found Emily, dead, near a tree. Her neck was bent, her body twisted. Flashbacks of war shuddered through Abdallah’s mind: blood and dust, torched grass huts. He crumpled to the ground.

Emily’s grandparents, who were traveling to the volleyball game in a different car, arrived at the scene. A truck driver also saw the smoking Camry and pulled over to help. He found Abdallah collapsed near Emily. Abdallah would later remember the truck driver, a burly white man with a gut, saying “Let’s pray,” followed by a few questions.

The first was, “Where are you from?”

“We’re coming from Baltimore, Maryland,” Abdallah said.

The second: “I didn’t mean where in the U.S. Where are you from?”

“We’re from Africa,” said Abdallah.

And finally: “Are you Muslim?”

“Yes,” Abdallah said.

The truck driver walked away, toward the Samses’ pickup.

I first met Abdallah at Baltimore-Washington International Airport. It was October 2012, and I was in my second year as a resettlement caseworker for refugees. I waited near the arrivals gate, clutching a cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and making sure my International Rescue Committee badge was visible. Abdallah was one of seven Darfurian men landing that night. I had a tiny row house ready for them in the Baltimore neighborhood of Pigtown. Earlier that day, I’d picked up three rotisserie chickens for their first dinner in America.

I’d been working with Darfurian refugees for a few months, but Abdallah and three of the other men who arrived that night were the first Masalit people I’d met. Most historical accounts place the start of the genocide in Darfur in 2003, when the Sudanese government began a vicious campaign to eradicate or evict the region’s western ethnic groups. The Masalit, however, have been under attack since at least the mid-1990s, a peril of living in the borderland between Chad and Sudan.

Abdallah was never a fighter, but he witnessed violence. In 1996, when he was 14, his father was killed resisting members of the Janjaweed, a state-sponsored militia, as they robbed the family of cattle. When he was 16, the Janjaweed massacred 50 people in an adjacent town. When the militia came to Abdallah’s town in 1998 and cut down his uncle, the family fled to Chad. They returned briefly, but the attacks increased. They left Darfur for good in 2003.

A week after the men arrived at the airport, during orientation, I asked if they had any questions. This was a time when clients typically asked me to repeat the details of their transitional benefits, like food stamps. Abdallah, leaning on the table around which the men were sitting, raised a hand.

“How can I be a good neighbor in America?” he asked.

I looked at him, astonished. His brown eyes, ringed in thick, dark lashes, stared back at me. He held a pen in his long fingers, waiting to write down my answer. “Well,” I said, “you can help your neighbor take in the groceries.”

He scratched that down with his pen and asked another question.

“Where can I volunteer?”

Abdallah quickly became my point person for his house. He would consolidate the queries of all seven occupants and bring them to me. When a cantankerous roommate stirred up drama, I sat in the living room to mediate and Abdallah interpreted for me. Whenever the other men raised their voices, he rocked back and forth, his thin back curved tensely and his arms pressed against his chest. Conflict made him squirm.

Around the resettlement office, other people came to rely on Abdallah, too. He was easygoing, neat, eager, and humble. His English was good and getting better. In 2013, Abdallah joined a trip to hear President Barack Obama speak, and he took his role as an audience member so seriously that he showed up in a suit. He was dismayed when the president’s staff filled the event’s front rows with people wearing T-shirts and jeans. Abdallah, dressed to the nines, had to stand in back.

Once, he hit gravel while riding his bicycle and crashed. I met him at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Sitting in the pharmacy, I pointed to a TV screen where Obama appeared in a news segment. “Look,” I said. “It’s your friend.”

Abdallah glanced up, laughed, and waved his hand dismissively. “I’ve already seen the real one,” he said.

A few days before Christmas in 2013, Abdallah and one of his roommates caught me on the street in front of the resettlement office. Grinning, they pressed a plastic bag into my arms. It was a Christmas gift. Inside the crinkling white plastic was a pleather jacket from Marshall’s. On a small piece of notebook paper, the men had scrawled a message in blue ink: “Hi Maggie—this is small gift from Jamoa yahia. mohamed Abdallah. and Juma mohamed. Thank you so much your helping, and thank you agania.”

I wasn’t supposed to accept presents from clients. I couldn’t control when a wizened Nepali woman surreptitiously slipped a can of Coca-Cola into my purse, but I’d disappointed dozens of clients with apologetic refusals of thoughtful offerings. Still, I accepted the jacket from Abdallah. My designated time—eight months—as his caseworker was technically up. I’d been waiting for this moment, when I could become his friend.

One weekend in September 2015, after I’d left resettlement work to become a graduate student and writer in New York City, I was supposed to meet Abdallah in Baltimore. He’d agreed to be an interpreter for one of my reporting projects. “I can’t pay a lot right now,” I said when I called him. “Only $15 an hour. But I hope I can pay more later.” The rate didn’t faze Abdallah. “Of course,” he replied. I could tell from his voice that he was smiling.

I never saw Abdallah that weekend. By the time I arrived on Friday, he was in jail. Earlier that day, four officers had shown up at his door with handcuffs and arrested him. His alleged crime was causing the fatal car crash in Kentucky four months prior. He would stay in a Baltimore cell, appear in court, and then be transported to Kentucky to await trial. The news felt like a punch below the ribs.

The Darfurian community in Baltimore was in a frenzy. My host, a refugee named Abbas Yahya, spent the weekend fielding and placing phone calls, then racing out the door to emergency meetings to discuss the situation. For many community members, it wasn’t a question of what had happened—they were aware of the crash and that Abdallah had been coping with its aftermath—but of what came next. What would the American justice system do? How would it assign blame for what seemed to be a tragic accident? The last two Masalit clients of mine who’d gotten in trouble with the law were young men caught sipping beer in a public park. They had no idea why they kept receiving mail from the city government, and their unpaid fines soared to more than $900 each. Abdallah’s legal tangle was far uglier, and it was more confusing than anyone in the community knew how to handle.

Yahya dropped me at the bus station early Monday morning, three hours before I was scheduled to leave for home. He apologized and explained that he wanted to get to Abdallah’s court hearing on time. Yahya knew he could only watch, but he intended to be there anyway. Like several other Darfurians in Baltimore, he considered Abdallah his dearest friend.

Abdallah was charged with second-degree manslaughter and two counts of assault; according to his indictment, he “wantonly drove his automobile into the [Samses’] automobile.” He was transported to a jail in Kentucky and held on $75,000 bail. From home, I wrote Abdallah a letter. “I was in Baltimore the weekend you were arrested,” it began. It devolved into a patchwork of encouragement and advice.

Two weeks later, I received an envelope with a red stamp on it that read “INMATE MAIL UNSECURED.” Abdallah wrote that he’d always told other people to be safe and not get in trouble, “but today I’m here in jail.” Being behind bars “let people miss a lot of appreci oppertunity.” Still, he wrote, he was trying to stay positive.

Former resettlement colleagues of mine pitched in to help Abdallah. One happened to be living in Kentucky, where she was working on a farm. She visited Abdallah in jail. Another, Amanda Olmstead, then the Darfurians’ main contact in Baltimore, found a private defense lawyer in Kentucky who agreed to represent Abdallah. The lawyer’s name was Dan Carman, and he haggled Abdallah’s bail down to $7,500. Yahya and Olmstead split the cost, and Abdallah was released on house arrest.

He moved in with a Masalit friend in Louisville; he wasn’t allowed to go back to Baltimore. Abdallah’s life in Maryland, including recently procured jobs as a security guard and an interpreter, dropped away like freshly snipped strings.

For two and a half years, Abdallah waited as his case moved through the legal system. The only places he was allowed to go outside of his apartment were the Amazon fulfillment center where he worked and the courthouse. Carman tried to negotiate a plea deal, but the prosecution wouldn’t budge on the charges or drop the penalty lower than five to 15 years in prison. Under federal law, a conviction for a “crime of moral turpitude” or an “aggravated felony,” which includes manslaughter, would place Abdallah at risk of being deported. To stay in America, he would have to stand trial and hope for the best.

Abdallah’s plight stuck in the back of my mind like a deep splinter. I’d let myself forget about them, then I’d see his Facebook posts—a humanitarian plea about Darfur, a cheesy inspirational quote, a Merry Christmas message, a selfie—and feel a sick pang. I’d remember that there had been a collision, that now Abdallah was in Kentucky, that a young girl was dead.

The few times we spoke, Abdallah evaded my questions about his case. Thinking that he was embarrassed, or that maybe he didn’t know the answers because legal matters can be so bewildering, I didn’t press the issue. I saw him once during his house arrest, in October 2016, when research took me to Louisville. Abdallah arranged for me to interview a young Masalit couple at his home, where he could interpret. I felt a surge of relief knowing that I’d see him in person and ensure that he was intact.

Abdallah was living on the third floor of a brick apartment building. When I arrived, we sat in the living room, me on a chair and Abdallah on a sagging couch. He poured me syrupy tangerine-colored juice. Rubber slippers rested in a doorway, available to anyone who needed to walk on the gritty tiles of the kitchen floor or into a nearby bathroom that smelled like pools of cool, stagnant water. The hems of Abdallah’s pants, as always, were let out to compensate for his long legs. Even so, they didn’t cover his ankle monitor. The device cost him $10 a day.

As an interpreter, Abdallah seemed his usual self, focused and professional. But when we spoke between interviews, he was subdued. His English had regressed. His shoulders drooped. When I asked what was happening with his case, he looked askance.

“Some things are not finishing,” Abdallah said.

“Do you know when they’ll be finished?”

He muttered something about his lawyer. I changed the subject.

When I left, Abdallah bid me goodbye from his front walkway, the invisible force of his ankle monitor tethering him to his home.

Through the speakerphone, I heard anxious, distant voices. My cell phone sat beside me on a sofa cushion. I clutched a notepad. Everyone on the line that day in January 2018, including my spouse, Sara, sitting across from me, knew Abdallah and felt invested in his situation. Amanda Olmstead had scraped us together for a conference call because she finally had details about Abdallah’s trial. It was scheduled for February 19. Carman, the defense lawyer, had told Olmstead that he needed character witnesses. Specifically, he needed white, American faces—people who could speak to Abdallah’s upstanding nature and “mix in” with the Darfurians who would inevitably show up in the courtroom to support their friend.

Olmstead told us what else she knew. The girl who’d died in the crash was named Emily Sams; her identity entered into my consciousness as a dense weight. Shella Sams, who worked in special education, had been in a wheelchair since the accident. Abdallah would be tried where the incident happened, in Scott County.

Someone asked if Abdallah’s charges were, well, normal. Olmstead explained that, according to Carman, they were not. It was unusual for felonies like second-degree manslaughter and assault to result from a crash involving sober drivers who hadn’t done anything overtly reckless. Authorities in Scott County had also deemed Abdallah a flight risk, despite preexisting limitations on his movement. He was a refugee with a green card; he couldn’t travel abroad without applying for a special permit. Between work and volunteering, he was entrenched in his community.

A knot of confusion settled across the conference call. Why, then, was this happening? We could guess but didn’t know for sure. And if what we suspected was true, we needed to hear it.

Olmstead relayed in more detail what Carman had said about Scott County: It was predominantly white, and it was conservative. It also had a sour history with immigrant drivers. On the same day as Abdallah’s accident, an undocumented Mexican man hit and killed a bicyclist, panicked, and drove a few miles with the dying man’s body in the back of his truck, where it had landed after hitting the windshield. The police eventually stopped him. The driver, who had a history of DUI convictions, was stoned and drunk. He was given 35 years in prison. At his sentencing, the man asked the cyclist’s wife for forgiveness. “You took away my husband,” she responded. “You have no respect for life.” Later, to the press, she said, “Obviously, we would like him to be in jail for life.”

Carman believed that Abdallah likely wouldn’t get much sympathy from a Scott County jury. From my vantage point, it was easy to share his concern. In 2016, Scott County went for Donald Trump by 31 points. The president had since vowed to keep Americans safe by barring people like Abdallah from entering the country. Young male refugees—unencumbered by children and often the first of a population to flee a troubled region—and Muslim immigrants were under intense national scrutiny. When I mentioned Abdallah’s predicament to friends, many furrowed their brows in apprehension. “And his name’s Mohamed?” they asked.

Several people from the conference call blocked off the third week of February in our calendars; some of us planned to carpool to Kentucky. Olmstead reserved an Airbnb in Louisville, one with bunk beds and a pull-out couch. We debated who should take on the role of the white character witness: Who knew Abdallah best? Ultimately, Olmstead and I were cast.

I felt desperate for information, in much the same way that my clients did when I was a resettlement caseworker. Refugees often wanted any useful thing I could tell them, any crumb of knowledge. How strange now to be on the other side. I counted down the days until my first phone call with Carman, which Olmstead also joined.

“I think he’s innocent,” Carman told us. He was a fast talker, with what I assumed was a Kentucky accent. “It was just an accident. Mohamed didn’t do anything wrong.”

To be clear, Carman continued, Abdallah had been speeding. My brain fumbled with this information. The Abdallah I knew followed rules to a fault. The cognitive dissonance ground down the words even as I transcribed them.

The GPS from the Camry, now in evidence with Scott County, showed the car going around 19 miles per hour over the speed limit, which was 70, around the time of the accident. In the preceding hours, Abdallah had topped 100 miles per hour three times. Under Kentucky law, going more than 15 miles per hour over the speed limit may accrue several points on someone’s license, but it doesn’t necessarily qualify as reckless driving. In order to prove its case, the prosecution would have to establish that Abdallah had demonstrated flagrant, excessive disregard for highway safety—“wanton” behavior, in legal speak, that showed indifference to the lives of other people on the road.

“There’s a lot going on in the case right now,” Carman continued, including the fact that, on his advice, Abdallah had hired an accident reconstructionist named Henry “Sonny” Cease, a retired major for the Kentucky police. Abdallah had paid Cease $5,000 up front but hadn’t yet received the accident report, which made us nervous. There was no way to tell if what Cease had to say would help or hurt Abdallah’s defense.

It was possible, Carman continued, that a Scott County jury might vote for a partial conviction as a compromise. “These jurors, they’ll see Mr. Sams in the grocery store,” he said. A partial conviction, however, wouldn’t mitigate the risk of Abdallah being deported. “The law is on Mohamed’s side,” Carman explained, “but the equities are not.”

When I spoke to Abdallah the next day on the phone, knees curled to my chest on my sofa, his voice sounded tight and low. For the first time, he talked to me about the accident. Jittery, I wrote down what he said on a half-size yellow steno pad.

He told me about the Sams family. How he thought he remembered their truck bumping his Camry before he went into the yaw. How he staggered to the pickup after the crash. How he looked for the girl and found her. “It was so sad,” he said. “It was so, so sad.” He told me about the truck driver and the questions: Where did he come from? Was he Muslim?

Abdallah and I spent the rest of the call brainstorming people who might be willing to write a character-reference letter for him. When I hung up the phone, I stared at the list of 53 names—people who’d been my colleagues, interns, and volunteers. They’d helped Abdallah during his resettlement, rented to him, hired him, and worked alongside him. He remembered them all.

We had prioritized people we hoped would win over a Kentucky judge. Most had Anglophone names. Only a few were Darfurian men. My striving for this mix would repulse me in retrospect. Right then, though, I didn’t care. I wanted a bluegrass roster.

When I sent out a mass email to the people on the list, I took care to explain that their letters wouldn’t be used during the trial; I didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up. The letters would come into play if Abdallah were found guilty. The writers’ job would be to convince the judge to minimize the sentence so that Abdallah might be able to stay in America.

Days later, on another call with Abdallah and Olmstead, we ran through everything we didn’t know, including why Scott County didn’t have Abdallah’s official statement from after the crash and how Mohammed Tom, who was set to testify, would get to Kentucky from Washington State, where he’d relocated. “It was an accident,” Abdallah kept repeating. “It was an accident.” He said it so many times that I finally snapped and told him that he’d better pull it together and get his head in the game. Get a nice suit. A respectable haircut. Practice American eye contact.

After Abdallah hung up, I told Olmstead that maybe I shouldn’t have been so harsh. She said that it was fine, that it needed to be said.

I took phone calls from Darfurians who couldn’t come to the trial but wanted to submit letters for their friend. I prompted them with questions, transcribed what they said.

“Mohamed is a good man. He is always giving,” said Jamoa Yahia, on a break from driving an 18-wheeler to Texas. “Whatever he has, he gives to people who need it.”

“Everyone loves him,” said Hassen Ismail. He added that Abdallah’s mother, who was still living in a refugee camp in Chad, was heartsick and scared.

I drove to Baltimore one day, shooting down I-95, and for a moment screamed so hard I thought my voice might rake open the flesh of my throat. When I arrived, I sat on Abbas Yahya’s couch, helping him with his own letter. “All the Darfurians in Baltimore have been impacted by the accident because we miss Mohamed,” Yahya dictated. “It feels like all of us had an accident.”

I admitted to Yahya that I’d cried during a recent call with Abdallah. He looked at me aghast—appalled by the breach in my professional veneer. I felt viciously bored with myself. When I got back home, I tore through my closet, packing for Kentucky. I had googled “what to wear as a character witness” and scoured my wardrobe for warm, feminine clothing. Nothing black. Nothing too coastal elite.

Carman called me to go over what he would ask me on the stand. I hammered him with anecdotes I’d been stockpiling: Abdallah’s good-neighbor question, the incident of overdressing to see Obama.

“Those are good,” Carman said, “but I can only ask, like, three questions. How do you know him, can you form an opinion on his character—”

“Yes.”

“—and what that opinion is. And you can basically just say ‘high’ or ‘very high.’”

That was all I’d get: a fragment of a sentence.

I doubted that so brief a testimony could persuade a jury of my faith in Abdallah. At the very least, though, I could bear witness. I’d been at the airport for Abdallah’s beginning in this country. If it came to it, I would be there for the end.

Georgetown, the seat of Scott County, is a picture-perfect small city. The buildings on its main drag are old, made of brick, and so charming they belong in a movie. At the courthouse, security guards smiled and nodded as I passed through the metal detector.

I arrived toward the tail end of jury selection, which had taken up most of a Monday morning. More than a dozen of Abdallah’s friends and supporters were already inside the courtroom. As witnesses, Olmstead, Mohammed Tom, and I were relegated to a hallway, opposite two nearly exhausted candy machines and a lime-crusted water fountain. We wouldn’t be allowed to watch the trial until we’d testified.

In the early afternoon, a young woman emerged from the courtroom and came over to us. She was Kalee Collett, Carman’s assistant. She had wide, clear eyes and straight blond hair. Her serious expression made her look older than her 19 years. She brought good news: Jury selection had been rigorous. For starters, the defense asked potential jurors to identify any biases they held against people of a certain skin color or religion, along with whether or not they knew the Samses personally. The prosecution had unsuccessfully tried to cut a black woman, citing a previous speeding ticket and alleging that her profession—engineering—would make her a difficult juror. A Hispanic man and a white woman who said she was from South Africa had made the final panel.

After Collett left, we took turns standing up to peer through large, rectangular windows into the courtroom. I tried to take notes, balancing my notebook on the ledge. But there wasn’t much to record: I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying.

At 4 p.m., the doors opened and jurors filed out. They looked numb and exhausted. A young man with sandy hair touched his stubble, an absent look in his eyes. The only black juror’s steps were narrow, her shoulders pressed in, as if trying to take up less space. A middle-aged woman with thinning hair and gaunt cheeks looked like she could use a smoke.

In the car on the way to our Airbnb, friends who’d been in the courtroom caught me up on the day’s events. A couple of them worried over the defense’s opening statement. Carman, who with his beard and stocky frame reminded me of a short lumberjack in a nice suit, had sketched out Abdallah’s past for the jury while Collett passed Abdallah a box of tissues. The statement took less than five minutes to deliver. The prosecution, meanwhile, offered meticulous scene setting.

The county’s first witness was Scott Burgett, who had traveled to Kentucky from Overland Park, Kansas, where he worked for the tech company Garmin. Pat Molloy, the lead prosecutor, asked Burgett about the GPS device he’d helped design, which was the model in Abdallah’s car. Then Molloy had Burgett read some of the data pulled from Abdallah’s GPS. Minutes before the accident, the Camry exceeded 90 miles per hour. According to Burgett, the car’s speed at the moment of the collision was 89 miles per hour.

The next witness was deputy sheriff Jeb Barnes, the first officer to respond to the crash. A large bald man who seemed affable and honest, Barnes described how the Samses’ truck had rolled and flipped before hitting the edge of a concrete drainage ditch and going fully airborne. Emily’s body was thrown around, a loose item in a violently pitching cabin. Barnes believed that Emily died before the truck hurtled through the treetops, shearing off its roof. She was ejected through the gaping hole that remained.

Barnes said that, despite asking for one, he’d never received a statement about the accident from Abdallah. Olmstead mentioned that she found this odd: She remembered helping Abdallah write his police statement when he got back to Baltimore, before she knew how serious the situation was.

Barnes introduced into evidence several photos that he’d taken of the accident: skid marks, smoking vehicles, what he called “gouges in the earth.” His testimony had a poetic precision. He was the last witness of the day.

Abdallah’s allies gathered for dinner at his new two-bedroom apartment. The living room had a large central rug ringed with couches and chairs. The space wasn’t as shabby as the one I’d seen a year prior, but Abdallah hesitated when someone complimented him on his home. He said that every time he had friends over, his upstairs neighbors called the police.

Soon after arriving, I found Abdallah alone in the kitchen, free of his suit jacket and dress shoes, next to an oven where he was roasting a huge foil-covered dish of goat meat. I’d never seen him so thin. He was happy to have company. While he cooked, I leaned against the fridge. We joshed about how much sugar he put in his tea. We giggled at each other’s bad jokes. The mood was light and ephemeral, like the soft crackle of carbonation.

Abdallah spread black trash bags across the living room rug and brought out dishes: hummus, pita, bell peppers, store-bought chicken, the chunks of goat. He added bottles of water to the array, placing one in front of each guest. For the span of the meal, we let go of the trial. We stopped rehashing how the Garmin man had listed high speed after high speed. How frustrating it was that Abdallah’s official statement was missing. How Carman seemed fine but we needed Atticus Finch.

Midway through the meal, I disentangled myself from the packed-in knees, the arms reaching for food, to stand on a chair and take a few pictures on my phone. Too often we document only victories, the moments of joy but not of loss. No one takes candids at a funeral. The images I got were muted by the apartment’s low light, like something out of time. They already looked like artifacts I would unearth one day, after the verdict had been read and there were no more choices to be made.

On the second morning of the trial, Collett gathered Abdallah’s friends together in the hallway: seven young white women, a white, ponytailed man, and a dozen Sudanese men in sharp suits and pointy-toed shoes. She warned us that it was crucial for us to keep it together today. The Sams family was going to testify. Shella had undergone 25 surgeries since the accident. Both of Emily’s grandmothers would be there. Many people who took the stand would be grieving.

When the Samses were finished, the defense would begin its case. At some point, I would be called to testify. Carman eventually came into the hall to prep me. I had to be careful, he said, because if I went off script—did anything other than answer his exact questions as succinctly as possible—the judge could shut me down.

Carman looked a little rueful over this restriction. Then he raised his eyebrows. “Unless,” he said, “if they ask you a question during cross-examination. If they give you an opening when they talk to you, you can go on for as long as you want. If they do that, go for it.”

He gave a meaningful nod. I nodded back, feeling unequipped for a filibuster.

As the morning passed, a man and a woman stood against a nearby wall. They emanated quiet intensity. The man, who was paunchy, looked stressed. The woman leaned against him, draping her thin limbs out across his chest and belly. They murmured to each other in pleading tones. I thought I heard the words “this country” and “Christian.”

I turned to Olmstead. “I think that’s the truck driver,” I said quietly.

She nodded. She’d been listening, too.

Eventually, the man was called into court—Abdallah’s court—and he disappeared behind heavy double doors. When he emerged 30 minutes later, he and the woman boarded the elevator. We didn’t see them again. Soon after, a raised voice in the courtroom snapped me to attention. It was muffled but hard, and clearly female. The volume ebbed, then spiked again.

“I think it’s the grandmother,” said Aliza Sollins, an old colleague.

“I saw her go in,” Olmstead added.

“Is she shouting?” I asked.

A while later, I peered through the narrow window while Shella Sams testified. Her composure struck me: She bore a gentle dignity in the midst of a storm.

That afternoon, when I was called to testify, the air in the courtroom felt stiff yet mildly electric. A damp light filled the space. I walked the single aisle between the wall and the gallery, past the double row of jurors. A bailiff settled me into the witness area, which held a small, walled-off table with a chair. There was a microphone, but it was too far away for me to reach. I imagined how I must have looked, a poor fit for the witness box and sweating through my carefully selected clothes.

Carman asked me my name. I gave it.

“Just generally and briefly, how did you come to know Mohamed Abdallah?” he asked.

I explained that I had been his caseworker. I knew I was supposed to look at the jury, but my brain couldn’t override how weird that felt.

“And did you have dealings with him for a number of months or even years?”

“Yes, I had dealings with him most intensely for eight months, and then on, for about two years.”

“Have you been able to be around him enough,” Carman asked, “to be able to form an opinion of his character?”

“Yes.”

“And what is that opinion?”

I straightened my back and leaned toward the microphone. “Extremely high,” I said.

A portly prosecutor who was assisting Molloy rose to cross-examine me. “Were you at the scene of the collision that occurred between the defendant’s automobile and the Sams family?” he asked.

“No, I was not,” I said.

“So you don’t have any direct knowledge of that day or that incident. Is that correct?”

“That’s correct.”

“Nothing further.”

I was dismissed. Testimony delivered, I was allowed to take a seat in the gallery.

Carman called for Mohammed Tom. At my urging to trim his goatee and wear dress shoes, Tom had shaved his entire face raw and smashed his feet into a too-small pair of brown Oxfords. He plopped onto the seat and slouched into a casual posture that treaded the fine line between self-assuredness and arrogance. I wished he would sit up straight.

An Arabic interpreter pulled up a chair beside the witness stand. Tom could put on a show of English, but it was mostly a confidence act. Carman questioned Tom for 13 minutes, after which Molloy, an older man with short hair, glasses, and a white beard, stepped in for the cross-examination. I thought Tom seemed confused at times, which he tried to mask with pride, appearing certain of everything he said even when it clearly wasn’t correct. At least once, he answered a question before fully hearing what it was. I thought there might be a hitch with the interpretating, because Tom’s answers didn’t always match Molloy’s questions. Also, the interpreter’s dialect didn’t sound like Sudanese Arabic.

In a Southern drawl, Molloy asked questions about minute details: the placement of chargers inside Abdallah’s car, the location of a cell phone, where the GPS sat on the dashboard, and the speed of the vehicle. At first, Tom insisted that Abdallah never went above 70 miles per hour, didn’t once break the speed limit. He would have known, Tom said, because the steering wheel would have started shaking. He mimed holding a rattling wheel. I gaped at him from my seat.

“The car is four-cylinder,” Tom said. “If you go over 70, it starts shaking.”

“Over 70, it starts shaking,” Molloy repeated.

“Four-cylinder, the car can go as fast as 80,” Tom said. “We didn’t go more than that.”

“So 80 would have been the top speed, is that correct?” Molloy asked.

Tom considered. “I think the fastest we went was 75. I don’t think we reached 80.”

“OK, 75 it is then.”

“I think so, yes.” The way Tom said it sounded like sure, why not.

I dug my fingers into the bench with such force that Aliza Sollins reached over to hold my hand. On the witness stand, Tom grabbed a couple of plastic water cups and started a series of improbable demonstrations reenacting the accident. Tom described the Samses’ truck bumping the Camry twice on its right side, which he indicated had caused Abdallah to veer left then right before hitting the Samses’ pickup. Tom tried to explain how he’d wanted to help the Samses after the accident.

“And that’s what you really came here to say, isn’t it,” Molloy said. It wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” Tom said, without irony.

The questioning lasted another 15 minutes. When it was over, Tom sauntered away from the witness’s chair. By the time he walked past me, three Darfurian men were already tearing into him. I hissed at them to be quiet or go eviscerate Tom out in the hall.

“What?” Tom kept asking, bewildered. “What?”

Abdallah took the stand without an interpreter. I watched him in profile as he leaned forward in the witness chair, placing both elbows on the table and folding his hands. His long legs were bent at the knees and tucked beneath the chair. Carman threw him softballs: Where did he grow up? Where is Chad? Where did he work? Did the United States government give him permission to be in the country? Abdallah spoke carefully, eyes up. At Carman’s subtle reminders, he addressed the jury.

When the questioning turned to the accident, Carman called in an interpreter. He explained to the judge that this was for accuracy, but it was also clear that he’d wanted to show off his client’s articulate English before getting deep into the testimony.

Abdallah admitted he’d driven fast, but said that his speed had gone only into the seventies and eighties. Like Tom, he said that he’d lost control of the car when the Samses’ vehicle nudged his Camry twice. After the crash, he recalled, “We tried to help. I was so scared, so I got the energy to help. We tried to open the door [to the pickup], but the door was locked, was jammed, and it wouldn’t open. And the man was crying and screaming, ‘Where’s my daughter, where’s my daughter?’”

“What are your feelings about all of this?” Carman asked.

Abdallah decided to answer in English.

“First of all, I would like to say is, I really feel very troubled about the family was lost their daughter. And I saw the mom sitting in the wheelchair. I just remember that I lost—I lost my father.” Abdallah wept as he spoke. “I saw the same situation. It is hard for me to describe.”

When Molloy addressed Abdallah on cross-examination, he said “ab-doo-lah,” as in “zip-a-dee-doo-dah.” I wished the pronunciation were correct; names are so vital to who we are. Molloy’s questioning began with a reference to Tom’s testimony, which Abdallah quickly contradicted, saying the car didn’t shake at any speed.

“I was the one who was driving, and I would know if the car is shaking,” he said.

“So when Mr. Tom said that—and he was pretty adamant about it—that’s not true?”

Abdallah agreed but pointed out that Tom had trouble understanding the questions.

“So it’s a language problem,” Molloy said. But hadn’t the court given Tom an interpreter? Abdallah explained that Arabic wasn’t Tom’s first language, Masalit was.

Molloy brought up the 911 call after the accident. According to Abdallah and Tom, they weren’t confident enough in their English to communicate with emergency dispatch, so they gave their cell phone to the truck driver—whose name, I finally learned, was Ed Schreiber. During his testimony, Schreiber had said that Abdallah and Tom were speaking in Arabic on the phone and that he had to snatch the device out of Abdallah’s hand to call for help.

Molloy continued: Hadn’t Abdallah avoided the police after the accident—skipped town and gone back to Baltimore, where he evaded Scott County’s attempts to get his official statement? Abdallah insisted this wasn’t true. Officer Barnes had called him once to get a statement, but when Abdallah asked for an interpreter, Barnes said there wasn’t one available.

“I told him, ‘My language is not enough,’” Abdallah said. “He did not engage with me in any conversation about the accident. I asked him a few questions. I said, ‘If you give me the chance, I can tell you what happened.’”

Abdallah sent a paper statement. When it bounced back in the mail for some reason, he sent it again. The authorities in Scott County apparently never got it.

Molloy asked whether Abdallah had contacted Shella Sams after the accident. Abdallah said no. Molloy looked unimpressed. “You never called her,” he said. “You never said a word to her, in almost—what—two years or little better, about how bad you felt, until you saw her in this courtroom today.”

“Right after the accident, I was really sad,” Abdallah replied. “And I know she’s a mother, so she was very sad, too. So I couldn’t reach out to her. Then I found out I was a defendant; they accused me of something.” He didn’t think he was supposed to contact the family, even though he wanted to know how they were—“to see what’s going on, what’s happening with them. I wouldn’t leave a situation like this.”

After Abdallah finished testifying, Carman called Olmstead so that she could tell the court about helping Abdallah with his statement. Calm and businesslike, Olmstead described how Abdallah came to her office for guidance. He’d already written a draft of the statement on scrap paper; Olmstead mostly helped as a proofreader, a human spell-check. She remembered Abdallah saying later that the statement had been sent back to him.

On cross-examination, the prosecution asked whether Abdallah had been in further contact with Scott County investigators. Olmstead answered, “He did tell me that he had called the police department a lot because he didn’t know what had happened with his car.”

“So his concern was his car?” the questioning prosecutor asked.

“One of them, yes,” Olmstead replied, her eyebrows rising.

I drove Abdallah and Tom home that night. In the back seat, Tom felt terrible, shaking his lowered head and saying over and over how sorry he was. He’d never be able to save face in the Darfurian community after making Abdallah look like a liar by association.

“Don’t worry about it,” Abdallah told him from the front seat. “It’s OK. It’s OK. I’ll tell them you did OK.”

At Abdallah’s apartment, Tom exiled himself to a bedroom. No one could coax him out.

People again filled the living room. Pizza boxes and plates of leftovers littered the floor. We were exhausted but reviewed the events of the day before I’d been called to the stand, including the testimony of Sonny Cease, the accident-reconstruction expert. A square-headed, heavyset man with sharp eyes, Cease brought toy cars with him to the witness stand; apparently, juries like that kind of thing. Cease contested the Garmin representative’s testimony about Abdallah’s speed, arguing that when the Camry slid sideways out of its lane, the friction with the asphalt would have reduced its speed to closer to 76 miles per hour at the moment of the collision with the Samses’ truck. Yes, Cease said, speed kills—but it didn’t kill this time.

Then there was the testimony of Ed Schreiber. The prosecution lauded him as a good Samaritan. On the stand, Schreiber described pulling over in his truck, comforting Emily’s grandparents, and later attending her funeral. On cross-examination, Carman asked Schreiber about the 911 call.

“You mentioned something about their religion to dispatch, did you not?” “Yes, sir,” Schreiber said. “That’s because when I grabbed the phone out of his hand, there was a name there that was actually a Muslim name, it was Mohamed something.” Carman then shifted gears and asked Schreiber about his Facebook account. Did he publish an anti-Muslim post on October 13, 2015? “I might have,” Schreiber said. What about on November 1, 2015? “I may have.” “Now, it’s just my job,” Carman said, shuffling papers at the podium. “I’ve got to do this.” His head snapped up. “Are you a racist?” “No, sir!” Schreiber replied. His chin rose in defiance. What about images of Confederate flags, Carman asked—did he post those? Carman gave Schreiber more dates. “I think. I mean, I’ve posted a lot of stuff,” Schreiber said. “I mean, I see stuff, and I repost it, and whatever.”

At Abdallah’s apartment, as our group talked, new, unspoken admiration for Carman hung in the air. A warm appreciation for the bailiffs also went around the room. The older Kentucky men had been kind: opening doors, pouring us cups of water on the witness stand. Nothing outside of their jobs, but their consideration seemed genuine.

I wondered about the heart of a place: Does such a thing exist? Who can legitimately claim to best represent a community out of everyone working to protect it, with their inevitable range of worldviews? The following day, the jury would be tasked with delivering a fair verdict on behalf of Scott County. What would that mean to them?

Judge Jeremy Mattox arranged the files in front of him. “Good morning, folks, and welcome to day three of the Commonwealth versus Mohamed Abdallah,” he said. The courtroom was the fullest it had been so far. The Samses and their supporters were there, along with some reporters and public defenders in training. Tom, whom Abdallah had cajoled into showering and dressing, sat with us. A clutch of Darfurian men who were expected to be there hadn’t yet arrived. We tried to spread out, take up space, make our group seem larger than it was.

To still my brain, I wrote down every word I could catch of the lawyers’ closing statements. It felt like cheating, a cop-out from having to watch what happened. I told myself that recording an event was important.

Carman took up a position behind a podium near the jury. He drank from a white paper cup and covered a cough with his fist. He buttoned his suit jacket, crossed his arms over his chest, and leaned back. “What I’m going to do with you here this morning,” Carman told the jurors, “is give you a top ten.” He asked that the men and women each take out a notepad and write down the items he listed. I was poised to do the same.

“Number ten.” Carman moved away from the podium, taking his notepad with him. “It was an accident.” He said each word slowly, emphatically. “And there are reasons we do not criminalize accidents.”

Number nine: Speeding didn’t cause the crash. He said it twice, reiterating Cease’s evaluation of the accident.

Carman cocked his head and swung back around the podium for number eight. “Mohamed’s vehicle was probably hit twice,” he said. Abdallah had been consistent on this point from the start of the case, and Tom remembered it, too: the Samses’ truck making contact with the Camry right before the accident. The Samses, however, had testified that their car never touched Abdallah’s until the crash. I wasn’t sure who had physics on their side; as the prosecution had pointed out, I wasn’t there for the collision. Carman scanned the jury. “A graze,” he said, “a small bump.” He gave a who-knows shrug.

The seventh point was that there were no drugs, no alcohol, no drag racing, no devil-may-care attitude involved in the crash. “Number six—this one’s not easy for me to even say. It’s not easy to remember, but it is my solemn duty to have you write down number six,” Carman said. “Emily was not wearing her seatbelt.”

For his fifth point, Carman touched on witness testimony. First, there was Schreiber. “He might have a bias against people of a certain color, people of a certain religion,” Carman said. Of the testimonies from Abdallah and Tom, Carman argued, “Nobody was coached.”

Number four: There were other opportunities for justice. A civil case, money from insurance companies. Lives didn’t have to be ruined further for there to be justice. For number three, Carman read aloud the legal definition of wanton: “aware and consciously disregard[ing] a substantial and unjustifiable risk. The risk must be of such nature and degree that disregard thereof constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of conduct that a reasonable person would reserve in such a situation.” Abdallah’s driving, Carman said, simply didn’t meet this definition.

Number two was what kind of a person Abdallah was. “You heard about his reputation in the community,” Carman said, then paused. “Did you notice all his support? If one of us were to go to trial, would ten or fifteen people show up every day of that trial?” The group of late-arriving Darfurian men had just settled into their seats in the back of the room.

Carman noted how forthright Abdallah was during his testimony. “Did you notice his hands were shaking a little bit?” Carman asked. “I don’t think it’s ’cause he was being untruthful.… You know why he was a little nervous?” Carman leaned toward the jury and lowered his voice to a dark whisper. “Because this is for all the marbles.”

For a moment he was silent, letting the jurors hold that thought.

“Moved around. Refugee from Sudan,” Carman continued. “Reminds me of Matthew, chapter eight: ‘Foxes have their den, birds have their nests, the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.’”

Carman was moving fast now. My heart sped up, too. “That brings us to number one.” He flipped to the next page in his notebook. The prosecution hadn’t “even come close,” Carman said, to proving Abdallah’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. He held forth on the concept of equal justice under the law, an idea dating back to ancient Greece and found in the Old Testament—in Hebrews, Exodus, Leviticus. Carman seemed to be morphing before the court, achieving a deft grace.

“The evidence shows that if this were Jimmy Smith from Georgetown, not Mohamed Abdallah, who got in an accident with the Samses, we would not be here today,” Carman said, jabbing a finger in the air.

“When the accident happened, who’s the first one on the scene?” he reasoned. “God love him, Ed Schreiber. He’s telling the dispatch, ‘I think these are Muslims.’” As for Mohamed struggling to submit his statement, “He’s dealing with logistical issues. He’s a doggone refugee!”

Carman abruptly stopped moving. He said that he believed America’s justice system was the best in the world. No one should be put on trial for “what color they are, what religion they are, what language they speak.” He banged his fist on the wall of the jury box. “Maybe I can imagine this kind of indictment, this kind of prosecution, this kind of conviction” happening somewhere else, Carman said, “but not in this county, not in this commonwealth, and not in this country. We are better than that.”

For the first time, I felt a flash of hope.

When Molloy rose to address the jury, I again burned anxious. In contrast to Carman’s fevered sermon, Molloy’s voice was low and steady. He choked up when he spoke of the Sams family. He knocked the flaws in Tom’s testimony. Molloy, a longstanding advocate for civil rights, rejected Carman’s argument that the trial had anything to do with racism, xenophobia, or Islamophobia. “This case is not about Mr. Abdallah’s place of birth. It is not about his religion. It is not about the color of his skin,” Molloy said. It was about what Abdallah did, and what he didn’t do. Abdallah drove too fast and “never showed any remorse, ever,” Molloy argued. “When Mrs. Sams came into the courtroom, he broke down crying. For himself. What a perfect time to say ‘I’m sorry.’”

“This is the day that Mr. Abdallah is to be held accountable,” Molloy concluded. “This is the day that you, the jury, having heard all you have heard, can hold him accountable for what he has done.”

The jury holed up in the deliberation room, and we clustered in the courtroom. Beside me, Abdallah sat with his hands stuffed between his knees. We chatted with Collett and Carman and produced the stack of 30-plus character-reference letters that we’d collected. I read them aloud to Abdallah. I skipped the parts where writers said that he seemed depressed and withdrawn because of his legal troubles, focusing on the bits where they heaped on praise. Every few letters, I reminded him that if the jury found him guilty, these documents were going straight to the judge.

Carman gave us the rundown of the ways the trial’s aftermath could go. Once Abdallah was convicted, he would be taken to jail on the spot. A probation officer would conduct and write up a presentencing investigation, which might take up to a month. The court would then hand down a final sentence. Immigration and Customs Enforcement could opt to deport Abdallah or render him a closely watched nonresident, a man who would move like a ghost through prison and life in America until he left the country or died.

Carman tried a metaphor. It’s like we’re on a path in the woods, he said, and we might have to turn and go down another path. We might get to a clearing. We might turn down a path and, whoa, there might be a bear, and we might have to shoot the bear.

Everyone stared at him.

He mimed releasing an arrow from a bow.

At 4 p.m., five hours after the jury began deliberating, the courtroom stirred. Collett whispered to us that there was a verdict. We drifted to our places. At the defense table, Abdallah looked slight and flimsy. The Sams family returned and sat up front. I looked at the backs of their heads with shame, pain, sorrow, indignation. There was a hard shiver in the back of my ribs that wouldn’t cease.

Seated in a back row of the gallery, between Olmstead and Tom, I watched officers I hadn’t seen before file in. They lined up against a wall and near the exits. Handcuffs glinted at their belts. Unlike the cordial bailiffs, these officers were younger and grim faced.

A peal of laughter sounded from the jury room. I felt nauseous and nostalgic for a half-hour ago and the burden of waiting.

Then the jury returned.

“Will the defendant please rise?” Judge Mattox asked.

Abdallah stood. My throat compressed.

“On count one,” Mattox read, meaning the second-degree manslaughter of Emily Sams, “we the jury find the defendant not guilty.”

Olmstead’s grip on my hand tightened. My other hand jumped to one of Tom’s but missed and hit his thigh.

“On count two,” for assault, “we the jury find the defendant not guilty.” The result was the same for the third charge, the last one.

I traded glances with Olmstead, whose stunned, frozen face mirrored mine. Tom was so busy showing no emotion I couldn’t tell if he’d missed what just happened. In front of us, other members of our party twitched and shifted on their benches.

Affectless, we rose as the jury filed out. One juror winked in our direction as he left. We let the Samses exit the courtroom next. Abdallah stood for their exit like a soldier at attention. Then we walked out in silence.

In the hallway, we shattered. Darfurian men held their heads and wept. They dove at me, at Abdallah, at anyone, with close embraces. They collapsed on my shoulders. At Abdallah’s side, Collett’s cheeks were wet with tears. We stumbled into the elevator, desperate to escape. I caught Carman ducking his way through a snuffle. The back of my hips hit the elevator’s wall. My hands found the railings behind me as my knees gave way.

We scattered to our cars. I was worried we’d leave someone behind, but we went, and in going, I somehow climbed into the back seat of my car. Abdallah got into the passenger seat. He closed the door, then he threw himself between the seats onto an armrest and sobbed.

Fawzia, a Darfurian woman who attended the last day of the trial, announced that we were “going to the river.” She knew a restaurant where we could celebrate, but her proclamation also felt baptismal. It was time to be clean of this.

The next morning—after the delirious phone calls, ululations, a glittering night, dinner by the river, more tears—Abdallah, Tom, and another friend came over to the Airbnb for pancakes and jam. We all sat in the sun-drenched living room, on the furniture and on the floor. It felt strange not to be in court in the daytime, stranger still for Abdallah to have shown up at some place he wished to go.

Abdallah kept repeating Mattox’s words: “Mohamed Abdallah, you are a free man.” His eyes shone when he relived how Carman had pounded his fist on the jury box. He echoed the Bible verses Carman had used, slowly committing them to memory.

Later, at a bowling alley where he chose “FREE MAN” as his name on the computer screen, Abdallah kept checking his cell phone. A man who worked for Scott County was supposed to contact him, and Abdallah was anxious that they meet. Eventually they did, in the parking lot of an Ethiopian restaurant where we went for a late lunch. The man swung open the door of a silver sedan and passed Abdallah a large pair of surgical-style scissors. In a series of hurried, stiff clips, Abdallah cut through the plastic band of his ankle monitor. Then he hugged everyone in sight.

Inside the restaurant, Abdallah thanked the crowd of Americans and Darfurians gathered. “I was very, very being patient, to see whatever the result happened,” he said of the trial. “I should be happy with that.” He looked around the room as he spoke. “Finally, yes, I’m a free man,” Abdallah said. “God bless everybody.”

A year after his trial, Abdallah was still in Kentucky. “You must think I’m crazy,” he told me. Driving away from the courthouse the day of the verdict, Abdallah had paged through a book on U.S. national parks, looking for ideas of where to move now that he could. He stayed in Kentucky because he applied for American citizenship through an immigration lawyer in Louisville. Once that was done, maybe he’d leave. Put in for a transfer at Amazon. Go to California. Maybe Utah. Pennsylvania.

Abdallah knew he’d been lucky. Still, it haunted him that, after the trial, Carman advised him not to reach out to the Samses. Just let it lie, the lawyer said.

I called both Carman and Molloy. The men had acute memories of the case, but their perspectives were different. Before the trial, Carman told me, he and Molloy were “pretty friendly,” often joining the same happy hour after work. A little wistfully, Carman said those days were through. Molloy told me that Carman had crossed a line in his closing argument when he suggested that a local defendant would have been treated differently than Abdallah. For Molloy, a man who had dedicated his life to justice, the insult implied in his opponent’s argument was intolerable.

I learned from a lawyer for Abdallah’s car-insurance company that the Sams family had settled for close to $60,000. I doubted that, as Carman had hinted in court, money felt anything like justice. I reached out to the Samses in February 2019. Emily’s father responded to me by email, taking on the task because Shella was still in recovery and exhausted at the end of the day. She had an infection in her femur that would require two additional surgeries.

Much of what Jeff Sams wrote was tough to read. He graciously said that he didn’t blame me for my participation in the trial—“I assume you were simply telling what you knew to be true about someone you knew”—but several of our truths diverged. He rankled at Carman, who he said should either “win an Oscar for that performance or burn in hell.” He also thought that bringing race into the trial had muddied the waters. For him the case was about speed. He saw Abdallah as a person with appalling moral decrepitude who lied to save his own skin. Still, Sams wrote, “Would I be happy if he was in jail, no. Would I be happy if he was deported to whatever hole he crawled out of, no. Would I be happy if he suffered and drew his last breath, no. That may seem odd, but it wouldn’t bring me joy. My joy is buried in a cemetery. My joy can’t surface as I watch my wife struggle to walk, do ordinary tasks, choke down 30 pills a day, or hold her as she cries because she misses our daughter.”

“We had nothing to gain from this,” Sams said of the trial. “Nothing would bring back our dead daughter, nor give my wife the ability to overcome paralysis. It was just a continuation of a nightmare.” They had been “handed down a sentence of pain, suffering, and tears long before it. It was a life sentence to us, no way around that.”

Earlier in the year, he’d attended a ceremony for Emily’s basketball team; the players and coaches had asked him to come. “They miss her just like everyone else. She was a stellar kid who made all A’s and was good at volleyball and basketball. Quick witted. Pretty. A great kid,” Sams wrote. “Not a day will go by we won’t think of her. Think of what she would look like, what college she might have attended, how great a volleyball player she would have been, what career she would choose, what boy she might bring home or marry, how many kids she might have, where she might live, or simply what it would be like to just hear her voice and hug her today.”

He added, “That child alone and missing her could be its own book.”

If I’d expected reconciliation, it wasn’t there. I remembered something my wife had said during the trial. “It didn’t feel like justice,” she’d observed after the first day of the proceedings. “It felt like two boys trying to win a game.”

What if the quest for justice brings no healing, only more pain? Abdallah lost nearly three years of his life; the Samses found no reprieve from their immense hurt and grief. If the accident had happened in peacetime Darfur, Abbas Yahya told me once, village leaders likely would have convened and decided upon compensation for the people affected. Here we duked it out until everyone in the vicinity of the case was black and blue.

Much like an angry brawl, the participants had different reasons for coming to the ring. Where the prosecution saw a need for consequences, the defense perceived systemic racism. I reached out to several jurors to better understand their decision in the case, but none responded. I’ve tried to stop guessing what went on in their minds—to surmise what, as individuals, they value and fear.

In our narrative-heavy culture, we are taught to interpret people and places as symbols, to imbue them with meaning. Stories, though, often fail to reflect the world’s complexity and contradictions. Justice, a concept ostensibly rooted in clear-cut truths, is in fact fickle. America can inspire grief and faith in the same stroke. And Abdallah, a man onto whom other people—myself included—have projected their perspectives, is nobody’s best or worst dream of him.

When I talked to Abdallah in the months following the trial, I sensed a sort of transient state. He couldn’t visualize his next step until he got his citizenship, giving him purchase in a country that had both welcomed and thwarted him. Life beyond the verdict still held a question for Abdallah—and, it seemed, for everyone who’d endured the trial. We were waiting to see what this land would hold.

Update, May 2019: Two months after this story ran, Mohamed Abdallah became a U.S. citizen. He took his oath in a government building in Louisville, Kentucky. It rained all day, but Abdallah told the story’s author that he didn’t mind—rain signaled a new beginning.

In April 2018, a blind man with one foot robbed a bank in Austin, Texas. This is a heist story—but unlike any you’ve ever read.

One

Edward Averill finished off the last slices of Genoa salami and sopressata from the deli packages in his mini-fridge, rolling them into tubes and eating them with his fingers. Between bites he drank a Modelo Especial. It was his favorite beer, and that night, April 5, 2018, he savored every sip. He didn’t expect to have another one anytime soon.

The 58-year-old computer engineer climbed into bed around 10 p.m. and lay staring at the ceiling for hours before drifting off to sleep. He jerked awake without an alarm at 8:30 the next morning. After turning on his laptop and scrubbing it clean of files and software, he wiped his external hard drive and reformatted it—twice. Satisfied, he powered down the computer and began tidying his room.

There wasn’t much there. He rented it from a woman named Anne Toney, who owned the house it was in. The rest of Toney’s home was cluttered—chairs, gnome figurines, even an old, empty candy machine. Averill liked to joke that people had vanished there amid all the bric-a-brac. But he took pride in his space, which was big enough for a double bed, the magnet-covered fridge, and a media cabinet he used as a pantry. He set drinks on coasters so they wouldn’t leave rings on his computer desk, which is where he ate most of his meals.

Over the previous week, he’d thrown away many of his belongings, including five USB sticks, a Swiffer, and an extra computer monitor. On the morning of April 6, he tossed the magnets and coasters, too. All that was left, aside from the furniture, were some clothes in the closet, a couple of cold beers, and a blue expandable plastic folder where he stored sensitive paperwork like his birth certificate and Social Security card. Old tax forms were in one sleeve; his diploma from Oakton High School in Vienna, Virginia, was in another.

Averill picked up the folder, stuck a bottle of Tums in his pocket, and grabbed the cane he used to help him walk. His left foot had been amputated—a complication of type 2 diabetes—and the cane kept him steady on his prosthetic foot. It was time for him to go. He left his keys on the laptop, closed the door behind him, and stepped carefully down the short flight of stairs to the living room. Toney was watching Matlock with the drapes drawn. Averill didn’t pause to say goodbye. He opened the front door, headed down the walk, and stopped at a sidewalk trash can to drop his blue folder inside, disposing of every paper record of his history and identity.

He turned right on the sidewalk and walked ten minutes uphill to the bus stop. He waited, squinting in the Austin, Texas, sun as the temperature crept into the high seventies. The 325 bus appeared. Averill boarded and then bumped along until the vehicle groaned to a stop near a Walmart. He got off and waited again. Then he took the 3 to the Austin Diner.

When the server came to his table, Averill asked for grits, eggs, toast, a double order of bacon, and lots of coffee. Paying for his breakfast would require the last of the cash in his wallet. After that, he had only $1.75 left in a Prosperity Bank checking account, which he’d opened roughly eight years earlier. But Averill wasn’t worried about money. The bank was less than a block away, and when he finished eating he was going to rob it.

He’d been researching how to pull off the heist for weeks. Averill had read online that bank tellers were encouraged to remain calm during a robbery—the money was insured, so they shouldn’t risk their lives. The employees at Prosperity seemed well trained, and armed guards weren’t posted by the door, unlike a branch of Wells Fargo that Averill had cased.

Around 12:45, he finished his coffee, took a deep breath, and left the diner. Averill walked to a traffic light and crossed the street, leaning on his cane with each step toward the bank. He hadn’t been nervous when he woke up, but as he approached the building he couldn’t help but worry. What if something bad happens? he thought. What if the teller has a gun and decides to be a hero?

Averill was at the door now. He pulled it open and limped inside. He was a longtime customer, but he didn’t recognize any of the employees, and they didn’t appear to recognize him. That was for the best. Averill felt himself calming down. When he got to the counter, he ignored the teller’s greeting and passed the man a note instead. “This is a robbery,” it read, “hand over all your 50’s and 100’s, thanks.”

He hoped the “thanks” would reassure the teller.

Averill waited as the man opened his drawer and handed over $2,900 in a loose stack of bills about two inches thick. No one else in the bank seemed to realize what was happening.

Money in hand, Averill hobbled back toward the entrance, then stopped halfway across the room. “Hey,” he said, waving the wad of bills in the air to draw attention. “I just robbed you. Please call the police.”

The next day, the Austin American-Statesman published a story about the crime. “A man was arrested on Friday after he robbed a North Austin bank and waited outside for police,” the newspaper reported, citing an affidavit. “Edward Austin Averill III, 58, was booked into the Travis County Jail on Friday on a charge of robbery, a second-degree felony punishable [by] up to 20 years in prison.”

In his mug shot, Averill stares to the right of the camera, his clean-shaven chin tilted upward. His white hair is feathered back from his face and reaches his shoulders. On top of his head, where his hairline has receded, several strands curl into the air like cotton candy. He looks placid, even pleased.

I wrote Averill an email through the jail’s website a few days later, asking if he would be willing to tell me more about his unusual crime. I included my email address and phone number, which he called after a correctional officer delivered my message—printed out—and Averill borrowed another inmate’s phone card. His last name is pronounced “aye-vrill,” I learned when he introduced himself. He was surprised that I was interested in him. He was nobody special, he said. Still, he was happy to meet. We scheduled a visit.

I arrived at the jail and waited among the small crowd of people who’d made the same trip to visit boyfriends, husbands, dads, and sons. The guard called out a list of inmates’ names, followed by the booth number that each visitor should use, but she never said Averill. “Not here,” she told me when I asked where he was.

I drove home and checked the jail roster; he was still in custody. I scheduled another visit for later that week and sent him an email to let him know. When I went back to the jail, again he didn’t show. I scheduled a third meeting, went, and waited.

“Ah…,” the correctional officer hesitated as she directed visitors to their booths. “Ah-vrill?”

I walked to my assigned spot and sat down. The chair on the other side of the plexiglass was empty. When Averill appeared, he was in a wheelchair pushed by a guard. A white beard had grown shaggy around his jaw since his mug shot was taken. His gaze was unfocused. The guard picked up the phone, punched in a number, and gestured for me to lift the receiver on my end. He handed the phone to Averill and walked away.

We exchanged formalities and talked a little. Averill apologized for missing our other meetings; he’d had an appointment with a doctor that he couldn’t miss. He was all but blind, Averill explained, which had everything to do with why he’d robbed Prosperity Bank.

A recorded voice interrupted our conversation—the line would disconnect in 60 seconds. Our time was up. I asked Averill if I could come back to hear the rest of the story.

“That would be fine,” he said.

I watched as he reached forward, hooking the air with the phone as he tried to locate the cradle. Giving up, he gently set the handset on the counter in front of him. He turned his head and looked in the direction he’d come from. He said something, but I couldn’t hear what. Other visitors filed past me, and a woman looked through the window at Averill. She suggested that I tell an officer that he was stranded. The blind bank robber needed help.

Averill was born in Titusville, Florida, in 1959. It was the first of many places he’d call home as his parents moved around the country and the world. His father, Edward Austin Averill, Jr., was a smart, handsome computer engineer who relocated his young family to such places as Taiwan and the Bahamas, where Tres—that’s what his parents called Averill, “three” in Spanish—learned to snorkel.

When Tres was a toddler, they moved to Texas, where his mother, Sylvia, had been a switchboard operator before she married. They lived in Plano, north of Dallas, but Tres’s father still traveled a lot. “Basically, I was raised by my mom,” Averill told me in one of the many conversations we had after that first jail visit.

Sylvia taught Tres to play the organ and to read. He devoured science-fiction novels and an Edgar Allan Poe anthology she gave him. Sylvia liked to see her son tucked into a book—she wanted him to be well educated. She was less concerned about his social life. “My parents didn’t like most people to come over,” Averill said. His orbit consisted of his mom, his dad, and a few relatives. About once a month, Edward and Sylvia left him with his aunt Shirley so that they could spend the weekend without their son, who, they revealed when he was still a kid, they hadn’t planned on having. “It’s not an uplifting thing to be told,” Averill said. “They tried their best to provide for me. I got a lot of material things. I didn’t get a lot of hugs.”

He had few friends, although when he was in elementary school, a boy in the apartment next door had permission to bring his Legos over to play. They built spaceships and crashed their Hot Wheels cars into them. In junior high, Averill slunk between his classes and his locker, sometimes hiding out in the library to avoid contact with the other students.

During his teenage years, the family moved to Otsego, Michigan, where his father had gone to high school, then to Virginia, where Tres began to notice girls. “I started talking to people a little bit more,” he said. He played linebacker for the practice football team, but it was when he took a computer-science class that he finally found his people. “I joined the geek gang,” Averill said. Soon he was hanging out with theater kids, artists, and musicians, too. During his junior year, he spent two months clearing a neighbor’s land to earn the $200 he needed to buy a Fender Telecaster knockoff. When he brought it home, his mother worried that the guitar would ruin his grades. She discouraged him from playing. “Cut that damn noise out,” she’d say.

Sylvia kept a close eye on her son as he got older. She didn’t approve of his high school girlfriend and tried to impose a nine o’clock curfew and stricter rules. They argued. It felt to Tres like his mom was trying to control his life, which she’d never intended for him to have in the first place.

After he graduated from high school in 1978, he got a job programming computers and drove himself to work in a Mustang that his dad helped him fix up. When his parents announced that they were moving back to Plano, they assumed that Tres, who still lived with them, would come along. But the 19-year-old had work and a girlfriend, who suggested that they get an apartment together. Sylvia was horrified. “You can’t move in with a woman,” she said. She’d become increasingly religious over the years. “You’ll be living in sin!” Sylvia cried.

“I could feel the apron strings around my neck very tightly,” Averill told me.

His dad was supportive, even if Ed Jr. couldn’t say so in front of his wife. “Don’t listen to your mom,” he told his son in private. “Just do what you need to.” He helped Tres pack up his things before he and Sylvia returned to Texas. Over the next several years, Ed Jr. visited his son, but Sylvia never did. She called from time to time, then stopped until the mid-1980s, when Averill and his girlfriend broke up. After that, every Sunday, Averill’s phone would ring at 9 a.m. “Why aren’t you in church?” Sylvia would ask when he answered. “Is there a woman in the house with you?”

Usually, there wasn’t. Averill dated, but he preferred being alone in front of his computer. A coding colleague did her best to lure him away from his screen by inviting him to parties at her house. Averill was reluctant at first, but finally he relented and was surprised at how much he enjoyed himself. The people—scientists and technology professionals—were interesting. Free beer didn’t hurt.

At one party, where Averill arrived carrying meatballs for the snack table, his colleague introduced him to Roan Dantzler. She worked for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on climatic models and liquid dynamics. He tried to listen carefully, but most of what she said was over his head. Then Dantzler pulled up her shirt and flashed him.

“Why did you do that?” he asked.

“You looked like you were bored,” she told him.

After the party, the pair started spending time together. Averill liked having someone he could share the world with. Dantzler’s personality sparkled—she was exciting. And her eyes didn’t glaze over when he talked about work or video games or music. She was a musician, too, and a redhead. Averill loved redheads. A few months after the party, they moved in together.

When they decided to get married and told Averill’s parents, his mother was furious. A letter arrived a few days later with a one-way ticket to Texas. “We’ll pick you up,” the note said.

Averill upgraded the ticket to round-trip and bought another one for Dantzler. When they arrived together, his mother erupted. Sylvia and her son spent the weeklong trip fighting. When Averill and Dantzler returned to their home in Rockville, Maryland, they called their friends and her relatives, bought rings, and convened at the courthouse to become husband and wife. Two weeks later, they boarded a southbound train to Disney World for their honeymoon.

When Averill called his mother to deliver the news, he warned her that if she gave him trouble, he wouldn’t talk to her again. A few days later, Sylvia called and said he should reconsider the marriage. After they hung up, Averill kept his word. His father visited a few more times, but eventually Averill stopped communicating with him, too. He never spoke to them again. When his parents died in the early 2000s, none of Averill’s extended family knew how to reach him.

For 15 years, Averill and Dantzler lived together companionably. They moved to Sunnyvale, California, and she joined him on hikes in Muir Woods, exploring the redwood groves along the Pacific Coast. They played video games together. But eventually, they started fighting. Sometimes their disagreements were small; they bickered over the grocery list. Other times they screamed at each other. Averill felt like Dantzler was trying to micromanage his life. He would hike without her sometimes, and on one trek he fell and hit his head. The injury caused him to permanently lose vision in his right eye.

He moved out in the early 2000s, living in his car in the parking lot of IBM, where he worked at the time. In 2003, Averill and Dantzler filed for divorce. As the split was being finalized, Averill met Sabine Sklar at a video-game conference in Silicon Valley. She was 38, a little younger than Averill, now well into his forties, and lived in Sunnyvale, though she was originally from Vancouver, British Columbia. She worked in human resources at a video-game company and spoke English, German, and Dutch. Averill thought she was beautiful—she was a redhead—and brilliant. They both played guitar; Averill liked ambient music, and she plucked out folk songs. They had the same sarcastic humor. Sklar made Averill feel good, happy. If he was in a bad mood, she perked him up.

Soon into their friendship, Averill told her he was in love with her. Sklar said she really liked him but added, “I’m just not ready to fall in love yet.”

That was OK with him, as long as he could be around her. He liked to help her. Sklar had type 1 diabetes and problems with her endocrine system. A cold could knock her out for a week. When it did, Averill would pick up chicken noodle soup and take it to her apartment. “It’s what friends do,” Averill said. When the company Sklar worked for closed her office, she took a job as an exotic dancer, and Averill visited her at the strip club. Other times they’d go to Murphy’s, an Irish bar that served great bangers and mash.

One night, in October 2003, Averill was supposed to meet Sklar at a bar called Hiphugger, but she never showed up. He went to her apartment and knocked. Nothing. He knocked again and pressed his ear to the door. It was quiet, but that wasn’t unusual. Sklar often shut herself in her bedroom to sleep when she didn’t feel well. Averill went home and fell asleep, too.

Sklar’s friend Trish called Averill from the strip club early the next morning. “Come down to the club,” she said. “Drop everything. I need to talk to you.” When he got there, Trish and several more of Sklar’s friends were in tears. Averill sat down warily.

“What happened?” he asked. Sklar had gone into a diabetic coma during the night, Trish said. She was dead.

Averill imagined Sklar inside her apartment, dying as he knocked on the door. He blamed himself. Why hadn’t he tried harder to reach her?

When she was alive, Sklar would ask Averill what he’d do when she wasn’t around anymore. “Find the tallest building in San Francisco,” he’d joke. Now that she was really gone, Averill was despondent: crying, often drunk, inconsolable. He once took a razor blade into the bathroom, but one of Sklar’s friends, who had a copy of his key, happened to stop by and prevented him from cutting his wrists. She and other friends organized a watch rotation to make sure he didn’t hurt himself. When he went to Sklar’s wake at a British pub, he thought he’d be strong. Instead, he burst into tears as soon as he walked in. After the memorial, he didn’t get out of bed for two days.

Averill never wanted to feel that bad again. He needed to protect himself, he decided. So he vowed to never again care about someone as much as he’d cared about Sklar.

He declined invitations to go out with friends. “I’m really busy,” he’d say. After a few weeks, his friends stopped trying. Averill had long frequented internet chat rooms and forums, and he knew some of the other users well. “I shoved those guys off,” Averill said, “changed my email address, changed my online persona.”

Step by step, he severed ties with everyone he knew. When a woman wrote him in 2004 and introduced herself as the half sister he didn’t know he had—from his father’s first marriage, which was also news to Averill—even she failed to get any traction. Averill didn’t have the energy to forge a new relationship, not after what had happened with Sklar. Soon, he told me, “there was nobody around anymore.”

Averill relocated to Austin around 2010, and eventually moved in with Anne Toney, whom he’d met in an online forum for hobbyists who like making 3-D models on their computers. Toney had inherited her house from her father and rented out the two spare bedrooms to a string of tenants. Sometimes she even offered up the couch to homeless men and women who slept on nearby streets. Averill paid $400 in rent, plus utilities. Sometimes he helped with the yard work or took out the garbage. He and Toney liked to sit around together and dream up inventions, like a doorbell that opened the refrigerator so a visitor could grab a beer on the way into the house. “He could be funny,” Toney said, laughing at her memories of Averill. “But he didn’t have any friends, not with what I would call real people.”

Averill secured contract work as a software engineer. On payday, Toney said, he went out drinking. He liked to go to the Yellow Rose, a strip club in North Austin. “They’d send him home in a limo,” Toney recalled. The women who worked there were nice to Averill and seemed to like him. He tried to be polite and respectful, and to tip appropriately.

Other than visits to the club, Averill spent nearly all his time in his room on his computer. He composed his ambient music. He self-published a book of poems. In one of his online profiles, on Medium, he described himself as a “software engineer, musician and all-around annoyance dabbling in too many things to even keep track of.” On AuthorsDen.com, he called himself a “poet,” “prose writer,” and “introverted intuitive.” He spent money on computer and music equipment, slowly building a studio in his room. He bought a real Fender—a Modern Player Telecaster Plus. He named it Christine. “Texas blues, here I come!” he wrote on Facebook.

As he turned inward emotionally, it became harder to do things physically. Before Averill moved to Texas, a doctor in California had noticed that his blood sugar was high when he came in with strep throat. She prescribed medication, but Averill never took it—he didn’t really understand what it was for. It wasn’t until he stepped on a piece of broken glass in Texas that a nurse again checked his blood-glucose level in the emergency room. By then, he had type 2 diabetes.

He tried to cut back on carbs but often ate hunkered down in front of his computer, hewing to what he called a “programmer’s diet”—pizza for breakfast, hot dogs and popcorn for lunch and dinner. He weaned himself off soda, but it wasn’t enough. In 2016, he had to have his foot amputated. He struggled to adjust. It disturbed him to look down at the stump at the end of his right leg when he didn’t have his prosthetic attached. The music he made got a little darker.

Soon it became hard to play music at all. He had a tingling sensation in his fingertips. He couldn’t hold a pick or feel the strings on his guitar. After his amputated leg got infected, he slipped deeper into isolation, rebuffing even Toney’s offers of food or conversation. Between work contracts, Averill would drink, polishing off a bottle of vodka and several beers a week. When the anniversary of Sklar’s death rolled around, he’d drink even more heavily. Toney always knew when it was that time of year again, because “Ed was on a spree,” she said.

In November 2017, Averill’s latest contract expired. He wasn’t worried at first; he managed his money carefully, keeping a cushion for the inevitable breaks between engineering and coding gigs. He knew he could always get another job developing video games.

Then, in early December, Averill woke up with what looked like blood clouding the vision in his good eye. He didn’t have insurance anymore—that had ended with the work contract—but he went to a doctor, who ordered an MRI. He had diabetic retinopathy, meaning his retina had detached from the back of his eye, causing capillaries to break and bleed. More worryingly, it looked like he had suffered an unrelated stroke about a month earlier.

The doctor prescribed hypertension medication, and Averill paid for eye surgery. An ophthalmologist used a laser to repair the detachment and put silicone oil in his eye to keep the retina in place while it healed. The oil, though, meant that he could barely see afterward. He needed glasses to decipher words on paper, and reading a computer screen was even more challenging. When Toney walked by his room, she’d sometimes see Averill wearing two pairs of glasses and holding a magnifying glass up to his monitor. Work became impossible.

He was paying for his appointments and prescriptions out of pocket, spending down his savings. He didn’t know what else to do. Help seemed out of reach, even in the era of the Affordable Care Act. If he’d lived in a state with expanded Medicaid eligibility, for people with chronic health conditions and low income or no job, he likely would have qualified for federal insurance. But in 2012, Texas’s then governor Rick Perry had declined to expand the program. It’s uncommon for a single Texan to qualify unless they’re over 65 and receive Social Security income. Averill wasn’t even 60 yet.

When the ankle above Averill’s amputation began to swell, it affected how his prosthetic fit. The device pushed against his skin, rubbing it raw. He needed to have it adjusted at a clinic, but he was running out of money and couldn’t pay for a more permanent fix. Toney noticed that he was eating cold hot dogs wrapped in tortillas. “Every time I tried to help, he’d say, ‘I’m a grown man, and I’ve been taking care of myself for 58 years. I don’t need your help or anyone else’s,’” Toney recalled.

He was her longest-ever tenant, and reliable, but in January 2018, he was late paying rent. Toney told him she couldn’t let him stay if he didn’t pay. She had to cover the mortgage and the utilities. On February 1, he gave her $400 and notice. “I will be gone by the end of March,” he said. But March came and went, and he was still there. He now owed her $800. “I can’t keep this up,” Toney told him. Somebody else was interested in taking the room.

He was trying, Averill told her: “I can only leave so fast.” He’d spent weeks in front of his computer trying to discern the text of search results and figure out what to do about his eye, his foot, his diabetes, his stroke. He looked into the possibility of getting some kind of private insurance. That was a dead end. The companies wanted a lot of money—the premiums he saw quoted were several hundred dollars each month, which he didn’t have. He looked into whether he might qualify for government disability or Social Security benefits but realized that, even if he did, the process could take months.

Well, he thought, I’m screwed.

Then he found a decades-old article about a homeless man who robbed a bank because he had health problems and couldn’t get insurance or a job. In prison, the article said, the man was getting decent care.

What the hell? Averill thought. Then again, it didn’t seem like such a bad idea: commit a crime, get free medical assistance.

If it had worked for the homeless guy, maybe it would work for Averill. He could plead guilty and get shipped off to federal prison. The food would probably suck, he thought, but at least he could see a doctor regularly. It wasn’t like he had anyone counting on him for anything. Who would miss him in prison?

When he told Toney that he was finally moving out, she asked him what he was going to do. “I’m going to rob a bank,” he said. She waved him off.

Averill shook as he sat on the curb outside Prosperity Bank, under the shade of an oak tree. His mind raced as he thought about the ways the robbery could have gone wrong. Somebody could have shot him. He could have tripped on his way out and hurt himself. But the crime had gone exactly as he’d planned.

A bank employee followed Averill and, recording the moment on his cell phone, asked why he did it. Averill explained that he needed to go to prison to get medical care. When the employee asked if he was armed, Averill pulled out a bottle of Tums, shaking it in the air. “Just antacid,” he said.

After a few minutes, a police van pulled into the bank’s drive-through lane. Two officers got out and asked the teller at the window what had happened.

“We just got robbed,” the teller said.

“Where did he go?” one of the officers asked.

The man pointed. The cops looked toward the curb and Averill as if they couldn’t believe what the teller was saying.

The officers eased Averill into the back of their van and turned up the air-conditioning. Then they drove downtown to the headquarters of the Austin Police Department. There, detective Christopher Brewer peered through his glasses as he watched Averill on a video monitor outside the room where the suspect awaited questioning. Averill was perched on the front of his chair, leaning forward, “like he was eager for something,” Brewer said. When the detective and his partner walked into the room, Brewer’s suspicions were confirmed: Averill wanted to talk. “He was genuinely trying to help us with our investigation,” Brewer said. “I was kind of taken aback by it.”

It wasn’t unheard of for people to commit crimes to get health care—a North Carolina man with arthritis and slipped discs robbed a bank of $1 in 2011, and two years later an Oregon man did the same thing for the same amount. Still, Brewer didn’t think anyone had ever done it in Austin. He asked if Averill was having a mental health crisis. “Nope,” Averill said. “I know exactly what I’m doing.” He described the robbery in meticulous detail. He said he wanted to be found guilty and go to prison as soon as possible.

When Brewer walked out of the room, he turned to his partner. “This is not one I’m going to brag about,” he said.

Brewer went to the municipal court to get a magistrate judge’s signature on Averill’s arrest affidavit. Judge Stephen Vigorito stared at Brewer after he read the document. “Are you kidding me?” Vigorito asked. After several minutes, the judge set a bond of $10,000, the lowest Brewer had ever seen for this particular crime—bonds in bank-robbery cases are usually several times that.

As the detective walked down the courthouse hallway to file the paperwork with the county clerk, he heard Vigorito running behind him. “Give it back, give it back,” the judge said, reaching for the affidavit when he caught up to Brewer. Vigorito wrote a new bond amount— $7,500—pressing hard with his pen so the numbers would be legible over the original figure.

After a brief stint in the downtown jail, including a trip to the ER because he hadn’t taken his hypertension pills and his blood pressure was dangerously high, Averill was booked at the Travis County Correctional Complex, a large detention facility just outside Austin. His bunkmates couldn’t believe what he’d done. “Damn, dude!” one of them said when Averill told him about the robbery. None of the other men in his cell—three in all—had committed such a serious crime. One was caught selling pot; another was busted for possession.

Averill felt relief. For the first time in months, he didn’t have to worry about where he was going to live, what he was going to eat, or how he was going to get medication. He was treated well, too. He was too weak to walk far, so guards wheeled him to the cafeteria to eat cream of wheat and fruit, cheese sandwiches, and chicken quesadillas. “I’ve had worse food in nicer places,” he told me on my second visit to see him. He squeezed his eyes shut describing a good meal, savoring the memory of it.

He’d been sitting in the booth when I arrived that day, but he couldn’t work the phone and waited while I found a correctional officer to ask for help. A nurse appeared on Averill’s side of the glass and handed the receiver to him, then left to get a code that would connect our phones. Averill couldn’t quite see me, but he knew I was there. He spun his finger by his ear to signal “crazy” and then shook his fist in feigned exasperation until the nurse returned and dialed the number that allowed us to talk.

By then the county had paid for his second eye surgery, just as Averill had hoped. The bad news, Averill explained, was that during the procedure, the doctor had discovered cataracts. So while the retinal damage was somewhat improved, his vision was still poor. The doctor had told him a third surgery would help.

But what if the justice system gave him a break that he didn’t want? Averill wasn’t a seasoned criminal knocking off banks across Texas. He was a blind bandit without an arrest record. The FBI had no interest in pursuing his case, which meant that he wouldn’t wind up in federal detention or get the health benefits he’d read about online. Cheryl Hindera, the attorney appointed to defend him, suggested that he might not even go to state prison. She was working with the prosecutor on a plea deal.

Averill wasn’t sure how to feel about freedom. He told me that he’d rob a jewelry store if he wound up back where he’d started, with no income or insurance.

While the lawyers worked toward an agreement, Averill was released from custody on his own recognizance, allowing him to go free without putting up any money for bail. In June 2018, nearly three months since Averill’s arrest, a correctional officer returned his few belongings—his clothes, the Tums—and he stepped out the door of the facility. Maybe, Averill thought, he shouldn’t have thrown away his Social Security card and the other documents in the blue folder.

The county sheriff’s office had him dropped off on the corner of East Seventh and Neches Streets, at the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless. The building had beds where more than 200 homeless men could spend the night and a free clinic where they could receive care. A line of weary, ragged people stood slumped against the building or were curled up on the sidewalk when Averill arrived. Some appeared to be smoking synthetic marijuana. It looked to Averill like there were drug dealers in the mix, too.

Once Averill was inside, a staffer told him he couldn’t see a doctor for at least ten days. Not going to work for me, he thought. This was exactly what he’d feared before robbing the bank, that he would wind up on the streets and die. He’d rather be in jail, so he decided to get arrested again.

Averill walked to a window and whacked it with his cane. “You can’t do that!” the receptionist said. She went to get a police officer, who told Averill, “We’re not throwing you back in jail.”

Averill gestured to another employee. “How about I just assault him?”

I learned all this when Averill called to let me know where he was. I’d been worried about him. I knew he’d been released from custody, because a visit I’d scheduled at the county detention center had been canceled, but I didn’t know where he was. A few weeks had passed by the time he called from the Guy Herman Center for Mental Health Crisis Care. That’s where he’d been taken after he threatened assault—not to jail, but to a place that assists people with mental illness, substance abuse, and developmental disabilities.

Averill’s arrival at the Herman Center had been tough. He was depressed. He was broke. His vision was getting worse. The cataracts made everything blurry, and his damaged retina blacked out the top and bottom of his vision, which made it seem as if he was always looking through blinds. He scheduled an appointment with his doctor, but told me that the staff member at the Herman Center who was supposed to take him overslept. The next available appointment wasn’t for a couple of weeks.

As we talked, Averill described avoiding the other residents; there was no one he wanted to have a conversation with. He sat by himself during meals and was curt with other people when they spoke to him. But then one afternoon, that changed.

A patient named Danielle Morris sat down and persisted through Averill’s short temper. The 41-year-old was petite, with a “sparky personality,” Averill said. She wanted to know about his life. As she probed deeper into Averill’s history, she learned about the bank robbery and how desperate he’d been before he was arrested.

She knew what it was like to feel helpless. Morris told Averill that she’d been waiting for Social Security disability benefits for more than a year. After moving from Illinois to Texas, she struggled to get the services she needed—she’d been diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, bipolar disorder, and PTSD. Eventually, she tried to overdose on Xanax. “I didn’t know what else to do,” she said. “Since then I’ve found that the system is pretty broken.” Waiting lists for low-income housing in Austin were typically two or three years long. If your application paperwork wasn’t perfect, it could gum up the process. Facilities meant to help the needy or mentally ill were overcrowded and case managers overworked.

Averill and Morris bonded over their shared frustrations. “We kind of clicked,” Morris told me. Averill reminded her of Alan Alda with a Santa Claus beard. (Averill was desperate to shave, but it was too hard for him without an electric razor.) His humor was dry, which she liked. They’d started to linger after meals with another resident, Arron Herrera, at a table in the dull gray dining room. They talked about old relationships, their health, the future.

This guy is way interesting, Herrera thought of Averill, who spoke with his face as much as his mouth, scrunching up his nose or rolling his eyes or dropping his jaw when he heard something stunning. Even after what Averill had been through, he struck Herrera as graceful, eloquent, and humble. “He has one of the sweetest souls ever,” Herrera said. “He permeates very positive energy.”

Averill sounded excited and happy during our phone calls, which happened every week or two. “The most terrifying thing is she is a redhead,” he said of Morris during one conversation. “I have apparently some kind of fatal attraction to redheads.” He called Herrera and Morris his little brother and sister, but he considered them friends. “You know,” he said, “I hate to admit it, but I might as well tell the truth. I kind of missed hanging out with people.”

Still, he struggled to understand why they wanted to hang out with him. He worried that he was weighing them down. He was roughly 20 years older. “They don’t need an old man bothering them,” he told me. It sounded like Averill was instinctively looking for ways to push other people away.

A few days after Herrera left the center—generally, patients can stay for only a couple of weeks—he returned with a bag of shirts, pants, and socks, because he knew Averill had only a single outfit: the one he’d worn to rob the bank. Averill was shocked. He gave Herrera a hug. When Herrera visited again the next week, he brought Averill two bacon cheeseburgers and coffee, because Averill had bemoaned the brown liquid they served at the center. As they ate together, Herrera said that when Averill got out, they’d go to Barton Springs and look at women in bikinis.

“Dude, I’m too old,” Averill said.

“Shut up,” Herrera replied.

Morris left the center, too, but she visited Averill nearly every day. She kept coming after he was transferred to another facility. She knew that Averill didn’t have a support network, and she wanted to be that for him—“to try to keep his mind off what’s going on,” she told me, “or talk him through it.” Which of those Averill preferred depended on the day, and his mood.

By August, Averill was living in a respite and recovery center. He shared a room on the second floor. He woke up each morning when sunlight came through the window and slowly made his way downstairs to eat.

Before it got too hot, he tried to make a visit to a blue bench surrounded by palm trees where he fed bread to the grackles, tossing chunks toward the birds’ outlines, which was as much he could see. Inside, people tried to talk to him. Here he could watch shadows flutter in the trees.

Sometimes he was optimistic about the future. He was learning that, even if he didn’t go to prison, there were agencies in Austin to assist people like him, people in crisis. Maybe, he told me, he didn’t need to be a criminal. “You live, you learn,” he said.

The staff had helped him apply for Social Security benefits for people with disabilities and Supplemental Security Income, a government allotment based on financial need. How much disability a person received depended on how much they’d paid into the system, and Averill didn’t know how much he might get. He hoped it would be enough to pay for health insurance and still have some left over to cover living expenses. In the meantime, the center’s staff scheduled doctor appointments for him, and he was able to get his prosthesis fixed. They also wrote my phone number on a piece of paper in large print so he could read it. Usually, though, they dialed my number for him when he wanted to talk.

When we spoke, he almost always sounded cheerful, and he made self-deprecating jokes. Yet he worried that he might never be able to work or make music again. He grew insecure about his new friendships whenever Morris or Herrera didn’t show up for a few days to see him.

He was unfailingly polite when we met—he almost always had an extra Styrofoam cup of water waiting for me. I took the lead from his friends and started to bring Averill a large drip coffee. “Bless you,” he’d say. Still, Averill sometimes seemed like he was tired of talking. I’d ask him questions about Sklar and other parts of his life that he’d tried to forget, and the next time we spoke he’d grumble about having replayed the conversation in his mind for the rest of the day. Yet he always agreed to another interview. One morning as he shook my hand, standing uncertainly without his prosthetic foot, he said, “You know more about me than anyone.”

At the beginning of another visit, he said, “I have a plan.” We were sitting at a round table in the main room of the center, where the residents ate their meals. The sun streamed in through the windows, and several people in scattered chairs stared up at a TV that was turned up too loud.

“What’s your plan?” I asked. Averill warned me that I wouldn’t like it.

He had an eye appointment coming up, and if he got bad news from the doctor, he was going to either stop eating or drink so much sugary soda that his body went into shock. He gestured toward the vending machine behind me. He couldn’t bear to spend the rest of his life handicapped. Averill was contemplating killing himself.

I froze, not sure how to respond. He told me that he’d listed me as someone the center could disclose his personal information to if he died. He told me I was a priority, that he didn’t want all the hours I’d spent talking to him to go to waste. He still hoped that the story I was writing would help someone else.

I left that day feeling afraid about what Averill would do and wondering what my responsibility was—whether I should talk to a staff member at the recovery center or maybe his lawyer. I was relieved when Averill called a couple of days later with good news: The doctor had told him that the odds of improving his vision were high. He might even be able to take care of himself again.

In late August, Averill received a letter from the Social Security Administration informing him that he would receive $750 a month. More good news arrived in the mail the next day: He qualified for Medicaid. Then, a few days later, Averill received another letter from Social Security. He’d been approved for retirement, allowing him to collect what he’d invested in the system. In lieu of that $750 disability check, he would receive $2,851 every month.

When he woke up the next morning, he still couldn’t believe it was true. He asked someone at the front desk to read him the letter again, just to be sure. He would have enough money to take care of himself even if he couldn’t get a job. He could afford a new laptop to make music again. A charger for his phone. A cellular plan. He started saying good morning to people passing through reception. “Did they up your meds?” someone asked him.

“It’s really strange,” Averill said when I visited him. We were sitting in the courtyard; he sipped his coffee, and I swatted mosquitoes. He had shaved most of his face, but the hair along his chin, which was hard for him to trim, curled into a long, bushy beard. “There’s an old me and a slightly different, new me,” he continued.

Then he coughed forcefully and hit his stomach. His digestive tract was irritated, Averill said, and the gas made him cough. But he assured me that he’d had a colonoscopy once and the doctors had told him that gas wouldn’t kill him. “I can’t think of a more boring way to die,” he said. “Imagine that on a tombstone: ‘Died of indigestion.’ Honestly, let’s try for something a little different.”

By September, a case manager had scheduled eye surgery. The cataracts were so bad—“the size of an elephant,” Averill said—that a laser wouldn’t work; doctors would have to surgically remove them. He was used to life looking like the film noirs he once watched while eating burgers at a restaurant in downtown Austin, everything in hazy black and white. The doctors told him that the surgery wouldn’t completely repair his eyesight but should improve it. For starters, he’d likely get his color vision back.

It seemed certain now that he wouldn’t have to go to prison to get the care he needed. Once he entered the mental health system, he had access to the appropriate resources. Still, his legal case was pending.

I woke up on the morning of October 2 to meet Averill at the Blackwell-Thurman Criminal Justice Center, where his presentencing hearing was set for 9 a.m. The judge wasn’t there when I arrived, and the prosecutor in Averill’s case, Jeremy Sylestine, had taken a seat in one of the juror’s chairs.

I found Averill sitting in the back corner of the room and bent down to let him know I was there, since he likely couldn’t see me; his eye surgery had been postponed. He said he was doing well but wanted some coffee. His lawyer, Cheryl Hindera, bustled around the bench. She moved so fast at times that her feet wobbled slightly in her black patent-leather heels. She finally sat next to Averill, who rested his hands gently on his cane with a calm expression on his face. “It doesn’t look like any courtroom I’ve ever seen, so that’s kind of depressing,” he said. He’d been expecting a Judge Judy scene, with people yelling and drama.

Before Judge Cliff Brown heard Averill’s case, Hindera needed her client to complete some paperwork. But because Averill couldn’t see, Hindera had to fill it out for him. “Are you currently in a gang?” she asked.

“Hardly,” he said.

Judge Brown called Averill’s case a few minutes before 10 a.m. and explained what pleading guilty would mean: Averill would waive his Miranda rights and wouldn’t be allowed near a Prosperity Bank branch ever again. The state was recommending a sentence of three years deferred adjudication with treatment or counseling.

“How do you plead?” Brown asked.

“Guilty,” Averill said. He was glad to say it.

Formal sentencing was set for November 13. Before that, Brown explained, probation services would conduct an investigation to determine whether it could support the plea agreement. Katie Cullather, a social worker assigned to his case, gave Averill her wrist, and the three of us started a slow march to an office five blocks away. We paused at one point so Averill could hike up his pants—he’d removed his belt before passing through the courthouse’s metal detector and hadn’t tightened it properly afterward. “Do you want to fix it?” Cullather asked.

“Out here?” he said. “Oh, God no, because next thing you know, they’ll say he’s exposing himself, and I’ll be right back in there.”

Cullather guided him down the street, pointing out gravel and dips and cracks in the concrete. By the time we reached the office, she wondered if he’d be able to find his way back without her. Averill told her not to worry. Next time he visited, he said, his friend Danielle Morris would accompany him.

A woman opened the door to a small office and called his name. “Yes, hold on a second,” he replied, gesturing in my and Cullather’s direction. “It takes this many people to keep an eye on me.”

Inside the office, the woman told him that he needed to come back in about three weeks and bring $43 for the assessment fee unless he wanted to add it to his court costs. No problem, Averill said. He’d received his first Social Security payment that morning.

Later that day, we went to a Starbucks so that Averill could have the coffee he’d been craving. He said that after everything—jail, the homeless shelter, the mental health facilities, contemplating suicide—he was grateful for two things: Social Security and friends. “And the friends,” he said, “may be on top.”

Averill felt so good that he started to think about getting into activism, to aid people who felt as desperate as he once had. If only they knew that they weren’t alone, he thought, maybe they’d reach out, find people who could help them access the services they needed. Maybe his story could become a rallying point. “If somebody doesn’t start it,” he said, meaning a movement to help the sick and isolated, “it’s not going to happen.”

Of course, there are many activists and organizations dedicated to improving the lives of vulnerable people in America. It’s easy to imagine Averill’s story becoming an anecdote in their literature or in a politician’s stump speech. The man who robbed a bank to get health care! Another example of how our system is broken. Sympathetic voters might nod their heads in favor of health care for all. Then they’d probably forget all about Averill. Perhaps, like he once had, they wouldn’t think too hard about what it means to be alone and needy—unless they actually were. Even then, they might not be willing to ask for help outright.

Averill told me that he wanted to start a Facebook group to advocate for streamlining systems that help connect the sick, poor, and unemployed with services. He recognized that sometimes people need a push, and he was ready to push. “You can’t help people from a position of weakness,” he said. “You have to help people from a position of strength.”

When I visited Averill in December at his new home, an apartment he shared with Morris, he’d hung a plastic shopping bag on the doorknob so that I’d know which place was his. He showed me the patio where he liked to sit and watch the trees sway in the wind and the bees buzz around the flowering ivy—at least he thought it was flowering ivy. He couldn’t really see it. He had an appointment with an ophthalmologist at the end of January. After that, he hoped, he would finally have surgery.

“This is pretty much a very high-class, very fancy prison cell,” he said of his home. “I can’t go anywhere. I can’t go outside without falling over things. I can’t drive a car and get anything. I cannot rely on the bus, because I can’t tell you which bus I’m going to be getting on, and I couldn’t see to get on the bus anyway.”

I couldn’t tell how happy—or unhappy—Averill was with the arrangement. There was an edge to his voice. Yet he was making plans. His bedroom had only a floor lamp and mattress then, and he wanted to show me where he would put things once he bought them. “Here is going to go my writing station,” he said, pointing to one wall, “either a folding table or a desk. My laptop will go here. I’m going to put a big ol’ monitor behind it. Here on the other side of the table is going to be a Keurig machine or an electric kettle. Then I’m going to have possibly a slow-brew, slow-pour coffee maker—pour by hand—and flowering tea.”

He turned to another wall. “This area here is set aside for musical instruments. Guitar will probably go over there, and then put a bass over here, and maybe a second guitar here, and all my studio gear will go right here in front of this window.”

He showed me the spice carousel in the kitchen, the knife block, the microwave, and the panini press. The dining table was covered in Morris’s crafts—she was going to make ornaments for the artificial Christmas tree in the living room. A new Swiffer leaned in a corner. “She cleans everything up even though I say, ‘You don’t need to clean everything up!’” he said.

Averill covered the rent, and Morris paid for utilities, internet, phone, cable, and half the groceries. She’d helped him pick out a 68-inch television, so that he could see what’s happening on the screen. She did the cooking and had helped Averill sign up for Ambetter, one of the options available in Texas through the federal government’s health care marketplace, after his higher income disqualified him for Medicaid. She drove him on errands and had called a cab to get them to his first meeting with his probation officer. Averill worried that he was burdening Morris. But he cared about her. He liked her company. And, he admitted, it was nice to have someone around in case something happened to him.

I walked to my car feeling glad that Averill had a safe and comfortable place to live. He’d found not only housing but also a community, even if it was a small one.

About a week later, Averill called. It was a Tuesday. On the previous Friday, he said, Morris had vanished. By Saturday morning he was worried, for his friend and for himself. He couldn’t sleep. He was chugging coffee and plowing through hundreds of Tums. “I was stuck here without a caregiver, with no way to get medicine,” he said. Morris had all his health-insurance information, which he wouldn’t be able to read even if he had it. “I was up the proverbial creek,” he said.

Unlike his circumstances just a year earlier, this time he asked for help. He called Katie Cullather, the social worker, and she connected him with an agency that sent a caretaker to his home. That woman renewed his prescriptions, helped him make his first health-insurance payment, bought food, and cleaned up the apartment. Averill arranged to pay for her to continue to help him twice a week. He felt like he’d dodged a bullet. But he was still distraught: Where was Morris?

Averill called me again later that evening and left a voice mail. Morris was back, he said. She’d stayed at the hospital for a few nights and thought that someone had told Averill that she wouldn’t be home. But no one had. Averill sounded angry. “I’m not sure what the hell’s going on,” he said when I called him back the next morning. “She opens the door and walks in like nothing has happened and just says, ‘Hi.’”

What he feared most had transpired: He’d let himself feel vulnerable, and now he was hurt. “I’m not willing to risk myself ever again,” he said. “I’m not going down that path ever again for anybody for any reason.”

I asked if he thought Morris’s disappearance might just be a misunderstanding. Maybe, he said. But it didn’t matter. He’d lost sleep over the ordeal. Was life with friends, people you counted on, really so much better than life without them? “I can create my art, I can work on my music, I can have casual interactions with people online and not tear my soul apart,” he told me.

Then he said what I was worried he would say: “I’m going back into isolation.”

I made the case that Averill shouldn’t give up. Maybe, I said, Herrera and Morris and the counselors he’d talked to at the Herman Center were like a lily pad—“or a life raft!” I said hopefully. Somewhere to land as he emerged from the remote world he’d occupied for so long, before he took another step, and met another person and then another, and finally found his way.

“Possibly,” Averill said.

He wasn’t sure he was ready to find out. He needed time. Then he would reassess. In that moment, he didn’t think that he mattered. Someday soon, I hoped he’d realize that he did.

What happens when an adoption fails?

By Rowan Moore Gerety

Of her five children, Djenane Phadael Estimé was hardest on two-year-old Marie Jacqueline. Djenane said that the little girl was hardheaded, and she wanted her to grow up to be a good person. When Djenane got angry, she beat Jacquie, as her family called the toddler, with belts, plates, and shoes. Jacquie walked with a limp because of a broken femur that her parents had left untreated. In November 1999, she finally died.

One Sunday night, Jacquie complained of pain in her arm and couldn’t fall asleep. Djenane took her to a Haitian healer who treated injuries, no matter how severe, with a mentholated ointment. They returned to their home in Lake Worth, Florida, around midnight, and Djenane put Jacquie to bed. The next morning, the toddler wouldn’t wake up.

In a panic, Djenane called her niece Claire Dameus, who often left her own children at the Estimés’ while she worked as a nursing assistant. Dameus instructed Djenane to call 911, then drove over to the family’s one-bedroom apartment in Lake Worth, a working-class town north of Miami. She found her aunt cradling the stiff child as Djenane’s husband, Pascal, stood nearby. They hadn’t yet called 911, so Dameus did. The emergency operator told her to put Jacquie on the floor and perform CPR.

“Don’t go nowhere,” Dameus said to Djenane. “Everything is not easy no more. When 911 come in, they’re going to ask questions.”

Paramedics found Jacquie dead on the kitchen floor in a tiny red dress. The cause was recorded as multiple blunt-force trauma to the head, but it was impossible to say which of Jacquie’s injuries had killed her. There were nine distinct contusions on her head; at least one of them had caused hemorrhaging in her brain. Twelve of her ribs were broken. She had a black eye and a burn mark on her thigh.

The Estimés’ four other children were in the apartment when Jacquie died. Gladina, who would turn one the next day, was the only sibling who appeared to be unscathed. Pinder, age three, had bruises on his arms and scabies on his hands, chest, and back. Seven-year-old James, the eldest, had impetigo so severe that it had spread to his lymph nodes, and there were welts on his body consistent with a belt or electrical cord, though he insisted he’d gotten them from falling down.

Then there was Deon. The four-year-old had fewer outward signs of abuse or neglect than his brothers did, but he also seemed more afraid. Slight and wide-eyed, he barely spoke to the men and women in navy blue uniforms who whisked him and his siblings away from their home. In the hallway of the police station, waiting to be taken to a doctor, Deon played quietly with green plastic toy soldiers.

That night, Deon and Pinder were sent to a children’s shelter, while James and Gladina went to a foster home. Within 24 hours, Djenane and Pascal were charged and denied bail. The state of Florida pledged to seek the death penalty for Djenane for committing first-degree murder. Pascal faced up to 15 years in prison for his failure to intervene or notify authorities about the abuse.

The case made headlines as as one of the worst documented cases of child abuse in Palm Beach County. “Hey, that’s my mom!” James cried when he saw Djenane’s mugshot flash across a TV screen at the shelter, where he and Gladina eventually joined their brothers while authorities decided what to do with them.

Florida’s Department of Children and Families (DCF) placed the Estimé siblings in kinship care, which meant that they’d be fostered and potentially adopted by members of their extended family. First they lived with Dameus, the cousin who’d called 911, then with one of their mother’s relatives a few miles south, in Lantana, along South Florida’s Atlantic coast. In August 2001, they were sent to the outer limits of the state’s child-welfare system: to their grandfather’s house in Haiti. (International placement in kinship care is uncommon but not unheard of, especially in states with large immigrant populations, such as Florida, California, Arizona, and Texas.) In a picture from the day they arrived in Saint-Marc, a small coastal city in Haiti, the Estimé children pose with their grandfather, Merès, and two DCF staffers—“a white lady and a black lady,” Deon remembered.

It wasn’t easy to get the siblings to Saint-Marc. The DCF spent months making arrangements, which included finding a Haitian organization that could serve as a liaison until Merès formally took custody of his grandchildren. The agency was gambling on oversight, too. The closest U.S. government outpost was the embassy in Port-au-Prince, about 55 miles south of Saint-Marc, and a DCF caseworker would only be able to visit Haiti every few months. The main point of contact for the Estimés would be an uncle who spoke halting English and lived in the capital. Still, family was family, so the DCF left the four children and $500 with Merès.

The Estimés felt at home in Haiti. Deon and his brothers had been born there and spent the first few years of their lives in Saint-Marc, before moving to Florida. Now they played chicken with cars along the main road and hitched rides on motorcycle taxis to get to Liberty Academy, a small private school run by American missionaries across the street from the Caribbean Sea. In a jungle of vines near Merès’s house, they played hide-and-seek and picked Spanish limes with the freewheeling kids who lived in a cluster of thatch-roofed houses nearby. They weren’t supposed to be there, but the risk that they might get caught by the pig farmer who owned the land was part of the fun. “Everybody said that the guy chopped off people’s heads,” Deon recalled.

One day the kids spotted the farmer, and most of them scrambled over a fence to safety. Deon—six years old, scrawny, and seconds too slow—got caught. “Merès! That’s my grandfather!” he blurted out. The man’s face softened, and he let Deon go. The next day, Merès brought his grandson back to the farm with a bucket of slop for the owner’s pigs. “People would be trying to sneak to get Spanish limes,” Deon said. “But all you had to do was feed his pigs and he would give you some.”

Having children in his house proved to be a strain on Merès. He had a business hauling loads of rocks from riverbed quarries to construction sites in a dump truck. With grandchildren at home, “I wasn’t able to work,” he said. “I had to go back and forth to school, to drop them off, to bring them lunch money at noon.” The funds that the DCF had given him didn’t stretch very far. “Five hundred can’t do anything for a year,” Merés said. “To give the kids three meals a day, to buy beds.”

When a DCF caseworker came for a visit, Merès asked for support. Instead, the caseworker decided to take the kids back to Florida. Deon remembered his grandfather sitting him and his siblings down before they left. “He said he couldn’t take care of us anymore, and that the next day, people would be coming to take us back,” Deon said. On August 12, 2002, a year and ten days after arriving in Saint-Marc, the kids boarded a flight back to Florida.

By then, Djenane had pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and been sentenced to 38 years in prison. Pascal had already been released after serving two years for lesser charges. Both had signed away their parental rights. Because Deon and his siblings were minors, they weren’t named in news stories about their sister’s death and the case against their parents. The kids asked about their mom and dad all the time, but they hadn’t seen either one since the day they were taken into custody.

Because the DCF had exhausted the available options to place the siblings with family members, the Estimé children now fell into a different pool of kids overseen by the state of Florida. They were potential adoptees, children in need of new parents altogether. For the state, the goal was permanency, a home where the siblings could live safely until they turned 18. For the kids, it was something more: a forever family. Deon would get neither.

The Estimés’ return to Florida coincided with a sweeping overhaul of the state’s child-welfare system, led by then governor Jeb Bush. Between 2000 and 2002, the DCF handed off responsibility for licensing, case management, and adoption in the foster-care system to a constellation of firms contracted on a county-by-county basis. This model of privatization, called community-based care, was hailed by the governor as a path forward for an underfunded and overcrowded system considered one of the worst in the country. Yet it was unproven and controversial. State officials acknowledged that pilot programs in the late 1990s had failed.

Melissa Neeley was a bubbly 26-year-old when she started working in the community-based-care system. After college she’d worked with the families of developmentally delayed children in Texas. Then she moved across the country and took a job as the manager of a chaotic group home in Lake Worth, where she made $10 an hour and fielded midnight phone calls about psychiatric commitments. “I wouldn’t say I had no idea what I was doing, but I wasn’t in my happy place,” Neeley recalled. One day an adoption caseworker encouraged her to apply for a position at Children’s Home Society, the nonprofit tasked with overseeing foster care and adoption in Palm Beach County. Neeley got a job as a case manager and was promptly handed 40 files, more than double the workload prescribed by the state.

The children whose lives were laid out in that paperwork were scattered in homes as much as an hour’s drive from Neeley’s office in West Palm Beach. Florida law requires caseworkers to visit each of their charges at least once every 30 days, but many of Neeley’s kids hadn’t been seen in months. Recruitment of adoptive parents had stagnated. It was difficult work, but Neeley found that her friendly bearing helped repair relationships with foster parents who had soured on her predecessor.

The Estimé kids were among her first cases. Gladina, too young to remember what her family had been through, was growing into a spunky, confident child. Once, sitting in Neeley’s office, she burst into tears when she learned that one of the interns there was blind. When Neeley asked why she was crying, Gladina whimpered, “Because she can’t see how cute I am.” James and Pinder “had defiance in their blood,” Neeley remembered, and still seemed to be processing the abuse they’d experienced. Staff from the DCF believed that Pinder may have been hiding in the room where his mother beat Jacquie the night she died. Sometimes, Pinder wouldn’t even speak to Neeley—he would just size her up from across the room.

Deon was different. “He was so sweet,” Neeley said. Somehow what had happened to his family “didn’t touch him quite as roughly.” A DCF report written just before his ninth birthday described Deon as “a well mannered, likable” boy who loved “to swim, play football, and ride his bike.” Still, there were hints of lingering trauma from his early life and the bewildering experience of being uprooted. The report described a child coping with unimaginable pain. “It is hypothesized that Deon cries and refuses to talk to a trusting adult when his feelings are hurt in order to avoid further feelings of sadness, grief, or loss,” the report observed. “[Deon] often changes the subject to avoid discussing his past experiences with his biological family.” It suggested three alternate coping mechanisms: “hugging his teddy, watching TV, and playing video games.”

Neeley—or Miss Melissa, as the Estimés called her—conducted home visits and interviewed prospective adoptive parents to see if they’d be a good fit for the siblings. She was determined to find a family that would be willing to adopt the four children together, however unlikely that might be. “I wouldn’t budge on that, because they had already lost too much,” Neeley said.

For a while, the siblings were in three foster homes in three different towns. Only Deon and Gladina were together, in Belle Glade, a town of 17,000 people nestled among sugarcane fields in a swampy stretch of Florida between Lake Okeechobee and the northern Everglades. Their foster mother was a deeply religious woman named Mrs. Clark who sent Deon to a small Christian school called Miracle by Faith. On Sundays, she took him and Gladina to church in a neighbor’s garage, which had been decked out with a stage and plastic chairs for pews. Clark was a strict disciplinarian who cared for four or five kids at once and didn’t hide the fact that she considered foster care a business. Foster parents are often given stipends by the state; in Florida at that time, the amount was roughly $15 per child per day.

“They always let me know, ‘Hey, we’re not your family,’” Gladina recalled of Clark and her Jamaican boyfriend. The kids weren’t allowed to socialize outside the house and spent their afternoons inside, watching Dragonball Z on TV. They were scolded for taking food from the kitchen without asking. “Tell the truth. God’s watching,” Mrs. Clark would say.

During visits, Neeley noticed an unhealthy fear developing in Deon and Gladina. When another driver cut Neeley off on the highway one day and she swore out loud, Gladina, strapped into the back seat, began to sob hysterically. “You’re gonna go to hell now,” she said. “God’s gonna punish you because you said a bad word!” As Christmas approached, Neeley made the rounds to the kids in her organization’s care, giving each one a plush brown teddy bear with a bow tie. When Deon got his, he promptly walked across the room and gave it to Mrs. Clark. “You deserve this teddy bear for putting up with a child like me,” he said. Neeley was shocked. She watched Gladina look around the room as she clutched her own bear. “She looked torn, wondering if she was supposed to follow Deon’s lead and give her the teddy bear, too, or if she was supposed to keep it because Miss Melissa gave it to her,” Neeley said.

Things were worse than Neeley knew. Mrs. Clark had once yanked Deon’s ear so hard that she ripped the skin where it connected to the boy’s head. When teachers sent Gladina home early from preschool after a bookshelf fell on her, Mrs. Clark spanked the little girl for disrupting her daily schedule, then made Gladina sit in a corner until Deon got home. Gladina was four at the time. “I used to pee the bed every day,” Gladina said. “To avoid them beating me from peeing the bed, I would throw the clothes in the washing machine.”

Then one day, Deon tangled with Mrs. Clark’s boyfriend and mustered the courage to pick up the house phone and dial 911. Bit by bit, a damning picture of the home came together on Neeley’s desk. Deon and Gladina were removed. “Mrs. Clark didn’t stay in business too long after that,” Neeley said.

In September 2004, Deon and Gladina were sent to Real Life Children’s Ranch, a sprawling, faith-based group home in Okeechobee where more than a dozen children lived in four bungalows, each overseen by what the ranch called “professional parents”—often a husband and wife who lived on the property with their own children. Deon arrived a few weeks after the start of fourth grade, a gangly four feet seven inches tall and 71 pounds. He was shy but excited to be among a crowd of kids. The ranch felt like it was part family farm, part summer camp, where children fed and watered the ranch’s animals as part of their daily chores. In the afternoons, they could float on inner tubes in a fish pond or spring off a trampoline into the water. Boys and girls lived in separate houses, but Deon and Gladina saw each other every day on the school bus. Gladina took comfort in knowing that her big brother would wake her up and make sure she got off the bus at the right stop if she fell asleep.

Still, the constant upheaval in Deon’s past had consequences. He had always struggled to stay focused in school. Now he bristled at authority and was repeatedly suspended for mouthing off at teachers. Professional parents at the ranch had him fill entire notebooks with the phrase “I will not use curse words” and show the notebooks to Neeley when she visited.

Adoption was the subject of constant speculation at the ranch, but none of the kids really understood how it worked. Would-be parents showed up to spend time with children they’d singled out on an adoption agency’s website, where they could view head shots and brief bios of the children. Other kids would watch and listen, hoping to pick up tidbits about the lives on offer to their friends. They focused their enthusiasm less on an emotional connection with adoptive parents than on the trappings of family life: a big house, a pool, toys, go-karts.

Deon knew that things didn’t always work out like kids hoped. One family who had expressed interest in adopting all four Estimés when Deon and Gladina were still in Belle Glade backed out when they absorbed the details of James’s and Pinder’s case files. At the time, James was 12, an age when he was half as likely as a younger child to be adopted. Nine-year-old Pinder, meanwhile, had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was taking an antipsychotic medication. Neeley started to worry that keeping the siblings together might be impossible. “There comes a point in any adoption case that you start thinking, Which is more important, keeping them together, or getting them out of this system as quickly as I can?” Neeley said. “It doesn’t matter how good a system it is, it’s still a system. It’s not a family. It’s not home.”

Shortly before Christmas in 2005, Deon and Gladina went to a restaurant with other kids from the ranch on the way back from church. Gladina noticed a black couple in their late thirties at the other end of the table. Eventually, they came over to introduce themselves as the Richardses. They didn’t have a family, but they wanted one. (The Richardses declined to be interviewed for this story.) When the kids loaded back into the ranch’s transport van, they peppered Gladina and Deon with questions: Do you know them? Are they going to adopt you?

Gladina had watched the movie Annie more times than she could count, and the way people around her talked about adoption made it seem like something she should hope for. Then again, she was happy at the ranch. “We’d already moved from a trash place to a better place,” she said. “You don’t test your luck.” Deon, meanwhile, couldn’t understand why he and Gladina would have to leave if they didn’t want to. “I wanted to stay at the ranch forever,” he said.

A few weeks later, the Richardses came back bearing McDonald’s—a Big Mac for Deon and a Happy Meal with chicken nuggets and a Little Mermaid necklace for Gladina. The couple took them to see the movie The Pink Panther and to tour their house in Orlando, which had a backyard shaded by a tall sycamore tree. There was a park with a baseball diamond just up the street. It looked like the type of place where a happy family would live, but Deon was hesitant. He thought he deserved the family he wanted. If adoptive parents got to choose kids, why couldn’t kids choose adoptive parents?

Florida’s child-welfare system is supposed to take kids’ opinions into account if they are “of sufficient intelligence, understanding, and experience to express a preference,” according to state law. It’s in no one’s interest for a child to go to a family they don’t like. But how does one determine that a child is old enough or understands enough about their situation to raise an objection? When Deon announced on a car ride with ranch staff in early 2006 that he didn’t “want to go with that frickin’ family,” one of his professional parents scolded him for being ungrateful. “After that I stayed quiet,” he remembered.

Neeley had noticed that Deon and Gladina didn’t seem to form as strong a bond with their prospective family as some kids do, but the Richardses were new to parenting. Besides, Neeley thought, these were easy, happy-go-lucky kids. “Deon and Gladina didn’t have any of the behaviors that would make you say, ‘Oh, I really need a family that has raised kids before,’” she explained.

In June 2006, during the adoption ceremony at the Palm Beach County courthouse, a judge looked Deon in the eye and asked if he had any reservations about the Richardses adopting him. He stayed quiet.

Deon and Gladina moved in to the Richardses’ L-shaped ranch house on Cedar Bay Road, at the north end of an Orlando subdivision called Dover Estates. They each had their own room. Fridays were family night, which meant playing games, eating at restaurants, or going to the movies. Deon and his new dad put together model cars and launched a toy rocket in the neighborhood park. Mr. Richards was a commercial pilot at AirTran, and his job afforded the family free plane tickets when they flew standby. They took getaways on a moment’s notice. In Washington, D.C., they visited museums on the National Mall, and Deon posed in front of a green screen for a photo that showed him in a suit, shaking hands with President George W. Bush. In New York City, they went to Times Square and the Statue of Liberty. In Maryland, they visited Mrs. Richards’s extended family; once they went up for a single day, just to attend a cousin’s birthday party.

A few months after Deon and Gladina moved in with the Richardses, Pinder was adopted, too, by a Cuban American family that lived outside Miami. The Perezes had three biological children of their own, two boys and a girl. The setup was “kind of like our original family,” Deon said. After Pinder’s adoption, the Perezes drove up from South Florida to meet Deon and Gladina in Orlando and brought them on family trips to SeaWorld and Disney World.

None of the Estimé kids had seen their parents since the day they first went into state custody, seven years earlier. For James, the only sibling without a permanent solution, the lack of closure was devastating. By middle school, he was stealing cars and running away from his foster home. He lived with the family of a retired sheriff’s deputy in Royal Palm Beach. They wanted to adopt him, but James resisted. “Y’all are not my family,” he said. Neeley, whose involvement with the other Estimé kids ended when they were adopted, was still responsible for James’s case. She thought he might be acting out in frustration at being apart from his siblings. “When James was worried about what was going on with them, his behavior was ten times worse,” Neeley said.

She arranged for him to spend a few days with the Richardses around Christmas 2006. When he got to Orlando, James was relieved to see that Mr. Richards liked planes and action figures. This man’s a nerd, but at least he’s not an alcoholic, James thought.

James returned a second and third time over subsequent holidays, and he started to talk about moving to Orlando. He gushed to Neeley about how Mr. Richards had promised to take him up in a Cessna prop plane. Neeley was apprehensive. She knew James to be angry and mercurial, and he’d been held back twice in school. “James is not Deon and Gladina,” she said. When she got a call from the Richardses in late 2007, she braced herself for the news that James could no longer visit. But that wasn’t what Mr. Richards had to say. “He told me they wanted to adopt James, too,” Neeley said.

Meanwhile, Deon was struggling to adjust to his new parents’ rules. Kids at the ranch were taught to be polite and address adults as sir or ma’am. They were told to say dang instead of damn and heck instead of hell, and to never take God’s name in vain. Though he was used to a relatively strict environment, the Richardses’ idea of manners caught Deon off guard. If he answered “What?” when Mrs. Richards called his name, she’d shoot back, “Don’t what me!” If he or Gladina spoke in a tone of voice she didn’t like, their mother sometimes slapped them across the face.

Once, while the family was in the Orlando airport, returning from one of their trips, Deon and Mrs. Richards got in an argument, and he told her, “I hate you.” When the family got home, Mr. Richards spanked Deon. Corporal punishment became one of the Richardses’ methods of dealing with bad behavior. Gladina said her father regularly gave them “whuppings,” meted out on bare skin with a belt or a wooden paddle. Once, in Deon’s telling, he and Pinder, who was visiting, were riding bikes borrowed from a neighborhood friend when Mr. Richards drove past and ordered them home. He accused Deon of stealing the bikes. Deon shouted back, “I didn’t steal those frickin’ bikes!” His father retorted, “Who do you think you’re talking to like that?” and began hitting him on the back and legs.

James, whose adoption had been finalized, smoked joints on the bus and picked fights at school, but he was careful not to act out at the Richardses’ home—he didn’t even grumble about having to attend early Sunday services at the family’s Baptist church. Together, he and Mr. Richards bonded over a love of cars, working on a blue 1984 Monte Carlo that Mr. Richards was fixing up. It reminded James of working with his grandfather in Haiti, grabbing tools as they tinkered with the dump truck in the driveway.

James shared a room with Deon, where they had a PlayStation and a weight bench, but the brothers barely knew each other by then; they hadn’t lived together since coming back from Haiti five years earlier. Now, at opposite ends of puberty, the three-year age difference between them felt huge. Deon was into basketball and football and decorated the walls of their room with posters from Sports Illustrated. James was more interested in girls and going out with friends. Some days he didn’t come home until it was time for bed. Deon only remembers really bonding with his brother when James agreed to help him prepare to go out for freshman football; they played catch together in the back yard.

The summer before ninth grade, Deon tried out for the team with his friend Shaquille Evans. Shaquille was put on the roster as a running back. Deon made the team, too, but his parents wouldn’t let him play—they said he needed to do better in school first. It was true that he rarely did homework and dodged questions about grades, but Deon felt like he had nothing to work toward without sports.

Gladina tried to tune out the arguments between her brother and their parents. When they fought, she would close the door to her bedroom and turn up the volume on reruns of Saved by the Bell and The Golden Girls. “The TV was my best friend,” she said. When things got particularly heated, Deon would sometimes spend the night at Shaquille’s. His friend’s mother, Nicky, was warm and welcoming. She’d had the family’s driveway widened just so her son and his friends had more room to play pickup basketball. Deon took to referring to Mrs. Evans as Mom.

James had always encouraged Deon to keep the peace with their parents, but by the time things really went south with the Richardses, James was gone: Just before Christmas in 2009, the 17-year-old left the house after an argument about cutting the lawn and never returned. His stuff stayed in the room he’d shared with Deon.

The Richardses took an increasingly hard line with Deon. They changed the locks and told him to stay out of the house until Mrs. Richards returned from work at 8 p.m. Gladina recalled her parents’ rationale as “OK, you want to be grown? You’re grown now.” That only made Deon want to leave more. He slept at friends’ houses, sometimes sneaking back in through his bedroom window to grab a change of clothes. One Friday at 11 p.m., before a weekend when Deon was grounded, he stormed out of the house wearing only a T-shirt and red basketball shorts. After 48 hours passed, the Richardses filed a missing person report. Deon finally came home on Tuesday.

Nicky Evans thought Deon wasn’t treated well at home and should consider reporting the Richardses to the DCF. But she could see that he was worried about getting split up from his sister, so she encouraged him to diffuse the tension, even sending him back home on occasion to make up with his mother. “He was always saying he just wanted to get older so he could get out,” Evans recalled. “I said, ‘Deon, whatever your mom asks you, just do it. You’re almost there.’” But Deon felt himself losing control.

Finally, he snapped. One day, about six months after James left, Deon was suspended from school and tried to hide in the closet until Mrs. Richards left for work. When she found him, she started throwing his sneaker collection into trash bags—ten pairs of shoes he had either traded for or bought with proceeds from a job passing out fliers for a local pizzeria. According to Deon, his mother accused him of stealing them and he lost his temper, threatening to blow up the house and break the windows of her new Chrysler Pacifica. Mr. Richards, who was also home, demanded that Deon, who was 15, go to the garage to be spanked. When Deon refused and left the house, Mr. Richards called the police. They found Deon at a friend’s and arrested him for “threats to do harm” to his mother.

Gladina worried that Deon’s relationship with the Richardses had reached a breaking point. She was terrified that he’d leave, like James had. You couldn’t stay just for me? she thought.

The next day, an investigator from the DCF came to the Richardses’ home and heard competing stories of what had happened. Both parents said Deon had threatened them, while the teenager claimed that the Richardses had abused him. As the investigator tried to make sense of things, she was working with limited information: It was 2010, and Florida’s child-welfare groups were in the process of integrating three separate data systems that tracked case histories. Deon’s pre- and post-adoption information should have been linked, giving the investigator access to records dating back to 1999, when Deon was taken from the house in Lake Worth where Jacquie died. In practice, though, access to information in cases like Deon’s was scattershot. The investigator noted that Deon’s tendency to run away “may be indicative of abuse in his past” and that he’d been adopted because his birth mother “beat his sister.” It isn’t clear if she knew anything more specific about Deon’s early life.

The facts on the ground that night suggested to the investigator that the family was at least stable. The Richardses had no criminal history and said they wanted a better future for their son. According to the investigator’s report, Mrs. Richards said that Deon was going through a rebellious stage and that he needed mental-health treatment, though there’s no evidence that she attempted to connect Deon with a therapist. (In fact, Deon had not received counseling since being in foster care in Belle Glade.) Mrs. Richards acknowledged using corporal punishment, though Mr. Richards denied it. Gladina corroborated Mrs. Richards’s assertion that Deon was often the aggressor in conflicts with their parents.

The Richardses seemed eager to follow up on the investigator’s suggestion that they seek family counseling, and Mrs. Richards signed a “safety plan” promising that she and her husband would not use corporal punishment. Deon entered a diversion program that would keep the misdemeanor charge off his record once he’d completed probation. The DCF investigation was closed within a few weeks.

Over the next several months, the situation didn’t improve. Deon worked out with a basketball team but quit when he realized he’d need his parents’ help to pay for travel and get a doctor’s permission to play in games. Arguments over washing dishes and picking up dirty clothes quickly escalated. In September 2011, four weeks into Deon’s junior year of high school, he got out a loaf of bread in the kitchen to make a sandwich. Mrs. Richards thought he was taking it to his room and blocked his path—one of the house rules was that the kids couldn’t eat in their bedrooms. She grabbed at the loaf, and a scuffle ensued.

What happened next is disputed. Deon said he suddenly let go of the bread, causing Mrs. Richards to lose her balance and fall backward. Mrs. Richards said Deon shoved her and that she had to hit him to defend herself. She dialed 911 and told the dispatcher that her son had pushed her. When the police arrived, they arrested Deon for battery. The only injury noted in the incident report was Mrs. Richards’s broken pinkie nail.

When a DCF investigator visited the house, Mr. Richards said that he’d bought a gun for the first time in his life. “I am not going to confront Deon empty-handed,” he said, according to the investigator’s report. “I will use a firearm to protect my family.” The shape of Deon’s life seemed to shift with those words: He was an outsider, not a son.

Deon was sentenced to a year of probation. The court stipulated that he complete 15 hours of community service, submit to random drug tests, write an apology letter to Mrs. Richards, and “obey parents.” The DCF again concluded that what was happening in the family didn’t require intervention. “No indicators of inadequate supervision,” the investigator’s notes stated.

The family was scheduled to begin counseling, but Deon showed up high to one of the sessions and refused to participate. The next month, he landed in the hospital after he used K2, a legal but potent concoction of synthetic cannabinoids that left him passed out on a friend’s lawn. When a DCF staffer suggested sending Deon to a youth shelter to give the family time to cool down, Mr. Richards said that he and his wife had already tried “everything.” The DCF staffer noted in a report, “Parents stated they were done with child and that the department could do what they needed to do to take the child in custody. The father said he … will do anything to keep [Deon] out the home.” For reasons that aren’t clear, the agency’s conclusions about the family’s dynamic were dramatically different than they had been just weeks earlier: “Parent talks about child in predominantly negative terms, hasn’t met child’s basic needs, risk of violence, escalating incidents.”

Still, Deon stayed with his parents until one night in mid-December, when he came home late and Mr. Richards, suspecting that Deon was high, refused to let him into the house. Deon kept ringing the doorbell until his father shut off the fuse. “Call the police!” Deon taunted from the yard. “I know the routine.” When he did make it inside, Deon went to the kitchen where, Mr. Richards told police, he started “verbally attacking” his mother and “pushing her into the cabinets.” Mr. Richards got his wooden paddle and hit Deon until the teenager went to his room.

The police returned and arrested Deon. He would never set foot in the Richardses’ house again. His adoption had failed.

The perils of foster care are well documented. The number of placements and the length of time children spend as wards of the state are linked to higher rates of juvenile delinquency and teen pregnancy, and to lower earnings as adults. After an adoption, the risk and uncertainty of foster care is supposed to resolve into a bond with a family that the child will keep for the rest of his or her life.

The reality, though, is that adoptions sometimes fall apart, leaving children in a precarious position. The phenomenon isn’t well studied or understood. Once an adoption is finalized, welfare agencies typically end contact with children and their new families. Adopted children also tend to move and change their names, making it difficult for researchers to gather enough data for rigorous analysis. “You have to have access to a sizable group of people,” said Trudy Festinger, a professor emeritus of social work at New York University who performed one of the few studies on the phenomenon of failed adoptions. “Where do you go to get that?”

What data there are suggest that the vast majority of adoptions are successful. But small studies have found that somewhere between 0.5 and 8 percent of children adopted out of foster care no longer live with their parents after four years. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, a number of factors can play a role in failed adoptions, including a child’s history of sexual abuse, emotional or behavioral problems, the number of siblings the child has, whether the adoptive parents have raised children before, and, most importantly, the child’s age. Adoptions of teenagers fail far more often than those of younger children.

If an adoption is going to fizzle, it usually happens during the trial period, before the arrangement is finalized in court. This is called a disruption, and the kids return to foster care as the search for an adoptive family resumes. Adoptions that break up after becoming legally binding are called dissolutions, a process that requires a court to terminate parental rights. From 2012 to 2017, the DCF counted 348 dissolutions out of nearly 17,000 adoptions statewide, or roughly 2 percent of the total.

Other adoptions fall apart but are never legally dissolved. When Deon’s parents kicked him out for good, the 16-year-old found himself in limbo: He was a juvenile lockout, which meant that he couldn’t go home although the Richardses were still his legal parents. He spent the night of his arrest in juvenile detention and then went to a weeklong, court-ordered rehab program for marijuana and K2. When he got out, Deon said, “instead of the Richardses coming to pick me up, it was somebody from DCF.”

He reentered foster care. The state’s position was that family reunification was still in Deon’s best interest, but in court the Richardses requested a no-contact clause, which prohibited Deon from reaching out to them and suspended any family counseling. Still, because the Richardses had parental rights, caseworkers had to ask their permission for everything—from sending Deon to get a haircut to obtaining his state-issued ID. The family also remained entitled to a $300 monthly adoption subsidy until Deon turned 18. The court ordered the Richardses to pay $150 a month in child support after Deon moved out, but according to a judicial review, they only sent him the money once.

Gladina was caught in the middle, left at home with the basketball she’d bought Deon for Christmas; he’d been removed from the home before she could give it to him. When she asked the Richardses how Deon was doing, they told her not to worry—he was being taken care of. She only saw her brother twice in the spring of 2012. On one of the visits, she told him that the Richardses were planning to move to Atlanta. Deon told a caseworker, who reached out to remind the family that they were required to inform the DCF if they relocated. Mr. Richards responded that there was no firm timetable for the move.

In June, as soon as Gladina finished the school year, the Richardses relocated to Georgia and ceased all contact with the DCF. They didn’t leave a forwarding address.

After leaving the Richardses’, Deon had moved into Great Oaks Village, a county-run group home of stucco cottages situated on a leafy campus outside downtown Orlando. It was January when he arrived, and he walked around in shorts and a T-shirt even though it was 50 degrees outside because his other clothes were too small. His toes broke through the basketball shoes that the staff had given him; afraid of seeming ungrateful, he didn’t want to admit that they were too small. The kids at Great Oaks fought and stole from one another, but they also shared stories of trauma and loss without judgment. Seven- and eight-year-olds spoke with authority about drug use; teenage girls talked matter-of-factly about sexual abuse and rape.

To employees, Deon seemed like a kid who was adrift and angry at the world. During the six months he was under their care, he was the subject of five missing person reports, filed each time he left the facility for more than four hours without permission. He had never been diagnosed with any clinical disorders, but a social worker’s assessment from Deon’s time at Great Oaks contains a stark list of the experiences he carried with him:

Failed adoption placementLack of primary supportSeparation of siblingsAdoptionBiological parents are incarceratedDeath of a siblingHistory of multiple foster home and school placementsJuvenile justice involvement

With the Richardses out of his life, Deon reached for the closest thing he still had to family: the Perezes. His brother Pinder had a cell phone, a pool in his backyard, a gaggle of relatives who showed up for Thanksgiving, and—most enviable to Deon—a father who coached his kids’ sports teams. In June 2012, Deon moved to Ft. Lauderdale to be closer to the family, but he hesitated to push for the close connection he craved, fearing it could strain his relationship with his brother.

He spent three months at a for-profit boys’ shelter called Crescent House, where neighbors complained of drugs, fights, break-ins, and vandalism, and police averaged two visits a week. Deon avoided most of the trouble thanks to his friendship with his roommate, the biggest kid there. “If he didn’t like you, you had a bad time there,” Deon said. (The city received so many complaints that it shut Crescent House down in 2016.) Deon wasn’t able to enroll in a GED program because he didn’t have an ID and couldn’t get one without help from the Richardses. With no identification, he was also unable to get a job, sign a lease, or open a bank account.

After he turned 18, in January 2013, Deon was finally free to make some of his own choices. He moved back to Orlando, landing at a group home for young adults who had aged out of foster care. He enrolled in a state program that would provide him with up to $1,200 a month until he was 23 years old, as long as he could show proof of employment or full-time enrollment in school. But Deon teetered on the edge of being able to do either. He was hired at a business called Extreme Laser Tag, then fired for coming in late. He lost a job working the turnstile at SeaWorld after four months when he went to the cafeteria and tried to redeem a stolen meal ticket that a colleague had given him. He enrolled in community college, intending to work toward an associate’s degree in physical therapy, but he gave that up, too. “I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t committed,” Deon said.

In the fall of 2015, he returned to Miami and moved into the home of Pinder’s adoptive grandmother, where he didn’t have to pay rent and there was plenty of good Cuban food on the table each night. He tried school again, and between his state stipend and a Pell grant, he had more money than he’d ever seen in one place. Pinder’s dad, Mario, urged him to go out for the college basketball team. But then Pinder’s grandmother found pot paraphernalia in Deon’s clothes while doing the laundry. In the spring of 2016, she told him he had to move out.

Deon, then 21, decided to try living on his own for the first time—no adoptive parents, no group-home supervisors, no sympathetic quasi-grandmothers. He had $3,000 saved up, and he gave a friend a few hundred bucks to sleep on his couch. The next six weeks ran together in a blur of blunts, fast food, and nights out at clubs. Deon was still taking college courses—earning B’s and C’s, doing about as well as he ever had. But everything else in his life remained precarious. “I had a lot of flashy things,” Deon recalled, “but I didn’t have anything.”

When a friend was robbed in a weed deal, Deon lent him $1,500, more than half the money in his bank account. Then Deon rear-ended a car while driving that friend’s BMW, and he knew he’d never get the loan back. When he got kicked out of his apartment, he started sleeping in another friend’s car, but a week later he lost all his clothes when the vehicle was repossessed. Deon and that friend resorted to sleeping on the poolside reclining chairs at a condo complex in the Miami suburbs for a few days. When it got cold, they retreated to the entryway to the pool’s bathrooms and woke up shivering as the sun rose.

Deon had finally reached his lowest point. As he saw his old friends from high school saving money and passing milestones, he realized that he’d been living passively, day to day. “I was just letting stuff happen to me,” he said. “A lot of people my age, they’d been working, they had cars, and I was just stagnant.”

I first met Deon in 2017, while reporting on what happens when kids in Florida age out of foster care. I learned the outlines of his story then and got back in touch a few months later, to see if he’d be interested in plumbing his case files to learn more about why his adoption had failed. In the spring of 2018, we started to meet regularly for breakfast at a restaurant near where he was living. His order: a Cuban sandwich and a mamey shake.

Earnest and soft-spoken, Deon has a quiet charisma and the stooped, self-effacing walk of someone trying to seem smaller than he is. He still says dang, heck, and frickin’, a hangover from his days at the ranch. Lithe and muscular, he stands six-foot-three, and his hands are just big enough to palm a basketball. Deon still plays obsessively, practicing crossovers as he walks down the street, dribbling in his bedroom until the downstairs neighbors yell at him to stop. When he plays basketball, Deon says, he feels at peace.

We talked for hours as I jotted down the shards of memory he’d retained from childhood: the sounds of Haitian Creole, the taste of warm lettuce served over a plate of rice and beans, banging his shin on the edge of the bed while roughhousing. “I remember I got this scar, or do I still have it?” he said, reaching for his right leg. “Yeah, this scar right here.”

His case file offers a different kind of life history. In theory, every piece of paper from the time Deon entered foster care at age four, through his adoption at age 11, and into extended state care after he turned 18 should have been readily available to him once he requested a copy of his case file. Organizations that are part of Florida’s community-based-care system are required to keep records on kids in state custody until they turn 30. Deon and I made dozens of calls to the long list of agencies that came in contact with his case over the years, including the DCF, Children’s Home Society, Community Based Care of Central Florida, and many others. Hundreds or even thousands of pages had gone missing, particularly those from Deon’s early years in the system. In some instances, we had to prod the agencies repeatedly to get what documents still existed.

All told, we obtained more than 2,000 pages from Deon’s file, along with more than 1,000 from the investigation of his birth parents’ criminal case. They reveal a bevy of people who tried to help Deon: case managers, state-appointed guardians ad litem (who advocate for a child’s best interest in court), and independent-living coordinators. One person’s email signature read, “Choices… not circumstances determine what people make out of their life!!!!!!”

Yet for all their good intentions, the sheer number of people involved contributed to the problems Deon faced. In the bureaucracy of child welfare, the only constant for him was change: a new face when an old caseworker got promoted, someone who had to get up to speed on his life when the person who knew all about it suddenly quit or was transferred. Much of Deon’s case file is written as though no one will ever read it. One report from when he was 19 traces the path he could take to working as a physical therapist. “There are no identified barriers to reaching goals,” the text reads. “Deon is motivated and has many supports in place.” In staid language, Deon’s lack of support is framed almost as an asset: In lieu of a nuclear family, he had an endless roster of paid employees who divvied up parenthood’s material tasks.

I never had parents. When he finally said it out loud, Deon seemed surprised somehow, like he’d tried so hard not to wallow in the past that the thought hadn’t crossed his mind. “I never had parents—I never had parents at all,” he told me again. “Never, man.”

One day in 2014, Deon got a call from a man with a Haitian accent: it was his birth father, Pascal. He had become a Jehovah’s Witness and was renting a room from a fellow worshipper just a few miles away. Fifteen minutes later, Pascal pulled up in an old truck. “I thought it was going to be super special,” Deon said. Instead, the meeting was short and awkward. “We talked for a little bit, but there wasn’t really a connection,” Deon said. After a few minutes, Pascal said he had to go. The two spoke briefly on the phone a few weeks later, but they haven’t been in contact since.

In the fall of 2018, Deon also reconnected with his mom, Djenane, in prison. He didn’t write to her—he was too impatient for snail mail—but instead used a messaging service that allowed him to buy a set of 30 virtual “stamps” for $12. One stamp allowed him to send or receive a note. Djenane sent him a recorded video, which cost four stamps. In it, Deon saw his mom’s face for the first time since he was four. Djenane was almost 50. She wore a baby blue V-necked uniform, with her gray hair plaited in two thick braids that hugged the sides of her head.“I love you, I love you, I love you, my son,” she said to the camera.

Deon went quiet as we watched it together. He had yet to respond to the video—he’d run out of stamps, and before he could buy them he needed to get a job. “I appreciated the opportunity to speak with her,” he said. “It really kind of filled a void.”

Deon’s case is a revealing study of one of the starkest policy choices a society faces: Who should care for children whose parents, including adoptive ones, can’t shoulder the responsibility? In Florida, authorities have made modest efforts to improve post-adoption services. Since 2015, case managers have been required to pick up the phone and conduct a welfare check at the one-year mark. In annual reports to the state legislature, the DCF now flags what it calls preventable disruptions, cases in which services like family counseling might have helped an adoption go through if only they’d been made available.

It’s hard not to see moments in Deon’s life where different decisions might have led to different outcomes. Deon’s cousin who first called 911 when Jacquie died and his grandfather both say they would have adopted the four siblings if only they’d had more financial support; unlike foster parents who receive payments automatically, extended family must apply to receive a recurring stipend for kinship care, and Deon’s family members say they weren’t aware this was an option. For all the Richardses’ eagerness to adopt, if they had known more about raising older kids with a history of trauma, perhaps their relationship with Deon wouldn’t have frayed so quickly. A counselor who worked with the family noted that the couple didn’t seem to grasp the difference between parenting a five-year-old and a 15-year-old.

Then there were Deon’s own misgivings. When the judge asked during his adoption ceremony if he had reservations, the 11-year-old felt pressure to stay silent. “That’s like the biggest regret I ever had in my life, not speaking up,” he told me.

I sent the DCF more than 50 questions while reporting this story; as of press time, it hadn’t answered any of them. I reached out to the Richardses several times, too, and spoke briefly to each of them—just long enough to explain that I wanted to write about how and why Deon’s adoption had fallen apart and the complicated emotions that must linger on both sides. Somehow they’d gone from claiming Deon as their son and wanting to love him forever to cutting off all contact, even as Gladina remained their child. Both Mr. and Mrs. Richards initially expressed openness to speaking with me but then declined to answer questions.

Deon still feels a measure of good will toward his adoptive family. He credits Mr. Richards with teaching him how to address strangers and potential employers. He acknowledges that the Richardses have been good for his sister. In high school, Gladina became a standout student and ran track. She graduated with honors, enlisted in the Army Reserve, and spent a semester at the University of Florida before deciding to become a firefighter.

Deon is the first to admit that he was a rebellious kid who sometimes acted out of spite. Looking back, he knows it must have been hard for the Richardses to adopt three children hardened by a life of abuse and contingency. James recently reconnected with the Richardses via Facebook, and Gladina says that her parents still ask about Deon sometimes. For Deon, though, losing his forever family has made it hard to hold on to anything else. Seven years later, Deon said, “I feel like I’m still getting my life fixed from the way things were at the Richardses’.”

When he was sleeping by the pool in 2016, Deon admitted that going it alone wasn’t working. He called a youth-services coordinator at his old foster-care agency in Orlando. Within a few days, Deon had a spot at a nonprofit supportive-housing program in Miami called Casa Valentina. Deon moved into Casa Valentina’s young-men’s house, a two-story stucco building not far from Miami-Dade College, where he was taking classes. Rent was $300 a month for an airy, one-bedroom apartment where he could stay for two years as long as he attended group meetings on Tuesdays and met weekly with an educational adviser and case manager.

He was still a long way from where he wanted to be, but Casa Valentina at least brought Deon some stability. The year after he left the Richardses’, he’d moved nine times in ten months; five years later, he still hadn’t spent more than six months in the same place. He started to make friends playing basketball at a court at the end of his block. He left the program for a few months in January 2018, only to go broke and wind up selling food stamps at a corner store. Luckily, Casa Valentina let him come back, giving Deon a second chance to overcome what one staff member described as his penchant for self-sabotage.

Deon got a job working at a stand that rents chairs and beach umbrellas on Miami Beach. As the sun set one summer evening, he scooped up armfuls of towels and dragged stacks of chaise longues across the sand like a linesman doing football drills—leaning forward, calves flexed as his toes pointed into the sand. He chatted with people on the beach, including a man in his sixties who did daily calisthenics with his dog by his side. “He’s not barking today!” Deon remarked. A moment later, the yapping began. “I spoke too soon,” Deon quipped. He told me that the dog’s owner had grown up on the streets of Colombia, apprenticed as an acrobat in Spain, and spent decades as a traveling circus performer. “When you don’t have a family, you make a lot of friends,” Deon explained.

One Friday in 2018, Deon and I drove to meet Melissa Neeley at a restaurant in Lake Placid, Florida, near her new home and career as a social worker for hospice patients. She’d become a county director for the Children’s Home Society before deciding she needed a change of pace. She first heard about the trouble at the Richardses’ at a conference in Orlando a few years after Deon’s adoption was finalized. Neeley told me that she tried calling the family but never heard back. “I was heartbroken,” she said, “and then really, really angry. I wanted to say, ‘You made that commitment. Who the heck are you to back out of that without notifying me, without calling me and saying you need help? This is not the puppy you take back to the pound. This is a child, and you committed to being their parents in front of judges and witnesses and God.’”

At the restaurant, a pan-Asian spot called Cang’s, Neeley stood up from her booth when she saw Deon for the first time in a dozen years, her arms outspread. They hugged, then their menus lay closed on the table for 30 minutes while they caught up. Neeley, arms crossed, looked up at Deon through oval glasses. Deon, grinning and fidgety as he basked in her affection, pulled up pictures from his siblings’ Instagram accounts. Together they scrolled through photos of Pinder’s trips to California and Paris, past James in a haze of smoke, to snapshots of all four Estimé kids in their rare moments growing up together. “That’s the little girl I know!” Neeley said when she saw an old photo of Gladina.

Neeley tried to help Deon look back on his missteps in the same way she saw them, as part of a lifelong negotiation to make the best of bad circumstances. “All you kids, you had so little control over your lives,” she said.

“After I left the Richardses’ house,” Deon said, “I just wanted to rebel, because I didn’t…”

“You didn’t belong anywhere.” Neeley said knowingly. “All I can think of is maybe they had expectations of who you were supposed to be. And you weren’t who they wanted you to be. That comes out a little bit wrong but…“

“Because we had expectations of what we wanted to be,” Deon said.

Deon declined Neeley’s invitation to order something he’d never eaten before—though he agreed to taste her seaweed salad—and opted for General Tso’s chicken. When the food came, Neeley instructed Deon on how to use chopsticks, laying one stick across the crook of her thumb and pinching the second like a pencil. The meal stretched over three hours, alternating between fits of giddy nostalgia and heartfelt reassurance.

“Now that we’re meeting again and talking and stuff like that, now I can put that chapter of my life to a close,” Deon said.

Neeley didn’t miss a beat. “What are you going to do with the next chapter?”

“I don’t know,” Deon sighed. “Just try to expand as much as I can, travel a little bit. Start my own family, do my own thing.”

First, though, he had to figure out his next move. In January, 2019 Deon will no longer be able to stay at Casa Valentina, and he’ll have to face adulthood on his own. He’s still taking classes towards a physical therapy degree and working as a pool attendant at a hotel downtown. He’s planning to move into an efficiency apartment in a friend’s building. He hopes that the next move will finally bring some stability. Whenever he and Gladina talk on the phone, she asks him questions about the future. What about paying for school? How is he going to make rent?

“You don’t gotta worry about me,” he tells her. “I’m an adult. I can figure this out.”

In September 2017, a police officershot and killed a queer collegestudent in Atlanta. By the end of the year, several of the student’s friends had been arrested, and twowere dead. What happened at Georgia Tech?

By Hallie Lieberman

The 911 caller’s voice was calm, almost cheerful.

“Hey, I’m up at West Village,” the person said, referring to a cluster of buildings at the Georgia Institute of Technology, better known as Georgia Tech. “It looks like there’s somebody, like, skulking around outside. It looks like he’s got—he’s got a knife in his hand. I think he might have a gun on his hip.”

It was 11:17 p.m. on September 16, 2017, a humid Saturday night. The university had resumed classes for the fall semester less than a month prior. A report of a potential gunman on Georgia Tech’s campus, situated in the heart of Atlanta, triggered emergency texts and tweets urging students to find shelter. Campus police were dispatched to West Village, located less than a third of a mile from their headquarters, to assess the situation. Was there really an armed man? If so, did he intend to harm himself or someone else? In the era of school shootings, tragedy that feels at once familiar and devastating is always just a trigger pull away.

“It looks like he might be drunk or something,” the 911 caller said, trying to provide a clear picture of the suspicious man. “He’s got long blond hair, white T-shirt, jeans.”

The dispatcher repeated the description and noted it in his records. Then he asked for the caller’s name, in case the police needed it.

“Uh, sure,” the caller said. “Scott Schultz.”

At that moment, Cat Monden was dashing around West Village, searching for her best friend, Scout. A bespectacled computer-engineering major, Scout had shown up at Monden’s door earlier that night, a green and white shoebox in hand. “Consider it a belated birthday present,” Monden heard Scout say, before her friend shoved the box into her hands and walked away without another word.

After closing the door, Monden went back to the couch, where she and another friend had settled in for the night to watch television. Monden thought it odd that Scout would come and go so abruptly. Even odder was what was inside the shoebox—all of Scout’s Magic: The Gathering cards, bearing images of fantastical wizards, beasts, and weaponry. Any obsessive player of the game, which both Monden and Scout were, knows that the cards are expensive and can take years to collect. Giving them away is tantamount to announcing that you’ll never play again.

There was something else in the box—a note to Monden. It thanked her for being the best friend Scout had ever had.

Monden and Scout had found each other in Georgia Tech’s tightly knit community of LGBTQ students. Monden was a petite black transgender woman, and Scout was white, bisexual, intersex, and nonbinary—that is, gendered neither male nor female and using the pronouns they and them. Monden and Scout were involved in Georgia Tech’s Pride Alliance. By 2017, Scout was in their second year as president of the student advocacy group. Like many LGBTQ youth, Scout, who was 21, struggled with mental-health issues, including thoughts of suicide. Though they boasted a 3.9 GPA and the admiration of fellow students committed to progressive activism, Scout had tried to kill themself at least once before.

The note in the shoebox wasn’t explicit, but Monden recognized it as a cry for help. She sprang off the couch and ran out into the hallway, leaving her keys in the apartment as she went.

After descending the building’s main stairway, her first stop was Scout’s apartment, located on the first floor. Monden banged furiously on the door until she was greeted by a bewildered roommate. Together they went into Scout’s room; it was empty. Another roommate walked into the common area and asked what was going on. “We can’t find Scout,” Monden said.

The trio hurried out of the apartment, planning to search West Village and beyond, if necessary. They spotted blue lights bouncing off nearby walls—the beams of police cruisers’ emergency lights. A fellow student warned them away from Eighth Street, which ran in front of the housing complex. The cops were trying to deal with a guy who was walking in the road, carrying a knife.

Several officers from the Georgia Tech Police Department (GTPD) had shown up in response to the 911 call. They spotted the man described to dispatch walking shoeless in front of a parking deck adjacent to a Wing Zone franchise, popular among students craving late-night calories. The man moved slowly, as if dragging his bare feet across the pavement required real effort. His shoulders were hunched and his arms hung limply at his sides. In his right hand, he clutched a small multitool that included a screwdriver and a short blade.

“C’mon, man, drop the knife,” one of the officers shouted. The cops all had their weapons trained on the suspect.

“Shoot me,” the man replied, continuing his measured advance.

“Nobody wants to hurt you, man,” a cop said. “Drop the knife.”

The man seemed unsure what to do. For a few seconds, he sped up his pace. Then he froze before again moving slowly toward the officers. Some of them backed up, giving him room. They kept their guns raised.

By then, Monden was just down the street, watching from the sidewalk in horror. She knew the person the police were trying to subdue. It wasn’t a man—it was Scout.

“Speak,” an officer shouted. Scout was silent. The cops asked for a name. Nothing. The officers ordered Scout not to move. Scout didn’t listen.

Instead, Scout kept walking, getting within 20 feet of one of the cops, a 23-year-old named Tyler Beck. Students peered out of dorm windows, and Monden looked on helplessly. With his colleagues arrayed around him, Beck pulled the trigger of his gun. There was a flash of light, and then a bullet tore into Scout’s body. They fell face forward onto Eighth Street. A video of the moment, captured by an onlooker’s cell phone, shows Scout’s prone body through a veil of leaves hanging from one of the young trees lining the road.

Monden released a mournful, guttural scream. Scout’s roommates grabbed her arms to stop her from running toward her friend, afraid that she, too, would be shot. Monden broke free and bolted at the cops. One of them restrained her. “We should put cuffs on this girl,” she heard another officer say.

Perhaps because Scout’s roommates pleaded with them, insisting that she wasn’t a danger, the police decided not to detain Monden. An ambulance arrived to transport Scout to the hospital. Monden went back to her apartment to get a phone charger, then ran from car to car on Eighth Street, banging on windows and begging through tears for someone to drive her to the ER. Finally, she gave up and sprinted away, heading toward the hospital.

Soon after, a text alert went out to the Georgia Tech community: “There is no longer a threat to campus.”

Monden arrived at the hospital desperate for word of Scout’s condition. Other friends joined her in the ER waiting room, where they huddled together in disbelief. At one point, a stranger with dried blood caked on her shirt approached them. “What happened?” she asked, concern in her voice. “You kids look like somebody died.”

Monden and her friends weren’t sure if someone had, and the doctors wouldn’t tell them. Law enforcement and university administrators milled around the waiting room, but whatever they knew they kept to themselves. Scout’s parents were en route from Lilburn, Georgia, a 30-minute drive from Atlanta. As Scout’s next of kin, they would be updated first.

One by one, Scout’s friends went home to get some sleep, including Monden. By the time she woke up, before dawn, the news was spreading: Scout was dead.

A press release issued at 6:45 a.m. by Georgia Tech’s dean of students described a “sudden and tragic death.” It didn’t mention what had transpired on Eighth Street; it didn’t specify that Scout had been shot by campus police. “We have communicated directly and offered our support and deepest sympathies to Scout’s family,” the release concluded. “At times like these, we are reminded of the importance of coming together in support, understanding, and care for one another.” Two statements issued later the same day, including one from Georgia Tech’s president, G.P. “Bud” Peterson, also omitted salient details. One described Scout’s death as “the result of an incident.” (University officials declined to comment for this story.)

For anyone who knew Scout, the pieces of the puzzle quickly fell into place. Scout had left several notes, including the one in the shoebox. Videos from the confrontation at West Village showed Scout begging the police to shoot. Then there was the 911 call from a seemingly cool and collected bystander. Scout’s last name was Schultz, and Scott was their birth name, the one they’d used before coming out. Scout had placed the emergency call.

Within 48 hours of the shooting, Georgia Tech was engulfed in crisis. Ideological fissures about police brutality, free speech, and gender identity snaked through campus, similar to divisions appearing in communities throughout the United States. In 2017, at least 28 transgender or nonbinary people in the U.S. died in violent incidents; Scout was the third in September alone. Scout’s parents retained a lawyer. “Let’s face it,” their stepfather, Bill Schultz, told me. “I watched Black Lives Matter. This time it was my kid.” Many people at the university, however, felt differently. Scout “was acting as a danger to everyone in the proximity,” a commenter on the Reddit thread r/gatech wrote. “What is this person a victim of? Their own actions? Play stupid games. Win stupid prizes.”

Was Beck to blame for shooting a vulnerable student or commendable for making a tough call about a threat? How exactly should grieving students be allowed to respond to fatal violence? I set out to write this story not so much to answer these questions as to trace their impact, as well as the lingering trauma of Scout’s death. After a flurry of national coverage, the shooting faded from headlines. Yet at Georgia Tech, where I’m an instructor in gender studies and journalism, the event was only beginning to take its toll. LGBTQ students felt it most acutely, and each frustration, indignity, and misunderstanding they experienced added to the burden. For some of these young people, the weight became too intolerable to bear.

What follows is a story of aftermath—of a community forced to navigate the emotional wreckage wrought by a wave of shock, anger, and confusion. Within a few weeks of Scout’s death, several of their friends were arrested. Within three months, two were dead. Now, almost a year after the shooting, the official narrative of the event is still being written. But by whom?

Scout was born in 1995, in Rockville, Maryland, and raised by their mother, Lynne, for the first 18 months of their life. Scout was still a towheaded toddler when Lynne started corresponding online with a defense contractor and Vietnam veteran named Bill Schultz who lived in Southern California. Meeting a romantic interest on the internet was unusual in the late 1990s, but Bill was more comfortable with the virtual world than most people. He’d worked on the development of Darpanet, the precursor to the internet, and gotten his first email address in 1972. Bill and Lynne moved to Iowa together, where they married and had a second child. Scout took Bill’s last name.

Scout was precocious: funny, creative, and a math whiz. Friends of the Schultzes sometimes described Scout as “scary smart.” They were also a perfectionist, always in pursuit of straight A’s, perhaps as a way to maintain a sense of identity and stability as they bounced from school to school. New jobs and subsequent firings or layoffs took the Schultzes to Missouri then on to Kansas. At one point the family had so little money that they lived in a tent in a city park for two weeks. “I was actually relieved, in a way, when Scout got a B,” Lynne said, “so they could see that it’s not the end of the world.”

Scout faced an unusual array of health challenges, including ulcerative colitis and migraines. They also had an anatomical condition called hypospadias, in which the urethral opening is in an atypical position, usually on the underside of the penis. Doctors assured Scout’s mother that hypospadias was merely a urinary issue, but it can also be an indicator that a child is intersex.

As they matured, Scout became an unabashed nerd. They collected Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh cards and played Minecraft, Dungeons and Dragons, and Magic: The Gathering with friends. They also became obsessed with Latin. In high school, which they attended in Georgia after yet another family move, Scout became fluent in the classical language, using it in text messages and teaching their dog to sit on Latin command. Scout also began to experiment with gender presentation, donning flowing gowns and lipstick in school plays.

Scout got a scholarship to Georgia Tech and was so excited to attend that they started early, in the summer of 2014. In many ways, the school was a perfect fit. It has always taken pride in nurturing geeks, from gamers to mathletes. It lacks the party-school atmosphere of other state schools, including the University of Georgia, and only a quarter of its students are involved in Greek life. Students focus on academics almost to a fault. According to a recent university report, “Data from the 2011 National College Health Assessment revealed that 89.9 percent of Georgia Tech students reported they were ‘very stressed’ while the national rate was 52.9 percent.”

Scout thrived academically, and they joined the Pride Alliance, a diverse group that for many members served as a kind of campus family. All students were welcome, no matter their race, gender identity, or sexual orientation, so long as they were committed to inclusion. Georgia Tech’s LGBTQ den mother was a black transgender woman named Kirby Jackson, who sported a short afro and rectangular glasses. She was protective, witty, kind, and candid. “Kirby was really the first person who reached out to me and said, ‘I want to make you feel safe here on campus,’” said Naiki Kaffezakis, a student who is transgender. Jackson founded a transgender support group called T+, which had lean beginnings. “She would sit in a room for a couple hours at a time on a weekly basis,” Kaffezakis said of Jackson, “just in case other people showed up and just in case other people needed support.”

Through the Pride Alliance, Scout came under Jackson’s wing and met fellow LGBTQ students like Kaffezakis, a double major in nuclear engineering and physics. On National Coming Out Day, October 11, of their sophomore year, Scout announced their identity and orientation for the first time. They shaved a beard they’d worn for a while and wore brightly patterned clothing, glad to draw attention to themself.

Scout seemed so happy in their skin that their mom, Lynne, was stunned to get a call from Georgia Tech’s counseling center one day. “Your son tried to hang himself from his bunk bed with a belt,” Lynne recalled the person on the line saying. The belt had snapped; Scout wasn’t injured. Still, their loved ones had missed the signs that they were hurting.

According to a 2014 survey, 45 percent of trans and nonbinary people 18 to 24 have attempted suicide. By the time Scout tried to take their own life, Georgia Tech had identified that it had a suicide problem—and not just among LGBTQ students. According to a survey of students who use the university’s counseling center, the number “who have ever attempted suicide … has steadily increased from 5.9 percent (2014) to 7.1 percent (2015) to 8.5 percent (2016) to 9.5 percent (2017).”

Scout started seeing an on-site counselor, but their family quickly realized that the resources on campus were inadequate. There was just one counselor for roughly every 1,500 students and a cap on the number of sessions (16) that a student could access over their college career. Scout started taking medication and seeing caregivers off campus, covered by their parents’ insurance. “It seemed like Scout got better after a few months,” Lynne recalled.

Scout continued to earn good grades, was elected president of the Pride Alliance, and demonstrated an interest in social justice that extended beyond LGBTQ issues. They got involved with Black Lives Matter and joined a chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. They toyed with anarchist ideas. In the winter of 2017, not long after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Scout cofounded the Progressive Students Alliance (PSA). The group’s first action was marching against the introduction of House Bill 51, intended to prevent universities from preemptively investigating sexual-assault allegations on campus in Title IX hearings. Under the proposed law, suspected felonies, including assaults, would be referred to the local police. Believing that the bill would silence survivors by making them afraid to come forward, PSA students marched from Georgia Tech to the state capitol on March 3, 2017. A few weeks later, the senate tabled the bill.

For every one of Scout’s milestones there was a stressor. The Pride Alliance lost its dedicated space when the school repurposed it and other student groups’ offices for the Greek system to use. The development wasn’t unprecedented: Many of Georgia Tech’s campus groups don’t have offices, including some religious organizations. Still, the loss weighed on the group’s president. Scout “felt the Pride Alliance was more and more disrespected,” Bill Schultz said. “I think Scout took some of the blame for that on themself.” Scout moved the Pride Alliance’s materials into their dorm room. What wouldn’t fit they stowed in their parents’ garage.

Scout also grappled with the euphoria and pain of first love. At a party one night during their junior year, Scout met a slender student from Georgia State University, also located in Atlanta. Dallas Punja was the child of Pakistani immigrants and gender-queer. She was a devoted fan of the web comic Homestuck, about a computer game that accidentally destroys the earth, and the animated show Steven Universe. Scout also loved Steven Universe. The pair spent the party cuddling by a bonfire while Monden danced nearby. Before long, Scout and Punja were dating. Scout even brought Punja home to Lilburn, where Punja greeted Scout’s mom with fake yellow flowers because, she said, they would never die.

Punja wasn’t out to her family and struggled with depression and borderline personality disorder. She’d tried to kill herself twice by taking pills, and she’d once gone to a bridge intending to jump off, changing her mind only at the last moment. Scout tried to quell Punja’s self-loathing.

“feels like i’m repulsive,” Punja messaged Scout once.

“you are Not,” Scout responded. “you are beautiful and I love you sooo much.”

In another message, Scout said, “i’m very tense and anxious. together we can be the splendid combination, like peanut butter and jelly: depression and anxiety.”

Like many young people’s relationships, the flame Scout and Punja shared burned bright and fast. During the summer before Scout’s senior year, they broke up. According to Kaffezakis, however, “Scout was still very much in love with Dallas.”

By the fall semester, the Pride Alliance had been working for almost a year with Tech Ends Suicide Together, a campaign to educate students about warning signs and encourage referrals to the counseling center. In a photo posted on Facebook in support of the initiative, a handful of Pride Alliance members cup their right hands into an O shape, signifying the goal of zero suicides on campus. Scout stands in the back of the group wearing a tie-dyed shirt, shoulder-length hair parted to one side, and a slight, inscrutable smile above a dimpled chin. Close by sits Cat Monden in a Pepsi T-shirt and black cap.

Unlike Scout’s parents, Monden’s father, with whom she’d lived during high school, hadn’t been wholly supportive when she’d told him she was transgender. He’d encouraged her to “try girls first” and refused to let her take hormones. College hadn’t made life easier, exactly; Monden still felt like an outsider. But the Pride Alliance was a home base and safe space, and Scout was her closest confidante. Whether playing fantasy games, decorating a float for Atlanta’s Pride parade, or talking about their dreams for the future, the two were inseparable.

As part of Tech Ends Suicide Together, Monden would have learned that people who want to kill themselves often start giving important possessions away. Nothing, though, could prepare her for receiving Scout’s Magic: The Gathering cards, then watching her best friend die in the street. Her thoughts turned to suicide, too, and she wasn’t alone. “It was almost like a weird game of chicken about who would go through with it first,” Monden said of her friends. “We were all feeling this way but trying to persevere.”

Georgia Tech set up emergency counseling sessions for students, but Monden said she was never contacted individually. “Nobody from Georgia Tech reached out,” said Bailey Becker, the friend Monden was hanging out with the night of the shooting. “That has been an ongoing theme.”

As media coverage of Scout’s death exploded, the Schultzes were troubled by a refrain they heard over and over. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) had been tasked with investigating the shooting, and in a much quoted statement released on Sunday, September 17, the day after the incident, it described Scout as “armed with a knife.” The phrase echoed through local news broadcasts, and in a headline The Chicago Tribune described Scout as a “knife-wielding” student. The Schultzes knew Scout wasn’t violent—not the type of person to carry a knife, much less threaten anyone with it. The evidence was in their favor: The only weapon recovered from the scene was Scout’s multitool, and its blade wasn’t extended.

By Monday afternoon, less than 48 hours after the shooting, Scout’s parents decided to defend their child publicly. Along with their lawyer, L. Chris Stewart, who’d helped represent the family of Walter Scott, the black man shot eight times in the back by a police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, the Schultzes held a press conference. They were in the midst of a divorce but put up a united front. Bill, a tall, heavyset man with stooped shoulders and long brown hair gathered into a ponytail, wore a gray suit, orange button-down shirt, and wire-rim glasses. Lynne, her eyes moist, wore her strawberry-blond hair draped over her shoulders and the straps of her floral sundress. She looked a lot like Scout.

Stewart dramatically unsheathed a large knife and held it up for the press to see. This, he explained, was not what had been in Scout’s possession. Stewart then displayed a multitool like the one Scout had been holding. Next he unveiled a blown-up photograph of the actual tool, taken by a member of the media who’d seen it lying on the pavement where Scout fell.

Then the Schultzes spoke. Bill described “all the people on campus who loved and respected and adored Scout.” His voice seething with dismay, he asked why the police hadn’t tried harder to deescalate the situation. “Whatever happened, it shouldn’t have ended in a death,” Bill said. When Lynne got to the microphone, she seemed to weigh each word in her mouth, as if afraid of letting one slip out too quickly. “Scout had a very promising future, or would have,” she said. “He—I mean Scout,” Lynne continued, correcting her pronoun usage, “stood up for what they believed in. This is a really big loss for a lot of people.”

She stopped speaking and cast her eyes downward, searching. After a pause she whispered, “I don’t know what else to say.”

People grieved, together and alone. One of Scout’s roommates couldn’t bear to stay in her campus apartment, where everything from the posters on the wall to an alarm clock on a table reminded her of Scout. She slept on a friend’s couch instead. On social media, Dallas Punja, Scout’s ex-partner, wrote, “no one gives a fuck about trans people but trans people,” and “s//cout didn’t approve of me drinking this much but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ they’re dead! so!! who cares what they thought!!! they sure don’t think it anymore!!!!” Punja added, “#i can’t wait till I fucking pass out and stop having s/c/out thoughts.” A makeshift memorial appeared next to a tree on Eighth Street—pictures of Scout, a teddy bear wearing a Georgia Tech T-shirt, bouquets of flowers, cards with messages scrawled inside. “You’re a world changer,” one read. “Rest in Power.”

The PSA organized a campus vigil for Monday night, a few hours after the Schultzes’ press conference. The event was held at the Kessler Campanile, an outdoor amphitheater with a fountain featuring an 80-foot obelisk made of stacked steel discs. The event was supposed to be peaceful and respectful, but Matt Wolfsen, who cofounded the PSA with Scout, was nervous. He knew that Scout had friends in Atlanta’s anarchist and anti-fascist (antifa) circles, whose approach to resistance can be aggressive and who have lately become a nemesis of the political right. Wolfsen contacted some of them to request that, if they came to the vigil, they avoid violence. The people he spoke to assured him that they wouldn’t “be rowdy and rude to the people grieving,” Wolfsen later said, “but afterward, they could do whatever they wanted to do.” The police were worried, too. Public records obtained for this story show that the GTPD decided to send plainclothes officers to monitor the vigil and asked the Atlanta Police Department to have quick-reaction teams on standby.

Who might be at the memorial wasn’t the only thing that was worrisome—so was what people knew about what had happened to Scout and how they were interpreting it. By Monday evening, several crucial pieces of information had become public. First was the fact that Scout hadn’t been wielding an exposed blade. Second, campus police carried guns and pepper spray but not Tasers, which the Schultzes’ lawyer described as “insane.” (Only 40 percent of campus police forces nationwide carry Tasers.) Third, Tyler Beck, the officer who’d killed Scout, hadn’t received training to navigate situations involving people in psychiatric crisis. Beck, who’d been on the force for 16 months and had gone on paid leave pending an investigation of the shooting, hadn’t completed the crisis-intervention training because it wasn’t mandatory.

People who believed Scout’s death was unjustified were infuriated and galvanized by what they saw as a perfect storm of institutional failures: Members of the GTPD were insufficiently trained and had used excessive force against a queer student suffering because of the campus’s deficient mental-health resources. Others in the Georgia Tech community felt like that reaction manipulated the facts to fit an agenda that demonized police and canonized minorities. “I fail to see a problem. They stopped a deranged lunatic from hurting people. That’s good work,” a commenter on r/gatech wrote. The bluntest view of all was that Scout was to blame for their own death, because what had happened was suicide by cop. “He approached police with a knife saying ‘shoot me,’” an r/gatech user wrote. “What part was undeserved?”

Frustration and accusations coursed through social media in the hours leading up to the vigil and spilled into the Kessler Campanile, where friends hung photos of Scout and distributed candles from plastic tubs. “Why did all of this happen? Why did Scout go down this route?” a student told the Associated Press as dusk settled over campus. “I’m angry,” another said, her voice tinged with disbelief. “I’m angry that the cops don’t have nonlethal ways to deal with things.” A third student said that watching the cell-phone video of Scout’s shooting, which had already been posted online, “induced a lot of panic in me.”

About 500 people attended, including Scout’s friends and the Schultzes. Aby Parsons, the director of Georgia Tech’s LGBTQ resource center, was one of the speakers. “Scout was frustrated with how apathetic the Georgia Tech community could be when it came to issues of social justice,” Parsons told the crowd. “They felt that I, as administrator, was trying to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house, when they wanted to smash that house into pieces and build a new one.”

Her words seemed prophetically timed. As Parsons spoke, along the periphery of the vigil a group of protesters, many wearing bandanas over their faces and some armed with hammers and cans of paint and pepper spray, unfurled banners emblazoned with the anarchy symbol and slogans like “Defend LGBT+, End GTPD” and “End Police Violence → End Police.” Fliers circulated announcing, “There will be a march for those who wish to grieve and express their outrage in a collective capacity.” Officers on-site alerted their chief, who contacted the Atlanta police to tell them, according to a affidavit, that “there could be a destructive march occurring.”

Toward the end of the vigil, students lit their candles, turning the amphitheater into a twinkling semicircle. The melody of the Jackson 5’s “I’ll Be There” wafted through the air. Then there was silence, broken when a transgender student began shouting about the lack of mental-health care on campus. Other people joined her.

“Every single year I’ve known someone who has committed suicide,” one person said, according to the student newspaper.

“Why don’t GTPD carry Tasers?” another yelled.

“Why are they here at all?” someone answered.

Before long the yelling morphed into chants of “No justice, no peace, fuck the police” and “Cops, pigs, murderers.” That was when the Schultzes left. “We just weren’t in the mood to hear that stuff,” Lynne said. But many of Scout’s friends joined the chanting and, subsequently, the march. The PSA and Pride Alliance would later say that the demonstration was supposed to proceed to Scout’s memorial on Eighth Street. Instead, the crowd made its way from the campanile toward GTPD headquarters. Along the way they encountered police, but the protesters kept chanting, and some lit flares or beat on drums.

In a burst of adrenaline, Monden launched herself onto the hood of a police cruiser. She stood above the crowd in skinny jeans and a plaid shirt, listening to people scream in anger about Scout’s death. Her friends would later say that Monden caused no damage to the car—“it didn’t even have a scratch,” Kaffezakis told me—but the police claimed she jumped up and down on the hood and appeared to try to break the windshield by kicking it.

Two officers pulled Monden from the car down to the street. She wrestled free and took off running, moving so fast that she lost control of her limbs and fell flailing toward the pavement. The cops grabbed her, and Monden’s friends, including Punja, whose hair was dyed fluorescent pink, ran to her side. The police told people to stay back, and Punja retreated to the sidewalk. One of the cops put cuffs on Monden, who was belly down on the street, arms bent behind her back and a grimace on her face. Blood seeped from the officer’s scalp, through his short blond hair, and down his cheek. A protestor, another cop later stated in an affidavit, had hit the arresting officer in the head with a hammer.

“You murdered one of us!” shouted Kirby Jackson, the transgender activist. Jackson had transferred to GSU that fall for personal reasons but was in close touch with the Georgia Tech LGBTQ community that she’d helped nurture.

The cops led Monden to a cruiser. “Fuck you—you killed my best friend!” Monden screamed as she was placed in the back seat.

The police shut the door and drove her away. Nearby, another cop car was burning. Protesters had torched it, sending flames and smoke shooting into the night sky.

Monden was booked into the Fulton County Jail under her birth name, and charged with a felony for interfering with government property and a misdemeanor for inciting a riot. Later, after police reviewed video from the protest, Monden would be hit with additional misdemeanor charges.

“Yo, she has a cut on her side, she needs to go to the hospital,” Monden recalled the booking officer shouting to colleagues. Monden was bleeding from an injury to her torso, which she’d sustained when she tripped and fell at the protest. She took another ride in a cruiser to the same hospital where Scout had been declared dead. Police handcuffed her to a chair and a physician patched up the wound.

Once she was back at the jail, according to Monden, the intake officer took away her bra. “You’re a boy,” she remembered the cop saying. She was placed in handcuffs, then put in a holding area, where two male GBI agents arrived. It was the first time she’d spoken face-to-face with law enforcement about Scout’s death. After expressing what Monden described as “token sympathy” about Scout, the agents asked questions about her friend’s political affiliations. Monden felt like they were implying that Scout had been “some sort of terrorist.”

After the GBI agents left, Monden was ushered into another room, where she stood in front of a dull gray backdrop and stared straight ahead as a photographer snapped her mugshot. From there she went to a holding cell—alone at first, because the cops didn’t know whether to put her with male or female detainees. Eventually, a man joined her. He was one of two other people arrested at the protest.

Monden would spend two nights in jail, including a stint in a mental-health unit where, after being evaluated, she did her best to sleep as people screamed and banged on their cell windows and doors. When she finally appeared in court, looking weary in her navy blue jail garb, her bail was set at $20,000.

Headlines the morning after the protest described a peaceful vigil turned violent and a campus told to “shelter in place” for the second time in three days. Matt Wolfsen of the PSA posted a picture of the burned-out cop car on Facebook, writing underneath it, “Unacceptable. This isn’t the time to destroy. We must improve as a community out of love.” Many students liked the post, but Kirby Jackson commented, “Fuck you, Wolfsen.”

At a Waffle House near campus, some of Scout’s and Monden’s friends gathered around 1 a.m. to talk over greasy diner food. Wolfsen went, too, and tried to find common ground with the LGBTQ students. Where was the line between righteous anger and pointless violence? Who was allowed to draw it? Wolfsen was struck by the presence of Punja, whom he hadn’t met before that night. She seemed depleted, a shell of a person.

“Look what they’re doing to the trans community,” Wolfsen remembered Punja saying at one point. “Do I really want to live through this?”

“I’m not trans, so I don’t know what it’s like,” Wolfsen replied. “But this is rock bottom. It doesn’t get worse than the police just murdering someone in the street. Hold on—it will eventually get better.”

That night, Punja slept with a friend on either side of her. She didn’t want to be alone. For the next several days, she updated a Tumblr post titled “Since Scout I’ve Stayed At,” which contained a running list of bullet-pointed names.

At 11:30 a.m. Tuesday morning, Georgia Tech’s president, Bud Peterson, released his second statement since the shooting. Once again he didn’t mention the cause of Scout’s death, and he called for unity. Peterson blamed the scene at the police headquarters mostly on “outside agitators intent on disrupting” the vigil. “They certainly did not honor Scout’s memory nor represent our values,” Peterson insisted.

If he knew it, the president didn’t say that one of the people arrested was a Georgia Tech student, a friend of Scout’s and a witness to the shooting. (A statement issued later that afternoon identified Monden as a student.) Nor did he acknowledge that Scout, like many students, had social networks extending to other area colleges and groups. He invoked a phrase that, in the American South, is loaded with fraught meaning. Outside agitator harks back to the Civil Rights Movement, when critics used it to discredit Martin Luther King Jr.’s legitimacy as an organizer. King addressed the phrase in “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” penned in April 1963. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly,” King wrote. “Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”

Monden’s friends were baffled. In their view, Peterson seemed more concerned about the protest than the shooting. Their confusion turned to outrage when signs of support for Georgia Tech’s police began popping up around campus.

The messages were scribbled in colorful chalk on sidewalks and in marker on posters taped up in dorm windows. We Support GTPD. We ♥ GTPD. We Are One GT. The last slogan seemed to summarize Peterson’s latest public statement.

The student president of the university’s Marksmanship Club started a GoFundMe page for “GTPD Office Recovery.” The fundraiser described Scout’s death as a “tragic suicide,” blamed the Monday riot on “the arrival of violent protestors, many of whom are not even currently attending Georgia Tech,” and asked people to give what money they could to support campus police. “GTPD has always been kind to students, treating us far more as equals than subjects; many of them are Georgia Tech graduates themselves,” the page read. “Now, it’s our turn to give back to them.” The page’s goal was $10,000, which it exceeded by several hundred dollars. The same day, a GoFundMe campaign started for the campus counseling and LGBTQ resource centers. It raised just $150 of its $5,000 goal.

A student named Courtney Allen created a Facebook event encouraging people to “Thank a GTPD Officer.” Allen wrote, “Take some time out of your busy class schedule and thank a GTPD officer. Thank every one you pass. Thank one that you look up to. Go to the department [and] thank all of them. Do something to show that the Georgia Tech student body still loves, cares, and supports our police officers.” In an interview, Allen told me she wanted to show that “students do still love our officers, like we would our family members after a horrible, life-changing event.” Not everyone felt the same way. “The GTPD murdered a troubled young person in cold blood, and you want to thank them?” one commenter wrote on Allen’s event page. “How dare you!”

Scout was gone, Monden was in jail, and “the first fucking response was, We should show our support for GTPD,” Bailey Becker told me, recalling the mood on campus after the protest. “It’s like, God fucking damn it. I know why you’re saying that, but that doesn’t make it any less basically sickening for me to see.”

Among those who responded positively to the outpouring was Tyler Beck, through his attorney. “He very much regrets the situation he was faced with, he and the other officers,” Don English, general counsel with the Southern States Police Benevolent Association, said of his client. “He is very appreciative of the support he has received from the Georgia Tech community, including most of the students.” Beck’s personnel profile, which was made public in the days after the shooting, contained no black marks. A month before Scout’s death, Beck had received a letter of commendation for “quick thinking” in stopping someone from stealing food from a dining hall by shutting them inside a freezer and calling for backup.

With regard to the shooting, English noted in his statement, “I’ve not talked to one law enforcement professional who would disagree that the use of force was justified in the situation that confronted these officers.” Critics, though, pointed to a case from 2010 that complicated the notion that Beck had no choice but to fire a lethal weapon. According to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution story, a Georgia Tech alum named Kshitij Shrotri attacked postdoctoral research fellow Samer Tawfik, with whom he had a personal dispute, on campus using a samurai sword. By the time the GTPD showed up, Tawfik was lying on the floor covered in blood, and Shrotri was standing above him clutching the sword and yelling, “You will have to kill me!” Police officers drew their guns, aimed them at Shtrotri, and pleaded for him to drop the weapon. Shrotri didn’t, so a cop pepper-sprayed him, subduing the armed threat. Tawfik spent time in the hospital but survived. Shrotri was charged with aggravated assault.

Some of Scout’s and Monden’s friends scrambled to append the chalked “We Support GTPD” messages with the words “…and the LGBT community.” One student told the local NPR affiliate that the pro-police sentiment “is just making it a lot harder to even be here.” He continued, “I did not think it would be so bad and that people would lack so much empathy, or only have sympathy for a burnt car.” Punja wrote on social media, “I’m so fucking sure this is just a nightmare but I haven’t woken up yet!!!!!!!!” and “my EX was SHOT and KILLED by COPS hahahaha What the Fuck.”

Even Matt Wolfsen, who’d initially criticized the protest, felt that the tide of public opinion was taking a worrying turn. Instead of talking about “students hurting” and the campus “needing real systematic change,” Wolfsen later said, he mostly heard complaints about “these crazy people setting fire to cop cars, just causing trouble.” Anxious to change the conversation, he gathered members of the PSA and drew up a list of demands for the Georgia Tech administration: better mental-health care, greater police accountability, improved services and accommodations for LGBTQ people. The PSA planned to deliver the demands to Peterson and hold demonstrations to publicize them.

Meanwhile, Kirby Jackson participated in an as-told-to article with Yahoo News several days after the shooting. “There were many more armed cops than there were Scouts,” Jackson said. “I’m incredibly surprised that the cops couldn’t have wrestled Scout to the ground or found some non-lethal way of ending that situation.” Jackson also criticized the counseling options on campus, which she’d personally found lacking, and defended the protest. “The vigil was very nice—it was a candlelight thing, a very moving, symbolic gesture. It was something Scout would’ve hated, as Scout was much more the type for action,” Jackson said. “It turned into a march over to GTPD headquarters, and it was tense—there’s a lot of anger about how they treated Scout, plus anger at police in general across the country.”

Privately, Jackson worried about Monden’s arrest. How was she handling it? As a black trans woman, was she safe in a penal system not exactly known for protecting vulnerable minorities? (About 20 percent of trans people who’ve interacted with police have been harassed; the rate is 61 percent among black trans people.) “That’s classic Kirby—to worry about other people more than Kirby,” her mother, Angela Amar, told me. When she was little, Jackson would drop pennies on the ground just so other people could pick them up and have good luck.

Monden was released from jail on Thursday, September 21. After consulting with her family, she decided to spend a few days in a mental-health facility. She described the experience as a “whole lot of extremely limited freedoms and awful regimented meals—and cookies, really awful cookies. They were like Lorna Doones. Also, lots of visible crying and fights.”

Just before she entered the facility, Monden had received an email from Georgia Tech announcing that she was being considered for suspension “because of the existence of significant risk to the health and safety of the Institute community.” If she wished to “be heard on whether [her] presence on campus poses a danger,” she had less than 24 hours to contact the relevant campus authorities and set up an appointment. Occupied with the distress she was experiencing, Monden didn’t reply.

A few days later, Monden was released from the mental-health facility. According to school records, the university established through its IT department that the e-mail notifying Monden of the pending suspension had been opened, but that she had not requested an appeal. In a message on September 26, she was officially suspended from school. Monden was banned from campus, pending a hearing before Georgia Tech’s Office of Student Integrity.

Around the time Monden left jail, the GTPD posted on Instagram that it was still actively investigating the protest “in coordination with local, state, and federal law enforcement.” The department asked “anyone who has footage of the march, riot, or events directly preceding or following the violence to upload your video” and provided a link to Leedir, an “eyewitness platform” used by law enforcement in emergencies.

Soon after, the arrests began.

At GSU, police identified a black student who’d been near Monden when she was detained. According to court records, the student was charged with misdemeanors for inciting a riot, willful obstruction of law-enforcement officers, and wearing a mask, hood, or other device that concealed his face. The affidavit for the arrest noted that the student was “known to this Department by him being arrested at other protest”—a reference, seemingly, to a previous demonstration against the Georgia Board of Regents, the governing body of the state’s public universities, for its policies toward undocumented students.

In another instance, according to an arrest report, police at GSU, based on information shared by their GTPD counterparts, entered a classroom, escorted a student who was friends with Scout into a hallway, and asked if she had any weapons. She said no and was patted down, handcuffed, and taken to police headquarters, where she was charged with willful obstruction of law enforcement and inciting a riot. Rumors also circulated that students who weren’t accused of crimes but who had attended the vigil were being pulled out of class and questioned; in a statement for this story, GSU said that never happened.

By early October, a half-dozen people had been arrested. Among them was Kirby Jackson. A police officer called Jackson’s home one day to inform her that a warrant had been issued. Unnerved that other students had been pulled from classrooms and anxious to avoid a similar scene, Jackson turned herself in. She was charged with willful obstruction of law enforcement.

The arrests flew under the public radar. Many professors and students weren’t aware that they were happening, and few media outlets covered them. Page Pate, a local trial lawyer, told a radio reporter that the police’s methods were unusual. “There’s no ongoing crime,” Pate explained. He saw the arrests as sending a message “that you better be careful when you show up and protest at the school or about something that the school has done.” Through a spokesperson, Georgia Tech responded, “No one is being targeted because they protested.”

Donald Downs, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Wisconsin and author of several books on free speech, told me, “I’ve read a lot of stuff on campus upheaval, but I have not run across any situations where there were arrests made inside classrooms and students questioned like that.” GTPD’s approach risked creating a “chilling effect on free speech,” said Clay Calvert, director of the Marion B. Brechner First Amendment Project at the University of Florida. “Students are less likely to [protest] if they know they are going to be yanked out of the classroom, embarrassed in front of their classmates.”

No one was more nervous about the arrests than Punja. She knew that her pink hair made her easily identifiable in protest footage. She grew anxious when she heard police sirens or saw flashing lights. “I’m not strong enough to go to jail,” Kaffezakis recalled Punja telling her. “I’m afraid of how my family is going to react.” Kaffezakis tried to reassure her friend that “this is not the end of the world.” Punja talked to Monden about killing herself but said she wouldn’t do it if Monden didn’t either—a suicide pact in reverse.

On Saturday, September 30, there was a home football game, a big social event on Georgia Tech’s campus. The team was playing the University of North Carolina, and like thousands of other students, Kaffezakis went to the stadium to watch. She was in the packed stands, checking her phone, when a friend told her to check out a worrying post on Punja’s Tumblr. Punja said she was at a gun show where “a guy asked me if i was here to attend or protest.” She added that the gun show “should really b stricter with the background checks; i’ve been involuntarily hospitalized like 3 times lmfao.”

Kaffezakis immediately dialed Punja’s phone number. A man answered and identified himself as a detective. “What’s going on? Why are you answering?” Kaffezakis asked, pushing through the stadium crowd so she could hear the detective clearly. He said that Kaffezakis would have to talk to Punja’s mother; then he hung up.

It took some time to get Punja’s mom on the phone. After being contacted by authorities, she’d sped to Johns Creek, a small city northeast of Atlanta where, after the gun show, Punja had driven, too. Punja had parked on the side of a road and, with a weapon purchased at the show, shot and killed herself. Law enforcement had spotted her car and identified Punja with ID recovered inside.

A memorial was organized off campus at Kweer Haus, a facility offering short-term housing for homeless LGBTQ people in Atlanta. The theme was pink, Punja’s favorite color. Pink candles and flower petals surrounded a framed picture of the deceased. Pink and silver balloons filled the room. At the end of the vigil, mourners went outside and released them. The orbs drifted above the trees of downtown Atlanta, catching the glow of streetlights. Eventually, they slipped from sight.

Before Punja’s suicide, the PSA had released a statement announcing that, if the Georgia Tech president’s office didn’t agree to implement the group’s demands, its members would march to his office and “engage in peaceful and non-violent demonstration, including but not limited to a ‘die-in.’” Students en masse would lay down on the ground “to represent the deaths that will result from a lack of mental health care.” The PSA’s demands included more funding for treatment, mandatory police training in crisis intervention, more gender-neutral bathrooms and gender-inclusive housing on campus, the reinstatement of the Pride Alliance’s office space, and the relocation of the LGBTQ resource center. For a little more than a year, it had been in a renovated storage room, with just enough space for the director’s desk and chair, as well as a couch.

The university didn’t publicly acknowledge the PSA’s statement, but two days later, Peterson made one of his own. In response to Scout’s death, Georgia Tech would be creating four “action teams” tasked with evaluating mental-health services, campus culture, LGBTQ issues, and public safety. They would make recommendations for change no later than November 1, 2017.

Behind the scenes, the administration was taking action of a different sort. When it was notified in advance of a planned demonstration at the campus’s student center, where professors and undergraduates would discuss the impact of Scout’s shooting, Peterson alerted the FBI and GBI, as well as state and city police. “After what happened Monday night,” Peterson later said in a meeting, indicating Scout’s vigil, “we didn’t know if we were going to have Charlotte or if we were going to have something that turned out to be a non-event.” He was referring to the widespread protests in North Carolina that had occurred in 2016, after police shot and killed a black man named Keith Lamont Scott. The governor of North Carolina had declared a state of emergency and deployed the state’s National Guard.

About 75 people gathered for the student-center protest on a Friday afternoon, and they were peaceful. They discussed feeling “fear, pain, frustration, deep sadness, [and] disappointment” since Scout’s death, according to a reporter who attended. Around 3 p.m., the demonstrators were alerted that the building was locking up early that day. It wasn’t a planned closure; the administration, it appeared, wanted them to leave the center.

Outside, a police helicopter hovered in the sky. This “is the kind of culture of fear that we’re talking about,” Anne Pollock, a participating professor, told a reporter. “They were very worried that antifa would take over our event or something like that.” Bailey Becker, who attended the gathering, told me that participants were afraid of getting arrested or worse. “All of us went to that protest with this fear,” Becker said. “Is this going to get someone else hurt? Is this benign action going to bring fire on somebody for doing something that they should be allowed to do without question?”

Georgia Tech officials acknowledged the protest in a statement but didn’t mention the decision to shut down the student center. “Since Monday’s activities,” the statement read, referring to the riot, “we’ve had an increased level of security on campus.”

A few days later, Matt Wolfsen was invited to a meeting with Peterson and two state legislators. By then the student government had pledged $500,000 to mental-health services, which the president’s office promised to match. The funds would be dispersed on a proposal-by-proposal basis. Peterson announced a separate $1 million endowment, established through the nonprofit Georgia Tech Foundation, for campus wellness and police training. Peterson also said that he was temporarily lifting the 16-session limit on counseling appointments. Some students pointed out that this wouldn’t address the fact that it often took weeks to secure a session—in fact, it risked making the backlog worse—or that people referred to the counseling center as suicidal often wound up at the Ridgeview Institute, a private psychiatric hospital, where expenses could balloon to nearly $1,000 a day.

Wolfsen had hoped to hear Peterson’s broader plans for improving health services, among other things on campus, when he met with the president and the two legislators at the Paul D. Coverdell Legislative Office Building, a white stone structure in downtown Atlanta. There, Wolfsen and another PSA student sat at a conference table across from representative Park Cannon, a queer black woman and the youngest Democrat in the state assembly. Mable Thomas, who’d served in the legislature on and off since the 1980s, sat at one end, Peterson at the other. The Georgia Tech president was the room’s center of gravity. Tall and patrician, with gray hair combed carefully to one side, Peterson is an engineer by training and the state’s highest-compensated public-college administrator.

The mood was tense. In a recording of the meeting obtained from one of the participants, Peterson responded to legislators’ concern about police preparedness for dealing with students in crisis; just 18 of the 85 officers on the campus force had received the appropriate training. Peterson also apologized for using the term “outside agitators” in his statement after the riot. “That carries a special connotation in the South, and I’ve been cautioned and apologize for the use,” he said. (Peterson, who hails from Kansas but has worked in the South for many years, has not publicly apologized for the usage.)

Cannon and Thomas peppered him with questions about the case against Monden and a perceived lack of sympathy shown by the university toward Scout’s family and friends. “There was almost [an effort] to marginalize it,” Thomas said of the shooting, “like, ‘Oh, [Scout] wanted to die.” She also remarked on how young Scout and the protesters were; most of them were under 25 and “immature as can be.” Her description echoed the only critical feedback in Tyler Beck’s police personnel file: “He is young and is still learning laws, policies, and criminal procedures.”

At one point, the legislators brought up the PSA’s proposed die-in. Wolfsen piped up, speaking to Peterson directly and thanking him for the steps, such as the action teams, that Georgia Tech was taking to address students’ concerns. “That’s been changed,” Wolfsen said of the die-in. “We hear you, and we’re very much appreciative of the efforts you’ve put forward. Going forward we want to make sure that this does result in long-term change. We are not going to be as aggressive anymore.”

Peterson responded, “Have you informed these representatives of your involvement and engagement with the people from off campus on the event Monday night? Have you disclosed that to them?”

Wolfsen was caught off guard. After the riot, he’d reached out to administrators to tell them that he’d personally asked anarchist and antifa factions to be nonviolent and was disappointed that they hadn’t obliged. Now, though, it seemed as if Peterson was suggesting that Wolfsen was trying to hide his contact with nonstudent protesters.

“Did you communicate with them before the event on Monday night?” Peterson demanded.

“Yes,” Wolfsen said. “I talked with them because I wanted them to be very clear about what they were doing.… It fell through, unfortunately. “

“Did you inform our public safety or anybody in the administration or staff at Georgia Tech that you were in communication with people off campus that were potentially violent?” Peterson asked.

The other PSA student jumped in. “It wasn’t that they said that they were going to do something violent,” she said. “It was that we asked them not to.”

“It would have been enormously helpful if we had been made aware,” Peterson said.

When the meeting ended, Wolfsen felt a nagging fear. What if the university thought he’d conspired to start the riot? Wolfsen contacted a lawyer and submitted a request under the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) for his student records.

On October 8, family and friends gathered in Tucker, Georgia, close to the Schultzes’ home in Lilburn, for Scout’s memorial. A picture of Scout protesting House Bill 51, waving a pride flag while walking down an Atlanta street, was set next to a podium and an array of vibrantly colored flowers. In lieu of gifts to the family, the Schultzes asked that people donate to two organizations benefiting LGBTQ youth: the Trevor Project, a national suicide hotline, and a thrift store in Atlanta that supported affordable housing. That Punja, the kindhearted kid who’d given her a plastic bouquet, was also dead made Lynne Schultz feel like she had to do more. She was too upset to deliver a speech, so she distributed fliers on which she’d printed information about resources for suicide prevention.

“We are joyful, angry, celebrating, and mournful. We’re proud and upset, disheartened but resolved,” the chaplain leading the service intoned. “Would the status and lives of secular, freethinking students, at Georgia Tech and elsewhere, be better served if Scout Schultz had lived to continue to work for that?… Yes. How much? We’ll never know.”

In a photograph from the service, Kirby Jackson, fresh off her arrest and awaiting a legal hearing, stands in front of a floral-patterned chair. Her arms hang at her sides, and her hands are clasped at her waist. Like Monden, who was also at the service, Jackson had been banned from the Georgia Tech campus, where she’d continued to spend a great deal of time since transferring to Georgia State and where many of her closest friends still attended classes. “Basically, she was cut off from her support network,” Kaffezakis told me.

Jackson stares directly into the camera, her gaze blank.

By mid-October, the media had mostly stopped covering the aftermath of Scout’s shooting. Without more rioting, there wasn’t obvious drama to focus on. The charges against Monden, Jackson, and the other people arrested would likely take months to work their way through the legal system. According to Georgia Tech policy, regardless of the charges against her, the university had 30 days after issuing her suspension notice to determine whether or not Monden could come back to school. Days turned into weeks. Thirty days passed. There hadn’t been a hearing, and Monden was still banned from campus. Before long, it was so late in the fall semester that there was no chance she could enroll for the spring. Monden would miss a full year of school. She moved in with her mom, who lived about nine miles from campus, and started working as a barista at a coffee shop.

Meanwhile, in early November, right on schedule, three of Peterson’s action teams submitted their recommendations. The ideas included increased money for counseling, new initiatives to diminish students’ stress, and the hiring of counselors with “extensive training in related areas such as gender and LGBTQIA studies.” But the fourth action group, focused on public safety, hadn’t yet convened because the investigation of the shooting hadn’t concluded. There was no timeline available for when that would happen.

Before Thanksgiving break, Matt Wolfsen got the result of his FERPA request. He was stunned to discover two binders thick with documentation; a third one arrived a few months later. Inside the binders was evidence that the university was tracking his movements. “Wolfsen travelled with a small contingent of students to Washington DC on July 31 to speak with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand [and] Congresswoman Maxine Waters’ staff regarding HB 51,” Steven Norris, the school’s assistant director of social media, wrote in an email to Georgia Tech’s office of communications. “Wolfsen is a registered member of the Democratic Socialists of America Group and is attending their national convention in August as an elected representative from Atlanta.” The administration also had eyes on Wolfsen’s social media, describing him as “one of the moderators of the FB group ‘Students Against House Bill 51.’”

On September 23, a week after Scout’s death, Norris had sent an email with the subject line “Weekend Monitoring.” He’d taken screen grabs of the PSA’s Twitter account, including a picture of a poster on campus reading “We demand the increase of current funding allocated to mental health on campus” and a tweet from Wolfsen describing the PSA’s demands of Peterson. The tweet, Norris wrote, “had received a fair amount of engagement this afternoon.” He added, “Thankfully many more mentions of football game and GT win have dominated conversation streams.”

The practice of colleges monitoring students’ social media is becoming more common. Some universities even pay private firms or purchase special technology to keep an eye on enrollees’ digital lives. Schools say that this tracking is necessary for campus safety and point to examples like a 2014 case in which a University of Georgia student was arrested after posting on the app Yik Yak that he was going to shoot up a building with an AK-47. Critics worry that targeted, sustained monitoring of certain students—those engaged in activism, for instance—could discourage free speech. “A reasonable person might say, instead of risking trouble, I’m going to shut up,” said Adam B. Steinbaugh, director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

In Wolfsen’s case, after he put some of his FERPA records online, Georgia Tech released a statement saying that it had “noticed” his posts because they either tagged or mentioned the university. The administration also pointed out that “he was never reprimanded or disciplined for anything he posted.” Still, the revelation about monitoring set some students, including Scout’s friends, on edge. They wondered if they were being watched and if they should leave Georgia Tech. “They can’t fire students,” Bailey Becker told me, “but they sure as hell can drive us off campus.”

There was a sense among Scout’s friends that if they could just get to the end of the semester, the situation might improve. They could take a break, go home, be with their families, grieve, recharge. In the spring, they’d have more energy and more distance from the shock of losing Scout and Punja.

Jackson, though, was struggling. Her mother, a self-described “eternal optimist,” reassured Jackson that she would get through this crisis. They would contest the legal charges against her and life would go on. “It was going to be rocky, but we were going to make it,” Angela Amar told me.

Jackson turned 24 on November 26. She went to New Orleans with family and friends to celebrate. At a birthday lunch, in keeping with her den-mother reputation, she told a younger female cousin who was getting bullied at school to call her anytime she needed to talk. Soon after, Jackson traveled back to Atlanta for final exams at GSU. She didn’t complete them: On December 6, Jackson shot and killed herself in her bedroom, located on the basement level of her mother’s house. She didn’t leave a note. Her obituary described her as “a gentle and sensitive spirit” and “a champion for the voiceless.” Jackson’s mother realized that the legal authorities weren’t aware of her daughter’s death when, well after the fact, a summons arrived in the mail ordering Jackson to appear in court regarding the charges brought against her following Scout’s vigil.

The day after her suicide, about a half-dozen of Jackson’s friends met at an off-campus apartment. One of them had invited a therapist to talk to the somber group. They shouldn’t blame themselves, the therapist told the young people who’d gathered, and they shouldn’t be afraid to ask for help and to look out for each other. But they’d been doing that already, the students thought, and all they had to show for it were three dead friends.

Monden became obsessed with a photograph posted on Facebook a few months prior. Taken at night under bright streetlights, the image shows a smiling Scout, hair draped over a white tank top and one arm wrapped around Punja, who’s wearing a black jacket and thick-framed glasses. Monden is on the other side of Punja, leaning into her, with bulky headphones slung around her neck. After Jackson’s death, Monden kept looking at the photo, thinking about how she was the only one in the picture still alive. Maybe it was her turn.

It should have been me, Monden thought, not Kirby.

I started teaching at Georgia Tech in January 2018, after the winter break. As a new arrival on campus, I wasn’t aware of a lot of what had transpired in the fall. I didn’t know, for instance, that Monden was still awaiting word on whether she’d ever be allowed to return to campus. On February 6, one of my students, who is nonbinary, asked me before class if they could make an announcement. It was about a vigil happening at 5:30 that afternoon. I obliged, and the student stood before their classmates to share the CliffsNotes version of Monden’s story, which her friends hoped would conclude after an upcoming hearing before the Office of Student Integrity. The student had fliers, which were placed on a table at the front of the room for anyone who was interested. On one side were the pertinent details about the vigil—time, place, and so on. On the other was an impassioned message:

OSI and GT administration has violated the following rights:

Right to an expedited trial

Right to clear and timely communication

Right to the least restrictive punishment

Right to innocence until proven guilty

Will you be the next target?

Out of curiosity, I attended the vigil. It took place near the Ovation Statue, lovingly referred to by students as the Ice Cream Statue because it looks like a swirl of soft serve. About 30 people were there, including several LGBTQ students. Someone offered me a sign to hold that said “Black Trans Lives Matter.” Was Cat black? I wondered, immediately regretting that I didn’t know the answer to a basic question about a student intimately tied to a campus tragedy. I was struck by how committed the gathered students were to Monden’s case. By contrast, the wider campus seemed to have moved on from Scout’s shooting and the subsequent unrest, just over five months after it had transpired. I wanted to understand why this empathy gap existed.

I interviewed students, submitted records requests, and read all the news and social-media coverage of the shooting that I could find. I talked to family and friends about Scout and Punja and Jackson, learning who they were in life and what their deaths had meant to the people who knew them best. I tracked updates from Peterson’s action teams, including a proposal to establish a new and improved LGBTQ resource center, which would open in the fall of 2018. Students told me that, on some issues, they’d pushed the university to follow through. Based on an action-team recommendation, for instance, buildings were supposed to have gender-neutral bathrooms available, but the process of installing signs designating the facilities had been slow. At least one student contacted the director of residential life for help; the director put in a work order, and within two weeks more signs had gone up.

One student-led initiative involved digging directly into the wounds left by Scout’s killing. Kaffezakis, with the help of the LGBTQ resource center, contacted the GTPD and offered to train officers on trans awareness and inclusion. The police accepted, and Kaffezakis convinced several of her trans friends, including her partner, to go to GTPD headquarters for six sessions. “For a lot of people there, it was super uncomfortable,” Kaffezakis said, “but there was sort of an acknowledgement that it was something that we had to do.”

For the first 90 minutes of training, Aby Parsons of the LGBTQ resource center discoursed on terminology and bias to about a dozen officers. At one point, Parsons handed officers a series of printed words affixed with Velcro and asked them to stick the items on a board in one of two columns. The words included slurs used against trans people and acronyms like MTF (male to female); the columns were labeled “green light” (acceptable) and “red light” (unacceptable).

The last half-hour was more unscripted. Kaffezakis and the other trans students stood in front of the room to answer questions. “How can we make trans students feel safe?” one officer asked. “Why do we need to use gender-neutral pronouns?” another wondered. “There were a lot of heartwarming parts,” Kaffezakis recalled, and officers who were “very clearly engaged.”

But some seemed unfocused, even annoyed. At one point, a cop asked, “Why do y’all not trust us?”

The obvious response was Scout’s killing, but Kaffezakis decided to go further than that. It wasn’t the GTPD specifically that trans students didn’t trust, she said, it was law enforcement everywhere. She detailed survey research done by the Solutions Not Punishment Collaborative, an Atlanta-based black transgender and queer organization, which in 2016 found that after calling the police for help, more than a third of the trans women of color interviewed wound up being arrested. Eighty percent of respondents had been stopped by police, and about half of those stopped had been questioned on suspicion of prostitution. “Everything that happened with Scout’s shooting,” Kaffezakis concluded, “centered GTPD within that perspective and those expectations.”

When she finished talking, the room was quiet. She hoped it was a signal of sympathy.

In December 2017, according to public records, the GBI handed the findings from its investigation of Scout’s shooting over to the Atlanta district attorney’s office for review. The Schultzes said that they’d been told it could be two years before they know who, if anyone, would be held accountable for their child’s death. Among the items in the DA’s possession are Scout’s suicide notes. The Schultzes said that they haven’t had a chance to read them and won’t be able to until the DA is done with them. The DA declined to comment for this story, citing its policy of not talking about ongoing investigations.

I was eager to talk to university officials to get their perspective on the case, the protests and arrests, and the changes proposed on campus. As any academic knows, committees and recommendations don’t necessarily translate into action; too often, semesters pass with little more than updates on measures that have been forthcoming for what feels like years. I reached out to several decision-makers, including Peterson and the GTPD chief, and was told by each person or their assistant to contact Lance Wallace in communications. Aby Parsons at the LGBTQ resource center didn’t reply to my inquiries. Even the counseling center, which I’d visited hoping to talk to someone about the general topic of mental health on campus, wouldn’t comment. While I waited to be told no, I spotted a bowl of rubber yellow bracelets with #JacketsEndingSuicide printed on them in white lettering and pamphlets about “surviving after suicide loss.”

I contacted Lance Wallace but didn’t hear back, so I decided to drop by his office. The communications building is situated next to Bobby Dodd Stadium, where Georgia Tech’s football team plays its home games; a large picture window in the entryway offers a sweeping view of the pristine green field. I climbed the stairs to Wallace’s office, where the door was ajar. “I’ve looked at the website she’s writing for,” I heard a voice say. “She’s trying to tell as dramatic a story as possible, the facts be damned.”

It took me a moment to realize that Wallace was on the phone and that he was probably talking about me. I waited a few seconds, then knocked. “One minute,” he called out. Wallace ended his call with “Bye, chief.”

When he emerged from his office, he looked and acted the part of a PR professional: polite, charming, and sharply dressed in a suit and tie. He couldn’t answer any questions, Wallace said, because there were still legal matters in process. His office, though, could get me a statement. When I conveyed that I wanted as much information as possible in order to write a balanced story, he smiled. “Absolutely, and it makes perfect sense,” Wallace said. “It’s not that we’re just kicking you to the curb and saying, No, don’t talk to her.”

A few days later, Wallace’s office sent me his statement on Scout’s shooting. “While the case remains under review by appropriate state agencies, Georgia Tech is not in a position to grant interviews on the case,” it read, “and no Georgia Tech employees will do interviews on the topic.”

It’s easy to dismiss what a university does or doesn’t say about its business—to say nothing of attempts to get answers out of them—as unworthy of coverage in the face of bigger, more sensational news stories. Yet how universities act matters, because they’re entrusted with the care of young people and with shaping their worldviews. Public institutions like Georgia Tech and GSU are also accountable to taxpayers.

More urgently, campuses have become microcosms of America’s divided political culture. They’re battlegrounds for disputes over free speech, personal identity, policing, and other pressing social issues. Fringe political groups and actors, some of them affiliated with the far right, stir up controversy and court potential members at colleges and universities, while so-called watchdog organizations like the conservative group Campus Reform scour the web for trolling fodder. A July 2018 Campus Reform article, for example, mocked the University of Wisconsin, Madison, for allowing a student to submit a bias incident report in 2016 for “being forced to choose male or female when completing forms/paperwork.”

Higher education is also on the front lines of a volatile debate over civil disobedience in the face of perceived injustice, waged in earnest since President Donald Trump’s election and amid increased scrutiny of America’s enduring legacy of white supremacy. In August 2018, as the fall semester began at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, protestors tore down a longstanding Confederate monument, eliciting praise from liberal circles and condemnation from many conservative ones. Ultimately, the state’s highest education authorities came down on the side of the right. The chair and president of the UNC system released a joint statement describing the statue’s dismantling as “unacceptable, dangerous, and incomprehensible. We are a nation of laws—and mob rule and the intentional destruction of public property will not be tolerated.” The statement did not mention the statue’s history, including stymied efforts to have it legally removed and a dedication speech in 1913 at which a Confederate veteran praised his fellow men in gray for defending the “welfare of the Anglo Saxon race” and bragged about how he once “horse-whip[ped] a Negro wench” about 100 yards from where the statue stood. As with Georgia Tech’s comments about Scout’s shooting, context was everything—and it was lacking.

Meanwhile, the Georgia legislature, following a model set by several other states and championed in conservative circles, passed a law in the spring of 2018, ostensibly intended to protect First Amendment freedoms on campuses by mandating that public institutions enact “content-neutral” policies regarding speeches, demonstrations, and other “expressive activities.” Yet the law also requires that schools sanction students who “disrupt or interfere with the functioning of the institution or classroom instruction.” In other words, students who protest campus events or school business—who, say, heckle a speaker they find offensive or stage a die-in at the president’s office—now run the risk of being punished.

The Georgia Tech administration was eager for campus life to return to normal after Scout’s death. For some students, however, normal was the problem. Scout’s friends wanted their pain to matter. “Bud Peterson and Georgia Tech are failing the students,” a third-year biomedical-engineering major said on a local news broadcast shortly after the shooting. “The thing is, if we return to the status quo, more people are going to keep hurting. People are hurting right now at Georgia Tech.”

I thought of those people when, through an open-records request, I received documents from Georgia’s Peace Officer Standards and Training Council. I wanted to know Tyler Beck’s status, since little had been heard from or about him since immediately after the shooting; I’d reached out to Beck but never heard back. The documents gave me some answers: As of July 2018, Beck was “actively employed in law enforcement” at GTPD. Since shooting Scout, he’d completed 126 hours of training, including crisis intervention. Meanwhile, the campus-safety action team still hadn’t convened; the website for Peterson’s office said that information about the group was “coming soon.”

In July, the GTPD hosted a going-away party for its interim deputy chief. In a photo from the on-campus event, posted to the department’s Facebook page, a man who appears to be Beck leans against a doorframe, a close-lipped smile above his square jaw. He wears a badge, a polo shirt and khakis, and what looks like a firearm strapped to his belt.

Beck isn’t the only person at the scene of Scout’s death who has since returned to Georgia Tech. In the middle of the spring 2018 semester, the OSI decided to revoke Monden’s suspension. It was too late to register for spring classes, but she could come back for the summer term.

As Atlanta slipped into months of ceaseless mugginess, Monden re-enrolled in classes in literature and communications. Georgia Tech is relatively quiet in the summer, but Monden never felt alone. For the first few days of classes, she told me, police officers followed her around. Eventually, she stopped noticing them, or maybe they stopped tracking her. Still, she occasionally spotted students giving her suspicious looks. When she introduced herself in conversations, people sometimes replied incredulously, “Are you that Cat?”

She kept a low profile and focused on the present, perhaps because what would come after the summer wasn’t entirely up to her. Monden wanted to graduate and become a video-game designer, but her charges were still pending; if convicted, she could face a maximum sentence of up to five years in prison. Prisons are notoriously dangerous places for trans people, who endure a disproportionate risk of sexual violence behind bars, and the Trump administration recently rolled back a federal policy mandating that inmates be housed according to their gender identity and not their biological sex. In my conversations with her, Monden seemed averse to talking about the possibility of spending time locked up.

On the morning of August 13, a week before the start of Georgia Tech’s fall semester, Monden appeared in courtroom 4A of the Superior Court of Fulton County. She wore a striped shirt and black dress pants, and her hair was fashioned into short dreads. Family and friends were present, including several LGBTQ students. One of them kept an arm tightly wrapped around Monden’s shoulders as the group waited for the hearing to begin.

Monden was appearing with the two other people arrested at the march following Scout’s vigil. Monden’s codefendants pleaded guilty and received five years’ probation, as well as a fine. “If you interfere with a cop, you’re going to get beat up,” Judge Henry Newkirk told the newly convicted criminals, both of whom were white men. “If you hit me, and I’m a cop, I better have two other cops to help me whip you.”

Monden’s lawyer, meanwhile, took a different approach. After noting Monden’s return to Georgia Tech over the summer, he successfully negotiated for pretrial intervention, which meant that after completing certain court-appointed activities—the specifics of which weren’t logged in the public record and which Monden didn’t want to discuss—his client could petition for the court to reject her case entirely. It wasn’t an outright acquittal or dismissal, but if she obeyed the terms of the deal, Monden would at least avoid a felony conviction.

As for the context in which the events before the court took place, Newkirk acknowledged that “it’s a very unfortunate incident whenever someone is killed, especially by the police.” However, he added that there are “good shots” and bad. “From what I can see, the ones that aren’t [good] usually get indicted,” the judge said.

That her day in court was anti-climactic was in keeping with how life had come to feel for Monden in the months after Scout’s death. At first, she told me, she was angry—so much so that everything she experienced became a blur. But then she grew weary. Even with the threat of jail gone, she didn’t feel much like being an activist anymore. “A lot of people around me are trying to make the best of things,” Monden said. “I’m trying to get through life.”

For the queer community at Georgia Tech, the new school year is full of uncertainty. The revamped LGBTQ resource center proposed by one of Peterson’s action teams opened the first week of classes, a reminder that, in Bailey Becker’s words, “We’re here and fucking vibrant.” At the same time, Becker told me that the Pride Alliance is timid, always wondering when planning activities what Georgia Tech’s administration will think and weighing whether “we can get in trouble for this, because it’s political and we’re political.” The group, Becker added, can sometimes feel like a place “where activism goes to die.” Some of Becker’s LGBTQ friends have considered transferring from Georgia Tech but have stopped short because they “want something from the school that’s not lasting trauma.”

The mood is a far cry from where the Pride Alliance was one year ago. On a sunny summer day in 2017, Scout sat behind a folding table on the Tech Green, the heart of campus. They wore a floral T-shirt and sucked on a lollipop, pulled from a glass jar that passersby were encouraged to rummage through for their favorite flavors. If they didn’t want a lollipop, Starbursts were available, too.

The table was draped with a rainbow flag and offered pamphlets about LGBTQ pride. This was recruitment for the Pride Alliance, and Scout was the group’s ambassador. “Always fun to greet the incoming first-years and get a glance at the folks who make up the future of the organization,” they later wrote on Facebook, capping the message with a smiley-face emoji.

In a picture taken at the event, Scout appears confident. They’d donned a rainbow-colored Dr. Seuss hat, which had flopped to one side. Another student was wearing a trans-pride flag around their shoulders like a cape, and Scout had decided to add a cape to their own ensemble—the rainbow one from the table. They looked like a queer superhero.

Four days, two murders, and one poplar tree that almost ignited World War III.

By Josh Dean

The poplar was a problem. One of the few survivors from a deciduous forest bombed into oblivion during the Korean War, the tree towered 40 feet over a stripped, scrubby landscape; in the summer, its leaves formed a thick green crown. A stranger to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the skinny belt of no-man’s-land that has divided the Korean peninsula since 1953, might have seen this as evidence of nature’s resilience. To the U.S. soldiers patrolling the area, however, it represented a conspicuous security risk.

That’s why, at 1030 on August 18, 1976, a 2.5-ton truck—a deuce and a half, in U.S. Army lingo—rolled up to the poplar and parked in its shadow. Out climbed a crew of five civilian maintenance workers, all of them Korean, and a ten-man security platoon led by Lieutenant Mark Barrett, a South Carolinian who’d been in Korea only a few weeks. Barrett’s boss was there, too. Captain Arthur Bonifas had arrived in a jeep and now stood to the side as the workers ascended the tree with axes and clippers and began to cut the branches.

A cheerful, devoutly Christian native of Newburgh, New York, and a father of three, Bonifas was in the final days of his deployment to Korea. The 33-year-old West Point graduate was known among his men for being very smart—he’d once taught math at his alma mater—and impeccably polite. Soon he’d be off to a new post, in Georgia, where he’d be promoted and placed in command of an artillery unit. In fact, Bonifas had already ordered the uniforms and shoulder boards that would reflect his new rank as an Army major.

The job in Georgia would be less unpredictable than the one that had brought Bonifas to the foot of the tree in Korea. Here he was second-in-command of a complex military entity known as the Joint Security Force (JSF), comprised of three platoons of American and South Korean soldiers who served as guards in the Joint Security Area (JSA). Situated in the heart of the DMZ, the JSA was also called Panmunjom, after a tiny settlement that once stood in the same spot, or simply the truce village, because it’s where the armistice that froze the Korean War was reached. Just under 900 yards across at its widest point, the JSA was supposedly neutral and the only place where soldiers from the Korean People’s Army (KPA) and the Republic of Korea (ROK)—north and south, respectively—stood face-to-face, while keeping watch over various ornamented buildings frequented by tourists and government officials. In reality the plot of land, which on a map resembled a slightly squashed circle, was one of the tensest places on the planet.

To monitor pressure in this geopolitical tinderbox—that is, to keep tabs on bad behavior exhibited by KPA guards—U.S. soldiers manned various checkpoints and guard posts. Everyone’s least favorite assignment was Checkpoint 3 (CP3), positioned at the foot of the so-called Bridge of No Return, which traversed the narrow Sachon River. Halfway across the concrete span was the North Korean border. Some U.S. guards feared being kidnapped and dragged across that invisible line, in which case they almost certainly would not be rescued, because Pyongyang would deem movement by U.S. forces into northern territory to retrieve prisoners an invasion. The North Koreans constantly harassed and intimidated the men stationed at CP3; they’d even erected two unauthorized checkpoints in close proximity just to impede access to what the Americans took to calling the loneliest outpost in the world.

Soldiers at CP3 took some comfort in knowing that, 600 yards up a nearby hill, their platoon mates at Observation Post 5 (OP5) had eyes on their position—except in summer, when the pesky poplar, in glorious bloom, blocked the sight line.

Almost anywhere else in the world, a military order to trim a tree for security reasons would have been considered uncontroversial. In the JSA, however, everything was disputed. The first attempt to tackle the poplar’s branches had been foiled by KPA guards who insisted that security officers from both sides of the JSA would need to approve any landscaping. A maintenance crew tried again on August 17, this time with a larger number of guards in tow, but the mission was rained out. On the third go, Bonifas decided to supervise, to ensure that the job got done. The operation would likely be his last in the JSA, and he wanted to be there in case the KPA caused trouble again. “Make sure you’re firm,” the JSF’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Victor Vierra, told him.

Special activities in Panmunjom were always filmed in case of incident. As Bonifas’s crew got to work, Captain Larry Shaddix, the JSF’s logistics officer, took up a position on a platform outside OP5. Shaddix raised his 35-millimeter camera’s telephoto lens and began to shoot. For a few minutes, there wasn’t much to see. The work was going according to plan, until Bulldog arrived.

Bulldog was Lieutenant Pak Chul, a rabidly patriotic North Korean platoon leader notorious for his provocations in the JSA, like the time he kicked an American guard in the groin during a scuffle over photographs. Bulldog strutted around, trying to make small talk with Captain Kim Moon Hwan, Bonifas’s Korean translator and the ranking ROK officer at the scene, and offering unsolicited advice to the civilians in the tree, some of whom had been on the scene last time, when their work was halted by KPA guards, and so were unnerved by Bulldog’s arrival.

Then, for no obvious reason, Bulldog changed course. He ordered the civilians to stop cutting—and threatened to force the issue, even shoot the workers, if they didn’t obey him.

Bonifas had seen enough. He strode forward and announced that the work would continue, period. The trimming was a legal, peaceful matter—a “routine action,” a Pentagon report later stated—that had been announced in advance. Besides, it would be over soon. Bulldog responded by muttering something to one of his guards, who ran off across the bridge and came back a few minutes later in a truck with reinforcements, bringing the number of KPA soldiers at the tree to at least 30. The North Koreans now outnumbered Bonifas’s men three to one.

Bonifas wasn’t about to be intimidated. Aware of the power a gesture can wield, he turned his back to Bulldog. That’s why he didn’t see the KPA leader calmly remove his watch, wrap it in a handkerchief, and put it in his pocket. Another North Korean officer rolled up his sleeves like a Mafia heavy preparing for a fistfight. Then Bulldog attacked Bonifas from behind, screaming an order to his men as he hit the base of the American’s skull with an open hand. The command meant, Attack the enemy and kill them!

On any other morning, Mark Luttrull would’ve been at Bonifas’s side. The , who was on his second tour in the Army after a brief, unsuccessful stint in college, had served as the captain’s personal driver for the better part of a year. Luttrull adored his boss, in no small part because the first duty Bonifas had given him was to escort Miss Rhode Island into the JSA as part of a USO tour. Luttrull especially liked driving Bonifas to security meetings in Panmunjom. The captain would ask Luttrull to drive fast while he rode in silence, studying his notes.

On August 18, however, Bonifas had asked Luttrull to stay behind at Camp Kitty Hawk, the JSF’s home base about a mile south of Panmunjom, to prepare his field gear to be turned in at the end of his deployment. Luttrull was sitting in the camp’s administrative office when he saw Kim, Bonifas’s translator, stumbling up a hill from the direction of the JSA, covered in blood and mumbling something that Luttrull couldn’t make out until the ROK captain was a few feet away.

As soon as he understood Kim’s words—“Captain Bonifas! Captain Bonifas!”—Luttrull ran for a radio and paged his boss. Then, as his call echoed from the camp’s tinny loudspeakers, a piercing siren began to wail.

U.S. military bases along the DMZ had two sirens: one for exercises and one for actual emergencies. This was the latter. It signaled for every man, from the infantry to the cooking staff, to drop what he was doing, throw on fatigues, a flak jacket, and a steel-pot helmet, and run to the armory for weapons and ammunition. Luttrull did exactly that.

John Pinadella, a 20-year-old private from New Jersey, had just come off a rotation in the JSA. Shifts in the zone were 24 hours each, from 0800 to 0800, and Pinadella’s last task before leaving Panmunjom that morning had been to open CP3 for the day. He’d thought it odd when three soldiers, instead of the usual two, showed up for the shift. Why did the checkpoint need reinforcing? But no matter—Pinadella had his sights on a little R&R. After a daylong stint with the Quick Reaction Force (QRF), the first-response team for incidents in the JSA, he’d get 24 hours off.

QRF duty was usually boring. The men sat around cleaning weapons, reading pulpy novels, bragging about their Korean girlfriends, and thinking about the leisure time that lay ahead: a full day of pickling themselves with booze in the nearest town, then sleeping it off before the whole cycle started over again. Pinadella was also crossing boxes off his calendar. He was the “shortest” guy in his platoon, the one with the least time remaining in Korea. He had just 98 days and a wake-up left before he went back to the United States.

Pinadella was reading mail on a cot in the unit’s Quonset hut when his platoon leader barged in, alarmed. Something had happened in the JSA. The lieutenant ordered Pinadella and the other men to gear up and get ready to go back, possibly into danger. “Get on the trucks!” he barked.

Half of the troops in the QRF, including Pinadella, were loaded into the open bed of a truck. These men were riot control, under orders to stop whatever was happening in the JSA, and they carried pickax handles. According to the terms of the armistice, soldiers on both sides could wield only batons and sidearms in Panmunjom, and U.S. commanders insisted that their troops stick to these options—unless there was an extraordinary escalation of violence. If Pinadella’s group couldn’t quell a crisis, or if the situation went truly, terribly sideways, then the other half of the QRF would be sent in. Those men would have M16s.

Just accessing Panmunjom, however, posed a problem. The moment the QRF entered, the United States would technically be in violation of the armistice. No more than 35 armed soldiers—30 enlisted men and five officers—from each side of the DMZ could be in the JSA at a given time, and that day’s rotation of Americans and South Koreans was already in place. Only the commanding officer on the scene was authorized to call in additional manpower. That was Bonifas, and no one could reach him.

Frustration built as the men of the QRF sat in their trucks waiting for information. They moved forward, as far as Checkpoint 2, just outside the gate to the JSA, and were sitting there as fellow soldiers on duty in Panmunjom began to straggle out. The men looked dazed; some were bleeding. There’d been a fight, they said, a bad one.

The exiting soldiers who weren’t hurt were asked to regroup and serve as backup for the QRF. Two of them refused, and Pinadella was stunned. Whatever had happened inside the JSA was so horrible that members of an elite U.S. force couldn’t face the scene again.

Finally, orders came down from Lieutenant Colonel Vierra to deploy the riot squad. As his truck rolled through the gate, Pinadella didn’t know that Bonifas had already been evacuated to the medic’s station at Camp Kitty Hawk, where Luttrull, his stomach in knots, was awaiting news. The medic on duty sought out the specialist, whom he’d heard was looking for Bonifas. Luttrull demanded to know what had happened to his boss.

“I tried to save him,” the medic stammered. “It was too late.” Bonifas was dead of catastrophic blunt-force wounds, including one that had split his helmet, and his eyeglasses, in half.

Shaddix, the logistics officer with the camera, had captured the murder in still frames. After Bulldog struck Bonifas on the back of the head with a karate-style chop, the captain fell to the ground and never got up again. At least five KPA guards immediately set upon him, kicking and hitting his head and body.

“Jesus Christ!” another American at OP5 yelled. “They’re killing him!”

Around the poplar, all hell broke loose. The civilian workers leapt out of the tree and ran, dropping their clippers and axes, which became weapons as North Korean soldiers snatched them up, encircled the guards who’d come to protect the tree trimmers, and commenced swinging and hacking. Shaddix’s photos would show outnumbered U.S. and ROK soldiers trying to fend off the attacks without resorting to firearms. An after-action assessment found that the men “reacted to a surprise, unprovoked attack with restraint and self-discipline.” Not one of them ever drew a gun.

The fight was brief, no longer than a few minutes, but furious. “There wasn’t time to be scared,” one of the U.S. soldiers later observed. “I was just trying to survive.” When Pinadella and the riot squad arrived, less than 30 minutes after Bulldog had initiated his assault, the scene was eerily calm. The North Koreans had retreated across the bridge or gone back to their stations inside the JSA. With no fight left to join, the QRF evacuated the men at OP5, including a rattled Shaddix. Inside the truck, someone pulled a fire extinguisher from its mount, and Shaddix gripped the canister tightly, ready to use it as a weapon if any North Koreans tried to stop the vehicle.

When the Americans and South Koreans regrouped outside the JSA for a head count, Bonifas wasn’t the only officer missing. There was no sign of Lieutenant Barrett, the man in charge of the security team at the tree, either. The last time anyone could remember seeing him was behind a retaining wall above a ditch near the poplar, where he’d apparently run to help a soldier who’d been surrounded by KPA guards.

The QRF’s riot-control team piled into their truck for the second time and drove back through the JSA gate. The vehicle went straight to the tree, and as soon as it screeched to a halt, the men scrambled out and began to search for Barrett. Pinadella jumped over the retaining wall and down into the ditch, where he found the lieutenant lying on his back, covered in mud and blood. Ax wounds riddled the young officer’s body from head to toe, and Pinadella was afraid to touch him, lest he make the lieutenant’s condition worse. He reached down tentatively to check for a pulse. Oh, my God, Pinadella thought when he felt a faint beating. He’s alive!

The young soldier choked back a wave of nausea and put his minimal training in field medicine to work. He screamed for help and cleared Barrett’s airway with his fingers, which allowed the injured man to cough and breathe a little better. When another private slid into the swampy depression and saw Barrett, he unleashed a primal scream; he seemed ready to charge up the hill at the nearest KPA checkpoint and attack whoever was there. Pinadella told the private to channel his adrenaline into getting Barrett out. Together with two other soldiers, they carefully lifted the lieutenant out of the mud, carried him to their truck, and gently laid his body down in the bed.

The men assessed Barrett’s injuries as the unit sped out of the JSA. There were deep blade wounds in the lieutenant’s chest, and blood was pouring from them. It pooled and quickly congealed in the thick August heat, causing boots to stick to the vehicle’s floor. One soldier attempted mouth-to-mouth, but it seemed futile; more air was exiting the wounds on Barrett’s head and neck than was reaching his lungs.

Barrett was transported to a helicopter that would carry him and several wounded ROK soldiers to a hospital in Seoul. As the chopper rose into the sky and shrunk out of sight, Pinadella made his way back to barracks. He changed out of his blood-soaked fatigues into a clean uniform, then he grabbed as many clips for his .45 semiautomatic pistol as he could carry. If there was about to be a battle with the North Koreans, he wanted to be ready.

That afternoon, all U.S. soldiers were ordered to convene in the mess hall at Camp Kitty Hawk, where Vierra, their gruff, square-shouldered commanding officer, addressed them. By then word of Barrett’s fate had arrived: Despite the efforts of Army medics aboard the helicopter, the young lieutenant had succumbed to his wounds before reaching Seoul.

Vierra assured his men that retaliatory action would be taken, and soon. He was awaiting orders.

“We’re going to feed you now,” the colonel told Pinadella, Luttrull, Shaddix, and the other confused, angry soldiers, “because we don’t know when you’re going to be able to eat again.”

A U.S. soldier stationed in Panmunjom hadn’t been killed in almost a decade. The last was in April 1968, when North Korean guards ambushed a truck en route to the JSA, leaving two Americans and two South Koreans dead. “About 20 bullet holes could be seen in the shattered front windshield of the truck,” the military newspaper Stars and Stripes reported. “Both headlights were blasted out. Three of the tires were punctured, and at least 40 rounds had ripped through the truck’s rear canvas cover.” An observer commented, “I don’t see how anybody survived this.”

In the years that followed, the JSA reverted to its norm: an uncomfortable state of high alert and suspicion. “The combination of physical, psychological, political, diplomatic, and military stresses,” George Chobany, the officer who led the QRF on the day of the ax murders, later wrote, “made duty in the JSA unlike duty just about anywhere else in the world.” Only certain men were chosen for the job. Members of the ROK contingent, known as the Korean Augmentation to the United States Army, tended to come from influential South Korean families and performed well on English tests. On the American side, recruits had to score more than 110 on the Army’s General Technical exam, an academic-aptitude test, and ideally have no black marks on their disciplinary record. They also had to be at least six feet tall—for maximal intimidation factor—and have a mellow temperament.

When men arrived on deployment in Seoul, an Army representative referred to as the turtle catcher sought out the tallest among them who met other basic requirements and asked if they’d like to volunteer for special duty. Those who said yes were taken north for further interviews and tests—for instance, soldiers screaming at them suddenly and for no apparent reason. The idea was to see how they might handle being cursed at and spit on in the JSA, because that would absolutely happen. North Korean soldiers in Panmunjom were instructed to be provocative, while their U.S. and ROK counterparts were under strict orders not to take the bait.

Much of the resulting gamesmanship was childish. Technically, the JSF fell under what was called the United Nations Command—another bureaucratic by-product of the armistice—and when leadership put floodlights on the exterior of the UNC headquarters, North Korea responded by erecting bigger, brighter lights at its main station. KPA guards sometimes taunted African American soldiers with racist gestures and placed boards covered with nails, pointed ends up, along the routes of UNC vehicle patrols. A stranded jeep was an opportunity for harassment, so if tires punctured, drivers were told to continue driving on flats.

U.S. soldiers weren’t innocent of mischief. They liked to play hopscotch on their half of the Bridge of No Return, drop their pants to moon guards on the other side, and sneak up on the KPA barracks in the middle of the night to pound on the walls until everyone inside was awake. On winter nights, they sometimes poured water on the steps of North Korean checkpoint buildings, so that the guards who arrived the next morning would slip on the ice.

By 1976, however, fatuous competition and pranks were giving way to renewed KPA aggression. In June of the previous year, a North Korean journalist spat on U.S. Army major W.D. Henderson as the two men sat on a bench arguing. When Henderson struck the man, KPA guards surrounded the major, stomped on him, and crushed his larynx, necessitating his evacuation from Korea. Several months later, a JSF guard on jeep patrol, Michael Brouillette, was assaulted when he took a detour near the Panmungak pavilion, North Korea’s main building in the JSA. Brouillette’s arm was broken, and he was later awarded a Purple Heart.

Keeping cool in the face of violence was a matter of U.S. policy, but that didn’t mean that the Americans simply turned the other cheek. In early 1976, at the suggestion of a soldier in , led by Lieutenant David Zilka, night patrols began carrying larger clubs—ax handles instead of riot batons—for protection. At the next joint security meeting, the North Koreans ranted about “Zilka’s Mad Dogs, who patrol the JSA at night and carry big sticks!” Second Platoon proudly adopted the Mad Dogs nickname.

Major General John Singlaub was in a staff meeting of the Eighth Army Command in Yongsan, a garrison in Seoul that served as the U.S. military headquarters on the Korean peninsula, when he got word by phone that two Americans had been killed in the JSA. Singlaub, who’d cut his teeth parachuting behind enemy lines during World War II and now wore two stars on his uniform, knew that nearly every U.S. official required to initiate a response to the murders was currently out of the country. General Richard Stilwell, the commander of all U.S. forces in Korea, was in Japan, making his last official visit before retiring from the Army after 38 years and three wars. Stilwell’s deputy, Air Force lieutenant general John Burns, was logging his monthly flight hours. And the American ambassador, Richard Sneider, was on holiday in the United States. “I was the man on the spot,” Singlaub later wrote in a memoir.

Singlaub sent a jet to Japan to retrieve Stilwell, then called the general to let him know that a plane was en route. “Sir, I think you should return to Seoul immediately,” Singlaub said. Stilwell considered the minimal amount of information he was able to receive over the unsecure line and asked his chief of staff to do two things while he flew back to Seoul. The first was to request an urgent security meeting for the following day, so that he could deliver a message to Pyongyang that its aggression would have swift, severe repercussions. The second was to prepare all units in Korea for a shift to Defcon-3, should the order come from Washington. Defcon, short for defense readiness condition, ranges from 5 (normal) to 1 (nukes are flying). Defcon-3 would involve American forces gearing up for possible combat.

The North Koreans were already broadcasting their version of events via Radio Pyongyang. “Around 10:45 a.m. today,” a bulletin announced, “the American imperialist aggressors sent in 14 hoodlums with axes into the Joint Security Area to cut down the tree on their own accord, although such work should be mutually consented beforehand. Four persons from our side went to the spot to warn them not to continue the work without our consent. Against our persuasion, they attacked our guards en masse and committed a serious provocative act of beating our men, wielding murderous weapons, and depending on the fact that they outnumbered us. Our guards could not but resort to self-defense measures under the circumstances of this reckless provocation.”

Barely five hours after the killings, North Korea showed its cards to the world. Pyongyang had sent a delegation to a meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement—a collection of countries that never officially chose a side in the Cold War—which was being held at the time in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The North Koreans distributed a document to the gathered representatives describing the fight in the JSA in terms similar to those used by Radio Pyongyang, then introduced a resolution calling on the conference to order the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Korean peninsula. It passed easily.

To American leaders, the timing was hardly coincidental. Singlaub considered the response from Pyongyang to be “clear confirmation that the murders had been part of a carefully planned campaign designed to force American troops out of Korea.” A memo prepared for the deputy national security adviser suggested that the highest levels of the North Korean regime had likely approved the attack at the poplar tree. The goal, the memo stated, may have been to provoke American troops to “over-react with firearms,” creating an international incident that could influence world opinion and the upcoming U.S. presidential election, which was less than three months away. A CIA report titled “DMZ Incident,” delivered by the agency’s director, George H. W. Bush, to secretary of state Henry Kissinger, described North Korea’s endgame: “If U.S. forces withdraw, if U.S. resolve appears seriously weakened, we believe the North might well act on its overriding goal of unification and seize the opportunity to achieve it militarily.”

The scary thing was that, given the opportunity, North Korea might well succeed. In 1970, a U.S. intelligence assessment had found “general parity” between North and South Korea’s military forces. But four years later, analysts noticed that North Korea was diverting concrete and steel into new, unknown military developments—a worrying development that, with the Pentagon’s attention focused on Vietnam, had gone largely unnoticed. Further review of satellite imagery led to a “horrifying” revelation, as the officer at the National Security Agency assigned to solve the mystery put it. Somehow the intelligence establishment had missed an enormous military buildup, despite U.S. armed forces being parked right next door.

Every line item stunned the Pentagon. North Korea’s armored divisions were 80 percent larger than those described in the 1970 assessment, and the country didn’t have 21 divisions of 10,000 combat troops each; it had 41. The intense, increasingly aggressive Kim had at least 2,000 modern tanks and 12,400 artillery pieces, most of them deployed to fortifications along the DMZ, within easy firing range of U.S. and South Korean forces, as well as fighters and bombers parked in hangars constructed inside mountains and reinforced with all that concrete and steel—save the portion used to build an extensive series of tunnels under the DMZ itself, including one big enough to accommodate a full combat division, with artillery.

According to Singlaub, the United States was forced to accept the “troubling, seemingly unbelievable conclusion” that “Kim Il Sung was poised to invade South Korea,” perhaps by engineering a false-flag attack. Kim may have been telegraphing this fact when he told a Japanese journalist five months before the ax murders that his country planned to “stir up world opinion more vigorously” by publicizing America’s “criminal barbarities.” The CIA believed Pyongyang would use the publicity around the JSA fight to garner allies and sour the American public’s view of the country’s military presence in Korea, to the point that U.S. forces would leave, clearing a path for the north to invade the south. There was reason for Pyongyang to think that possible: The long, bloody slog of Vietnam had worn thin Americans’ patience for war, and on the presidential campaign trail, a Georgia peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter was agitating to withdraw American soldiers from Korea.

When Stilwell landed at Kimpo Airport in Seoul, Singlaub met his boss and briefed him in the car on the way to Yongsan. The two had known each other for 25 years, since Stilwell ran the Far Asia division of the CIA and Singlaub served under him. When Stilwell got his fourth star and was given the prestigious Eighth Army Command, he picked his old friend to be his chief of staff. Now the men sped toward base, discussing how to respond to the murders. As Stilwell saw it, there were relatively few options—three, really. The United States could do nothing, but that would be seen as weak. It could launch a massive retaliatory response, with bombs and rockets, but that might start World War III. Or U.S. forces could do something “meaningful,” an action that sent a message but wouldn’t result in American casualties. Stilwell favored the third option, but what meaningful thing could U.S. forces do? And what if the North Koreans overreacted, igniting the very war Stilwell had hoped to avoid?

By the time Stilwell arrived at the newly designated war room, a concrete basement at Yongsan, it was 2040 on August 18, and he had a plan in mind. U.S. forces needed to reassert control before the situation in the JSA slipped further into chaos. Because the fight had started at the poplar tree, Stilwell reasoned, the response should be focused there, too. “That damned tree must come down,” he told Singlaub. Not only that, but the JSF needed to destroy the two checkpoints near CP3 that North Korea had installed without approval. They’d stood long enough.

The mission was a matter of both tactical necessity and principle, and in theory it could be done quickly and in a way that appeared to respect the parameters of the armistice. But there was a way to make a louder point, too. Chopping down the poplar would be a real threat if, in Singlaub’s words, it was accompanied by a “massing [of] American air, ground, and sea power to remind the North Koreans of the nature of their opponent.” Stilwell had the perfect name for the mission: Operation Paul Bunyan.

The security meeting that Stilwell had ordered Singlaub to organize was held the morning after the murders. It was a gathering of the Military Armistice Commission, comprised of North and South Koreans, Americans, and neutral-nation observers—Czechs, Poles, Swedes, and Swiss—who oversaw implementation of the peace agreement and mediated disputes in the JSA. The MAC headquarters, a narrow, single-story building with blue walls, parallel banks of windows, and well-worn office furniture, had seen its share of one-upmanship and sabotage. In the early days of the armistice, each side had attended MAC meetings with a progressively bigger flag to place before its delegation, until they could no longer fit comfortably in the room. More than once KPA soldiers were seen shining their boots with an American flag. Later the U.S. side assigned guards to protect its microphones, because the American delegates were concerned that the North Koreans would cut the cords.

The meeting on August 19 was different, because the stakes were unprecedented. Normally, a U.S. honor guard attended in Class A uniforms: white helmet, blue satin sash, polished boots. That day, members of the JSF had been on alert for nearly 24 hours. They were dirty and sweaty, wearing combat fatigues and scuffed boots, and they were seething at the deaths of Bonifas and Barrett. According to one observer, they “marched in with a force and purpose like never before,” forming a cordon as Rear Admiral Mark Frudden, the senior U.S. representative at the meeting, strutted from his car to the conference room in impeccable dress whites.

Press swarmed and flashes popped as Frudden and other officials arrived. A TV camera panned the tense scene, pausing for a moment on the exhausted face of John Pinadella, who was a member of the honor guard. Later that night, when the footage played on the evening news across America, Pinadella’s father would relax for the first time since the announcement the previous day that two unnamed soldiers had been murdered in Korea. His son was not one of the dead men.

Frudden opened the meeting by delivering a written message from Stilwell. “The UN Command views this brutal, vicious act with gravity and concern and warns that such violent and belligerent acts cannot be tolerated,” Stilwell wrote. “North Korea must bear full responsibility for all consequences.” As expected, emissaries from Pyongyang pushed back. North Korea had fully denied the 1968 killings of the men in the truck, and this time, too, it claimed innocence. American soldiers provoked the violence, the country’s representatives said. This was often how it went at MAC meetings: The Americans complained about KPA aggression, and North Korean envoys pretended nothing had happened—or flipped the blame back on their adversaries.

This time, though, the Americans had evidence of murder: the photos that Shaddix had taken from OP5. Shaddix had used Ektachrome, a high-end Kodak color film, and because there wasn’t a single facility in South Korea that could process it, the Army had overnighted the film to Japan with orders that it be developed and returned by the following morning, in time for the MAC meeting. Now an aide spread the damning pictures out on the table as Frudden read more of Stilwell’s message. “Your guards took the very axes meant for peaceful uses,” it said, “and turned them into instruments of death.”

South of the JSA, U.S. staff sergeant Charles Twardzicki of the Second Engineer Battalion was summoned for a special assignment. It was Twardzicki’s 25th birthday, and he was supposed to have the day off. Instead, he and a lieutenant would drive north, change into a uniform from one of the JSA’s neutral nations, and go on a recon mission in Panmunjom. Their task: to get a good look at the poplar and decide how to chop it down. There wouldn’t be enough time for measurements, so the men would have to suggest a plan after merely eyeballing the tree.

The lieutenant was supposed to brief various commanders, but he got caught up in another meeting, so Twardzicki, an enlisted man, was tasked with delivering the intel to a room twinkling with brass. The sergeant stood sweating as generals and admirals—“lots of stars and eagles,” he recalled—breezed past him into the meeting room, where they aired their opinions on how best to take down the poplar. “The Navy said, ‘We can come in close with a battleship and drop a round right in there,’” Twardzicki recalled. “The Air Force said they could smart-bomb it, and I think the Marines were of the mentality that, ‘We’ll low-crawl in and use our bayonets and whittle it to the ground.’”

Finally, attention turned to Twardzicki. What did the engineer think?

To sever the tree at its trunk, he replied, would require a large saw powered by air-compressors, which would mean transporting heavy equipment to and from the JSA. If Stilwell was looking for speed and stealth, though, the engineers could work the old-fashioned way: by climbing into the tree and using chainsaws to cut the branches where they forked until only the trunk remained. The job wouldn’t be pretty. Saws would break, but the engineers could bring extras.

What about a backup plan, the commanders wanted to know—how long would it take for the engineers to set charges on the tree and blow it to smithereens? Twardzicki, an explosives expert, said that he could prepare satchel charges and rig them in the crotch of the tree in about two minutes. The engineers wouldn’t have much time to exit the blast zone. “They’ll be pulling toothpicks out of their butts,” Twardzicki told the room. He felt as if he were spitballing—there was, he later said, a “pull-it-out-your-butt fudge factor” to the whole conversation.

Later that day, one of Twardzicki’s platoon mates, Bruce Simpson, was also called in for his opinion. Simpson was a 23-year-old specialist who had worked for a landscaper back home in Massachusetts, making him the only guy on the engineering squad with actual expertise in cutting trees.

“How long will it take?” an officer asked, referring to Twardzicki’s plan.

Simpson considered the question for a moment. There was driving and parking and setting up a ladder and climbing into the tree and starting the chainsaws and accounting for a few of them conking out. Then, once the branches fell, the men would have to cut them into pieces and drag them off the road, so that they didn’t give the North Koreans another reason to complain. Finally, the soldiers would have to drive out of the JSA.

“Probably 45 minutes,” Simpson answered.

Was he certain of this?

“Yep. I can guarantee it,” Simpson said, even though he couldn’t.

This was good enough for the brass.

At 1300, Kimpo International Airport was closed for an hour for a somber event: a memorial service for Bonifas and Barrett. Stilwell presided over a short ceremony, during which Bonifas was posthumously promoted to major and both men received Purple Hearts. Afterward the caskets containing the men’s remains were placed on a plane and sent home. Stilwell then flew north, where he presided over a second memorial service at the officers’ club at Camp Kitty Hawk. The general stood next to Bonifas’s and Barrett’s boots, which were on display in front of a small altar, and as he finished his remarks, he told the troops who packed the room that something big was going to happen—an important action, which they would lead. On that ambiguous note, he headed to the helicopter that took him back to Seoul, where the plans for Operation Paul Bunyan were quickly filling up a binder.

Singlaub wrote, “The key elements were surprise, speed of execution and withdrawal, and avoidance of direct engagement with North Korean troops.” The job of cutting down the tree would fall to a pair of eight-man teams from the Second Engineer Battalion, Twardzicki and Simpson’s unit, and they would be protected by two platoons of U.S. and ROK infantrymen and a contingent of South Korean special forces. Behind them, just beyond the JSA border, would be an ROK recon company reinforced with U.S. anti-tank missile teams. An infantry company of about 150 men would hover in 20 Huey helicopters, with 12 AH-1G Cobra gunships flying alongside them. Tank-busting F-4 Phantoms would fly in slightly higher orbit, and F-111 strategic bombers would orbit higher still, visible on North Korean radar.

Forces would mobilize on the ground, too. Three batteries of American 105-millimeter howitzers would move across the Freedom Bridge, the only permanent span over the Imjin River, which skirted the southern edge of the DMZ. Twardzicki and other engineers had already wired the bridge for destruction in the event of war. On the opposite side of the Imjin, three more batteries of ROK heavy artillery would be placed in clear view of North Korean positions. Lastly, at the moment the tree-trimming convoy rolled into the JSA, “a massive flight of B-52 bombers from Guam would be moving ominously north from the Yellow Sea on a vector directly to the North Korean capital,” Singlaub wrote, while the USS Midway carrier group, which would have moved to Korea from its base in Japan, “would launch 40 combat aircraft” to “vector north above international waters.”

Once the plan was complete, Stilwell needed Washington’s approval, but he was worried about D.C. officials’ penchant for micromanagement. He’d watched politicians muck up numerous operations in Vietnam, and his deputy, Lieutenant General Burns, had seen it first-hand in 1975, after Khmer Rouge soldiers in Cambodia seized the container ship SS Mayaguez, prompting an infamous botched rescue mission. Burns was in Thailand, overseeing air support for a Marine assault on the island where the Mayaguez hostages were thought to be held, when the White House had intervened, using a command-override channel to reach the helicopters directly. According to Singlaub’s account, Air Force pilots were shocked to hear their controllers’ voices replaced by that of a civilian—specifically, Henry Kissinger, who had no direct authority over a military operation. Singlaub claimed in his memoir that Burns was about to order the Marines not to land on the island, where an ensuing battle and chopper crash killed 41 U.S. soldiers, but couldn’t because of the override. “Kissinger bypassed the entire local command structure and fouled up the operation,” Singlaub wrote. “We were determined this would not happen to us.”

Stilwell dictated the memo for Operation Paul Bunyan over a secure line to the Pentagon, and he chose his words carefully. This was not the starting point for a conversation—it was a final document that didn’t require further comment or conversation. He described the range of North Korea’s possible responses: It might do nothing, which he hoped would be the case; it might react with small-arms fire, which could be met with mortars and gunfire to cover an evacuation of U.S. and ROK forces; or Pyongyang could panic and stage a larger attack. “We would then have to be ready for more important actions,” Stilwell said. “In between the two extremes are a legion of possibilities which could make precise control of escalation difficult to manage. We will need good local communications, cool heads, and thorough understanding of the mission.”

Stilwell waited until late at night Korea time to send the message. He knew the Ford administration was eager to move quickly, and he wanted to limit the amount of time for possible meddling, so he requested a green light within 24 hours. Once he got it, the mission could launch at dawn on August 21.

When top national-security officials met at the White House to discuss the ax murders, Ford wasn’t there—the president was in Kansas City, Missouri, for the Republican National Convention, facing supporters of an ornery upstart challenger named Ronald Reagan. Ford wasn’t the only top decision-maker absent: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was also at the convention, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was traveling, forcing the deputies for both to take their seats at the table in the Situation Room.

Kissinger dominated the meeting, expressing frustration that the U.S. soldiers at the poplar hadn’t fought back. “If I had been one of those men and was being beaten to death,” he remarked, “I would have used a firearm.” Now he firmly supported retaliation. “If we do nothing, they will think of us as the paper tigers of Saigon,” the secretary of state said. “There may be another incident, and then another.”

Some officials went so far as to suggest dropping smart bombs, staging B-52 attacks, and coordinating assaults by Airborne Rangers. The acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs floated a plan to use a submarine or Navy SEALs to blow up an “industrial site” at a North Korean harbor, but he backed off the idea after assessing that the chances of pulling it off without casualties was slim. Ultimately, none of the men wanted dead Americans on his conscience, nor did he want to be blamed for starting yet another war in Asia.

According to a declassified transcript of the meeting, the advisers decided to “seek presidential approval of a military action to cut down the tree and try to do it in such a way as to avoid confrontation.” This was the basic premise of Operation Paul Bunyan, and like Stilwell, the men in Washington wanted to do more than merely dispatch soldiers with hedge clippers—they, too, wanted to demonstrate military might. “It will be useful for us to generate enough activity so that the North Koreans begin to wonder what those crazy American bastards are doing or are capable of doing in this election year,” Kissinger said. Yet he was as wary of Stilwell as the general was of the secretary. “We are not going to let Stilwell run loose,” Kissinger warned.

While Washington spent the day reviewing the memo for Operation Paul Bunyan, armed forces in Korea were ordered to go to Defcon-3. It was the first time the U.S. military had raised its alert status in the region since the Korean War. Washington also launched a military mobilization of breathtaking scale. The Pentagon staged an “exercise” that routed B-52s armed with conventional and nuclear weapons uncomfortably close to Pyongyang. A squadron of F-4 fighters flew from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa to Korea and was joined by a squadron of nuclear-capable F-111 fighter-bombers dispatched from Idaho. The USS Midway was sent toward the Korean peninsula from elsewhere in the Pacific, while RF-4D reconnaissance planes and Wild Weasel air-defense-suppression jets arrived from bases in Japan and the Philippines after flying within range of North Korean radar. Two infantry divisions, one American and one South Korean, were pushed forward from their bases south of the Imjin River to the DMZ, while conventional and nuclear artillery and missiles were moved into concrete bunkers built in preparation for precisely this kind of emergency scenario. Every military unit in Korea was abuzz with activity; cargo helicopters shuttled munitions and equipment out of Seoul, and truck convoys clogged the roads heading north.

The armed forces also planned for a worst-case scenario. SR-71 Blackbird surveillance jets took off from a base on Taiwan to take detailed photos of North Korean military movements and identify the coordinates of anti-aircraft radar, which lit up as the jets screamed past 80,000 feet in the air. Intelligence analysts would use the coordinates to pre-target Nike Hercules missiles and then, if necessary, launch them in advance of U.S. bombers raining fire north of the DMZ.

The Blackbird was, and still is, the fastest manned plane in history, so there was no reason to be secretive about its mission. The jet was too fast to shoot down—or do anything about, really, other than complain. That’s what the North Koreans did, issuing a proclamation over state radio about the “military provocation” and the drumbeats of war. “The U.S. imperialist aggressors should be clearly aware of the fact that they will never be able to avoid the grave consequences that might arise from such reckless provocations of violating the armistice in Korea,” Pyongyang warned. “They should act discreetly.”

The clock was ticking toward Stilwell’s deadline for a green light. The general was surprised when he received a communiqué asking if it would be possible to mount Operation Paul Bunyan sooner than he’d suggested; the Ford administration wanted it over and done with. Sure, Stilwell replied, he could do it, but the operation would be “ragged,” because he’d have less time to prep his men and move equipment. “We are aware of our solemn responsibility to accomplish the mission with minimum jeopardy to our forces,” he replied. Stilwell reiterated what he’d said in his memo: 0700 on August 21 was optimal. His men could roll in and, if Simpson’s guess was right, cut down the tree in 45 minutes, finishing before 0800, when KPA guards would drive across the Bridge of No Return to assume their positions in Panmunjom for the day.

On the night of August 19, Ford accepted the Republican nomination for reelection, telling the crowd in Kansas City that he was “proud to stand before this convention as the first incumbent president since Dwight D. Eisenhower who can tell the American people, ‘America is at peace.’” The line was written for cheers, and Ford paused to take in the applause of some 2,000 GOP delegates, none of whom had any idea that, halfway across the world, the United States was preparing for war.

Kissinger had flown to Kansas City to brief Ford in person, which he did in a back room of the convention center. The president was nervous about coming off as too aggressive, but he agreed that the United States needed to make a point.

On the morning of August 20, Washington dispatched the order to execute. The message reached Stilwell at 2345 his time, 15 minutes before the deadline. Just under the wire, Operation Paul Bunyan was a go, with only one addendum from Washington: Kissinger insisted that, should the tree mission draw North Korean fire, America would get revenge by destroying KPA barracks near the JSA. Stilwell didn’t like the idea—for one thing, the strikes would land uncomfortably close to the camp housing Swiss and Swede observers of Panmunjom—so he added a caveat: The bombing of the barracks could be executed only on his direct order.

Secrecy was paramount. The only way for Washington to monitor the mission in real time was by secure phone, and Stilwell, with the Mayaguez fiasco very much in mind, used this to his advantage. He allowed only two secure lines out of Korea, both connected to the Pentagon. One of them was at his desk in Yongsan, and the other was at his forward command post, where he’d relocate during the mission. From each of those locations was a secure line to the operation task force in the DMZ. In practice this meant that the only way for Washington to communicate with forces in the field was through one of Stilwell’s offices, and the only way to contact those offices was through phones located at the Pentagon. If Kissinger wanted to talk to someone in the DMZ, he’d have to go to the Department of Defense in Arlington, Virginia. Stilwell exerted further control by directing Singlaub and the rest of his staff to leave the lines to the Pentagon off the hook. When his staff needed to speak to Washington, they would initiate the conversation, and when it was over, they would cover the mouthpiece with a Styrofoam coffee cup so that it sounded like they’d hung up.

Singlaub assumed the job of choking off Washington’s access with gusto. He informed his communications officer, a colonel charged with manning the phones in Korea and delivering messages to and from the Pentagon, that his “entire future in the U.S. Army” depended on following the order that “under absolutely no circumstances whatsoever” should he allow “any direct communication from a higher headquarters” to bypass Yongsan. “I don’t care,” Singlaub told the officer, “if President Ford himself is on the other line.” In the event of objections, which were inevitable, the colonel was to say that, unfortunately, the communications system in Korea was incompatible with the one back home, preventing him from patching calls through to the front. This was a lie, and technicians would likely know it, but Washington was half a world away, with no way to open additional lines to Korea. Officials might get mad, but they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

A half-hour after receiving this order, the colonel returned with a message. Washington wasn’t happy; it wanted a direct line to the front. The colonel returned again to report that officials in the U.S. capital wanted to know how old the tree was, a pointless question that boiled Singlaub’s blood, and then a third time to say that the lieutenant general in charge of worldwide military communications was personally demanding a secure line to the DMZ.

“I told [him] to talk to you, sir,” the colonel told Singlaub. “He was not exactly pleased.”

“Don’t worry, colonel,” Singlaub replied. “I’m your rating officer, not him.”

There would be no sleep that night, but there would be more bureaucratic conflict. Around 0400, Ambassador Sneider finally arrived in Yongsan, after a daylong flight from the United States. As Sneider entered the war room, Stilwell was on the phone with the commander of the task force. When Sneider realized who was on the line, he reached for the phone. The muscles in Stilwell’s arm clenched as the ambassador grabbed the receiver, and the two men engaged, according to Singlaub, in a “ludicrous tug of war” that the general ultimately won.

“Was there something you wanted me to ask?” Stilwell said politely, if smugly, after hanging up.

Sneider was miffed and reminded the general that he was President Ford’s personal representative in Korea. If Ford had questions for “my field commanders,” Stilwell replied, “I’ll be happy to relay any.”

Stilwell was on the very edge of retirement and so had little to risk in the way of his career by placing obstacles between Washington and the DMZ. His top priority was to not introduce any unnecessary risk into an already sensitive mission. When he met with South Korean president Park Chung Hee to discuss Operation Paul Bunyan, he agreed outwardly with Park’s optimism that the tree would come down and that Park’s hand-selected ROK commandos, who were masters of martial arts, could take on KPA soldiers if it came to that. In truth, Stilwell thought there was a strong chance the North Koreans would fight back—hard—and once the bullets were flying, it would be difficult, maybe even impossible, to stop the fire from becoming an inferno.

In the war room, Singlaub was thinking about extreme measures. “It was my estimate, shared by many of the staff, that the operation stood a 50-50 chance of starting a war,” he later wrote. “We might be teetering on the brink of a holocaust. If North Korea did invade, we would have no choice but to request authorization for the first use of nuclear weapons since World War II.”

Just before dawn, Singlaub took a moment to find a quiet corner and pray.

At 0500, members of the JSF were awoken and instructed to move “as quietly and expeditiously as possible” to a barracks. Once they were assembled, groggy-eyed, the briefing began. Before them stood their platoon leaders and captain Ed Shirron, who’d replaced Bonifas. Shirron announced a surgical mission into the JSA to cut down the poplar tree, backed up by tremendous force. “The way it was explained, it sounded like it was going to be the most carefully staged and concentrated display of power since D-Day in World War II,” then private Bill Ferguson recalled.

The mood was heavy, the room silent. After nearly 48 hours of wanting revenge but being allowed to do nothing—of wondering what was going to happen along one of the world’s most precarious military fault lines—the JSF was being asked to finish the job that had started the crisis. The plan was invigorating, and also terrifying. Every man who worked in the JSA knew the rumor that, by taking up his post, he was automatically known to the Army’s Graves Registration Service, which handled retrieval, transportation, and burial of soldiers killed in the line of duty; that way, if the North Koreans ever launched a fusillade and wiped Panmunjom from the map, the Pentagon would know who’d been killed without having to identify them. Now, with Operation Paul Bunyan, the Army was rolling the dice on the men’s lives. “My life expectancy if anything happened,” Ferguson said, “was extremely short.” After the briefing, he wrote letters to his family members, just in case.

The operation would begin at exactly 0700 and involve all three U.S. platoons in the JSF, plus select troops from the Second Infantry Division, the only other American unit based north of the Imjin River. The JSF guards were told that they could take only the most basic defensive gear, including flak jackets, ax handles, and their .45 handguns, which were meant for close range and would be virtually useless against an attacker more than ten yards away. With no idea of what lay ahead, the men snatched up whatever rudimentary weaponry they could hide in their boots and pockets: knives, shoestrings, socks stuffed with rocks. “If there was the slightest chance that we somehow survived,” Ferguson said, “we at least wanted some kind of fighting chance to not become prisoners.”

Twardzicki, Simpson, and the other engineers who would cut down the poplar gathered their chainsaws—about a dozen in all—and piled into two dump trucks to head north. Their commander briefed them one last time.

“If the North Koreans go to stop this thing,” he said, “you know what they’re going to shoot at.”

“The guy with all the stars, right?” Twardzicki replied.

“No, the guy with all the chainsaws.”

At 0648, as the sun was rising, 23 vehicles loaded with soldiers rolled toward the JSA. At the same time, the 20 Huey helicopters carrying the Army rifle company took off and began circling above the DMZ. Cobra gunships, armed with Gatling guns, Hydra rockets, and anti-tank missiles, joined them.

The soldiers sat quietly in the trucks. Ernest Bickley looked at the stitches in his right hand, which patched a wound he’d suffered in the fight that started this whole mess. He wasn’t a smoker, but when an ROK Marine offered him a cigarette, he took it and smoked for the first time. In another truck, two thoughts ran in a loop in Ferguson’s head, both of them from movies. One was a quote from the 1970 western Little Big Man: “Today is a good day to die.” The other was a song lyric from Paint Your Wagon, the Clint Eastwood musical: Where am I going, I don’t know / When will I get there, I ain’t certain / All I know is I am on my way.

Mark Luttrull, Bonifas’s former driver, was a late addition to the unit. He’d told Vierra that he wanted to be at the tree when it came down, and he’d been called to meet with Captain Shirron at 0300. “I’m looking for a radio operator,” Shirron told him. It had to be a volunteer, because the job was dangerous. In battle, the guy with the antenna standing next to an officer was always among a sniper’s first targets.

“You’ve got only a 50-50 chance of returning,” Shirron told him.

“I’ll take the job,” Luttrull replied. Now, in the back of a deuce and a half, he thought mostly of Bonifas, and he wasn’t afraid.

The last stop before the gate to the JSA was Checkpoint 2, where John Pinadella was waiting. Pinadella had a special job: Just before 0700, he was to walk into Panmunjom and observe KPA activity. What was the size of the North Korean force? Had any guards showed up early that day? Pinadella did as he was told and saw nothing out of the ordinary. He returned to the checkpoint and used a field phone to call back to base.

“Go,” he said.

Then Pinadella opened the gate to let the trucks through. In the basement of his checkpoint were ten M16s and 3,000 rounds of ammunition. Pinadella’s instructions were to use them to cover the trucks if they came streaming back in retreat. By then soldiers stationed at camp would be igniting fuel cans and explosives positioned at the door of every building. The camp would go up in flames, ensuring that nothing of strategic value would be left behind for the North Koreans to seize as the men of the JSF fought for their lives.

The first deuce and a half roared through Panmunjom’s gate, turned left, and headed for CP3, the loneliest outpost. It stopped at the poplar long enough for the guards in back to jump out and take up defensive positions around the tree, then the driver backed up onto the Bridge of No Return and parked, effectively blocking any KPA vehicles from crossing. A second truck arrived with a platoon of ROK commandos in civilian uniforms, and they spilled out into a half-circle around the tree. Finally, in a dump truck came the engineers, who immediately pulled out their ladders and saws and got to work.

The chainsaws weren’t prime specimens; they were Vietnam surplus and ran well only when held straight up and down or dead flat. Hold one at an angle and it got wonky. Twardzicki and Simpson prayed that the machines would work well enough. They didn’t want to deploy the backup plan of loading the tree with explosives and running like hell.

Twardzicki mounted a ladder and began sawing into one of the poplar’s three main limbs. He cut a wedge out of the far side, a trimmer’s trick to make sure the branch didn’t fall back on him, then commenced furiously sawing. He was too busy to wonder whether someone somewhere had a sniper rifle aimed at his head. Twardzicki knew that there were layers of security around the tree and up in the air, including the B-52s now circling the scene, their bellies loaded for bear with bombs.

It seemed like no time before the first branch came down. The mass of wood dropped with a thud onto the engineers’ truck, denting the hood. “I vividly remember the crash it made as it fell on the truck, and the cheers we all made—raising our ax handles and yelling,” Ferguson recalled. Engineers on the ground then cut the limb into smaller pieces and threw them into the ditch where three days earlier Pinadella had found Barrett on the brink of death.

By then the KPA had received a communiqué from the UNC, sent strategically—on Stilwell’s orders—at 0705, after the trucks were already in the JSA. It stated that a UNC work party would “enter JSA at 0700 in order to peacefully finish the work left unfinished by the UNC work detail which was attacked by your guards on 18 August.” As long as the KPA didn’t engage, the message said, there would be no violence.

Ferguson and his platoon mates near the tree gripped their ax handles, keeping one eye on the engineers’ trimming and the other on the activity across the bridge. At first the North Korean guards reacted as Stilwell hoped they might. The KPA closest to the bridge appeared confused, and when backup arrived, those soldiers also seemed like they didn’t have orders to follow.

But then a group of KPA guards ran from their barracks to an observation post built on a hill. They set up a machine-gun nest, with barrels aimed across the river. A few minutes later, a makeshift convoy of vehicles—trucks, buses, a clunky old East German sedan—arrived, and about 150 reinforcements with small arms jumped out, taking positions along the Sachon River.

The Americans were prepared for this. A second platoon of men, poised up a hill near OP5, moved forward to reinforce the guards near the poplar. Meanwhile, soldiers from the Second Infantry who’d been waiting near the gate to South Korea moved ahead, too. In full battle rattle, they fanned out along the JSA’s main road, clearly visible to the North Koreans.

The Americans were merely showing force in numbers. Several ROK soldiers, however, reacted differently to the sight of KPA guards taking attack positions. They ripped open their shirts to reveal Claymore anti-personnel mines strapped to their chests. Each man clutched a detonator in his hand and waved it in the direction of the KPA soldiers, yelling at them to cross the bridge and face certain death.

ROK men wearing explosives and howling at their enemies shocked forces on both sides of the river. Luttrull yelled to Captain Shirron, and the unit radioed Vierra at his command post outside the JSA: “Be advised that the ROK special forces have Claymore mines!”

Vierra was furious. This wasn’t just a violation of the armistice; it was a reckless action that put his men, and the entire operation, in jeopardy. To him it seemed that “they had their own plan—to cause the KPA to do something.” He wanted to scream into his command channel for someone to rein in the South Koreans immediately, but he knew that had to be careful with his words. He was already concerned that, if hostilities broke out, he might not be able to control the ROK. “I did not know whether they would follow my orders,” Vierra said. “I did not know their orders.” He held his tongue.

At the tree, Ferguson froze at the sight of the ROK soldiers. Time seemed to warp. “Some things appeared to be in slow motion,” he said, “and other things seemed to happen faster than my eyes and brain could register them.” Then he heard a faint rumble in the air—a thump, thump, thump coming from the south. He looked up. It was a gray day, with a low ceiling of clouds, but not so low that he couldn’t see the source of the sound: a phalanx of U.S. helicopters rising up over the horizon line and hanging there, “seeming to stretch for over a mile.”

Ferguson was suddenly hyperaware of his tenuous place in the world. “Nukes in the air, who knows how much artillery from both sides concentrated on our location, crazy guys with mines on their chests yelling at the North Koreans to come on over, the KPA less than 100 meters away with machine guns trained on us, and me and my buddies are standing around with ax handles and .45s,” he said.

Ferguson took a breath and waited for the rifle crack or puff of smoke that would signal the end. “All I’m thinking,” he recalled, “is that I hope I can take a couple [KPA] with me.”

The engineers in the tree didn’t feel the gathering storm. They were busy wrestling their unwieldy chainsaws through gnarly wood, their arms burning with lactic acid, then trading off the job with other men. Twardzicki in particular was having problems. His chainsaw had stalled. He yanked on the starter once, twice, several times. It flooded. For four or five minutes passed, which felt like hours to everyone watching, Twardzicki fumbled with the machine. “What the hell is going on?” he heard someone ask. Finally, the saw wheezed and whirred back to life, and Twardzicki finished off the stubborn branch.

But there was still more to cut—one last big branch, high up the trunk and difficult to reach. Simpson was standing on top of the dump truck’s roof and leaning out as far as he could without toppling over so that his saw could reach the limb. He was visibly tired from the labor, but he had to keep going; the 45 minutes he’d promised were all the engineers needed would soon be up.

Just then an engineer named George Deason bounded over to the tree. A lieutenant, he’d been with the unit tasked with tearing down the KPA’s two illegal checkpoints. That work had been easy enough. The men had wrapped heavy chains around each structure’s gates and posts, attached the chains to a truck’s bumper, and given the driver a thumbs-up. Now Deason wanted to make his fresh arms useful at the tree. He hopped on top of the truck and took the saw from a weary Simpson. Standing on his toes, with fellow soldiers spotting him, Deason finished off the branch.

With that, the poplar was no more. Its foliage and limbs lay in chunks on the ground, and what remained standing was a sad, serrated trunk in the shape of a fork.

As soon as the final limb was cut into pieces, the engineers jumped back into their truck and drove away. His work finally done, Twardzicki took in the scene and was stunned by one particular sight: a group of ROK commandos, at least a platoon’s worth, emerging from near the Sachon River, where they’d apparently been hiding in dense brush since infiltrating the JSA the night before. They wore camouflage face paint and carried guns and grenades. “They were armed to the teeth,” Twardzicki said. Their covert placement was yet another decision the South Koreans had made without U.S. knowledge.

The first branch fell at 0718, and the last soldiers were leaving the JSA by 0745. Since the convoy had rolled in at 0702, after Pinadella opened the gate, Operation Paul Bunyan had technically lasted 43 minutes—two less than Simpson had predicted, making him look brilliant. When the engineers arrived back at camp, Twardzicki spotted Stilwell. He walked over and handed the mission’s architect the small wedge of wood he’d cut out of the first branch. It was the only piece of the poplar any of the men carried out of the JSA.

The North Koreans hadn’t reacted in real time. A U.S. intelligence analyst listening to KPA tactical radio channels later observed that the show of force “blew their minds.” There was no gunfire until 1015, when an overzealous KPA soldier took some pot shots at a U.S. helicopter circling the scene. That fire, Singlaub later wrote, “stopped abruptly when six Cobras banked line-abreast and swung into firing position, their twinkling laser sights directly on the enemy gun position.”

But the crisis wasn’t over. There was still a chance that Pyongyang was plotting a response—which could happen hours or even days later. In the meantime, the Americans had to go about business as usual in the JSA. After all, they’d told the KPA that the chopping of the tree was merely the completion of routine work. For the remainder of August 21, after the helicopters and planes and infantry brigades had pulled back, Pinadella and other guards were left on duty in checkpoints and observation posts, watching their KPA counterparts and analyzing every move. “Those were the scarier moments,” Pinadella said. “The task force was gone, and now we were just out there by ourselves listening to the North Korean tanks rumbling off in the distance.”

U.S. and South Korean officials held their breath waiting to hear what Pyongyang would say about Operation Paul Bunyan. There was mostly silence, even on propaganda channels. Then, around 1200, an urgent request arrived: The North Koreans wanted a meeting of the MAC.

The body convened late that afternoon, and because the meeting had been called so suddenly, there was less pomp than normal. According to U.S. embassy reports summarizing the event for Washington, the atmosphere was “calm and quiet.” The KPA delegation seemed “chastened,” as one diplomat put it. There was no bluster, no talk of imperialist aggressors or imminent war. In fact, the only people in the room who seemed peeved with the United States were the neutral-nation observers, who’d been given no advance warning of the operation. They “were cold and refused to acknowledge the U.S. rep’s salute,” a CIA report noted.

Pyongyang’s senior representative glumly read a message from Kim Il Sung. The note expressed “regret” over the August 18 incident and stated that it was Kim’s hope that both sides would make efforts to prevent anything like it from happening again.

Luttrull was on guard outside the windows of the conference room that afternoon and watched the exchange. He saw Pyongyang’s emissary, his head bowed in contrition, pass the note from the Supreme Leader across the table to Admiral Frudden, who shot back, “That is not enough!’” Luttrull felt the same way. Bonifas’s killing haunted him, and he regretted that he hadn’t been at the tree when Bulldog attacked. “I might’ve fired,” Luttrull said. “Even though I knew that was against the rules, and I could’ve started a war, I might’ve done it.”

Later that day, a press officer at the State Department echoed Frudden’s retort, telling a reporter that the message from Pyongyang didn’t go far enough to satisfy the United States. At the very least, Washington wanted a full public apology. But Kissinger, conscious of the president’s desire to end the crisis and move on to dealing with his reelection, quickly walked the statement back. “We consider this a positive step,” the State Department clarified.

Certainly, the North Korean response was unprecedented: It was the first time Pyongyang had expressed any responsibility for violence in the DMZ. The message from Kim was also the first that North Korea’s leader had personally sent to the UNC in its 23-year history of enforcing the armistice.

In the days that followed, stress in the JSA remained high. Every man was aware that the mission could have ended differently, with twitchy ROK commandos or KPA guards opening fire at their enemy. “The scuttlebutt was that they already had the telegrams printed to our parents and loved ones,” Pinadella said. Amplifying tension was the fact that American forces were still at Defcon-3. “They flew the B-52s for days afterward,” Pinadella recalled, and the JSF guards knew that the planes’ silhouettes, tens of thousands of feet in the air, preoccupied the KPA. “We’d be close to the North Koreans, like a couple of feet away, and we’d point up in the sky,” Pinadella said. “I used to point and do a whistle, like a bomb’s sound, and say, ‘Kaboom!’—North Korea gone!”

The next MAC meeting, on August 25, provided the balm that Panmunjom needed. This time the North Koreans proposed something historic: a permanent barrier, which neither army would be allowed to cross, to be erected along the international demarcation that cut through the JSA, ending almost a quarter-century of free movement. The UNC supported the idea, and it was formally adopted on September 6. Two days later, the Joint Chiefs of Staff reverted troops to Defcon-4, and the USS Midway departed Korean waters for its base in Japan. There would be no World War III over a tree.

Stilwell retired as scheduled, on November 1, 1976, and he always spoke in rote, soldierly terms about the dramatic mission to chop down the poplar. It “was a simple military operation performed with precision and discipline,” he once told an interviewer. Singlaub was more reflective. “The only reason Kim Il Sung finally backed down,” he wrote in his memoir, “was that we made him understand the danger he faced.” In the summer of 1976, North Korea’s leader was arguably bolder and more powerful than he’d ever been on the international stage, and he used the dispute over the tree to flex his newly honed military muscle. But Kim underestimated his adversary—in particular, its willingness to resist aggression with threats of its own.

The men who participated on the ground in Operation Paul Bunyan went back to their regular deployment duties, and later to their personal lives. Twardzicki saw a story in Stars and Stripes in which the wife of an F-4 pilot told the reporter how worried she’d been about her husband during the mission, flying 30,000 feet over Korea. Oh really? Twardzicki remembered thinking. How about the guy with the chainsaw? Looking back, he said, “that one event probably made my career—to be the guy who cut the tree down. I didn’t know whether they expected me to be expendable or important.” Pinadella, meanwhile, learned that his mother, a lifelong Democrat who’d been campaigning for Jimmy Carter in 1976, cast a vote for Ford that November “because he didn’t escalate” in Korea.

Ford lost the election, and in 1977, when Singlaub publicly opposed President Jimmy Carter’s proposal to remove troops from Korea, the general was relieved of his duties in Yongsan. Two years later, facing political pressure and intelligence reports of Pyongyang’s continued military strength, Carter relented on his plan, and U.S. soldiers stayed in place. By the 1990s, South Korea had assumed sole responsibility for defending its side of the DMZ. American guards remained close by to serve as reactive support if necessary. They are still there today, stationed at a base rechristened Camp Bonifas.

The concrete barrier requested by Pyongyang went up in the JSA in the fall of 1976. More than four decades later, it was at this divider, erected because of Operation Paul Bunyan, that North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in met to discuss bilateral relations and denuclearization. On April 27, 2018, the sworn enemies strode to the barrier, stood on either side, and shook hands. Then Moon invited Kim to step over the curb into South Korean territory—the first time a North Korean head of state had crossed the border since 1953.

The poplar tree is gone, even the trunk. Its former location is marked with a stone memorializing the deaths of Captain Arthur Bonifas and First Lieutenant Mark Barrett. The tree, though, never really went away. A week after Operation Paul Bunyan, Larry Shaddix took a crew into the JSA to retrieve the poplar’s dismantled branches, which were still lying untouched where the JSF had left them. The men secured the trees remains in a fenced lot that the Army used for storage; only Shaddix had a key. “The tree became very popular after the incident,” he said.

Pieces of the poplar ended up in various hands, but the chain of custody—exactly who got what, when, and where they took it—isn’t always clear. Several soldiers assigned to the JSA took thin slices, which they shellacked and mounted in offices and homes. Bruce Simpson’s hangs above his desk at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri.

The section given to Stilwell, who died in 1991, was hung on a wall at the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon, alongside a plaque reading, “This wood was taken from a tree at Panmunjom. Beneath its branches two American officers were murdered by North Koreans. Around the world, the tree became a symbol of communist brutality and a challenge to national honor. On 21 August 1976, a group of free men rose up and cut it down.”

Seventeen years before the Stonewall Riots, Dale Jennings proclaimed to a California court that he was a homosexual. It was the first glimmer of a civil rights revolution.This is the story of an unsung, and reluctant, hero.

By Peyton Thomas

Where seven men once stood, only four remained. They were silver haired, with wrinkles cross-hatching their papery skin. Under a searing California sun they moved slowly, tilting on metal walkers and wooden canes. Half a century prior they’d risked everything—investigation, imprisonment, even death—to gather in dim basements and curtained living rooms, away from prying eyes. They’d formed a circle, joined hands, and recited a pledge in hushed unison: “We are sworn that no boy or girl, approaching the maelstrom of deviation, need make that crossing alone, afraid, and in the dark ever again.” Now, on a bright afternoon in the summer of 1998, they were gathering for one last meeting of the Mattachine Society.

If you know the story of the Mattachines, it’s likely only in brief, as an inconsequential prelude to a revolution. The Stonewall uprising of 1969, that glorious cavalcade of shouting and smoke and shattered glass, has been canonized as the birth of gay activism in America. A national monument stands at the site; in his 2012 inaugural address, President Barack Obama spoke of Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall. Within the LGBTQ community, it might as well be the Big Bang.

Yet the clandestine Mattachine Society, formed in California in 1950, paved the way to Stonewall. Its founders were thinkers and writers, friends and lovers. After a burst of pioneering activism, their work took on a life of its own; in the decades that followed, they drifted apart. Three of its founders died before 1998, when filmmaker Eric Slade convened the survivors in Los Angeles for interviews that would compose his documentary Hope Along the Wind. The men seemed giddy to be together—all but one.

While the others embraced and whispered the compliments of old men (“You haven’t changed!”), Dale Jennings hung back. So tight was his grip on his walker that his knuckles were white. Eighty years old, he wore a utilitarian blue jumpsuit buttoned fast over his rotund figure. His white, wiry hair stood up straight on his head, as if shocked into formation. When Harry Hay, an old comrade draped in luxurious purple fabric, spotted Jennings, he approached and leaned in for a hug. Jennings parried, lifting his hand for a desultory handshake instead. Within the gesture were decades of painful personal history too complex to exhume in the moment.

Later, seated before Slade’s camera, Jennings summoned his story. Dementia was setting in. As he spoke into the microphone pinned to his lapel, he was fuzzy on specific dates and small details. He contradicted himself. He also recollected without nostalgia. The other men described Mattachine meetings as invigorating. To Jennings, they’d been unbearable bores. “We kept repeating ourselves!” he snorted. “I just sat back and went into a coma.”

A contrarian in his youth and a curmudgeon in old age, Jennings had always cut a complicated figure. Being at the vanguard of a movement never suited him, and he’d struggled to shoulder the hero’s mantle, often wishing that he could shrug it off entirely. It had fallen on him heavy and unsolicited in 1952, in the form of a stranger’s menacing stare. Jennings then carried it into a California courtroom, where he declared himself a homosexual at a time when to be gay was to violate the law of the land. The pronouncement was valorous, and its impact was deeply felt, if not seen, in the years that followed. But when Slade asked Jennings if he would do it all again, nearly half a century after the events that shaped his fate, the elderly man shook his head.

“The answer is no,” Jennings replied. “Absolutely not.”

When Jennings was a child, his parents never missed an opportunity to proclaim that he was exceptional. Born in Amarillo, Texas, on October 21, 1917, and raised in Denver, he distinguished himself as a gifted violinist. His parents, a working-class salesman and a housewife, pinched pennies to pay for his weekly music instruction. It was a drain on the family’s finances, but the Jenningses were willing to make sacrifices—to a point. When his elder sister, Elaine, requested lessons of her own, she was told that the family could only afford to educate Dale, the nascent virtuoso. “If he was rude or obnoxious,” Jennings’s nephew Patrick Dale Porter wrote in a letter to a longtime friend of his uncle’s, “he was ‘special,’ and it just had to be forgiven.”

After graduating from high school in 1935, Jennings enrolled at the University of Denver. By then his love of music had transformed into a desire to write stories for the stage and screen. Lured by Los Angeles, he left college, moved to California, and rented a converted stable at the corner of Olympic Boulevard and Alvarado Street. The space doubled as the headquarters of Theater Caravan, a ragtag drama troupe that Jennings founded. He designed sets, composed music, hired actors, directed, and performed. Over two years, Theater Caravan mounted some 60 plays. The troupe never earned a substantial income, but it granted Jennings creative freedom the likes of which he’d never experienced before. In a set of photographs from this era, he appears lissome and joyful, clad only in white shorts, leaping into the air like a seasoned dancer. At some point in these carefree years, Jennings married a woman named Esther Slayton.

Then, like many young men of his day, he set aside his professional pursuits to fight in World War II. On November 13, 1942, Jennings walked through the tall gates of Fort MacArthur in San Pedro, California, to spend three months in basic training and then study anti-aircraft technology. He became a technical sergeant and was transferred to Camp Hulen near Palacios, Texas, where he trained in cryptography. In December 1943, he was stationed in the southern Philippines as a member of the 356th Searchlight Battalion. He taught courses on scouting and reconnaissance. In the wake of the historic campaign on Guadalcanal, Jennings was transferred to that island and lived there for a time.

Even in wartime, Jennings couldn’t stop himself from picking up a pen. He volunteered as editor in chief of his battalion’s newspaper. In private moments, according to anthropologist C. Todd White, Jennings kept a diary. He wrote affectionately of his wife, whom he called Tuck. He also described an unnamed man in his battalion with whom he shared a strong, strange connection. “I looked at him today and knew that our friendship is a nighttime thing,” Jennings journaled. “By day, with all his features sharp and clear, I do not know him.”

Away from home, surrounded by men, Jennings began to acknowledge a fundamental truth about his being—and the extent to which the world despised it. “There is a delicate tropic fern … that closes up when touched,” Jennings wrote in his diary one evening. “A design of rich, green living changed in the moment of touching into a withered, brown, dead-seeming wisp of rubble.” Earlier that day, he’d observed two soldiers examining such a fern, poking at the fronds and laughing as the leaves shriveled. One man called it a cannibal plant; the other disagreed. “They’re a homosexual plant,” Jennings recalled the second man saying. “Use their pollen on themselves.”

“Somehow,” Jennings concluded, “I was very angry.”

After two years and 15 days of duty, Jennings returned to Fort MacArthur on Christmas Eve 1945. He was decorated with several medals and a Philippine Liberation Ribbon with one Bronze Star. On January 2, 1946, he was honorably discharged. Six months later, he divorced Slayton. He resolved to rekindle his career in Hollywood and to explore sex with men. But he didn’t brand himself gay. According to White, who studies the history of LGBTQ organizing in California, Jennings once wrote that declaring himself attracted to men “would be like tattooing a target on one’s chest; it would be the equivalent of suicide.”

This had been the case since the earliest days of the republic. The first European settlers in America observed gender nonconformity among indigenous peoples and ruthlessly stamped it out. Colonial legal codes, drawing from the Bible and a 1533 English “buggery law,” regarded homoerotic acts as transgressions on the level of adultery, fornication, and bestiality. The penalty for sodomy could be as severe as death. By the late 19th century, harsh laws remained in effect, but homosexuality nonetheless emerged as an identity cutting across lines of culture and class. Alongside this flowering came backlash, including in liberal Southern California. In 1887, moralists in Los Angeles complained of “sissy boys” who gathered in “trysting places” like Central Park, Pershing Square, and Westlake Park (now MacArthur Park). That year a controversial All Fool’s Night ball drew enormous crowds of cross-dressers—or “drunken prostitutes of both sexes,” in the words of a contemporaneous bit of press, who took part in “vile orgies.” This sort of indignant outcry spurred the Los Angeles City Council to pass an ordinance in 1898 forbidding individuals from “masquerading” as a different gender. In 1915, oral sex between members of the same sex, previously considered a misdemeanor, joined sodomy as a felony under a revised penal code.

Still, the film industry made Los Angeles a bastion of relative freedom. During Prohibition, gay speakeasies were popular; when alcohol became legal again, the establishments multiplied into what historians have referred to as a “pansy craze” of bars catering to gay patrons. Private parties were even more liberated. Hollywood luminaries like George Cukor, director of hits such as The Philadelphia Story and Gaslight, opened their homes to young gay men, lesbians, and “Gillette blades”—early slang for bisexuals, in reference to the double-edged razors. Ben Carter, an African American casting agent, hosted gatherings for black gay men aspiring to careers in show business, providing a space free of both homophobia and racism.

Straight audiences were kept in the dark about the private lives of their favorite stars. Though androgyny enjoyed a cultural moment in the early 20th century, with tuxedoed women like Marlene Dietrich and effeminate men like Rudolph Valentino capturing viewers’ hearts, censors pushed hard for depictions of conventional gender roles. In 1930, Hollywood studios caved to the demands of moralists, unanimously agreeing to the stipulations of the Hays Code, which banned representations of homosexuality in film.

During the postwar period, as part of a widespread cultural embrace of family and tradition, films took a rigid perspective on sexuality. Studios mandated that partners of the opposite sex accompany stars to public appearances. Henry Willson, a prominent talent agent who was privately gay, hired off-duty police officers to watch his closeted clients and keep any jilted lovers quiet. At least once, he used outing as a weapon. When Confidential, a tabloid newspaper, threatened to publish an exposé on Rock Hudson’s homosexuality, Willson bought its silence with a salacious tip about another gay actor, Tab Hunter, who’d been arrested for lewd behavior at a dance party. The Motion Picture Production Association paid the police to keep gay scandals quiet. “Carousing wild men like Errol Flynn and homosexual stars were constantly being picked up by the LAPD,” historian Joe Domanick has written, “but never booked.”

Gay men who weren’t famous were among cops’ favorite targets. If you were a homosexual in Los Angeles in the early 1950s, and you’d never been arrested, you almost certainly knew someone who had. LAPD chief William H. Parker was a hardline reformer bent on rooting corruption out of his force and reducing crime citywide. He was also a bigot. A square-jawed military veteran with an austere crew cut, Parker referred to black people as monkeys and Latinos as the offspring of “wild tribes.” He directed his vice squad to pursue homosexuals by entrapping them and charging them with “lewd vagrancy” and “sexual perversion.” According to historian Lillian Faderman, Paul de River, the LAPD’s head criminal psychiatrist under Parker, wrote that homosexuals were “a grave danger to society” and “seducers of children.” In “sexual orgies,” he added, they were even prone to commit murder.

“Wild Bill” Parker, as he was known in Los Angeles’s gay scene, was an existential threat. In 1948, the Los Angeles Times reported that the LAPD kept records on 10,000 “known sex offenders,” a euphemism for homosexuals. Helen P. Branson, who operated a gay bar in the city, described the cops’ standard playbook in a memoir. “Young and good looking policemen are dressed as ‘gay’ as they know how,” she wrote. “They go into a gay bar, act as they think a gay fellow should act, and wait for someone to talk to them. They offer someone a ride or accept a ride, and that does it. Some of them play fair, inasmuch as they wait for the gay one to make a pass at them, but many others wait only long enough to get in the car before declaring the arrest.”

Across the country, urban law-enforcement agencies were deploying the same predatory tactics. Police in Washington, D.C., arrested more than 1,000 homosexuals per year; in Philadelphia, cops filed an average of 100 misdemeanor charges against gay people every month. But the LAPD had a special advantage: It could recruit undercover operatives from the scads of handsome young men who populated Los Angeles in search of stardom. Rendering the approach all the more insidious, some of the actors recruited by the LAPD were themselves gay. Some vice-squad officers even used entrapment for sexual gratification, sleeping with their marks at night and producing their badges over breakfast. (A macabre joke among gay men of the era was, “It’s been wonderful, but you’re under arrest.”) Black and Latino gay men endured particularly brutal treatment at the hands of the police, while lesbians were subjected to raids on the bars they frequented, along with detentions, beatings, and bogus charges.

Entrapment was only the first act in a long, dramatic nightmare. The maximum sentence for engaging in oral sex was 15 years in prison; anal sex could result in a life sentence. Lesser charges carried strict punishments, too. If a person was found to have violated Section 674a of the California Penal Code (“soliciting or engaging in lewd or dissolute conduct”) or 674d (“loitering in or around a public toilet for the purpose of engaging in lewd or dissolute conduct”), they were required to register as a sex offender until death. Those who plea-bargained usually received two years of probation and an order to refrain from associating with known homosexuals. Many people who ran the gauntlet of the legal system faced further abuse after it spit them out. As a result of their orientations being exposed, their families forced them into asylums, where they often endured castration, hysterectomy, or lobotomy.

Not only did the LAPD terrorize gays, it also rarely deigned to protect them. “We don’t realize the physical danger that the early queers lived in,” Jennings told Slade in 1998. “There were so many that were beaten up and left to die that were never reported…. The police thought, Well, the queer must have made a pass at somebody, so let’s forget it, and that was the end of it.”

In 1950, Jennings married again, to a woman named Jacqueline Carney. “I wasn’t about to be tagged as fag,” he later wrote, “and so leaned over backwards playing it straight.” The couple fought frequently about whether to have children. Carney was aware of her husband’s sexual attraction to men and worried that their offspring would inherit it. “She was afraid it was catchy,” Jennings told Slade. “She didn’t want to bring up a brood of little queers, you know? A silly woman.”

The union was annulled after only a few months. Seeking community and identity, Jennings gravitated toward Los Angeles’s leftist circles, which overlapped with its underground gay scene. He advocated for the civil liberties of Japanese Americans and redress for their internment during World War II. He rubbed elbows with members of the Communist Party, including Bob Hull, a gay music student with sweet, boyish features. It didn’t take long for Jennings to fall in love with Hull. “He was brilliant, absolutely brilliant,” Jennings recalled. “I so admired him.”

Born and raised near Minneapolis, Hull had attended the University of Minnesota, where he was a chemistry student by day and a communist organizer by night. Like Jennings, Hull had come to Los Angeles hoping to make art. One day after a musicology class, his instructor, Harry Hay, slipped him a pamphlet calling for “androgynes of the world” to unite. Hull hurried home and showed it to Jennings. Curious, Jennings tagged along a few days later when Hull and his roommate, Chuck Rowland, ventured to a meeting of like-minded men at Hay’s house.

Years later, when asked to describe the origins of his relationship with Hay, Jennings blinked, exhaled, then burst into riotous laughter. “Oh dear,” he said. “That’s the beginning of a volume as big as War and Peace.”

The house was tucked behind laurel, oleander, and bottlebrush on a hill in Los Angeles’s Silver Lake neighborhood. It overlooked the vast, picturesque reservoir from which the area took its name. Residents of the two-story clapboard homes lining Cove Avenue could reach the water by walking down a public set of steep concrete stairs. It was up those steps, Hay later wrote, that his guests approached on November 11, 1950. Rowland was clutching the pamphlet Hay had given to Hull. “We could have written this ourselves!” Rowland exclaimed. “When do we get started?”

The answer was now. Hay kicked off the gathering with a speech about “the heroic objective of liberating one of our largest minorities from social persecution.” He was approaching 40 and handsome, with a chiseled jaw, cleft chin, and furrowed brow. When he spoke about the wholly unprecedented and dangerous undertaking of organizing gay men, Hay’s confidence was contagious. As Jennings later put it, “I’d never met such a persistent, omnipresent man in my life.”

Hay had been born the bluest of blue bloods. His parents, Henry and Margaret, met in Edwardian South Africa, where Henry managed the Witwatersrand gold mine under Cecil Rhodes. Hay never lived up to his father’s expectations, never exhibited the discipline and hard work that Henry deemed fundamental to manhood. After an accident in a copper mine left Henry with one leg, the family relocated to Los Angeles. There, Hay developed interests in music, literature, and theater. Henry began to fear his son was a sissy and tried to beat him into normalcy.

Hay’s deliverance arrived at age 11, when he found a copy of Edward Carpenter’s The Intermediate Sex at the library. Carpenter’s book, one of the first to speak positively of “homogenic attachments,” was a revelation to Hay. “As soon as I saw it, I knew,” Hay told his biographer, Stuart Timmons. “I wasn’t the only one of my kind in the whole world after all, and we weren’t necessarily weird or freaks or perverted. There were others. The book said so.…. Maybe, someday, I could cross the sea and meet another one.”

In his early twenties, Hay became active in the Communist Party. He performed in agitprop demonstrations and traveled north to raise his fists in the San Francisco General Strike of 1934. He was bothered, though, by the party’s prohibition of same-sex behavior and the Soviet Union’s persecution of homosexuals. Other gays and lesbians in the party opted to conceal their orientations, but Hay struggled to rectify his identity with his politics. He eventually enlisted the services of a psychiatrist, who suggested that he do what everyone else did: marry, have children, and keep his sexuality a secret. Hay followed those instructions to the letter. In 1938, he married fellow communist Anita Platky and officially joined the party. The couple settled in Silver Lake and adopted two children. For the duration of their marriage, which ended in divorce in 1951, Hay never told Platky about his affairs with men.

He also didn’t discuss his evolving views on homosexual identity. In the late 1940s, Hay drafted a prospectus on the topic, drawing inspiration from Joseph Stalin’s definition of nationhood. “A nation,” Stalin wrote in a 1913 essay, “is a historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture.” Lineage and genetics, in other words, were secondary to collective values. Stalin devised this definition to restrict potentially fractious ethnic elements in the Soviet Union, but Hay saw it as applicable to an imagined revolution: homosexuals declaring themselves part of a fledgling nation. “We have a territory in common,” Hay said in an interview with Eric Slade, referring to gay neighborhoods and nightlife. “We have a language in common—because, after all, the language of camp, when you come right down to it, is the way by which we can all reach each other almost simultaneously. And we certainly have a common psychology of make-up, which manifests itself in a community of culture.”

Hay became enamored with the idea of forming an organization of homosexuals. In July 1950, he met Rudi Gernreich, a Jewish fashion designer who’d fled Nazi-occupied Austria. The two became lovers. Hay confided in Gernreich about his idea for a group, and Gernreich responded with unbridled enthusiasm. They spent the rest of the summer discussing how to proceed. To gauge interest, they trawled Los Angeles’s gay haunts with a petition opposing the Korean War. As they collected signatures, they engaged men in conversation about the government purging homosexuals from federal employment, an event now known as the Lavender Scare. Most of the men to whom Hay and Gernreich spoke thought that the firings, which had begun that year at the State Department, were a travesty. They balked, however, at the suggestion of forming a gay collective to do something about it.

Months passed before Hay and Gernreich found an ally in Hull and, by extension, Jennings and Rowland—fellow “sexual outlaws,” as Hay later wrote. After the first gathering in Hay’s house, the men agreed to keep meeting to discuss ways to protect their rights and bring more men into the group. After a few conclaves, they decided that they needed a name. Hay searched for inspiration in history and was delighted to discover medieval France’s sociétés joyeuses. The groups of unmarried young men adopted the dress of court jesters—both male and female—and participated in performances critical of the monarchy and the Catholic Church. Central to these performances were folk dances known as les mattachines, which historians described as relics of Pagan fertility rituals. Hay saw contemporary parallels with gender nonconformity and communist agitprop. He wanted to call the new group the Society of Fools, but Hull suggested the more oblique Mattachine Society. “The need to explain the name to others,” wrote Will Roscoe, a historian and a longtime associate of Hay’s, “would give members of the organization the chance to define themselves in their own terms.”

Jennings didn’t share Hay’s obsession with the past. “I thought, Here we were, here and now,” he told Slade in 1998. “Who cares about the Middle Ages?” Still, he couldn’t deny the thrill of being part of something new and progressive. “I became more of a split personality,” Jennings said. “I was an ordinary person during the day, and evenings I became a wild radical.”

Inspired by the Communist Party’s inner workings, the founders of the Mattachine Society shrouded the group in secrecy. The five men formed a steering committee, dubbed the Fifth Order, and shielded their identities. New members would be organized into cells that remained unknown to one another. The society would keep no membership records. Anonymity was security.

The Fifth Order’s first priority was to create a safe gateway for recruits. It settled on a series of public discussions on popular sexual subjects like the Kinsey Report, which in 1948 had proclaimed that some 10 percent of American men were “more or less exclusively homosexual.” The Mattachines hoped the events would attract gay men and women without requiring that they out themselves. On December 11, 1950, 18 people gathered for the first of these discussions. They used clinical, academic language to tiptoe around the topic of homosexuality. The founders scanned the sparse crowd, taking note of any individuals who seemed particularly interested in the conversation. They planned to take those people aside later and invite them, discreetly, to become Mattachines.

By April 1951, the society had added only a handful of people to its ranks, including Konrad Stevens and Jim Gruber, who joined the Fifth Order, bringing the founding membership to seven, and Ruth Bernhard, the first female Mattachine. Hay insisted on pomp and circumstance when inducting members, including the recitation of a pledge. “To many a homosexual, who may have lived out years of loneliness or bitterness, believing that his lot in society was a miserable one and without hope,” Jennings later wrote, “the sense of group fellowship, the joining of hands in solemn oath, bespoke something so new, and of such dazzling implication, as to be well-nigh unbelievable.” Hay conveyed to the newcomers with blistering pride that the Mattachines were building an empowered entity—a nation, really—that would march toward social emancipation.

That conviction drove a wedge between Hay and Jennings. “I didn’t believe we were a minority—and by the way, I still don’t,” Jennings said in 1998. Rather than promote a collective identity, distinct from the cultural mainstream, Jennings was concerned with the more practical goal of ensuring freedom of choice in sexual behavior. Whether homosexuals wanted to be part of a glorious community was immaterial to the protection of their well-being. In meeting after meeting, Jennings held firm to his stance, sowing discord with Hay and other Mattachines. “We would argue all the same old points, and I found, to my alarm, that the people who opposed me were not any more willing to give in than I was,” Jennings later said.

By 1952, the internecine rift had widened into a gulf. Bob Hull broke up with Jennings to be with Paul Benard, a bisexual actor and new society member. “The first act of the Paul-Bob alliance,” Hay later recalled, “was a concerted effort to kick Dale out of the top Mattachine echelon.” Jennings grew distressed and despondent. It seemed like his days with the society were numbered.

On the night of Friday, March 21, 1952, Jennings set out from his apartment in central Los Angeles to see a movie. His breakup with Hull still smarted. Settling into the anonymous darkness of a theater for a couple of hours, he hoped, would be a balm. His only obstacles on this quest were his own standards; Jennings passed one theater, then another, stewing about the lowbrow tastes of the moviegoing public.

A little before 9 p.m., he headed toward a third theater, hoping for a better selection. Along the way he took a detour through Westlake Park in search of a public restroom. “This, too, was a mistake,” Jennings would later write in a detailed account of the evening. “Respectable people don’t use these civic conveniences under any circumstances.”

When Jennings entered the restroom, it was empty. He relieved himself, turned around, and stepped to a sink to wash his hands. When he looked into the mirror, he saw a man standing over his shoulder, leering. The “big, rough-looking character,” Jennings recalled, had somehow entered the bathroom without making a sound. Jennings’s heart began to hammer against his ribs. He said nothing, pushed past the man, and left as quickly as his legs would carry him.

The stranger followed.

As Jennings walked toward the movie theater, the man trailed him, trying to strike up a conversation. Jennings alternated between asking the man to leave him be and not answering at all. If the stranger was soliciting sex, Jennings wasn’t interested.

At the theater, Jennings groaned when he saw on the marquee that the only movie showing was one he’d already seen. Frustrated, and more than a little flustered by the man from the bathroom, he decided to go home. The stranger continued to shuffle along a few feet behind Jennings as he made his way toward his apartment. Surely, Jennings thought, the man would give up eventually. When Jennings reached his door, he put the key in the lock and looked over his shoulder. Firmly, he told the man goodbye. But the stranger shoved him aside, twisted the knob, and strode into the living room.

Stunned, Jennings stood in the doorway. Was the man planning to rob him? Assault him? Worse? Years later, in an allegorical short story, Jennings would imagine the man as a ravenous dog. The protagonist, a stand-in for Jennings, tries to placate the dog: “He spoke reassuringly, then squatted with one hand held out. The big dog merely stood looking straight at him, not panting, not moving as it watched. Reflected light made flat, cold discs of its eyes.” When the protagonist attempts to sidestep the dog, the animal lets out a low, cruel snarl.

The stranger slumped onto Jennings’s sofa, legs sprawled wide, and reached down the front of his pants. He lifted his chin and shot Jennings an ugly, suggestive look. So this was a solicitation, albeit an aggressive one. Jennings shut the door. A jumble of thoughts rushed through his head. He was afraid of the man and certainly didn’t want to sleep with him, but he didn’t know how to get rid of him. Calling the police was risky. No matter what he said, the officer on the line might assume that he’d invited the stranger in and then had a change of heart. If that happened, the cops might arrest him for lewd behavior.

The man called out to Jennings, propositioning him, and Jennings responded by begging the intruder to leave. Instead, the man rose from the couch and sauntered into the bedroom. He dropped his jacket on the floor. His fingers went to his collar, and he began to unbutton his shirt, grinning at Jennings all the while.

“Come in here!” he said. “Let down your hair!”

The man sat on the bed, leaned back, and slapped the mattress, motioning for Jennings to sit.

“You have the wrong guy,” Jennings said.

Finally, the stranger lost his patience. He lunged forward, grabbed one of Jennings’s wrists, and forced the fingers of the trapped hand beneath his waistline, past his belt buckle. Jennings leaped away, clutching his hand to his chest as if he’d burned it on a stove. He “almost felt raped,” he would later tell a friend, and feared he might actually be. With every muscle in his body tense, he waited for the stranger to react.

The man reached into a pocket. Out came a badge. With his other hand he retrieved cuffs.

“Maybe,” the undercover cop said to Jennings, “you’d talk better with my partner outside.”

Jennings emerged from his front door in handcuffs. There wasn’t anyone outside. The cop’s partner was back in Westlake Park, waiting with a third officer in a squad car near the restroom where Jennings had been targeted for entrapment. Jennings was forced to walk over a mile back to where the mortifying saga had begun, the cop prodding his back the whole way. When they arrived, the officer greeted his colleagues by complaining that it had been a slow week for the vice squad. “It’s all I can do,” he said, “to keep up the old quota.”

Jennings was shoved into the back of the car, where the trio of officers launched into an interrogation. “It was a peculiarly effective type of grilling,” Jennings later remembered. “They laughed among themselves. One would ask, ‘How long you been this way?’” Too scared to speak, Jennings sat on his hands and thought only of the possible consequences of his precarious situation. Annoyed by Jennings’s lack of cooperation, one of the officers turned the key in the car’s ignition and maneuvered the vehicle into the street. At a painfully slow pace, less than ten miles per hour, the car wound through the streets, venturing farther and farther away from the park, into neighborhoods Jennings barely knew. He was sure he was going to be beaten, perhaps in some remote spot outside the city limits. The cops “repeatedly made jokes about police brutality,” Jennings wrote. “Each of the three instructed me to plead guilty and everything would be all right.”

In the end, they didn’t beat him. Terrifying him had been sufficiently fun. Around 11:30 p.m., they returned to their station and booked Jennings on a charge of lewd and dissolute conduct. They put him into a jail cell, and his bail was set at $50 (the equivalent of about $470 today). At 3 a.m., when he was permitted to place a phone call, an exhausted Jennings dialed Harry Hay, the only person he knew who had a checkbook.

By 6:30 a.m., Hay had swept in to rescue Jennings, posting bail and ferrying his fellow Mattachine to the Brown Derby for sustenance. The popular diner, with its iconic building designed to look like a giant hat, was one of Hay’s favorites. The pair slid into a half-moon-shaped leather booth beneath walls cluttered with cartoon sketches of the Derby’s most famous patrons: actors, producers, and the like. Hay knew that his first task was to cheer Jennings up. After they ordered breakfast, though, he revealed his ulterior motive.

“Dale, the whole society that we have going is going to support this,” Hay said. “And we’re going to fight it.”

Jennings looked up from his coffee, bewildered. “We’re going to fight it?”

“Yes,” Hay continued. “You’re innocent, and we’ll prove it. This is what we want.”

“Good God,” Jennings said. “Where do you get this we stuff?”

Hay laid his hands on Jennings’s shoulders, staring at him with his trademark solemnity and “imperial self-confidence of the chosen,” Jennings later wrote. Entrapment, Hay explained, was destroying lives. But unlike most victims, Jennings was well positioned to mount a legal challenge. He was currently employed as an advertiser for his sister’s sewing business, so he stood no risk of losing his job. Divorced and childless, he wouldn’t embroil any family in scandal. “The Great Man pointed out that I, in my miserable way, would be somewhat Chosen, too, if I stood up to the Establishment,” Jennings wrote. “I had nothing to lose but my chains.”

Hay’s appeal to blaze a trail, Jennings later said, was “not a very comfortable thought to someone whose world has just ended.” If the case went to court, the publicity might ruin his professional prospects. And he couldn’t shake the feeling that Hay was more concerned with what the affair represented than with how it might affect Jennings personally. He asked Hay if he would plead innocent under the same circumstances. “He himself would be honored to do such a thing,” Jennings recalled. “But, of course, he had too many familial responsibilities.”

Hay managed to convince Jennings to at least convene an emergency meeting of the Fifth Order a few days later, on the evening of March 28. Together, Hay said, they would decide what to do next. So the Mattachines piled into Jennings’s living room. Hay, true to form, opened with an impassioned address about elevating the plight of homosexuals into mainstream political discourse. The moment, he argued, was a golden opportunity to argue that homosexuals deserved the full protection of the law. Furthermore, the Mattachine Society might put a nail in the coffin of entrapment, a practice that threatened not only gay men, but any second-class citizens who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time with cops who had to hit arrest quotas.

In blocky handwriting, Rudi Gernreich dutifully recorded the meeting’s minutes in a notebook, including discussion of Jennings’s constitutional right to due process:

Entrapment case. Decision to fight on basis of 5th Amendment—politically, not morally. Test case—willing to fight from lowest courts to highest. Try to get support from ACLU and other civic groups.… Every minority in danger on entrapment basis.

Several years prior, Gernreich himself had been in Jennings’s shoes. Entrapped by police, he took his case to court, proclaimed his innocence, and demanded a jury trial. At times during the proceedings, he felt that he was making headway. One woman on the jury was pleasant enough, looking at him from her perch with what he thought was sympathy. Yet the jury found him guilty. Devastated, he made a point of staring down each juror, one by one, as the verdict was read. When he landed on the kind-seeming woman, she turned her face to the wall, refusing to look him in the eye. Now Gernreich was hungry for justice—to fight, win, and repudiate the woman who had been unable to meet his gaze.

As the conversation unfolded, Jennings realized that his comrades were in unanimous agreement with Hay. “We seized on it as a rallying point,” recalled Jim Gruber. “There wasn’t much arm twisting at all. Inasmuch as I was often a dissenter, I was aware that any of the dissenters would have spoken up at that point.” Especially emphatic was Chuck Rowland, who rose to his feet, eyes flinty with righteous indignation, and gestured at Jennings. “The hinger of fistory points!” he shouted.

The group fell silent at Rowland’s blunder. They stared at each other for several seconds. Then Gernreich began laughing. The rest of the men followed suit, some of them falling over sideways. In that moment, Jennings felt his resistance melting. “One of my prevailing thoughts,” he later said, “was, I’m not alone.”

In 1950s Los Angeles, only a few attorneys deigned to represent homosexuals in court, and they were more interested in financial gain than civil rights. Harry Weiss, a lawyer who owned a popular gay nightclub called the Crown Jewel, was rumored to cooperate with the vice squad. Weiss, dubbed “the faggot lawyer” by judges, purportedly gave the police tips regarding the identities of his gay patrons. The vice squad then passed Weiss’s business card to any men they arrested, and Weiss paid the police half of any legal fees he earned from the resulting cases. Another attorney, a flamboyant woman named Gladys Towles Root, a.k.a. “the defender of the damned,” appeared in court in elaborate, colorful outfits that rivaled the nighttime getups of the drag queens she represented. “She had all sorts of connections in the city government, so she’d get you off,” Jennings once said. “Her charge? Very often it was everything you had.” Records from the period indicate that Root and Weiss charged clients on a sliding scale from $2,800 to $28,000 in current dollars; the wealthier the client, the more he paid.

Regardless of a case’s specifics, Root and Weiss generally required defendants to plead guilty to misdemeanors and pay whatever fines the city demanded. The only benefit for the defendants was that they avoided felony convictions. “You were run through the mill,” Jennings recounted, “and swore to God you’d never go into another park.”

After Jennings agreed to plead innocent, Hay suggested that he retain Long Beach lawyer George Shibley, an old leftist acquaintance. “George has always said that I taught him more about Marxism than anybody else,” Hay once claimed. A Lebanese American attorney with a long, narrow visage, wide brown eyes, and thick brows, Shibley had developed a reputation in the 1930s and 1940s as a defender of labor unions. In one case against the Ford Motor Company, he’d proved himself so potent an adversary that Ford had attempted to hire him as in-house counsel; Shibley declined the offer. He won public renown during the sensational 1942 Sleepy Lagoon trial, in which he defended several Latino youth charged with murder. The judge in that case, Charles Fricke, was known for handing down harsh sentences. “It was said that when you went to trial in Fricke’s court, you had two prosecutors there,” Shibley’s son Jonathan told me in a recent interview, “one from the DA’s office, and Fricke.” Shibley made so many objections over the course of the trial that Fricke mocked him; in one hearing, according to Jonathan, the judge said, “I’d be disappointed if you didn’t make at least one per session.” The defendants were convicted, but Shibley filed an appeal, accusing Fricke of prejudice. The court ruled in favor of the defendants, and their sentences were overturned.

Shibley had never defended gay clients, but that didn’t matter. “He said he didn’t give a damn what the charge was,” Jennings remembered. “He was for civil rights, and he sounded like Christ on a white horse. God, he was everything.” His sympathy for oppressed minorities came from experience. Although he wasn’t Jewish, his appearance made him a frequent target of anti-Semites, as did the fact that his wife was white. “When he first moved to the neighborhood,” Jonathan told me, “we heard rumors that some of the neighbors were saying, ‘Let’s get that Jew for being with that white woman.’”

Shibley’s only hesitation in accepting Jennings’s case was his lack of knowledge about homosexuality, so he asked the Mattachine Society to educate him. The Fifth Order carpooled to Shibley’s office on a weekly basis in the months leading up to Jennings’s trial, which was set for June 1952. “We went down every Friday night after work, all about seven or eight of us,” Hay later said. “We told our coming-out stories to him. We educated him on what it was like to come out as a homosexual in a straight world, and what we ran into, and what our problems were.” Shibley came away angry that the men were treated so badly and eager to defend Jennings. “He [felt] that what they were doing to this man was, in the vernacular, just plain chickenshit,” Jonathan Shibley said, referring to the LAPD’s actions. “So what if he’s a homosexual? He’s minding his own business. Why was Mr. Cop trying to harass him?”

This was likely the first time in American history that an attorney had agreed to defend homosexual rights. It was certainly the first time that a group of gay activists banded together to legally defend one of their own. The Mattachines’ first concern was fundraising. Shibley’s services would cost $7,000 (in current dollars), and the group hoped to raise an additional $28,000 to print and distribute copies of the trial transcript to lawyers across the country. If Jennings won, the Mattachines wanted other progressive legal minds to know how to defend gay clients in similar entrapment trials.

To support Jennings without exposing their secretive group, Shibley suggested that the Mattachines form an ad hoc Citizens Committee to Outlaw Entrapment. Coordinated by the Fifth Order, the CCOE raised money for Jennings’s defense and tried to publicize his trial in the media. The press, though, had no interest in covering it. “I let all of these various news services know about the trial every step of the way,” Hay said once. “Not one single magazine or newspaper or radio station or TV station ever printed or published or spoke one word about this entire trial. We had a total conspiracy of silence.”

Without coverage, the CCOE had to rely on informal networks within Los Angeles’s gay community. They distributed flyers throughout the city: on beaches, in bars, and around popular cruising spots. Members of the Fifth Order met with gay small-business owners, encouraging them to surreptitiously drop flyers into customers’ bags at check-out. The flyers laid out Hay’s vision of homosexuals as a minority and the CCOE’s mission to fight police brutality. Jennings’s trial would “expose to all eyes an injudicial and unconstitutional police conspiracy which, under the cloak of protecting public morals, threatens not only all Minorities but civil rights and privileges generally.” The Mattachines hoped that other people in Jennings’s circumstances would follow his lead. “If 1 percent of the people who had been entrapped had stood up, things would have changed drastically,” Jennings said in 1998. “Here was one person standing up. That just upset the apple cart completely.”

Donors began to mail donations to the CCOE’s post office box. Encouraged, the Fifth Order scheduled a number of fundraising events. The first was a showcase by Lester Horton’s dance troupe, one of whose members had been entrapped by police in early 1952. Jennings was also sent on a kind of lecture tour, appearing at public discussion groups and private gatherings to talk about his case. “I was called upon just about every night of the week,” he later said. “These gay guys [would] sidle up and say, ‘I feel for you. I think you’re just wonderful.’”

“I gave out autographs,” he added. “It was ridiculous.”

As his trial approached, Jennings’s misgivings about the whole endeavor returned in force. His newfound status as a civil rights leader made him more anxious than proud; it felt thrust upon him rather than chosen or earned. “I certainly didn’t feel heroic at all, in any way,” he recalled. “I felt sucked in by a system that was absolutely voracious. It ate me alive and picked the bones over.”

Jennings was afraid that he would be found guilty, and he hated feeling subsumed in the excitement about what the case meant. Also distressing was that many of his peers didn’t believe his story. They thought he’d invited the cop to his apartment and maybe even had sex with him before the badge came out. The truth about what transpired before the arrest didn’t matter to his supporters, so eager were they to have a champion of their rights. But Jennings wanted people to believe him; he couldn’t stand to be regarded as a liar. “To be innocent, and yet not be able to convince even your firm constituents,” he wrote in a 1953 essay, “carries a peculiar agony.”

The trial began on June 23, 1952. Settling into his seat, sweating through his Sunday best, Jennings feared that the judge and jury were already allied with his adversaries. The prosecution’s case had been argued successfully many times before, against many innocent gay men. A city attorney would pit the police’s false claim that Jennings had behaved lewdly against his description of entrapment. The attorney would then tar Jennings as a pervert, a degenerate, a sexual psychopath who had conspired to seduce an upstanding officer of the law. The members of the Mattachine Society who’d accompanied him provided little comfort; they could only observe in silence from the courtroom’s gallery.

When Shibley rose to make his opening argument, though, Jennings was reassured that the trial would follow a new script. The lawyer made no effort to deny Jennings’s homosexuality, no attempt to curry favor with the court by portraying him as a heterosexual family man. Instead, Shibley argued that “homosexuality and lasciviousness are not identical” and that “no fine line separates the variations of sexual inclinations.”

“The only true pervert in the courtroom,” Shibley declared, was the arresting officer.

With that pronouncement, Shibley shifted the court’s focus away from Jennings and toward the officers who’d detained him: partners James L. Martin and T.N. Porter. The two cops had recently been charged with assaulting a different prisoner; the following day, in fact, they would appear in another courtroom as defendants. According to the Los Angeles Times, Martin and Porter were alleged to have beaten a man named Ramón Castellanos, striking him “several times with fists and elbows, as well as a ‘dark object.’” Castellanos had sustained lacerations to his head and scalp, a black eye, a broken nose, and numerous bruises. Pressed to explain Castellanos’s injuries, Martin and Porter said he’d tripped over a large flower pot. The LAPD’s internal affairs division was unconvinced by the explanation and suspended the officers pending trial. The Castellanos case didn’t prove Jennings’s innocence, but the charges against Martin and Porter, and the specter of their suspension from the police force, worked in Shibley’s favor. In entrapment trials, police testimony was considered unimpeachable; Shibley shook that assumption on day one.

By the time he took the witness stand, Jennings felt emboldened by Shibley’s defense. Under oath he declared himself to be a homosexual. Before he could continue, the judge interrupted him. “We don’t use that word here,” he said, casting a withering glance at the defendant.

In a sense, the judge was correct. Men went to great lengths, often pleading guilty to lesser charges, to avoid the humiliation of their homosexuality being made public during a trial. On the few occasions when defendants pleaded innocent, they built cases on the assertion that they weren’t homosexuals and therefore couldn’t possibly have done what they were accused of. Not Jennings. “What you’re doing is silencing me,” he replied to the judge. “I’m here because I am an avowed homosexual, and I’m not ashamed of it.”

It was unprecedented for a gay man to speak so boldly before a court, in California or anywhere else in the United States. Shibley didn’t dwell on the symbolism of Jennings’s statement, however. He drilled down on inconsistencies in the police officers’ stories. According to LAPD policy, two cops had to be present at an arrest. Jennings had been detained by just one officer before being perp-walked to the squad car in Westlake Park. T.N. Porter, however, claimed otherwise when he took the stand. Shibley paused for dramatic effect before replying, “Well, that’s very interesting. Because in your deposition, you say exactly the opposite.”

Over the course of ten days, Shibley continued to punch holes in the cops’ credibility. That the officers were juggling the Jennings proceedings with the Castellanos trial made his job easier. It also made his pioneering defense of Jennings all the more profound. Shibley vouched repeatedly for the decency and innocence of his client, in contrast to the violent behavior of the police, and argued that Jennings’s sexual habits should have no bearing on his constitutional rights.

Shibley delivered the final blow in his closing statement, when he turned inward for inspiration. He invoked his experiences with prejudice: the neighbors who’d sneered at his interracial marriage, the people who’d called him a “Jew bastard.” Shibley knew what it was to experience oppression, alienation, and loneliness. Didn’t everyone, in some way? And didn’t everyone deserve respect? Certainly no one should be subjected to state-sponsored cruelty. When Shibley finished his emotional address to the jury, Hay saw “wet eyes in the courtroom.” As he later explained, “We had never heard a kind, good word said about us in public before in our lives.”

During their first round of deliberations, 11 jurors voted to acquit Jennings. Only one member, the foreman, called for a conviction. So the group deliberated for 40 hours, most of it spent laboring to convince the foreman of Jennings’s essential humanity and of the cops’ clear deceit. Finally, the jury returned to the courtroom without a verdict. The foreman hadn’t budged. The group was hung. “They asked to be dismissed,” Jennings later wrote, “when one of their number said he’d hold out for guilty ’til hell froze over.”

The prosecution could remount the case “in an orderly and a decent fashion,” the judge instructed, but the district attorney wasn’t interested. Though Martin and Porter were simultaneously acquitted in the Castellanos trial, a hearing of the LAPD’s internal Board of Rights found them guilty “of using undue force in making an arrest and making false reports to a superior officer.” Martin was suspended without pay for a month, and Porter for three months. They were public liabilities to the LAPD, and trotting them out for a second prosecution of Jennings might ignite a political scandal. “And so it was dropped,” Jennings said in 1998. “The cops copped out.”

Three months after his arrest, Jennings had won. So had the Mattachines. “Walking out of the courtroom free was a liberation that I’d never anticipated,” Jennings recalled. “I never thought this would happen.”

The media didn’t report Jennings’s acquittal, much less the Mattachine Society’s hand in it. Once again, the CCOE spread the word via flyers. “A great victory for the homosexual minority,” they proclaimed. Word quickly spread through gay communities beyond Southern California. The CCOE was bombarded with letters of support, some from homosexuals wondering how they could establish advocacy groups like the one that had supported Jennings.

And so chapters of the Mattachine Society began to appear in other cities. They spread south to San Diego and north to San Francisco, then east to Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C. Gerry Brissette, a lab technician at the University of California at Berkeley, was inspired enough by the Jennings verdict to launch a Mattachine chapter. “They flock to us in hordes,” Brissette wrote in a letter to Chuck Rowland, “hungry, anxious, eager to do something, say something, get started.” As the group’s expanding membership infused it with professional and political expertise, the scope of the organization ballooned and branched. In Long Beach, factory workers established a group; in Laguna Beach, according to Rowland, membership comprised mostly “Junior Chamber of Commerce types.” Some clusters of Mattachines preferred to debate intellectual topics—the sociology of homosexuality, gay themes in literary fiction—while others set their sights on police entrapment in their own cities and towns. They compiled newspaper clippings on vice-squad arrests, gathered testimonials from victims, and labored to raise awareness of police tactics.

Within a year of the Jennings trial, historian John D’Emilio believes, the Mattachine Society counted close to 100 chapters, with about 2,000 participants total. Those numbers may be underestimated, given the group’s resistance to official rolls. Most of the new members didn’t share the communist ideology of the Fifth Order, but Hay was “delighted,” he later said, “with the fact that people were all practically pounding down our doors, wanting to get in.” Rowland echoed the sentiment: “We moved into a broad, sunlit upland filled with whole legions of eager gays.”

Jennings, however, was characteristically suspicious. He found that the shine of his legal triumph quickly faded. He was proud that so many people wanted to support the Mattachine Society, and that he’d played a key part in securing their attention. But he was also unsettled. “All of a sudden, we had houses overflowing with strange people that came uninvited,” he recalled. “I didn’t like it.” In retrospect, his skepticism may have been well founded.

In early 1953, the Los Angeles Daily Mirror published a story on the Mattachine Society, written by a reporter named Paul Coates. It was the first article in the evening paper’s history to use the term homosexual. It wasn’t a glowing profile of the organization’s expansion, however—it was an alleged exposé on the dangerous political power of gay men and women.

Coates fretted that homosexuals in Los Angeles made up a voting bloc of nearly 200,000 people. If empowered by lax policies and cultural tolerance, they might overthrow the very foundation of decent society. Coates’s sources for these claims were spurious, as were his accusations that members of the Mattachine Society were subversives. “If I belonged to that club,” Coates wrote, “I’d worry.”

The article’s fearmongering was an echo of what was happening nearly 3,000 miles east of Los Angeles on Capitol Hill. In January 1953, senator Joseph McCarthy began his second term in office. Deploying his investigative powers as the newly installed chairman of the Government Operations Committee, McCarthy was intent on rooting Communists out of U.S. government. If there was anything he disliked as much as a leftist, it was a homosexual, so he went after them, too. Anti-communism swept the country, reaching even the liberal enclave of Hollywood. As more and more people fell prey to accusations of ideological treason, homosexuals increasingly feared for their jobs, their reputations, and their lives.

The Daily Mirror article sent the Mattachine Society’s membership into a state of panic. Many new recruits demanded that the Fifth Order abandon its policy of secrecy, expunge Communist sympathizers, and reinvent itself as a more dignified organization. Members of the Laguna Beach branch even proposed that all Mattachines swear fealty to the United States. Rowland responded to the idea by writing in a letter that “come hell or high water, we will oppose all idea of a non-Communist statement by any group using the name Mattachine.” Concerns kept pouring in. “Many members of the meetings … feel that Mr. Coates asked legitimate questions,” wrote Marilyn Rieger, a participant in another Mattachine chapter. “Explanations are definitely in order…. [We need] complete faith in the people who set forth policies, principles, aims, and purposes.”

Hoping to soothe everyone’s worries, the founders invited more than 100 Mattachines to a weekend-long “democratic convention” in April 1953. The stated aim was a restructuring of the society; those gathered would draft a constitution, establish by-laws, and elect officers. In reality, the Fifth Order expected nothing less than two days of heated debate about communism, and that’s what it got. Participants left the weekend having resolved little, so a second gathering was scheduled for May. By that time, opposition to the Fifth Order was better organized and far more vocal. “We know we are the same, no different than anyone else,” Marilyn Rieger said in an address. “Our only difference is an unimportant one to the heterosexual society, unless we make it important.… [Our] homosexuality is irrelevant to our ideals, our principles, our hopes and aspirations.”

Rieger’s statements emphasizing sameness stood in diametric opposition to Hay’s vision of homosexuals as a distinct cultural minority. Indeed, they were more in line with Jennings’s views on sexual orientation. But Jennings, long an avowed leftist, couldn’t abide Rieger’s hard-line anti-communism. He feared it spelled the undoing of the Mattachine Society. “If the opposition had wanted to ruin us, that was the perfect way to do it,” Jennings said in 1998.

The members of the Fifth Order were outnumbered. Rieger’s words had struck a chord with Mattachines who wanted to reduce antagonism in their lives, to be welcomed into the fold of mainstream society rather than stake a claim on their own frontier. Though the founders and their supporters were able to narrowly defeat resolutions denouncing “subversive elements” and “infiltrat[ion] by communists,” they saw plainly that their time was up. “We all felt, especially Harry, that the organization and its growth was more important than any of the founding fathers,” said Jim Gruber. “We had to turn it over to other people.”

At the conclusion of the May convention, the Fifth Order announced that it would step down from leadership. “This,” Hay later said, “was not the golden brotherhood that I had looked forward to.” Another meeting in November 1953 marked the formal changing of the guard. Some founding members would remain with the society in informal capacities; others opted to end their involvement altogether.

For Jennings, the decision to depart wasn’t easy. On the one hand, he felt relief. He’d never liked Hay’s theatrics, as much as Hay had never liked his reluctance. “Like a Judas,” wrote Hay’s biographer, Stuart Timmons, “Jennings was continually in vocal opposition to anything that Hay favored.” The dissolution of the Fifth Order represented an opportunity for Jennings to continue activism on his own terms, which meant working as editor in chief of One magazine, a new gay-interest publication and one of the first of its kind in America. In 1953 and 1954, Jennings wrote the majority of the magazine’s content, often under pseudonyms. He did so to camouflage the small size of the staff; perhaps, too, he wanted to keep his name out of the limelight in a way that the Mattachines had made all but impossible.

Yet Jennings also found himself looking back on the society through rose-colored glasses. In a few short years, and despite internal turmoil, it had put homosexual organizing on the political map. At the November 1953 gathering, where Jennings accepted an award for his contributions to the Mattachine Society, he gave a lengthy speech that doubled as a farewell. “This is most decidedly not just another meal,” he said. “Nor are we here to applaud society at large for loosening a jot more of its infinite prejudice. Or the law for a smattering more of acquittals and dismissals. Or religion for rattling a few less teeth on its bone necklace.

“In today’s absence of tomorrow’s laurels, let us immodestly crown ourselves,” Jennings continued. “And how realistic—how crystal clear-eyed we are to do so. For we are most surely making history.… Our only mistakes occur when we forget that fact.”

Before ending the speech, Jennings breathed deeply and looked at the sea of faces before him. “Let’s applaud ourselves,” he said. And the room did, everyone rising to their feet in a standing ovation. Those gathered behooved Jennings to join them—to clap, for just a moment, for himself.

The Mattachine Society existed for several years after its founders walked away, but in a state of steady decline. Its revolutionary verve dwindled, and so did its membership. When the Stonewall riots happened in 1969, the last vestiges of the group, including its concern for tradition and assimilation, were swept off the agenda in favor of a more radical LGBTQ-rights movement—one in line with what the Mattachines had had in mind when they first gathered in Hay’s Silver Lake home.

The members of the Fifth Order lived to see gains (anti-discrimination legislation) and tragedies (the HIV/AIDS epidemic) befall gay Americans. Their own lives took dramatic turns. Hay was summoned to Capitol Hill in 1955 and asked, “Are you a communist?” He was no longer formally involved with the party, so he was able to say no, saving himself from further poking, prodding, and humiliation by McCarthyites. Hay went on to found a spiritual movement called the Radical Faeries, which urged gays and lesbians to resist “hetero-imitation” and develop distinct identities. He developed a reputation as an elder statesman of the gay rights movement, lending his name to various causes and providing invaluable perspective on the plight of homosexuals in the postwar period. Hay passed away in 2002 at the age of 90.

Jennings’s life recentered on his first love: writing. He left One magazine after a few years and began focusing again on film and fiction. He published a novel in 1968 and sold a movie treatment to Warner Brothers in 1970, which ultimately became The Cowboys, starring John Wayne. In the 1980s, Jennings lost much of his money in a lawsuit filed by a former lover. To make ends meet, he came aboard as a staff member at the Homosexual Information Center, a nonprofit research and archival outfit dedicated to compiling and sharing information about LGBTQ history. As Jennings’s health suffered under the weight of dementia and alcoholism, he bequeathed his papers to the HIC. He didn’t grant any interviews until Eric Slade approached him for the documentary about the Mattachines. “For a bunch of faggots,” Jennings told Slade, “we were very courageous to start at that particular time, when a false word or gesture, or some character thinking you were queer, could get you beaten up.”

Jennings died in 2000; he was 82. His New York Times obituary described him as “a novelist, playwright, and pioneer of the American gay rights movement.” It didn’t mention his ambivalence about his heroics. Perhaps that’s what the deeply private Jennings would have wanted. Slade, though, had pressed him on the matter, questioning his assertion that he wouldn’t relive his experience in court.

“Why did you decide to do it?” Slade asked.

“I didn’t have a choice,” Jennings replied.

“Well, you could have pled guilty,” Slade pointed out.

Jennings sat quietly for a moment, slumping away from the camera, deep in thought. “Oh, I suppose…,” he ruminated. Then he straightened up and shook his head vigorously.

“No,” he said. “I couldn’t.”

I.

Near dawn on April 21, 2005, José Guadian arrived at the federal prison where he’d worked for more than a decade. The bland, low-lying complex in Florence, Colorado, was located off a stretch of State Highway 67, a two-lane road running like a jagged vertical scar through the middle of the state. To the north and west, Guadian could see the Rocky Mountains towering on the horizon. They stood in majestic contrast to the land around the prison. Sun-bleached grass, scattered shrubs, no trees to speak of—it was lonely terrain.

Guadian had made a habit of arriving early for his shift; he never wanted to rush any tasks. The correctional officer walked through a metal detector and past the guards at the front entrance, then down a quiet, sterile hallway illuminated by fluorescent bulbs. At the complex’s administrative hub, he signed out a set of keys for the video-monitoring room, a small office outfitted with a desk, a couple of swivel chairs, and about two dozen small TV screens. Guadian ran through a checklist. He switched on the monitors; they were all working. Check. He inspected the VCRs connected to the screens; they were loaded with tapes. Check. The tapes were recording properly. Check.

The feed came from cameras positioned in the prison’s recreation yards. Guadian could control them from a computer at his post. It wasn’t exciting work, watching grainy video for hours at a time, but it wasn’t all that taxing either. The Administrative Maximum Facility, or ADX, ran like clockwork. Altercations among inmates were exceedingly rare, and none had been deadly. No one had ever tried in earnest to escape. On rec ops, Guadian had to stay alert in case a rare infraction occurred.

A little before 7 a.m., his partner for the shift, Alan Aragon, arrived. That was the last item on the checklist; prison staff on rec ops always worked in pairs. Guadian radioed his colleagues in the residential units to tell them that it was time to take the inmates outside. One by one, clad in workout clothes, thick tube socks, and bulky white running shoes, some of the most dangerous men in America walked into the thin morning air.

ADX Florence, nicknamed the Alcatraz of the Rockies, is where the government locks up the serial killers, terrorists, and drug kingpins considered too dangerous to keep anywhere else. It houses more than 400 inmates, all of them men. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, is there. So is Ramzi Yousef, who plotted the 1993 World Trade Center attack, and Terry Nichols, a co-conspirator in the Oklahoma City bombing. Timothy McVeigh was held there until his transfer to death row in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 2001. The inmates who aren’t household names are just as ruthless, including white supremacists who committed multiple prison murders before being shipped to the ADX and a cult leader convicted of sex trafficking and child molestation.

The prison is a veritable fortress. Located about an hour south of Colorado Springs, it’s designed to keep inmates caged and isolated. ADX Florence keeps every prisoner in solitary confinement for upwards of 20 hours per day. For someone to get out, he would have to contend with the thick concrete walls of his cell, remote-controlled steel doors, razor-wire fences, attack dogs, and armed guards.

Back in 2005, inmates were rarely permitted more than an hour or two in the rec yards each day, and deciding who was allowed to be outside together was a carefully controlled process. Authorities conducted extensive reviews of disciplinary and arrest records; they monitored inmates’ mail and phone calls. They even posed the question directly to each prisoner: Is there anyone you can’t be grouped with? Men deemed a potential threat to one another weren’t allowed to comingle. With few exceptions, this meant members of rival prison gangs never came into contact. If they did, correctional officers feared, they might try to kill each other on sight.

One of the cohorts allowed outside that April morning consisted of eight members or associates of the Mexican Mafia, also known as la Eme (Spanish for the letter M). Hardened killers and drug traffickers comprised the powerful gang; many were tattooed with a black hand, signaling that they’d made their bones. Once the men arrived in the yard, a concrete space about the size of a football-field end zone, they wasted little time. They greeted each other and started doing burpees, push-ups, and toe touches. Murderers engaged in the mundane.

From their outpost, Guadian and Aragon watched. The cameras picked up video but no audio. When a few guys clustered together, the officers zoomed a camera in on the inmates’ hands and feet, looking for the surreptitious exchange of weapons or contraband. They scanned for any unusual or sudden movements. A little over an hour into their shift, the officers hadn’t spotted anything noteworthy.

Then, at 8:21 a.m., Guadian thought he saw something.

“Hey, go back,” he said to Aragon, who was controlling the cameras.

Aragon spun a camera to the left and zoomed across the length of the rec yard. There, in a corner, an inmate was lying on the ground. He didn’t appear to be moving.

Paul Middleton was sitting in his office when his phone rang. Not his regular desk phone, but the red one. Dubbed “triple deuces,” it was one of four phones in the ADX used in the event of a life-threatening emergency. Middleton had one because, as head of the prison’s inside control, he operated every door in the facility. If someone wanted to initiate a lockdown, they dialed 2-2-2 on a landline and were connected to an officer on a red phone. Those calls almost never happened.

When Middleton picked up the receiver, he heard the voice of a distressed officer. There was a fight in progress in a rec yard in Echo Unit, the officer said, and there were inmates on the ground.

Middleton moved fast. He announced the emergency on a system that overrode all other radio communications in the prison. He unlocked a door that would allow correctional officers a clearer path to the rec yard. Then he rolled a cart of “less lethal” weapons—guns that fired either pepper-spray balls or teargas—into the hallway outside his office so that guards could grab them as they ran past.

When officers arrived at the rec-yard gate, the inmates looked relaxed, as if nothing had happened. Some even continued exercising. ADX policy required a three-to-one ratio of staff to inmates before officers could enter the area. To meet that standard, guards had to pull a few men out of the yard. They ordered everyone to drop onto their stomachs with their hands above their heads, then called an inmate’s name. He got up, walked to the gate, and put his hands through a slot. The guards secured cuffs on his wrists before opening the door and pulling him inside. Protocol demanded that the officers do this one prisoner at a time.

At 8:33 a.m., 12 minutes after rec ops initiated the triple-deuces alert, correctional officers had removed enough prisoners to overtake the area. As they surrounded and handcuffed the remaining men, Nona Gladbach, a nurse practitioner and the prison’s ranking medical officer that day, hurried toward the downed inmate. His body was folded against a wall. Blood was splattered on the cement around his head. He wasn’t breathing.

In her six and a half years at ADX Florence, Gladbach had gotten to know many of the inmates well, but she couldn’t tell who the man was. The skin on his face was blackened from bruising, and his features were swollen from extensive blunt trauma. One signal of brain activity is the responsiveness of pupils to light, but Gladbach couldn’t pry the man’s eyelids open to perform the test.

As staff lifted the inmate onto a gurney and wheeled him at speed to the prison’s medical center, Gladbach began chest compressions. Someone else called local paramedics, who arrived at 8:50 a.m. They spent 22 minutes trying to revive the man with CPR, intubation, and epinephrine. Nothing worked. They would have declared him dead on the spot, but federal policy required that he be transferred to a hospital before that could happen. So the paramedics loaded the man into an ambulance and drove into Cañon City, the nearest town with a hospital. Just after 10 a.m., an ER doctor called time of death.

What came next was uncharted territory: an investigation of the first homicide in a place specifically designed to prevent violence of any kind. Instead of a shank or some other crude weapon, the killer had used fists and feet to pummel a fellow prisoner to a pulp. He’d committed murder in broad daylight, with cameras everywhere, yet avoided being caught in the act. Who had done it? And, more importantly, why?

When an investigator arrived at the ADX shortly after the murder to interview the other prisoners who’d been in the rec yard that day, he got no answers. No one spouted a lie or even a perfunctory “fuck off.” One by one, the men sat down across from the investigator and refused to talk. At most they uttered “not interested.” Several inmates offered only blank stares.

The silence felt calculated. It was as if, collectively, the men had decided how to handle the situation—or were following orders. Law enforcement had to wonder: Maybe, improbably, a murder conspiracy had played out in the most secure facility in America. For the better part of the next decade, a rookie FBI agent would try to prove that it had.

The agent hasn’t given other on-the-record interviews about his involvement in the investigation. His name doesn’t litter public documents about the case. The matter was so sensitive, and the criminals involved so dangerous, that he asked me to safeguard his identity and that of his family. So I’ll refer to him by his first name: Jon.

Jon grew up in the Bible Belt. In his hometown, Southern Baptist revivals were annual events. Jon, who is now in his forties and just this side of six feet tall, with close-cropped brown hair and a sleeve of tattoos on his left arm, likes to joke that the gatherings were just a bunch of guest speakers telling everyone that they were sinners. Still, he credits his religious upbringing with keeping him out of trouble. That and the fact that law enforcement practically runs in his blood.

Jon’s parents worked long hours in blue-collar jobs, so his grandparents looked after him most of the time. One of his grandfathers was a captain in the local police department. He took Jon on visits to the station and the local courthouse, introducing his grandson to friends and colleagues. People lit up when they saw Jon’s grandfather; he was that kind of guy, personable and memorable. And he loved his job as much as people loved him. He was still on the county’s payroll when he died at the age of 96.

After Jon graduated from college, he followed in his grandfather’s footsteps and joined a police force, starting out as a patrolman and working his way up to detective. He investigated robberies, kidnappings, and homicides. After a few years on the job, he started imagining what it would be like to work for the FBI. Jon liked the idea of operating with national jurisdiction and solving major crimes. He assumed, however, that he’d never make the cut to join the bureau, so for a while he didn’t try. Then one day some fellow detectives talked him into submitting an application, after which he’d have to take a written exam. To save himself the embarrassment of announcing that he’d failed, Jon decided not to tell his family what he was doing.

He took the test with about 50 other FBI hopefuls, many of whom had brought along scientific calculators. Jon didn’t have one. Would there be math on a law-enforcement exam? he wondered. There was, and it had been a long time since Jon had heard mention of the Pythagorean theorem, much less answered questions about it. By the time the all-day test was over, Jon was spent and certain that he’d done poorly. When the results came in, only two people had passed: a certified public accountant and Jon. I don’t know what they were testing me on, he thought, but it must not have been math.

After some additional screenings, the FBI invited Jon to attend its training academy in Quantico, Virginia, a cross between college and boot camp. When he finished, the 35-year-old got his first field assignment, in the bureau’s Denver division, working out of a satellite office in Colorado Springs. On his second day there, in 2006, Jon toured ADX Florence. Because it was a federal facility, he’d be investigating cases that originated there. He didn’t know much about the place going in. When he learned the identities of some of the inmates, names he’d heard on the nightly news, he realized that it was home to “a bunch of sociopaths.”

That was by design. Once upon a time, Alcatraz was the only federal maximum-security prison. The storied facility in the San Francisco Bay began housing inmates in 1934 and operated for three decades, at which point someone crunched the numbers and realized that the expense of running the Rock, as it was called, was three times greater than the operating cost of any other prison in the country. It was pricey to stock it with supplies, for one thing, including the million gallons of fresh water that had to be shipped there every week. So the feds shuttered the prison in 1963.

The next facility designated for high-risk prisoners was a penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, a small town five hours south of Chicago. Then, on October 22, 1983, members of the Aryan Brotherhood, one of the country’s most powerful prison gangs, stabbed to death two correctional officers in separate attacks on the same day. The bloody incident at Marion prompted the head of the Federal Bureau of Prisons to advocate a new approach: a lockup built specifically to keep problem inmates in near total isolation. The result was ADX Florence. The $60 million, state-of-the-art facility opened in 1994.

Jon learned that each general-population cell, constructed mostly from poured cement, contained a concrete-slab bed with a thin mattress, an unmovable stool, a writing surface, a toilet, and a sink. To avoid guards having to escort prisoners to a shower block, where they would encounter fellow inmates, the cells were equipped with timed showerheads. Each cell had a single thin window and two doors—an interior grate and a solid exterior—separated by a space called a sally port, which provided an extra layer of containment; an inmate couldn’t slide, say, a note or shank under his door for another man to grab. Meals were delivered directly to prisoners three times a day. There was no reason for a man to leave his cell, save for limited rec time.

Civil rights groups had chastised the prison for its extensive use of solitary confinement, but government officials heralded the ADX as exactly what the penal system needed. After touring the facility, Cheri Nolan, then a U.S. deputy assistant attorney general, told the press, “I’ve never seen anything like it as far as the technology and physical setup.” As far as violent incidents were concerned, the men and women who worked at ADX Florence were proud of keeping a clean record—until April 2005.

Not yet 48 hours into his inaugural FBI assignment, Jon learned that he’d be investigating the first murder at the ADX, which had badly shaken the facility’s staff. A colleague explained that, as far as he could tell, the killing had everything to do with the Mexican Mafia.

“What’s that?” Jon asked. “Like a street gang?”

“No, it’s not a street gang,” his colleague replied. “It’s the mother of all street gangs. It’s like the Navy SEALs.”

Contrary to its name, the Mexican Mafia didn’t originate south of the border. The group started in 1957 at a juvenile lockup about 60 miles east of San Francisco. Luis Flores, a 16-year-old kid from Los Angeles, hatched a plan to unite rival Mexican American crews into one supergang. Prison was a dangerous place, and the idea was that if they banded together, they’d wield more power and be able to protect themselves. About a dozen founding members started recruiting, with an eye toward inductees who were willing to attack on command. The story goes that one of the gang’s architects found tales of the Italian mob alluring and coopted its name.

By 1961, the nascent group had perpetrated enough violence at the juvenile institution that its members were transferred to an adult penitentiary, San Quentin State Prison. San Quentin sat at the end of a small peninsula abutting the San Francisco Bay, not too far from Alcatraz. The Mexican Mafia quickly asserted its influence there, and by the end of the 1960s, the gang had extended its tentacles beyond San Quentin into every correctional facility in the state. Members deliberately caused enough problems at one prison—targeting guards, stabbing other prisoners, funneling in drugs from the outside—to get transferred to another facility, where they’d again use violence and intimidation to establish their authority.

In the early 1970s, a burst of brutality in California prisons attracted the attention of the FBI. There were 36 murders in 12 months, and officials believed that the Mexican Mafia was to blame for as many as 30. The FBI was also concerned that the gang might be infiltrating structures outside the correctional system. A special agent in San Francisco penned a classified memo in 1973 that described the gang (which “controls the major lines of narcotics into California prisons”) as having approximately 750 members. Based on information gleaned from confidential informants, the memo concluded that “the Mexican Mafia has become so sophisticated that it has put together an efficient intelligence organization, pools of sympathetic lawyers, has used revolutionary groups for its own ends, and has taken over respectable Mexican-American social action groups.” As members were paroled, they established sets across Southern California. In one instance, they allegedly infiltrated a nonprofit center for disadvantaged youth.

The gang developed an organizational structure not unlike that of a Fortune 500 company, with ranking members and a voting board that weighed in on matters like which new associates to recognize and which hits to approve. But membership wasn’t offered freely. Becoming a mafioso often took years. It required a current member to act as your sponsor and prove your willingness to kill. Once you were in, the rules of the gang were clear. No homosexuals, informants, or cowards would be tolerated. Members couldn’t harm each other without sanction, sleep with fellow mafiosi’s wives or girlfriends, or steal from one another. Joining the gang was a lifelong commitment. Dropouts would be killed, no questions asked.

Over the next two decades, la Eme continued its vicious reign. There were murders on the streets of California, stabbings in attorney visiting rooms, and violent feuds with other prison gangs. Reportedly, in the early 1990s, the group considered assassinating California governor Pete Wilson over what it viewed as an anti-Latino proposition to bar undocumented immigrants from using certain public services. According to The Black Hand, a book by journalist Chris Blatchford, the California Highway Patrol received eight separate tips that Wilson might be in danger, including mentions of a $1 million hit by la Eme. The agency investigated the tips but found nothing. An assassination attempt never materialized.

In 1995, the federal government filed an 81-page indictment against 22 alleged Mexican Mafia members and associates under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, the statute that designates penalties for offenses committed as part of an ongoing criminal enterprise. The FBI had flipped a high-ranking mafioso; he’d agreed to wear a wire, which netted damning evidence of murder, extortion, and kidnapping. Thirteen of those arrested were ultimately tried, and all but one were found guilty. At sentencing, prosecutors sought to cripple the gang by dispersing the convicted to various federal penitentiaries. Distance, they believed, would hamper communication and collusion. In fact, it helped the gang plant seeds across the entire country.

A few years later, the government tried again to undercut la Eme. In the early-morning hours of February 2, 1999, hundreds of law-enforcement officials suited up in tactical gear and fanned out across Los Angeles County. Armed with search and arrest warrants, they raided homes and businesses, sweeping up hundreds of suspects believed to have gang ties. Twenty-seven people were indicted under the RICO Act. Among them was Manuel Torrez.

A married father of four, Torrez, nicknamed Tati, was in his fifties. He’d spent much of his life in and out of state prisons. His kids only got to know him during the spurts—two years here, three years there—when he wasn’t locked up. I spoke with his son Andres, now 39, who told me that his father had tried to shield the family from the violence of the gang. Torrez took his two sons hiking in the hills outside Los Angeles, and he spoiled his two daughters, bringing home bags of candy and hiding the sweets from everyone except the girls. Occasionally, Torrez would throw a mattress in the back of his pickup and take the family to a drive-in movie.

Torrez told his kids that, although he couldn’t act as a role model for how to get up every morning and hold down a nine-to-five job, he could be an example of the awful things that would happen if they took the same path he had. “I’ve done enough time for everyone,” he said.

It was impossible for him to separate his two lives completely. Andres saw his father get arrested once. On another occasion, the narcotics cops who kept close tabs on Torrez pulled him over while he was running errands with Andres. When they noticed a white substance on the car’s dashboard, the police crowed, “We got you, Tati!” But it wasn’t cocaine; it was residue from a jelly donut that Andres had just finished eating.

Torrez’s past caught up with him in 1999, when he was charged under RICO for a range of allegations involving homicide, assault, extortion, and possession of drugs and weapons. According to a member of the Metropolitan Violent Gang Task Force who was involved in the bust, Tati was a big get: a longtime mafioso suspected of ordering numerous hits. Torrez pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 13 years at Lompoc, a federal prison an hour north of Santa Barbara.

He was senior enough in the Mexican Mafia that, at Lompoc, he was able to take charge of the yard—a coveted leadership role. As a seasoned gang veteran, Torrez no longer had to do any dirty work, but he oversaw it all: drug deals, assaults, and other violent business. When officials realized the power he wielded, they decided to put Torrez somewhere far from his connections in la Eme. The government transferred him to ADX Florence.

Torrez was in his sixties by then, with four grandkids back home. At the ADX, he gained a reputation as one of the graying old guard. He moved slowly when officers escorted him down a hallway or up a flight of stairs. Sometimes he had to steady himself against the prison’s walls. Andres told me that, at some point, his father had suffered a stroke.

The morning of the rec-yard murder, after the commotion had settled, ADX staff realized that Torrez was the man missing from Echo Unit. Fingerprints confirmed his identity. Less than a year after arriving in Colorado, the inmate whom a correctional officer once described as a “used-up gangster” became the prison’s first homicide victim.

Jon began his investigation by reviewing what the prison staff knew. As guards cleared the rec yard, one of them had noticed that an inmate’s shoes were spattered with blood. The prisoner’s name was Richard “Chuco” Santiago. He was a short man with a thick build and intricate tattoos, including several Aztec figures, covering his arms and chest. When guards arrived at his cell, they found Santiago stripped to his boxers and bent over his toilet, dunking his clothes and shoes in the water.

“What do you want?” Santiago asked as the officers entered the sally port. “I’m just washing some clothes.” The guards ordered him to stop. He looked right at them and kept going. Only when he was threatened with forceful extraction did he comply.

Santiago wasn’t a troublemaker. The guards considered him polite and respectful, and it was unusual for him to ignore an order. Still, there’s a common saying at the prison—no one winds up at ADX Florence by mistake—and Santiago was no exception. At 45, he’d amassed an extensive rap sheet that stretched all the way back to his teenage years: armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, felony possession of a firearm, narcotics violations, parole violations. When he committed the crime that put him away for life, he was already locked up. On the afternoon of January 25, 1989, he stabbed another inmate to death while working his shift in the kitchen at Lompoc. DNA testing linked Santiago to the crime, and his cell mate testified at the trial that, a few weeks before the murder, Santiago had asked what it would take to get into a prison gang. The cell mate also said that, the night before the killing, he’d overheard Santiago discussing a hit with a member of the Mexican Mafia. Santiago was found guilty in 1993 of the murder that, in all likelihood, had secured his place in la Eme.

After moving Santiago to a holding area, the ADX guards’ next step was to review the tapes from the rec yard’s cameras to figure out what they’d missed. The eerie, gruesome footage began at 8:15 a.m., six minutes before Guadian noticed Torrez on the ground. Torrez was doing toe touches near a camera in one corner of the yard. Santiago and another inmate, Silvestre “Chikali” Rivera, stood about ten feet away. Rivera swung his arms in a windmill motion, as if warming up for a workout. Santiago approached Torrez alone, and Torrez appeared to reach out to shake Santiago’s hand. Then Santiago darted at him and threw a punch. The blow pushed Torrez backward, directly underneath the camera. His position made it impossible for the lens to capture the attack.

The only other camera in the yard was in the far corner, which also made it difficult for officers Guadian and Aragon to spot what happened next: Rivera and Santiago punching and kicking Torrez in the ribs and head for two minutes straight. The attackers then took breaks, walking away from their victim. At one point, Santiago sipped from a water bottle. Then he went back and delivered several more blows. Torrez’s body jolted with the impact of each kick but was otherwise motionless. Four minutes after the final phase of the assault, guards arrived at the yard.

Later, when officers went to retrieve Rivera from his cell, he appeared to be shaking. The 47-year-old had never been charged with murder; he’d first gone to prison in 1979, when he was 21, for committing a string of bank robberies. He’d struggled with heroin addiction, and his prison file included write-ups for assaults on other inmates, peddling illegal drugs, and cooking a 25-gallon batch of contraband wine. Once, at another facility, he’d tried to escape by using a hacksaw to get out a window. He’d been transferred to the ADX from another lockup for beating and biting inmates and getting caught with heroin.

The day after the murder, while moving through a special housing unit for disciplined inmates, Rivera spoke to the guards escorting him. “I know you guys are mad at me for what I did,” he said, according to one of the officers.

The guards didn’t respond. Rivera kept talking.

“While I’m at rec, I heard this was the first at this facility,” he said. “Is that true?”

“What are you talking about?” an officer responded.

“What I did,” Rivera said. “I heard it made the news.”

When Jon watched the security footage, he wondered what there was to investigate. The case wasn’t a whodunit. This is ridiculous, he thought. It’s so obvious. Jon figured even the greenest of prosecutors could hit play on the tape and have a reasonable shot at extracting guilty pleas from the two inmates. And if the men didn’t admit what they’d done, surely it wouldn’t be that hard to convince a judge and jury to convict them.

“Boy,” Jon told me, “I didn’t know what I was talking about.”

Among the things he didn’t immediately comprehend were the legal peculiarities of the prisoners’ circumstances. Santiago was already serving life in prison; Rivera had another 15 years behind bars. In the grand scheme of the men’s incarcerated lives, a plea deal for, at a minimum, a few decades would mean very little. The government wanted to send a message to gangs: Stop killing behind bars. The question, then, was how to punish prisoners who’d all but reached the end of the line. One possible answer was the death penalty.

The Justice Department’s Capital Crimes Unit reviews federal cases that are eligible for death-penalty proceedings, and all first-degree murders are eligible. The death squad, as it’s known among defense lawyers, exists so that the same standard is applied to capital cases in Colorado as in, say, Georgia. Requesting permission to take someone’s life, however, calls for more than grainy video from a security camera. To begin with, it requires proving intent and premeditation. In the Torrez case, that would mean examining the inner workings of the Mexican Mafia.

Jon saw a thread that, once tugged, might help him unravel the backstory of the crime. Torrez and Santiago had been at ADX Florence since 2000 and had been housed in the same unit for almost a year; they’d been in rec yards together dozens of times and never seemed to be in conflict. Rivera, on the other hand, had arrived at the prison only a few weeks before the murder. The morning of the crime was only the second time he’d ever been outside for group rec. Jon wondered if Rivera had been the catalyst for the killing.

That question also piqued the interest of the prosecutor assigned to the case. Bob Mydans, a fit man in his fifties, with a square jaw and a full head of dark hair, was a longtime assistant U.S. attorney in Denver known for handling complex litigation. He’d helped bring down the city’s major mob family, the Smaldones, and prosecuted the so-called Cowboys, seven prison guards indicted for conspiring to deceive, threaten, and even torture inmates and hide the evidence.

In early 2007, Mydans invited Jon to his office on the 16th floor of a high-rise building with sweeping views of Denver’s downtown. Jon, who lived south of the city, didn’t make the trip to the capital often. It felt bureaucratic and stuffy. He preferred a slower pace of life and easy access to the mountains. He was relieved when he instantly connected with Mydans. They shared a deep love of the outdoors, and Mydans, 23 years Jon’s senior, boasted of exploring every continent except Antarctica. They talked about hikes in Rocky Mountain National Park that tourists too often skipped.

Then they began formulating a plan to tackle the ADX case. According to prison guards, a rumor was floating around that Santiago was a torpedo, slang for someone designated to carry out la Eme’s bloody business on the inside. If true, high-ranking mafiosi had decided to green-light Torrez, or mark him for death. Then they’d gotten word to Santiago, possibly through a messenger. One of the leaders of the Mexican Mafia, Adolf “Champ” Reynoso, was locked up at ADX Florence. Could he have called the shots? Or could the green light have come from a mafioso at another prison or one living on the outside?

Before Jon drove home, Mydans proposed setting up an office for the FBI agent next to his own. He wanted Jon to have the option of being just a shout away the deeper they dug into the case. “We both knew what we were getting into,” Jon told me.

The Mexican Mafia purportedly kept a secret list of approved hits. “Every now and then, a copy would surface,” Jon said, “and it was freakin’ 15 pages long.” The lists were almost certainly fake; the real one, if it existed, lived in the minds of the gang’s leadership.

If Torrez had ever been targeted for a hit, the FBI’s field office in Los Angeles might know. No place in the country boasted more experts on la Eme, and at least one analyst worked the beat full time. Jon and Mydans decided to pay them a visit.

When the two agents stepped off the plane onto a jet bridge at LAX in 2007, the sun was warm and bright. It felt invigorating. What they encountered at the FBI office did, too; the place was like a library stocked with every book they needed. “They had a ton of intel,” Jon said, ranging from historical documents about the gang to files on current members. “We wanted it all.” That was the strategy: collect as much information as possible and sort through it later.

Agents in L.A. shared the taxonomy of Mexican Mafia power players and a rundown of who was housed in which prisons. They also offered access to two pools of valuable sources. The first were behind bars: men associated with la Eme who had struck a deal agreeing to pass along information and rumors to the FBI. The second were gang defectors, who at great risk to themselves had provided information about la Eme to the government. They’d been placed in witness protection and were living under new identities in remote locations across the country.

Jon and Mydans decided to meet with countless sources in person. “It’s not like you’re going to get a subpoena and read through their email,” Jon said. He and Mydans flew all over the country, visiting dusty towns with a couple of stoplights and a Chili’s. Mydans seemed to relish the work. He was a traveler at heart. “Everywhere he went, it was going to be an adventure,” Jon said. Mydans loved to stop locals on the sidewalk and solicit restaurant recommendations. To him, eating ribs off a paper plate at a hole-in-the-wall barbecue joint was a form of enlightenment.

Among the people they met with were ex-mafiosi. Jon couldn’t tell me who the defectors were, where they were located, or the specific intelligence that they shared. Putting identifying information into the world risked the Mexican Mafia showing up on its former members’ doorsteps and killing them on the spot.

The trips produced several explanations of why la Eme might have green-lit Torrez, but one came up more than the others. Before his arrest in the 1999 RICO case, Torrez had been involved in the drug trade in Southern California. He’d used the Mexican Mafia’s muscle and threats of violence to collect taxes from dealers and junkies; they paid him for the right to sell and to use on the streets. But Torrez overstepped. He wanted taxes from another mafioso’s territory, so he’d had the man killed—a clear violation of two gang rules: You don’t interfere with another member’s business, and you don’t unilaterally decide to kill another mafioso.

That would mean Torrez was murdered in 2005 for something he’d done in the 1990s. Such a long delay isn’t unheard of. In the Mexican Mafia, it can take years for information about an offense to circulate, and even longer for leadership to sign off on a hit, given how diffuse and secretive the gang is—to say nothing of the fact that, in many instances, both shot callers and their targets are in lockup.

Jon and Mydans came to believe that Rivera was the messenger who’d arrived at ADX Florence with confirmation of the green light and communicated it to Santiago. During the investigation, Jon heard stories of the extraordinary lengths la Eme went to when it wanted that kind of information conveyed. The message didn’t always come directly from a high-ranking member. Maybe another inmate had told Rivera while riding with him in a transfer van or sitting with him in a holding cell. Or maybe word had been passed through a corrupt correctional officer or attorney.

Equally alarming were tales of how la Eme manipulated legal cases against its members and associates. The gang viewed discovery—the phase when lawyers share evidence in advance of a trial—as a fact-finding mission. It was an opportunity to identify defectors and snitches and to learn how the feds were gathering their intelligence. Armed with that information, the Mexican Mafia could figure out ways to clog the investigative process or order hits against cooperators. “They value life so little, it’d be nothing for them to go put a shank in somebody just so they could take it to trial and corner all these witnesses up,” Jon told me.

Jon watched the security footage of Torrez’s murder so many times that he lost count. Some days, when he and Mydans weren’t on the road, he would arrive for work, sit down at his desk, bring the video up on his computer, and hit play. He memorized the men’s movements and gestures. He looked for clues he might not have seen the previous dozen times he’d watched.

The morning of the murder, guards hadn’t taken Rivera out to the rec yard right away. It seemed to have been an honest clerical oversight. When Rivera hailed an officer to his cell and said that he should be outside, the guard checked prison records and realized that the inmate was right. Rivera was shackled and led to the yard. The whole process took about ten or 15 minutes. In the intervening time, as Jon saw on the security footage, Santiago appeared to wonder where Rivera was. At one point, he stood talking next to a small window in one of the walls facing the rec yard. Based on diagrams of the ADX, Jon could see that the window was in Rivera’s cell.

Because the footage had no accompanying audio, Jon decided to visit the ADX to discern what the inmates knew about the conversation. Maybe someone from a rival gang had seen something from his window or had heard a fragment of a rumor about what was said through a drainpipe, which carried voices between cells. Jon approached the prison’s in-house law enforcement, Special Investigative Services, for help.

“Do you guys have an interview room?” he asked.

“Yeah,” one investigator said. “But you can’t use it.”

No one wanted to be seen, willingly or not, talking to an FBI agent. It could mark him as a traitor.

Guards had to be crafty. One tactic, later discussed in court proceedings, was to pull an inmate from his cell under the pretense of a doctor visit or a lawyer call, then escort him to an out-of-the-way area where Jon waited on the other side of a thick pane of glass. Still, when prisoners saw or heard that someone was being moved through the block, they got curious. “Hey guard, why’s this guy getting out?” one would yell from his cell. If the answer was “dentist appointment,” the skeptical retort was, “I didn’t know he had teeth problems.”

Jon was nervous about the interviews. He mostly met with gangsters; the big-name prisoners, terrorists like the Unabomber, were segregated in special units, disconnected from where the Torrez murder had happened. Jon sat across from men with hard-bitten countenances. Lives of violence and incarceration had left them tattooed, scarred, and bitter. Some had been locked up by the FBI, and when Jon flashed his badge, they turned hostile and demanded to be taken back to their cells. Others, though, seemed desperate to talk. Not about the murder—no one, it turned out, had anything pertinent to say about that. They just wanted to shoot the shit. The men had stumbled into a disruption to the monotony of their daily lives and wanted to stay in it as long as they could.

Though Jon came away from the interviews with very little, the ADX guards shared an important tidbit. Just before he was killed, Torrez had used the yard’s intercom system, which allows inmates to ask guards questions. He’d asked where Rivera was. “It’s crazy,” Jon told me. “He’s inviting his killer to come outside. It’s like [the gang] got word to him that Rivera’s got something he wants to share that’s really important. Then Rivera shows up and it’s, ‘Yeah, by the way, you’re green-lit.’”

By early 2010, Jon and Mydans were confident that they had the evidence they needed to support their green-light theory. Mydans filed a straightforward, two-count indictment at the federal courthouse in Denver. It alleged that Santiago and Rivera had “willfully, deliberately, maliciously and under premeditation and malice aforethought” killed Torrez. It kept details about the hit, like who might have ordered it, to a minimum. Presumably, Mydans wanted to hold that knowledge close until trial.

Court was still a long way off. There would be standard pretrial motions and maneuverings. More important, the Capital Crimes Unit had to decide if it wanted Mydans to pursue the death penalty. He and Jon waited a year before they heard from the unit.

In March 2011, Mydans announced that he would seek the death penalty against Santiago but not Rivera. The reason why was tied up, at least in part, with a deft move by Rivera’s defense attorney, David Lane. A prominent Denver lawyer whose name was on a short list of people approved to act as court-appointed counsel in capital cases, Lane had taken Rivera’s case in 2010. Like Jon, when he first watched the security footage, he felt uneasy. It reminded him of an old newspaper cartoon in which a lawyer sits in a jail cell talking with his client. In Lane’s recollection, the caption said something to the effect of, “OK, the crime is on videotape. You’re plunging the knife in 52 times. Then you get in your car, run over the guy. It was in Times Square, and there are 10,000 eyewitnesses. Your fingerprints are on the knife, and your DNA is all over the body. Now, here’s my plan.”

Lane decided that his first duty was to save his client from the death penalty. On that front, he saw an opening. When he learned about the unsolicited comments Rivera had made to a pair of guards the day after the murder, seemingly admitting to the crime, Lane noted two relevant facts: First, although he’d spent much of his life in America, Rivera was a Mexican citizen. According to the Vienna Convention, an international treaty, citizens of one country arrested in another must immediately be appraised of their right to speak to counsel. The second fact was that no one had advised Rivera of that right. Testimony about Rivera’s comments, Lane believed, shouldn’t be admissible.

Arguing that the government had violated the Vienna Convention wasn’t an ironclad legal tactic—among other problems, the Senate has never ratified the treaty—but it was a canny diplomatic move. The Mexican ambassador to the United States agreed to write a letter to then attorney general Eric Holder and secretary of state Hillary Clinton. “The Government of Mexico has no record of any consular notification ever being provided in Mr. Rivera’s case,” it stated.

Two months after the letter was delivered to officials in Washington, Mydans announced his intent in the case. Rivera sidestepping a death-penalty prosecution meant that he and Santiago would be tried separately. Rivera’s trial would come first. Before it could begin, though, tragedy struck.

In 2008, two years into the investigation of the Torrez murder, Jon had met a woman I’ll call A.K. when she joined the FBI office in Denver. A.K. had always wanted to work at the bureau. A self-described geek and overachiever from the Midwest, she was the kind of recruit who, unlike Jon, had studied for the math on the entrance exam. She’d served in the military as an intelligence analyst. In Colorado, she was assigned to the international terrorism desk. More than a year later, Jon asked her out, and among their first dates was a hike in Rocky Mountain National Park, one of those hidden gems that Jon and Mydans liked to talk about. The pair trekked about a mile and a half up to Dream Lake, a long, narrow body of water nestled among emerald-colored fir trees and 10,000-foot slate peaks. It was a beautiful spot, particularly in winter. After several years of dating, Jon and A.K. decided to get married there.

The morning of Saturday, February 18, 2012, was brisk. Jon and A.K. bundled up, strapped snowshoes onto their boots, and headed up the snow-covered trail toward the lake. The ceremony took place at the edge of the water, and the officiant was the only witness. On their way down, they ran into a stranger and told him they’d just gotten married; he agreed to take their picture. To celebrate, the pair spent the night at a cabin in the park.

When they descended the next day and regained cell service, their phones lit up with messages and missed calls. They weren’t from friends or family offering congratulations, however. They were from colleagues calling with terrible news: Mydans had died of a heart attack. It had happened while the attorney was snowshoeing with his wife in Rocky Mountain National Park, not far from the happy couple on the edge of Dream Lake.

Jon was devastated. He’d spent the first six years of his FBI career working closely with Mydans, living and breathing an unprecedented case. At the funeral a few days later, Mydans’s boss, U.S. attorney John Walsh, said in prepared remarks, “We tried some difficult cases as a team, and there was no one better to do it with.”

Within a few weeks, Jon decided to hand the Torrez case to A.K., who by then was off the terrorism desk and working other crimes, including some at ADX Florence. Jon was confident that he and Mydans had built a strong argument. By transferring responsibility to his wife, Jon would still be close to the trial, and he could advise or consult if the FBI needed him. But he would also have space to grieve while working his new beat: white-collar crime.

U.S. attorney M.J. Menendez took over Mydans’s role as lead prosecutor. She and her second chair, Valeria Spencer, had work to do; there were 873 pretrial filings. In part that was because death-penalty cases are so complex. They can drag on for years. Lane, Rivera’s attorney, even moved at one point to dismiss the charges against his client on the grounds that the prosecution had failed “to commence the case against him within such a time as to afford him his right to due process and to speedy trial.” The request was denied.

Rather than try to prove the green-light theory that Jon and Mydans had worked so painstakingly to bolster, Menendez and Spencer decided to take a more conservative approach: They were going to rely on the security footage to convince the jury that a murder had occurred, but not dwell on whether or not la Eme had ordered it. The lawyers declined to discuss with me why they made that decision. Though she wasn’t involved in trial strategy, A.K. pointed out that green-light theory added complexity and risk to the proceedings, so the lawyers did what, to them, seemed most sensible.

Jon agreed with his wife’s take. Still, he told me, “We could have presented that case the day after the murder happened.” Gone was the opportunity to discuss publicly and in detail the channels by which the Mexican Mafia ordered hits. Gone was the chance for ex-gangsters to take the stand, with their identities protected if they chose, to declare that Santiago was a torpedo.

Rivera’s trial opened in Denver on April 6, 2015. For security reasons, the jury was sequestered and anonymous; each member was assigned a four-digit number, affixed with his or her initials, as an identifier. The defendant, wearing a checked shirt, gray slacks, and a salt-and-pepper mustache, sat next to his attorneys with his legs chained to a bucket filled with cement. U.S. marshals were positioned nearby.

In her opening statement, Spencer ran the surveillance tape for the jury. “What you’re about to see,” Spencer said, “is footage from those cameras … showing Mr. Rivera and Mr. Santiago taking an old man in ill health completely by surprise, attacking him, and killing him. The video will also show how the other inmates on the yard did absolutely nothing in response.” She didn’t mention the possibility that the Mexican Mafia had ordered the hit.

The defense opened with a different theory. “There was a plan to commit a murder on April 21, 2005,” defense co-counsel Kathryn Stimson said, “but that plan was by Manuel Torrez, and that murder was planned for this man who sits before you today, Silvestre Rivera.” The defense intended to show that, were it not for Santiago stepping in to help Rivera, Torrez would be the one on trial for homicide. Her client, Stimson continued, “was acting in self-defense … to protect himself and save his own life.”

It’s common after a prison murder for the perpetrators to claim that they did what they had to do. What worried the prosecution wasn’t the approach; it was the defense’s promise to call witnesses who would prove its theory, including another ADX inmate. In all their years of investigation, Jon and Mydans had never been able to secure an eyewitness to the murder.

For the next four days, while laying out their side of the case, Menendez and Spencer called more than a dozen people to testify. Each one provided a detailed account of what happened the day of the murder, from the moment rec ops noticed Torrez on the ground to the moment he was declared dead. José Guadian choked up on the stand while recalling what he’d seen in the video-monitoring room. “It didn’t matter that they’re inmates to me,” Guadian, who’d since left ADX Florence to work for the Department of Homeland Security, told the jury. “It’s that this happened on my watch.” A paramedic testified that the only other instances when he’d witnessed the extent of trauma Torrez had suffered was in people who’d jumped from the nearby Royal Gorge Bridge, which spanned a rocky chasm 1,000 feet above the Arkansas River. The coroner who’d examined Torrez’s body reported that the inmate was almost certainly dead before he was removed from the ADX; in fact, he may well have died before he was carted out of the rec yard.

When the defense took over, the attorneys depicted ADX Florence as a place where the kill-or-be-killed way of life common in many prisons was at its most extreme. Lane called Wayne Bridgewater, 63, to the stand as a sort of character witness. Bridgewater was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood and had been behind bars for 42 years; he was serving four consecutive life sentences at the ADX, each for a different prison murder. He’d agreed to testify because he thought Rivera seemed like a decent person.

“When you are in prison and somebody accuses you of being a ‘check-in,’” Lane asked, “are you familiar with that term?”

“Yes,” Bridgewater said.

“Explain to the jury what that means.”

“That means that somebody went to prison staff and requested to be locked up in a segregation situation, to be away from all other inmates.”

“And what does that signal to the rest of the inmates?”

“That he’s a coward.”

“What’s wrong with being labeled a coward?”

“Prison isn’t a good place to be labeled a coward.”

“Why?”

“You know, it’s prey to predator in prison. So if you’re not a predator, you’re going to be prey. That just opens the door for that.”

“If somebody were to walk up to you and say, ‘I thought you were a check-in, Bridgewater,’ how would you take that?”

“I’d kill him.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s being disrespectful to me.”

“I don’t understand. You would kill him because he’s being disrespectful to you?”

“Yeah.”

“Why is that a capital offense?”

“You got to understand the honor code that we live by in prison,” Bridgewater replied. “First thing is, you don’t allow people to disrespect. You know, you live your life by certain moral codes in prison, and you live and die by them.”

The following day, the defense called another ADX inmate, Arcadio Perez. He’d been in the rec yard when the murder happened. He’d also been Rivera’s cell mate at a previous lockup. Menendez and Spencer had no idea what Perez was going to say to the jury, but they sensed that he was the defense’s key witness.

Speaking through an interpreter, Perez shared a very different account of the crime. He said that Torrez had asked him multiple times to help kill Rivera. (Because Rivera was an associate of la Eme and not a made member, Torrez wouldn’t have needed approval from the higher-ups.) A few days before the murder, a fellow prisoner who, because of good behavior, was allowed to clean the prison’s halls, had passed Perez a note from Torrez. It said that Rivera had been disrespectful and had to be dealt with. Stimson, who was questioning Perez, asked what he’d done with the note. He said that he’d ripped it up and flushed it down his toilet “because it was a hot letter.” Perez also told the court that, in the rec yard, Torrez said he’d smuggle in a piece of metal to use in the hit. Torrez would signal the attack on Rivera with a simple “let’s go.”

During cross-examination, Spencer tried to undercut Perez’s credibility by playing the security footage and pausing at moments when Perez and Torrez stood next to each other in the yard. Was that when Torrez said that he wanted to kill Rivera? Perez said he couldn’t remember. When Spencer pressed him, he insisted, “I’m not lying to the ladies and gentlemen of the jury. He said to me, ‘We’re going to kill him.’”

Spencer also broached Jon and Mydans’s green-light theory, one of only a few instances during the trial when the idea was mentioned. “You knew that Mr. Rivera had come over to ADX and brought that final piece, that final message over, that the green light was activated on Mr. Torrez and it was time to kill him, didn’t you?” Spencer asked. The defense pounced, objecting that the question rested on facts that weren’t in evidence. The judge allowed the question, and Perez said that he’d never heard about any green light. Spencer didn’t pursue the matter further. (Lane, for his part, was dismissive of the theory that Rivera was a messenger. “There are ways to pass messages without having Silvestre Rivera come to the ADX,” he said in an interview.)

Rivera was the last person to testify. The courtroom fell silent, and the jurors’ posture stiffened in anticipation of what the defendant had to say.

“Did you intend to kill Manuel Torrez?” Stimson asked.

“No, I did not,” Rivera said.

“Did you kill him?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“Why?”

“Because if I didn’t get involved right then and there, I would be the one dead that day.”

“How do you feel about the fact that he’s dead?”

“I feel bad. I feel bad because a life was taken. I ain’t never done that before, but it was either him or me. That’s the way it was.”

Rivera claimed that Torrez had become angry with him. He couldn’t say for sure why, but he had a guess. There were often internal disputes within the Mexican Mafia. Over the years, Rivera had become close with a few guys Torrez didn’t get along with, including one who’d wanted him dead. Rivera revealed those connections during his first day in the rec yard. Later Torrez shouted at him, “I’ll take your fucking life, you fucking punk.”

Rivera had been surprised when Santiago, who’d once held the title of boxing champion at San Quentin, offered to look out for him. “Don’t worry,” Rivera recalled Santiago saying. “I got you.”

The jury didn’t reach a verdict right away. After a full day of deliberation followed by a night of rest, they reconvened at 8:30 a.m. on April 21, 2015—exactly ten years after Torrez’s murder.

At 12:02 p.m., the jurors sent word to the judge that they had a question. The attorneys gathered in the courtroom to hear it read aloud: “Would you consider providing us the ability to consider a charge to a lesser degree than murder in or to the first degree?” This almost certainly indicated good news for the defense. Lane, however, had already discussed this possibility with his client, and Rivera didn’t want the judge to consider another charge. He was approaching 60 and still had several years on the books for his bank robberies. Any felony conviction would amount to a de facto life sentence; his only chance of seeing the outside world again was to beat the murder charge altogether. The judge said no to the question.

At 5:23 p.m., the jury returned its verdict: guilty. The defense’s gamble had failed. Rivera would spend the rest of his life in prison.

Afterward, the judge let the lawyers speak with the jurors. More than one indicated that the deciding factor was the duration of the assault. Rivera had claimed self-defense, but what the jury saw in the surveillance video was a few too many punches and kicks after the supposed threat had been neutralized. No one spoke about the possibility that the hit had been ordered.

When A.K. got home after spending the duration of the trial at a hotel in Denver, she and Jon decided to open a bottle of wine, something special. “We’re pretty simple,” Jon told me, “so special’s not $200 a bottle.” There’s a line of California wines called 19 Crimes; each label bears the backstory of a legendary convict. That night, Jon and A.K. drank a cabernet called the Prisoner.

Sentencing was a formality. Nevertheless, at the hearing a few weeks after Rivera’s conviction, both sides of the case had something to say. The prosecution introduced letters written by Torrez’s sons describing their father. “My Dad was a man who loved his family and worked hard to keep us from his lifestyle,” one read. “I just want the court and these two cowards to know that when they killed my Dad, they didn’t kill a ‘crime boss’ or a ‘shot caller’ NO! They killed my dad, my Mom’s Husband, & my Children’s Grandfather! They denied us the opportunity to share our special moments with him.”

Lane followed up by admonishing hypocrisy. “The government is humanizing Mr. Torrez and completely dehumanizing Mr. Rivera and Mr. Santiago,” he said. “Had this day gone according to plan, Mr. Torrez would be seated in this courtroom facing a death penalty for the murder of Silvestre Rivera…. The fact that Mr. Torrez is the person who ended up in the morgue that day and not Mr. Rivera is not lost on anyone, but just as Mr. Torrez is a multifaceted human being, or was, so is Mr. Rivera, so is Mr. Santiago.” The statement pointed to what Lane saw as a flawed, even inhumane attempt to impose the same standards and assumptions that govern the outside world on a place like the ADX, which one of its wardens had described to the press as “a clean version of hell.”

All life is fragile; at ADX Florence, it was constantly under threat. Why, Lane wondered aloud, did the legal system struggle to acknowledge that reality?

In the end, no one got the chance to make the same case in Santiago’s defense. A few months after Rivera’s trial, the government offered Santiago the opportunity to plead guilty and avoid the death penalty. He took the deal.

Several times during our conversations, Jon remarked on how frustrating it can be when cases drag on or don’t go as planned. I asked how he handles the stress of his job. “I’m not sure,” he replied. “Bourbon helps.”

Jon hasn’t been back to ADX Florence in several years. A.K. still works cases based there, but she’s never handled a homicide. There hasn’t been one since 2005. In recent years, the prison has more often made headlines for potential civil rights violations. A class action lawsuit, the largest ever filed against the federal Bureau of Prisons, was settled in January 2017. Attorneys alleged widespread abuses of mentally ill prisoners and “deplorable conditions of confinement that are inhumane to these prisoners.” The suit described inmates who, traumatized in solitary confinement, ate their own fingers or sliced off their earlobes, and others with preexisting conditions like depression that the prison neglected, sometimes to the point that prisoners committed suicide. The ADX agreed to improve inmates’ psychiatric evaluations, and it transferred more than 100 prisoners with diagnosed mental illnesses to other facilities.

The most tangible outcome of the Torrez murder was a policy change that surely displeased the lawyers battling for better conditions at ADX Florence. The day after the crime, the warden ended group rec for good. Instead, inmates would have access, one at a time, to chain-link cages erected in the yards.

After his trial, Rivera disappeared back into the ADX. Santiago did, too. These days, when either man is scheduled for rec time, two guards escort him out of his cell, down a hallway, and into one of the individual enclosures. The inmates’ lives are lived between two cages.

After reading thousands of pages of government documents and court records and transcripts, I decided to write Rivera a letter asking if he would talk to me about his trial. Surprisingly, he wrote back. When I’d spoken with Stimson, one of his attorneys, she’d told me that Rivera was one of her all-time favorite clients. He’d learned how to crochet in prison—using plastic hooks he bought with commissary money—and liked to make hats and gloves. Stimson said Rivera had crafted a few pieces of outerwear for her young children, which drew compliments from strangers. “Straight from the ADX!” she would boast.

I didn’t receive any knitted items from Rivera, but his letter was courteous. “I honestly thought that when my trial was over I’d be forgotten,” he wrote. His handwriting was a series of printed block letters that resembled tiles on a Scrabble board. “I don’t even know how to reply to your letter. You have to understand one thing about me, any time someone takes interest, the first thing I think it must be a set up.” After spending more than 35 years behind bars, Rivera added, “you start to be a little leery of people.” He said he wanted to consider my request some more before making his decision. Since Christmas was coming up, he wished me happy holidays.

The next letter arrived several weeks letter. Rivera again thanked me for my interest but declined an interview. The main reason: He wanted to protect Santiago. “If you’d want to make me look good to your readers, someone has to look bad. I rather die a thousand deaths than to do that to my codefendant, after all if it wasn’t for him you’d be trying to write Mr. Torrez story now,” he wrote. “This is my life and even though I would love to put my story out there so people could learn of the injustice in here, I’d be putting myself in a bad spot.”

In other words, Santiago had defended him, but people on the outside, who can’t fathom what life is like inside the ADX, might not understand why. “We live in a different world in here,” Rivera wrote.

I sensed another message, too. Maybe Rivera couldn’t risk violating the codes of the Mexican Mafia, including its version of the First Commandment: La Eme comes before everything else. Thou shalt have no other gods before the gang.

Rivera signed the note, “With much respect, Silvestre.”

A fearless journalist wrote a seminal account of police brutality during the 1967 race riots. Then he wound up on the wrong side of the law.

By Greg Donahue

1983

The night Ron Porambo was shot in the head, he told his wife that he was going out to meet a friend. It was late, but that was when the 44-year-old newspaper reporter did his best work. As he had countless times before, Porambo slid into his Volkswagen hatchback and cruised through the dark into downtown Newark.

Outside the car windows, Newark’s row houses looked like gathering ghosts. Block after block, the battered wooden structures loomed three stories tall. Their facades caught the dull glow of the streetlights that flickered on when the sun set each day; the broken lights—and there were many—had been that way for as long as Porambo could remember. Below sagging front stoops, where cracked asphalt met stained sidewalks, garbage clogged the gutters.

Newark had been decaying for decades. Crime, corruption, and disenfranchisement had led Harper’s magazine to dub it “the worst American city.” Porambo, though, saw it as scrappy and resolute. He saw himself in much the same way: as a man with something to prove.

Porambo drove to 186 Ridgewood Ave., the address where he was supposed to meet his friend. After pulling to a stop at the curb, he cut the ignition and waited. He’d made a career out of consorting with hustlers, sex workers, and drug dealers to unearth gritty investigative stories about the city’s poorest residents. Most of his sources and subjects were black. Porambo, who was white, wrote about the people he believed had the most insight into suffering, inequality, and resilience in America. “They know,” he once told a fellow reporter.

A man approached his passenger-side window. It wasn’t the person Porambo had expected to see—or if it was, the greeting was a terrible shock. The man raised a .38-caliber handgun and pulled the trigger.

Three bullets penetrated Porambo’s skull. Another lodged in his left leg. He slumped over the steering wheel, filling the streets of Newark’s South Ward with the drone of a car horn. The sound must have scared off the attacker before he finished what he’d come to do. A rag was later found stuffed in the car’s gas tank; lighting it on fire would have blown the hatchback, and Porambo, to oblivion.

As blood poured from his head and thigh, Porambo struggled to open his door. A 16-year-old girl who lived down the street walked by just as what remained of the bullet-riddled window shattered onto the pavement. She ran home to call the cops. By the time they arrived, Porambo was unconscious. He would later recall feeling like he’d slipped into a dream. He was weightless, flying.

The crime, committed on May 19, 1983, made headlines in New Jersey. It wasn’t the first time Porambo had been in the news for finding himself at the wrong end of a gun. His meticulous reporting on Newark’s 1967 race riots had culminated in his opus, No Cause for Indictment, a book that implicated law enforcement in the unjustified killings of nearly two dozen black residents. The New Yorker heralded it as “probably the most moving and instructive book yet written on any of the bloody civil disturbances of the sixties.” After it was published, an unknown assailant caught Porambo in his car unawares and shot him in both legs. Porambo claimed that the attack was retribution for his reporting. His publisher took the opportunity to place a full-column ad in The New York Times promoting the book in block letters: “LAST WEEK THEY TRIED TO MURDER THE AUTHOR.”

In a different world, Porambo might have joined Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, Truman Capote, and Jimmy Breslin in the pantheon of 20th-century journalism’s giants. No Cause for Indictment might have become mandatory reading in classes on investigative reporting and urban studies. Today, it might be referenced in articles about police brutality—a subject Porambo covered relentlessly—and Black Lives Matter. Instead, scarcely anyone knows Porambo’s name.

That’s because, by the time he was shot on Ridgewood Ave., his life had gone off the rails. Porambo seemed to carry two opposing selves, one as bitter as the other was generous; his wife sometimes called him Jekyll and Hyde. During the years that should have been his journalistic prime, his dark side won the battle for his soul. On that particular night in May 1983, he wasn’t attacked for his reporting, but for his second, unlikely career.

When he awoke after surgery in a Newark hospital, Porambo still had a bullet in his brain. Doctors couldn’t get it out, leaving him with permanent speech and motor deficiencies. He couldn’t remember who’d shot him, but that didn’t matter. Porambo had been handcuffed to his bed. The cops who’d pulled him from the Volkswagen were investigating the fearless writer for murder.

The bar where Porambo spent late nights while working at his first full-time newspaper job, in Kingsport, Tennessee, was called the Bloody Bucket. The name honored the vicious brawls that frequently broke out there. Little more than a two-room shack that looked like a place where firewood would be stored, the bar teemed with sex workers, johns, and moonshine bootleggers. In 1965, the year Porambo arrived in town, police arrested the Bloody Bucket’s owners for “running a Negro house of prostitution catering mostly to white customers.”

It was exactly the kind of rough-and-tumble joint where Porambo liked to cultivate sources for his stories in the Kingsport Times-News. Municipal buildings and politicians’ offices he could do without. The same went for the manicured suburban existence of his childhood.

He was born in East Orange, New Jersey, on Thanksgiving Day in 1938, to Millie and Frank Porambo. They owned Franchett’s, a wholesale bakery; his father had patented a device to manufacture double-twist crullers. The Porambos were traditional Italian American Catholics, hardworking and dutiful. Thanks to the doughnut business, they were also quite wealthy. As a kid, Porambo liked model boats and comic books, and he developed a fascination for the culture and history of Native Americans. He considered their collective plight to be America’s original sin and was apt to decry it to whoever would listen. “He was always for the underdog,” Ron’s uncle Mike Magnolia once told a reporter.

By his early teens, Porambo was restless. The sober experience of Catholic school was becoming unbearable for the energetic, socially conscious kid. Hoping to find their son an outlet, his parents encouraged him to sign up for a youth-boxing program in nearby Newark, run by Jack Reno, a police officer and local sports legend. Most of the young men Porambo encountered in the gym came from Newark’s poor black neighborhoods. In the ring, the hierarchies that plagued society fell away. A boxer proved his worth by fighting and winning, nothing more. Porambo was enthralled.

At first he came off as a rube to the native Newarkers. “He used to show up at the gym, and he’d be wearin’ these big thick suspenders and plaid shirts,” sparring partner Chico Belleran told a journalist at New Jersey Monthly years later. But his opponents quickly found out that Porambo could punch. After only a year in training, he won the 1955 New Jersey Golden Gloves. He turned pro and earned a reputation as a middleweight who, rather than use footwork to avoid getting hit, relished slugging it out. When Reno asked Porambo why he didn’t try to out-box his rivals, the young man replied, “You know, Jack, that’s my style.”

The teenager was fiercely independent, and his time in Newark created a gulf between himself and his family. He started dating black women and brought them home to meet his stunned parents. He asked Reno to save his boxing earnings in an account to help him pay for college, so that he wouldn’t be beholden to anyone. Supporting himself as a prizefighter, he explained to a friend, was the “right thing to do.”

Porambo landed a few big fights in his early twenties, including bouts at Madison Square Garden and one in front of John Wayne on the undercard before the historic Ingemar Johansson–Floyd Patterson heavyweight championship in Yankee Stadium. His softer side, though, derailed his career. “He was a terrific puncher, but he didn’t have that killer instinct,” Belleran said. “He’d get to talking to his opponents before a fight, get to feelin’ sorry for the guy and all that. Then he’d go out an’ lose.”

As his boxing ambitions waned, Porambo looked for other ways of making a living. He joined the military, but that ended abruptly in 1963, after he rowed a boat away from his posting at Fort Slocum, New York, for a midnight rendezvous with a woman he’d just met. He toyed briefly with joining his older brother, Carl, in the family business, but Carl was as eager a rule follower as he was not. Finally, Porambo settled on attending Rutgers University’s journalism program. He later told The New York Times, “I knew that was the only course I could conceivably pass.”

After graduating, Porambo took to his new profession with characteristic doggedness and an instinct for landing a knockout punch. Within a year of starting the job in Kingsport, one of his features won a state journalism prize. He was willing to cover topics other reporters wouldn’t: Kingsport’s black neighborhoods, for instance, and the city’s homeless population. He once wrote a story about an abandoned parking lot nicknamed “the jungle” where alcoholics drank grape juice mixed with Solox, a shellac and paint thinner consisting of ethyl alcohol, methanol, and gasoline. Ingesting it caused the individuals to fall into a nearly comatose condition. During his reporting, Porambo counted some 75 empty cans of Solox scattered around the jungle. Kingsport’s public-safety director called Porambo’s report an exaggeration, so the journalist went back to the lot and gathered every can he saw—76 this time—and photographed them stacked neatly in the Times-News’ offices. The image ran in the paper with the headline, “All Right, Jim, You Count ‘Em.”

Porambo was also audacious when it came to love. One night at the Bloody Bucket, the 27-year-old spied a pretty, stylish young black woman across the room. She eyed him, too, the white guy with a roguish grin and heavy-lidded brown eyes. Thanks to a strict routine of push-ups, sit-ups, and running, Porambo’s coltish, five-foot-eleven frame remained chiseled, though he’d given up boxing. His lips were thick and his ears misshapen from getting knocked around the ring, giving his visage the raw look of a sculptor’s first pass at a clay bust.

The woman’s name was Carol Scott, and she was 19, with a seven-month-old daughter named Glenna. Porambo liked Carol because she was strong-willed and curious. She liked Porambo’s intellect and brio. Soon after they met, she started wearing his college ring on a chain around her neck. “It just got serious right away,” Carol told me in a recent interview, snapping her fingers. “I didn’t have a fear of going out with him.” Her attitude was bold, given the politics and social mores of Tennessee. Interracial marriage was illegal. Six months after meeting Carol, Porambo proposed anyway.

In early 1966, the couple drove to New Jersey and holed up in a motel near Porambo’s parents’ house. He called his uncle Mike to the hotel and asked him to break the news of the impending marriage to the rest of the family. Maybe hearing it from him would help smooth things over, he thought. It didn’t. To Porambo’s parents, dating black women when he was a rebellious teenager was one thing; marrying one was another.

Porambo argued with his mother about the relationship over the phone. When his parents finally had the couple over for dinner, Carol sat uncomfortably at a table as the hosts, who barely addressed her, disparaged black people. Porambo admonished them. “What do you mean by ‘those people?’” he demanded. “They’re people just like we are!” By the time the dinner ended, it was clear that he and Carol would be getting married without his family’s blessing.

For all the time he spent in dive bars, Porambo rarely drank to excess. Yet he showed up to his own wedding plastered. He and Carol had recently moved to Albany, because it was legal for them to marry in New York. As Porambo staggered into the Catholic church, the quick-thinking priest corralled him into a side room to offer some counseling—and, in all likelihood, a large glass of water.

Carol waited patiently at the altar, beaming in a blue chiffon dress and white veil. Glenna, whom Porambo had adopted, played on the floor with the young son of the wedding’s only invited guests: Fred Bruning and his wife, Wink. Bruning and Porambo both worked at the Knickerbocker News, a local paper, and the two had become fast friends; their families spent evenings together cooking Italian food or playing marathon games of carom billiards. Because the Brunings weren’t Catholic, the priest had asked two female church employees to serve as witnesses. They looked on wide-eyed as Porambo eventually emerged from the side room and walked unsteadily across the sanctuary’s marble floor to his southern bride. When the priest asked Porambo if he took Carol to be his lawfully wedded wife, Porambo threw back his head and yelled, loud enough to shake the rafters, “I do!” After the ceremony, the newlyweds returned to their basement apartment with the Brunings to celebrate. The party quickly shrank to three as Porambo found a comfortable spot on the bathroom floor and slept through his wedding night.

Porambo cut an equally blunt figure at the Knickerbocker News. On his first day in the office, he wore a black beret cocked sideways across his forehead and carried an electric teakettle tucked under one arm. A full-bend pipe was clamped between his teeth, and a wake of spicy tobacco musk trailed him through the newsroom as he walked to his desk. Before long, water was boiling in the kettle and Porambo was on the phone hunting for stories. He hadn’t yet introduced himself to his coworkers.

In the 1960s, city newsrooms hummed with excitement; they were the beating hearts of a robust industry. Reporters bustled down narrow aisles yanking sheets of copy paper from messy desktop stacks and hammered away at Underwood typewriters. Ink from hot-metal Linotypes hung in the air in thin clouds. Writing styles were evolving, particularly at big New York outlets. Journalists were becoming household names by bringing personality to formerly stodgy newswriting. They experimented with voice, perspective, and structure. Porambo read and idolized hard-nosed, humane writers—Jimmy Breslin, in particular—for providing an unflinching glimpse into the lives of blue-collar workers, marginalized minorities, and crime lords. He promised to bring a similar voice to Albany, which he saw as a launchpad for fame in a bigger market.

In exchange for his talent, he wanted autonomy. “He was going to write what he wanted to write, in his own particular way, at his own particular length, at his own particular rhythm and rate,” Bruning recalled. But Porambo’s editor, Bob Fichenberg, didn’t agree. Fichenberg was a by-the-book executive who wasn’t impressed with his new hire’s independent streak. Porambo’s first drafts were often an ungainly mess, and he was savagely unyielding when copy editors altered his work. Time and again he found himself in Fichenberg’s office, engaged in a shouting match over the timeliness of an article or the quality of his prose. In a matter of months, Porambo was fired.

Over the next year and a half, he bounced around half a dozen papers: the Morning-Journal in Lorain, Ohio; the Suffolk Sun in Deer Park, New York; and the Toronto Telegram, to name a few. Editors tried to tame him, but Porambo grew increasingly arrogant and unmanageable. Sometimes his tenure lasted only a few days before he got fed up or was canned for refusing to neuter his style for a publication he considered unworthy of his talent.

Eventually, he landed back in his home state, at Camden’s Courier-Post. He wrote articles about work programs for the handicapped and rural land grabs. Most of his reporting, however, was set in the black slums of nearby Philadelphia. Porambo had long believed that the front lines of America’s most vital news cut through the tenements, factories, bars, and back alleys where the oppressed fought against the grinding teeth of poverty and prejudice. This proved true in what came to be known as the long, hot summer of 1967, when simmering racial tensions boiled over in some 159 cities. From Atlanta to Buffalo, Tampa to Detroit, black residents took to the streets to protest police brutality, segregation, housing discrimination, and other wrongs.

Porambo watched the events unfold and covered the impact they had in Philadelphia, where a riot three years prior had left hundreds injured. Authorities feared a repeat incident. For one story, Porambo visited a craps game at an apartment in north Philadelphia, where police claimed that dangerous militants were living. In the building, the reporter found only weary, poverty-stricken black residents whom city planners and social services had all but forgotten. “Color breeds hatred in this country,” Porambo wrote, “and we’ve never known just how deep it went until 1967, the year of the riot.”

He also noted that “stories are starting to come out about needless shooting” by police—injustice magnified by tragedy. Some of those stories were emerging from Porambo’s beloved Newark.

A rebellion was all but inevitable. The immediate post–World War II economic boom had attracted workers to Newark and helped grow the city’s industries, but white residents soon began deserting the crowded urban landscape for the suburbs. After surging for decades, Newark’s population shrank by nearly 8 percent in the 1950s. Black residents, who had a harder time finding jobs and affording homes, stayed behind, and Newark soon became one of America’s first majority-black cities. It was still run by a white power structure, however, and corruption and inequality ballooned. Poor black neighborhoods were home to some of the highest rates of crime, unemployment, substandard housing, tuberculosis, and maternal mortality in the country. Residents’ patience with the status quo stretched thinner with each passing year.

The city was a combustion chamber primed for an explosion. All it needed was a spark. One finally came on the evening of July 12, 1967, when a man named John Smith flashed the high beams of his cab and drove around a police cruiser that was blocking his lane at the intersection of South Seventh Street and 15th Avenue. The cops quickly pulled him over. Smith was a reserved black man in his forties, originally from North Carolina. He lived alone, and when he wasn’t driving his cab, he enjoyed practicing the trumpet. He explained to the white officers that he thought he’d passed their cruiser legally, but they arrested him anyway. They told the woman in the back seat of Smith’s car that she’d have to find another ride home.

A few minutes later, an incapacitated Smith was dragged through the rear door of Newark’s Fourth Precinct. Residents of the Hayes Homes project across the street from the station watched it happen. Smith had been battered with a nightstick in the ribs and groin. Yet a rumor quickly spread that the police had beaten him to death.

Within an hour, dozens of people had gathered to protest outside the Fourth Precinct. The crowd quickly grew into the hundreds. When someone threw a Molotov cocktail at the building, police stormed out, batons swinging. The crowd dispersed, but later that night angry looters took to smashing liquor-store windows. Police director Dominick Spina advised his officers to let the situation lie, “because once you begin to look at problems as problems, they become problems.”

The plan backfired. Police stood by for nearly two days as the looting spread. White-owned stores were targeted; to signal plunderers away, black business owners scrawled “Soul Brother” on their windows with soap. When mayor Hugh Addonizio called in state troopers and the National Guard, he said in dismay to an arriving officer, “It’s all gone, the whole town is gone.” The sense of alarm spiked even higher when word came across the police radio that someone had swiped 24 rifles from inside a Sears-Roebuck. “The line between the jungle and the law might as well be drawn here as any place in America,” governor Richard Hughes told the press.

Over the next three days, Newark became a city under siege. Bridges were barricaded. Tanks rumbled down thoroughfares, cracking the pavement with their armored weight. State police converted a stadium into barracks and marched through the streets in formation, rifles at the ready.

Many of the officers were reservists, and their inexperience showed. They were quick to fire their weapons. They sprayed the Hayes Homes with bullets in response to suspected sniper fire, killing three women in their apartments. In another incident, ten-year-old Eddie Moss was shot in the head and killed as his father slowed the family car before a roadblock on the way home from a meal at White Castle. Michael Pugh, 12, was shot to death while taking out the trash. Jimmy Rutledge, 19, was left with 42 holes in his body after he was caught looting a liquor store. The majority of the wounds were shotgun blasts to the back. Six were in the rear of his skull.

All told, over five days, 13,319 rounds of ammunition were fired in what authorities described as a peacekeeping effort. Twenty-six people lay dead, ranking Newark’s riots among the deadliest in American history. Among the casualties were a cop, a fireman, and 21 civilians, all shot by police or guardsmen.

Governor Hughes extolled the outcome. “I felt a thrill of pride in the way our state police and National Guard have conducted themselves,” he told the media. As for the roots of the unrest, authorities dismissed the notion that racism, economic disenfranchisement, and state-sanctioned violence were to blame. Instead, they accused communist agitators, paid protestors, and criminal thugs of stirring unwarranted rage among the city’s poor.

It was a time before cell-phone videos and body cams, and the accounts of white officers met with little resistance, trumping those of black citizens. No one in the state or local government was charged with wrongdoing. Not everyone, however, could accept the whitewashing these events received. Among them was Porambo.

Six months after the riots, Porambo left the Camden paper for a gig at the Daily Journal in the town of Elizabeth, a few miles south of Newark. The paper had long been a stepping-stone for cub reporters who went on to bigger and better things. Carl Bernstein had just departed for The Washington Post. Porambo wanted to follow a similar path.

His first piece was about a candy-store robbery. He transformed the story of a petty crime into something bigger by writing it from the imagined perspective of the thief, describing what it was like to need money so badly that you’d take a gun into a shop catering to children. He followed that with a story about a family of 17 living in four rooms—“the bare edge of civilization,” he called it—whose patriarch was murdered in a dispute over a billiards game. Next came a profile of a black building superintendent who, after saving the lives of 20 residents when the structure he maintained went up in flames, was fired and evicted for demanding that the landlord improve the property’s conditions.

Joe Jennings, the executive editor, loved Porambo’s unorthodox style. “He was one of the best pure writers I’ve ever seen at a newspaper,” he said years later to New Jersey Monthly. Thom Akeman, a fellow reporter, described Porambo’s work as having “a lot of leeway and imagination,” which made it compelling. “I’d never stopped to think about looking at a robbery from the point of view of the guy who has the gun,” he told me.

Porambo and his growing family—he and Carol had two more children together—lived in a house in the Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, a middle-class, mostly black area. He was happy to be home, but he found the city of his youth irrevocably changed, tattooed with a post-riot identity. Burned-out buildings dotted downtown, citizens projected an air of defeat, and the city’s reputation lay in ruins. The New York Times described Newark as a “nightmare … finally succumbing to America’s catalog of urban ills.”

One day, Porambo covered a meeting of the Newark Human Rights Commission, a community group that advocated for police reform. He watched as witness after witness took to the floor to recount beatings and shootings perpetrated by police during the riots. The stories had been circulating through Newark’s black neighborhoods for months. In his article about the meeting, Porambo noted, “It was the first time these things were said in a public auditorium,” but the black survivors of the riots “heard nothing they didn’t know.”

He was determined to put the stories he heard on the front page. So he got to work on what the Daily Journal dubbed the Post-Riot Notebook, a 15-part series intended to introduce readers to the people living in the areas of Newark most affected by the unrest. Porambo knew that something bigger than the color and detail of individual lives was at stake in his reporting. The governor, the mayor, cops, and public prosecutors had all denied complicity in what had transpired in July of 1967. Now, in the name of justice, Porambo wanted to expose it. In the introduction to the series, he promised that “those within the power structure will not like what they read because it will be too close to the truth.”

To get the story, he did what he’d always done. He became a regular at Newark’s roughest watering holes, sitting on stools and slouching in booths at establishments with names like Dick and Ann’s and the R&R. He frequented pool halls and sweaty go-go joints. He told regulars everywhere he went that he wanted to hear what really happened during the riots—what the people who lived through those harrowing five days witnessed. That Porambo was married to a black woman gave him extra cachet in the establishments where he spent late night after late night.

People talked. Over hot dogs and games of nine-ball, he heard desperate scenes recounted, like the one on Beacon Street on the evening of July 14, when state troopers opened fire for no apparent reason. In the melee, James Snead, 36, was shot in the stomach while repairing his car. Karl Green, 17, was shot in the head. Both survived. Seventy-six people signed an eyewitness petition demanding an investigation into the shootings, but no action was taken. For the series’ fifth installment, Porambo drove with 22-year-old Mack Tucker to the spot where police shot him while he sat in a friend’s car. Tucker bore the scars of slug wounds on the side of his face and neck.

The death of Jimmy Rutledge, a looter discovered with 42 bullet wounds, was perhaps the most damning. In the series’ eighth installment, an anonymous police detective walked Porambo through the shooting. Cops on the scene had claimed that Rutledge brandished a butcher knife before they opened fire. But the detective was incredulous: somehow, Rutledge had found the time to wipe his fingerprints from the handle of the blade before falling to the floor dead. According to witnesses, his last words were “Don’t shoot. I’ll serve my time in jail,” followed by “I will come peacefully.”

The more he heard, the more Porambo’s outrage grew. The Post-Riot Notebook consumed him. At a certain point, he took up residence in the Daily Journal’s office, sleeping at his desk and showering in the bathroom the next morning. His union reps fumed over his unlogged overtime. But his dedication was about to pay off.

The New York publishing house Holt, Rinehart, and Winston got wind of the series and offered Porambo a modest $7,500 advance to expand his investigation into a book. He jumped at the chance. He was eager to leave newspaper work behind for a while. No more battles over word count or whether he had to cover a school-board meeting. No more destabilizing hired-and-fired cadence to his life. Just a chance to make it big. “This was going to be the vehicle for him becoming famous and important and influential,” Fred Bruning, Porambo’s old friend from Albany, told me. “He wanted all those things badly. But I think that his first priority, always, was to give voice to this stuff that he felt so passionate about.”

Nearly every morning, Porambo donned a heavy gray sweatsuit, leashed up Ralph, the mutt he’d rescued in Tennessee and loved so much that he’d contemplated listing him as a dependent on the family’s taxes, and jogged several miles through Newark’s South Ward. On his way home, he always picked up fresh bread, tea, and the first editions of the local papers, which left ink stains on his hands. Porambo ate breakfast with his wife and children, Glenna, Franklin, and Ronda. Then he went into his small, book-lined office and shut the door. He was not to be disturbed while he wrote, connecting the dots of the scrupulous reporting he’d compiled over the previous two years.

Unraveling the facts of the riots wasn’t easy. Many of the surviving victims and the families of those killed moved frequently and rarely filed a change of address. Porambo had worn through shoe leather ringing doorbells all over the city. In the process, he fell more deeply in love with Newark. “Everything’s so personal,” he told a reporter, “because everybody’s crushed together, deprived of human rights, down to life itself.” He was as likely to interview a community activist or business owner as a career criminal or drug addict. He described the array of characters he encountered as the personification of “much of black Newark as it was six months after its riot.… Black men sell women and white men buy them. Black children shoot heroin and white politicians give the city away to the mobsters who supply the narcotics.”

Of course, not every pimp and pusher was interested in talking to a reporter. While pounding the pavement, Porambo was threatened more than once, and he kept a revolver close at hand: sometimes under the seat of his car, other times hidden in the light fixture on the living room ceiling. When muggers demanded his grandfather’s pocket watch, they discovered the ex-boxer still had a nasty left hook.

Early in the summer of 1970, Porambo turned in a 700-page draft to his publishers. It landed on the desk of Warren Sloat, a laid-back, 35-year-old editor. “I was appalled by some of the writing,” Sloat later said. “It was just all over the place.” He spent several weeks poring over the text, crossing out digressive rants about conservatism and Richard Nixon. Beneath the vitriolic fat, though, he found a lean narrative of authenticity and verve. “The voices of the people he spoke with rang true,” Sloat recalled. “And his description of how he found them was terribly interesting.” Porambo described it as “sifting through the ashes.”

The book was a scathing account of police brutality, corruption, and cover-ups spanning several years before and after the riots. Porambo chronicled, for instance, the shooting death of 22-year-old Lester Long Jr. on June 12, 1965. Cops pulled Long over because his car had a noisy muffler. Suspecting that his license might be fake, they put him in the back seat of their cruiser. The stop happened across from the Happy Inn Tavern, and a crowd, including some of Long’s friends, gathered outside to watch. After 45 minutes of being detained, Long made a break for it. He got about 30 feet from the car before a bullet hit him in the back of the head. At first the local papers reported the police’s version of events as fact: Long had tried to cut an officer with a knife, the officer had stumbled out of the car bleeding, and a gun had gone off accidentally. But the crowd that watched the events unfold claimed there was no knife, no blood, no accidental shooting. Bystanders saw an officer square up and gun down a fleeing man.

Corrupt political machinery quickly hijacked the narrative. Police advocates claimed that Newark’s finest would be devastated if one of their own were charged with murder. Long had a criminal record, they pointed out. The accused cop went so far as to sue a citizens group for handing out leaflets that labeled him a killer. “What should have been an issue defined by facts had become an ideological conflict with ‘police morale’ as the main issue,” Porambo wrote. “Any action was permissible if it maintained so-called law and order.” This same thinking, he believed, led to the bloody display in 1967.

“If there are two occupational groups that can be expected to lie with abandon on the witness stand,” Porambo wrote, “they are hardened criminals and experienced police officers.”

One chapter in the book was dedicated to the trial of John Smith, the cab driver whose arrest had sparked the riots and who had been charged with assaulting two police officers. He claimed that the officers had brutally beaten him; they countered that Smith was the one doing the beating. That Smith had injuries requiring hospitalization and the officers seemed unharmed didn’t shake the court’s opinion. An all-white jury convicted Smith, who after appeals served just under a year in prison.

Porambo broadened his reporting to examine corruption in law enforcement beyond the riots. A heroin dealer went on record to say that he was occasionally supplied by an officer in the city’s vice squad. Porambo unearthed Mafia campaign contributions that had helped elect Mayor Addonizio. And he didn’t hesitate to name names as he laid out kickback schemes that traveled all the way up the chain of command to police director Dominick Spina.

Warren Sloat knew he had something astonishing on his hands. When his heavy edit made it to Porambo’s desk, however, the writer reacted with typical outrage. He’d never met Sloat. Who was this son of a bitch carving up his book? He jumped in his Oldsmobile and raced the ten miles down Route 22 to Plainfield, New Jersey, where Sloat lived on a tree-lined street in a stucco house with a play set in the backyard. Porambo marched up to the door and rang the bell.

After ushering the livid writer inside, Sloat gathered his revisions and Porambo’s original material. For two hours, they sat at a table comparing the texts line by line. The changes were justified, Sloat explained, if only to distill the most important and convincing aspects of the work. “I’ve never read a book quite like this,” he told Porambo. It was going to be valuable to the people of Newark. It might garner national awards.

For the first time in his career, Porambo bought into the editorial process. He headed back to Newark sure that he was on the verge of fame and fortune. He’d been driving a soft-drink delivery truck to make ends meet since his advance ran out. Now he began dreaming of a Pulitzer Prize.

While Sloat put the finishing touches on the manuscript, Porambo hustled to secure what he believed would bring his reporting into perfect focus: photographs taken by the county coroner’s office of bodies with wounds in their backs, sealed by the courts from public view, showing beyond a doubt that many of the riot’s victims were shot as they fled police. Porambo was willing to do anything to obtain visual proof of police brutality, even pay one of the force’s own. In November 1970, he approached officer John Balogh, a hard-bitten veteran whom he’d interviewed during his reporting, and made an under-the-table offer: ten photos for $10 apiece.

At first, Balogh appeared agreeable to the offer, and he provided half the requested the photos. But it turned out to be a ruse. Balogh recorded their conversations and shared them with public prosecutors. One day at a local restaurant, he passed a second stack of images to Porambo, and the writer chose the ones he wanted. As the final payoff went down, Porambo found himself in handcuffs. Balogh was arresting him for bribing a police officer.

Porambo seemed unfazed. “The worst I can get is six months,” he mused in an interview with Thom Akeman, his ex-colleague from the Daily Journal. “Unless I get one of those judges I wrote about.”

The book was published, without photos, while the bribery case was still pending. It was a masterpiece of urban reporting, as raw as it was authoritative. The first page alone must have caused jaws to drop and eyebrows to jump as readers, particularly white readers, took it in. Porambo began his 398-page investigation with a description of a black dancer:

She was ghetto Newark and her brown arms glistened and drops of sweat covered her bare stomach. They formed trickles that dripped into her navel and on down into what little there was of the bottom half of her dancing costume, down into black Newark, a place where tattered kids play on dirty brick streets; where, at the first light of dawn, working people rise for another day’s labor and junkies look for anything worth stealing to feed the needle; where locked warm thighs in the restless morning start the cycle all over again, bringing screaming infants into a cramped jungle that now must be called post-riot Newark. … Keep moving, brown-skinned girl, you are Newark and you are beautiful and the place you call home has a primitive beauty and allure of its own.

In the next paragraph, he called the deaths caused by police during the riots “homicide,” an unflinching accusation that he later unpacked in the book’s most devastating chapter, entitled “Nailing the Lid on a Coffin.” Porambo outlined each of the killings brought before grand juries after the riots. He described eyewitness accounts in meticulous detail—people who’d watched the violence from apartment windows and fire escapes and street corners—and revisited the police’s own investigatory materials. The picture he painted was at best one of police misconduct, at worst one of a murder spree. Yet in case after case, the authorities had proved immune to prosecution. “Due to insufficient evidence of any criminal misconduct,” courts ruled, “the jury found no cause for indictment.” The phrase became the title of Porambo’s book: No Cause for Indictment: An Autopsy of Newark.

The city had placed fault for the deaths on the shoulders of the looters and protesters who’d flouted the law in the first place, and on individuals not sufficiently cognizant of the war zone Newark had become during the riots. Porambo declared this nothing short of craven racism. “The inference was clear that the guilty included Eddie Moss’s father, for taking his son out for hamburgers,” Porambo wrote, “Michael Pugh’s mother, for telling her son to carry out the garbage, and Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Spellman, and Mrs. Gainer”—the three women killed in their Hayes Homes apartments—“for being the same color as the rioters.”

When the book hit shelves, Porambo became a household name in Newark overnight. “It was a reference point,” Amiri Baraka, a poet and community activist who featured in the text, later told the Star-Ledger. “One had to be able to say, ‘Yes, I know that book,’ whether you had read it or not.” A review in the Baltimore Sun noted, “Even if Mr. Porambo is wrong ten per cent of the time, and that is unlikely, his is still a very serious indictment of the Newark police.” Kirkus heralded, “Porambo is energetic, angry, and he spares no one.”

Frustrating to the writer, most of the major New Jersey papers didn’t review it—perhaps because he’d reserved disdain for his own tribe in the book, dubbing the local press “the whorehouse’s blushing counterfeit virgins.” Porambo believed newspapers had done little to investigate violent incidents, instead parroting police accounts. When evidence proved those accounts wrong, the stories often went uncorrected. In one case, Porambo confronted a reporter who’d written about the shooting of 17-year-old Dexter Johnson after an alleged struggle with police. Witness accounts made it clear that a fence standing six feet high separated Johnson and the cop who’d shot him; a scuffle between the two would have been physically impossible. The reporter was shocked when Porambo told him about the contradictory evidence. In his book, Porambo derided lazy reporting as the reason “why whites, who read once again of a ruthless punk and a valiant police officer, remain so uninformed.”

No one demanded retractions or sued. Still, Porambo was prepared for backlash. “I wrote a book about how people were murdered during the riot,” he told a reporter. “I also wrote about corruption in city government and the police department. It’s only natural that I join the victims.”

Three weeks after his book’s release, in December 1971, Porambo was driving in the thin light of dawn along a desolate street abutting Interstate 78. In his rearview mirror, he saw a car with its headlights switched off surge toward him. It veered left and pulled alongside his window. The driver whipped out a pistol and sent seven bullets into Porambo’s Oldsmobile before speeding away. Porambo lost control of the car and jumped a curb. He stayed crouched in his seat, covered in broken glass and too afraid to move, for a solid ten minutes.

Afterward, Porambo told reporters that he was certain the attack had to do with his book. He even insinuated that the police were trying to shut him up. “Newark is the way it is,” he said. “Nothing should be surprising in Newark. Nothing.” A sluggish investigation turned up no suspects or evidence.

Soon after, Porambo got a job as a correspondent for 51st State, a program that aired nightly on public television in the New York City area. The show offered “news from the bottom up,” told through the perspectives of the people who lived it, and reporters weren’t afraid to be provocative. Porambo fit right in. He spent most of his time in the field but sometimes came to 51st State’s headquarters above Columbus Circle in Manhattan. Producer Gary Gilson remembered him as a “madman genius” and “like a member of an Italian street gang. He was rough, but he was an artist.” It showed in his segments. One of Porambo’s investigations, about the ease of buying illegal guns on the streets of Newark, opened with the camera zoomed in on a man leaning into a car window, seemingly doing business with the person behind the wheel. As the camera pulled back, viewers saw that Porambo was the buyer. He turned to face the lens, lifted the pistol he’d pretended to purchase, and fired several shots. It was unnerving stuff, and it has been lost to history: When the station that aired 51st State moved offices in the 1990s, it recorded over or lost almost all of the show’s archive.

On January 14, 1972, Gilson, who was in charge of Friday programming, answered his desk phone. When he did, it threw his scheduled lineup into disarray. Porambo was on the line. “It’s Ron,” he said. “I can’t come in. I’ve been shot.”

The night before, around 11 p.m., he’d gone to Dick and Ann’s, one of his favorite bars. He’d ordered a drink from waitress Sherry Rivers, who mentioned that a man had been in earlier asking about a “white guy.” The stranger was talking about Porambo, who took the news in stride. Maybe it was someone out to get him, like whoever had shot up his car a few weeks prior, or maybe it was someone who just wanted to talk. After Dick and Ann’s, Porambo went to Tony’s Tavern, where the bartender told him that someone had been asking around for a “white dude shooting pool.”

At 1:30 a.m., Porambo paid his tab and went to his car. The driver-side door was still busted from the shooting, so he climbed through the passenger’s side. As he slid across the bench seat, a heavyset white man pushed through the open door behind him and leveled a pistol at his head. Porambo kicked and fought, but he couldn’t get away. The attacker fired seven times, and bullets penetrated both of Porambo’s legs. Blood began soaking his pants. He had his own gun under the seat, which he managed to grab and discharge at the fleeing assailant. But the man got away, leaving only a brown loafer in his wake.

At the hospital, after doctors bandaged his legs, Porambo held court with journalists who’d gotten wind of the shooting. “I don’t think they’re trying to kill me,” he said. “They just want to terrify me.” Newark cops were stationed at his door, and as visiting hours ended, they tried to escort the interviewers out. Porambo argued that the journalists should be allowed to stay. Neither side would back down, so against the wishes of his doctors, Porambo checked himself out of the hospital. In a fury, he grabbed some crutches and hobbled out the building’s double doors.

Over at 51st State’s offices, Gilson rushed to put together a new opening segment with the title “Our Man in Newark Has Been Shot.” TV crews showed up on the steps of Newark’s police headquarters to demand answers. Suspicious that he might have staged the shootings, officers asked Porambo to take a lie-detector test. He refused. “The cops just want to try to discredit the book,” he told a reporter, also noting that a polygraph would be “very unreliable for someone with my temperament.” One of the bullets in the second incident had narrowly missed an artery. He took chances, Porambo insisted, but he wasn’t stupid.

Or was he? The night of the second shooting, before Porambo went to Dick and Ann’s, he and a friend whom his kids called Uncle Artie sat in his office sipping scotch and milk. Carol was in the adjacent living room listening to Roberta Flack on the record player, and in between tracks she caught snippets of the two men’s hushed conversation.

“Come on, man. You’ve got to do this for me, man,” Porambo said.

“What if I mess up and do something else?” Artie responded.

“I need you to do this,” Porambo implored.

Eventually, the men left the house together, Porambo telling Carol that they were off to play some pool. Unsure what her husband was planning, Carol brushed off what she’d overheard and turned up the volume on “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow.” When the phone rang several hours later, and a voice on the other end told her that her husband had been shot, Carol’s first thought was, I can’t believe he convinced Artie to do it. She and Glenna grabbed the three portable TVs in the house and lined them up on the wide kitchen counter, tuning them to ABC, NBC, and CBS. They sat at the kitchen table watching as Porambo talked with newscasters in the hospital.

Quietly, Carol told Glenna what she suspected had happened. But she had no plans to tell the cops. Glenna understood why. In the Porambo household, loyalty was to the bone. If one of the kids snitched on another for breaking a rule, the tattler caught it first with a wooden ruler. So mother and daughter tacitly agreed to keep their lips sealed about what in retrospect may have been a warning sign of Porambo’s deteriorating grasp of right and wrong.

Others soon followed. No Cause for Indictment sold out its initial run of 7,500 copies, and the publisher ordered a second printing. The critical success buoyed Porambo’s belief that he would win a Pulitzer. He already felt that he’d earned it by dedicating years of reporting to his book and even risking his life for it. “He used to talk about it all the time,” Carol told me. In the spring of 1972, however, a jury of his peers decided that another book was more worthy of nonfiction’s highest honor: a history of General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell’s exploits in the Far East by historian Barbara W. Tuchman. Porambo was heartbroken. “He didn’t have another dream to replace that one,” Glenna told me.

Intensifying his pain and frustration was Porambo’s realization that his book wasn’t having the tangible impact he’d hoped, however naively, it would. Newark had elected its first black mayor while he was writing it, a development that Porambo lauded. During the mayor’s first year in office, however, eight black people were shot dead by police for petty crimes, six as they fled scenes. Soon after, the Evening News and Star-Ledger decided to cut back on crime reporting, because editors worried that stories of violence were becoming repetitive for readers. In his book, Porambo had pilloried Tony Imperiale, a Stetson-wearing, race-baiting rabble-rouser who’d encouraged white citizens to take up arms against rioters in 1967 and once referred to the civil rights movement’s most prominent leader as “Martin Luther Coon.” In 1970, Imperiale was elected to the city council; three years later, he became a member of the state senate.

Porambo had written a seminal text about urban America. He’d used bold tactics. He’d positioned himself on the right side of history. It hadn’t been enough to move Newark’s social needle. Would anything?

When a source gave him documents outlining corruption in city contracts, Porambo saw it as a chance to at least force some discreet change. According to the documents, officials were approving payouts for demolition contracts on buildings that didn’t exist. Porambo trusted his source, a 23-year-old city employee named Aleck Grishkevich. The two men were drinking buddies. Porambo produced segments on 51st State based on the papers and demanded that officials state on the record when indictments would be forthcoming. He confronted representatives of the mayor’s office and the demolition company that had allegedly drawn canceled checks for the work orders.

Then one day, Porambo received a call from Grishkevich’s mother. Her son had been arrested on forgery charges, she said. The documents used in the segments were fakes. When Porambo reached out to the prosecutor’s office, he learned that a warrant had been issued for his arrest, too. He pleaded ignorance about the forgery, and ultimately the charges against him were dropped. But he’d put his colleagues’ credibility in jeopardy by failing to corroborate the details of the materials provided by his source. The show fired him.

Around the same time, the longstanding bribery charges were finally brought to court. Porambo was found guilty and served three months behind bars. He emerged jaded and indignant.

The renowned psychoanalyst Alfred Adler believed that the need to cope with feelings of inferiority drives human behavior. We work hard in personal, professional, and communal spheres to develop self-assurance, and we establish goals that might compensate for our perceived deficiencies. When people can’t overcome or process these flaws, however, they can grow depressed, anxious, and insecure. Some channel their frustrations into manipulating or dominating other people. They become, in a word, bullies.

Porambo fit that mold. The one-two punch of losing the Pulitzer and his job at 51st State proved too much for him to bear, and his psyche cracked. He’d always been argumentative, volatile, and domineering. Now he could be vicious. Even his eyes changed. The brown wells that had always seemed attentive became cold and unfeeling. He looked “like nobody loved him,” Carol told me.

When he got back late and found his kids’ clothes and toys left in piles on the floor, Porambo would wake them, even in the middle of a school night, and demand that they clean their rooms. He would holler at his wife and dump laundry she’d folded down the stairs. He could be physically abusive, too, often reserving his fiercest anger for his son Franklin. “He would slap him in the nose and then look at me and say, ‘See what you made me do?’” Carol recalled. “I would go off to a motel with the children until he calmed down.”

Despite his professional blunders, Porambo still had plenty of admirers. He got a job as a field producer for City-TV in Toronto and moved his family to Canada. His kids gathered around the television at 7 p.m. each night to watch their father, wearing his signature black beret, unleash blistering reports. Carol worked as a photographer at a mall, and the family lived in a roomy two-bedroom condominium with floor-to-ceiling windows. On Sundays, Porambo planted himself in front of the TV to watch football. He always rooted for the underdog. The family seemed to friends and neighbors like the picture of domestic bliss. Privately, though, Porambo was becoming increasingly erratic.

One day, Carol came home to find that he’d painted the exterior of their home a rusty red, because he was sick of it being uniform with the condos around it. The paint job lasted only as long as it took the community board to have it sandblasted off. Porambo made good money, roughly the equivalent of a $150,000 annual salary today, and his parents regularly deposited money into the family’s bank account. But Porambo was reckless with cash and fell into debt. He maxed out two credit cards to buy Carol a $1,500 blue and gold macaw named Harold for her birthday. He taught the bird to sip wine from a glass until it skulked off-balance along the edge of the dining table. He refused to cage it, even outside. Once, during a family barbecue, Harold flew up into some trees, and the fire department had to come retrieve him.

Rather than pay off his credit cards, Porambo sent letters to the banks pretending to be an attorney. He claimed “Mr. Porambo” had fallen ill and couldn’t pay his bills on time. Eventually, he wrote that his client had died. At work, Porambo began taking small payoffs from stringers at the TV station in exchange for guaranteeing that their clips were broadcast. When their segments didn’t show as promised, the freelancers alerted executives to the scheme. Soon after, the station discovered that Porambo had been cooking his expense reports. Once again he was fired.

The question of why a reporter who’d built his reputation skewering corrupt systems would lie to banks, to say nothing of swindling fellow journalists for a few bucks, is difficult to answer. Maybe he genuinely believed that his family needed the cash. Or maybe he feared that he was living the cookie-cutter life he’d always dreaded and broke the rules just to prove that he could. Either way, losing his job didn’t scare him straight. It only pushed him deeper into vice.

One day in March 1978, Porambo dyed his hair a garish red—or donned a wig that color, no one can remember for sure—and drove to the parking lot of Toronto International Airport. He carried a toy gun that he’d spray-painted to look real. Porambo approached a parking attendant, demanded money, then ran away with the cash. A few days later, police tracked him down and arrested him. Porambo claimed that he’d robbed the attendant to make a mortgage payment. “I just did the wrong thing,” he told a reporter several years later. “I was real messed up.” Yet the crime was so preposterously amateurish, so cartoonish, that it seemed engineered to fail.

One theory, now shared by Carol and Glenna, is that Porambo intended to get in trouble with the law, or at least flirt with the prospect. The seed of this theory is a book. In 1968, writer Nathan Heard had published Howard Street, a hyperrealistic novel set in Newark. It was about sex workers, pimps, and pushers, and it was hailed for its raw honesty. Boosting the book’s profile was the fact that Heard wrote it while he was finishing an eight-year stint in prison for armed robbery. His vivid prose and personal story wowed readers and the literary world. Howard Street sold a million copies. Porambo kept a copy on his shelf, where it became an object of envy for him. In Toronto, he started working on a novel he titled Walker’s Last Stand. No one ever read the draft—Porambo was protective of his work, and the manuscript was later lost—but his family gathered that the plot centered on a criminal enterprise. Perhaps, Carol and Glenna told me, No Cause for Indictment had made him realize that, despite his reporting chops and ear for gritty, untold stories, he lacked the profile to launch a book about urban life into the commercial stratosphere. In which case, maybe he thought that crossing the line into criminality would give his writing authenticity.

The idea sounds farfetched. Then again, Porambo was notoriously rash. And the theory brings to mind the first story he wrote for the Daily Journal, about the robbery at the candy store. On its face, the article reads like a remarkable feat of empathy with the thief. But could its perspective have been a sly confession about how Porambo got the story? Given the trajectory of the writer’s life, in hindsight it seems plausible.

Following the stick-up at the airport, Porambo was found guilty of armed robbery. Carol packed up the family car and headed back to Newark. She was fed up with her husband’s antics, but she still loved him. She’d be there when he got out.

Porambo kept working, taking inspiration from his circumstances. He was allowed a typewriter in his cell and published a piece in the Toronto Star on the endless boredom of “dead time,” the days that convicts spend before sentencing that may or may not count as time served. After nine months, he was released and deported to America, where he reunited with his family in Newark. It wouldn’t be his last stint behind bars.

Porambo was determined to sell Walker’s Last Stand. The manuscript was finished, and he wanted it to win the accolades that No Cause for Indictment hadn’t. He commuted into Manhattan for long dinners with book publishers at Italian restaurants in the West Village, with Carol by his side. He was so pushy when promoting his work, so sure of his brilliance, that she was sometimes embarrassed for him. “Ron had no shame, so nothing was awkward for him,” she said. When nothing came from a meeting, he would mutter to his wife under his breath, “I hate people.”

Without a book deal or steady work, Porambo began leading a double life. By day he worked on his novel and pitched freelance articles. By night he descended into Newark’s underworld—this time not as a reporter but as a participant. In 1980, the city was posting some of the highest crime rates in the country, and Porambo joined the fray by reviving the stick-up routine he’d tried in Toronto. Glenna, with whom Porambo was close, helped him. She rode with her stepfather to nice neighborhoods and cased potential marks. When Porambo bought wigs and fake mustaches for the disguises he wore when holding people at gunpoint, he paid Glenna $10 to trim them so they’d fit his face. “It was a lot of money back then,” she told me.

Porambo pocketed modest amounts of cash from his robberies, but that didn’t seem to be his main motivation. Like his parents all those years ago, Porambo fumed about “those people,” except he was referring to whites who worked in Newark during the day and returned to their cushy suburban homes at night. He ranted to Carol about how the rich never spent their money where it was needed.

“He thought he was getting back at rich people and society,” Carol confided in Fred Bruning, who’d kept in touch while building a respectable career at papers up and down the East Coast. Or maybe, Carol added, her husband was just unwell.

There was a Robin Hood quality to his logic, but Porambo didn’t spread the wealth he pilfered. He seemed more vindictive than benevolent.

Porambo made friends with street criminals willing to team up with him on jobs. One night in June 1980, he and an accomplice, 20-year-old Richard Norman, staked out the parking lot of Snuffy’s, a restaurant in the town of Scotch Plains. It featured faux marble colonnades, lobster buffets, a plate-breaking show with cries of “Opa!” and a “sit down eating clam bar”—the greatest hits of Greek American hospitality. Their stomachs full of surf and turf and two-dollar glasses of wine, a couple named the Kilpatricks were walking to their car when Porambo and Norman approached. One of them pistol-whipped Mr. Kilpatrick, and the attackers made off with $277 in cash. Fifteen minutes later, the police pulled them over in a car matching the description the Kilpatricks had provided. Porambo later admitted to being a little “high on alcohol” during the slapdash heist. Once again the weapon he used was a toy gun.

Porambo was sentenced to seven years for robbery and assault and shipped off to Leesburg State Prison, a medium-security lockup that employed inmates in good standing on a working farm. Porambo did well inside, and he even gave his investigative career another go. He began looking into the prison’s bloated work contracts and compiled a 16-page report on fraud and kickbacks. He tried to mail it to a newspaper, but prison authorities discovered the draft and confiscated it. Despite the provocation, he earned early release to a halfway house in less than two years.

As a parolee, looking for a job was a legal requirement. Asking Newsday to hire him was ballsy. The Long Island daily was cherry-picking writers and editors from bigger, better-known outlets. Murray Kempton, the former editor of The New Republic, came on board as a columnist in 1981 and won a Pulitzer four years later. Breslin jumped ship from the Daily News and worked at Newsday until he retired in 2004. Porambo secured an interview with Tony Marro, one of the top editors, and hoped he could convince the paper’s leadership to help him stage a comeback.

When he visited Newsday’s offices, Porambo’s first stop was at the desk of Fred Bruning, who’d recently joined the staff. Over the years, in phone calls and at dinners when the men found themselves in the same city, Bruning had been a calming influence on his friend. He’d always been jealous of Porambo’s talent. Now, as they sat in the Newsday cafeteria, Bruning realized that the journalist he’d long admired was no longer there. Personal demons had done their worst; the conversation was brutal. “Looking grim and exhausted,” Bruning later wrote, “Porambo told me he was going to give newspapers one more try. But, he warned, if he couldn’t find a job at a prestigious place like Newsday, if the business rejected him again at this late date, he was returning to his avocation—to crime.”

The gig at Newsday didn’t materialize. Over the next few weeks, Porambo appeased his parole officer by picking up work at the Atlantic City Press. Then, in January 1982, he missed his nightly sign-in at the halfway house. He explained that he was late because he’d been at work—the very work that the legal system required him to have. It didn’t matter. He was charged with attempted escape and shipped back to prison. When he got out a few months later, he made good on what he’d told Bruning he would do.

Porambo rubbed spirit gum along the contour above his upper lip and pressed the flimsy mustache into place. He pulled the wig, selected from the Headstart Hair for Men line, over his scalp. He’d bought it a few weeks earlier at a store called Town Wigs in Irvington, New Jersey, where he’d told the salesman his name was Ron Pope. The wig made him look like Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees. He glanced in the mirror to make sure he was unrecognizable. Then he grabbed his brown overnight bag and stuffed his supplies inside: silver .32 revolver, duct tape, ski masks, fake police badges, bullets, and makeup.

Carol was crying. She pleaded with him not to go. They had money; they would make rent. And there were consequences to the dangerous game Porambo was playing. “God don’t like ugly,” she told her husband.

Since getting out of Leesburg the second time, Porambo had settled into a new line of crime: taking down drug dealers. It was a high-risk, high-reward business. The upsides were cash and other items—cocaine, marijuana, jewelry—with serious street value. Plus, Porambo’s marks rarely called the police. But there was little room for error in robbing hustlers. One mistake and you could wind up dead.

Porambo didn’t work alone. His accomplices were the same sort of people he’d once relied on for news tips. There was Eddie Crawford, who supplied Porambo with information about targets—where they lived, what they were carrying, when their shipments came in. Larry Page and Bob Windsor, two men Porambo had met in prison, helped him do the dirty work: While he held a dealer at gunpoint, they would shake the target down. After making their getaway, the team would divvy up the spoils. Jewelry got fenced through Willie Rabb, the owner of a We Buy Gold outfit in Newark.

Carol disliked her husband’s new friends so much that she quit her job as a nanny to make sure her kids were never alone when Porambo brought the men around. Windsor was from south-central New Jersey and had been in and out of jail for the past decade. He was 38, white, and a little overweight. Porambo sometimes scolded him for being a junkie. Page was black, a few years younger, and imbued with a cruel streak. According to Carol, “He was the devil.”

There was no better proof than what happened on April 10, 1983. It was a rainy spring day. Water dripped from trees and gutters as Porambo and Page walked toward a five-story redbrick apartment building in Newark. They had to pass the entrance a few times before someone who lived in one of the units came out. Porambo, wearing a blue uniform jacket, smiled and tipped a fire-marshal hat toward the tenant. Then he stuck his foot between the door and the frame; he and Page slipped inside.

Three floors up, Sidney Davis and his girlfriend, Betsy, were naked and doing cocaine on Davis’s big circular bed. A 34-year-old drug dealer, Davis wasn’t the richest or flashiest guy pushing coke in the neighborhood, but he moved a decent amount of it. Just after 2 p.m., there was a knock at the door.

“Did you hear that?” Betsy asked.

Davis stuck his head out from the bedroom. “Who’s that?” he yelled.

“Fireman,” was the answer. Davis hadn’t heard an alarm in the building. Still, he threw on a robe and opened the door.

He instantly knew he’d been set up. These guys were no firemen. Porambo pushed past him and pulled a revolver from his jacket pocket, which he pointed squarely at Davis’s chest. Then Page barged in, and the robbers forced Davis to lie facedown on a couch.

Porambo kept his gun trained on Davis while Page scoured the apartment for money and drugs. In the bedroom, he found a few thousand dollars, diamond-studded watches, and Betsy. She was trying to hide from the intruders. Page started to force her into the living room, then changed his mind. He pushed her back onto the bed and raped her.

When Page finished, he dragged Betsy out to the couch and threw her on top of Davis. Then he shoved a pillow over her head and demanded that Porambo shoot them both. For all the mayhem Porambo had caused in his life, he’d avoided crossing the line that divides threatening deadly violence and committing it. Davis, though, couldn’t have known that. Lying on the couch under the weight of his girlfriend’s battered body, he decided that he wasn’t going down without a fight.

Davis roared up from the couch and lunged at Porambo. Betsy did the same, clawing wildly at the faces of the two surprised robbers. In the ensuing fight, bottles were smashed, furniture was flipped, and skin was torn open. Then a crack of gunfire split the air. A downstairs neighbor heard it and stuck her head into the hallway. She listened as two men raced to the exit on the floor above her, one of them shouting, “Hurry up, I’m hurt!”

As Porambo and Page bolted from the building, Betsy called the police. When they arrived, the officers found Davis laying in the hallway, his bloodstained robe trailing behind him. He had a gushing wound in his chest. Adrenaline and shock had kept him awake long enough to tell the cops that a white man had shot him. He was pronounced dead within the hour.

Inside the apartment, there were blood smears on the floor and coffee table, and a long streak on the wall where a hand had reached for support. In the bedroom was an extensive stash of cocaine and drug paraphernalia. Betsy was hysterical and unable to describe much of the robbery, except to say that she’d been raped. On the floor, detectives found a black wig, a blue fireman’s hat, and a silver .32-caliber revolver with two spent cartridges.

When Porambo returned home later that night, he was bleeding from a gash on his head and wearing different clothes than he’d left in. “Whose sweater is that?” Carol demanded. All Porambo would say was that he’d borrowed the shirt from Page. “What have you done?” Carol asked. Her husband stood in front of a mirror trying to pull off the gluey wads of wig hair matted together with dried blood. Someone had smashed his head with a vase, he replied. She didn’t believe him. “I can’t help you,” Carol said, throwing up her hands. He’d made his choices.

Porambo packed a suitcase and disappeared for a couple of weeks, staying at Windsor’s bungalow in southern New Jersey. A seismic shift had occurred: Porambo was now a killer, and it was likely only a matter of time before Davis’s associates came looking for him. His nerves were raw. He told Carol and his children not to open the door for anyone they didn’t recognize. “You could sense a little change in the way he felt about it. He said he might’ve stepped a little too far,” Glenna told me. Before long, though, he started lining up a slate of new jobs back in Newark. He was like an addict convinced that he wouldn’t overdose a second time. “I went about it the way I did everything else,” Porambo later told Bruning of his criminal exploits. “If there had been eight days in a week, I would have done it eight days.”

One month after Davis’s murder, Porambo and Windsor robbed a major drug dealer named David Williams, a job that involved dressing as cops and tying up Williams’s domestic help in a brazen midday home invasion. The pair made off with a briefcase of cash, jewelry, and drugs. When Porambo delivered the jewelry to Willie Rabb, his longtime fence, Rabb had a choice to make. Porambo had been a reliable partner, but Williams was a fearsome guy. If the drug dealer found out that Rabb had flipped his possessions, it could spell the end for the We Buy Gold proprietor. Rabb picked up the phone, called around until he got Williams on the line, and told the dealer how the job had gone down.

A few days later, on the night of May 19, Porambo was home with his family when the phone rang. He answered it in his office and kept his voice low while he talked. “All right, I’ll see you there,” was all Carol caught of the conversation. After Porambo hung up, he told his wife that he was going out. As usual, she begged him to stay and he brushed her off, telling her that he’d be back soon.

It was the same thing that Eddie Crawford, Porambo’s tip provider, had told his girlfriend a few hours earlier. After taking a phone call, Crawford had left home and gone into Manhattan, where he’d been gunned down by an unknown assailant. By the time Porambo got in his Volkswagen and drove to 186 Ridgewood Ave., Crawford was in a Harlem hospital, brain-dead. Maybe the person who’d called Porambo’s house had warned him that he was in danger, too. Or maybe it was the same individual who lured Crawford out. Nobody knows for sure, because the next time Porambo spoke to anyone, he was under arrest in a hospital bed, with a bullet lodged permanently in his brain and little memory of how it got there.

The cops who responded to Porambo’s shooting searched the Volkswagen where it had happened and found a bag containing wigs, fake badges, and two loaded pistols. The accessories linked Porambo to several unsolved crimes, including the murder of Sydney Davis. A rent receipt led police to an apartment in Belleville, New Jersey, where they found cash, stolen driver’s licenses, maps with homes and addresses circled, passports and birth certificates with random names, and more guns and disguises.

To some people, the scope of Porambo’s crimes seemed implausible. His parole officer told police that he’d had “no inclination that [Porambo] was doing anything wrong.” Local newspapers covered the story, listing the pending charges against him and referencing Porambo’s renown for his “controversial book.”

Carol’s reaction to the scope of her husband’s deceit was stoic. Nothing surprised her anymore. “It was just so hard for me to even cry tears,” she told me. In a final act of spousal loyalty, she dug through Porambo’s office and found a fireman’s uniform he often wore during robberies. She burned it in their apartment building’s incinerator.

While he sat in jail awaiting trial for felony murder, acclimating to life with a chunk of metal in his head, Porambo’s moods were fitful. Sometimes he was chipper, like the day a detective visited him with a nurse to take hair and blood samples. The nurse patted one of Porambo’s muscled forearms in search of a vein, and the inmate bragged that he’d been doing lots of pull-ups lately. At one point, he said to the detective, “It’s really nice to make your acquaintance. I only wish it had been under different circumstances.”

“You’re the first guy in seven years in your situation that ever said that to me,” the detective replied.

When the nurse turned her attention to his hair, zeroing in on a strand to pluck, Porambo said, “Don’t take the gray hairs! Those are special to me.” When the nurse asked why, he glanced up with a scampish grin, “I got them from all of my unpublished works.”

In other moments, Porambo was matter-of-fact. Page and Windsor had given statements to the police implicating him in multiple crimes, including Davis’s murder, in order to protect themselves. He assumed they did so because they were sure he would die of his gunshot wounds. “How can you hurt a man who’s already dead?” he explained in a letter, one of hundreds he wrote while awaiting trial. The letters piled up on his lawyer’s desk, in the prison warden’s office, and at the newsroom of the Star-Ledger. He wrote so many to Richard Newman, the judge assigned to his case, that Newman was forced to recuse himself after prosecutors complained that the accused’s overwhelming contact might influence the trial.

Some of these letters revealed another side of Porambo—a peculiar, perhaps delusional one. He claimed that Jesus Christ had been whispering in his ear since he woke up in the hospital. He carried a small crucifix to legal meetings and signed correspondence “Sincerely and Faith in Christ.” Before a pretrial hearing, as he was preparing “notes” for the new judge on his case, he suddenly switched to writing that Jesus had told him, “No, no, run. Go to court! Why write the judge when you can tell [him] face to face.”

When the trial finally began, in July 1984, two of Porambo’s letters became focal points for the prosecution. In one, Porambo offered to testify against Page in exchange for a plea bargain; it was a tacit admission of guilt. In the other, he stated that he was “the only person who can or will recount the last moments of Mr. Davis with the dignity with which he deserves.” That sentence placed him at the scene of the murder.

Porambo’s defense was based largely on the precariousness of circumstantial evidence. His blood type was found in Davis’s living room, for instance, and Betsy identified the disguises in his car and at the secret apartment as looking similar to those worn by her attackers. Porambo’s lawyer also contended that the Newark police were framing his client as payback for No Cause for Indictment. The corrupt system Porambo had exposed, the attorney argued, had finally found a way to silence him. There was no proof to support that claim, however.

As the trial dragged on, the damage to Porambo’s neurological system caused spittle to collect at the corners of his mouth and sometimes drip down his chin. He was prone to bursting into tears unexpectedly. When he was called on to don the disguises allegedly used in his crimes, the moisture on his face rendered the glue used to attach them useless. Cheap beards and mustaches drooped pathetically off his visage as he stood before the jury. His lawyer later described it as “almost a sick kind of scene.”

Carol came to the hearings. She knew that their marriage was over, but she wanted to be present for her husband’s reckoning. Nervous that whoever had shot Porambo—a crime the police never solved—might come after her, she kept a low profile by sitting in the back row and avoiding the press. She never spoke to her husband. She can’t remember even making eye contact with him.

On October 2, 1984, a jury of eight women and four men found Porambo guilty. He was sentenced to 30 years to life. Though he never admitted to killing Davis, as the trial came to a close, Porambo made a statement before the court. “I am two people,” he told the judge. “I’m a good person and a bad person. I know that now.”

For the first few years of his sentence, as he passed through bland prison hallways on his way to eat or shower, Porambo bounced awkwardly on the balls of his feet. Brain damage had spoiled his equilibrium. Below his black, thick-framed glasses, his chin jutted out at a strange, painful-seeming angle. He still drooled. Yet he kept in shape by jogging for an hour every day in the recreation yard, stopping to change into dry sweats halfway through. And he loved to shadowbox, doing the footwork that, as a teenager, he’d shunned in the ring. His moves inspired shouts of “Rambo!” among fellow inmates, who liked the smart, funny, and accomplished guy from Newark. Prison officers were less enamored: Porambo once threatened a hunger strike, detailing a “suicide schedule” in a letter, unless they provided him with speech and occupational therapy.

Eventually, Porambo began to wither, emotionally and physically. Outbursts of anger at his brother’s family, who tried to maintain contact with him, drove them to cut off communication. (Family members I contacted either did not reply or declined to comment.) His psyche took a major hit when, in 1989, his daughter Ronda slipped into a coma during routine surgery related to rheumatoid arthritis. Doctors said she was unlikely to survive. Prison authorities told Porambo that he could either visit her in the hospital or go to her funeral. He chose to see her before she died.

Carol heard her husband before he entered Ronda’s hospital room: his shuffling footsteps in the sterile hallway, the clanking shackles on his wrists and ankles. During the 15 minutes he was allotted for the visit, he wept over Ronda’s inert body, gripping it as tightly as he could. Then he trundled out. It was the last time Carol ever saw him. Years later, Porambo would remember Ronda’s death and say simply, “Lost without her.”

The trapped bullet eroded Porambo’s memory and his ability to speak and move. In time he was relocated to a prison unit for people with permanent health problems. When he could no longer jog, he took to walking the yard. When speaking more than a few words at a time became difficult, he scribbled on a pad of paper. Another prisoner helped him do basic tasks like tie his shoes and type.

In the summer of 2006, after Porambo had been behind bars for 23 years, Fred Bruning paid him a visit. They hadn’t seen each other in decades. Bruning found his old friend a shell of his former self, a desperate man who alternated between boisterous fits of laughter and racking sobs when talking about the past. Responding to questions, Porambo mostly grunted, roared, or scratched words onto his pad of paper. His phlegm-rattled breathing made him sound like a predator on a phone call in a horror movie.

Bruning had come to interview Porambo about his life. “Where’s Carol?” Porambo wanted to know. Bruning had no idea. They talked about what Porambo would be doing if he were free. “Work,” he managed to say. Then, putting pen to paper that was wet with his saliva, he continued, “Work is everything.” Bruning mentioned that two of his children, including Porambo’s own goddaughter, taught in minority schools. “God bless her,” Porambo wrote. When Bruning brought up the most painful subject of all—how his friend had wound up disabled and serving time for murder, how a life of such promise had come to this—Porambo let out a series of mournful cries before managing a single word: “Mistake.”

Three months after Bruning’s visit, on the morning of October 22, a corrections officer peered through the cutaway glass window of cell 2C. Inside, Porambo was on his knees with his upper body bent over the metal frame of his stiff cot, as if in silent prayer. An hour prior, he’d had his breakfast. The officer knocked on the door. Porambo didn’t move.

The guard called in a “53,” the code for a medical emergency, over his walkie-talkie, and the lock on Porambo’s cell thudded open. Paramedics rushed in and dragged Porambo’s unresponsive body onto his mattress. They began chest compressions. Thirty-three minutes after being discovered in his cell, Porambo was pronounced dead.

At first it wasn’t clear what had killed him. The medical examiner saw no signs of physical injury: cuts, scrapes, bruises, torn fingernails. Porambo’s gray hair was shorn nearly to his scalp, and there was no visible head trauma. It wasn’t until the examiner conducted a full autopsy, cutting open his body, that she found the cause of death. The reporter once hailed as “a truth-seeker above all,” the criminal deemed by Newark prosecutors as “an extreme risk to society,” the erratic father, husband, friend, and colleague who’d been shot six times, had choked on a slice of orange. He was 67.

Finding any next of kin was difficult. No one could figure out where Carol was; she’d long ago ceased interacting with Porambo and anyone who knew him. When I tracked her down for this story, she was living in Kingsport with a second husband, in a cramped, homey apartment across the street from where the Bloody Bucket used to be; the place was filled with pictures of grand- and great-grandchildren, stacks of DVDs, and several pet cats. Carol told me that she and her children finally learned of Porambo’s death months after it happened, when Glenna searched for her stepfather’s name online and came across an obituary. By then, lest Porambo wind up in a pauper’s grave, his brother had claimed his remains.

Cleaning out the dead man’s cell, at least, was easy. Everything he owned fit into two plastic bins: a few books, a black-and-white portable TV, an electric typewriter. And a letter.

It had arrived in June 2006, a second chance in a white envelope. “Dear Mr. Porambo,” it read. “I was very moved by your book, No Cause for Indictment: An Autopsy of Newark. It’s an important piece of journalism and an enlightening read.” The sender was an editor at Melville House, a small publisher, who’d found a used copy of Porambo’s book on a sale rack at a local library. “I write to ask if you would allow us to bring it back into print,” the editor went on, remarking that the following year would be the 40th anniversary of the Newark riots. “We believe the book deserves a new life.”

With the help of another inmate, Porambo had typed a reply accepting the offer. The paper was taut and stained with tears.

When the book was reissued in 2007, its publisher crowed of the author, “His life … had this one great piece of work. And, by God, if you accomplish one great thing like that in your life, is it really a wasted life?” Warren Sloat, the original editor, penned a new introduction. “There’s nothing to compare with Porambo at the top of his form,” Sloat wrote, describing No Cause for Indictment as “borne aloft by an authentic literary voice.” That voice reverberated through time, with a righteous fury as widely relevant in the 21st century as it was when the book first appeared. Porambo wrote of “two distinct worlds,” one “rented to the city’s poor, a sprawling mass of slums and high-rise prisons,” the other for prosperous white people who “retreat” from facing up to pernicious realities in which they are complicit. Racist public policies cemented the divide, and bigoted law enforcement patrolled it. “Violence perpetrated on ghetto people is condoned by police superiors,” he said, “if not by overt action then at least by silence.”

Sloat pondered the book’s limited success—“maybe [it] was too late to be journalism and too early to be history”—but not Porambo’s existential downfall. That task fell to Bruning, whose prison interview formed the reprint’s poignant epilogue. He cycled through possible psychological explanations, concluding that nobody could say for sure what went wrong in Porambo’s life, not even Porambo himself. Bruning then quoted Spanish author Miguel de Unamuno, who once wrote, “At some point, it is inevitable that you find yourself and it is up to you to determine whether that moment, that encounter will be about gladness or about sorrow.” Bruning wondered. “Did gladness spook Porambo? If so, sorrow awaited.”

When I spoke to Bruning on the phone in the fall of 2017, he told me, “There is a starting point to this somewhere, somehow. Without knowing it, there’s going to be a hole in every story done about Ron.” Perhaps, though, that hole is the point—the counterintuitive thing that makes the narrative of Porambo’s life both universal and complete. We all have cracks, some wider than others, through which devils can creep to fight our better angels. And as Porambo wrote in his book, “There are no such animals as ‘minor corruption’ or ‘little lies’ … since both evolve into predatory monsters.”

The race to save a child from a genetic death sentence.

By Amitha Kalaichandran

Chapter One

The lightning hit on a sweltering and stormy June afternoon. It thrashed through the chimney of the Beishes’ two-story home in Denton, Maryland, a rural community, before ripping into the basement. There it arced into the gas line, setting off an explosion that shook the walls of the house.

Jeff Beish, a truck driver, was often away for extended stretches of time. That day in 2016, however, he was in the living room with his three-year-old son watching television. “It was the loudest boom I’d ever heard. Then I saw smoke spring up through the wall,” Jeff said. “I grabbed Conner, booked it, and called 911.” While they stood outside in the yard, the fire surged through the living room floor.

“Thank God it happened during the day and not while we were asleep,” Hollie, Jeff’s wife, added. She and the Beishes’ other son, seven-year-old Jaxon, had been out running errands. By the time they got home, firefighters had extinguished the flames. The house was salvageable, but electrical wiring needed to be rerouted, and floors and walls required structural repairs. The Beishes spent the next month at a nearby hotel.

Which would have been fine, except that Conner was sick. He had been for months, and the cause was a mystery. He got worse at the hotel. The Beishes hoped that the elusive condition wasn’t serious and they’d find the right treatment soon. Certainly, they reassured themselves, it was nothing catastrophic. After all, the cliché is that lightning never strikes the same place twice.

Born in August 2012, Conner had been a healthy infant. He was prone to colds and had “baby asthma,” but the doctors said that would go away. By the time he turned one, he had a full head of wavy blond hair that Hollie kept long. Sometimes it fell down his forehead, meeting the long brown eyelashes that framed his blue eyes. He had a wide, mischievous smile. He started walking at 13 months and two months later was chasing Jaxon around the house dressed as a lobster for Halloween.

Words came slowly to Conner. By his second birthday, he’d mastered about ten of them; at that age, the number should have been at least 50. “I assumed it was because Jaxon would always speak for him,” Hollie said, something big brothers often do. “Sometimes I thought maybe he was just shy.” The Beishes’ pediatrician said not to worry, that some children gain words in bursts. Family and friends were also reassuring. “They would joke that once he started talking, he wouldn’t stop,” Jeff recalled. Months passed and Conner’s progress was still glacial. The Beishes took him to a speech pathologist.

Hollie was in her late twenties then, five-foot-three with green eyes and a silver hoop through the inner cartilage of one ear. Jeff was a few years older, was much taller, and liked to wear baseball caps backward. They’d met ten years prior at a Walgreens, where she’d worked as a clerk and he’d made regular drop-offs driving a Coca-Cola delivery truck. Hollie had decided to be a full-time mom, which suited her “strict and structured” personality, she told me. It also meant that she was the person who adapted the most to Conner’s limited communication.

“Eat! Eat!” he would yell when he was hungry. Hollie would take him to the pantry or fridge and point to various food items. He would nod or gesture at what he wanted. “It was a bit like negotiating,” Hollie explained. If Conner didn’t know a word, he would make a sound instead—imitating the sucking of liquid through a straw if he was thirsty, for instance. Some words he understood but couldn’t quite say: Jaxon was “Bubba,” Jeff was “Da,” and Hollie was “Me.”

Conner started preschool at three. When picture day rolled around, on October 1, 2015, Hollie dressed him in khaki pants and an OshKosh collared shirt with white and beige stripes. She noticed that he seemed tired. At school, Conner sat for his picture against a blue background that matched his eyes, offering the photographer a measured, close-lipped smile.

Then, as he made his way across the classroom to return to his seat, Conner suddenly went limp. He crumpled onto the carpet. His teacher rushed him to the nurse’s office. His forehead felt warm, and soon he began convulsing. Conner’s seizure, his first, lasted six minutes.

When the school called Hollie, she jumped in her dark purple Ford SUV and resisted the urge to speed. “I even put the car on cruise control,” she said. She also forced herself to stop crying, because the tears were blurring her vision. She didn’t want to get into an accident.

At the hospital where Conner had been rushed in an ambulance, doctors ruled out an infection like meningitis. Then they sent him home. “It could happen again, or it might not happen again,” one of them told Hollie. If it did, she shouldn’t worry. About 470,000 children in the United States have epilepsy, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but an underlying medical condition isn’t the only cause of seizures. High temperatures can also trigger an episode in a developing brain. The doctor told Hollie that Conner had likely experienced one of these so-called febrile seizures and instructed her to give him Tylenol.

Jeff was “scared to death” when Hollie called to tell him what had happened. He thought back on their families’ medical histories and couldn’t remember anyone who’d experienced seizures. Hollie, though, was comforted by what the doctors had said. When Conner had more seizures—after his nighttime bath, while playing in his room—she imagined that she and Jeff would one day look back on these episodes as they did Conner’s baby asthma: They would remember them as part of a passing phase.

Two months later, the Beishes took Conner to a clinic in Baltimore for an electroencephalogram, which measures brain activity through electrodes attached to the scalp. The results were abnormal: He endured multiple seizures during the procedure, some so small that his body never visibly moved. Conner was prescribed a low dose of an anti-seizure medication, which seemed to work. By the time of his follow-up appointment in February 2016, he’d been seizure-free for three months. He was even able to ride a scooter, a Christmas present from his parents, in the backyard with Jaxon.

The good news didn’t last long, however. During the February appointment, Conner had an MRI. The test revealed that his cerebellum, the part of the brain responsible for balance and coordination, was unusually small. “Some doctors said it could be a normal thing, like some people just are born with a small cerebellum,” Hollie said. “Another doctor said it could mean it had changed and had become smaller as he got older.” They would need to run more tests.

That night, after her family went to sleep, Hollie poured herself a glass of soda, sat down with her iPad, and Googled “small cerebellum.” The conditions that popped up were terrifying. There was Alzheimer’s, which she knew Conner couldn’t have, and fatal childhood brain disorders, which she couldn’t stand to think about. Then Hollie saw cerebral palsy listed. “I always thought that was something that happened at birth,” she said. “But one article I read said it’s hard to tell in some kids until they’re older.” If Conner had cerebral palsy, the Beishes could handle it. They knew a few kids with the condition. Her eyelids heavy, Hollie clicked off her tablet and went to bed feeling hopeful.

Conner didn’t have cerebral palsy. His doctors were able to figure out that much—but little else. By May 2016, the seizures were back and worse than ever. “He was standing beside his wooden train table and fell and smashed his face on it,” Hollie said of one attack. Then he threw up. His doctors increased his medication. It didn’t work.

By then the costs of Conner’s prescriptions, procedures, and visits to specialists tallied into the tens of thousands of dollars. The Beishes had private insurance that covered most of it; not every American family could say the same. Still, Hollie and Jeff were exhausted and frustrated. Conner’s life, and theirs, had been upended by a medical riddle.

The Beishes didn’t think the seizures had anything to do with Conner’s speech delay, which had remained static for months. He still had his small arsenal of vocabulary, and he could parrot what his parents and speech therapist said. He would answer his mom when she pointed at things, even if the words he used for them weren’t exactly right: “Moo” was cow, for example, and “meow” was cat. He knew his colors, too, especially red, green, and blue.

One day in August, a few weeks after lightning struck the Beishes’ house, Hollie and Conner were working on a puzzle. “What color is this?” Hollie asked, holding up a blue piece. Her son was silent. She asked again, this time more slowly. Conner stared at her and still said nothing. “He was looking at me like, What do you want me to do?” Hollie recalled.

Blue was the first word Conner lost.

Chapter Two

Emily de los Reyes had two career choices. “All the women in my family were teachers or doctors,” she said. De los Reyes was born in 1963 and grew up in Manila. Her family was well off, so they didn’t feel the most acute effects of the Philippines’ widespread corruption and privation, the fallout of President Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorship. When de los Reyes went to medical school, however, she witnessed social ills firsthand. On Sunday afternoons, following church, she sometimes assisted health workers caring for children in poor parts of the city. Hundreds of kids would queue up—some with parents, some on their own—and wait to be seen. The experience stayed with de los Reyes as she pursued a career in pediatrics.

Toward the end of medical school, in the mid-1980s, she joined her classmates in protesting the waning Marcos regime. When I met her at a busy Starbucks in Columbus, Ohio, more than 30 years later, it was hard for me to imagine her as a firebrand. At 54, she was the picture of precision. Her hair had been blow-dried into a neat black bob and showed a few streaks of gray. Nearly everything she had with her was a shade of pink: her laptop cover, her iPhone case, her zip-up sweater. Before I arrived, she’d been carefully finalizing a PowerPoint presentation. “I was so idealistic back then,” she said of her youth, a smile creeping across her face.

After graduating she decided to work in the United States, because its democracy was strong and medical care first-rate. She moved to San Francisco, where there was a large Filipino community, then to Charleston, West Virginia, where there was not. One day, while completing her residency at a local hospital, she rode in a helicopter to pick up a sick infant from a farm. When the mother saw de los Reyes’s dark skin, she hesitated before handing over the baby. Still, the young doctor found a community. Her residency class had several other foreigners—not uncommon in underserved parts of the United States—and she met an American doctor who soon became her husband.

In the early 1990s, West Virginia became a relative hotbed of an infectious brain disease called La Crosse encephalitis. Like Zika, the virus is spread by mosquitoes, and most cases occur in children. Dozens of patients came to the Charleston hospital where de los Reyes worked. Some presented with nothing more than a fever. Others arrived comatose, with terrified parents. “A day or two before, their child was fine,” de los Reyes said, “just running around in the woods.” Then the kid would struggle to wake up, have seizures, and become delirious before passing out. “We would give them anti-seizure medications and make sure they were ventilated,” de los Reyes said. “Most would do fine.” But some would not: They left the hospital with permanent neurological deficits.

De los Reyes decided to specialize in pediatric neurology, a field rife with harrowing conditions that degrade young brains. Many of those ailments are rare diseases, a legal designation that in the United States is generally reserved for illnesses afflicting fewer than 200,000 people. Nearly 7,000 maladies fall into the category. Most are complicated genetic conditions that pharmaceutical companies have never been inclined to gamble on. The industry prefers to focus its resources on widespread ailments with identifiable causes, an approach that requires less research investment and offers a larger stable of patients who will eventually pay for the pills, injections, and devices that companies invent. A U.S. law called the Orphan Drug Act, signed in 1983, offers tax breaks, subsidies, expedited approval, and exclusive manufacturing rights to companies that develop treatments for uncommon conditions. The law led to the creation of hundreds of new drugs in its first three decades on the books. Still, when de los Reyes entered pediatric neurology, 95 percent of rare diseases had no cure. Over the course of her career, that number would hardly budge.

After finishing her residency and a fellowship, de los Reyes was recruited to work as a neurodevelopmental specialist at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. It was there, in 2001, that she saw a case unlike anything she’d ever treated. The patient, referred by an ophthalmologist, was a nine-year-old girl who’d been born healthy but was now losing her eyesight. Her family was from Guam. They’d traveled more than 7,000 miles for the appointment at the Little Rock hospital, which through word of mouth they’d learned had excellent eye specialists.

De los Reyes examined the little girl, who had a chubby, tamarind-colored face and short black hair—not so different from her own appearance when she was a child in the Philippines. The parents described a bizarre constellation of symptoms on top of progressive blindness: speech delay, seizures, and difficult walking. Together with the ophthalmologist, de los Reyes began testing for various illnesses. The doctors ruled out macular dystrophy, a genetic condition that destroys cells in the retina, and keratomalacia, a chronic deficiency of vitamin A that causes blindness. Could it be a problem with the little girl’s brain, like a tumor? Imaging came back negative for suspicious masses.

Stumped, de los Reyes called her mentor, Paul Dyken, one of the country’s foremost experts in childhood brain disorders. She spelled out everything she’d learned and asked if he’d ever seen anything like it. “Oh Emily…,” Dyken replied with a heavy sigh before delivering the news.

The little girl had a condition so rare that most pediatricians hadn’t heard of it. But Dyken had. He’d treated several patients with, and coauthored scientific papers about, the disease. He was one of the few doctors in the world who could say “I see this all the time” about the condition, because afflicted families sought him out. If she was lucky, Dyken said, the girl would live to be 20. De los Reyes could help her die a slow, inevitable death as painlessly as possible—nothing more.

Chapter Three

Soon after the Beishes moved back into their home after the lightning strike, Conner was hospitalized twice for tonic-clonic seizures, marked by a loss of consciousness and violent limb contractions. Doctors diagnosed him with Doose syndrome, a form of childhood epilepsy that more often affects boys. “It was comforting to have an answer,” Hollie said. They told their worried families; everyone relaxed.

Conner had just turned four. As he headed into his second year of preschool, he took various combinations of anti-seizure medications as his doctors tried to find a cocktail that worked. Hollie and Jeff had never heard of the prescriptions, which had names like Keppra, Depakote, and Onfi. Sometimes Conner would scream when he couldn’t remember a word for something he’d once been able to name, which seemed to happen more and more often. His legs began trembling when he walked.

That fall, a blood panel came back with surprising results. Conner had two genetic markers indicating that he might be missing an essential enzyme called tripeptidyl-peptidase1 (TPP1). A second blood test would be necessary to confirm the discovery. If it came back positive, that meant Conner had a rare genetic disorder. “The doctor advised me not to look anything up on the internet,” Hollie said, “which of course I did as soon as I hung up.”

What she saw on her iPad was horrifying. Being born without TPP1 was a slow death sentence. There was no cure and no treatment. Hollie saw videos of kindergarten-age children in wheelchairs, unable to speak or control their limbs. She began to sob.

More blood was sent off to the lab, and for what felt like the millionth time, Hollie and Jeff waited for the results. As fall turned to winter, Conner stopped running around with his brother, and he could barely speak. “It was like he wanted to say things and would open his mouth, but nothing came out,” Hollie recalled. He developed tremors in both hands, like an elderly man with Parkinson’s. He had trouble feeding himself, taking longer to use a fork and struggling to bring the utensil to his mouth. Hollie had to hold his cup when he drank.

Grasping for any shred of comfort, the Beishes kept reading about TPP1 deficiencies and looking for differences between the doomed children who appeared on their computer screens and their own son. They realized that in each case they read about, the afflicted kid was blind. Conner’s vision was fine. It was something to hold on to.

That December was mild in Maryland. On days when snow fell, it melted as soon as it hit the pavement. Conner had to grasp one of his parent’s hands in order to walk. Otherwise he crawled. Hollie emailed the doctors and requested, if the news from the blood test was bad, that they not deliver it before Christmas. She wanted the holidays to be happy. As a gift for Conner, the Beishes adopted a golden Labrador retriever, whom they named Joy. Jeff hid the puppy in the garage until Christmas morning, when Hollie put reindeer antlers on Joy’s head for the big reveal. Conner shrieked with glee when he saw the puppy, then stroked her back as she lay curled up next to him on the floor. His parents imagined a similar scene repeating itself as Conner and Joy got bigger. “It would be his dog that he would grow up with,” Jeff said.

When the doctors didn’t call after Christmas, Hollie thought they might have forgotten about Conner. Or maybe the news was good, so not a high priority. The Beishes didn’t nag, preferring instead to preserve a semblance of normalcy. “I wanted to know, but at the same time I didn’t want to know,” Hollie admitted.

Then, on January 19, 2017, she called to ask for an update. It turned out there had been an error: Someone had put Conner’s test results in the wrong part of his chart. A doctor would call with answers the next day, the Beishes were told, which happened to be the date of Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration. Jeff and Hollie had voted for Trump. “I didn’t like either candidate, but I picked the one whose policies lined up with me more,” Hollie explained. She and Jeff hoped that the ceremonies on TV would distract them while they waited for the call.

Hours passed. As the sun was setting, they turned off the inauguration feed. They sat side by side on the staircase in the foyer, Hollie’s iPhone clenched in her hand. Finally it rang.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t call earlier,” the doctor said. “But…” She paused before continuing. “The test results confirm things.” Conner was missing TPP1. “He has Batten disease,” the doctor said.

Hollie was standing on the steps, the phone to her ear. “OK,” she said weakly, the only word she could manage. Jeff was on the other side of the banister, unable to hear the doctor. He held his hands suspended in the air, palms up, in a gesture that seemed to plead, Tell me what’s happening.

Chapter Four

Frederick Eustace Batten, a British physician of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was one of the founders of the field of pediatric neurology. A “brisk, lithe figure” with “bubbling humor,” according to one medical historian, Batten was “practical and purposeful,” and “children loved him.” In 1903, he published research on two young siblings suffering from the same undiagnosed condition, in which their brain function and eyesight deteriorated rapidly. The disease was given the name juvenile amaurotic idiocy, which endured in the medical lexicon until the 1970s.

Idiocy is no longer considered appropriate terminology, and Batten disease is now known by the name of the man who identified it. Still, Alfried Kohlschütter, a pediatrics researcher at the University of Hamburg and an authority on the condition, uses another controversial label. “I always say it’s a form of childhood dementia, though people don’t like me using that term,” he told me recently. Dissenters claim that it oversimplifies the condition and suggests a link to adult memory loss, which has different underlying causes. To Kohlschütter, though, the progression of the diseases is strikingly similar. “It’s like these children are melting in front of you,” he said.

Batten disease is a glitch in the body’s nervous system. Whenever the brain completes basic cellular and metabolic processes, its cells produce waste. Batten disease sufferers lack certain enzymes or proteins required to process this waste. As a result, brain cells are forced to store it internally. (See figure below.) Eventually, the cells become clogged and die. One parent of a child with Batten disease compared the condition to “your kitchen filling up with garbage” because no one ever takes it out, to the point that the room is no longer usable. Along the way, patients’ motor, verbal, and emotional capacities diminish.

In the United States, according to the National Institutes of Health, between two and four of every 100,000 children are born with Batten disease. They can get it if both their parents are genetic carriers. There are 14 subtypes of the disease, each affecting a different gene, involving a different deficiency, and decreeing a different life span. Conner was diagnosed with subtype CLN2, distinguished by the absence of TPP1. Symptoms initially appear around the age of two; a speech delay is often the first noticeable sign of disease. After that come seizures, language regression, motor dysfunction, and blindness. Patients die between the ages of eight and twelve.

The first Batten disease case that de los Reyes saw was the little girl from Guam. Her subtype was CLN3, indicated by a protein missing from cellular membranes. Her family was stoic when de los Reyes delivered the diagnosis. By then she had young children of her own. Explaining a fatal illness to parents who’d come thousands of miles to Little Rock, armed with faith in doctors’ abilities to help their daughter, “was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do,” de los Reyes recalled.

The family flew home a few days later. De los Reyes communicated with the girl’s local doctors for about two years. But eventually the calls from Guam stopped. “We lost touch,” de los Reyes said. “I have no idea how long the girl lived.”

Like her mentor, de los Reyes fashioned herself into one of the world’s few experts in Batten disease. She diagnosed several more cases in Arkansas before being recruited to Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. As the head of the neurodevelopmental department, she took on the project of turning Nationwide into a hub of Batten disease research and patient care. Families traveled from around the world for appointments with her.

De los Reyes was proud of her work, but the script she was forced to recite to parents was excruciating: There is no cure. Your child will die. People reacted in different ways. Some turned numb and silent, like the parents from Guam, dumbstruck by the futility of feeling or doing anything else. Others put the blame on de los Reyes, because she was the messenger of the devastating news. Or they lashed out at loved ones, their disappointment channeled into anger.

De los Reyes advised parents to spend as much time as they could with their sick kids. She promised to support them while they did, with medication, physical therapy, and walking aids. “I can’t tell you how many funerals I’ve been to,” she said in the Starbucks, her gaze shifting to the floor. She hoped that things would be different one day.

Science is almost never done in a vacuum. Given Big Pharma’s historical indifference to rare-disease research, finding a treatment or cure almost always requires a scrappy army of academic researchers, patient advocates, and bold financiers. Collectively they must be willing to endure years of painstaking, costly investigation and the litany of failures that typically precede even marginal gains. The quest to unravel Batten disease was no exception.

While de los Reyes was delivering tough news in Little Rock and Columbus, Peter Lobel and David Sleat were hard at work in a lab at Rutgers University in New Jersey. During the late 1990s, the scientists isolated TPP1 and demonstrated its role in processing cellular waste, a breakthrough in knowledge of CLN2. Their research led to a new hypothesis: If children with CLN2 are sick because they’re missing TPP1, they should get better when given the enzyme. The proposition was straightforward enough, but testing it wasn’t.

Lobel and Sleat’s first step was replicating CLN2 in mice, so that the animals could be used as experiment subjects. “This part was really, really hard,” Sleat told me in a mildly accented voice, a remnant of his native England, which he left 30 years ago to work in the United States. It took about two years to genetically engineer the TPP1-deficient stem cells needed to produce a mouse that showed signs of Batten disease at around seven weeks old. “You could pick them up and feel them shaking,” Sleat said. “As they got older, the shaking got worse, and they would have difficulty walking, dying at around four months.” (Healthy lab mice live two or three years.)

The next phase of research involved administering lab-made TPP1 to the mice through the spine. Remarkably, at just a fraction of normal TPP1 levels, young mice didn’t develop signs of Batten disease. Older subjects with severe symptoms experienced only mild gains. Early treatment, the research confirmed, was crucial.

Other labs around the world began using mice that had been genetically altered using Sleat and Lobel’s method. Some researchers experimented with cerebral shunts, which worked at least as well as the spinal route in terms of reducing seizures and cellular waste. But inserting a device into the brain left severe scarring, and the subjects died within a few months.

Meanwhile, at the University of Missouri, ophthalmology professor Martin Katz was studying dogs’ brains for clues to help solve neurodevelopmental problems in humans. In 2005, a man in Pennsylvania had grown worried about his longhaired dachshund, Frodo, who at a few months old had started having seizures, then ceased walking and eating on his own. His owner took him to several vets, none of whom had any idea what was wrong. When Frodo died at just one year old, the owner offered his body to the veterinary lab at the University of Pennsylvania, which packed it in ice and sent it to Katz, widely known for his research.

Katz was intrigued. He extracted tissue samples from Frodo’s brain and examined them under a microscope. He compared the samples to research texts, which led to a surprising match: Cellular waste that had accumulated in Frodo’s brain was essentially identical to that found in autopsies of human subjects who’d died of CLN2. Both had a distinctive curvilinear pattern. “If you imagine a bowl of alphabet soup with all C’s and very little liquid, that’s what it looked like,” Katz told me.

Unlike the Rutgers mice, Frodo was a natural subject for Batten disease research. If there were more dogs like him, they could be used to test treatments. Katz quickly traced him to a breeder, to whom he explained that Frodo’s parents could produce puppies that might help sick children get better. The breeder agreed to let Katz adopt the two adult dachshunds, Captain and Autumn. “Captain and Autumn were very attached to each other,” said Katz, who has a soft voice and a head of thick, wavy chestnut hair, not unlike the coat of some dachshunds. “It was nice to have them around.” Both dogs were perfectly healthy; the genetic mutation that causes CLN2 was recessive in their DNA. They produced several litters in Katz’s lab, each bearing a few puppies with Batten disease.

Here an unusual player in rare-disease research entered the scene. BioMarin is a Northern California pharmaceutical company that develops treatments for uncommon genetic disorders. Founded in 1997, it has a risky business model: Pour money into research for orphan drugs, then profit from large price margins and limited competition. Relying on a handful of willing investors and the provisions of the Orphan Drug Act, the company’s path has been anything but smooth. After posting disappointing revenues, BioMarin laid off a third of its staff in 2005, the same year its second rare-disease drug went to market. That proved to be a turning point: Within a few years, the company’s first two proprietary treatments would reap more than $500 million annually through licensing and medical coverage of just a few thousand patients. By 2017, the company would finally reach the edge of profitability.

Around 2009, building on Lobel and Sleat’s research at Rutgers, BioMarin began producing purified TPP1 in vats. When it heard about Katz’s dachshunds, the company suggested collaborating on trials to determine how enzyme injections affected dogs. Katz agreed, and together they launched a pilot study. Three dogs with CLN2 received injections at the base of the spine, a procedure that lasted a few minutes. After only the second round of treatment, they mounted an allergic response. After the third, they went into anaphylactic shock. Ultimately, they were euthanized.

Rather than declare failure, Katz brainstormed new approaches. “I always tell my students that it wouldn’t be called research if it worked out all the time,” he explained. His team spaced out the injections and tried administering the enzyme to the dogs’ brains through the cranium, even though complications with that approach had previously killed lab mice. Finally, Katz hit on a method that worked. Two puppies named Waylon and Lulu had shunts surgically inserted into their brains. (A pathologist would later find no scarring as a result of the procedure.) Compared with injections, the shunts gave researchers more control over the rate at which TPP1 entered the dogs’ bodies—and slower delivery minimized the risk of allergic reaction.

Waylon and Lulu received infusions every other week for a few hours at a time, then were observed alongside sick subjects that weren’t given treatments. For a couple of months, Waylon and Lulu behaved like healthy dogs. They were attentive and playful with the scientists, they didn’t wobble when they walked, and they didn’t have seizures. When Batten disease symptoms finally appeared, they progressed slowly. Ultimately, Waylon and Lulu lived 50 percent longer than the dogs that didn’t receive TPP1 infusions.

A BioMarin researcher presented the study’s results in the summer of 2012, at a meeting in Charlotte hosted by the Batten Disease Support and Research Association, a network for families affected by the condition. De los Reyes, who by then sat on the BDSRA’s medical advisory board, perched in a chair at a table in the dimly lit room, absorbing Katz’s PowerPoint presentation. Katz ended the slideshow with split-screen video footage. On one side, Waylon and Lulu were running; on the other, two dogs of the same age struggled to walk.

“The whole room gasped,” de los Reyes said. No one had ever seen anything like it. Accustomed to brutal disappointment when it came to Batten disease, de los Reyes initially considered Katz’s findings too good to be true. When her skepticism subsided, however, her thoughts turned to the obvious question: When can we give this to kids?

Chapter Five

Standing on the stairs, Hollie could barely hear what the doctor on the phone said next about Conner’s diagnosis. Shock had quickly morphed into anger. First it had been febrile seizures, then Doose syndrome, now Batten disease. Why had it taken so long—nearly 16 months since Conner’s first seizure, even more since the onset of his speech delay—to get the right answer?

“We’d like for you to come into the office to discuss it further, and moving forward we’d like…”

“That’s OK,” Hollie interrupted the physician. “I’m not interested. I’d like to find a new doctor.” She demanded that Conner’s medical records be sent to their house. Then she hung up and told Jeff everything. Together they cried at the bottom of the stairs.

The next day, Hollie found herself strangely invigorated. “I felt a weight had lifted. All of our questions and the wondering were just gone,” she said. “Now it became, What can we do to help Conner?” The clock was ticking. The longer it took the Beishes to find their son the right care, the more muted his short life would be. And maybe—just maybe—there was something out there that might save him: a medicine, or a miracle.

The Beishes read about various hospitals and specialists. “It was time to find a doctor who knew what this disease was,” Hollie said, “someone who could give us answers.” She kept careful notes about everything she learned. The Beishes told their families, who began doing research, too. Jeff’s mother read about the BDSRA and called its director. “Please speak with my daughter-in-law,” she begged.

The director phoned Hollie soon after. “You should give Dr. Emily at Nationwide a call,” she said, referring to de los Reyes. “She’s the Batten disease guru.” Not only that, but Nationwide had a clinical trial under way that Conner might be able to enroll in.

Delivering an enzyme directly to a child’s delicate brain had never been done before, and it was a scary prospect. “The knowledge translation is difficult,” de los Reyes said. “We know mice are not men.” Nor are dachshunds. BioMarin tested the infusion method on monkeys, which are genetically more akin to humans, to screen for complications and determine the safest dosage level (300 milligrams every two weeks). Then, in 2013, the company launched human trials of the treatment, cerliponase alfa, which it gave the trade name Brineura.

Twenty-one children were enrolled to receive infusions at one of three participating hospitals in Italy, Germany, and England. BioMarin also wanted a small research cohort in America. Nationwide was a natural fit, and de los Reyes was adamant that the hospital participate. “I’m an impatient person,” she told me with a smile, the same one I’d seen when she talked about her time as a student protester in Manila. The hospital’s ethics board and research coordinators were concerned that the treatment might expose children to infection or cause injury. “Even with rare diseases where children are dying, we don’t want to hasten their death,” de los Reyes explained.

She had a plan: De los Reyes invited the hospital’s decision-makers to her clinic to meet children with Batten disease. Some of the top brass had never seen an afflicted patient; they’d only read about what the illness did to young bodies. By the end of the tour, one of the research directors was crying. “Emily, we want to help,” she said. “Let’s do this.” Need was weighed against risk, and Nationwide’s participation in the trial was approved.

Due to funding limits and the trial’s protocol, which capped the number of participants at 24, only three children could be enrolled at the Ohio site. They came from various locations, referred by physicians in their home states. The plan was for them to fly into Columbus every other week for treatment. “They had no alternative,” de los Reyes said. “The alternative for them was death.” One by one, starting in December 2014, the participants had catheters and ports inserted into their skulls by neurosurgeons at Nationwide. No infections or injuries occurred. After that, de los Reyes used the surgical implants to administer the enzyme infusions. (See figure below.)

Weeks passed, then months. None of the three children got sicker. They maintained their motor skills or even made gains. Some saw their speech improve. “They didn’t go from single words to sentences, but they were acquiring new words, which is so important,” de los Reyes said. “They could tell their family what they wanted.” Juice, snacks, a hug.

The first trial results weren’t released until March 2016. By then de los Reyes was bursting with excitement over what she knew: On average, participants’ clinical decline was 80 percent slower than expected during the first 48 weeks of treatment. In nearly two-thirds of cases, the disease stabilized. The most common side effects—hypersensitivity, fever, vomiting—were generally tolerated. Batten disease effectively had been halted in its tracks. That the stalling had happened so quickly was all the more remarkable.

News of the clinical trial’s early results spread quickly through the tightly knit community of families coping with Batten disease. It reached the Beishes, through the BDSRA director, in late January 2017. Hollie immediately called de los Reyes and left a message. Her request was simple: She wanted Conner in the trial.

When de los Reyes called Hollie back, she offered to evaluate Conner as soon as the Beishes could get him from Maryland to Ohio. While she could talk to them about Brineura, however, the trial was limited to its original participants. De los Reyes hoped the treatment might be available to more children soon.

Hollie looked at her son. He seemed both too young and too old, his mind and body slipping away before they could really develop. How could anyone deny him help? “I thought maybe if the doctor met us and Conner, she might get us into the trial faster,” Hollie told me—an idea similar to the one that de los Reyes had acted on to convince Nationwide to study Brineura.

Hollie made an appointment for March 13. That day friends and family in Denton wore T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Fighting for Conner.” Jaxon had one, too; he wore it to school while Hollie, Jeff, and Conner piled into the family’s SUV. It was an eight-hour drive through snow and slush to Columbus.

The Beishes had never explained Conner’s condition to him. He was too young to understand. All he knew as his parents led him into the huge glass building that is Nationwide Hospital was that he was going to see another doctor. In the exam room, he sat on a narrow green table, a sippy cup in one hand. When de los Reyes came in, Hollie was struck by how tiny she was—scarcely five feet tall.

“Hi, Conner,” de los Reyes said. “You’re holding that cup very well!”

She was soon joined by several specialists: an occupational therapist, two physiotherapists, and a speech pathologist. They examined Conner, watching him take a few assisted steps and listening to his strained speech. They peppered Hollie with questions about his medical history. The entire process took more than four hours, much longer than the Beishes had expected.

When the examination ended, de los Reyes repeated what she’d said on the phone: The trial was closed. Hollie’s heart sank. De los Reyes explained that the Beishes would have to wait for the treatment to get approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Then Brineura would be available commercially. The doctor was hopeful that that would happen soon, but there were no guarantees.

Normally, drug approval moves at a sluggish bureaucratic pace. But in 2016, BioMarin had filed for a rapid assessment of Brineura. On one hand, the enzyme-replacement study had a small number of participants and a limited time frame. No one had any idea how TPP1 infusions would affect a child two or five or ten years into treatment. The FDA was tasked with avoiding a nightmare scenario in which a drug is approved too early and adverse side effects appear down the road, requiring a recall and possibly leading to lawsuits. On the other hand, the FDA might agree to fast-track Brineura, given that it targeted a fatal disease and had positive early results. The BDSRA was pushing hard for that to happen, providing the agency with families’ testimonials. Some of them had children who would never benefit from Brineura—kids who’d already died or were nearing the age when they would. Still, their parents felt compelled to speak up.

The FDA would weigh all these factors in its ruling, de los Reyes told the Beishes. “It’s a horrible feeling having to ask a family to wait,” she told me. “They know their child is dying, and I’m sitting there saying, ‘I don’t have access to the medicine.’” In the meantime, she prescribed Conner leg braces, a gait trainer, and adjustments to his seizure medications. The Beishes went home to wait and hope for good news—yet again.

Hollie kept de los Reyes updated on Conner’s condition. She shot videos on her phone, including one recorded in April at a party themed around the Star Wars movies, some of Conner’s favorites, thrown by the Make-A-Wish Foundation at his school, where he’d been able to return since the appointment in Columbus. Flanked by volunteers dressed as stormtroopers and Darth Vader, Conner stood in the frame of his customized walker, equipped with a saddle that held him upright. He was able to move haltingly, with a plastic red light saber in one hand. Jeff wore a black shirt that read, “I am your father.”

But happy moments were sporadic. Conner struggled to react emotionally to external stimuli like smiles and friends saying his name. Before long he would lose one of the last words his brain had managed to hold on to. “We had this routine where, when I picked him up from school, he would say, ‘Me! Me! Me!’” Hollie explained. As his disease worsened, he had stopped repeating his word for her so many times. Then he got to the point where he would chirp it only once. Finally, in the spring of 2017, he stopped entirely.

“I picked him up, and he smiled. But he didn’t say ‘Me.’ He was just silent,” Hollie recalled. “He never said it again.”

Chapter Six

On the morning of April 27, Hollie was in her car, getting ready to pull out of the parking lot of a deli in Denton, when her phone rang. It was de los Reyes. “I have some really good news,” the doctor said. “Brineura was just granted approval.”

It was the first time the FDA had given its blessing to any sort of Batten disease care. The rapid decision was based largely on trial data showing improved ambulation—that is, kids with CLN2 who received Brineura were able to walk better. The agency said that it couldn’t make a call on how the treatment affected children’s emotional or verbal development. But the motor-skills gains, coupled with minimal side effects, was enough. If the Beishes wanted, de los Reyes said, she could treat Conner in Columbus, following the same protocol as her earlier trial participants: surgery, then infusions every two weeks. He would be part of an expanded research cohort, monitored for long-term safety implications.

“Tell us when we need to be there and we’ll be there,” Hollie replied.

Then she called Jeff, who was driving a tractor-trailer and didn’t immediately pick up. When he noticed several urgent notifications on his screen, he pulled over and called his wife back. “I cried my eyes out,” Jeff recalled. “You have no hope. Then you get the call.”

That night, sitting at their kitchen island, the Beishes plotted a plan of action. Money wouldn’t be an issue, they hoped. As part of the trial, Conner would be eligible for 90 days of Brineura infusions, after which Jeff’s insurance would be responsible for coverage. (According to BioMarin, the wholesale cost of a single Brineura infusion comes to $27,000.) Then there were the logistics: driving to Ohio every other week, for instance, because flying was too expensive. But what if they got in a car accident? “My mind went into overdrive,” Hollie said. “Anything could happen.” After airing out every worry they could think of, they contacted de los Reyes and scheduled Conner’s surgery for May 22.

In Columbus, the Beishes stayed at the Ronald McDonald House, a fixture at most children’s hospitals that offers families of sick kids free or low-cost lodging. The morning of the procedure, Hollie reassured Conner, who seemed scared of going into a big, cold room without his parents, even though he couldn’t say so. “You’re going to go to sleep, and when you wake up, you’ll see us,” Hollie said, giving her son a kiss. “Everything will be OK.”

A surgeon used a blue permanent marker to make a cross on the right side of Conner’s forehead, just above the hairline. Conner didn’t feel the marker; he was already under anesthesia. Around the cross, the surgeon clipped away the little boy’s soft, caramel-colored hair, then used a scalpel to make a shallow, crescent-shaped slice through the first layer of skin. Next came antiseptic, followed by a local anesthetic, and the surgeon made a second, deeper cut—this one through muscle. There was a lot of blood. The scalp is incredibly vascular; arteries, veins, and arterioles crisscross it like spiderwebs. The surgeon called for suction.

Once the blood was cleared away, the surgeon saw bone. He drilled through it, then penetrated the dura, the thin gray layer of tissue that envelops the brain. An errant cut could prove fatal. The surgeon double-checked anatomical landmarks, making sure he was in the right place. Then he picked up the device he would insert into Conner’s brain.

It was shorter than a No. 2 pencil and looked like a spindly mushroom, with a small ivory-colored dome made of plastic attached to a thin tube containing a catheter. The surgeon guided the tube into Conner’s brain, threading it like a needle until it neared his third ventricle, the midline cavity that sits between the brain’s hemispheres. At that point, the plastic dome was flush with Conner’s skull. This was the port where TPP1 would be injected every other week. From there the enzyme would flow through the catheter and soak Conner’s brain.

When the procedure was done, a doctor stitched Conner’s scalp back together. Slowly, the little boy was brought out of anesthesia. Hollie and Jeff were allowed to see him. “Hi, buddy,” Jeff said softly at his bedside. Then the Beishes climbed up on either side of their son, where they stayed while he slept. Jeff stroked Conner’s head carefully, so as not to disturb the incision. In the coming weeks, hair would grow back over the surgical site.

Conner was discharged three days later and went home to Denton. After less than two weeks of rest, during which a fever sparked fears of infection—it turned out to be a stomach bug—Hollie bundled him back into the car to ferry him to Columbus for his first infusion. Her father, Bruce, went with them. Jeff stayed behind to throw Jaxon his eighth birthday party. As ever, the Beishes tried to keep their lives normal.

The infusion was supposed to take three and a half hours, followed by a 45-minute saline flush to minimize risk of infection. When the medical staff attempted to access the reservoir in Conner’s scalp with a needle, there was still swelling from the surgery. The little boy began to cry. Finally, they got a needle into the port, then wrapped his head in gauze to hold everything in place. TPP1 began to flow through an IV drip. Conner settled down, intermittently napping and watching movies. First it was Frozen, then Moana. His legs were covered with his favorite Star Wars blanket. Occasionally, he sipped a vanilla-flavored nutrition drink.

Two weeks later he did it again. And again two weeks after that. Conner tolerated the long trips and infusions well, but nothing about his health seemed to improve: His mobility, his speech, and his emotional intelligence stayed the same. “It was frustrating and hard,” Hollie said. “I had to tell myself to keep going.” De los Reyes explained that the enzyme could take a while to have an effect. If it were the garbage truck pulling up to the metaphorical kitchen overflowing with trash, it would need to haul out a couple of loads before the space became usable again. Or it might not work at all. Failure was always a possibility.

It became part of Conner’s routine at every infusion to watch The Lorax, the movie based on the beloved Dr. Seuss story of the same name. The plot is a fable about the dangers of environmental destruction and humans’ responsibility to prevent it. “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,” the main character says at one point, “nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” In de los Reyes’s clinic, it was a familiar mantra.

Around his fifth birthday, in August 2017, Conner was in a Maryland doctor’s office with Hollie and Jaxon. He’d been through about half a dozen infusions by then. The doctor he was seeing would be adjusting the prosthetics in his shoes, which helped him maneuver better with his walker.

The doctor was running behind schedule, so Hollie pulled out a book and began reading Conner a story. She pointed at various objects on the pages, naming them slowly. The method was supposed to help Conner gain words, but that hadn’t happened in almost two years. Hollie did it anyway.

On one page was a star, a word Conner had once been able to say but had lost. Hollie placed her finger on the yellow symbol and named it. She was about to move on when Conner raised his right hand and placed his own index finger on the page. There was a long pause. Then Conner spoke.

“Star,” he repeated.

Chapter Seven

The Beishes’ home is located in a quiet residential neighborhood in Denton. When I visited in October 2017, two pumpkins sat on the stoop, waiting to be carved, and the windows on either side of the front door were adorned with ghost and haunted-house decals. A wreath made of orange and red leaves hung on the door. “We’re all set for Halloween,” Hollie acknowledged with a smile when she greeted me.

She wore a sweater and sweatpants, with her hair pulled into a bun. We’d met once before, at an infusion appointment in Columbus, right after Conner started saying words again. Since then he’d made more progress. Hollie was eager to show me what he could do.

We settled onto a sofa in the living room. Nearby, above the doorway to the kitchen, I noticed a decorative sign that read, “Family… where life begins and love never ends.” Joy, the now huge golden Lab, lay across my lap. Conner was on the floor playing. At one point, he crawled across the room and hoisted himself up to stroke Joy, making eye contact with me before tumbling back down. He was more responsive, more interactive, and more deliberate than I remembered. At one point, after finishing a smoothie, he gestured to the flatscreen TV mounted on the wall. He wanted to watch cartoons.

In the coming weeks, Conner would learn to feed himself—yogurt was his first solo snack—and say “Bee,” his name for his grandmother. He would regain “choo-choo,” his word for train, when Hollie showed him a treasured family Christmas ornament in the shape of a locomotive. Then came “Da,” for Jeff. And the Beishes would soon stop traveling to Columbus every other week. A hospital in Washington, D.C., began offering Brineura treatments, so Conner could get his infusions there. Hollie said she would miss seeing de los Reyes, but staying close to home would be a relief.

The Beishes had found themselves on a lifeboat, along with the handful of other U.S. families with kids who’d started Brineura infusions. They didn’t know how long they could bob in the ocean—maybe forever, more likely not. No one had ever survived Batten disease. The Beishes would need to be cautiously optimistic. They shared stories with other families in their position and tried to think like scientists: incrementally, with judicious notions of progress. “I’ve heard of kids who can now walk 30 steps and kids that couldn’t sit up who can now sit up,” Hollie told me.

In our conversations, de los Reyes had described Brineura as “a treatment until we find a cure.” She told me that she was starting an extension study of the trial to examine the long-term safety and effectiveness of Brineura in children under three. The goal was to determine whether toddlers could be treated before they ever showed symptoms of CLN2. At Rush University in Chicago, researchers have been investigating therapies that could treat TPP1 deficiencies with pills already approved for addressing other medical conditions. For its part, BioMarin is hedging bets by scaling up production of Brineura. It’s also considering the treatment as a model for other direct-to-brain care, which could lead to breakthroughs for patients suffering from other rare neurological diseases.

There may be political hurdles. Congressional Republicans recently slashed the orphan-drug tax credit in half as part of the tax-reform package supported by the Trump administration. Meanwhile, legislators failed to renew the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which expands and supplements Medicaid for some nine million kids whose families otherwise don’t qualify. After short-term funding—a bandage, basically—for the program expires in March 2018, Batten disease experts worry that the CHIP lapse could hurt some families that need Brineura.

When I was in Denton, Hollie told me that her views on health care had changed drastically since her son’s diagnosis. “I used to think Obamacare should just be repealed, but there are things that come from Obamacare, like no lifetime maximum for insurance companies, that make a difference,” she said. “I wish [legislators] could see children like Conner and the impact these policies could have.” (As it happened, Conner would visit the White House in December 2017, as part of a holiday event for sick local children. Trump was in Florida playing golf at the time.)

Hollie said that she’d been using her trusty iPad less lately, resisting the urge to read about new data and prognoses for kids like Conner. She knew that uncertainty about his future was more terrifying than his current reality. She wanted to stay in the now. But sitting on the couch, she grabbed the device to show me some old home videos. There was Conner at age two running around the backyard, at three eating a cupcake and giggling as Jeff teased him. There he was at four hugging Jaxon. Then Hollie showed me a video from June 2016, when Conner was having seizures almost every day. When it was shot, he seemed to be doing well and was playing outside. “This was just before the lightning hit,” Hollie said.

I noticed just how much of the living room was new: the walls, the curtains, the TV on which cartoons were playing. Hollie, smiling with nostalgia, was already moving on to another video of Conner in a diaper. Then she looked up for a moment. “You know, sometimes, when the air-conditioning is on,” she told me, “it will blow, and for a few minutes the room will smell like a campfire.”