In July 2005, when she was only 13, Chelsea confided to her friend Amanda King* that she’d had sex with 19-year-old Ray. Amanda was shocked—and immediately told her mother, who called Chelsea’s mom. But when Mrs. Brooks asked Chelsea if it was true, she denied it. Still, her mom forbade her to see Ray again, and called the police. Because Chelsea wouldn’t admit to having sex with Ray, the police told her mother they couldn’t do anything. Since Chelsea wouldn’t implicate him, they couldn’t even question him about statutory rape (having sex with a minor, a crime punishable in Kansas by at least 12 years in prison if convicted). So Mrs. Brooks tried to handle it herself—by calling Ray. “I don’t want you around my daughter,” she warned him. “Forget you ever knew her. I can’t be responsible for what will happen to you if you continue to see her.” Ray was totally calm. “She’s just a friend,” he said. “We talk on the phone sometimes.” Mrs. Brooks didn’t believe him, but there wasn’t much else she could do.
Chelsea was desperate to somehow keep seeing Ray. On September 4, she wrote on her Xanga.com blog, “I love my boyfriend … and I want to be with him … but I just don’t know what to do about all the people who don’t want us to be together.” She begged her friends to keep it a secret, and she often used their cell phones to call him.
TOUGH CHOICE
By that fall Chelsea was terrified—she realized she might be pregnant. In October she wrote on her blog, “I’m so stupid! I never should have done what I did and I wouldn’t be in this situation.” In December she asked her friend Kelsey Gresham to go with her to buy a test. Chelsea was devastated when the result was positive. “But she refused to believe it,” Kelsey says. “She kept saying, ‘It’s wrong. It’s wrong.’” She had taken five or six tests, and they were all positive. “There’s no way you’re not pregnant,” Kelsey told her.
Chelsea didn’t tell Ray—who she had been seeing off and on—until New Year’s Eve, when she was three months pregnant. At first he seemed happy. But then he realized he could be charged with statutory rape. He was afraid the police would find out he was the father through DNA tests as soon as the baby was born. “I’ll die if I’m put in jail,” he told Chelsea. In early January 2006, Ray came up with a sick, violent plan to keep himself out of trouble. He suggested that they go to a school parking lot one night so he could kick her in the stomach to make her miscarry. Chelsea reluctantly agreed—until she told a friend, who talked her out of it.
The same month, one of Chelsea’s classmates told her mom she’d heard Chelsea was pregnant. That mother notified an assistant principal, who alerted Mrs. Brooks. She confronted her daughter, and Chelsea admitted it was true. “I was trying not to explode I was so angry,” Mrs. Brooks says. At first, still trying to protect Ray, Chelsea claimed the father was a 15-year-old friend, but she eventually admitted Ray was the real dad. Her parents discussed with her whether she should keep the baby or give it up for adoption. Then Mrs. Brooks asked Chelsea if she was still seeing Ray; her daughter said no. But since Chelsea had lied about him in the past, Mrs. Brooks didn’t believe her. So on February 13, she went to the local courthouse and filed a petition for a protective order to force Ray to stay away from Chelsea. “The defendant has been in a sexual relationship with my minor daughter for at least 8 months,” she wrote in the petition. “She is now pregnant, and he is psychologically manipulating her to keep secret the fact that he is the father.” A judge ruled that Ray couldn’t contact Chelsea or he would be arrested. Even so, months later Chelsea still had feelings for him. On June 5, she wrote on her blog, “I am sick to my stomach because of him!! I don’t need him, so why do I dwell on what’s never going to happen?? Get over it!!”
BRUTAL MURDER
On June 9, the night she was killed, Chelsea met some friends at 7 P.M. at Skate South, a popular skating rink and local hangout. Ray contacted her and asked her to meet him. Even though they hadn’t been dating for months, she agreed, and Ray sent Everett to pick her up. Chelsea left the rink at 8 P.M. After Everett dropped off Chelsea at his sister’s home and returned an hour later without Ray, Chelsea was furious. A little after 9 P.M., she sent a text message to her friends, who were waiting for her at the rink: “We’re on our way back there. Ray stood me up. I’m mad.” She also wrote that they had to drop off another guy on the way.
According to Everett’s court testimony, minutes later Ted yanked the cord around Chelsea’s neck and pulled it until she stopped kicking. Then the men drove to a secluded dirt road near a wheat field in Butler County, just outside Wichita. Ted dragged her body out of the car. He told Everett to bring a shovel and start digging a hole. Everett grabbed the shovel from the trunk and dug a shallow grave. Then Ted dropped Chelsea’s body into the ground facedown and covered it with dirt.
When Chelsea didn’t return to the rink, her friends got worried and called her parents, who then contacted the police. The next day they hung flyers all over town asking for help finding her. Then on June 14, two men working at the edge of the field where Chelsea had been buried found her body and called the police. The cops questioned Everett, the last person seen with her on the night she disappeared. He broke down and confessed that Ray had asked him to “get rid” of Chelsea and had offered Ted $500 to kill her. Police arrested Everett, Ray, and Ted, and they subsequently were charged with murder and other crimes. Everett has pleaded guilty and could be sentenced to life in prison; Ray and Ted could face the death penalty if they’re found guilty.
Today Mr. Brooks grieves for his daughter. “Any guy that age who hits on a girl that young is a predator,” he says. “By killing Chelsea, Ray thought he was gaining his freedom. But he may have lost it forever.”
*Name has been changed.
A Mom
Who Loved
Too Much
No one knows exactly what went down in
the schoolyard that day. But one thing is certain:
The neighborhood will never be the same.
There was no limit to Miss Mary’s love. She and her husband, a retired Amtrak mechanic named Larry Beard, raised 18 children of their own— 10 girls and eight boys, the youngest of whom is now 9. But even with all those kids, Miss Mary still had time for her many friends in her neighborhood in the Bronx, a part of New York City.
Miss Mary, at 50, was plump and smiling. She blew-dry her long, straight hair for special occasions; otherwise, she twisted it up into a bun. She sometimes wore a brown, fuzzy coat that her friends joked made her look like Fozzie Bear, and she carried a black pocketbook, straining at the seams, that could magically produce everything from meeting agendas and safety pins to Band-Aids and Tylenol. Miss Mary’s smile was so beautiful that when she frowned, you would stand up straight, run to class, do whatever it was she told you to do—just so she would smile at you again.
Miss Mary and her family had lived in the Forest Houses projects for nearly 20 years, and everyone there knew her. If your mother needed a cake pan, Miss Mary would lend you one. Linda, 39, borrowed one pan so many times that Miss Mary said to Linda’s daughter, “Tell your mother to keep it. If I need it, I’ll borrow it from you.” She was on the PTA at the middle school and the elementary school. Sometimes she cooked breakfast in the basement kitchen at the housing project where she lived and served it to the hungry.
But one thing about Miss Mary? She never minded her own business. Once, a man trying to break into a window of an apartment turned around and asked her just what, exactly she thought she was looking at. It turned out that the man lived there and had locked himself out.
Miss Mary said, “You should be glad I’m looking. What if someone was breaking into the house?”
The man backed down. “Yes ma’am,” he said. “You’re right. Thank you.”
If Miss Mary was sitting on one of the park benches on Trinity Avenue, outside the apartment tower where the Beards lived on the fifth floor, parents knew they didn’t have to worry about their children playing outside. Miss Mary would watch everyone’s kids as if they we
re her own. If she saw a little kid out by himself, she would chase him on home. If she saw a fight, which happened often, she would break it up. No one would ever have guessed that it would be her Good Samaritan impulses that would lead to such tragedy.
A NORMAL DAY
The weather was finally nice in New York City, and Miss Mary was sitting on the park bench outside her building, waiting for her best friend, Gloria. They were going to the market, Western Beef, and then to the dollar store to get chocolate pudding and marshmallow pies for the kids. Across the street was the schoolyard of the elementary school, P.S. 146, where three of Miss Mary’s young sons went, and on the next block down was I.S. 301, where her 13-year-old daughter, Yamilee, and Yamilee’s friend Stinae were in sixth grade. The last bell rang just before 3:00, and Yamilee and Stinae started walking to the store to buy a pineapple soda.
Yamilee, whom everyone calls Yaya, is tall, slender, and tough, with hair that stands up like a lion’s mane. She doesn’t say much, except to note that she plays tackle football. She wants to be a lawyer, but she avoids the classes for smart kids. Stinae takes those. If you ask Yaya what she wants to tell the world about herself, she says, “Don’t come near me.”
Stinae has intricate braids that creep along her skull, weaving under and over each other. She is skinny, but it’s easy to see that she’s tough too. Stinae had a simmering feud with an older high school girl, who claimed that Stinae’s brother was trying to beat up her brother. The high school girl threatened to hit Stinae’s brother, which upset Stinae because the high school girl was so much bigger than either of them.
WHO STARTED IT?
That fateful day, when Yaya, Stinae, and their friends reached the tree-shaded corner of the block where the elementary school sits, the older girl appeared. She said something to Stinae that Stinae, when she was telling the story later, did not want to repeat because it was too rude. Yaya says Stinae hit the high school girl in the face and she deserved it. Stinae says she didn’t hit the older girl. But either way, everyone started drifting toward the P.S. 146 schoolyard. One of the neighborhood boys egged them on. “She wants to fight y’all; she wants to fight y’all!” he taunted Stinae.
The schoolyard is pure inner city: a sea of asphalt in front of a squat, ugly school with burglar bars. It is dotted with basketball hoops and surrounded by a tall chain-link fence, and the only color comes from a series of murals painted by Yaya’s class when she was in fifth grade, the year the World Trade Center fell. On the biggest segment of wall, set apart from all the rest, is Yaya’s mural of the New York City skyline at sunset, with red and white billowing stripes on either side.
It was in front of this wall that the fight broke out. “We started throwing our hands, and I took a swing at her,” says Stinae. Soon the fight became a brawl, involving at least 10 people Yaya can list by name—cousins, siblings, friends of both Stinae and the older girl—and a bunch of people she didn’t know.
Yaya says she did not get into it until Stinae was knocked to the ground. “I felt like if I didn’t jump in, my friend wasn’t going to trust me anymore,” says Yaya. “And she’s my best friend.” Yaya went right for the older girl, swinging her fists. All around her, people were fighting. Quanta, Stinae’s littlest brother, was getting kicked. One of Stinae’s friends picked Stinae up with one hand and pounded a girl with the other.
MARY GETS INVOLVED
It was then that the crowd of onlookers parted to make way for Miss Mary. She was not running, but she was walking fast, straight into the melee, where she grabbed Yaya by the hood of her gray sweatshirt. Some people say that when Miss Mary tried to stop the fight, a boy kicked her. Others say she dropped to her knees. And some people said they saw a girl jump on her back and punch her from behind. “I think the girl was trying to get at me,” Yaya says.
It was not long—maybe a minute—before Miss Mary emerged from the circle of people. She was breathing hard, and she went over to the chain-link fence and held on to it, slumped over, her chest heaving up and down. Gradually people started to notice that Miss Mary was not okay. The circle opened, and the fight stopped. Yaya had never seen her mother have a bad asthma attack before—her mother who put chicken or ribs on the table every night, who got antsy if she had two minutes to relax, who charged down the halls at school with her bulging pocketbook.
So at that moment, Yaya didn’t realize the seriousness of her mom’s condition. She was more worried about Stinae, who’d gotten knocked around in the fight, and began to walk her friend home. Meanwhile, the schoolyard filled with teachers, security guards, and people from Miss Mary’s buildings. The older girls who had been fighting fled. Gloria came running up to the fence. “I can’t breathe,” Miss Mary told her, and then she collapsed. “I can’t breathe,” she said again to Larry, her husband, who was down on the asphalt at her side.
Stinae, meanwhile, turned out to be just bruised, and Yaya headed back toward her own house. At the schoolyard, she saw a large circle of people and an ambulance with flashing lights. Yaya stopped. She did not want to get any closer. “I was too scared,” she says. When she is asked what she thought was happening, she just shakes her head and looks at the ground.
Yaya went up to her apartment, where one of her older sisters told her what had happened: Their mother was dead. The medical examiner reported that Miss Mary died of an asthma attack following intervention in an altercation, which means that if she hadn’t tried to break up the fight, she probably would not have died.
THE NEIGHBORHOOD MOURNS
Miss Mary was a Jehovah’s Witness, but her church was not nearly big enough to accommodate all the people who came to her funeral. To begin with, there were the children and the grandchildren. Then there were the people from the neighborhood. Then there were the VIPs, like the school district superintendent and a representative from the borough president’s office. Miss Mary was well loved in her own right, but the way she died made her an outright hero.
“I think the kids knew their mother was important,” a family friend says. “But I don’t think they realized how important until they saw how many people loved her.”
Life is different now in the Beard home. Yaya’s father, a quiet, understanding man with a peaceful air, cooks the dinners. Sometimes he wears a T-shirt with a photo of Miss Mary on the front, and a photo on the back of Belinda, his daughter who died when she was 23, also of an asthma attack. MAMA OF THE BIG OL’ FAMILY, the front says. DADDY’S LITTLE GIRL, the back says. Now that he takes care of both the children and the grandchildren, Larry has his own nickname: Grandpa Mama.
Larry seems almost not to realize that there has been a lot of talk around the neighborhood about who was responsible for Miss Mary’s death. Some people say it was the school security guards, who witnesses say were nowhere to be found when the fight started. Some say it was the fault of the older girls, who have never been seen in the neighborhood again.
But hardest of all for Yaya and Stinae is the idea that they might be to blame. Yaya’s older sister tells Yaya that it was not her fault. “But,” Yaya says, staring down at the blacktop where it happened, and where, two months later, her brother and Stinae’s brothers are now playing basketball, “I still say it is.”
Daquan, an 11-year-old who is also playing basketball, complains that he doesn’t like it that now, every time there is a problem, his principal brings up Miss Mary’s name to remind the students of the dire consequences of fighting. On the other hand, he says, what happened to Miss Mary “should teach people a lesson.”
“It taught some people a lesson,” Yaya says, meaning herself. “I learned that if it’s a fight between your friends, you got to walk away from it; but if it’s family, you can get involved. My mother told us we have to stick by each other. She told us not to betray each other for nobody.”
Contributors
Virginity Murder BY JULIA DAHL
Fight to the Death BY GINI SIKES
I Didn’t Kill Him! AS TOLD TO NELL BERNSTEIN
School Attack BY ERIKA KINETZ
My Nanny Molested Me
BY LINDA DIPROPERZIO
She Killed Her Mom BY JULIA DAHL
A Tragic Night Out BY K.C. BAKER
Miscarriage or Murder? BY AMY UPSHAW
Lesbian Killers BY J.E. DAHL
An Imperfect Crime BY ALICE MCQUILLAN
The Woman Who Seduced
Teenage Boys BY LINDA BARTH
Dying to Get High BY LEAH PAULOS
Girl Still Missing BY VANESSA GRIGORIADIS
Natural Born Killers BY SARAH JIO
Josh’s Suicide BY NANCY RONES
Angel of Death BY NANCY RONES
Killed for Getting Pregnant
BY DARLA ATLAS
A Mom Who Loved Too Much
BY SHAILA DEWAN
Seventeen Real Girls, Real-Life Stories Page 9