The 57 Bus Read online

  “Well,” Sasha said. “It came true. What you were always worried about.”

  The ambulance took a long time to arrive. The police, on the other hand, came right away.

  “Do you know who did this to you?” the officers kept asking Sasha.

  “No.” Sasha’s teeth were chattering. “I was asleep.”

  They had never been so cold. Their legs were naked to the November chill. More than naked—skinless, exposed. Karl took off the outback hat he always wore and used it to shield Sasha’s crotch from the eyes of passersby.

  “Don’t you have anything to keep him warm?” Debbie asked the cops, forgetting all about Sasha’s pronouns. A police officer brought a sheet of yellow plastic from the squad car—the kind usually used for covering corpses. Debbie didn’t want to put it over the open wounds on Sasha’s legs, so she wrapped it around their shoulders.

  At last, after maybe forty-five minutes, the ambulance arrived. Paramedics loaded Sasha onto a gurney and hooked up an IV. Warm fluids flowed into Sasha’s veins. Morphine. The pain and cold receded. They were safe. Alive. Everything would be okay.

  Karl climbed in the front of the ambulance that took Sasha to the hospital. There wasn’t room for Debbie. She stood on the sidewalk and wept as they drove away. Everyone had left except the teenage girl and her mother.

  “They did it because he was wearing a skirt!” Debbie sobbed.

  Together, the girl and her mother wrapped Debbie in their arms. “That’s no reason,” they said.

  THE RIM FIRE’S REVENGE

  Sasha was giddy in the emergency room. Talking. Joking. High on morphine. “It’s the Rim Fire’s revenge,” they told the doctors, remembering how they had been evacuated from the fire in Yosemite with Nemo. Debbie and Karl had never seen them so social. “Everybody’s so nice,” Sasha gushed. “They’re taking such good care of me!”

  Sasha had been taken to Saint Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco so that they could be admitted into the Bothin Burn Center, a specialized unit that treats burn victims from around the Bay Area. Dr. Richard F. Grossman, one of the burn center’s surgeons, came to the emergency room to assess the situation. The wounds on Sasha’s legs were a collage of colors—red, pink, black, and yellow—but what Dr. Grossman noted immediately was that many of them were white, a leathery colorless char that looked like overcooked tuna. That signaled third-degree burns, in which the skin has burned all the way through, down to the fat below.

  From the emergency room, Sasha was taken to the burn unit. The first stop was an enormous stainless-steel tub filled with a solution of diluted bleach. (Infection is one of the leading causes of death for burn victims.) It was there, naked in the tub, that Sasha began to understand the severity of their injuries. Their legs were unrecognizable—weirdly colored, charred, and flaking. Dr. Grossman estimated that the burns covered 22 percent of Sasha’s body.

  Still, he was reassuring when he met with Debbie and Karl. The burns were very deep, he said, but they were treatable. In the years he’d been at the Bothin Burn Center, he had seen much, much worse. “We have people die here every few days,” he explained later. “I knew Sasha would not be one of them.”

  THE TEN O’CLOCK NEWS

  Every night, Kaprice watched the ten o’clock news. It was part of her preparation for the next day at school. If someone had gotten shot in Oakland, odds were that somebody at Oakland High School would be connected, affected, or implicated.

  That night, the news reported that a man had been set on fire on the 57 bus. She shook her head. “Who would do something like that?” she wondered.

  LOCKED OUT

  Kaprice got a call from a teacher the next morning, saying one of her children wanted to be excused from class. Then Richard got on the phone. “I really need to talk to you.”

  Kaprice couldn’t imagine what was so urgent that it couldn’t wait until class was over. “Come in at lunchtime,” she said.

  He was there at lunchtime but her office was filled with kids. She could tell he wanted to talk in private, but clearing the office wasn’t easy. One girl didn’t want to leave and Kaprice had to physically escort her out of the office, through an antechamber, and into the main hallway. As she did, she heard the door click behind her. She was locked out. Her keys and phone were sitting on her desk.

  Annoyed, she walked down the hallway to the main office and threaded her way between desks to the back of the room. There, she dug out the key to a side door that opened into her office. The whole journey couldn’t have taken more than a few minutes. But when she stepped back into her office, Richard was gone.

  She found him outside, being led away in handcuffs by two uniformed police officers. She never learned what he’d wanted to tell her.

  MAYBECK

  When Sasha didn’t show up at school the next day, Nemo was concerned. They asked around—did anyone know where Sasha was? A student who was a neighbor of Sasha’s had heard they were in the hospital, but didn’t know why.

  Nemo called the house. No answer. Then they called Karl’s cell phone, voice shaking. “Is Sasha okay?”

  Debbie and Karl were at the hospital. They told Nemo what had happened—the fire, the burns. The surgeon said the prognosis was good, Karl assured Nemo. Sasha would be okay, but they were going to be in the hospital for at least a couple of weeks.

  “Tell them I love them,” Nemo said before hanging up.

  Nemo told Michael. Michael told Healy. Healy told Teah. The friends huddled together, shaken and in tears. As news spread, life at school came to a halt. It was unfathomable. How could such a thing happen in the queer-friendly Bay Area?

  “We were all liberal, hippie teenagers, so we didn’t even think of that happening,” Healy says.

  But it had. Someone had set Sasha on fire. Inevitably thoughts turned to the person who had done it.

  “Hate him,” Healy says. “Hate his guts.”

  SHYAM

  Shyam Sundar was the science teacher at Maybeck. A burly, bearded man with a reputation for academic toughness, Shyam taught biology, chemistry, and organic chemistry and was somewhat of a legend among the students. There was a card in the index card game titled Shyam. The instructions were, Imitate Shyam as best you can, child. Shyam called them all “child.”

  Sasha was his favorite student. “A scholar,” Shyam called Sasha, the highest compliment he could give. “Not a scholar-in-training. A scholar.”

  On his way to work on November 5, Shyam heard on the radio that someone had been set on fire on the bus. But it wasn’t until Sasha didn’t show up at school that he learned what had happened. He doesn’t remember exactly how he found out. In fact, he doesn’t remember much of anything.

  “The whole week is blocked out from my memory,” he says. In his fifteen years of teaching, he had never let anything get in the way of his work. Even when his grandmother died—he got the news in the middle of a lecture and kept right on teaching. “To me, that’s what she would have wanted,” he explains. “To me, teaching is sacred.”

  But after Sasha was burned, he couldn’t teach. He still showed up every day, but he just handed out worksheets to his students. Sasha had always sat in the same seat. Now that seat was empty. Shyam found he couldn’t even look at that part of the classroom.

  “The students who sat there,” he says, “got no eye contact from me whatsoever.”

  I KNEW MY BABY

  Jasmine was watching television when she saw that police had arrested a suspect in the bus passenger burning that had been all over the news. The newscaster didn’t say a name, nor did the broadcast show the suspect’s face, but Jasmine’s heart began pounding all the same. The TV showed the boy’s back as he was marched in handcuffs up the steps of the police department. White jeans. Black hoodie. The same clothes Richard had worn to school that morning.

  “I knew my baby as soon as I seen him,” she said. “As soon as I saw his body, I saw his structure, I knew exactly who it was.”

  She call
ed Kaprice, who confirmed that Richard had been arrested. Then she began calling everyone she could think of—Richard’s father, his probation officer, the police station. No one could tell her where he was. And so she sat and watched the news and waited for someone to contact her. Richard never called. He called his father instead, maybe because he didn’t want to face his mother’s disappointment. By the time Jasmine was allowed to see him, six days later, the district attorney had decided to charge Richard as an adult and his name was all over the news.

  THE INTERVIEW, PART 1

  When Richard arrived at the police station on the day of his arrest, the officers placed him in interview room 202 and instructed him to remove his shoelaces, belt, bandanna, and the cord from his hoodie. Then they left him there.

  The room was small and shabby, containing only a rectangular table and three chairs with blue plastic seats. The plaster was pitted and peeling—pieces littered the floor as if someone had recently punched the wall and no one had bothered sweeping up afterward. Richard leaned forward and rested his forehead on the edge of the table. Minutes ticked by. He sat up and rubbed his eyes with two fingers. Leaned back in the chair and stared at the floor. Leaned forward with his chin resting on his arms. Cradled his head in his hand. Sat up and rested his chin in his palms. Ten minutes went by. Then twenty. Thirty.

  After an hour an officer peeked in to hand him a bag lunch. He unpacked it: a soda, a turkey sandwich, a bag of SunChips. He smoothed the paper bag flat and placed the sandwich on top. Then he folded his hands and bowed his head. He crossed himself three times. Then he ate the sandwich.

  He had his head down on the table when Officers Anwawn Jones and Jason Anderson came in, two hours and nineteen minutes after he’d first been placed in the room. They moved him into the center seat and settled themselves on either side of him.

  “You didn’t eat all your chips, man?” Officer Jones asked. He was tall and African American, with a shaved head, glasses, and an easy, sympathetic manner.

  “I was getting a little stomachache,” Richard said.

  The officers assured him that they wanted to keep things relaxed. They asked about Richard’s life—where he lived, what sports he played. “How are you doing in school?” Officer Jones asked.

  “I was doing okay,” Richard admitted. “But then it started falling off. The school’s not good for me. There’s too many distractions. I need to go to a smaller environment where I can focus.”

  “A lot of kids wouldn’t understand that,” Officer Jones said, nodding. “I had the same issue when I was younger.”

  “Any girlfriend right now?” asked Officer Anderson. He was white and heavyset, and though he smiled a lot, his friendliness seemed forced.

  “I’ve been looking,” Richard said.

  “Looking?” Anderson grinned. “On the prowl?”

  “It’s not looking too good,” Richard said.

  “Were there girls up in Redding?” Anderson asked. “They cool?”

  Richard looked puzzled. He’d been in a group home up there, he explained, and hadn’t been allowed to mix with girls.

  Jones sat with one hand resting on his knee, the other on his writing pad. “Did you learn something in the group home? Did you learn some important lessons, being away from your family?”

  “It was hard,” Richard admitted. “It took me actually a while. And then I was doing good. And then my best friend since forever, my best friend ever, he passed. And then I had a little breakdown.”

  “What happened to your friend?” Jones asked.

  “He was murdered.”

  As the conversation continued, Richard was candid, almost confiding. He told them about getting robbed, about how he’d been set up by someone he’d called a friend. “I have trust issues right now,” he told the officers.

  “Well, here’s the deal,” Officer Jones said at last. “I’m going to explain to you why you’re in here. We have some questions we wanted to ask you. So we can get your side of the story, your version of what transpired. But before we get into that, I need to read you your rights.”

  MIRANDA WARNING

  “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to talk to a lawyer and have him present with you while you are being questioned. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be appointed to represent you before any questioning. Do you understand the rights I have explained to you?”

  “Why did you talk?” Jasmine asked Richard later. “You should’ve waited until you talked to either me or your father or a lawyer.”

  But studies show that more than 90 percent of juveniles who are interrogated by police don’t wait to talk to an attorney and don’t understand the rights the police have read them. They do what Richard did. They talk.

  “Kids are not going to spontaneously ask for a parent,” explains Barry Feld, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and one of the nation’s leading experts on juvenile justice. “They’re embarrassed, they’re ashamed, they’re thinking in their adolescent brains that somehow their parents won’t find out. They’re thinking, How do I get out of here?”

  “They read him his rights, and they asked him, did he understand? He didn’t understand,” Jasmine says. “And I know he didn’t understand because I could barely understand. When we’re in court, I don’t know nothing until the lawyer tells me.”

  THE INTERVIEW, PART 2

  “You have a pretty good memory, right?” Officer Jones asked when he finished reading Richard his rights. “Give me the rundown of what you were doing, say, yesterday, after, say, school. From the time school got out till, say, about eight to nine o’clock at night.” Richard told him about Lloyd meeting him at the gate at the end of the school day and about going with him to get a phone from someone, a process that had taken close to two hours. Then he described getting on the bus and how there was a man on the bus wearing a skirt. He’d just gotten off the 57 bus to get the express bus, he said, when he heard screams and ran back. When they opened the door to the bus, he saw that the man’s skirt was on fire.

  “What do you think about dudes who dress up in skirts?” Jones asked.

  “I’m not with that,” Richard said. “I wouldn’t say that I hate gay people, but I’m very homophobic.”

  Jones nodded. “Okay. Why would you call yourself homophobic?”

  “I don’t have no problem with somebody if they like men. But like if you do too much? Nobody cares, really.”

  “Do too much?”

  “Taking it to the next level,” Richard explained.

  Jones asked for an example of the next level.

  “Cross-dressing and like—some people, like they try to make everybody know that they are that and they try to do too much and—it’s just a lot.”

  Jones spun his pencil in circles on his notepad, like the spinner for a board game. “A lot of people share the same views,” he said. “People who display stuff outwardly for everybody to see.”

  Then he asked Richard to go through the events on the bus again.

  “I think there’s a couple parts where you haven’t been completely honest with us,” he said when Richard finished. “You’re a good kid. I like people to be honest with me. We’re going to be honest with you. I expect people to be honest with me.”

  He asked Richard to describe what he and Lloyd and Jamal had been wearing on the bus the day before. Then he slid some photographs across the table.

  Richard. Lloyd. Jamal.

  Richard picked them up. Looked them over.

  “It’s pretty obvious we have some pictures,” Jones said, tucking the pictures under his notebook. “And mind you, these are not still pictures. These are pictures from video.”

  “Both of the buses you were on, they have audio and video cameras,” Anderson added. “With that in mind, I want you to take a quick second and I want you to rethink the story that you told us. And I want you to tell us what really happened.

  “Y
ou’re not a bad kid,” Anderson said. “Sometimes we make decisions that are not the best decisions. Keeping in mind that you know we have video, and the video shows everything that happened on that bus. Everything. Right now is a time in your life when you’ve got to decide, am I going to take responsibility for my actions? Am I going to be honest? Because that dude on the bus whose skirt caught on fire got burned pretty good.”

  “Can I see the video?” Richard asked.

  THE INTERVIEW, PART 3

  They only showed him a short snippet of the video, but it was enough. Richard slumped in his chair, one hand shoved in his pocket.

  “Why would you set that dress on fire?” Officer Anderson asked.

  “Being stupid.” Richard’s voice was low.

  “What was going through your mind?”

  “Nothin’.”

  “Have you done this before?”

  “No.”

  “What would even remotely make you think about setting something on fire like that—someone’s clothing?” Anderson persisted. “That dude got seriously burned. It’s not like he went home. He’s awaiting surgery at a San Francisco burn center right now. He got burned real bad. What was going through your mind when you decided to light that dress on fire?”

  “Nothing.” It was a whisper now.

  “Was it because the dude was wearing a dress? Did you have a problem with him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “People do things for a reason,” the officer said. “We’ve all made decisions in life that may not have been the best choice to make at a given time. What we’re trying to figure out is why this happened.”

  “I’m homophobic,” Richard said at last. “I don’t like gay people.”

  “Really? And you had a problem seeing him on the bus?”

  “I don’t know what was going through my head,” Richard said. “I just reacted.”