The 57 Bus Page 5

  Being a mother was harder than Jasmine had expected, but she took pains to do it well. Richard’s temperament made it easier—he was a happy kid, always dancing and singing, playful and silly. She brought him to church every Sunday, taught him to recite his prayers and say grace before he ate, made sure he held the door open for women and seniors, minded his manners, was helpful around the house. Richard’s friends knew his mom ran a tight ship—no disrespect, no talking back.

  Jasmine had two sisters, Juliette and Savannah, each of whom had children of their own. The three sisters were young and beautiful, with high foreheads, large, almond-shaped eyes, and full, Cupid’s-bow lips. There was always a lot of laughing when they were together. The kids moved easily among the sisters’ houses cocooned in the warmth of a large extended family.

  But on December 30, 2006, when Richard was nine years old, everything changed. A car parked in San Francisco was sprayed with bullets, killing three people inside. Savannah was one of them. She left behind two little girls, ages four and eleven. They moved in with Richard, Jasmine, and Derick. Jasmine treated her nieces as daughters, but it was hard on everyone. The girls had lost their mother. Jasmine had lost her sister. And nine-year-old Richard had gone from being the center of his mother’s world to just one more traumatized member of a family with a gaping hole in it.

  “I don’t get any attention now,” he told his mom.

  Jasmine tried to explain. “I know how I feel because it was my sister. You know how you feel because it was your auntie. But for them it was their mom. And I have to share the love, you know? Even it out.”

  Two years later, Jasmine had a baby with Derick. The household now had six members: Derick and Jasmine, Richard and his new brother, Derriyon, plus the two girls. They had moved into a four-bedroom stucco bungalow in the far reaches of East Oakland’s Elmhurst neighborhood. The house was pale pink and had rosebushes in the front yard. It was a tough neighborhood, but a quiet street.

  Jasmine had always hoped to continue her education. But it was a scramble just to get the bills paid and the children cared for and the house scrubbed and neat the way she liked it, no spots on the glass tabletop, no dust in the corners. When Richard was a junior in high school, she was working in food service at a residential care facility. She wanted something better for Richard. “I’m not making that much at my job,” she said. “I want him to have a career. Go to college.” She hadn’t saved much, but she figured if he started out at community college, he could transfer to a state school.

  These were big dreams in her part of town. Of the roughly six hundred African American boys who started Oakland high schools as freshmen each year, only about three hundred ended up graduating. Fewer than one hundred graduated with the requirements needed to attend a California state college or university.

  The odds of landing in the back of a police cruiser, on the other hand, were much better. African American boys made up less than 30 percent of Oakland’s underage population but accounted for nearly 75 percent of all juvenile arrests.

  Jasmine worried about Richard. Prayed. Prayed he’d graduate from high school. Prayed he wouldn’t become a parent as early as she had. Prayed he’d be safe from all the dangers that lurked for a young black man in Oakland—guns and crime and gangs and cops. Prayed he’d stay out of trouble. Prayed he’d survive.

  WHERE HE LEFT OFF

  Richard brought Kaprice his schoolwork to put up on the wall, just like the others did. His grades weren’t great, but that wasn’t the point. Getting a D was better than getting an F. “Next time it’ll be a C,” she told him. “Before long it’ll be a B. And then you’ll be making straight As.”

  When the two of them were alone, he confided in her about his life, replaying things that had happened and explaining how he’d do them differently now. Sometimes he’d tell her about a situation he was struggling with and ask for advice. But most of the time they weren’t alone. Kaprice had a lot of other children. When they were in the office, Richard sat and listened to them talk.

  “He would make himself invisible, but he would observe and notice everything,” Kaprice says. “A lot of times, students would come in here and he was like their little counselor. He would help them get through whatever was going on.”

  He wanted people to be happy, that was the thing everybody noticed about him. He was always joking, goofing around. Kaprice had a toy basketball hoop on her door to give her students’ younger siblings something to do when their parents came in for meetings. She usually kept it pinned up so the bigger kids wouldn’t use it, because when they did things tended to get out of hand. Richard would shoot balled-up paper through it on the sly, making sure Kaprice noticed. “Did you see that bird, Miss Kaprice?”

  If the mood in the room was tense he might suddenly pull his pants up high above his waist like a nerd to get people giggling.

  “There’s already enough craziness,” he told Kaprice. “I just like happy stuff.”

  That’s how everyone knew Richard—as the funny one, the one who made people smile. He pulled pranks like putting ketchup on people’s faces while they slept, or ambushing them with water balloons when they’d just woken up. He would do anything for a laugh—put on one of his female cousins’ sexy cropped sweaters, for example, or post a selfie on Instagram of himself dressed in a bra and a wig, gazing into the bathroom mirror with a sultry expression. I’m a THOT for Halloween, the caption explained.

  That fall, Jasmine was planning a family trip to Disneyland.

  “You might not have fun because you’re a big kid now,” she told Richard.

  That wouldn’t be a problem, he assured her. “I’m going to have fun like I’m five years old.”

  He’d lost a year of his childhood, his cousin Gerald pointed out later. He’d only just come back after being sent away. “He didn’t really get to experience the fun time. He’s probably, like, living from where he left off.”

  HOW IT WAS BEFORE

  Sometimes when Cherie thinks about her old friends, her eyes fill up with tears. “I’m not going to say we were angels,” she says. “I’m not going to say we were scholars. But we all had good hearts. We looked out for each other because that was all we knew.”

  She was talking about 2012, the year she and Richard were freshmen in high school, before everything went bad. In those days they cut school on the daily, heading to the intersection of Fruitvale Avenue and MacArthur Boulevard, where kids gathered from all over town in the afternoons to talk and flirt and play dice, occasionally to fight.

  They had a crew they called the Heartbreak Kidz, not a gang but a play gang, a set of initials to write down in jagged letters: HBK. They went bowling. They went to the beach. They rode the bus all over town, stopping in at high schools where they didn’t even go to school, just to visit whoever might be hanging around the halls. They knew everyone, it seemed, everyone from the east side anyway, but they loved one another best. They’d grown up together, and now they were in high school, full of sass and fire. Skeet and Ashley were the oldest, at sixteen. Jesse was fifteen. Cherie, Hadari, and Dae were fourteen. So was Richard, though he seemed younger.

  “Skeet used to take up for him,” Cherie remembered. “Richard was like a little brother, he was the youngest one. Him and Hadari but Hadari, he brave-hearted, he didn’t take too much from nobody. But Richard, like, everybody just watch him. Richard’s hecka goofy and hecka obnoxious, and would do something stupid. He would do the craziest stuff.”

  Back then they had their whole lives ahead of them, or so they thought. It wasn’t supposed to turn out like it did, which is why the tears keep leaking from her eyes as she talks. She never dreamed it would turn out like it did.

  Because at the time?

  At the time they were beautiful, they were young, and they had one another. And it was fun. Not gonna lie—in those days it was hecka fun.

  FIGHTING

  They wanted to go to the beach. It wasn’t particularly warm, maybe seventy degrees, if tha
t, but they were bored and so they went—Richard, Cherie, Dae, Skeet, Hadari, Jesse, and Ashley, all of them on the bus to the beach. It was April 2012. The way Cherie remembers it, they got off at Fruitvale to change buses but Ashley wasn’t paying attention.

  “Ashley! Come on! Ashley! We finna miss the bus!”

  Turns out there was another girl on the bus named Ashley. She and her friend got off the bus behind them.

  “Why y’all following us?” Ashley demanded. “What y’all want?”

  That was just what they did in those days. Argued.

  Now Ashley and Other Ashley were arguing, and Dae was arguing with Other Ashley’s friend.

  “Come on,” Cherie called. “They don’t want no problems.” The argument seemed pointless to her. Stupid. They were trying to get to the beach.

  But then, according to Cherie, Ashley hit Other Ashley, and the fight began for real. Cherie tried to break it up and got hit, so she hit back. Then Richard tried to break it up, but he got hit too. In the tussle that followed, something fell out of Other Ashley’s bag—insulin and needles. Richard picked them up and tried to hand them to her, but she threw them at him, and so they all just took off, laughing and breathless.

  “She was so hyphy!”

  “Why’d she have all them needles?”

  “She must have diabetes.”

  “I tried to give it back to her. Oh well.”

  They ended up in a park, Cherie remembers. Scrubby grass, a soccer field, tennis courts. There were some Latino kids there, skateboarders. How the boys ended up fighting them was a mystery to Cherie, but that’s what happened. Somebody spoke to somebody wrong and then Skeet and Hadari were fighting, and Richard joined in because if his friends were fighting, he’d fight too. Skeet hit one of the kids with a skateboard.

  “It was hecka savage,” Cherie said later.

  Then they went to the beach. Ran around in the sand, talked about what had happened. Partied. Adrenaline pumping. Laughing. Bleeding a little.

  On the way home, the bus went down Fruitvale. Looking through the windows, they saw the girls they’d fought with, and the skateboarders from the park. “Look, there they are! They’re talking to the police!”

  Then a cruiser pulled up behind the bus.

  ARRESTED

  “We were just young,” Cherie explained. “We didn’t even think we could go to jail for it. Honestly, we didn’t think about jail when it happened.”

  But the law didn’t see it that way. The police arrested Richard, Cherie, Dae, Skeet, Hadari, and Ashley. Jesse had already gotten off the bus by then, so he got away. The rest of them kept waiting to go home, but they weren’t allowed to go home.

  Juvenile records are sealed, so it’s impossible to reconstruct exactly what went down. But it appears that the skateboarders said some of their stuff was missing, including a cell phone. Nothing was found on Richard and his friends, but charges were brought. Sometime after midnight they were booked into Juvenile Hall. That’s where they stayed, distributed across separate units. Juvenile Hall policy doesn’t let kids who are arrested together stay together, both so they don’t have a chance to compare stories and to keep them from getting into any more trouble.

  The first time they went to court, for a detention hearing, Richard got all goofy, excited to be reunited with his friends, sure that when the court appearance was over they would get to go home. But that’s not what happened. There’s no bail for juvenile offenders—it’s up to the judge to decide whether to let you go home or keep you in custody. When there’s violence involved, they tend to keep you. Hadari had known. He was the only one of them who’d ever been arrested before. He said, “We’re not getting out of jail. Don’t even think that.”

  And he was right. Cherie recalls that they were in custody for a time and then one by one they went their separate ways. Cherie got out on probation, a GPS monitor on her ankle. Skeet and Hadari were sentenced to out-of-home placement and sent to group homes, where they would have to complete formal treatment programs before returning to their families. Richard was released on GPS early on, but eventually he was sentenced to a group home in Redding, California, a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Oakland. He would stay there until the following summer, more than a year after his arrest.

  The six kids would never all be together again. After that, everything went wrong instead of right.

  NOW IT’S A GOOD DAY

  Skeet was an extrovert, a goofball, a practical joker. People remembered him after they met him. They remembered his quick wit, his energy, his magnetism, his loyalty, and—if they got on the wrong side of it—his temper. He was the one who could do a backflip off a traffic barrier. The one who sauntered on and off the debate team at Skyline High School, sometimes showing up, sometimes not, but always quick on his feet, leading with his wit and his gift of gab even if he couldn’t be bothered with the preparation.

  Skeet was sent to Boys Republic, a residential treatment facility for troubled youths in Chino Hills, California. It’s not clear how long he was supposed to stay there, but he ran away and returned to Oakland long before his time was up. On November 26, 2012, he posted a sepia-toned photo of himself on Facebook. He was sitting in a car, head tilted back to look down at the camera, his eyes hooded. He had a gun in his right hand.

  What is that, someone queried.

  Tre eight, Skeet wrote, meaning that it was a .38-caliber revolver, but this old b4 I wen tto jail.

  U out foe good?

  To myself yeah but to the polce they wannt a nigga.

  He’d run away from the group home and was back in Oakland. The day before he posted the gun photo, he’d posted a photo of himself with a bottle of cognac and a bottle of cough syrup. Got my syrup and my Remy now its a good day. Now he posted a picture of himself drinking straight from the bottle. Big Boi Drinking.

  That was his last Facebook post.

  On the afternoon of January 7, 2013, more than a month after running away from the group home, he was shot multiple times while driving a car near Hegenberger Road and Hamilton Street. He was seventeen years old. The man police blame for his murder was killed four days later in an outbreak of violence that left four people dead in one six-hour period.

  When Richard heard about his friend’s death, he called his mother from the group home in Redding to find out if it was true. When she said it was, he began to cry and couldn’t stop.

  He didn’t even hang up. Just put the phone down and walked away.

  IF

  Everything turned dark then.

  Skeet dead.

  Skeet dead.

  Skeet dead.

  “That killed Richard,” Cherie said later. “It killed all of us.”

  She didn’t have an explanation for his murder, except the usual: wrong place, wrong time, wrong company. Skeet was two years older than she and Richard were. After he ran away from his southern California group home, he took up with other, more dangerous friends. “I keep thinking,” Cherie says, “if we’d never got into that fight, maybe Skeet would still be alive.”

  It was an open-casket funeral. Cherie says she almost passed out when she saw Skeet lying dead in his coffin. People had to hold her up.

  But at least she wasn’t alone. Richard, in a group home three and a half hours away, had no one beside him to keep him from falling. No one who knew Skeet. No one who understood.

  MURDER

  In 2012, Oakland was the most dangerous city in California. According to Oakland Police Department statistics, there were nearly 2,800 assaults and more than 4,100 robberies. In all, 131 people were killed. Eight of them were under eighteen.

  Lamont Price. Killed February 16, 2012. Age 17. Shot.

  Charles Hill III. Killed March 23, 2012. Age 16. Shot.

  Shonte Daniels Jr. Killed April 21, 2012. Age 15. Shot.

  Hadari Askari. Killed July 10, 2012. Age 15. Shot.

  Tattiaunn Turner. Killed August 8, 2012. Age 16. Shot.

  Bobbie Sartain. Killed November 2
5, 2012. Age 16. Shot.

  Raquel Gerstel. Killed November 25, 2012. Age 15. Shot.

  Jubrille Jordan. Killed December 30, 2012. Age 15. Shot.

  Richard and Cherie didn’t know the Hadari who was killed, but they were friends with Charles Hill. He was killed at a party out by Sixty-Eighth Avenue. Cherie was there the night it happened, but she’d gotten spooked by all the guns at the party and left. She could feel death in the air. She walked down to the corner and called Dae in tears. “Come get me,” she pleaded. “Somebody’s about to die.” By the time Dae arrived, Charles was dead.

  Skeet was the first murder of 2013. There would be another ninety-one people killed before the year was out. Seven of the people who were shot were younger than eighteen, including an eight-year-old girl and a sixteen-month-old boy.

  “Every year we lose somebody,” Cherie says. “It’s just like, who’s next? I’m scared for myself because bullets don’t have no names on them. That’s why I don’t go outside. There’s too much going on.”

  Richard had lost two aunts to murder—his mother’s sister Savannah and his father’s sister, Tish, who was killed by her boyfriend in 2008. Now he’d lost two of his friends. Violence was like the fog that swept in from San Francisco Bay on summer afternoons to cloak the city in damp shadow. Even in the bright sunshine, you knew it could roll in at any minute and chill you to the bone.

  WORKING

  Richard returned to Oakland the following summer, having spent all of sophomore year in Redding. Jasmine was delighted to have him home. She’d visited him regularly while he was away and talked with him on the phone, but it had been hard on both of them. Now it was time for a fresh start. Richard signed up for a job-training program conducted by the Unity Council, an Oakland nonprofit, which led to an internship. The workshop facilitator, Josue Guzman, noticed that Richard stood out from the other young participants. He was smart and focused and a quick study, and he seemed to be enjoying himself.