“That’s ridiculous,” Janet Camacho told the investigators. “There isn’t even a real gun in my house. There is a BB gun, that’s all.” The BB gun belonged to her brother Joshua, who kept it locked up in his bedroom. The kids had never been allowed to touch it, and it had never been pointed at anyone. She admitted to having a fight with the father of her kids. They didn’t live together anymore because they fought so much. The current conflict stemmed back two weeks earlier when Williams came to the Camacho residence to drop off the kids and there’d been a fight.
The investigators had a question: “You have a bandage on your hand. What happened there?”
“I cut myself on a piece of broken glass from a candle,” she said.
Janet Camacho and Robert Williams’s kids were interviewed separately. Destiny said she knew the difference between the truth and a lie, and she said her mother and father did not fight. It was determined that Isaiah was unable to tell the difference between a truth and a lie, so he was not considered a credible witness.
The kids were given the once-over and showed no signs of abuse.
Officer Butson spoke briefly to Joshua, who vouched for the fact that his BB gun was kept locked inside his bedroom closet. The allegations were untrue, he said.
On Wednesday, November 12, at 7:47 in the evening, Rachel affected a chummy tone at first: “Hey, Sarah, it’s Rachel. I’m in my car and I’m sure you-all are walking because yours are broken or you don’t have cars. You need the exercise. Maybe it’ll thin you out a little bit. I don’t know … I was just wondering where you are, because if you come to my job, you’ll be arrested on the spot. And I’ll spit in your food. I’m sure you won’t mind because you’re not even going to notice because you’re going to scarf it down. You’re like my fucking dog. You probably don’t even chew your food. But do me a favor and meet me there, bitch. Bye.”
Sarah did go to Applebee’s, when she knew Rachel was working, and specifically asked to be seated in Rachel’s section—the better to mess with her. She tripped Rachel while Rachel was carrying beer. She further harassed her rival by complaining to the manager that Rachel had spit in her food.
As the feud escalated, neither girl was having much fun. The only one having fun was Joshua. Friends of both Rachel and Sarah verified that Joshua was amused by the little war between his sex slaves.
One night in November, Rachel was angry with Joshua. She and her friend Lisa Lafrance put their heads together and came up with “the bright idea” to go to Janet’s house, where Joshua’s car was parked.
“We drove by and egged his car,” Lisa said. “Only he didn’t know it was us. At least we didn’t think so, but I think he put two and two together.”
Rachel and Lisa returned to Rachel’s apartment. That same night, someone entered Rachel’s building, ran up the stairs, pounded on her door, and then ran back down.
“They used to torment Rachel,” Lisa observed. Later that night, a car stopped several times out in front of Rachel’s building, honked the horn, and then left.
Lisa slept at Rachel’s that night; and when she went out to drive home the following morning, November 12, she discovered three of her tires were slashed. Lisa called the cops and told Officer Lawrence Kolbicka that she didn’t know for sure who did it, but the tires were still intact at ten o’clock the prior night.
She said her best guess was that the tires had something to do with the recent quarrel between Rachel Wade and Joshua Camacho. Joshua was angry because Rachel hung out with people of whom he did not approve.
Officer Kolbicka spoke to Joshua, who said he knew nothing about slashed tires. Joshua said the police “bothered him” and refused to answer further questions. Due to lack of evidence, the investigation ended there.
Two days later, a little after seven in the morning, police received a call from Charlie Ludemann. Officer Andrew S. Cappa answered the call. Charlie explained that earlier that morning his daughter Sarah and he had gotten into an argument as he was driving her to school. She was in a bad mood because she’d earlier had a fight with her boyfriend, Joshua Camacho. After arguing, Charlie took Sarah’s cell phone from her as a disciplinary action. At the next traffic stop, Sarah got out of the car and walked. Charlie called the cops. The policeman retrieved Sarah, who had yet to reach school. He scolded her for her actions, explaining that until she was eighteen, her father had every right to take her cell phone away from her, especially since he was paying the bills for it. Cappa drove Sarah the rest of the way to school and advised both daughter and father to calm down.
On February 25, 2009, police were called when a gang of young people, maybe fifteen to twenty of them, were circled in the street, surrounding a fight that was about to happen. By the time the police arrived, the crowd was gone, but members were quickly located. They had split into two groups and were milling about, a few blocks apart. Asking questions, police learned that the dispute had been between Joshua Camacho and Javier Laboy.
Javier explained that Joshua was mad at him because he “played baby daddy for five months to his son.” That is, Javier dated Erin Slothower. Joshua, Javier said, was packing a knife and brass knuckles. He knew because earlier a car containing Joshua cruised past him and Joshua waved the weapons out the window.
Police found Joshua in the other group, and his story, of course, differed. He said it was Javier who’d been hanging out of a car holding a knife and shouting, “I want to kill you!” Nobody was arrested, as there had been no actual physical confrontation. Police explained to everyone that there were better ways to solve their differences.
The incident was important because it took place outside Javier Laboy’s house, only a few feet from where Sarah Ludemann would be stabbed six weeks later.
Jamie Severino lent an insider’s expertise to those troubled times. Sarah didn’t do drugs—at least not when Jamie was around. Joshua and Janet Camacho smoked weed—smoked weed a lot—but Jamie never saw Sarah do it.
“I don’t do drugs, either, so me and Sarah would be sitting while they’d be smoking,” Jamie recalled. Not that Sarah was a saint. She was normal enough, unless the subject was Joshua; then she became “crazy, too.”
Jamie, like Lisa Lafrance before her, had her tires slashed. That was in March, and she had always felt Sarah did it. Sarah admitted it. Sarah had a problem with Jamie because Jamie was really good friends with Erin.
“She didn’t like the fact that Joshua was still seeing Erin,” Jamie recalled. Sarah’s thinking was any friend of Erin’s was an enemy of hers.
One thing Jamie noticed: If she met Sarah alone, Sarah was cool with her. But when Sarah was with her friends, it was a different story.
Just two weeks before Sarah was killed, she got into another fight. This one was with Erin. “It was a fistfight. No weapons. Joshua was there. They fought each other, and that was it,” Jamie recalled. “I mean, you shouldn’t fight at all, but it was a fair fight, and when it was over, they stopped messing with each other.”
After the fight, Sarah figured it out. Erin wasn’t going anywhere, so she might as well get over it. She couldn’t get Erin to stop talking to Joshua. They were always going to talk. They were parents, after all.
The young women reconciled with one another—“Let’s put everything aside” was how Sarah put it—and Sarah tried to recruit Erin to fight with her against their common enemy: “She had tried to get me to go with her to fight Rachel.
“That was a couple days before her and Rachel, but I didn’t go,” Erin remembered.
The last time Erin and Rachel spoke, Rachel said foul things about Erin’s son.
Erin explained, “I felt I was never going to get anywhere for my son if I continued fighting over Joshua.”
Chapter 3
LISA
Lisa Lafrance, born and raised in Pinellas Park, had known Rachel Wade since middle school, but they really started hanging out in ninth or tenth grade. “She was dating our friend Nick, and we had grown up with Nick,” Lisa exp
lained.
Lisa and Rachel started out as enemies. The problem, of course, involved a boy. In what would become a familiar pattern, hostilities between Rachel and Lisa built up through phone calls and text messages. They had a fight on Rachel’s driveway. Lisa took complete blame for that. She’d started it. Rachel didn’t want to fight. Lisa had to go onto Rachel’s property to throw the first punch.
“Rachel liked to talk it, but she wasn’t violent. She wasn’t face-to-face confrontational,” Lisa said. After the fight, they became BFFs—best friends forever.
Even back then, Rachel was only “off and on” when it came to living with her parents. She began to date Nick, and then spent a lot of time at Nick’s. Lisa hung out there, too.
When they were hanging out, sometimes their activities were mundane. They played cards. But they were also bad girls. “We did a lot of drugs together,” Lisa remembered. Those were the days of smoking weed, snorting coke, and taking Roxies.
Lisa was with Rachel for one of their shoplifting busts: “We used to steal clothes, sell them at Plato’s Closet, and use the money to buy gas,” Lisa explained.
Lisa could never figure out what it was, but Rachel’s home with her parents was not a happy place. Her parents were nice, and they had her back no matter what, but they couldn’t prevent her from being a relentless rebel.
Constant rebellion brought animosity, which led to further rebellion. Rachel yearned to do her own thing in a world without rules—a world where she had no one to answer to.
Plus “she was boy crazy,” Lisa said. “She was always with a boy. The entire time I knew her, she was never without a boyfriend.”
She was so dependent on boys that whichever boy she was with became Rachel’s absolute priority. Parents were no longer necessary. Dealing with parents became intolerable.
“Her parents were great,” Lisa said. “They just didn’t know how to react when Rachel grew up, being as mature as she was for her age.”
Lisa noted that Rachel had a brother, who was just a couple of years older than Rachel. The siblings never got along; and in Lisa’s experience, he was never around.
“Rachel used to say they she and her brother fought all the time. She said that her brother hated her. She didn’t talk about him much. She didn’t like to talk about him. It was a sore subject.”
Rachel needed a boyfriend to validate her feelings and make her feel better about herself. “Even though she was gorgeous and had a great personality, she needed validation,” Lisa said.
Rachel’s life improved immensely when she got her own apartment. Once they no longer shared the same roof, she and her parents were on even better terms with one another.
Lisa remembered the days of hanging out at Nick’s as some of the best times ever. She remembered the problems she had with Jamie Severino over Jay. That got complicated: that was what had started the big fight outside Nick’s with the brass knuckles and the cops.
Lisa had maybe the best perspective of the events that would follow because she had been really good friends with both Rachel and Sarah. In school, Lisa and Sarah used to hang out in the gym together. This was before Rachel and Joshua got together. Sarah and Erin didn’t get along because of Joshua, and Jamie and Lisa had their troubles over Jay.
Lisa and Sarah never really had a falling-out, but they did stop speaking. With Sarah and Rachel feuding over Joshua, Lisa could no longer be friends with both, and—since Rachel was her best friend—Sarah was dropped.
During the last days of their friendship, Sarah had tried to pump Lisa for info. What was up with Rachel and Joshua? Were they hanging out? According to Lisa, Sarah asked, “Could you please break them up for me?”
Lisa felt bad about it. She understood where Sarah was coming from. Sarah had lost her virginity to Joshua.
Lisa understood what a bond that could create. For four years, Lisa was with the guy who had taken her virginity; and when another girl came around, she was always willing to fight for him.
Lisa told Sarah to her face that, out of loyalty to Rachel, she had to stop being her friend. Sarah took it well. “Sarah and I never had problems. We had an understanding that I was going to stand by Rachel,” Lisa recalled.
Sarah was awesome, a really good kid, but not as innocent as some made her out to be. She was just fighting for Joshua: fighting for his love, for his attention. She even said to Lisa, she never felt good enough for him. Erin was beautiful; Rachel was beautiful; Sarah was beautiful, too, but she was insecure because of her weight problems that had plagued her for much of her life. She was cruelly affected by all of the juvenile taunts she had heard.
“Kids used to call her ‘Shrek,’” Lisa remembered. “That was so messed up—because Sarah was gorgeous.”
Lisa was aware of the escalating problems between Rachel and Sarah. Rachel would call Lisa while she was coming home from work and would talk until she was safely in her apartment. She needed somebody to talk to because she anticipated an ambush some night from Sarah.
During the last weeks of Sarah’s life, Lisa was no longer speaking with Rachel, either. But it was her own fault, not Rachel’s. Years had passed since the days of doing lines, weed, and pills at Nick’s, and Rachel had—as far as Lisa could tell—stopped taking drugs. Rachel was vocal about her disapproval of Roxies, which was like taking heroin without the needle. Rachel had seen Nick getting goofy on pills, choosing pills over everything else. That was what had broken them up.
For Lisa, however, those drug vices she had acquired while hanging out at Nick’s had become habits. She had a serious addiction. “I let Roxies take over my life for three years,” Lisa admitted. She tried to recall in detail the last time she spoke to Rachel before Rachel went to jail, but it was hard. She could remember events only as reflected in something resembling a whacked-out carnival mirror.
Rachel was with a friend of hers named Jeremy Sanders at the time. Rachel’s friends, in fact, would have said that Jeremy was Rachel’s boyfriend. He was a muscle-bound stoner, but he made Rachel “feel so safe” when he held her in his arms—his “guns.”
That there was still a soap opera going on involving Joshua Camacho would have surprised many who knew Rachel—especially Jeremy, who had been told by Rachel that Joshua was a thing from the far, far past. Rachel had assured Jeremy that she wasn’t even going to think about Joshua anymore.
That bitch on the voice mails? Those weren’t the “real” Rachel. That was an act. Rachel might have sounded pretty aggressive in her voice mails to Sarah, but in reality she was insecure. Rachel had thought about the situation with Sarah and Joshua.
“I don’t think I’m going to get to be with Joshua anymore,” Rachel said.
Lisa didn’t recall taking that too seriously. Rachel was all about breaking up and making up.
“Still, it was my understanding that she was with Jeremy at the time,” Lisa said.
At one point during that final visit, with Lisa slurring her speech and bleary-eyed, Rachel gave Lisa the ultimatum: “The pills or me.” It was the first time Rachel had ever spoken to Lisa that way—and it was obvious she was doing it because she wanted to help her. Rachel had lost Nick to pills, and now she was losing Lisa to them.
Sadly, Lisa chose the pills. She was high all of the time. She was high on the night Sarah died.
Chapter 4
LAST DAY
On Tuesday, April 14, 2009, in the lunchroom at Pinellas Park High, Sarah stood out from the crowd. While other seniors ate their lunch and chatted noisily, Sarah sat alone in a corner, eyes swollen from tears.
Her friend Amber Malinchock came over to find out what was wrong. It was Joshua. Again. They’d been going out for months, Sarah was in love with him, and Joshua said she was his one and only.
But it wasn’t true.
He was still seeing his ex, a bitch named Rachel.
As Sarah tried to survive school all morning, with her emotional upheaval, her task was complicated by texts she was receiving from Rachel,
boasting and taunting that she was back with Joshua.
Amber listened to Sarah and told her to forget about Joshua. He was a jerk and she deserved someone who could love her back. Amber told Sarah they should do something to cheer her up, go shopping, go to a movie or something, but Sarah said no thanks, she needed to talk to Joshua.
That afternoon Charlie Ludemann picked up his daughter after school, as usual. He was very concerned about her. She’d been crying again. When he tried to comfort her, she pulled away from him. She’d been dieting. He yearned for her to see the light. She’d never been with a boy before. She didn’t know about all of the great guys that were out there. No matter what he said, she did what she wanted to do, and she wanted to be with Joshua.
When Sarah arrived home, she went to Myspace and checked Rachel’s latest postings.
Her rival had written: Mood: Lovin’ my boo J.
Sarah sent Joshua a text:
Whatever Joshua, you get so mad at me for everything but you don’t give a shit when she puts something up or says something. You always believe her. It’s like no matter what I do she’s always that much better. All we fight about is her or something that has to do with her, and it sucks. I hate fighting with you. I love you so much, but this shit hurts.
No response. Sarah waited an hour and tried again:
You say you love me but you don’t have the decency to text me back.
It was just past 8:00 P.M. when Joshua finally responded: Bring the movies.
Her anger forgotten, Sarah returned to her Myspace and wrote: iloveyoubaby.
It was Rachel’s night off from waitressing at Applebee’s. She was in her apartment with her friend Egle Nakaite, who’d come over to visit—and Rachel was kvetching. As usual, the subject was Joshua. She wanted to trust him, but she couldn’t. He said he was true to her, but there was all of this evidence that he was seeing Sarah, again. Joshua had slept over the night before, but then he took off. It was like he had someplace better to be. Rachel couldn’t help it. Her vainglorious mind seized at the indignity.
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