As usual, Charles didn’t say much, but he talked about Justina the whole ride home. In many ways, the two were nothing alike: He’d dropped out of school (with his mother’s prodding, he eventually got a GED); she was a sophomore at the College of Staten Island and was set on being the first in her family to graduate from college. He was of Puerto Rican descent; she was Italian-American. (“Anything that had to do with Italians, she loved,” says her brother Vincent, 29. “The Godfather, Scarface, Casino—she liked that genre of movies; she loved the action.”) And then, of course, she was one of the most outgoing girls in the neighborhood, and he was reserved around new people. But they did have some things in common—one of the most crucial being that, unlike many of their friends, neither drank or did drugs.
UNREQUITED LOVE
Throughout the fall Charles and Justina spoke on the phone and spent a few more evenings on her stoop with their friends. Charles was hesitant about making a move, but “all he did was talk about her,” says Mario, 24, one of his closest friends. “He would say over and over, ‘Mario, this girl is so nice.’”
The problem was, Charles didn’t seem to be getting anywhere—until a chilly Saturday in November, when he showed up at her house in a new car. Okay, so he didn’t actually own the sleek white Nissan 350Z—it belonged to Mario. But he was saving up for one just like it, and when Justina and her cousin asked if it was his, he jumped at the chance to impress them. “Yes,” he said winningly. “I just bought it.”
His friends now say that Charles had talked about buying that car almost as much as he had talked about Justina. And if you knew him, it made sense that he liked fast cars—Charles had an adventurous side. He’d taught himself to snowboard, played paintball, and rode all-terrain vehicles. Despite his limited income, he and his friends would take off to Florida or the Bahamas, looking for fun. Another thing about Charles—one that his friends still have a hard time believing—is that he had a seriously bad driving record. According to the New York Department of Motor Vehicles, he’d been convicted three times for moving violations, and his license had been suspended six times and was revoked in 1999 for driving without insurance.
The car didn’t immediately win Justina over. (“I think he’s cute. But he’s too shy,” Mario recalls her saying later.) But by Monday, there were signs she might be starting to like him back: She talked to her friend Megan about him outside the school cafeteria that morning, and then brought him up again to another friend. “She was saying, ‘I’m interested in him. What should I do? Should I go out with him? Should I call him?’” says Vanessa, 20. When Justina got home, she did just that. “She called him and said, ‘I’m so happy I met you,’” says Mario, who was hanging out with Charles at the time. And she told her mother she was going out for a drive in a friend’s new car.
FINAL RIDE
After dinner with her family, Justina did her hair, put on makeup, and changed into one of her trademark sweat suits. She hung out on the porch talking on the phone as she waited for Charles. “I’m leaving!” she yelled out to her mother as he pulled up.
It was their first date if you ask his friends, or a just-friends thing if you ask hers. “If she was really interested in him, I would have met him,” says her mother, Donna. But either way, it was going well at 11:40 P.M., when Justina’s friend Gabriel called her to say—as he often did—and asked if she was having fun. She didn’t skip a beat. “Yeah,” she told him. She was.
No one knows exactly where they were headed, but at 11:46 P.M., they were speeding down Hylan Boulevard, the wide, busy main drag. Charles may have been pumped up about being out alone with Justina, or he may have been trying to show her how fast the car could go. He might even have been racing another driver (there were two other 350Zs on the road as well, according to the police). Only one thing is for sure: As he approached a red light at the intersection of Lincoln Avenue, he floored it, blasting though at 90 miles an hour just as it turned green.
Of course, the perfect timing of a near-miss like this one could impress a girl if it didn’t terrify her. But Charles wouldn’t even have had a chance to catch Justina’s reaction. Just past the intersection, he hit a dip and, because he was driving so fast, he lost all control of the car.
The chassis slammed into the dip with a deafening crash. Sparks flew as the car spun out and went careening across two lanes. After spinning around until it was facing the traffic it had just passed, it crashed into a telephone pole. The force sent bumpers, seats, and pieces of carpet flying through the air, landing as far as 100 feet away. And it twisted the car so tightly around the pole that the front and rear tires were actually touching.
Justina died on impact—the passenger compartment was smashed so badly that it was all but obliterated. Charles was still alive, pinned inside the car. A rescue team worked for more than 20 minutes prying his legs from the twisted steel and then rushed him to the hospital. He had broken his cervical spine and split his diaphragm and right kidney. He died four hours later.
BITTER FEELINGS
Now, after five months, friends and families are still trying to cope with the pain. Vincent has instinctively picked up the phone countless times to call his sister since the accident, but he’s never once picked up the phone to call Charles’s family. He’s still too angry. “She was 19, and everything was falling into place for the kid,” he says. “And then somebody came along and ended her future. Stopped it right there.” But the fact is that two promising young people died that night. “We all make bad judgments, but we don’t die from them,” says Charles’s sister, Laurie, 32 “Unfortunately he did—and she died with him.”
Miscarriage
or Murder?
Nakita, 19, got pregnant when she was just 13.
Now her baby is dead—and she blames her mom.
Here’s her side of the story.
On Wednesday night, March 14, 2001, 13-yearold Nakita Smith leaned back on her living-room couch and screamed in pain. Her mom, Julie Smith, a nurse in Marshall, Arkansas, sat at Nakita’s feet, waiting to deliver her daughter’s premature baby. Nakita’s contractions made her feel like her insides were being ripped open, and she began to sob. But 15 minutes later, at about 11:30 P.M., Nakita gave birth to a baby boy.
MOTHER AND DAUGHTER
Julie Smith had moved to Marshall with her children, Nakita and Joel, then 2 and 7, respectively, in 1989, after she and their dad, Larry, divorced. Marshall is a small town, and life there was hard for Smith—she barely made enough money to take care of her kids. Every few months their electricity would get turned off because she couldn’t pay the bill—and there were lots of times when all she could afford to feed them for dinner was a can of soup that had to be heated on their wood-burning stove.
But what kept the Smiths happy was the fact that they had each other. Nakita and her mom had fun just dancing around the house together. “When I was little, I’d visit my dad during the summer,” Nakita says, “But I’d have to come back early because I’d miss my mom.”
In 1995, Joel started not getting along with Smith, so he went to live with his dad in Texas. Nakita says that’s when her mom started to get paranoid that she and 8-year-old Nakita would grow apart. Smith couldn’t bear the thought that Nakita might eventually leave too, so she slowly started to let Nakita do whatever she wanted. All that mattered to Smith was that Nakita was happy living with her. Nakita says that by the time she was 13, her mom let her skip school—she missed more than 30 days in seventh grade—and go out with any guy she wanted.
DANGEROUS LOVE
On August 14, 2000, Nakita, 13, was outside a friend’s house when she saw a muscular guy drive by in a pickup. “He was so good-looking!” she says, “So I waved. He almost got into a wreck turning around to meet me.”
That night Nakita and David,* who was 20, spent hours talking—and they immediately became a couple. After just a week, they had sex for the first time.
Since David didn’t want to use a condom, Nakita didn’t pr
essure him to, but they talked about what would happen if Nakita got pregnant. “I’ll stay with you—I’ll take care of the baby and take care of you,” he promised her. Since Nakita was in love, she believed him.
The more time Nakita spent with David, the less time she spent in school. On September 13, a month after they met, school officials asked social workers to begin monitoring Nakita’s attendance and behavior.
SCARED SICK
A few weeks later, Nakita started eating more than she ever had—ice cream, cookies, pickles—and acting moody. One day, she says, her mom just asked, “Are you pregnant?!” Even though Nakita feared it might be true, she didn’t want to believe it, so she said, “No!” But then, a few mornings later, Smith woke up her daughter, handed her a pregnancy test, and told her to go into the bathroom. After several minutes Nakita walked back into the kitchen, where her mother was nervously waiting, and handed her the plastic stick. Smith placed it on the counter, and a pink line gradually appeared—Nakita was pregnant.
“Oh, s***!” Smith yelled, as a terrified Nakita backed away. Nakita then saw her mom kick their stove so hard that it fell over. According to Nakita, her mom was getting even more worried that she’d lose her: She was afraid that if Nakita’s social workers found out she was pregnant, they’d put her into foster care. “We’re going to find some way of dealing with this,” Smith told her. Then, Nakita says, over the next few days, her mom began pressing hard on her belly, hoping it would make her miscarry. She also started giving her chamomile tea with black pepper, which she’d heard ended pregnancies.
But as Smith was seemingly trying anything to make her daughter lose her baby “naturally,” Nakita began resenting her mom and wanting to keep her baby. She started pretending to drink her mom’s tea mixture— but secretly poured it out. She also began staring in the mirror, imagining herself holding a baby. “It started to make me feel good that I was going to be a mom,” she says. But since her mom didn’t want her to have the baby—and David didn’t even believe that she was really pregnant—she was afraid to speak up.
DESPERATE ACT
By January 2001, when Nakita was four months pregnant, Smith made her start wearing baggy blouses to hide her growing belly. At this time, Nakita says that her mom thought it was too late to induce a miscarriage, so she’d stopped making the tea. Instead Smith talked about moving to Hot Springs, Arkansas, right after the baby was born—and telling everyone that it was hers.
But then on March 1, when Nakita was about six months pregnant, one of her social workers asked her if she was pregnant. Nakita said no and rushed home to tell her mom. At that point, Nakita says, Smith decided that Nakita needed to have her baby right away—even though she still had three months to go in her pregnancy. That way, she’d no longer be pregnant on March 14, when she had to appear in court for her truancy. Nakita says her mom was scared that if she went there pregnant, the court officials would notice her belly—and take Nakita away.
So on March 12, Smith put on a rubber glove, walked Nakita into the bathroom, and made her sit on the toilet. Then, Nakita says, her mom stuck a scalpel inside her to break her water, so she would deliver the baby. Nakita felt some pressure and then liquid rushed out of her. She didn’t feel any pain. “I thought I was ready to go into labor and just needed help along,” Nakita explains.
But Nakita didn’t go into labor that night. Though she’d started having light contractions the next day, it wasn’t until two nights later, while Nakita and her mom were driving back from her court date (where they’d successfully hidden her pregnancy), that Nakita’s contractions began to get strong. During a very painful one, she squeezed the car door handle so hard that she broke it off.
As soon as they got home, Smith told Nakita to lie down and spread her legs so she could see if Nakita was ready to deliver. The contractions were coming faster, but they decided not to call and tell David, as he’d recently broken up with Nakita. “Hold on!” Smith told her daughter. Nakita screamed in pain. Just 15 minutes later, Smith declared, “It’s a boy!” Nakita saw that his blood-covered body fit into her mom’s hand— his frail legs hung about two inches down her arm. She says that he opened his eyes and took a breath, but his chest looked sunken. Nakita named her baby Joseph— and fell asleep.
UNEARTHED SECRET
Smith rocked Joseph for about two hours—until he stopped breathing.
At 6:30 A.M., she nudged Nakita awake to tell her that he’d died earlier that morning. Very hazy from blood loss, Nakita fell back asleep. Smith put Joseph’s body in a cotton-ball bag and buried him out back.
Over the next year, Nakita occasionally visited her baby’s grave to put wildflowers on it—even though her mom insisted that she continue to keep him a secret. But then on March 11, 2002, almost a year after Joseph’s death, Nakita crawled into her closet—and cut her wrists with a knife. “I started thinking about him and … wished he was around….,” she trails off. She’d decided that since Joseph had died, she wanted to die too.
An hour later Smith found Nakita crying. “Are you okay?” she frantically asked her bleeding daughter. But Nakita pushed her away. A family friend came to take Nakita to a counseling center, where she finally broke down and admitted everything. Though she knew her mom would be mad, she says it was a relief: “I finally didn’t have to keep it to myself.”
ONGOING SAGA
Eleven days later investigators arrested Nakita’s mother for first-degree murder. Then, on April 21, 2004, at age 17, Nakita testified against her mom in court, tearfully telling her story. But Smith (who declined Seventeen’s request for an interview) testified that she only broke her daughter’s water because Nakita was already in labor—she said that the whole thing was just a tragic miscarriage. Ralph Blagg, Smith’s lawyer, claimed that the baby had just been too small to survive. Though some of the jurors hearing the case thought Smith was guilty of a crime, they couldn’t come to a unanimous decision, so a verdict wasn’t reached and the judge declared a mistrial. Nakita sobbed for her dead baby. Smith was retried, with the charge reduced to manslaughter. She plead guilty and was sentenced to 72 months probation and received fines.
In the meantime, Nakita lives with her dad in Madisonville, Texas, where she has stayed for the past few years. She’s still trying to come to terms with everything that’s happened. “I know I made a mistake by having sex that early,” she pauses, thinking about how much she loves her baby, “but I’ll never see Joseph as a mistake.”
*Name has been changed.
Lesbian
Killers
Holly, now 17, was furious that her
grandparents forbade her to see her girlfriend—
so she decided to make them pay.
Holly Harvey, 15, had been living with her grandparents Carl and Sarah Collier for about four months while her mom, Carla Harvey, was in prison on drug charges. Things had not been going well. On Monday, August 2, 2004, at about 5 P.M., Holly lit a joint in her bedroom in the Colliers’ Fayette County, Georgia, basement—just to tick them off. The ploy worked: After a few minutes, Holly heard their footsteps pounding down the stairs.
“I can’t believe you’re doing drugs down here!” Mrs. Collier, 73, yelled as she marched into Holly’s room. “Do you want to end up like your mother?” Holly just rolled her eyes and said nothing. Meanwhile, Mr. Collier, 74, walked to the closet to grab a suitcase for a trip. As his wife turned to follow him, Holly pulled an eight-inch kitchen knife from her jeans, closed her eyes, and plunged it into Mrs. Collier’s back. The older woman screamed, but before she could turn around, Holly had stabbed her two more times. At that point Mr. Collier tried to grab the knife from Holly, and they struggled for the weapon. Holly won— and 10 minutes later Mr. and Mrs. Collier were both dead.
ROUGH CHILDHOOD
Growing up, Holly had moved around a lot because her mother was in and out of jail for DUI and drugs. Whenever her mom was arrested, Holly would stay in or around Fayetteville, Georgia, with her uncle, her
grandparents, or her mom’s friends.
In spring 2002, Ms. Harvey was in jail once again, and Holly, then 13, went to stay with her uncle, Kevin Collier. At first the two got along well, and Holly did what she was told—including chores, like cleaning the bathroom. But once her mom got out of jail and moved in with them, Holly felt she didn’t have to listen to her uncle anymore, so she started refusing to do anything he asked. Eventually Holly’s rebelliousness escalated to the point where she was caught shoplifting cosmetics at Wal-Mart (and had to pay the store back). Then she was suspended from school for having a bottle of prescription drugs that didn’t belong to her.
FORBIDDEN LOVE
Holly started seventh grade that fall, and in middle school she met Sandy Ketchum. The two girls had a lot in common: Both were tomboys who liked to write poetry and listen to hard-core rap. Both experienced troubled upbringings. (Sandy’s mom had abandoned her when she was a baby, and she’d been raised by her father and three different women over the years.) And they were also into drinking alcohol and smoking pot—but Sandy also experimented with harder drugs too, like crack and mushrooms. Holly and Sandy became inseparable, and Holly even cut her hair short like Sandy’s.
In April 2003, Ms. Harvey was arrested yet again, and Holly went to live with family friends. A year later she moved in with her grandparents, who were hoping they could help Holly turn her life around. They had strict rules: no smoking in the house, no drinking, no drugs. They wanted to know where Holly was at all times—and who she was with. When Mrs. Collier met Sandy, she was instantly suspicious of the girl in the bandanna, oversize shirt, and baggy pants. She asked around and learned that Sandy had been arrested a few times for running away. Mrs. Collier told Holly that she couldn’t hang around Sandy anymore. “We’re in love!” Holly retorted. Mrs. Collier was shocked. “Two women together is an abomination!” she yelled. Holly wrote a poem about her anger—the last line read, “All I want to do is kill.”
Seventeen Real Girls, Real-Life Stories Page 4