Kill the Silence

by Monika Korra

  I don’t know why, but after I had heard that, any suspicions I’d had went away. I’d been trying to tell myself not to be too on guard, to just let experiences come to me and remain open to them like I’d always been.

  A few days later, Petra and I drove to a Thai restaurant in Highland Park. It took my eyes a moment to adjust, going from the bright sunlight into an ultra-modern room dominated by blue-and-green geometric light fixtures. I felt as if I’d gone underwater. An elegantly dressed woman stood up and waved. I followed Petra over to her table. The woman had a sleek haircut and rimless glasses. Though she was probably as tall and slight as me, she stood perched on a pair of high heels that I wouldn’t have even been able to walk in. When she gave me a hug, she had to bend slightly. I heard a jangle of bracelets next to my ear as she held me and said, “I’m so pleased to meet you.”

  After we made our introductions and settled into our seats, Petra asked Kelly about her holiday trip to Canada.

  “You know how much I love it up there. I know the cold and snow are nothing unusual for the two of you, but it truly is beautiful up there in the winter. I can’t imagine holidays anywhere else.”

  Kelly explained that she’d read in the newspapers about me. She knew that I was from Norway, and she figured that I was there without a family. She just wanted to let me know how sorry she was for what had happened and that if she could help in any way, she’d be glad to. We made small talk for a while, and then she finally got around to the topic that I knew she wanted to talk about further. I appreciated her not just jumping into the attack but also not just ignoring it either.

  “Enough about me, how are you doing, Monika? How have things been for you since the attack?”

  There was something about her, some way in which she was able to make me feel comfortable instantly despite the circumstances that had brought us together. She seemed so at ease with who she was, and her approaching me and acknowledging immediately that she knew that I’d been raped, not talking around that fact, served as a model for how I wished everyone could have dealt with me.

  “I have good days and bad days, but I’m moving ahead.” I surprised myself by not choosing my usual default response, “I’m fine.”

  “I’m sorry about the bad days but happy about the good ones,” she said, then smiled and reached across the table to lightly rub my forearm in a gesture that warmed me up to her immediately.

  I was struck by how this stranger had reached out to me and treated me in a way that was so different from my girlfriends back home. Part of that was cultural. I’d noticed that Americans were more open and willing to extend to people they didn’t know that well a kind of courtesy and warmth that we reserved only for those with whom we had established close relationships. Kelly had the openness and warmth that I admired about Americans, but she also carried herself with the kind of confidence and calm that reminded me of a Norwegian. In that sense, she was like my mother or my sister. At the end of lunch, she shared her phone number and e-mail address with me, and she told me that if I needed anything to be in touch. She also said that she really hoped we’d be able to get to know each other better.

  I told her that I would like that, and eventually that’s what happened.

  As much as I missed having my mother around, I was fortunate to have other women who helped me, even before the attack. Dallas has a Norwegian Society, and two women who’d moved to the area had been in contact with me since earlier in that fall semester of 2009. I’d met with Wenche and Sidsel several times at lunches, and they’d taken Kristine, Silje, and me into their homes or on outings in Dallas, to help us get familiar with our new home away from home. They had such big hearts, and they’d reached out to me after the rape to offer whatever assistance they could. I was so fortunate to have them in my life.

  —

  I MET ANOTHER woman who had an enormous influence on me. On February 22, 2010, someone in the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office let me know that I was to report to the sixth floor of the Frank Crowley Courts Building in two days, at 1 p.m.

  I had two thoughts. Why was I being called in? What about the class I had at that time?

  The woman was able to answer the first question: “This is a preliminary meeting with Assistant District Attorney Erin Hendricks.”

  The second question basically went unanswered. This was an important meeting and I had to be there. I was a bit upset by that. I was determined to get back to being a normal student, to keep up with my classes and get good grades. With some of my finals being delayed, and classes starting for the new semester, the last thing I wanted was to fall behind in any way.

  Fortunately, Coach Wollman intervened. After I told him that I’d been called in, he set things up with the DA’s office. We’d meet at his office.

  I had no idea what to expect from the meeting. I arrived to find two women and a man, none of whom I’d ever met before. After brief introductions, things immediately got off to a bad start. The victim’s advocate gestured to the other woman, a brunette, and told me that she was the lawyer assigned to my case, and that the man was Brandon, who would be assisting her.

  “What do you mean, ‘assigned to my case’? I want to pick my own lawyer.”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” the lawyer said. “The District Attorney’s Office represents crime victims, and they choose the prosecutor who will work with you. That’s me. I’m Erin Hendricks.”

  “I want to choose who will represent me.”

  “This is how it works in America. The government gives you us, and you’re stuck with us,” Erin said. She offered me her hand, and I took it reluctantly. It was a firm handshake, but something about how she spoke upset me.

  I had expected that I’d be given several choices for representation, and a chance to develop a personal relationship with this person so that this case would be as personal to him or her as it was to me. I saw this as my case, and I wanted it to be my lawyer’s case as well. I didn’t fully understand until much later that in a criminal proceeding it was the People vs. each of those men. In my mind it was Monika Kørra against those three. The way things were shaping up in those first few minutes, I felt like it was going to be Monika Kørra versus the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office.

  —

  HAVING LITTLE REAL understanding of how the American criminal justice system worked wasn’t helping me feel more comfortable with the process. I had a victim’s advocate there with me, Coach Wollman, and now this other woman, whom I’d never met, was going to be responsible for what I considered one of the most important events in my life. I was so used to being composed in most situations and being the polite, rule-following young woman, but this whole situation was new to me. I had dozens of questions to ask, and I had no idea if they fit at all into the context of the meeting. I sat there while Erin made some initial remarks, but I wasn’t really listening fully to her. I was too upset with myself for not having a better understanding of the process to fully understand what she was saying. If this was the way my trial was starting off, what else would be out of my control?

  I assumed I was going to have to be at the trial. I wondered if I was going to be able to ask questions of the men who had been arrested. I had thoughts about how I was going to dress, how the process was going to affect my studies, my track meets, how I was going to be able to get back and forth from where I lived to the court. Were there going to be photographers there? Was I going to have my face plastered all over the newspapers? Were people going to know that one of them had forced me to put him in my mouth? Was I going to have to stand up in front of everyone and say, “He’s one of them and he did this to me”? And what about the fact that when I’d been shown those photos I hadn’t been absolutely sure? I knew that one of the men had confessed, but what did that really mean as far as the other two? Were the men going to be able to question me?

  The one thing that did make its way through my tangle of thoughts also added to my frustration. Erin explained that the
trial was going to most likely occur in May. She said things about preliminary motions, discovery, and a bunch of other concepts that only added to my frustration.

  Five months. Another approximately 150 days. Nearly half a year to go before this part of it would even begin. I sat in that meeting room, and I had a similar sensation to the one I’d had earlier in dealing with the police. People were talking, their mouths were moving, but I had suddenly become nearly deaf. It was like I was back again in those first days in the U.S. struggling with a language and cultural norms that I had no experience with at all. I’d worked hard to overcome that the first time, and here I was back at square one.

  At several points, Erin did ask if I had any questions, but I felt like I was at a lecture in a Physics class where the professor was talking about dark matter and all I could really come up with was a question about whether or not this had anything to do with why my cell phone sometimes lost reception. Finally, Erin stopped speaking.

  “I have this.” I reached into my bag and slid my journal across the table to her. “I wrote down everything I remember about what happened. All the details.”

  Erin glanced at the cover and then at me. “Okay.”

  She looked at the others in the room and then back at me. I sat staring at her expectantly. She opened the journal up and leafed through a few of the pages, scanning them. “This must have been difficult for you to do. Thank you, though. This will be helpful.”

  “I want you to know what it was like. What I went through. If some of the things aren’t clear to you, please let me know. I can think about it some more and get you better answers.”

  “I will do that,” she said, and I watched as she turned a few more pages. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to take this home with me.”

  “Sure. I’m done with it. For now. Unless you have more that you want me to write.”

  “Not now, no. But thank you.”

  I didn’t understand at that point that Erin had lots and lots of other documents to read, or that she’d already read. Charges wouldn’t have been filed unless there was enough paperwork backing up the evidence they’d gathered to convince the people in charge of the courts that these men could be picked up and held awaiting trial.

  I expected Erin to be so grateful to me for helping out, to make more of the fact that I was chipping in with my efforts and determination. I flashed back on dropping off the gift on my friend’s doorstep, feeling like I’d done the wrong thing again by doing what I thought was the right thing.

  CHAPTER TEN

  My Team

  I told everyone on my team, not the track team but my recovery team, about the meeting and how poorly I thought that it had gone. It wasn’t Erin’s or Brandon’s fault that I felt like I’d been hit in the face with this part of the process, but still I was upset. I worried that I had come across as an angry and spoiled young woman who was making demands for how things should be happening even though I had no real idea of what the right versus the wrong way of handling a case was.

  My team reassured me that I had every right to feel the way that I did. These people were strangers to me and they were going to have to earn my trust. No one had sat down with me at any point before that to explain fully how the legal process in this country worked. I had a general idea, but I knew nothing about the intricacies of the process.

  How passionate could they be, given that scenario? I knew they were professionals and would do their job because that was what they were paid to do, but that wasn’t how it was with teammates as I thought of them. Teammates should be there for you and support you because you are important to them, because you have forged a relationship that isn’t based on just a roster and chance. They also know that each has a role to play. Kelly and Coach Wollman looked out for me and helped me navigate the confusing court system. They organized meetings with my lawyers (I could never get used to the idea that they weren’t “mine” but belonged to the government) when I was frustrated or confused. They did everything they could to make sure that my needs and expectations were being met. Robin, Kristine, and Vicktoria monitored my emotional state and made sure that when I needed a laugh, they provided one; when I needed to cry, they held me; and when I needed to scream in frustration or anger, they took me out to run. We became even closer than we were before, and that helped enormously. I came to think of myself as a complicated case, and no one person could take on the responsibility of handling every part of me. Back home, my parents and my sister provided me with everything they always had, the kind of support that doesn’t diminish through distance.

  As most trusted friends would do, mine decided to try to help me get through this next phase. They saw that at least now my frustrations had a focus, whereas before they seemed all-encompassing. My team had felt helpless in the immediate aftermath of the rape because there was nothing they could do to undo it; now that my anxiety was focused on the woman who was going to represent me in the trial, they took it upon themselves to do whatever they could to eliminate whatever uncertainty I had about Erin’s suitability for the task and for working with someone like me.

  We learned that someone within the Dallas County prosecutor’s office had some connections to SMU, and my friends began trying to get more information. They thought that if we could get some more information about Erin, about the kinds of cases she’d tried, what her conviction record was, and anything else related to her professional life, I might feel a little more at ease. In a way, it was similar to how I sometimes had to approach races and my opponents in them. For me, not knowing anything at all about another runner was more frightening than if I knew as much as possible. What was her personal best in a particular race? What kind of tactics did she use? Would she try to go out fast early and wear the rest of us down? Did she save herself for a strong finish kick and outsprint everyone to the tape? Knowing what kind of competitors my opponents were gave me a mental edge.

  I’m sure that we kept Erin on edge. My friends phoned her, my coach phoned her, all on my behalf and all with the best of intentions, but ultimately I feared that we were all proving to be a distraction. The other thing I knew that I liked to do in preparation for a race was to clear my own head of too many thoughts about classes, friends, and my relationship with Robin. I used headphones and my MP3 player in warm-up, just to limit the amount of exposure I had to other people. If I had been in a better state of mind, I might have thought that Erin deserved and needed the same kind of space and time.

  Ultimately, our undercover efforts didn’t turn up anything particularly useful. We learned that Erin was very, very good at what she did. She had been working in the District Attorney’s Office since 2002, had graduated from SMU’s law school, and had been part of the D.A. Office’s Sexual Assault Unit since 2007. We received assurances that she was very committed to my case and to me.

  Looking back on it, I don’t think there is any piece of information that would have made me feel more at ease. I was still struggling with the idea that there wasn’t more that I was being asked to do on my end to help convict these guys. I was still very much having a hard time letting others help me. Having someone else be completely responsible for the case made me uncomfortable, and not even having had a choice in who that someone was to be made it even worse. I called and e-mailed Erin all the time, asking her to fill me in on what was going on. I was sure she thought I was a complete pest, but still I kept after her.

  The first week of March, Kelly arranged a meeting for the three of us—Erin, Kelly, and me—to have lunch. Kelly chose a quiet spot where we could sit and talk. I was feeling anxious about the meeting and wondered if I was again going to end up disappointed.

  Having Kelly there made a difference. Erin seemed to open up a bit more; she was still her no-nonsense straight-to-the-point self, but with Kelly there to act as a buffer, I didn’t have the same sense that I’d had during the first meeting that I was being rushed or having my concerns set aside. The fact that this was more of a social occasion certai
nly helped. Since Kelly had set it up, that meant that, for me at least, the two of us were more in charge than I’d been at the previous meeting in Coach Wollman’s office. Then, I’d felt like, in a different sense, I was the one who was on trial. This time I got a better idea of how committed Erin was to my case. It helped that she was able to explain to me how it was coming together. She told me as much as she could about how the men had been found and arrested. I’d only known what had been written about in the newspaper and the bits and pieces that I’d been told when I was in too stressed a condition to really process the information. The three men were all Hispanic and came from Mexico. Erin told me their names, Arturo Arevalo, Alfonso Armendariz Zuniga, and Luis Fernando Zuniga. By the time our lunch was over, I’d been able to figure out that those three men were, in order, the Worst One, the Boss, and the Weak One. The Boss and the Weak One were cousins.

  It turned out that my cell phone, which I’d been so worried about since the men could have used it to locate me, my friends, and many other people, had actually played a big role in the first of them being arrested.

  Erin explained a bit about how cell phones could be traced to an approximate location. There were some delays that night in getting my carrier to start the process, but when they finally did, every fifteen minutes they’d ping my phone and relay the location information to a special unit within the Dallas Police Department. The police knew that even after I’d been located, someone else was using my phone, hours after I’d been released, in fact. Based on the location the pinging produced, they sent officers to try to find a black SUV with chrome wheels. They spotted one, and discovered that the person to whom the vehicle was registered was a registered child sex offender. Unfortunately, it turned out that the man driving the SUV had just purchased the car and had not yet registered it in his name. He also had an alibi for that night, said he didn’t have my phone (which was true, since a few hours after he was questioned my phone was being used by someone else), and he was not my rapist.