In 1990, Joan Didion received an assignment from Bob Silvers, editor at the New York Review of Books, to write about a highly publicized, emotionally fraught crime almost nobody wanted to read about after it was, in theory, solved. Nor did the resulting story, published January 17, 1991, receive much mention amidst the tributes to the many novels, screenplays, memoirs, and magazine narratives produced by Didion, the acclaimed “new journalist” who died last month at 87.

For me, though, “Sentimental Journeys,” constituted her most memorable and outstanding  accomplishment as a reporter — one that helped shape my own journalism and whose lessons I carry to this day. Among them:

• How factual evidence gathered through painstaking sourcing, bolstered by a writer’s informed opinions, allowed the shattering of conventional wisdom about the criminal justice system (never her specialty before 1991);
• How an entire metropolis (New York City, no less) can serve as an effective central character in a nonfiction narrative, especially if that central character is beset with multiple personalities;
• How a specific locale (Central Park) within the larger metropolis can serve as an effective supplementary character;
• How historical context (the racist trope of animalistic Black men raping virginal white women) can inform understanding of present-day unrealities;
• How the journalistic convention of protecting the identity of sexual assault victims while naming the suspects can lead to false judgments by the public;
• How the divergent coverage of prominent white victims while downplaying the nightmares of non-white victims rips at the fabric of society and deepens entrenched racism.

The rushed case to avenge the Central Park jogger

The crime prompting Didion’s assignment occurred late the night of April 19, 1989. A woman in her late 20s, later identified publicly as Trisha Meili, was jogging alone in Central Park after dark. She was attacked, sexually assaulted and nearly beaten to death. Meili, who was white, worked as a rising star in the financial district after a privileged upbringing and elite education. From Didion’s story:

She was found, with her clothes torn off, not far from the 102nd Street connecting road at one-thirty on the morning of April 20, 1989. She was taken near death to Metropolitan Hospital on East 97th Street. She had lost 75 percent of her blood. Her skull had been crushed, her left eyeball pushed back through its socket, the characteristic surface wrinkles of her brain flattened. Dirt and twigs were found in her vagina, suggesting rape.

After Meili’s mangled body was discovered, police moved at warp speed: They rounded up and questioned dozens of Black and Hispanic teenagers who had gathered in the park a couple of hours before Meili. Some in the ragtag group had targeted whites in the park for after-dark harassment, but there was no evidence that any had assaulted Meili. Despite that, police focused on six as suspects. Five were indicted.

Those five were ages 14, 15 and 16. Children, really. But millions of outraged citizens stereotyped the suspects as wilding monsters of color, not children at all.

Four of the five suspects offered supposedly voluntary confessions after extensive interrogations. There were no lawyers present, and often no family members, despite settled law that police could not legally question crime suspects under 16 without a parent or guardian in the room. There were no video or audio recordings of the interrogations.

None of that mattered to the daily press at the time. The massive circulation New York Daily News published this headline: “Central Park Horror/Wolf Pack’s Prey/Female Jogger Near Death After Savage Attack by Roving Gang.”

Outrage against the five teens was stoked by other journalists, commentators and politicians. The defendants and their families were portrayed as monsters. Race-specific hatred abounded, relying on ugly stereotypes: non-white youngsters from the housing projects of Harlem; violence-prone kids with no future, family members freeloading on welfare.

Only a few journalists, public commentators and citizens delved beyond the stereotypes to learn a very divergent and positive picture of the five defendants and their families. But that was drowned out by a louder drumbeat: Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Nobody with a public megaphone mentioned the standard of “innocent until proven guilty.” Financier playboy Donald J. Trump advocated for the death penalty.

Prosecutors orchestrated two trials — one for three of the defendants, another later for the other two. Jurors reached guilty verdicts, as preordained; the convicted teens entered juvenile detention centers, and later were transferred to violence-ridden adult prisons. Case closed. Sub-humans found, locked away and forgotten.

Until Silvers and Didion decided to court potential calumny by looking deeper:

Criminal cases are widely regarded by American reporters as windows on the city or culture in which they take place, opportunities to enter not only households but parts of the culture normally closed, and yet this was a case in which indifference to the world of the defendants extended even to the reporting of names and occupations.

Investigating flawed investigations

To fully appreciate Didion’s resulting narrative, it is vital to realize that back in 1991 few people believed the vaunted U.S. criminal justice system would put innocent defendants in prison. Almost every journalist, cop, lawyer and judge I knew then subscribed to the conventional wisdom that “all prisoners claim they are innocent, no matter their crime.” I myself was guilty of that notion as a fledgling newspaper reporter working in a high-crime, mostly Black city during the early 1970s.

But a decade later, my perceptions changed. Why?

Mostly because during 1983 I accepted a job running the journalism membership group Investigative Reporters & Editors, which I had joined as a charter member in 1976. Every day, IRE members used me as a sounding board and reporting resource.

A tiny percentage of IRE members were starting to question the purity of the criminal injustice system. Some within that tiny percentage were paying attention to the emerging technology of DNA analysis, which could demonstrate actual guilt or innocence of convicted inmates. Others were probing the questionable reliability of “evidence” presented by police and prosecutors: shaky eyewitness identifications; dependence on jailhouse snitches; doctored police reports; undisclosed exculpatory details; forensic errors in police-operated crime labs, and reliance on “junk science” such as footprint matching, bite mark analysis, and misunderstanding of fire behavior that led to flawed arson convictions.

But when the Meili assault was prosecuted, the now-renowned Innocence Project, based in New York City, did not exist. An early version, named Centurion Ministries, was founded by a non-lawyer seminary student in Princeton, New Jersey, but it could barely afford to accept cases given its tiny, donation-based budget.

I joined the journalists who were investigating questionable convictions. Part of my early education came through a seminal 1932 book by a law professor, from the studying the efforts of lawyer Erle Stanley Gardner (mostly famous for writing the Perry Mason novels) to form “the Court of Last Resort” in the 1940s, by reaching out to pioneering reporter Gene Miller at the Miami Herald, and by delving into my first specific case of suspected wrongful convicted.

Ellen Reasonover was serving prison time for the murder of a service station attendant in St. Louis, Missouri. Her conviction made no sense based on my reading of the trial transcript, among other documents: Why did police arrest her based on zero evidence that I could detect? Why did the prosecutor file charges without detectable evidence or the faint scent of a motive? How did 12 jurors — all white — reach agreement?

Still a novice in the realm of wrongful convictions, I was stunned by the verdict. It is relevant to know that Reasonover was Black and the murdered attendant was white. Reasonover, a young, single mother, escaped the death penalty only because one juror voted to spare her.

Probing the lack of evidence and logic

When I look back now at Didion’s story about the Meili case, her painstaking research makes the flaws in the Meili convictions clear.

She would have noted the weaknesses in the prosecution’s case. For example, the four confessions failed to agree on numerous details, and in some instances contained information that was verifiably false. No matches had been found between Meili and the defendants regarding semen, blood or analysis of fingernail scrapings. And the tunnel vision of the police ignored factors that would lead to the arrest of the actual perpetrator a decade after the attack. As Didion plainly stated:

There were, early on, certain aspects of this case that seemed not well-handled by the police and prosecutors, and others that seemed not well-handled by the press.

Careful research before, during, and after the two 1990 trials would have uncovered the exaggerations and outright lies of the Manhattan prosecutors, and would have revealed a rarely used procedure within the court system to designate a specific trial judge —  one with a well-deserved reputation as pro-prosecution.

That analysis in her 1991 narrative jumped out at me, given my own focus on traditional evidence of a crime, or lack of such evidence. Yet those paragraphs constituted just a fraction of Didion’s piece; most of the thousands of words she wrote offered an entirely fresh approach to understanding miscarriages of justice, an approach I had never before considered.

“Slow journalism” as a form of sociology

Perhaps no agreed-upon label for Didion’s approach to this narrative exists. Here is my suggestion: Sociological Evidence.

I have always considered sociology to be “slow journalism.” Among other talents, Didion exhibited attributes of a masterful sociologist in much of her nonfiction.

She accomplished that within the Central Park jogger narrative with context, context, and more context. Even the design of the park becomes a character. That design, dating back to the 1850s, suggested potential dangers for females alone in portions of the park after dark. In actuality, Didion wrote, Central Park had been sentimentalized as “an artificial pastoral,” when from the beginning it was a capitalistic project of “contracts and concrete and kickbacks.”

The realities of New York City become characters, too — especially powerful white New Yorkers distrusting non-white members of a perceived underclass, and non-white New Yorkers distrusting those wielding power:

The perennially racist coverage of crime by white-owned New York City newspapers and broadcast stations also qualified as a character in Didion’s narrative. She demonstrates in paragraph after paragraph how such racist coverage demonized the teenage defendants and their families, while turning Meili into a plaster saint. For mainstream journalists and the politicians they quote, violent crime becomes an all-purpose bogeyman to cover up what Didion considers to be the essential unworkability of New York City as a metropolis. At several junctures, Didion suggests New York City demonstrates attributes of third-world nations:

Stories in which terrible crimes are inflicted on innocent victims, offering as they do a similarly sentimental reading of class differences and human suffering, a reading that promises both resolution and retribution, have long performed as the city’s endorphins, a built-in source of natural morphine working to blur the edges of real and to a great extent insoluble problems.

Naturally, loyalist, privileged New Yorkers expressed offense at Didion’s atmospheric portrayal.

No run-on of excerpts from “Sentimental Journeys” can adequately demonstrate the boldness or complexity of Didion’s take on the crime, and what it said about New York. I leave it to you to study each Didion paragraph from the narrative and decide for yourself whether her high-wire approach deserves praise.

Delayed justice

Before signing off, I feel compelled to add a postscript:

Nobody, including Didion, could have predicted the shocking denouement of the five wrongful convictions — not just wrong, but egregiously wrong, demonstrating the bitter wages of incompetent, dishonest, race-biased cops, prosecutors, judges and, yes, journalists.

In 2002, more than a decade after Didion’s narrative, a career criminal named Matias Reyes confessed to the Meili assault. Age 18 on the fateful night, Reyes entered Central Park, intent on rape. He noticed Meili alone, snuck up on her, bashed her skull, dragged her body to an even more secluded spot, raped and beat her.

No wolf pack. No gang rape. No connection between Reyes and the five convicted teens. Reyes raped other women during 1989 and 1990, but police failed to connect him to those rapes before the two trials, despite obvious clues.

The final kicker: Minutes after Reyes raped Meili, two police officers saw him strolling out of Central Park. The cops spoke with him briefly. They never detained him for questioning.

***

Steve Weinberg former executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors and instructor at the Missouri School of Journalism, is the author of several nonfiction books and a freelance writer for magazines.

The post The bold Joan Didion story you probably never read appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Imagine, if you will, an investigative series in a metropolitan tabloid daily newspaper about renegade narcotics cops and a lying informant, a series that opens with a headline like this:

“The informer, the cop and the conspiracy: snitch says narc lied to jail alleged drug dealers. Did he?”

Imagine the opening paragraph reading like this:

“Ventura Martinez feels like he has a target on his back. On the city's toughest streets, where vengeance rules, drug dealers warn him that he's a dead man. At home, Martinez peeks out windows and listens for sounds of a hit man, lurking in darkness, ready to pull the trigger. When outside, he darts his head from shoulder to shoulder, wondering if this is the day he'll get whacked.”

Imagine also, in that opening story, learning that the snitch is so close to Jeffrey Cujdik, his handler in the Philadelphia Police Department, that his kids call him “Uncle Jeff.”

Vivid, right? It’s the work of Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman, who would go on to win the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative News for their Philadelphia Daily News series on rogue narcotics cops and the snitch who snitched on them.

Investigative projects such as this one, rolled out as occasional stories throughout the calendar year, are typically difficult to write in a compelling way, and difficult for readers to track because the information dribbles out slowly, at unpredictable intervals.

But Laker and Ruderman managed to build their case over the year, layering detail upon detail, allegation upon allegation, to create a damning case against the unit at the Philly PD. (And later went on to write a book about it: “Busted: A Tale of Corruption and Betrayal in the City of Brotherly Love.” )

The pair relied on Martinez heavily, at first, to tell a saga filled with blatant thievery, sham drug raids, sexual offenses and a very particular MO: cutting the wires to surveillance cameras so their misdeeds wouldn’t be recorded.

Relying on Martinez involved a credibility risk. But Laker and Ruderman made it clear to readers that paper trails and people trails other than Martinez had been consulted: search warrant applications, judges’ orders granting those applications, municipal payroll records, criminal court filings, a Police Department Internal Affairs source, defendants in drug cases plus some of their lawyers, Martinez’s common-law wife, residents of homes raided by Cujdik’s unit, proprietors of mom-and-pop retail stores trashed by Cujdik’s unit, current and former uniformed and plainclothes Philadelphia police who knew Cujdik well, and law professors.

Biographical details enhanced the coverage. Cujdik’s brother also served as a Philadelphia narcotics officer, and was being accused of dirty tactics. Cujdik’s father had served on the police force, and Cujdik’s sister-in-law was a prosecutor. Martinez’s father was a police officer, and Martinez’s brother was a crack addict.

Two weeks after the initial piece, the Daily News published an account with this headline:

“Cop added insult to injury, she says.”

A source named Lady Gonzalez had agreed to talk about a drug raid at her home, probably based on false information from Cujdik via Martinez. Nine narcotics cops tore apart room after room, while one of those nine sexually molested Gonzalez. Eventually, numerous other women would come forward and tell the reporters that same police officer molested them during staged drug raids.

The second major narrative line—the mom-and-pop raids—emerged when the Daily News published a piece on March 20.

The headline said: “Drug raids gone bad: Shopkeepers say plainclothes cops barged in, looted stores and stole cash.”

Laker and Ruderman wrote the pieces less and less tentatively, moving along the narratives with shocking, unforgettable details.

One common denominator: As Cujdik and his partners stormed stores run by meek, bewildered immigrant families, the cops cut the wires to surveillance cameras so illegal behavior couldn’t be pinned on them. The misbehavior included stealing cash and merchandise. Rarely did the raids involve successful drug busts.

Take a look at this scene, headlined, “Video sharpens focus on raid: Store owner’s hidden back-up shows cops snipping security camera wires.”

After Cujdik and his squad members burst into the store, they cut the wires to the surveillance camera with wire cutters, an owner said, then looted the store. That owner came to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic in 1996, and had been operating the store just five days. One cop took a Black & Mild, a slender cigar, from the shelf and started to smoke, said the owner, speaking in Spanish through an interpreter. The officers took three brown boxes from his kitchen and loaded them with food, he said.

"It was like they was shopping," said Maria Espinal, who was working in the kitchen and saw the cops take boxes stuffed with packaged goods. The cops put a gun to Espinal's head, she said, before identifying themselves as police. "I thought I was going to die," she said.

The cop coolly smoking a Black & Mild. The immigrant from the Dominican Republic, who had owned the shop for just five days. The worker with a gun held to her head, sure she was going to die. Those are the kind of details that make the series memorable. That build their case, story after story.

The post The Pulitzer at 100: Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman on “Tainted Justice” appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

This New Yorker story about a fatal police shooting could have seemed like “same old, same old.” After all, I’ve consumed (and sometimes written) countless death-by-cop sagas during my 50 years as a journalist. But Rachel Aviv’s narrative stands out as something special.

Why? For one, she delves deeply into the history of the dead man’s severe mental illness.

A huge percentage of unarmed people shot by police are severely mentally ill, which means they might not correctly evaluate the words and actions of police officers confronting them.

Christopher Torres was 27 when he was shot to death in his back yard. He suffered from schizophrenia, and the story is filled with humanizing details such as the touching anecdote in this paragraph: “Occasionally, when Christopher was under stress, he imagined that he had a wife and children, somewhere in the city, whom he’d abandoned. Renetta reacted calmly and offered to look for them. “We’d get in the car and search for his family,” she said. “Once we’d driven a while, Christopher, by the grace of God, would let go of the idea and feel O.K. and be ready to go home.”

The story paints a police department awash in machismo. It gives this damning statistic: “In the five years before Christopher’s death, the Albuquerque Police Department shot thirty-eight people, killing nineteen of them. More than half were mentally ill. In Albuquerque, a city of five hundred and fifty thousand, the rate of fatal shootings by police is eight times that of New York City.”

I spoke with Aviv about the story via email. The questions and answers have been slightly edited for length and flow.

My questions are in red, his responses in blue.

Published in the New Yorker on February 2, 2015.

[annotation q="How did this story come about?" a="I had been interested in the phenomenon of police officers committing acts of domestic violence and being protected by the “blue wall of silence,” as it is often called. As I was researching this, my search terms somehow led me to a petition by a father in Albuquerque whose son had been killed by the police. The petition made it sound as if the son was one of many who had met the same fate. From there I began collecting names of young men (mostly Hispanic) who had been shot by the Albuquerque police."]

Stephen Torres was meeting with a client at his law office, in downtown Albuquerque, on April 12, 2011, when he received a call from a neighbor, who told him that police officers were aiming rifles at his house. He left work and drove [annotation q="Did you ask what he was thinking during those minutes?" a="I believe I did ask him, and it was precisely what one would expect (fear, alarm), so I didn’t think it was necessary to articulate what was probably obvious."] to his home, in a middle-class suburb with a view of the mountains. There were more than forty police vehicles on his street. Officers wearing camouflage fatigues and bulletproof vests had circled his home, a sand-colored two-story house with a pitched tile roof. Two officers were driving a remote-controlled robot, used for discharging bombs, back and forth on the corner. [annotation q="Why did you decide to include the robot detail?" a="I guess because it really seemed as if these offers were having fun, playing with toys that were totally irrelevant to the task at hand."]

Stephen’s wife, Renetta, the director of human resources for the county, arrived a few minutes later, just after three o’clock. A colleague had heard her address repeated on the police radio, so her assistant pulled her out of a meeting. When Renetta saw that the street was cordoned off with police tape, she tried to walk to her house, but an officer told her that she couldn’t enter the “kill zone.” “What do you mean ‘kill zone’?” Renetta asked. “Ma’am, you can’t go any further,” the officer said. [annotation q="This is so effective, having the words “kill zone” so close to “her house.” We don’t know who the dead person is yet, so it builds a sense of dread, and also the lingo also suggests inhumanity in the police department. Did you know when you saw the words “kill zone” you would use it?" a="Yes. Actually it was one of the reasons I decided to pursue the story. I watched a YouTube video of Steve and Renetta describing the scene, and the idea that their neighborhood had been labeled a “kill zone” just seemed incomprehensible. It was after watching that YouTube video that I decided to get in touch with them."]

Renetta and Stephen found each other at the southern end of the street. There were nearly eighty officers and city officials on the street, many of whom they recognized. Stephen saw a police-union attorney, who defended officers when they were in trouble. Renetta saw the city’s attorney, who worked in the same building and on the same floor as she did, and the deputy chief of police, whom she’d known in graduate school. “I kept looking her way, but she would not make eye contact with me,” Renetta said.

Renetta knew that the only person at home was the youngest of her three boys, Christopher, who was twenty-seven and had schizophrenia. Two hours earlier, he had stopped by her office for lunch, as he did a few times a week. Then he visited an elderly couple who lived two houses away. He said that he needed to “check up on them”; he often cleaned their pool or drove them to the grocery store. Because he found it overwhelming to spend too much time among people, he tried to do small, social errands, so as not to isolate himself. [annotation q="Talk a bit about how you used this graf to humanize Christopher, and establish him." a="It was important to me to establish—in a way that didn’t feel saccharine or forced or exaggerated—that this was a gentle person who was pretty much universally trusted."]

When Stephen asked the police what had happened to Christopher, he was told only that there was an “ongoing criminal investigation.” [annotation q="Again, effective use of impersonal police lingo. Did you deliberately use it?" a="Yes, I found it revealing that this impersonal language allowed officers to distance themselves from the human tragedies that they were witnessing (and causing)."] Stephen offered to let the officers inside the house, but they refused. Stephen called a close friend on the force, who said that a person had been taken off in an ambulance earlier in the afternoon, at around two o’clock. Stephen called the three main hospitals in Albuquerque, but Christopher hadn’t been admitted to any of them.

Stephen called a neighbor, Val Aubol, who lived across the street, to find out what she could see. Aubol peeked through the shutters of her front window and saw ten officers lined up against a neighbor’s garage, next to the Torreses’ house. The SWAT team’s Ballistic Engineered Armored Response Counter Attack Truck was parked in front of them. When Aubol went into her back yard, she saw a rope dangling from her roof. An officer had climbed up and was pointing his gun at the Torreses’ house. Another officer was crouching behind the gate at the side of her house. She told the officers that she’d spoken with Christopher’s father, but an officer waved her back inside. “Stay in the house!” he shouted. [annotation q="At this juncture, are you sharing what you see as neutral details? Or are you sending a message to readers early in the narrative about a police department shot through with incompetence and/or blood lust?" a="I don’t see these as neutral details, but I was trying to deliver them in a somewhat “neutral” tone, so that the reader is the one coming to the conclusion that there is incompetence here."]

At around five-thirty, a female officer stepped out of a mobile crime unit, an R.V. where detectives processed evidence, and waved the family over. “She was so detached,” Renetta said. “All she said was ‘I regret to inform you that your son is deceased.’ ” She did not tell them how their son had died or where they could find his body. The Torreses asked if they could go home, but the officer said that it was still an active crime scene.

About half an hour later, Val Aubol heard a booming noise, and her ceiling shook. The officer on her roof had shot a flash-bang grenade, which produces a concussive blast of noise and light, onto the Torreses’ front patio. The device temporarily blinds and deafens anyone near it.

It is not clear what the officers thought they were doing at that point. In a report filed later that day, one officer wrote, “Detectives believed another person was inside the house refusing to exit. Supposedly they saw movement in the house.” Another wrote, “There may be three people still inside the residence and all were possibly armed.”

Not long afterward, several officers used a battering ram to open the Torreses’ front door, which had on it a “Welcome” sign decorated with an Easter bunny. [annotation q="Wonderful contrast there. Where would you say you fall in the “show” versus “tell” camps of writing?" a="“Telling” comes less naturally to me than “showing.” There are passages further down where there is a need to describe what is happening on a more systemic level, and my editor had to push me to be more explicit about asserting the nature of the connection between this incidence of police violence and other shootings throughout the country."]The officers searched the laundry room, the basement, the attic, and four bedrooms, dumping the contents of drawers onto the floor. No one was home.

Although there were no suspects to apprehend, the neighborhood was still filled with cops, who had heard on the police radio that an officer had shot someone. According to Thomas Grover, a sergeant with the Albuquerque Police Department, who resigned a few months after Christopher’s death, shootings by officers set off a ritual in the department: other officers quickly reported to the scene. “It was just team spirit, I guess,” he said. “Everyone would say, ‘Oh, there’s a shooting, we got to get there, everyone’s going down there.’ It was a place to be seen.” He said that in the hours after a shooting cops would ask one another, “Was it a bad shoot? Or a good shoot?”

The Torres family learned how Christopher died from watching the news the next day. At a press conference, the department’s chief public-safety officer said that two officers had tried to arrest Christopher at home, but, when he resisted and grabbed a gun from one of them, the officers felt that their lives were in danger. The local television stations ran an unflattering picture of Christopher with his eyes bugged out. One station reported that the “police suspected Torres is responsible for several violent road rage incidents around the city.” The police department said publicly that Christopher had a lengthy criminal history, which was untrue. He’d never been convicted of a crime, though he had been arrested once, for public affray, disorderly conduct, and impersonating an officer: he’d fought with a man who had illegally carried his gun into a restaurant where Christopher was eating. Christopher told the man that he was a government agent, tackled him, and took the weapon. When asked to show his credentials, Christopher flashed his library card.

In the five years before Christopher’s death, the Albuquerque Police Department shot thirty-eight people, killing nineteen of them. More than half were mentally ill. In Albuquerque, a city of five hundred and fifty thousand, the rate of fatal shootings by police is eight times that of New York City. Renetta vaguely remembered hearing about many of the deaths in the local media. Nearly every time, the police announced that the person who had been shot was violent, a career criminal, or mentally ill. “I just assumed that these men must have done something to merit being killed,” she said. “On the news, they relayed these really sinister stories about the men, and they’d flash these horrible pictures. They looked frightening.” [annotation q="How did you decide where to place the context about the police department?" a="I tried to wait until the moment where the reader might be asking him/herself those questions."]

Grover, the former sergeant, said that when officers shot someone the department typically ordered a “red file” on the deceased. “The special-investigations division did a complete background on the person and came up with any intelligence to identify that, you know, twenty years ago, maybe, the person got tagged for shoplifting,” he said. “Then they gave the red file to the chief.” [annotation q="Did Grover worry about retaliation, or at minimum broken friendships, as a result of being quoted by name?" a="I think the broken friendships had already occurred…"]

More than a thousand people attended Christopher’s funeral, at the Catholic church where he prayed with his parents every week. Stephen, in his eulogy, said that he considered the chief of police, Raymond Schultz, his friend. The Torreses’ sons used to play soccer at the same neighborhood club as Schultz’s children; after the kids’ games, the fathers would play. “I called Ray’s office and conveyed a personal invitation for him to join us this evening,” Stephen said. “I promised him that he would be treated with all due courtesy and respect. If he’s not here, then I ask those police officers who are here, who are some of my dearest friends . . . please convey the following message to him.”

Stephen said that his son’s shooting resembled that of many young men in Albuquerque who were mentally ill and had been killed by police. He begged the chief and the mayor, who worked in Renetta’s building, to meet with him to discuss what had gone wrong. “My wife and I extend our hands to you, Mr. Mayor, and to you, Chief Schultz,” he said. “Please don’t reject our offers.” Schultz was not there. He and Stephen never spoke again.

Christopher had been an easygoing, athletic child, but when he was nineteen he grew more private and sensitive. He was reluctant to leave the house and, eventually, to emerge from his room. He often seemed distracted, as if he were listening to something. A voice kept saying to him, “Well, Chris, I’m here, so let’s get moving.” He wondered if Jesus was talking to him, but he also doubted it. “He felt like maybe he was coming under a depression,” Renetta told me. “He had a great sense of humor that seemed to have been dulled.”

After Christopher received a diagnosis of schizophrenia, in the winter of 2003, his older brother Daniel, who was twenty-four and worked at an auto shop, quit his job and moved home to take care of him. For two years, he tried to make Christopher’s days placid and predictable. Like many people with schizophrenia, Christopher had a low tolerance for abrupt movements or loud noises. When the family watched television or listened to music, they kept the volume low. If they argued, they did so quietly.

It took Christopher two years to adjust to the antipsychotic medications that were prescribed for him. Eventually, the voices he heard became less compelling, and he began working at a metal-fabrication shop. His boss, George Montez, described him as shy, focussed, and deferential. He said that the only time he saw Christopher agitated was when colleagues bickered. “It was just horsing around, but it upset him,” Montez said.

According to the treatment notes of Christopher’s psychiatrist, Kevin Rexroad, Christopher was amiable and not inclined toward drama. When Rexroad asked how he was feeling, he responded, “I’m O.K. How are you?” Christopher’s most persistent symptom was anxiety, which Rexroad traced in part to grief over the onset of his illness. Christopher felt that he was falling short of his own expectations. A therapist who briefly helped him with anxiety wrote that his goals were to “feel good about self,” be “proud of where I’m going,” and “read a little more.” [annotation q="How did you obtain what would normally be confidential medical information?" a="The medical records were obtained by the lawyers who represented Christopher’s family. I asked the family for permission—we had a long conversation about why I felt it would help me characterize Christopher and make readers identify with him more easily—and they then conveyed that to the lawyers, who released the records."]

Occasionally, when Christopher was under stress, he imagined that he had a wife and children, somewhere in the city, whom he’d abandoned. Renetta reacted calmly and offered to look for them. “We’d get in the car and search for his family,” she said. “Once we’d driven a while, Christopher, by the grace of God, would let go of the idea and feel O.K. and be ready to go home.” [annotation q="This paragraph is heartbreaking. You’ve created a character we feel for in just one anecdote. Can you talk about that a bit?" a="I was really moved by the patience and affection that Renetta showed towards her son; it was such a gentle and accepting way of approaching his delusions. I liked this detail because it was so specific to this particular family’s way of processing and dealing with Christopher’s illness."]

After Christopher had worked at the metal-fabrication shop for a few years, Stephen urged him to take classes at a community college. But the idea of being surrounded by peers who might think that he was odd caused him so much anxiety that he couldn’t sleep. In August, 2010, Renetta e-mailed Rexroad to say that Christopher had been perceiving invisible dangers: when Stephen told him to do a household chore, Christopher reacted as if he’d been threatened. “Given a little bit of time and space he then comes back around,” she wrote. “As you know sometimes we walk a very fragile line and strive not to cause any undue agitation.”

A few months later, in February, 2011, when Christopher was driving, another vehicle pulled in front of him into the left-turn lane. At the red light, Christopher got out and walked to the car in front of him, pounded on the windows, and pulled the driver’s door open. The woman driving the car said that it seemed as if he had mistaken her for someone else. She shut her eyes and prepared to be attacked. [annotation q="You’re showing here how unpredictable he could be, contrasting sharply with the psychiatrist and boss. Was this a way to suggest why cops might not have known how to handle him?" a="I’m not sure if an impression of unpredictability was necessarily what I was after; but it did seem to me that this was an instance where he was not occupying consensual reality—he was not seeing things as they were, and that was a symptom of his illness."]

When she opened her eyes, Christopher had turned around and clutched his hair, as if he realized what he’d been doing. The woman called 911 and reported the incident to the police. She described Christopher as “psycho” and told the police that if she’d had a gun in her car she would have shot him.

About two months later, C. J. Brown, a thirty-nine-year-old detective, interviewed the driver and then filled out a warrant for Christopher’s arrest. Brown didn’t know that Christopher had a mental illness, even though police records showed that he had stated, during his first arrest, that he had schizophrenia. Brown said, “So basically just—you know, at that point, I had a guy that just had a bad attitude while driving.” [annotation q="Would a well-trained, well-intended police officer have known about Christopher’s mental illness before visiting the home?" a="Yes. If Brown had looked at the records, he would have seen that the Torres family had already alerted the police about Christopher’s mental illness, after a previous arrest."]

Brown, who is five feet ten, weighs two hundred and twenty pounds, and has short, receding brown hair, had been an officer with the department for four years, since 2007. At the time, the department had been ordered by Mayor Martin Chávez to expand by at least a hundred officers, to bring the total number up to more than a thousand. Chávez had promised to reduce crime and quality-of-life infractions, and he developed a program that allowed officers to use nuisance-abatement laws to evict people from businesses and from homes.

The crime rate had been declining for nearly a decade, but the city still ranked in the top fifteen per cent in the country. To recruit new officers, the department advertised on billboards throughout the East Coast and the Midwest. In 2007, the department installed a twenty-five-foot billboard on a wall in downtown Manhattan: it featured a panorama of the Albuquerque skyline and promised a five-thousand-dollar hiring bonus, retirement after twenty years, a “take home car and more.” [annotation q="This is such a great detail – everyone will go “whoa” about this, imagining it in Manhattan. Talk a little about using such details, instead of a recitation of facts, so it becomes more real." a="I thought this illustrated how completely desperate the department had become."]

Nevertheless, the department struggled to find qualified officers. “We took a beating from the city council,” Schultz, the chief of police, told me. “They berated us. They kept saying, ‘We’ve given you the money—how come you don’t have those numbers?’ ”

The department accepted officers from other police forces, even if they had been disciplined or fired, and it sometimes waived the psychological exam. Steve Tate, the director of training at the Albuquerque Police Academy, said that, after the hiring push, he noticed new cadets “exhibiting some characteristics that I thought were a little strange.” “They were not in charge of their emotions,” he told me. “People were breaking down into tears.” He spoke with the head of the department’s psychological unit, and asked why so many officers seemed psychologically unstable. “I could pick up a sense of worry from her,” he said. “She described to me feeling as though they were strong-armed into seating people that they didn’t feel were ready.” Peter DiVasto, a contract psychologist for the department, said in a deposition that psychologists felt that they were supposed to “err on the side of acceptance.” He testified that “deputy chiefs had been threatened with firing unless those numbers went up.” [annotation q="You obtained numerous remarkable direct quotations. How did you build trust with current and former law enforcement personnel so that they would speak so candidly on the record?" a="One thing I did was tell the officers who else I had spoken with. I think they felt: if that person talked to her, I feel comfortable doing it, too. Also, some of them had already given depositions, so I told them I had already read the deposition and wanted to put some of their comments in context."]

At meetings with the police chief and his deputies, Tate said he pleaded to reject applicants who seemed erratic. He said that a “common phrase was ‘Well, we got seats open, so let’s give them a try.’ ” The department began accepting candidates whose “backgrounds were so bad it was just, like, wow,” he said. There were cadets who had admitted to crimes and had been repeatedly disciplined in previous jobs. Of the sixty-three officers who joined the Albuquerque police force in 2007, ten eventually shot people.

Brown had already been rejected by the Albuquerque Police Department, in 1995, because he had bad credit, which was seen as a sign of recklessness. He ended up in the Roswell Police Department, three hours south of Albuquerque. While he was there, a city councillor brought a civil-rights lawsuit against him—she alleged that he had arrested her for exercising her right to free speech—and five citizens filed complaints. He was accused of injuring a man by throwing him to the ground; of humiliating a mother when arresting her for speeding; and of pointing his gun at someone who got out of his car too slowly. Later, he estimated that he had drawn his gun during a traffic stop on at least ten occasions. In 2005, he applied to work for the police department in Rio Rancho, just north of Albuquerque, but he was rejected for having a bad attitude.

Since the last time he applied to the Albuquerque Police Department, Brown had been in two car accidents and filed for bankruptcy—events that the department typically considered indications of instability—but his second application was accepted, and he was given a signing bonus of five thousand dollars. He didn’t take a psychological exam. His training lasted six weeks.

The day that Christopher was killed, Brown arrived at the Torreses’ house wearing bluejeans, black sunglasses, and a shirt that said “Buell Motorcycles.” He said that he found it easier to approach people when he wasn’t wearing a uniform. [annotation q="So obviously Christopher wouldn’t know who he was, and might feel a bit threatened by him, right?" a="Right."] He was joined by another officer, Richard Hilger, who wore jeans, an untucked T-shirt, and hiking boots. They rang the doorbell, but no one answered. They could see the living room through the slats of the window blinds; no one appeared to be home. They were about to return to their car when Hilger heard a noise in the back yard. According to statements made later by both officers, they walked toward the fence and Hilger called out Christopher’s name. [annotation q="Did approaching suspects when not in uniform violate written rules or generally agreed-upon best practices?" a="It did not."]

“Yeah,” Christopher said, approaching the fence from the other side. He wore plaid pajama pants, a white undershirt, and flip-flops.

“I just want to talk to you real quick,” Hilger said. [annotation q="Did you quickly accept this version of the conversation? Was there a body camera recording with audio?" a="Yes, there was a body camera recording."]

“You’re talking to me,” Christopher responded.

“Well, can I talk to you face to face?”

“We’re face to face right now.”

“You have a felony arrest warrant,” Brown said.

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do. You have a felony warrant for your arrest.”

“I haven’t done anything wrong,” Christopher said. “This is my back yard.”

According to Brown, Christopher said that the officers would have to fight if they wanted to arrest him. When Christopher took a step backward, Brown jumped the four-foot fence, breaking part of it, and tackled Christopher. “He went to hit me, I punched him, and then the fight was on,” Brown said. Hilger followed his partner into the back yard by removing a panel of the fence. “I basically bum-rushed them all,” he said.

A twenty-four-year-old neighbor, Christie Apodaca, who lived behind the Torreses, heard someone shouting, “I live here. What are you doing? I live here.” She ran to her fence and looked through a coin-size hole in one of the wooden panels. Christopher had gone to her high school, but she’d only spoken to him once or twice. She saw him on his hands and knees, about twelve feet away from her. One man pressed his weight onto Christopher’s lower body and another punched his right side and his face.

Apodaca ran inside her house to call 911. She told the dispatch operator, “I think the other guys are trying to rob the place.”

“Ma’am, are you on—is this on Sunrose?” the operator asked, naming the street where Christopher lived.

“Huh?”

“Is this on Sunrose?”

“Yes.”

“O.K. Those are officers that are on that scene.”

Outside, Brown and Hilger tried to handcuff Christopher, but he tucked his hands underneath him, and flailed his head and legs. On Hilger’s police radio, which was on for just a few seconds, Christopher can be heard yelling, in a high-pitched voice, “I’m a good guy! This is my house!”

The officers tried to pin Christopher to the ground, but they said that he was somehow able to rip his right arm free and grab Hilger’s gun. They said that he wouldn’t let go, even as they punched him. Brown unholstered his pistol, a nine-millimetre handgun that he’d owned since he was sixteen. [annotation q="What an amazing detail. How did you find that out?" a="He casually mentioned this in his deposition."]He pressed the muzzle against Christopher’s back and pulled the trigger. He didn’t hear any noise, and wondered if the gun had malfunctioned. He squeezed the trigger again. This time Christopher said, “Ow.” Christopher was still trying to get up, so Brown shot him in the back a third time.

Apodaca heard the shots, and went back outside and looked through the same hole in the fence. This time, she saw Christopher lying down, facing the ground. He was handcuffed, but he wasn’t moving. The two men stood next to Christopher’s body, looking down. A few minutes later, Emergency Medical Services arrived. One man picked up Christopher’s legs and another lifted his shoulders, and they carried him out of the back yard.

The day after the shooting, Apodaca went to the office of a lawyer, a family friend, and told him that she had witnessed her neighbor’s death. “The way I saw him treated—I just couldn’t put that together,” she said. While she was there, the lawyer called an officer he knew in the police department, and told him that there was an eyewitness to Christopher Torres’s shooting. For several months, Apodaca waited in vain for someone from the department to call.

Albuquerque lies at the intersection of two interstate highways, one stretching from California to the East Coast and the other from Texas to Wyoming. A local saying is that many citizens, intending to drive from one coast to the other and start a new life, end up living in Albuquerque when they run out of money. A fifth of the residents live below the poverty line, many of them in the southeast part of the city, which is often called the “war zone.” Wealthy residents tend to live in the northeastern corner, at the foot of the Sandia Mountains. The division reflects the social climate throughout the state, which has the widest income gap between rich and poor in the country. Gilbert Najar, the director of the police academy in Silver City, New Mexico, who worked for the Albuquerque Police Department for twenty-five years, told me that the department “did policing one way in the South Valley, where there were a lot of immigrant families and people of lower socioeconomic status, and we knew we could violate their rights. But we did not dare commit those tactics in the affluent neighborhoods, where we knew they would file complaints on us.” [annotation q="Did Najar worry that talking to you frankly might poison his relationship with the police department?" a="He didn’t express this concern."]

Since 1987, the police department has shot at least a hundred and forty-six people. The shooting of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, looked almost routine to people in Albuquerque. They had seen such incidents many times before. Few people protested, and no one paid much attention. Police violence appeared to be a matter of concern only to Albuquerque’s underclass: those who are mentally ill, addicted to drugs, Native American, or Hispanic and poor. David Correia, a professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico, told me, “There’s this myth here of tri-cultural harmony—indigenous people, Mexican-Americans, and Anglos—but this precarious arrangement is built on a long history of violence against Spanish-speaking and indigenous people that still plays out.” [annotation q="How did you decide where to place the paragraphs of socio-economic-political context, and how much depth to include?" a="Similar to my answer about the context on the police department, I tried to think about what point in the story the reader would be asking him/herself these questions. I don’t want to give the info before those questions come up—then the reader won’t be as interested."]

The city has hired a succession of experts, a new research team every few years, to analyze the police department’s use of force, but officials seem to have viewed the act of commissioning a report as a proxy for doing something about the problem. Samuel Walker, an expert in police accountability who was hired in 1996 to co-author one of the reports, after the police killed thirty-two people in ten years, said, “When we gave an oral presentation to the city council, I had a very strong impression that many city-council members were not interested.” He described his conversation with Martin Chávez, the mayor, as one of the most hostile interviews he’s ever conducted. He said that the police chief would not look him in the eyes when he briefed him. One city-council member refused to meet with him or return his calls. [annotation q="Did you receive any pushback from your editor about the first sentence of this paragraph?" a="No."]

His report highlighted the department’s incompetence in responding to people with mental illnesses. The city lacks a comprehensive mental-health-care system, and cops are often called to assist people in the midst of psychotic episodes. When these people don’t follow the officers’ orders, they are sometimes beaten or shot. Grover, the former sergeant, told me that “there was a running joke within the department: don’t threaten suicide with officers, because they’ll accelerate it.”

Five years after Walker’s report, and fourteen more fatal shootings, another task force concluded that the department needed to create an oversight system in which officers would suffer consequences for abusing their authority. In 2006, after sixteen more deaths, the city hired a team of consultants to do another report, which noted that “many recommendations made in this report are based on issues voiced by the prior consultants that are still valid and should be addressed.”

When Mayor Richard Berry took office, in 2009, his transition team tried to draw his attention to a speech, delivered by an ethics scholar at an international conference for police chiefs, called “How Police Departments Become Corrupt.” The speech described the four stages of dysfunction in a police force. The transition team said that the department appeared to have entered the third: employees abide by the “unwritten rules of internal politics”; leaders are promoted because of their relationships, not their work; and officers “rationalize doing unethical things during conversations with each other.” In its report on the department, the transition team wrote that the department showed at least one sign of having entered the fourth stage, exhibiting a commitment to “keep corruption out of the newspapers at any cost.”

The report contained seven paragraphs about corruption; but, by the time it was submitted to the mayor’s office, in November, 2009, those paragraphs had been deleted. In their place was a discussion of the problem of “serial inebriates,” citizens who drained the department’s resources. Paul Heh, a senior sergeant, presented the original version of the report at a city-council meeting in 2011, but he was told after two minutes that he had exceeded the time limit for speaking, even though he had arranged to speak longer. The city council voted on whether Heh should be permitted to continue his speech, and ruled against him.

Heh worked for the department for twenty-four years, and he said that early in his tenure he noticed that small lapses went unpunished. The department’s rules stated that “personnel will not write a police report of alleged officer misconduct in the line of duty either by citizen request or of their own initiative.” Supervisors were responsible for handling claims of misconduct, a policy that allowed them to screen the account that entered official records. Samson Costales, a retired officer, said, “They tell us that we have to cover for each other, because we are a brotherhood, and brothers in blue don’t like rats,” a mentality that he said he learned from his training officers. “You don’t challenge another officer; you don’t testify against him—you lie if you have to. The code existed long before I was a police officer, and I can’t see it ever going away.”

It was widely known that many people in the department were having extramarital affairs with other officers. “These guys would pass these female officers from one to another,” Heh said. “It all grew from there.” Cassandra Morrison, a sergeant who retired in 2013, described the department as an “old-boys’ club,” where certain men became untouchable. “As women, we were thought of as a subculture,” she said. “If you wanted to move up, you had to kiss somebody’s ass, rub somebody’s elbow, take somebody out to dinner, or have sex with somebody.” The social hierarchy in the department rewarded an exaggerated masculine ethos, which Schultz seemed to encourage. When asked by a local reporter about extramarital affairs within the department, he pointed out that his officers were young, attractive, and in good shape. “There’s nature at play,” he explained.

In the legal-training materials distributed to officers, the lesson on strip searches featured a cartoon of five male officers staring through the window at a silhouette of a naked woman—with a shapely butt and enormous breasts, which she is fondling—the object of their search. The lesson on arresting prostitutes showed a drawing of a hairy transvestite with a single breast, which droops to her potbelly. “How d’ya know I ain’t jus another purty face out shoppin’ fer my family?” she asks the officer who has come to arrest her.

Morrison said that officers were socialized to be cynical about civilians. “We’re taught to almost dehumanize them,” she said. “It just got to the point where it’s, like, they’re a piece of shit. We don’t care if they raped a baby or were speeding in traffic—everybody’s a piece of shit.” Early in her career, she was often injured, because she fought with people while arresting them. Then she took a forty-hour course offered by the department in crisis-intervention training, a model used by many police departments to help officers communicate with suspects, particularly those who are mentally ill. She never got injured on duty again. She became a senior instructor in the class, but it was held in low regard by many of her colleagues. By 2007, fewer than thirty officers were taking the course each year.

The Albuquerque Police Department acquired weapons and resources from both the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Department, which lends police departments surplus military gear. Until recently, officers were also permitted to come to work with guns that they had bought themselves. For some, the weapons functioned as status symbols; expensive, military-style ones were valued highly. Najar, the police-academy director, said that the leaders of the Albuquerque police force, like those of many departments around the country, stated publicly that they subscribed to the theories of community policing, a model that encourages officers to embed themselves in the communities they serve, but that those ideals never permeated the culture of the department. The people the cops arrested were usually strangers. Officers approached them with “all their fears and biases and prejudices,” he said.

Two and a half months after Christopher’s death, Stephen Torres wrote to Mayor Berry, alerting him that another unarmed man had just been killed by police. An officer hired the same year as Brown had shot a twenty-two-year-old man who appeared to be in the midst of a mental breakdown. The officer, Sean Wallace, thought that the man was holding a gun. It turned out to be a spoon. Shortly after the shooting, Wallace received five hundred dollars from the Albuquerque police union, which routinely gave money to officers to help them “decompress” after a shooting, according to a statement issued by the union’s president and vice-president. Wallace had already shot two other unarmed men, killing one of them. He has since received a department award for outstanding service.

Stephen told the Mayor, “I trust that you agree with us that we do have a problem.” He noted that he still had not heard from Schultz or anyone in the police department. “May we please hear from you?” he wrote. A few months later, when Schultz’s mother died, Stephen wrote him a sympathy card. “I was still thinking maybe we would work on this together,” Stephen told me.

One of Renetta’s friends, Jewel Hall, the president of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Center, which promotes diversity and human rights in Albuquerque, met with Mayor Berry in July, 2011, and asked him to join her and other activists in inviting the U.S. Justice Department to investigate civil-rights violations by the police department. She believed that the shootings reflected an “élite attitude toward certain neighborhoods and certain citizens.” She added, “Their lives are not valued by those in charge.” The meeting was brief. Berry told her he thought that Albuquerque’s police force was one of the finest in the country. (Later, when the city council passed a resolution requesting that the Justice Department investigate the police force, Berry vetoed the measure.)

Renetta worked in the same building as Berry, and when they ended up in the same elevator they would greet each other awkwardly and then look away. When Renetta ran into him or other top city officials, she imagined that they were thinking, There must be some reason that they killed your son. (Berry told me, “We don’t think any less of the Torreses as a family, and I hope they wouldn’t think any less of us, even though this is a tragic situation.”)

Having worked in government for thirty-three years, Renetta said that she didn’t expect the city to respond to her husband’s pleas. “You don’t know these people,” she told him. Stephen worried that Renetta’s cynicism was a symptom of grief. “She worries me,” he said. “She doesn’t think that the city gives a damn.”

Ray Schultz told me he knew that Stephen Torres was waiting for him to call, but that he couldn’t contact the Torres family, because he didn’t want to compromise the internal-affairs investigation into Christopher’s death. Although the internal review was completed roughly a month after the shooting—a police-department detective interviewed Hilger and Brown in the presence of a union attorney, a union representative, and a “buddy officer,” who provided emotional support—the case still had to be considered by an Independent Review Officer, who was supposed to produce another set of findings, which the department would then review. Schultz said that when he retired, in 2013, this process had yet to be completed.

According to Schultz, a few wayward officers were responsible for the shooting deaths. “Like any other organization, you have that two per cent that are making bad decisions,” he said. In November, 2012, the Department of Justice announced that it would investigate the Albuquerque police force. In a memo, Schultz informed commanders that “most likely the DOJ will find that APD has its house in order. . . . Have your officers stand tall and be proud to be part of our great department.”

Stephen and Renetta Torres met regularly with other parents whose children had been killed by the police. “We are the family that no one wants to be part of,” Ken Ellis, one of the parents, told me. In 2010, his son, a twenty-five-year-old Iraq War veteran, threatened suicide by pointing a handgun at his head outside a convenience store. Several police officers tried to negotiate with him, until an officer saw him “twitch” and shot him in the neck. Ellis drove a truck covered with images of the faces of his son and eleven other young men who had been fatally shot by Albuquerque officers. On one of the back windows, he had a picture of Christopher Torres, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and tentatively smiling. Ellis said that officers had approached him and advised him to take down the pictures, but he refused.

Like many of the families, the Torreses filed a lawsuit against the police department shortly after their son was killed. They also asked the district attorney to press charges. Renetta said that, among the families, paranoia became normal. On her iPhone, she kept seeing an invitation to join a wireless network called Surveillance Van 2. Her neighbor Richard Simes noticed it, too, and drove around the neighborhood looking for the source. He eventually installed surveillance cameras in front of his house and reviewed the footage every day. He said that if he found himself in a crisis he wouldn’t call the Albuquerque police.

Christie Apodaca, the eyewitness, found herself minimizing the time she spent outside her house. The police department had not contacted her, but she noticed a police car parked on the street in front of her house almost every day for seven months. “He could have been there for another reason,” she said. “But I found it very strange that when I walked out to see what was going on he would drive away.”

The Torreses’ daughter-in-law, Nicol, their son Daniel’s wife, said she initially assumed that everyone was being skittish. Then she and her husband noticed that Albuquerque officers kept cruising around their small suburb, even though it was outside the city limits. She told me, “As a white person from the East Coast, with no run-ins with the law, I was very naïve.” Nicol is a research psychologist for the county’s juvenile-detention center, and she believes that her response to Christopher’s death—she was vocal at city-council meetings—has foreclosed the possibility of promotions at work. People avoid her in the hallways. “I don’t get invited to the meetings that I used to, because the mayor will be there or the chief of police will be there,” she said. “No one is going to come out and say, ‘Your career is ruined,’ but these are the signs.” One day after work, she found a note wedged underneath her windshield wiper. It said, “Shut up and watch what you’re doing.”

The Torreses’ oldest son, Matthew, who is a lawyer, sometimes crossed paths with Officer Brown at the courthouse. It infuriated him to know that Brown was testifying in other cases, and that his statements were trusted in court. “He still thinks he’s a cop and I have no business glaring at him,” he said. “I think he murdered my brother, and I’ll do everything I can to make him uncomfortable.”

When Matthew saw that Brown had arrested someone for marijuana possession and that the defendant had no lawyer, he took on the case for nothing, even though his practice is devoted to family law. At the first hearing, he requested that the judge allow him to interview Brown about his unethical behavior. Matthew said that the judge looked bewildered—the defendant hadn’t even shown up in court—and called for a recess. Then she dismissed the case. [annotation q="Is there a suggestion here that the judge was protecting Brown?" a="I’m not sure, as I wasn’t there. I imagine she was trying to avoid an explosive confrontation that was not quite legally relevant."]

In thirty years, no officer in Albuquerque has been indicted for shooting someone. Until recently, officer shootings were evaluated by what the district attorney called an “investigative grand jury.” The jurors did not have the authority to indict, even if they wanted to. They were tasked only with determining whether a shooting was “justified” or “not justified.”

The grand jury lent the process an illusion of objectivity: the district attorney could say that the decision rested with citizens. But prosecutors are dependent on their relationships with police, and the grand jury’s decisions—every shooting in Albuquerque was deemed “justified”—may reveal less about the facts of each case than about the way that prosecutors presented it. After an article on investigative grand juries in the Albuquerque Journal, by a reporter named Jeff Proctor—one of the few local journalists who consistently questioned the police department’s narrative about its shootings—a judge asked the district attorney, Kari Brandenburg, to suspend the practice, in 2013. Brandenburg now reviews the details of police shootings herself and determines whether or not to put the case before a more conventional grand jury.

It took nearly three years for Brandenburg to decide that there was not enough evidence to charge the officers who killed Christopher Torres. She based her decision on the police department’s internal report, which was finally released to the Torreses’ lawyers, Randi McGin and Kathy Love, in 2013. The thirty-nine-page report never mentions Christie Apodaca. It notes that if Christopher were still alive he would have been charged with resisting arrest, disarming a police officer, and aggravated battery on a police officer, in addition to the charges that brought the officers to Christopher’s home. The report was titled “Aggravated Battery on a Police Officer.” The first page identified Christopher as the suspect. The State of New Mexico was listed as the victim.

In the years leading up to Brandenburg’s decision, the Torreses’ lawyers met with Brandenburg three times. They tried to persuade her to indict the officers in Christopher’s death, because the public had lost faith in the police department. Brandenburg, a chatty woman whose office is decorated with animal knickknacks, told the lawyers that she disagreed. She remarked that when she goes to the grocery store or the dentist’s office people approach her and say, “I think the police are doing a good job, and they ought to shoot more criminals.” Brandenburg told me that she still hears this sentiment. The people who make these comments are “not evil people,” she said. “But they lack understanding. They talk as if it doesn’t matter if somebody were to die.”

Four months after Brandenburg declined to bring charges, the Torres family won its civil lawsuit. The judge referred to statements by Apodaca, who testified at the trial, and wrote that she found no credible evidence that Christopher had threatened the cops with a gun. Brown, in his testimony, wouldn’t admit to regretting any decisions. “My choice to jump over the fence was a reaction to his choice not to partake in our conversation,” he said. “If you are asking me ‘would’ve’s’ or ‘could’ve’s,’ I mean, I could have not gone to work that day.”

Richard Hilger appeared more tentative. He said that Christopher, in his attempt to fight the officers, delivered only a “glancing blow” that did not injure anyone. He also acknowledged that some officers in the department might feel pressure to lie in order to corroborate a partner’s story.

Shortly after the civil trial, the Department of Justice published a report detailing how the police fostered a “culture that emphasizes force and complete submission over safety.” The Department of Justice then began negotiating a settlement agreement with the city and the police force. In an e-mail last June, the chief of police, Gorden Eden, who was appointed in early 2014, wrote to his dispatch operators, “Please comply and advise your people: NO one is to meet with DOJ—no one!! DOJ and its representatives have held several meetings with APD officers. This is a CRITICAL MATTER! No one. Make it clear to everyone, it’s got to stop immediately.”

The Department of Justice has investigated more than fifteen police departments in the past four years, and its description of police practices in Albuquerque is arguably the most disparaging. The settlement agreement, which was released this fall, requires that all officers use body cameras (which had previously been required but whose use had not been strictly enforced); that the specialized units, including the canine, bomb, and SWAT teams, more clearly document and justify their activities; and that the department establish a committee that will develop new policies for responding to people who are chronically homeless or mentally ill. To address what it called a culture of “pervasive and deliberate leniency,” the agreement instructs that supervisors in the department be far more vigilant about documenting misconduct. But it does not seek sanctions against officers who had previously used excessive force. Eden said that, in part because of the department’s contract with the police union, “it’s almost impossible to do retroactive discipline, once the time frame has expired.” If officers resist the reforms, Eden said, he will encourage them to retire.

Mayor Berry, who was reëlected in 2013, told me he hoped that the department, by implementing the required reforms, would make Albuquerque a model for the rest of the nation. He traced the number of fatal shootings to the lack of mental-health services in the city, but declined to speculate about other factors that had led the department to its current state. “I just don’t spend any of my time or energy worrying about who did what, why, and when,” he said. “The last thing I want to do as mayor is play the blame game.”

The officers who killed Christopher Torres have never been disciplined. They returned to work after three days of paid leave. Renetta and Stephen Torres are skeptical that the culture and values of the department can change when the cops have not been held accountable. Many of the families who have protested the department’s shootings believed that officers would be charged in the deaths of their sons. When the district attorney declined to bring charges in their own case, they had set their hopes on the cases of other families. Now there is only one case left that has a chance of going to trial: the shooting of James Boyd, a homeless schizophrenic man whose death, last March, was captured on video.

Boyd had been camping illegally in the mountains when an officer ordered him to gather his belongings, including two small knives, and sleep somewhere else. Boyd responded to the request by making threatening, nonsensical comments. Soon, forty-one officers reported to the mountain, and several of them pointed rifles at Boyd. An officer named Keith Sandy, who had been hired the same year as Brown, called Boyd a “fucking lunatic” and joked to a colleague that he’d like to fire a Taser shotgun at Boyd’s penis. (He later told detectives that he and his colleagues talked so much “garbage to one another” that they developed a safe word, “china,” so that they would know when to stop joking.) As Boyd bent down to pick up his belongings, Sandy threw a flash-bang grenade at his feet. When Boyd reached into his pocket and brought out his knives, Sandy and another officer fired six shots at him with their assault rifles. It was the department’s thirty-ninth shooting since 2010. (When citizens protested the shooting by marching through the city, an undercover officer, dressed as a hippie, walked along, videotaping activists.)

Last October, Kari Brandenburg told a police-union attorney that she was leaning toward filing murder charges against the officers who shot Boyd. Within weeks, Brandenburg found herself the target of an investigation by the Albuquerque Police Department. Her twenty-six-year-old son, who was addicted to heroin, had stolen thousands of dollars of his friends’ belongings, and Brandenburg had offered to reimburse them. In late November, an Albuquerque detective gave the state attorney general an investigative file that he said showed that Brandenburg had bribed and intimidated witnesses. In a recording of a conversation between officers working on the case, a detective with the Criminal Intelligence Unit acknowledged that the evidence against Brandenburg appeared insubstantial. He said, “There might be charges—they’re super-weak—it’s probably not gonna go anywhere, but it’s gonna destroy a career.”

A week after the investigation became public, Brandenburg told me that she would continue as district attorney, despite calls for her to leave the office. When I asked her if she saw the investigation as a form of intimidation, a way to prevent her from indicting the officers who shot Boyd, she said, “I think right now it’s best if other people connect the dots.”

On January 12th, Brandenburg filed counts of murder against the two officers who shot Boyd. The case will now go before a district judge, who will determine if there is probable cause to send the officers to trial. At a press conference announcing the charges, Brandenburg said, “I am not going to be intimidated.”

The next day, the Albuquerque police shot and killed another person. According to the police department, the man, who was suspected of stealing, ran away from the officers and fired his gun in their direction. Two cops returned fire, killing the man. One of the cops had killed a civilian in 2011 and the other had been sued in 2010 for using excessive force. Brandenburg sent a prosecutor from her office to the scene of the crime, as she has at every officer shooting in the past decade. But, for the first time, the police barred the prosecutor from attending the police briefing or participating in the investigation. The police department’s attorney told her to go home, saying that her legal advice was not needed.

The Torreses disagree about whether the city has ever apologized to them. Last summer, Mayor Berry met with Stephen and two other fathers, Ken Ellis and Michael Gomez, whose sons had been shot by police officers, men who have since been promoted. Berry extended his condolences and said that he prayed for them. Stephen is satisfied that it was, he said, “as close to an apology as the Mayor’s legal team would allow him.” Renetta, who still hopes that someone will accept responsibility for Christopher’s death, considered this another instance of a politician knowing when to use “nice little phrases.” “It’s hard to be encouraged when you’ve already seen so much double-talk,” she said. [annotation q="Did you sometimes interview Stephen and Renetta separately?" a="Yes, I found it helpful to interview them separately because they both had very different personalities and modes of speaking and attended to different sorts of details when answering my questions."]

When Christopher’s death was first described by the police department, Stephen had contemplated suing the city for slander, until he realized that the dead have no right to be protected from defamation. He couldn’t understand how Christopher, in the course of an afternoon, had been turned into a stereotype: a dangerous schizophrenic. The family had rarely told people about Christopher’s diagnosis, because they were wary of the meanings that people ascribed to the word. Christopher’s first psychiatrist had told the family, “Let’s hope it’s a brain tumor and not schizophrenia, because a tumor we can do something about.”

Renetta said that she struggled to accept that “you can’t always set things right in the world of your child.” She believed that Christopher had been getting better every year. The side effects from the medications, like muscle stiffness and lethargy, had become less distracting. He was opening up to the idea of going to school. He still heard occasional voices, but, for the most part, he had stopped believing what they said. “Christopher was trying to figure out, ‘How do I fit in?’ ” Renetta said. “He was so close to finding his way.” [annotation q="How did you reach your decision about the ending?" a="One of the tragedies of this case was that Christopher didn’t get a chance to be seen, publicly, as a person separate from his diagnosis. His schizophrenia diagnosis was offered almost as an explanation for his death. I hoped to convey that the shooting froze his life at a particularly difficult moment with regard to his illness and that he was deprived of the chance of moving beyond it."]

The post Annotation Tuesday! Rachel Aviv and “Your Son Is Deceased” appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

I’ve been grappling with what made Ida Tarbell so good since about 1983, when I was appointed executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE). I felt I needed to read her 1905 classic, “The History of the Standard Oil Company.” This plainly titled book was no mere history; after I found the book and devoured its 800-plus pages, I was struck by her journalism, which felt not only exemplary but also as relevant as if written the month before I read it. I became an avid admirer of Tarbell’s, and determined to write her biography [Taking on the Trust: How Ida Tarbell Brought Down John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil, 2009]. What I learned during my two decades of Tarbell study led me to formulate the hypothesis that more than any other individual, Tarbell invented the brand of reporting we call “investigative.”

[caption id="attachment_123819" align="alignright" width="765"] Ida Tarbell at her desk, circa 1904-1905[/caption]

Tarbell (1857-1944) was a superb reporter. She gathered information so compelling, so fresh, that her published pieces could not fail. As every reporter and editor eventually realizes, pyrotechnic writing rarely yields memorable journalism without a foundation of highly sophisticated information gathering. She did her reporting under circumstances difficult to fathom in 2016. She worked decades before open records/open meeting laws. Travel to repositories was arduous and time-consuming, and there was no photocopying, faxing or digital servicing. Tarbell also encountered misogyny and condescension.

She and a few male counterparts worked to create something new, digging into the netherworlds of giant corporations, individual tycoons, the federal government, local governments, and corrupt politicians. These “muckrakers” often worked for McClure’s, the magazine run by S.S. McClure. He decided during the 1890s to employ Tarbell as a staff writer, setting multiple precedents—hiring a salaried journalist, hiring a woman to publish serious journalism, and creating what we now call investigative reporting.

In my study of Tarbell, I learned that obstacles never discouraged her. Agreeing to McClure’s request that she investigate Standard Oil was fraught with risk. Standard Oil qualified as the world’s most powerful corporation, at a time when companies faced less regulation than they do today. Its founder, John D. Rockefeller, was forbidding.

Tarbell was also tireless. Her appetite for documents was never satisfied. She located Congressional hearings and transcripts of debate, regulatory agency initiatives, railroad contracts with shippers, records of Rockefeller’s philanthropy, filings about previously mysterious Rockefeller family members, and more. She could also work a source – she convinced both current and former Standard Oil executives to talk with her, she interviewed Rockefeller’s dissident brother, and met with an array of important additional human sources.

And she could write. Her Standard Oil series ran in nineteen parts, and was widely read. Then she expanded that into a book despite efforts by Standard Oil minions pushed by Rockefeller to neutralize her damning revelations. Tarbell’s ability to take a complicated story and keep people interested in it is remarkable still.

Here is how she introduced her story:

“One of the busiest corners of the globe at the opening of the year 1872 was a strip of northwestern Pennsylvania not over fifty miles long, known the world over as the Oil Regions. Twelve years before, this strip of land had been but little better than a wilderness, its chief inhabitants the lumberman, who every season cut great swaths of primeval pine and hemlock from its hills, and in the Spring floated them down the Allegheny River to Pittsburgh.

“The great tides of Western emigration had shunned the spot for years as too rugged and unfriendly for settlement, and yet in twelve years this region avoided by men had been transformed into a bustling trade center, where towns elbowed each other for place, into which three great trunk railroads had built branches, and every foot of whose soil was fought for by capitalists. It was the discovery and development of a new raw product, petroleum, which had made this change from wilderness to marketplace.

“What had been done [to find oil] was, in [the independent oilmen’s] judgment, only a beginning. Life ran swift and ruddy and joyous in these men. They were still young, most of them under forty, and they looked forward with all the eagerness of the young…They would make their towns the most beautiful in the world…

“But suddenly, at the very heyday of this confidence, a big hand reached out from nobody knew where, to steal their conquest and throttle their future…”

The big hand belonged to Rockefeller. Tarbell discovered how he had gained advantage by conspiring with the railroads to undercut his competitors, creating an unlevel playing field.

Tarbell’s shocking revelations about underhanded conduct demonstrated that there are lucky reporters, but rarely lazy, lucky reporters. She set new standards for journalism. The rest, as the cliché goes, is history.

Steve Weinberg is currently writing a biography of Garry Trudeau.

The post “Why’s This So Good?” No. 101: Ida Tarbell and “The History of The Standard Oil Company” appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Elizabeth Weil had never written about criminal justice, but when asked to write about a controversial case of whether a baby was killed by his father, she produced the gripping "What Really Happened to Baby Johan?" Her story raises questions about the line between accident, murder and malpractice, and the reasons why certain cases come to trial at all.

Weil is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and also writes for Outside, The New Republic, Matter and Vogue. Her stories range across a wide set of topics, but often involve the twists and turns of family life. The essay on being a refugee she co-authored with Clemantine Wamariya, "Everything Is Yours, Everything Is Not Yours," was a finalist for a 2016 National Magazine Award, and her story "The Woman Who Walked 10,000 Miles (No Exaggeration) in Three Years" won a 2015 Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award. She's the author of "No Cheating, No Dying" and co-wrote the best-selling "Off the Sidelines" with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.

[caption id="attachment_122001" align="alignright" width="222"] Elizabeth Weil[/caption]

Storyboard: What is the genesis of this piece? Did you initiate the idea? Or did you receive it as an assignment from an editor? Either way, why did it run here rather than a different outlet where you have published?

Weil: Mark Lotto, the editor of Matter, called and asked me if I wanted to write the piece. It had a bit of a complicated back story. Bear with me: Mark’s boss, Edward Lichty, is married to the writer Kelly Corrigan. Kelly had some friends in common with Jennie and Kristian, the subjects of this piece. Kelly spent an afternoon with Jennie, hearing her story, as Jennie wanted her story told. But Kelly ended up feeling this was a topic that needed a journalist, not a memoirist or fiction writer. So Kelly talked to Edward and Edward talk to Mark and Mark passed the story along to me.

Had you written previously about a flawed criminal justice system? Did you have prior knowledge of shaken baby syndrome?

I hadn’t ever written directly about flaws in the criminal justice system. I’d written one piece on lethal injection and what an awful mess it is, and one piece about a wrongful birth lawsuit, but that was really about ethics, not crime. This was my first real crime piece.

Did you need to wrestle with a word count limit?

Not really — that’s the beauty of writing for an online-only publication! But I also didn’t want the piece to sprawl. I was pretty worried about getting people to read about a dead baby, period, let alone 10,000 words about a dead baby. So we tried to keep it to 8,000 words, which is still really long.

How does this piece fit into your overall body of published pieces?

God, that's a hard question. Sometimes I feel like my body of work, which I never really think about in those terms — somehow that feels pretentious; I just write magazine articles, for the most part — is not at all coherent. I just follow my interests. That said, this story did feel slightly of a piece with the wrongful birth story … and over the past 13 years — I have a 13-year-old daughter — I’ve been interested in family stories. But I also write sports profiles sometimes. In fact, I started writing sports profiles after I wrote the lethal injection piece because I needed a break from the heartache. Obviously, this assignment took me back there.

My questions are in red, her responses in blue. To read the story without annotations first, click the ‘Hide all annotations’ button below the byline, up and to the right.

What Really Happened to Baby Johan?

The father, mother, police, doctors and hospital records all tell different stories about that night. Does anyone know the truth?

Originally published on Matter, February 2, 2015

1. THE LETTER

Jennie and Kristian Aspelin have five sons — Lukas, who is six; Johan, who would be four but is dead; and the triplets, Peter, Rudy, and Tommy, who just turned one. How did you decide to open with such a seemingly undramatic, matter-of-fact sentence, instead of something obvious—and maybe trite--like “When Kristian Aspelin found out his infant son had died, the devoted father never imagined he would be labeled a baby killer”? I really felt that the story itself was so overwhelmingly dramatic and horrible that I wanted my voice to be very matter -of-fact, not over-hyping, just bearing witness to their lives. I try to do that. I think a lot of people do, right? Write hot stories cool and cool stories hot? Anyway, I’ve only written a couple of crime-related stories, but in neither one was I very interested in crime, per se. I tend to be interested in emotional drama and— this is cliche, too, sorry— the stories people tell themselves. Another writer might have written this piece focused tightly on Kristian, the husband, who was accused of the crime. I was at least as interested in Jennie.

Last spring, when the triplets were nearly 113 days old, Johan’s age when he died, Jennie told me about the letter from the donor agency. It arrived around Christmas 2010. At that time, Jennie’s husband, Kristian, wasn’t living at home, as he couldn’t legally share a residence with Lukas, then their only living son. In the letter, the California Transplant Donor Network thanked Jennie and Kristian for Johan’s heart, liver, pancreas, and small bowel and told them the ages of the children whose lives those organs had saved. After reading, Jennie called the California Transplant Donor Network. As she recalled, Johan’s lungs were requested soon after she’d signed the donation papers. Why was no small child breathing with them? The donor network promised Jennie they’d look into the matter, and several weeks later they gave her an answer: No child had received Johan’s lungs because Johan’s lungs were unusable.How did you decide to place Jennie’s reaction to the unusable lungs at the top of this feature? Did you make the decision primarily to back into informing readers that a criminal proceeding would dominate the narrative? Or did you include the lung obsession here mostly to help illuminate Jennie’s character? I was incredibly worried from the start that no one would want to read another shaken baby story — because the truth is, when I started out, I felt Emily Bazelon’s shaken baby piece in the New York Times Magazine had done the job, and done it so well, that avid magazine readers wouldn’t see any point reading a shaken baby piece ever again. So even though this is a story with a shaken baby prosecution at its core, I never wanted that to be the primary subject. I wanted the subject to be the family ordeal with grief and accusation. How do you survive not only the loss of your child but your husband being accused of killing him? What if your husband didn’t do anything criminal but he killed your baby by accident — how do you survive that? What do you tell yourself that enables you to go on? So the lungs are up top because they are a crucial piece of how Jennie is going to survive this thing. They also tell the reader, even before shaken baby comes up, that this is not the same shaken baby story you read in 2011.

Jennie set to work trying to collect all of Johan’s medical records because, on November 10, 2010, the State of California charged Kristian with penal code section 273a(a), willful cruelty to a child, a complaint amended three days later to include homicide for the death of their son. Kristian always maintained his innocence, and Jennie always believed him. Born in New York to Filipino parents, raised in Saudi Arabia, Jennie described herself as being “from tough stock” — here she was, caring alone for infant triplets, inviting me into her home. Over the course of the prior three and a half years she’d lost a baby, her house, her job, all of her money, and, very nearly, her husband. Her face had transformed. In pictures taken before Johan died and Kristian was charged with his murder, Jennie looks full of élan and glamour — a smart, sexy, worldly Asian beauty, long dark tresses falling over her shoulders, indomitably optimistic look in her eyes. Around her home hang portraits, in various family configurations: Jennie and Kristian; Jennie, Kristian, and Lukas; Jennie, Kristian, Lukas, and Johan; and then just Jennie, Kristian, and Lukas again.Why did you decide to insert yourself into the story here? I’m a fan of light first person, in that it adds another layer. And part of what is going on in this article is that Jennie is getting me to tell the story—I’m there because I’m part of her plan to get this story told. She wants the world to know what happened to her family. She’s on a quest for justice. She wants the assholes who accused her husband of killing her child to pay. My announcement that I’ve been invited by Jennie is also a tiny bit of morally covering my ass, of letting the reader know Jennie wants me here, she wants her story told. Kathryn Shulz made the excellent point in her recent New Yorker piece, about "Making a Murderer" and "Serial", that we—writers, readers, listeners— are turning crime and victims’ pain into entertainment and that’s ethically dubious. Which it is. But at least in this case the subject had an agenda of her own in getting involved with a journalist. About physical description: Did you worry about readers wondering whether it’s legitimate to view a photograph and determine if a gaze looks optimistic or pessimistic? Ha! I didn’t think of that! Maybe it is? But I do think you can see hope and confidence or resignation and defeat in a face.

After learning from the donor network that Johan’s lungs had not been transplanted due to “a matter of function,” Jennie redoubled her efforts, camping out at San Francisco General and UCSF hospitals, trying to gather every shard of evidence about Johan’s final days — all the nurses’ notes, every test result. By that point, the Aspelins’ lawyer had subpoenaed the medical records, but the files came back incomplete. So Jennie made the rounds, showing up at each department that touched her son — emergency, radiology, anesthesiology, pediatrics, intensive care. “If I had to, I’d play the grieving mother card,” she told me. “If they were Filipino, I’d play that up. I’d talk to them in my broken Tagalog.” At the end of the day she returned to her house. She collected thousands of pages of records which she kept in binders. Anything to piece together a story that made sense of her life and Johan’s death.

II. THE INCIDENT

A month before the donor letter arrived, on Monday, November 8, 2010, at 5:55 p.m., Kristian picked up Johan and Lukas, then ages three months and two and a half years, from Wonderful World of Learning, a Russian home daycare in San Francisco’s Sunset District.Did you decide early in the reporting/writing that you would use flashbacks as part of the narrative’s architecture? What is the rationale for using flashbacks rather than straightforward chronology? I knew from the start that I couldn’t just tell the story chronologically, because I’d lose a lot of readers due to what I mentioned earlier. "Oh, another shaken baby story. Yawn." My great editor, Mark Lotto, agreed. We even discussed it before I took the assignment. This wasn’t a story you could write from start to finish. As soon as I started trying to organize my material, I decided to start with the lungs—or at least try to. I was greatly relieved that it worked. I don’t have a lot of experience writing stories like this.
Kristian was born and raised in Sweden and is leading-man material: blond, square-jawed, six-foot-two and over 200 pounds. Daylight savings had just ended, making it too dark at 6 p.m. for Kristian to take the boys to the park. He drove home. Johan was cranky. Jennie, an accountant and human resources manager, had finished her work at the office but was lingering, enjoying a rare moment of baby-free calm, “just looking at Amazon,” she says. Before Johan’s birth she’d commuted nearly an hour each way to Palo Alto. But shortly before Johan was born, a former boss offered her a job with flexible hours and one quarter the commute. Thrilled and relieved, she agreed to start when Johan was five weeks old. Jennie’s income provided the Aspelins stability. Kristian had started a tech company with a friend, but it was far from the glinting, golden dream of billion dollar IPOs; instead it was filled with stress, risk, and weird hours, building supply-chain planning software. On Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday evenings, Kristian picked up Johan and Lukas just before the daycare closed at 6 p.m. Jennie usually arrived home by 6:30 or 7 p.m. Together Jennie and Kristian bathed the boys, put them to bed, then ate dinner. After Jennie went to sleep, Kristian worked late and gave Johan his 2 a.m. bottle.

On the evening of November 8, back home with the boys, Kristian tried to feed Johan. When the baby refused the bottle, Kristian set Lukas up in the living room with a Little Einstein video and gave Johan a bath. Johan remained fussy — sometimes it’s hard to catch a break in a family with an infant, a toddler, and two jobs. As Kristian tells the story, while he was in the nursery, dressing Johan after the not-so-calming bath, he heard a crash.Your attribution in the sentence, “As Kristian tells the story,” jumps out, and feels suggestive of doubt by you. Am I over-interpreting?No! It’s meant to be suggestive of doubt. I wanted the reader to hang on to a little doubt. Even the day I submitted the story I still held a tiny bit of doubt. Not all the facts fit snuggly together on this one.

Kristian picked up Johan and ran to the kitchen, where he found that Lukas had pulled lots of food out of the refrigerator — yogurt, leftover pizza, strawberries. Gus, the family golden retriever, was licking it up. Kristian squatted down to clean the mess, cradling Johan in one arm, but he slipped on the dog-saliva-wet floor and fell backward. Johan’s head hit the terra cotta tiles and he passed out. When the baby opened his eyes, his body remained limp. When Kristian fell backward, did his head smash into the tiles? No.

Three or four minutes later, at 6:57 p.m., Kristian called 911. English is not Kristian’s first language, but he speaks fluently, albeit with a thick accent. Yes, he’s still breathing, Kristian told the dispatcher, almost snoring, not making eye contact, body and limbs are limp. The dispatcher instructed Kristian to put a hand under Johan’s chin and tilt the baby’s head back to keep the airway clear. The dispatcher then remained on the line until 7:02 p.m., when the first EMTs arrived at the house. Reports from the first-responders state that Johan was lying on the master bed. His heart rate was alarmingly low, and his eyes couldn’t focus. He had no bruising, no abrasions, no hematomas, no blood in his mouth, no blood in the ears, which, given Johan’s minimal consciousness and the account of how he fell, was strange. Still, when a paramedic flicked Johan’s feet, to try to stimulate a response, Johan moved and let out a vigorous cry for the first time since the accident — a huge relief.

Meanwhile, Kristian repeatedly tried to call Jennie, who by this point was on a Muni and not answering her phone. A firefighter helped Lukas put on his shoes and buckled the toddler into his carseat in Kristian’s car. An ambulance then drove Johan, code 3 — lights and sirens, ignoring traffic laws — to San Francisco General Hospital. Kristian and Lukas, escorted by a firefighter, drove to the West Portal train station to pick up Jennie.

During the ambulance ride across town, Johan’s alertness varied from nine to 11 on the Glasgow’s Coma Scale. (Fifteen on that scale indicates fully alert; three is deeply comatose. Severe injuries are eight and lower.) The baby’s legs stiffened and his arms turned inward, a position known as “decorticate posturing,” which often indicates brain damage. Paramedics roused Johan into consciousness for the last time on the walk into the emergency room, at 7:23 p.m. Doctors quickly intubated the baby, shoving a plastic airway past his vocal chords and into his tiny trachea. They also sedated Johan with two paralytic drugs, Versed and rocuronium, after which radiologists performed a CT scan, which revealed a moderate brain bleed and swelling on the left top of Johan’s head. Just before 9 p.m. a nurse noticed that Johan’s blood oxygen levels were low and retracted the plastic intubation airway by one centimeter. At 10:43 p.m., a nurse observed Johan’s chest rising and falling asymmetrically and heard diminished breathing sounds on Johan’s left side. She readjusted the tube. A lot of medical procedural jargon potentially threatens the narrative drive. Did you include it, knowing the outcome of the criminal case against Kristian would drive curious readers back to this juncture? I like the specificity of the medical language and I wanted to put the reader, as much as I could, inside the medical world in this moment. This is what the EMTs, nurses, and doctors are seeing. This is how it all looks to them.

This was every parent’s nightmare: Three-month-old baby in the hospital, tubes taped to his face. Around midnight, Kristian returned to the Aspelins’ house, to relieve the family friend who’d picked up Lukas earlier that evening and brought him home to sleep. The Aspelins had no sense that Johan’s injuries might be fatal, though shortly before midnight Dr. Amy Beck, one of the chief pediatrics residents at San Francisco General, called Child Protective Services. Beck recalls feeling that something about this case just didn’t add up. By 2 a.m., a doctor noted that Johan’s right pupil was dilated and sluggish and that his left pupil was fixed. A second CT scan, performed at 3 a.m., revealed more brain bleeding, clotting in Johan’s superior sagittal sinus (a cavity that drains blood from cerebral veins), and a diffuse brain injury that appeared to be from lack of oxygen. Are you subtly setting up Dr. Beck as a villain or heroine here? How do you view foreshadowing as a narrative technique? Are you treating Dr. Stewart similarly but with less subtlety in the following paragraphs? I want the reader to doubt everybody — which is maybe terrible. But what happened to Johan wasn’t the result of one big mistake. It was the result of many smaller mistakes. So I wanted to slowly build up the sense that everybody made mistakes, or at least might have made them, and that also everybody was well-intentioned. The same holds for Dr. Stewart, though the stakes are higher with him, and Jennie and Kristian place A LOT of blame on him. But I should say, again, that I think Dr. Stewart is well-intentioned, a good guy and a great doctor doing his job, seeing the world through eyes of a man who dedicates his life to protecting children. I really believe everybody can behave well and terrible things can still happen.

III. THE NEXT DAY

On the morning of November 9, Kristian dropped Lukas at daycare, crying as he explained to the staff why Johan was not there. He then drove to the hospital and Jennie returned home to shower and change. While she was gone, Dr. Chris Stewart, a professor of pediatrics and the doctor responsible for San Francisco General’s suspected child abuse and neglect reviews, asked to speak to Kristian. Stewart informed Kristian that Johan was doing badly. The baby’s Glasgow Coma Score was now seven, his brain continued to swell and bleed, and blood had hemorrhaged in his eyes.

Stewart also serves as director of the Children’s Advocacy Center of San Francisco. He asked Kristian to retell the story of the accident, so Kristian did — cranky baby, didn’t eat, fussy after bath, crashing sounds, run to kitchen, slip and fall, drop baby on tile floor. Stewart then informed Kristian that this plot sequence was unsatisfactory; it failed to explain Johan’s injuries. Kristian said he really couldn’t think of anything else, but he tried to be accommodating. When Stewart asked if perhaps Kristian might have shaken the baby, Kristian paused. Then he said, “Yes, there may have been some times. I may have shaken him before.”
With the details you chose from the Stewart-Kristian interactions, are you seeking to lead readers in any specific direction—for instance, that Stewart’s medical training led him to ask a loaded question that might result in criminal charges against Kristian, or that Kristian’s naivete about shaken baby syndrome might have led to poor communication that wrongly harmed him? Yes, I’m just hoping to set up here that everybody is trying. Stewart is hearing a story that, to his mind, does not add up, and he’s trying to get to the bottom of it, to protect this tiny child. Kristian is trying to cooperate and he’s digging himself into a hole.

According to the official “child maltreatment consultation” report Stewart composed several weeks later, he handed Kristian a pillow to demonstrate. (Stewart declined to provide details about the case out of respect for the privacy of the Aspelin family. Many details in this story are taken from official investigation transcripts.) Kristian “showed a fairly gentle side to side motion holding the pillow in front of him with both hands.” Stewart asked Kristian if he may have shaken Johan anytime previous to this. “Father said maybe 4 or 5 times,” Stewart noted, “maybe before the weekend.” To confirm, Stewart asked Kristian again what he meant by shaking. Kristian gently rocked the pillow side to side.

In the context of a brain-injured infant, the word “shake” has totemic meaning. To many parents and caregivers, it evokes a modern-day version of the Salem witch trials, a trumped-up charge, a specious crime. As Deborah Tuerkheimer, a Northwestern University law professor, writes in Flawed Convictions: Shaken Baby Syndrome and the Inertia of Injustice, we can’t tolerate just sitting with “the sudden, seeming inexplicable collapse of an infant.” So we created a narrative and a class of villains to meet our moral and emotional needs. How did you decide to use the adjective “totemic”? I really wanted to stress that we attach a whole wheelbarrow of rocks to the word “shake” in this context. It has a ridiculous amount of weight.

The American Academy of Pediatrics acknowledges that the label itself — “shaken baby syndrome” — has become contentious and distracting, so doctors now use “abusive head trauma.” But the change, in part, is PR. Many pediatricians continue to see a story with a villain. Subdural hemotomas and other severe injuries rarely result from short falls with multiple adult witnesses. They are also vanishingly uncommon in places that require careful record-keeping, like hospitals and schools. As a result, children continue showing up at emergency rooms with brain bleeding, brain swelling, and retinal hemorrhaging, and doctors continue to believe that those injuries result from shearing forces caused by adults who lose it on crying babies and shake them too hard.

This mess stems, in some ways, from what’s possible in journalism. As Brown University public policy and political science professor Ross Cheit notes, it makes good copy to argue that a convicted mother or father or babysitter is innocent, whereas it makes libelous copy to insist that a legally innocent caretaker is guilty.
Everybody loves a good wrongful conviction tale. I have researched so many alleged and actual wrongful convictions over my decades as a journalist that I must fight against certain thought pathways I might have developed. Did you enter the Johan saga with beliefs about the validity of criminal charges in shaken baby cases? Well, yes, I did—largely from Emily Bazelon’s piece. I found my interview with Ross Cheit fascinating. Journalists love to tell wrongful conviction stories! And the press is really well-suited to telling those stories. It’s much easier to try to exonerate someone in the press than to try to convict someone in the press.

IV. THE ARREST

Johan continued to deteriorate. By noon on November 9, doctors transferred him across town, from San Francisco General to the UCSF Children’s Hospital, which has more expert pediatric intensive care. Kristian rode with Johan in the ambulance to the Parnassus Avenue campus, just up the hill from Golden Gate Park. Once Jennie arrived, too, she and Kristian shared a cigarette — unusual for them — to try to cope with the stress. Kristian, by his own definition, is “a stoic Scandinavian person,” by which he means, “in general, when you feel depressed or sad, you deal with it by yourself. That’s Viking men — you don’t complain.” That afternoon, Alexis Goldner, an inspector from the San Francisco Police Department Juvenile Division, called Stewart, who told her that he found Johan’s case “extremely concerning” as he didn’t see any way the accident Kristian described could have produced the baby’s injuries. Goldner arrived at the hospital with two social workers from the San Francisco Human Services Agency: Mary Alice Means and Eric Morgan, who Jennie described as a “big guy [who] bothered me.”

Goldner, Means, and Morgan invited Kristian, without Jennie, to join them in a conference room. Goldner led the interview. After a few niceties she asked Kristian how he calmed Johan when Johan was fussy. Kristian laid out the standard parenting arsenal — feed, change, bathe. Goldner then handed Kristian a teddy bear and asked him to demonstrate how he shook Johan. Kristian rocked the teddy bear back and forth.

“And then what do you do when you’re frustrated and he keeps crying?” Goldner asked.

Kristian said, “Normally, I just put him down.”

Goldner pivoted back. “How about before you gave the baby a bath? Weren’t you feeling — I think you said you were feeling pretty frustrated….”

In the transcript, the officials sound full of BS, manipulating Kristian’s paternal love to try to compel him to confess. “I see that you are someone who is trying to be very forthcoming and I see that you love your children,” Means said. “But two little children really close in a row like this is, is a lot of parenting. It’s four times the work as one little child two years old. And, you know, we get that….”When you wrote the phrase “full of BS,” had you concluded that the three questioners had formed an opinion about Kristian’s guilt? I was so angry when I read this material in the transcripts. Yes, I did feel that the questioners were just determined to find a specific answer. I was spending a lot of time with Jennie at that point, too, so I was really empathizing with her.

Kristian, in good Viking style, remained impassive and tried to take responsibility, owning that Johan was indeed injured while in his care. But he rejected the insinuation that he abused Johan, causing Goldner to try a new angle. She asked Kristian if he had seen his infant son that day. Kristian said, “Yeah, of course.”

“And how’s he doing today?” Goldner asked.

“He’s not doing well,” Kristian said, explaining Johan looked dazed, “like a vegetable, almost….”

Then, tag-teaming, Means, the social worker, stepped in. “It is really serious, I’m so sorry to tell you. The more information they have, the better chance that they can….”

Kristian, ever composed, told the same story of the accident yet again. Eventually Means dropped all pretense and called Kristian a liar outright. “Whatever happened to him that caused the injury wasn’t that little fall out of your arms. It wasn’t.” Means said. “It’s like saying my baby, my baby has a burn mark right here and it happened because I put my baby down on the bed and the sun was on him.”As you relate Kristian’s composed demeanor and stoic character more than once, are you suggesting that various authorities grievously misinterpreted superficial indicators? You know, I do think he’s a guy that reads as suspicious in San Francisco…. He’s just so contained. It makes you wonder why he’s so contained, though by the end of reporting the story I saw him, in many ways, as more emotionally present and grounded than Jennie. He seems very Northern European.

That night Kristian slept at a friend’s house, at the request of the social workers who had begun their investigation that day. (The social services agency later filed a petition with the court under the California Welfare and Institutions Code, Section 300 — intended to protect children from their parent’s abuse and neglect—barring him from unsupervised contact with Lukas.) In the morning he drove with Jennie to the hospital, where a doctor told the Aseplins that Johan’s condition had grown worse. Kristian felt overwhelmed — “almost like a zombie, you don’t feel anything,” he says. Meanwhile, Stewart and Goldner spoke again, confirming each other’s impression that Kristian’s explanation of the accident, in Stewart’s words, was “not the correct story.”  As you reported the story, you seem to have developed suspicions of confirmation bias among the authorities. Am I inferring correctly? Yes, I think everybody had confirmation bias here, including Jennie.

In a Delivered Services Log from that day, November 10, Means notes that Goldner was “hoping to avoid arrest at this time, as she knew Johan was dying.” But that evening, a friend of a friend, a lawyer, arrived at UCSF and noticed a group of police officers entering the hospital. He found Jennie and Kristian crying in a private room on the pediatric floor. He counseled Kristian that if those officers came to arrest him, he should exercise his Miranda rights and remain silent.

Soon after, at 8:45 p.m., Goldner entered the room and charged Kristian with child endangerment, including inflicting “unjustifiable physical pain.” Kristian remained silent, gave Jennie his keys, wallet, and wedding ring, and extended his arms to be handcuffed. “Can I say goodbye to my son?” Kristian asked. In Johan’s room, wrists shackled, Kristian started to lean over the crib to kiss Johan for what everybody knew would be the last time. “Sir, step away from the baby,” one of the officers said. Means describes the scene in her log as “a heartbreaking visual.”

Jennie called after Kristian as he was led away: “You did nothing wrong — you’re a good dad! I will get you out as soon as I can! Be strong and careful.”

V. BEFORE

Jennie and Kristian met at Matrix, a bar on Fillmore Street, Jennie says, “’02 or ’03 — I can’t remember, my life was wonderful.” Jennie was 29 years old and not working, just volunteering at the Asian Art Museum and with the Junior League, and tutoring math to kids in Hunters Point, one of San Francisco’s few rough neighborhoods. She’d grown up privileged — her father worked as an accountant for a large oil concern; she’d gone to boarding school at Kent, in Connecticut — but she was indeed from tough stock. When Jennie’s grandmother, who played on a Filipino national-level softball team, was in her 30s, Jennie’s grandfather was killed in a political murder. She never remarried. “She just put her needs on the back burner,” Jennie told me, and raised her four children on her own.How did you decide to place the flashback about the beginning of the relationship here, rather than higher or lower? Oh God, that’s a hard question. I think I just kind of vibed that at this point the reader is sucked far enough into Kristian and Jennie’s lives so as be ready for back story.To what extent did you chart the narrative arc before writing the first draft? I spend FAR more time charting the narrative and figuring out what pieces of material go where than writing a so-called first draft. I say “so-called” because for me there’s not a bright line between the documents I create to map out the flow and my story drafts. After I finish reporting, I just start thinking about structure—this is my section one, my section two, etc.—and then I start placing accumulated material into that structure where I think it should go. Then I read through that flow again and again and again, clarifying my argument for myself, adding things, deleting things, moving things around. Somewhere along the line, as I’m thinking through that flow of details my notes turn into sentences. By the time everything is in place and I’m just working on the writing, I’m not sure it’s really a first draft. Maybe it is? What numbered draft is this published version, if you kept count? I’m not very good at keeping numbered drafts. I basically just tweak tweak tweak until I go from an outline of notes to a story. Once I submit a draft, then it's a little clearer.

When he met Jennie, Kristian was 31 years old and just back in the States after a yearlong software consulting gig in London. He’d grown up in Sweden, an athletic kid with a prominent father, a radiologist who served as the vice president of the Karolinska Institute, the medical university responsible for selecting Nobel Prize winners in medicine. In junior high, Kristian spent a summer in Kansas with family friends. He returned to the States for college, earned a master’s degree in management information systems at the University of Arizona, and started working in tech. Jennie described Kristian as “like a male version of me.”

Jennie and Kristian decided that they wanted to have four children even before they married in 2005. Jennie did not get pregnant easily. She took the fertility drug Clomid; they considered adoption. “We didn’t care how we got our children,” Jennie says. “We just wanted to be parents.” In those years theirs was the fantasy San Francisco life: They skied 20 days a year in Tahoe, walked their dog along the beach to the Golden Gate Bridge, shared buckets of golf balls and pitchers of beer at the Mission Bay driving range. IVF worked after a couple of rounds. When Lukas was born, on May 11, 2008, Jennie and Kristian were living in their dream house, the one with the terra cotta tiles on Vicente Street.

Johan was born a little over two years later, on July 23, 2010. Jennie and Kristian found being second-time parents so much less stressful. As Jennie later wrote to the parents of the girl who received Johan’s donated heart, Johan was “just so smiley, mellow and easygoing.”How did you decide what to include about the Jennie-Kristian relationship, and what to exclude? Did you end up excluding details you now wish had remained in the published piece? I don’t know, not really. That’s not a very interesting answer!

VI. THE NEXT WEEK

On November 11, 2010, at 1:30 a.m. the police locked Kristian in a holding cell at the Mission station with, as he recalls, “one drunk, high Latino gay guy screaming and showing his tongue to everyone, saying he wants to F everyone; drug dealers.” Kristian’s handcuffs felt tight. Later that evening, at San Francisco’s main jail, on Bryant Street, a guard advised Kristian to keep quiet about the charges against him because criminals hate child abusers.

Jennie, on the outside, snapped into practical overdrive — asking her Harvard- and Stanford-educated friends for defense attorney referrals, coordinating rides from the airport for her parents and in-laws, arranging playdates for Lukas, and raising bail, which the judge initially set at $2 million. After interviewing 14 lawyers, Jennie hired Stuart Hanlon, a prominent San Francisco attorney who defended some members of the Black Panthers and the Symbionese Liberation Army in the ’70s. Jennie liked Hanlon immediately. He decorated his office, she says, with “50 pictures of his two sons and a golden retriever — that was like us.”

Meanwhile, guards stripped Kristian and placed him solitary confinement. After a few hours, naked, in a bare safety cell, Kristian asked when he might get out. The guard replied, “When you start behaving.” Kristian broke down for the first time since his arrest. He told me he felt, “very raw, like Middle Ages. Maybe a little bit like what the Holocaust people felt — helpless.” Coming from a large, white, blond man, this sounds off-putting and cold, but he meant something vulnerable. “Relatives are dying, and you can’t help it, and you have no idea what is going on in the outside world.”Without using the word “suicide,” are you conveying that Kristian might have been feeling suicidal? Or are you instead primarily conveying the automatic cruelty of prison protocol? I didn’t really mean to be suggesting suicidal impulses. I don’t think he was suicidal. But the cruelty and dehumanization broke him—capturing that was the intent.

After Kristian had spent 24 hours in isolation, guards gave him an orange jumpsuit and moved him to the locked psychiatric ward at UCSF, where he had a bed and books, including one called Indian Givers, that Kristian’s mind locked onto to keep him sane. Kristian’s new keepers explained that he’d been sent to solitary because San Francisco jail protocol demands that an inmate spend a day in isolation before being admitted to the psych unit. Kristian’s arrest had been featured in The San Francisco Examiner and on local TV news. Guards told him that they feared they couldn’t keep Kristian safe in the general population.

The litany of horrors involved when one member of a family is accused of killing another is impossible to process. On November 11, Kristian’s parents flew in from Sweden. His mother, Linda, spent the entire Frankfurt to San Francisco leg crying; Kristian’s father, Peter, the eminent radiologist, kept wondering if anybody could prove that his son had done anything wrong. The next day, Jennie launched into the ghastly bureaucracy required to donate Johan’s organs.

The following day, the 13th, Johan was declared brain-dead. And the State of California issued a four-count felony complaint against Kristian, alleging “assault by force that a reasonable person would know would likely cause great bodily injury resulting in pain and death.” No one took time to grieve.

The actual organ harvesting took place on November 15, in the afternoon, in a UCSF operating room. Surgeons aborted retrieving Johan’s kidneys due to difficulty of separating his tiny renal arteries from other vessels. By 4:30 p.m. the other organs were carefully packed in ice coolers. Soon after they were in an ambulance speeding to San Francisco International Airport for shipping.

Kristian arrived at his bail hearing and arraignment in shackles, his face pale and blank. A crowd of friends showed up to support him — dozens had written to the judge on his behalf — but he didn’t make eye contact with anybody besides his family. The judge ordered Kristian released on bail, which Hanlon had successfully lowered from $2 million to $750,000. The guards led Kristian away. Upon on his release, the first thing he requested was decent food; in the past seven days he’d lost 15 pounds. That evening he didn’t want to be around people, but he also didn’t want to be alone, so Jennie invited their closest friends and family to gather at a neighbor’s. There she served traditional Swedish princess cake and the lasagna that kind people had dropped at her house. The mood at the gathering bounced between tears and laughter, which Jennie suspects her neighbors thought was crazy because Johan had just died. But as she recalls, “There was so much tension. No one knew what to do or ask.”

Trust and security drained out of Jennie and Kristian’s lives. Even gestures of generosity aroused doubt. For instance, many people offered to loan money for Kristian’s bail. The first to do so were a couple who babysat for Johan the day before the accident. They’d dropped by Aspelins’ house to pick up Lukas to go to the playground with their son and offered to bring Johan along so Jennie and Kristian could nap. It was a thoughtful favor — not a big deal. That week they wired $230,000 to the bail trust set up by Hanlon, Kristian’s lawyer. Jennie and Kristian weren’t close enough to couple to know they had that kind of capital. Did something happen to Johan on their watch? Was this guilt money?Did you contact the generous couple for an interview? If yes, how did they respond? If no, why did you make that decision? I didn’t—and not for any good reason, which seems embarrassing now. When I was reporting and writing, I was just trying to capture Jennie and Kristian’s experiences. From the outset, I knew that I was not going to re-investigate the case.

The night of Kristian’s release, he and Jennie slept on air mattresses at their neighbor’s. Lukas slept at home with his grandparents. The family shattered, by Johan’s death, was fractured again by the legal system. Kristian was now legally barred from living at their house and spending time unsupervised around Lukas, now his only son.

VII.  THE CASE AGAINST KRISTIAN

For six months Kristian bounced between friends’ places before settling in Redwood City, south of San Francisco, with a friend who’d just gone through a divorce. During the day Kristian tried to work and at night he obsessively researched his own case, or really, cases. The State of California was charging him with homicide and the Human Services Agency had made Lukas a dependent of the court. Jennie was also being scrutinized. Did she know that Kristian had killed her baby but was protecting her husband?How do you know about Jennie being scrutinized, and how deeply did you pursue that angle? The lawyer from their juvenile case was extremely helpful and told me about it. Jennie told me about the scrutiny, too. I could have gone much, much deeper into the juvenile case but at some point I just needed to write the story and be done. To be clear, I spent months on this piece. I brought six boxes full of legal files with me on our family’s summer beach vacation. But I’m married to another writer and raising two kids in San Francisco so …. at some point I needed to finish, move on, and get paid.

Twice a week, one hour each time, Kristian was allowed to see Lukas at the Juvenile Division of the Mission police station. The Department of Social Services takes a healthy skepticism toward parents when one is accused of killing a child. The juvenile court assigned Lukas his own attorney, separate from Jennie and Kristian. On some official documents Kristian is referred to as “Father (Alleged).” For each meeting between Kristian and Lukas, Jennie needed to take half a day off work and pull Lukas out of preschool — all so Social Services employees, usually graduate students, could scrutinize her small, sad family. While reading books and playing games with Lukas, Kristian constantly worried that his son would flinch or pull away — or, Kristian says, that he’d be “playing dinosaurs and the daddy dino stomps on the mommy.” If that happened the social services staff or Lukas’s lawyer might decide to take a more forceful position in the case.

Kristian kept up his stoic demeanor, but he was cracking. Along with reading scientific papers about retinal hemorrhaging and subdural hematomas, and reviewing them on the phone with his father, Kristian spent nights torturing himself by digging up nightmare stories of people wrongly accused of child abuse. Among the worst was the story of the O’Shell family in Henderson, Colorado. The father, Dave, a police officer, was suspected of cruelty to a child after he and his wife brought their three-month-old daughter, Alyssa, to the hospital in 2008, with 11 broken bones. Dave became the prime suspect in the case after Alyssa looked away from him several times during a supervised visit. Expecting to be arrested, and apparently unable to stand the idea of his wife raising his daughter alone, Dave shot his wife at point blank range while she was sleeping in their bed. Then he put two guns in his mouth, pulled both triggers, and killed himself. The same day a doctor noticed that Alyssa could not lift her head — unusual at her age — and that her thumbs turned inward strangely and her legs wouldn’t straighten. A genetic test showed that Alyssa had a rare disease, spinal muscular atrophy, responsible for her symptoms. She was adopted by her grandparents and died of spinal muscular atrophy at age seven months.How many other cases did you find and study? How many involved shaken baby syndrome specifically? Oh God, this is getting really embarrassing! This is the only story that Kristian told me about that I dug deep. When I was following up with him about his late-night self-torture material he sent me four news stories, as examples, all shaken baby cases. Alyssa’s family’s story just slayed me—it’s so horrific. And in a perverse way it sheds some light on Kristian and Jennie. Jennie was—is—so determined to not lose her entire life to this nightmare. She was not going to lose her marriage. She was not going to lose her child. She was not going to let Johan's death be the end of her family. She came out of this hell and had triplets.

Meanwhile, police investigator Kevin Jones was gathering material for the homicide case, interviewing first responders, doctors, and daycare employees. Under the force of his questioning, damning details surfaced in people’s minds. Firefighters recalled that when they arrived at the Aspelin home, Lukas was “a handful” and had bad manners. The Lego table was too close to the heating vent — a fire hazard. Kristian was too stoic, “not bothered by the fact that the baby was very sick,” or conversely, he was “extremely distressed” and “overwhelmed with two small children.” The dog had “some bizarre head injury. It looked like he had been run over because half its head was like smashed and his tongue was hanging out.” Kristian and Jennie took too long to show up at ICU at San Francisco General. Jennie returned to work too soon after Johan was born.

As is commonly the case, witnesses offered conflicting accounts of concrete details. Some first responders remembered Kristian telling them that he dropped Johan in the nursery while lifting him from the crib; others, that he dropped Johan in the kitchen while trying to clean up Lukas’s mess. Still, individual conviction in one’s own ability to assess guilt and character remained strong. “The only thing I know is that those injuries aren’t caused by just a fall,” Jones said to a rescue captain.

Kristian “didn’t seem as if he was, I don’t know, he seemed very not all there,” said Michael Carion, a 20-year SFFD veteran and a former military medic. “I used the analogy when we got back to the firehouse — we were sitting at the table. I said, ‘You know, this guy reminds me of a book I read, Of Mice and Men.’ And [he] reminded me of Lenny.”

VIII. THE CASE AGAINST THE HOSPITAL

A couple of months after the California Transplant Donor Network sent the Aspelins their initial thank-you letter, the agency forwarded the family a letter written on February 1, 2011, from the mother of the girl in Tacoma, Washington, who received Johan’s heart. The mother expressed her family’s tremendous gratitude, and Jennie wrote back the following month, telling her that she had been keeping “the letter with me at all times so I can read it whenever I am sad.” Jennie also detailed the child abuse charges pending against Kristian, figuring that the recipient’s family might Google them and find out on their own. Shaken baby syndrome “is a very polarizing topic and if you/your family have strong opinions about it, it’s best you know about our situation now,” Jennie wrote. “I would not be able to handle it if you were to find out about us later and abruptly cut ties.…”

The mother took a long time to write back — nine months. By this point Jennie had a much more detailed and infuriating story to tell about her family. Johan’s complete medical files revealed two major, plot-scrambling incidents.

First, minutes after Johan was admitted to San Francisco General, doctors botched the intubation, causing a complete collapse of one lung and severely compromising the other.

Second, the hospital botched his sedation, twice overdosing Johan with the anesthetic drugs—he received as much as eight times the appropriate dosage of Versed both times he was injected, and he was administered as much as 2.3 times the correct amount of rocuronium each time. This left him essentially paralyzed and unable to communicate distress as air was pumped into his compromised lungs. On the second CT scan, taken at 3 a.m., about seven hours after the first, Johan’s brain looked different. Now instead of moderate bleeding and swelling at the top left of his head, he now had a diffuse brain injury, suggesting insufficient oxygen. He also had a blood clot in his superior sagittal sinus.

Doctors at San Francisco General are known for their speed and skill in treating trauma victims, but relatively few of those patients are babies. So perhaps one reason why, the next morning, Dr. Stewart believed that abusive shaking had caused Johan’s symptoms is that no one seems to have told him that the hospital had massively fucked up. A chest X-ray taken on November 8 at 8:37 p.m. showed Johan’s collapsed lungs, but it’s unclear when this information was relayed to the ICU. Nowhere in the police investigation transcripts does it suggest that doctors considered Johan had a brain injury and retinal hemorrhaging due to low blood-oxygen levels and high carbon dioxide pressure, problems that may result from faulty intubation.

Kristian spent many nights awake, fantasizing about his upcoming trial, as he says, “playing out scenarios in court to call out the fraud.” Maybe he’d show photographs of various pairs of eyes with retinal hemorrhages and ask doctors to identify which hemorrhages resulted from altitude and which from shaken baby — and, of course, they’d fail. Or he’d pose a hypothetical question: Tell me what would happen if you removed 75 percent of the lung capacity on a baby who has overdosed and also had a blood clot. How would that baby fare?

Kristian found the juvenile case against him “almost more insulting and harder to deal with, because to be accused of shaken baby — anyone can lose their temper at any point in time.” Kristian not only resented civil servants watching him play with Lukas, he found Social Services’ assessment techniques perverse. For instance, the agency wanted to do an anger management study on Kristian but, as he asked me, who in his position would not be terrifically pissed off? He also resented being given a Rorschach test. “I was looking at pictures, abstract art, and telling them what I was seeing? Do I see a butterfly here? Does that mean I’m aggressive and abusive? It’s insane.” Kristian believed the agency possessed an essentially female worldview, whereas he had an essentially male one. They privileged relationships and feelings; he put stock in science.

What’s more, Social Services created a logic that put Kristian in a double bind. For a hearing at the Superior Court of California, on February 16, 2011, the department argued that Kristian’s insistence that he was innocent was meaningless. The charges he faced carried a potential life sentence so “if he did inflict Johan’s injuries, he could never admit it — at least not now.”

Worse, the agency brought up what they considered a “concerning” event in Kristian’s history: He had been arrested for sexual assault in 1998.Did you use the word “worse” as a neutral transition, or as a commentary on the bias of various investigators? I used it as a transition to build to what was a really sensitive piece of material. I thought for a really long time about including Kristian’s prior arrest. Jennie and Kristian were really open with me, but they didn’t tell me about this incident—I just found it in the records. I had many, many discussion with my writer husband and lawyer father-in-law about whether to include the detail, because it’s so explosive. In the end, I felt I had to include it, but I decided that I would not use the word rape, which is in the police reports. One of the hardest phone calls I’ve had to make as a writer was reaching out to Kristian, near the end of my reporting, to tell him that I was going to put the dropped rape charge in the story. By that point, of course, we’d had many conversations, and he trusted me. His wife, Jennie, had really wanted this article to happen, to get their story out there. Of course I told them at the outset that I was a reporter and I was going to call a lot of people and read a lot of stuff and write my own story about their story…. the standard rap. But still—this was the moment when I revealed that I was indeed going to do just that. None of their friends knew about the prior. To their great credit, they were very gracious.

According to police documents, on the night in question, in Tucson, Arizona, Kristian shared a cab from a party to his apartment building with a University of Arizona student. She didn’t live in that building but she intended to visit a friend. Instead, by choice, she entered Kristian’s apartment. There she fell asleep and, she told the police, woke up to Kristian having sex with her. Kristian, when questioned, said the sex was consensual; she was awake, she helped take off her own clothes. Both agree that, after sex, the young woman freaked out, ran away, hopped a fence, and asked a stranger for a ride to the police station. The case was dismissed, but it lingered prejudicially in Kristian’s files.

IX. "HOMICIDE"

Jennie maintained her sanity by watching Lukas sleep — his beautiful brown curls unfurled across the pillow, his body blissfully relaxed. Despite what she called “this shit tornado storm,” he was, miraculously, still a healthy, well-adjusted kid. She stayed strong for him and for Johan — or at least for Johan’s memory; Jennie grew up Catholic but wasn’t sure she had faith in God anymore. She held her family together because love and her character demanded it.

Almost a year after Johan died, while running errands, Jennie received an email that made her knees weak: the coroner’s report. Already she understood that everybody had a different version of what happened to her baby — doctors believed that Kristian shook him intentionally, Kristian believed that he fell. This version, of course, was particularly important, not just legally but emotionally. For nearly a year Jennie had been waiting for the medical examiner to look at the physical evidence, complete the autopsy, and clear Kristian’s name. She drove home to read the report that Hanlon’s assistant had scanned. Kristian headed to Hanlon’s office.

Medical Examiner/Investigator’s Report, Case 2010–1093 is dutiful, bureaucratic, and poignant. Even the stock line drawings of an infant’s body — large head, cute butt cheeks — will break your heart. The report begins, “This unfortunate 3 and a half month old baby …” then goes on to note: “The body is received in a plastic pouch and is identified by an appropriately labeled Medical Examiner’s tag on the left ankle.” The litany of body parts that the medical examiner describes as unremarkable is an ode to grief, a meticulously detailed list of all the normal perfections, the feet that are so beautiful because they are just like all other feet, the skin that is magical because it is plain and unblemished. “The face is symmetric, intact, and unremarkable with no dysmorphic features.” “The mouth and lips are normally positioned and unremarkable.” “The nose is symmetric and unremarkable. The nasal septum is intact.” “The forearms and upper arms are normally formed, symmetrical and intact. The hands, fingers, fingernails, feet, toes and toenails are well-formed, intact, and unremarkable.” “There are no readily apparent scars. There are no readily identifiable tattoos.” “The visceral and parietal pleurae are intact and unremarkable with a smooth glistening serosa.” Glistening.Why did you slip into the second person by writing “will break your heart”? Along with the Lenny quote, this part of the record hit me so hard the moment I read it…. the clinical autopsy of this perfect little body. As a person, a parent, it’s so upsetting. (I’m not a huge crier but I’m crying as I’m writing this, I can’t even really think about the baby autopsy without crying.) I slipped into the second person because 1.) it’s universal and 2.) because I wanted the reader to slow down. What follows is a close reading of a bureaucratic document and the most searing word in it is unremarkable.

Then, after the examiner accounts for the “microscopic diagnoses,” she writes:

CAUSE OF DEATH: CLOSED HEAD/NECK INJURY
MANNER: HOMICIDE

“I was crushed,” Jennie told me. She’d been assuming the medical examiner would exonerate her husband. In her one acknowledged moment of doubt, she confronted Kristian one afternoon while walking Gus, their dog. “Is there anything you didn’t tell me about that night? Are you sure?”

X. WAR

Stuart Hanlon amassed testimony from seven medical experts demonstrating how Johan’s injuries could have happened by accident, the abuse diagnosis was flawed, and medical malpractice contributed to Johan’s death. Jennie, infuriated by the medical examiner’s report, told him, “This is war now.”
These were the established facts: Johan arrived at the hospital with a head injury. Upon his arrival, doctors screwed up the intubation, resulting in 70 percent loss of lung capacity, a problem not corrected for at least 90 minutes. During that time hospital staff lost control of Johan’s ventilation system; as can be seen in hospital notes, Johan’s oxygen pressure drops and his carbon dioxide pressure jumps. A lack of oxygen can lead to brain death and excessive carbon dioxide can increase pressure in the brain and cause blown blood vessels.

The endgame was bizarrely anticlimactic. The case had lingered so long that the prosecuting assistant district attorney changed three times, and the third, a former nurse, seemed more receptive to their arguments. Jennie and Kristian had adapted, almost, to their supervised lives. “It did start to feel normal,” Jennie says, coordinating schedules with friends about who could watch over their family meals on which nights, as required by the court. “It’s just like what I do now — like we have soccer and tennis.” Jennie had told Lukas that his father didn’t sleep at home because Kristian worked nights, and Lukas was young enough to believe that.

On September 5, 2012, Hanlon sent the assistant district attorney a mountain of discovery materials — medical timelines, annotated slides of Johan’s brain. (Meanwhile, the medical examiner apparently lost confidence in the autopsy conclusions, amending the manner of death from “Homicide” to “Undetermined.”)

On December 4, in the evening, Hanlon emailed the Aspelins to tell them that the following morning a judge would dismiss their case. Jennie and Kristian put on their court suits — by that point, they each always had two in rotation. At the courthouse, on December 5, the Aspelins’ case was one of 30 on the docket. “It was like, ‘Dismissed, go on with your lives,’” Jennie told me. “After screwing us for two and a half years.”

Wrapping up the juvenile case proved more complicated. More than 18 months had passed since social workers opened their investigation, and the judge refused to grant another continuance, so the Aspelins and their lawyers decided Kristian’s best option was to plead out. Kristian acknowledged that he was in possession of the child when he became injured and those injuries may have led to his death. He was registered in California’s Child Abuse Central Index.

Kristian finally allowed himself to grieve Johan’s death, looking at the small shrine Jennie had created in their bedroom, complete with a Lego angel. He focused on his supply-chain planning software business. He wanted to put his legal problems behind him. But Jennie felt furious and needed absolution. By this point she was pregnant again — with triplets. She’d started trying to conceive just four months after Johan died, a bulwark against the floodgates of loss, but until now she’d been too stressed to produce viable eggs. She still had social workers coming to her house, which she hated. “I was like, ‘I’m having more children with this man — he’s not beating me! Go away!’”

It took three months, a 300-page motion, a two-day trial, and a cost of $9,000 to the family to get Kristian’s name expunged from the abuse registry. The Aspelins needed to wipe the slate clean.

XI. TRIPLETS

Jennie carried the triplets to 35 weeks. When she gave birth, on January 29, 2014, Peter and Rudy, who are identical, weighed 3 pounds 11 ounces and 5 pounds 14 ounces, respectively. Tommy, their fraternal triplet, weighed 5 pounds 9 ounces. From the postpartum room at California Pacific Medical Center, Jennie and Kristian watched on TV a news story about their family and the faulty science of shaken baby syndrome.
It had been three years since the first responders had entered the Aspelins’ home, noticing their ill-placed Lego table, their disfigured dog, their poorly behaved son. Three years since the on-call pediatric resident felt that something about Kristian’s story just didn’t add up. Three years since the doctors decided that Johan’s brain injuries and bleeding eyes looked like parental malice.

Those stories had decimated Jennie’s family, and now that she was out from under them, she was determined to burn into the public record her own version of the nightmare. She called the media — NPR, CBS. She gave footage to a documentary filmmaker. She made endless time for me. Tragedy, for each of us, requires a tolerable narrative. “We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five,” Joan Didion wrote in her essay collection “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live.” “We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.”

The versions we choose often remain irreconcilable. In Jennie’s, her husband picked up the kids from daycare; he slipped in the kitchen; Johan hit his head, but the baby would have been home from the hospital the next day if doctors hadn’t killed him. As a means of enduring the unendurable, Jennie’s cinematic tidying up makes sense. She refused to let the arrest of her husband for the death of her son destroy her marriage. So she took a terrible story doctors, police, and social workers told about her husband and turned it into a terrible story about social workers, police, and doctors. But Kristian tells a different story, a messier one, one that seems to be struggling to contain the range of available facts. In his, he’s legally innocent but not blameless. He had an accident in which he gravely wounded his son; Johan, in his vulnerable state, was too weak to survive the hospital’s mistakes, and he died. Kristian is careful not to misrepresent this. Every day he wears a Donate Life bracelet, a reminder of Johan and the girl who’s growing up with his son’s heart.

How did you choose this ending? I could see you ending with the triplets and not Kristian’s messy story. I know it would be the conventional move to end back where I started, with Jennie and Kristian's sons, and describe a moment with the triplets and older son. But I loved ending on that bracelet. It was one of those details, when Kristian showed me, that stuck in my throat for months. The bracelet is Kristian not letting himself forget Johan, despite the true horror of his death and its aftermath. The triplets are the moving on, the positive future, the let's-bury-ourselves-in-babies-and-all-their-new-love. The bracelet is a hair shirt. The bracelet is the messy past.

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