The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts

by Laura Tillman

  The most promising proposal came from Melissa Delgado, who headed the Brownsville Wellness Coalition, and helped start the Tres Ángeles garden. Her positivity and determination were contagious: by 2015, more than 850 residents had participated in community gardens across Brownsville, a groundswell that sprang from that little plot on the corner of East Tyler and Eighth Street. The group planned to add several urban farms as well, and even a mobile unit that would bring fresh, local vegetables to residents in affordable housing. While Delgado initially felt that the memories attached to the building were “too sorrowful” for the city to proceed with any plan save demolition, she became increasingly convinced that the structure was the natural home for a community center for the Brownsville Wellness Coalition—a space that would host healthy cooking classes and serve as a base for the walking club, community garden program, and the farmers’ market. The road to such a vision was long and fraught with potential complications. Shortly after her plan emerged, the city voted to proceed with demolition, after which the Historic Preservation and Design Review Board, which had replaced the heritage council, voted unanimously against demolition, a notable reversal from their original vote in 2008. Uncertainty continued, and the building sat, waiting.

  I stopped by the garden whenever I could, visiting it along with the building. Usually the door was shut, but sometimes a gardener would let me in and casually give me a tour. One day, I met Isai Ramirez, a grandfather who had retired the month before from a career as a boat mechanic at the Port of Brownsville. A soft-spoken man with a gentle manner, he had a gray mustache and was dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt. He spoke proudly about his plot and held up a massive leaf of rainbow chard in wonderment. He’d never grown it before, but the plant was thriving. It doesn’t taste very good, he said, but it’s got lots of vitamins.

  Isai was one of the first of the gardeners on East Tyler Street, and he’d felt a bad energy on this piece of land back then. “Every day you feel it less and less.”

  Isai looked at the building and down at his little plot of earth at its back.

  “You just keep praying that you never get in that situation, you know, you or your family.”

  While I’d initially been skeptical about the community’s motivation for destroying the building, wondering if it was a scapegoat for a set of troubling social issues Brownsville hadn’t yet begun to resolve, things turned out to be much more complicated. The pain of seeing the building every day and watching what it was turning into, and therefore wanting it to be leveled, could be attributed to guilt. But in reality, the desire to destroy it wasn’t an effort to pass off the blame. If anything, that impulse showed that the community was wounded by the murders, and they, too, wanted to heal. They wanted better conditions for the city’s families, not run-down old structures.

  The fate of the building was incidental compared to that of the lives that surrounded it, and the new projects aiming to provide sustenance and support for the families and children across Brownsville. There weren’t enough projects, but there were more than there had been in 2003. The old challenges remained, but more people seemed to be working to overcome them, with a consensus that the problems of one were the problems of many.

  A crime can unfairly define a community at large, the force of its violence blurring out whatever else might exist alongside it—the bystanders, the world afterward, the determination to prevent similar cases. In Brownsville, the response to what happened on East Tyler Street has been both moving and harrowing to explore. Maybe there is no purely right response when something so terribly wrong has happened. I struggle still to imagine how I might face a tragedy of this magnitude. I had the choice to learn about this story—it was not forced upon me.

  The garden, with its name, Tres Ángeles, reflects an acknowledgment of the role the children have in shaping the city. They did not get to grow up, but they did leave their impression behind. Their presence here continues, with no end in sight.

  It would be intolerable to spend all of our time examining the repercussions and roots of terrible acts. It would rob each of us of the time we have on this earth—finite, if we need reminding—to experience joy, to face our lives without fear, to be inspired and fascinated, and to feel deeply about our loved ones, rather than the life ended in another city far away.

  At the same time, such crimes challenge us to think about who we are and whom we want to be to one another. At these moments, what would happen if we could dispose of the words that are so easy to fall back on when it’s too exhausting to search for more precise language? What might become clearer when we draw into focus the blurry edges around the brutality? What questions might we voice for the first time? Such atrocities feel fresh to us and stun us into silence, but this process of questioning can keep us from reaching for that shelf where humanity’s unimaginable violence is kept. It can keep us from closing the door. Tragedies such as this one threaten to obliterate subtlety, and in so doing, their suspected perpetrators become alien to us, often even when they are innocent. How can we expect to grant reasonable trials if we are so distracted by the crime that we label the presumed criminal “monster” and their actions “evil”? What insights do we miss when the initial shock of a crime causes us to look away and never revisit it again, except as one in a laundry list of regrettable events? A crime should never be used to define a community, but neither should it be treated as salacious and exceptional, requiring no further examination. We should demand a better world, and to do this we must better understand the world in which we live.

  The events on East Tyler Street have become a part of people’s lives, people who, like me, had no direct connection to John or Angela. I’ve spoken to many about this crime whose voices do not appear in these pages, people who were kind enough to share insights that helped guide my inquiry. I thank them, and all of those whose thoughts are documented here, for taking the time to talk about something so dark and difficult, with such generosity and care. Without them, I would understand nothing about the legacy of this case, one I initially viewed as a straightforward history of violence, and now know to reveal a city in which perseverance, optimism, and hope accompany even the darkest tragedy. Each conversation has led out in a dozen directions, linking up with a quote or image or feeling from days or months or years ago. This interconnectivity is striking—the way a crime both derives from and happens to us all, whether we are aware of it or not.

  I’ve been unfailingly amazed by the power of time. I cannot imagine trying to look at this crime in this way in its immediate aftermath. Time has given me the ability to interview people without the intense grief, shock, and rage that might have prevented us from speaking at all. It has allowed me to see the way people have changed, and the way the building has changed under their influence. Time may be a community’s most valuable asset when trying to comprehend a terrible act that’s shaped it.

  The buffering effect of time is complicated. It can lead to forgetting, until the act is so far in the distance that memory of it disappears altogether, or the event transforms into myth. But time may also be the only salve that a family, of the victim or the perpetrator of a crime, has to heal a gaping wound. For them it’s perhaps only by allowing that temporal distance to accumulate that the wound might turn into a scar.

  The building drew me in, but the real pull was not the structure, it was the questions. I thought after all this time they would be resolved. Instead, I find myself more unmoored than when I started. Yet that doesn’t bother me: resolution doesn’t seem to be the purpose of questions like these. They open journeys, within and without, daring us after each step to go still further. The building on East Tyler Street is just a place where something happened. Its power lies in its ability to make present what is past, a past that too often contains events we wish were absent from reality. Ignoring these events does nothing to prevent them. And while the impulse to wipe the markers of their existence from the face of the earth
is human, it shouldn’t be misconstrued as a solution.

  That day at the cemetery, the sky was clear and the air hot. A few small toys, which looked as if they’d been plucked from Happy Meals, were scattered on Mary Jane’s grave. The flowers were dirty, beginning to die an artificial death. But the place was lovely, in its way. A low mesquite tree provided a spot of shade, and I could see farmland in the distance. The grass and the lonely tree obliterated the violent images of the children that had been swimming in my mind. Here, at last, at least, they had a peaceful place to rest.

  Acknowledgments

  This book began with a seemingly misguided idea. I am indebted to the many people who offered encouragement and a healthy dose of skepticism. Both have been essential to its completion. Suzannah Lessard, thank you teaching me that passion about a particular topic is the most practical tool a writer can possess, and that a few thousand missteps are indispensable when on the path toward a project worth doing. Richard Todd, Diana Hume George, Tom French, Jacob Levenson, Leslie Rubinkowski, and the great Patsy Sims, thank you all for making the Goucher MFA program an unmatched home for literary nonfiction. Every residency I spent with you helped me to venture further, even when I didn’t know where I was headed. To my Vassar College professors, thank you for providing the foundation that helped me tackle this subject.

  My editors at Scribner, Nan Graham and Daniel Loedel, thank you for your fierce belief in this project. Every paragraph has benefitted from your insight and intelligence. Your rare sensitivity and willingness to embrace the ambiguous nature of this story have been a gift. In our work together, I’ve often felt as if I’m in a dream and might wake at any moment. Thanks to Jaya Miceli for the powerful cover, and Liza Longoria for her beautiful photograph, originally shot for The Brownsville Herald. At Scribner, a hearty thank-you to Elisa Rivlin, Colin Harrison, Brian Belfiglio, Kara Watson, Mia Crowley-Hald, Emily Remes, Steve Boldt, and Kate Lloyd for their dedication and enthusiasm at every turn, and to the many others behind the scenes.

  To my agent, the incomparable Andrew Wylie, thank you for seeing what was possible and finding the right home for this book. I will forever be indebted to you for your unwavering confidence and wisdom. Thanks to the rest of the Wylie Agency, especially Jacqueline Ko and Julia Sanches.

  To the staff of The Brownsville Herald, and to Rachel Benavidez for my first job in journalism, thank you for bringing me to the Rio Grande Valley. I count it as the best decision I ever made. Brad Doherty, thank you for all the images you’ve shot for this project over the years, some of which appear in these pages, and for your friendship. Thanks also to Macarena Hernández, Jennifer Muir, and Mireya Villarreal for talking with me about the experience of covering this case, and to Oscar Cásares and Cecilia Ballí for your insight into writing about the region.

  I have so many people to thank in Brownsville, generally, but I have to begin with Yvette, Jojo, Blanca, and Joe Vela. You gave Chris and me a family in Brownsville, and we will always be grateful. Nadia Elfarnawani and Ruben Marin, thank you for your support through this process. To the many people in Brownsville whom I’ve interviewed, both directly for this book and over my years as a reporter, thank you for all that you’ve taught me. I imagine other places exist where there is such a concentration of kindness and generosity, but if there are, I haven’t found them yet. To John Allen Rubio, thank you for sharing your story with me.

  Many people read parts of this book at various stages and gave me invaluable feedback. Justin Pope, Chris Sherman, David Tillman, Candice Lowe Swift, Theo Emery, and Abby Evans, thank you for so generously offering your time and insight. Kate Pumarejo, thank you tremendously for using your legal expertise to review mountains of court documents and ensure that I got the story right. Tom Colligan, my expert and persnickety fact-checker, thank you for your diligence and willingness to immerse yourself in such a difficult subject.

  David Tavarez, Anthony Knopp, David Novosad, Daniel Greenfield, James Marcus, Austin Sarat, Antonio Zavaleta, and Mark Clark, thank you for our extended conversations on topics as diverse as historic preservation, forensic psychiatry, the death penalty, and religion, some brief glimpses of which appear in these pages. To Charles Eisendrath, Birgit Rieck, and Travis Holland in Ann Arbor, thank you for your inclusion and the great service you do for journalism. To Mark Schoifet and the late Fred Wiegold of Bloomberg News, thank you for taking the time to teach a lowly intern many valuable lessons about journalism and ethics. Thanks also to Dan Baum, for the early, essential advice that started me on this path in earnest. To the Sherman family, thank you for welcoming me in as one of your own. To my friends, with whom I’ve shared countless conversations about this project, you have helped me to think through problems big and small, and given me the extra push that I needed to continue—thank you.

  I dedicate this to my family, especially my parents. Everything I am comes from your unwavering support and your example. I love you.

  Finally, thank you, Chris, for your endless belief in this book and in me. I couldn’t love you more, and then I do.

  About the Author

  Photograph by Catherine Epstein

  Laura Tillman is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and Pacific Standard, among other publications. Originally from Maplewood, New Jersey, she began her career at The Brownsville Herald in South Texas. She holds a BA in International Studies from Vassar College and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College. This is her first book.

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  Interior design by Jill Putorti

  Jacket design by Jaya Miceli

  Jacket photograph by Liza Longoria/The Brownsville Herald

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-1-5011-0425-1

  ISBN 978-1-5011-0430-5 (ebook)