The 57 Bus Page 8

  “Did Jamal or your cousin Lloyd tell you to do it?”

  “No.”

  “I know you said you didn’t know what was going through your mind,” Officer Jones said. “But did you get angry because he’s a gay dude in a skirt, not just being gay but ‘doing too much’?”

  “Actually, I really didn’t know that his skirt was going to do that, I didn’t know that it was going to catch like that,” Richard blurted. “It was, like, a little flame. I thought it was just going to go out.”

  But it was too late to backpedal. On the charging documents, Officer Jones wrote in block capitals, DURING SUSP INTERVIEW, THE SUSP STATED HE DID IT BECAUSE HE WAS HOMOPHOBIC.

  A MAN IN A KILT

  The news spread quickly, first to local media, then national, then international. “A man wearing a kilt-like garment was set on fire as he slept on a public bus in Oakland, California, during evening commuter hours,” Reuters news service reported.

  “A passenger on an Oakland, Calif., public bus received burns to his legs after his kilt was set on fire,” UPI wrote. The word kilt seemed to have gotten lodged in the minds of reporters. It was in every report, as if Sasha had been on the way home from bagpipe practice. The Daily Mail, in the United Kingdom, even illustrated the report with a photo of a kilt, explaining that a kilt is “the national dress of Scotland.”

  It felt wrong to Debbie. Sasha wasn’t wearing a kilt, they were wearing a skirt. And she was pretty certain that the skirt was the reason Sasha had been set on fire. So when a reporter showed up on her doorstep, she began to explain.

  “My son considers himself agender,” she said. “He likes to wear a skirt. It’s his statement. That’s how he feels comfortable dressing.”

  It wasn’t until later that she realized she’d gotten the pronouns wrong.

  THIS IS REAL

  Healy instant-messaged Michael at 9:16 p.m. on Tuesday, November 5.

  Healy: how are you

  Michael: mixed

  and you?

  Healy: [tapping a random assortment of keys] fohasjofpivcskm

  Michael: uh huh

  Healy: ya

  you understand

  Michael: it finally kinda hit me in physics class

  Healy: It hit me in science but I didn’t wanna cry (although i did) but then also when I saw it on the news?

  Like this is real this is not fake there are people I’ve never met who’ve seen this there are proably people who i’ve met at cons or talked to on the internet or something who watched and were like thats fucking crazy

  Its horrifying

  Michael: yeah …

  did you hear that sasha’s cousin started a fundraiser to help pay for the medical bills?

  Healy: Yes, i saw it

  it has already raised about 2G

  Michael: nice

  Healy: i dunno

  I guess that they are responding to texts? just an FYI

  Michael: they are!?!?!

  what makes you think this?

  Healy: Yes, they responded to one of Nemos, although they may not be tonite b/c their first surgery is tomorrow

  Michael: sasha must be medicated out of their mind …

  Healy: You want to know a fun fact?

  People’s typing generally gets worse if they start crying

  Michael: well, I’m glad that they’re in contact

  I left a message on sasha’s phone earlier

  Healy: yes, me too!

  I did, and I sent them a REALLLLLLLLY long text

  Michael: aw

  now I feel like I should do something else

  Healy: yes well I am a worry-type person

  Wait that shouldn’t make you feel bad

  don’t feel bad

  Michael: so, I was going to start on the bio essays tonight

  Healy: ME TOO

  but I haven’t

  Michael: but there’s no way I’ll be able to focus

  Healy: yeah …

  I got basically nothing done tonight

  Michael: I want to ask shyam for an extension, but I feel like that would be profiteering off of sasha’s injury …

  Healy: yes, I thought of that, but it seems unfair and I refuse to.

  I’d rather just stay up late well, not rather persay it just seems a better optionmore moral option?

  something like that

  … Are you really okay I don’t think your okay as you want everyone to think

  Michael: I’m not sure what I feel like

  my emotions are changing wildly minute to minute

  Healy: Yeah, I dunno, i just feel kinda … numb, now

  Michael: one second I’m getting ready to bawl my eyes out, the next I’m somber

  I don’t want to do anything right now

  homework?no

  cookie clicker?no

  I want to share a link to a news article about sasha, but I’m not sure what I’d write and I kinda just don’t want to talk about it on facebook

  Healy: yeah, everything just feels, wrong

  did you watch the video i sent

  I thought it was okay

  you?

  Michael: yeah

  that guy at the end was kinda odd

  ‘I think it might have been due to video games’

  that guy was weird …

  Healy: yeah, he was

  I don’t like him

  We “Don’t know for sure” but I’m pretty sure it was a hate crime, IDK about you weirdo

  Michael: yeah

  there’s pretty much no way that it wasn’t

  Healy: Uh-huh

  I must go

  enjoy your night

  Michael: yeah, right

  sleep well

  BOOKED IN

  The squad car pulls into the sally port at the side of Alameda County Juvenile Hall and the officers escort you into the booking room. A sign on the wall says:

  ALL PERSONAL

  PROPERTY

  REMOVED IN THIS

  AREA INCLUDING

  PIERCINGS WIGS

  AND DETACHABLE

  HAIR PIECES

  The police have already taken your personal belongings and put them in a bag with your name on it. Now a Juvenile Hall staffer asks the cop to remove your handcuffs.

  “Take off your shoes,” the staffer instructs. He pats you down and has you walk through the ViewScan metal detector, which will locate any hidden weapons. Another sign explains:

  NOTICE:

  WE DO NOT RETURN

  CIGARETTES

  LIGHTERS/MATCHES

  TOOLS, KNIVES, DRUGS,

  GANG-RELATED PARAPHENALIA OR

  ANY ITEM DEEMED

  INAPPROPRIATE FOR

  MINORS.

  They take your clothes and hand you the replacements: khaki pants, green undershirt, charcoal-gray sweatshirt. Underclothes: white bra and panties for the girls, white boxers for the boys, white socks for everyone. Boxy black shoes, plus slides for the shower. You can take a shower now if you want. Most people do. Chances are, you’ve been sweating.

  When you’re dressed, you’ll go into the holding tank. There are five of them—concrete-slab boxes with the walls painted white. Nothing in there but a stainless-steel sink and toilet and a call box so you can communicate with the staff. You might be alone in there, or, if it’s a busy day, you might be with someone else. They check to make sure they don’t put two kids together who have a preexisting beef—they don’t want fights.

  Once they locate your paperwork, they’ll start booking you in. You get two phone calls. One to a parent or guardian, the other to your employer if you have a job, or your probation officer if you’re on probation. Then you get a medical screening: “Are you on medication?” “Any injuries in the last twenty-four hours?” They’ll offer you an HIV test and, if you’re a girl, a pregnancy test. If you’ve been here before, you already have a medical file. They’ll thumb through it, checking up. “How’s your asthma?” they might ask.

  Then
it’s time for photographs and fingerprinting. They document your scars and tattoos. Put your prints in the database. And then you’re done. Booked in. The whole thing takes less than an hour.

  Down a long hallway with mustard-colored walls. The floor is linoleum, shiny clean, patterned in squares of tan, yellow, and beige. Younger kids charged with serious crimes go into unit 4, one of two maximum-security units. Each unit has thirty single rooms spread over two tiers, one upper, one lower. These days the units are only half full.

  The doors are blue, the stairs are blue. The rooms are yellow and bare of anything except a single blue bunk, a steel sink and toilet, and a call box by the door. Eight feet by eight feet and brightly lit. A steel door with a square of window. If you’re like most kids, once the door slams behind you you’ll stand at that window looking out.

  There’s not much else to look at, unless you count your blurred reflection in the metal mirror over the sink. Nothing to do but look at the sliver of the world you can see through that square of glass or lie down on the blue vinyl-covered mattress, shut your eyes, try to get your heart to stop banging against the wall of your chest.

  You won’t be leaving the unit anytime soon, except for court appearances, and the weekend visiting hours—three hours on Saturday or Sunday, parents or guardians only, no siblings. Aside from PE, which takes place in the gym down the hall, and a visit to the medical unit, everything you do you’ll do here, in this unit, with these same people. School is here. Meals are here. Chapel’s here. A barber comes in twice a week to give haircuts in the chair in the corner. The nurse comes here. The counselor too. The rec yard is just outside the door.

  There’s another rec yard, big and open, three basketball hoops. It’s surrounded by razor wire, but also by hills and trees and sky, a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the world, the world. But if you’ve been charged as an adult, you can’t go out there. Your exercise will take place on the triangular yard outside the unit—thirty yards by twenty yards by twenty yards, with a mural of wildlife hung above the basketball backstop. Tilt your head back and you see a pie-shaped wedge of sky through a screen of wire mesh.

  After they book you in for something serious—murder, attempted murder, setting a person on fire on a bus—they put you in a camera room for the first twenty-four hours. They know that as soon as you’re alone, it’s going to hit you. What you did. What could happen. So they watch to make sure you don’t become your own next victim.

  SURGERY

  The first morning in the hospital, Sasha was overcome by anxiety. They didn’t want to eat, couldn’t keep anything down. It’s a common reaction to losing your skin: cold, clammy fear. That’s why sedatives and antianxiety medicines are as much a part of burn treatment as painkillers.

  Sasha needed to eat—burn victims require extra nutrition to heal, and Sasha wasn’t a big eater to begin with. The hospital nutritionist wanted to give them a nutritional supplement through a feeding tube that would be inserted through their nose. Sasha objected at first because the supplement wasn’t vegan, but Debbie and Karl persuaded them to set aside their principles just this once. “This is going to get you out of here sooner,” they promised.

  The next morning, November 6, Sasha went into surgery. In the operating room, Dr. Grossman shaved away at the burned, dead skin, cutting away thin layers until he reached bleeding tissue. Then he covered the open wound with a temporary graft of pig skin. This xenograft, as it’s called, would stay in place until the underlying tissue had regenerated enough to supply blood to the skin graft.

  By now, Sasha’s name was on the news. As Debbie and Karl stood at the nurses’ station talking with the burn unit’s director, a call came from the lobby. Someone was there to visit Sasha. He said his name was Max and he claimed to be “a pastor from Sasha’s hometown.” After that, Debbie and Karl drew up a short list of approved visitors along with a plan for dealing with the press.

  That evening, Sasha checked out the news coverage online, but the spectacle didn’t hold their interest. Their mind drifted, dulled by painkillers and sedatives. News from the outside world was like listening to the radio on a drive through the mountains—the distant voices clear for a moment, then warbling, and then washing into static.

  Debbie and Karl didn’t talk to Sasha about it, but Debbie had spoken to one of the police officers who had interviewed Richard. She took notes on what he told her about Richard:

  He actually said he’s homophobic. He giggled.

  STILL KINDA DYING

  Michael messaged Healy at 7:02 p.m. on Wednesday, November 6.

  Michael: hey, you there?

  Healy: yush< je suis

  Michael: how’re you?

  Healy: [tapping a random assortment of keys] uhfwcanovdwbjhgwoeaihs

  I got to text sasha while I was babysitting

  That was nice

  Michael: nice

  yeah, I caught them on skype earlier

  hey, gmail says they’re online

  glad to see they’re awake

  Healy: yes, I was JUST texting them, like, 20 mins ago

  Michael: indeed

  Nemo and I are visiting him tomorrow

  *them

  Healy: Oh, thats nice

  i wish I could

  didn’t know they were allowed visitors

  well, maybe I’ll go on Friday (?)

  I can bring them a pic of sasha skirt day~

  Michael: sasha skirt day?

  Healy: didn’t you hear? we’re all wearing skirts on Friday for sasha and were gonna take a pic~

  Michael: no one told me this

  I approve

  Healy: I’M GOING TO WEAR A SKIRT

  Its a big deal

  I hate skirts

  Michael: heh

  does sasha know of this yet?

  Healy: nooooooo its a surprise no telling

  Michael: this is gonna be fun

  Healy: yes tis

  how are YOU feeling?

  Michael: a lot better

  taking a day off was a good idea

  Healy: thats good

  getting to talk to them helped me, but I’m still kinda dying

  Now I feel like shit, AND I’m not done with my HW

  Michael: yeah … I didn’t get much work done today, either

  I have a late night ahead of me …

  Healy: I can’t sleep

  Everytime I close my eyes, i freak out

  I didn’t sleep except for maybe an hour or 2 last night

  Michael::(

  I was exausted, personally

  I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow

  Healy: yeah, but I was just, I mean, think about it, they woke up and they were on fire

  CHARGES

  Two days after Richard’s arrest, the district attorney’s office released his name to the media. He was being charged as an adult, which meant he no longer had the protections given to juveniles, one of which is anonymity. They charged him with two felonies: “aggravated mayhem” and “assault with intent to cause great bodily injury.” Each charge also contained a hate-crime clause that would increase Richard’s sentence by an additional one to three years in state prison. If convicted, he faced a maximum sentence of life in prison, a punishment he would never have faced if he had been charged as a juvenile.

  “[Richard ____’s] violent and senseless criminal conduct resulted in severe and traumatic injuries to a young and entirely innocent victim,” Alameda County district attorney Nancy O’Malley said. “The intentional and callous nature of the crime is shocking and will not be tolerated in our community.”

  Lloyd and Jamal were never interviewed, arrested, or charged.

  DIRECT FILES

  “Stop right here, and for a moment imagine yourself forced to submit to being handcuffed, and see what kind of feelings will be aroused in you,” a Chicago lawyer named John P. Altgeld wrote in an 1884 book called Our Penal Machinery and Its Victims. Arguing that “submission to that one act o
f degradation prepares many a young man for a career of crime,” he took the reader through the experience of a youthful offender—which began with the accused, usually arrested for vagrancy or disorderly conduct, spending the night in the police station among older, more vicious criminals. He compared the criminal justice system to “a great mill which, somehow or other, supplies its own grist, a maelstrom which draws from the outside, and then keeps its victims moving in a circle until swallowed in the vortex.”

  Altgeld was part of a movement headed by two prominent reformers, Lucy Flower and Julia Lathrop, whose work led to the establishment of the nation’s first juvenile court, in Cook County, Illinois, in 1899. Young offenders, these reformers argued, were different from adults. They were works in progress, malleable, and could be set on the right path if the law behaved like a stern but loving parent rather than as an instrument of punishment.

  The notion that juvenile offenders are fundamentally different from adult ones lasted for more than eighty years. Then came the crime wave of the late 1980s and early 1990s. As crack and guns flooded the cities and gangs battled over turf, the violent-crime rate for juveniles ages fifteen to seventeen doubled, as did the violent-crime rate for people ages eighteen to twenty. John J. Dilulio Jr., a political scientist who was then at Princeton, argued that we were seeing a new kind of juvenile criminal, utterly unlike the misbehaving teens of the past. He called them “super-predators.”

  “A super-predator is a young juvenile criminal who is so impulsive, so remorseless, that he can kill, rape, maim without giving it a second thought,” he explained. And he warned that the numbers of these “fatherless, Godless, and jobless” teens were growing. By the mid-2000s, he predicted, their numbers would double or even triple, unleashing a tidal wave of violence across the nation. “As many as half of these juvenile super-predators could be young black males,” Dilulio wrote in a 1996 article entitled “My Black Crime Problem, and Ours.”

  In response, one state after another enacted direct-file laws that allowed juvenile offenders to be transferred to adult courts if they committed certain crimes. “There are no violent offenses that are juvenile,” thundered Newt Gingrich, who was then Speaker of the US House of Representatives. “You rape somebody, you’re an adult. You shoot somebody, you’re an adult.”