The Education of a Coroner

by John Bateson

  “Something’s not right,” Holmes was told. “You need to look into Devon’s death further.”

  Holmes turned to Pam Carter. She was the lone female among his three investigators and had a strong medical background. In her early forties, five foot seven, trim, attractive, with dishwater-blond hair and clear, sparkling eyes, she had worked at Marin General Hospital for more than twenty years before testing for a job in the coroner’s office and being hired.

  “She would look at lab values,” Holmes says, “the printout on blood gases, and go, ‘Whoa, the liver is a little high,’ or ‘Calcium is a little low.’ I’d look at it and go, ‘Oh, really?’ She knew the values, the medicines, the dosages, what was contraindicated. I know most of the regulars that everybody deals with, but she knew them all.”

  To start, Carter reviewed the write-ups of each of Devon’s fifteen visits to the Marin Community Clinic, plus two hospitalizations. The initial clinic visits were to test for a dairy product allergy that Devon’s mother thought he had. Later visits and hospitalizations were because there was blood in his stool and he had a prolapsed rectum, meaning his rectum was inverted. It’s a condition that occurs at birth on occasion when the mother is pushing hard, but is rare after that. Abdominal X-rays were taken, and nothing else seemed wrong. Devon was treated, ate well, recovered each time, and was released to his parents.

  A second set of X-rays told a different story, however. Devon had multiple rib fractures—a red flag for abuse. Fractures of the clavicle can result from physiological problems at birth or an accident of some kind, but anterior and posterior rib fractures in an infant as young as Devon can only come from a squeezing type of injury. A prolapsed rectum also can be evidence of squeezing, of forcing everything out.

  Pam Carter interviewed Katja and Jereme Gromer half a dozen times. Holmes participated in all but the first interview, which was three hours and taped by Carter. It included a scene reenactment of Jereme Gromer holding a doll the way he said he held Devon, with Carter taking pictures of it.

  Both parents were in their twenties and huge. “Katja was like a linebacker,” Holmes says, “and Jereme was even bigger, about 240 pounds.”

  The Gromers said that they were Devon’s only caregivers. Carter asked how Devon got a bruise on his chest, which was discovered during the autopsy. They said it was caused by a Coke glass that fell on him. Carter asked if the Gromers’ other child, a three-year-old daughter named Makela, had had any health problems. The Gromers admitted that she had had a couple of broken bones early on, but they were healed now and she had no other problems.

  “I’d like you to sign a release form,” Carter said, “so that I can review Makela’s medical records.” The Gromers did.

  In subsequent interviews, Carter and Holmes learned that Jereme Gromer worked nights as a security guard. When he came home in the morning, he would lie down on a couch with Devon, then when his wife went to work he would go to bed with the baby. Invariably when she got home, he told her that Devon had been fussy or seemed to have an upset stomach. She either took Devon to the clinic or emergency room to have him checked, or she called an advice nurse. Each episode occurred while her husband was caring for the baby and ended with Katja being the one to seek help or answers. Theories ranged from Devon having colitis or colic to him being lactose intolerant.

  Jereme Gromer was with Devon the night he died. When Carter interviewed him, taping the conversation, he was so matter-of-fact that it was chilling.

  “I was just about to go to sleep,” he said, “when I heard, I don’t know how to call it, like whatever was left inside just finally squeezed out, you know, the last breath that came out of his body, and it kind of startled me.”

  Carter investigated the case for six months and felt that she had established a clear pattern of abuse. In her report she summarized her findings.

  “Each time the baby was removed from the parents’ custody via hospitalizations, he thrived,” she wrote. “It appears, given the symptoms described by the parents and the pattern established in Devon’s short life, that he suffered another squeezing event sometime around the day of this death.”

  Despite her conclusion, which was supported by medical records and the testimony of multiple doctors, the district attorney decided not to charge the Gromers. After the autopsy, Devon’s remains were released to his parents. They had him cremated; thus the only evidence of rib fractures was in the second set of X-rays.

  Several months passed, then Holmes received another phone call from his informant, who was still in touch with the Gromer family. “Don’t give up,” Holmes was told. “Katja is pregnant again, and it’s going to start all over. Also, Makela has had another broken arm.”

  The next time Holmes heard from his source was early one morning and the message was alarming. “Just to let you know,” the source said, “their new baby was airlifted to Children’s Hospital in Oakland with a lacerated liver. He is three weeks old.”

  Holmes flew out of bed, called Children’s Hospital, and told one of the pediatricians about Devon Gromer’s history. The pediatrician already had seen the new baby and knew that some kind of child abuse was involved because there were rib fractures on one side. All of the injuries occurred when Jereme Gromer had him, which was most of the time because Jereme wasn’t working and his wife was putting in extra hours at her job to compensate.

  “It turned out that he didn’t like to hear babies cry,” Holmes says. “I guess he felt that if he squeezed them long enough and hard enough they would stop.”

  Jereme Gromer was charged with multiple counts of child abuse and responsibility for Devon’s death. He accepted a plea bargain and was sentenced to twenty-one years in state prison. Holmes and Carter attended his sentencing.

  In a postscript to the story, Katja Gromer divorced Jereme by the time he was tried. She wanted to keep the new baby, who survived his father’s abuse, but Child Protective Services took him from her custody and let him be adopted by a policeman and his wife who couldn’t have kids. Makela also was taken from her mother and hasn’t had any broken bones since, as far as Holmes knows. Katja eventually remarried, got pregnant, and gave birth. The last time Holmes checked with his source, the baby was healthy and injury-free.

  THE FAMILY

  Shortly after Holmes discussed the Devon Gromer case with me, he asked, “Have I told you about Ndigo Wright?”

  I recognized the name from the file, which actually was labeled “Ndigo Campbell-Bremner–Wilson-Wright.” I wondered why a nineteen-month-old boy had four surnames, and Holmes explained. It started when Ndigo’s lifeless body was brought into a Kaiser hospital in Marin by three white women, none of whom seemed to have any sense of urgency or emotional attachment to the biracial boy.

  “Our child isn’t breathing,” one woman said. She was older than the other women and seemed to speak for the group.

  She told Dr. Tom Meyer that the child’s name was Ndigo and he was a year and a half old, but to Meyer the boy looked half that age. His skin was mottled, his belly was distended, and his legs were bow-shaped like the legs of a frog. The woman also told Meyer that they had tried to revive him with a warm bath and CPR prior to bringing him to the hospital.

  Meyer said afterward, “It seemed very bizarre to walk up with an obviously dead child and before that not realize that something bad was going on and not call an ambulance.”

  Odder still, when Meyer informed the women that the child was dead, none of them reacted. Instead, the lead woman asked if the coroner had arrived yet. Meyer said he had.

  “Good,” the woman said, “because we’re ready to go home.”

  Gary Erickson, Holmes’s investigator, viewed Ndigo’s body in the hospital’s emergency room and noted numerous irregularities. Ndigo’s belly was bloated, his back was humped, and there was little or no musculature to his buttocks. All of it pointed to severe malnourishment and neglect.

  “Can we get some X-rays?” Erickson asked.

  In other se
ttings, the coroner’s office paid $200 to $300 to have a mobile X-ray van come and do it, but hospitals had the equipment right there and usually did it for free. When the X-ray technician brought the films to Erickson, he was scratching his head.

  “These are really opaque,” the tech said. “I can’t see much. Let me shoot some more.”

  A half hour later he returned. “This kid has no bones,” he said.

  Erickson looked at him. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean his bones aren’t showing up in X-rays.”

  “Is there a problem with the machine or the film or the light?”

  The technician shook his head. “I took a picture of my arm with the same film and it was clear, so it’s not the equipment. There’s no density to his bones.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “The only possible explanation I can give you is that this kid has never had any vitamin D. He has never been in the sun, and his bones haven’t developed.”

  The autopsy revealed that in addition to being underdeveloped, Ndigo’s bones were broken in dozens of places due to a calcium deficiency. He also had rickets, a disease caused by a lack of vitamins, which was prevalent during the 1800s but rare since then.

  “Ndigo’s arms and legs were Gumby-like,” Holmes says. “They could be flexed—not a lot, but a little—because the bones inside them hadn’t hardened.”

  Erickson contacted local police and Child Protective Services and told them about the case. Two cops and a CPS response worker met him at Ndigo’s house. It was on a cul-de-sac in the newer part of Marinwood, a subdivision of San Rafael. The older part of Marinwood, where Holmes lived at the time, was middle class and consisted of single-story ranch houses. The newer part was more upscale with larger homes, many of them two stories and valued at $800,000 or more, and featuring expansive, well-maintained yards.

  They arrived at seven o’clock on a Wednesday evening. The house was set back from the street, shaded by palm trees and protected by a tall fence with a gate. All of the curtains were drawn, so there was no way to see inside. Only one light appeared to be on.

  The police officers went through the gate and rang the doorbell. When no one answered, they knocked loudly on the door. Still there was no response.

  Erickson went to talk to the neighbors on one side while the cops went to talk to neighbors on the other side. One set of neighbors told Erickson that they could hear children every once in a while in the house but never saw any kids. The other set of neighbors said that they had never seen or heard any kids and were fairly certain that no children lived there.

  In order to enter the house without permission, the cops needed a search warrant. Getting one usually took several hours, so the CPS worker left. Erickson decided to stay and see if anyone came out of the house. He sat in his car and wrote up his report, keeping an eye on the front door in case anyone emerged. No one did.

  With the warrant, police went through the gate again, knocked on the door, and said, “San Rafael Police. We have a search warrant.”

  A woman opened the door immediately. Nothing prepared the police officers or Erickson for the scene that they encountered.

  Inside, in the dark, were twelve children ranging in age from eight months to sixteen years. All were malnourished, and some were deformed. Several children older than Ndigo couldn’t walk; they didn’t have enough bone structure to stand on their own feet. One two-year-old boy couldn’t even sit; he had a huge callus on his forehead because the way he moved was to push his head along the hardwood, linoleum, and tile floors as if he were a wheelbarrow.

  All of the children slept on mattresses on the floor in one room, and called each of the four women in the house—Carol Bremner, age forty-five; Mary Campbell and Deirdre Wilson, both thirty-seven; and Kali Polk-Matthews, age twenty—“Mom.” There was hardly any food in the refrigerator—no milk or orange juice or anything other than a handful of vegetables—and the kids looked to Erickson as if they had never seen the light of day.

  The father wasn’t present, but authorities learned that he was an unemployed forty-five-year-old African-American man named Winnfred Wright. Wright had long, graying dreadlocks, smoked crack regularly, and according to one journalist who covered the case, “had convinced the women that they had to pay for the racist sins of their white ancestors by serving him financially, physically, and sexually.”

  On the walls of the house were bizarre paintings. One was of an African-American man who was holding a rifle over his head and standing on the naked, facedown bodies of white women.

  Because Holmes lived nearby, he saw Wright on occasion, walking up and down Lucas Valley Road. Wright was hard to miss. In addition to being a black man in a predominantly white neighborhood, he wore a knitted, multicolored Rastafarian hat, the same kind of tie-dyed shirts favored by Jamaican reggae singer-musician Bob Marley, and tight black pants with wide bell bottoms that started around the knees and had pleats that matched his hat. Still, Holmes didn’t think much of him.

  “He was just a guy in the neighborhood,” he says. “I never actually spoke to him, and of course I had no idea by looking at him what was going on in his world.”

  What was going on was a small cult that the prosecutors, and subsequently the media, referred to as “The Family,” which operated in total seclusion. The children didn’t go to school, didn’t see a doctor or a dentist, and rarely went outside. They subsisted on a vegan diet and routinely were starved. For punishment, they had to wear tape over their mouths and eat hot chili peppers.

  None of the women in the house—three of whom were white, with one (Polk-Matthews) half black—was married to Wright, yet he exerted total mind control over them even though all were intelligent and well educated. Bremner graduated from UC Berkeley. Wilson had attended Wesleyan College; moreover, she was the trust fund granddaughter of the founder of Xerox Corporation. Campbell came from a middle-class Italian-American family in Brooklyn. Polk-Matthews had gone to Lick-Wilmerding, a prestigious private high school in San Francisco. Collectively, the women paid all of the group’s living expenses through jobs they had and Wilson’s trust fund. In the process they financed Wright’s drug habit while suffering quietly from his physical and mental abuse and servicing him sexually. Prosecutors were baffled as to why the women kowtowed to Wright, but he had a powerful presence, preyed on their sense of white guilt, and isolated the women so that they felt dependent on him. When he wasn’t meditating, fasting, doing drugs, writing, painting, reading spiritual books, or procreating, Wright was issuing dictums to the women on everything from how they dressed and what food they consumed to how their children were to be raised.

  When some of the children began to show bone deformities, Wright insisted that they were due to genetic defects, not illness, and the women took his word for it. They weren’t brainwashed zombies, but they had been living with Wright’s nonsensical beliefs so long that the beliefs didn’t seem strange.

  Margaret Singer was a psychology professor at UC Berkeley who specialized in what she called “cults of charisma.” In 2002, at the time that Winnfred Wright and his four concubines were arraigned in federal court on a variety of child abuse charges, and a year before Singer herself died, she was interviewed by the Los Angeles Times about the case. She said that all of the women who fell under Wright’s influence—there had been others previously—were young, naïve, and idealistic.

  “Wright first convinced the women that they’d be part of something more spiritual and progressive and wonderful than they could find elsewhere,” Singer said, “and then slowly eroded their self-confidence and moral perceptions.” He separated them from their families and others who could provide support, instilled fear of physical abuse (“We were terrified of him,” Mary Campbell said later), and after impregnating them said that no one would want to help a white woman who had birthed children fathered by a black man.

  The fact that “The Family” existed in quiet, affluent, suburban Marin, under everyone�
�s radar, made it that much more sensational. Moreover, it would have continued to exist, with no one aware of it, if little Ndigo hadn’t died.

  Carol Bremner was the first woman Wright recruited, and she became the de facto leader among them. She bore Wright’s two oldest daughters and was instrumental in recruiting other women. The way she recruited them was through the guise of a women’s art project. The project, allegedly, was a mural that celebrated femininity. Photographs of ninety women were needed, Bremner said, as models. Once inside the residence, the women were offered massages, pot, and herbal cigarettes while soft music played in the background. They were told to take off their clothes and slip into a robe because it would make a better picture. If they stayed, Wright had sex with them. If they left, they were replaced by new recruits.

  Four months prior to Ndigo’s death, Bremner became ill. Wright wouldn’t let her see a doctor so she tried to heal herself with herbal remedies. Her condition continued to worsen, however, and Wright finally agreed to take her to a doctor. It turned out that she had leukemia, a fatal form of cancer that attacks a person’s bone marrow and blood cells. Wright told her that she had “brought it on herself.”

  Bremner’s diagnosis was received at the same time that Ndigo got sick. Mary Campbell, Ndigo’s birth mother, asked Wright to let her take Ndigo for a checkup, but Wright refused. After Ndigo died, he told the four women, “It’s Ndigo’s time to pass. He doesn’t want to live the human life anymore.”

  Wright was charged with the second-degree murder of Ndigo and accepted a deal in which he pled guilty to felony child abuse instead and was sentenced to seventeen years in prison. Mary Campbell, the mother of five other children by Wright besides Ndigo, was sentenced to ten years in prison for felony child abuse. Deirdre Wilson, the mother of five of Wright’s children, was sentenced to seven years for the same offense. Kali Polk-Matthews, the youngest recruit, hadn’t birthed a child by Wright yet, and charges of involuntary manslaughter and child endangerment against her ended up being dropped. Carol Bremner, meanwhile, died of leukemia while in judicial custody.