The Valley of the Shadow of Death
Page 30
* * *
President Clinton was on TV coordinating relief efforts. UN secretary-general Ban Ki Moon appealed for aid. Clinton hammered a message of hope. Haiti’s moment of crisis must be its moment of change. He launched his program: Haiti would “Build Back Better.”
Since his honeymoon in Haiti in 1975, the poor island nation held an emotional place in Bill Clinton’s heart. He and Hillary had flown there repeatedly, and they described themselves as a “Haiti-obsessed family.” Clinton was the first sitting president to visit since Franklin Roosevelt. And when the earthquake hit, Clinton said he took it “personally and emotionally,” while Hillary became “physically sick.”
Following the quake, Clinton, the UN special envoy to Haiti, along with fellow former president George W. Bush, led the long-term recovery effort. Clinton, who thinks constantly of Haiti’s future, expressed his hopes that one day it would be the next South Korea, become another “miracle economy.”
Two days after the quake, Clinton was in his Harlem office leading a high-powered team of philanthropists and nongovernmental organizations in his effort to “Build Back Better”: fixing roads, planting trees, growing fruit for export, and expanding recycling efforts. Clinton’s words from the Harlem meeting: “The Haitians have the first chance they’ve had to escape their own history.”
Once again I was hurled into historic events I wanted no part of. The Watts Riots, the tragic crime, now, on the world stage, the worst earthquake in recent memory.
Orphans Manoucheka, Jameson, Zachary, and Semfia were among the poorest and most vulnerable of the poor. All were just outside the epicenter near Port-au-Prince. Clifton, as far as we knew, was still at Mission of Hope.
There was no phone service and four days after the earthquake we still couldn’t get any news regarding the children.
I felt all of the old wounds reopen. The brief solace of salvation was extinguished by the familiar pall of darkness that had marked my last twenty years. I had that helpless, meaningless feeling, the numb anger that comes with being overwhelmed when events tear out of control. This time it wasn’t an unknown gunman at daybreak, but Mother Nature in the late afternoon. I couldn’t blame this one on myself, but that didn’t still the pain.
Was this what the last six years would come to? More than twenty trips to the island, exhausted savings, spent emotions, and what would we have to show—the corpses of the kids we’d promised to rescue.
For days, Tami tried everyone in Haiti she could think of. But the lines were down. For days we didn’t sleep.
Worldwide, the Haitian diaspora moaned, in Manhattan and Queens, Miami, Boston, and Montreal, in France, Jamaica, and the Virgin Islands. They talked to each other, some talked to Tami, but they were as information-starved as us. No one could get through. But rumors, speculation, fears, and apocalyptic scenarios spread like disease. And no one could blame their pessimism, certainly not me. If you were of Haiti, you couldn’t help thinking the worst. I did.
At this point, I really didn’t know if I had it in me to withstand another trauma. I feared it would simply override my system, short-circuit me the way the first tragedy nearly did. It took twenty years to overcome August 31. I wasn’t up for another twenty from January 12. That was a sentence I wouldn’t serve.
I couldn’t stop imaging funerals. I sketched them in my mind. I dreamed them. I obsessed over them and counted them: one, two, three, four, five, followed by a sixth: mine. My obituary: “Former NFL star, sixty-nine, dies of guilt.”
I could only think, if those five kids die, that will be the end of me, I will be the only man to die twice.
* * *
As Haiti fights through the rubble, and Tiequon Cox sits in his death row cell awaiting the decision on his federal appeals, two conflicting developments mark California’s ongoing death penalty wars.
First, a petition to abolish capital punishment is launched. If enough signatures are collected, for the first time since 1978, Californians would vote on the death penalty. If passed, the referendum would convert more than seven hundred death sentences to life without parole. The measure is backed by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups, who argue that capital punishment is primitive, unfair, cruel, unusual, and costly. Opponents, who include law-and-order advocates and victims’ rights groups, contend that the death penalty serves as a deterrent, brings justice and closure, and affects only a tiny fraction of the most heinous killers, who have all been proven guilty beyond a shadow of doubt.
The second development is the completion of San Quentin’s new lethal-injection-only facility. It is stark, white, modern, and medical. It is capable of administering either the three-drug protocol or the single injection of sodium thiopental. It contains no chair, only a gurney onto which the inmate is strapped.
Prison staff report that if the referendum fails, the new chamber will be activated, and condemned with exhausted appeals executed at a quickened pace.
In an effort to keep Tiequon Cox out of the new chamber, his attorneys have argued that he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. The diagnosis is part of the larger claim that Cox’s attorney, Edward Cook, provided ineffective assistance of counsel by failing to accurately portray, during the penalty phase of the trial, the psychological horrors to which the young Cox was subjected.
The appeal claimed that because Cook had been ineffective by forgoing a guilt-phase defense, calling no witnesses and merely stating “submit it” for argument, he therefore forwent a proper penalty-phase defense.
Cook responded that he felt there was no chance to make any argument during the guilt phase, since the evidence was overwhelming. Cook therefore placed all of his efforts into saving Cox’s life. Cook felt the best chance of this was by surprising the prosecutor with the wrong-shooter argument.
In the world of capital appellate defense, attacking the trial attorney for ineffective assistance of counsel is a common tactic. Here the impetus of the federal attack was Cook’s failure to show Tiequon in an appropriately sympathetic light, given his abusive childhood. They stressed that while Cook presented the basics, he did little to expose the true horror of Tiequon’s upbringing and convince the jury to save the young man’s life. Had this been done, Cox’s attorneys argued, there was “a reasonable probability” that “the result of the proceeding would have been different.”
In support of this argument, a clinical psychologist, David Lisak, asserted that “[d]uring the first twelve years of his life, Tiequon experienced well over a dozen incidents in his home and family life, so far outside the range of human experience, that each one alone meets the psychiatric criterion as a precipitator of PTSD.” Lisak stated, “By the time of Tiequon’s incarceration in the California Youth Authority at the age of 15, and his release at age 18, he had witnessed or been aware of so many gunfights, deaths, and maimings in his community of South Central Los Angeles that he would be classified as having endured moderate to heavy combat if assessed using criteria developed for the classification of adult Vietnam combat veterans.”
In Cox’s interviews with Lisak, Cox stated, “I never learned to have any goals about my future. I never had a positive sense of the future. I was never given that type of vision of the future.” Cox continued, “I’ve seen people beaten up, beaten to death, robbed, get shot, run over and crushed. It makes you numb after awhile. You have to become numb to it or it will destroy you.” He estimated that more than thirty close friends had died in gang disputes, and he assumed that he would be killed.
As a coping mechanism, he became hypervigilant and hyperprepared, both traits he would hone during his life in prison. Describing his life on the streets, he would “peer out the windows, check the bushes, look over the cars on the street, check the rooftops.” He “listened for clicks, fast movements, car engines accelerating, doors slamming. These are all dead giveaways,” he said. “So you learn to tune out the common sounds. You must, because if you miss a beat you might be dead.”
* * *
As the days dragged on, Tami kept trying every number in Haiti she could summon, every contact she had ever made. For days, no luck.
Then, finally, she got through, reaching a key contact by phone.
Had he heard anything from any of the ministries?
He said it would take him a few hours to contact the ministries and that he would call her back.
Oh God, more waiting, nothing worse than waiting for a phone to ring. My memory of phone calls wasn’t good. I would always think of Neal: “Why would they mess Mom up?”
When her contact failed to call back, Tami called him, and called him, and called him.
The odyssey continued.
If the shootings of August 31, 1984, initiated the hundred-year drive, the earthquake of January 12, 2010, inflicted the hundred-year wait. The unifying theme: suspended in limbo awaiting terrible news.
We prayed. Tami called. I paced.
And I kept pacing, walking around the house, out to feed the horses, clean the pool, anything to keep busy, sweep the patio so clean you could scrub yourself with the bricks. And then I’d return to the house and just sit there.
I stared into the rooms we’d arranged for the kids. The rooms we’d planned, set up, altered, and rearranged dozens of times in the years since the adoptions began.
And sometimes I’d flash back, to empty beds from another time. “Stop it,” I’d command. But I didn’t listen. I couldn’t stop. Those other beds, children’s beds flashed, jagged, angular, sharp colors, dark red, bodies trapped in blankets, forever frozen in sleep. “No,” I barked. Those beds were different, soaked in blood, final, fatal, graves of the departed. These were different, clean, empty, but clean, clean awaiting new arrivals.
“Hope,” my light side beckoned, “arrivals soon to come. Hope.”
But the dark side, far stronger, crushed it. “You never really arrive, won’t you learn. Every arrival begets heartbreak. Give up. Clean beds, yes,” the dark side continued, “but only because the blood runs elsewhere.”
“Stop it,” I started, before I was interrupted.
Ringing. Well, one ring. It couldn’t finish.
Tami grabbed the phone before the first ring was through. “Hello.” Then silence.
She fell to the ground in tears.
* * *
According to his attorneys, as a child Tiequon’s cognitive and emotional capacities were overwhelmed. “Children typically manifest PTSD symptoms somewhat differently than do adults,” the psychologist, Lisak, wrote. “They may become jumpy, agitated and restless and be unable to sit still or concentrate for very long.” “Traumatized children often desensitize themselves to protect themselves from the overwhelming emotions induced by the trauma.”
And Tiequon manifested these symptoms, the psychologist argued, with friends and relatives describing him as “empty” and “numb.” Cox said he figured out how to “block out thoughts.” As a child, he was described by those around him as “shy and kind of withdrawn,” “alert, careful, and always looking around,” “quiet and watchful.”
The psychologist concluded his assessment by linking Tiequon’s hypervigilance with changes in his nervous system, and how these changes affected his ability to thrive and learn. “Tiequon, like many children who are forced to live under such chronic hyper-vigilance,” the report stated, “showed other signs of his hyper-aroused nervous system: he could not sit still for long, showed repeated signs of psychomotor agitation and could not concentrate. His hyper-reactive nervous system was constantly being activated by stimuli which he could not screen out, for his life had taught him that all stimuli could signal danger. Not surprisingly, Tiequon had tremendous difficulties in school, where sitting still, concentrating, and screening out noise and distractions are mandatory for precision learning.”
* * *
It sounded like a low chant, as words from a trance. It was otherworldly. It was a voice I had never heard come from her before. As she hung up the phone, she cradled it in her hands, repeating: “They’re alive. . . . They’re alive. . . . They’re alive.”
A path through the woods. Morning light slants across the Valley. Shadows ebb. The sun through the windows is electric.
We embrace, a moment of bliss. But only a moment, then hurled back into the world of planning and calculation.
“They’re alive.”
Now all we had to do was figure out how to get them out of there, something we had failed to do for the last six years.
I returned to the TV, but now with a fresh sense of hope. Tami got back on the phone.
We learned that following the earthquake, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano announced that humanitarian parole would be granted to children already in the process of adoption.
We again returned our attention to the TV, continued scenes of devastation and relief efforts, devastation and relief. But for both of us, we felt an incredible personal relief. We saw immediate hope on a micro level. Everything Clinton, the UN secretary-general, the foreign ministers were speaking of, we would be part of. For the moment, it was good to be part of an international story.
But I had come not to trust the moment. It seemed all too often to turn into another moment, and then something else altogether.
But no matter what, we would do all in our power to bring immediate relief to five orphans as soon as we could. And we pledged in that moment that once the immediate chaos subsided, we would redouble our efforts to bring clean energy, which would mean clean water, to the people of Haiti.
As soon as we could we filled out paperwork to get all five kids on the federal list. We then engaged in a constant back-and-forth with the State Department, and then finally, with the dedicated efforts of a volunteer from a local radio station, were able to get the paperwork resubmitted and through the proper channels.
The major remaining snag was that the Haitian government, concerned with illicit adoptions and exploitation of the chaos following the earthquake, put a halt to most adoptions.
* * *
Finally, twelve days after the earthquake, and six years since we had started the adoption proceedings, we were told that the children would be on a plane to Florida.
Following another round of delays and misplaced documents, the State Department notified Tami. The news: the four children were on their way to Florida.
“Four, what do you mean four?” Tami said. “There’s five.”
“Five?” A pause. “Hold on, actually, we’ll call you back.”
After rounds of additional calls, Tami learned that Clifton’s travel documents were missing. Clifton’s paperwork had a hold placed upon it in an effort to prevent child trafficking, which was rampant in the disaster’s wake. Clifton could not leave, because the government planned to restrict all traffic out of Haiti.
Calling an emergency number with a contact at the Department of Homeland Security, Tami learned that four of the children would arrive in Miami on January 25, 2010. But her contact said he would need several more days before he would know anything about Clifton.
As we continued our vigil, the news out of Haiti deteriorated. Strong aftershocks, routinely hitting 6.0, brought down more damaged and ill-constructed housing. Fears of an impending cholera epidemic spread as the desperate relied upon, and were surrounded by, only badly contaminated water. International aid agencies were trying to get as many children out of Haiti as they could, despite the restrictions.
Fearing that Clifton would be forever trapped in Haiti, Tami arranged for me to meet the other four kids in Florida, while she hired a pilot she knew to fly her to the Dominican Republic. From there she would have to travel west to the border, cross through the mountains, and then make her way across Haiti to the coast.
* * *
The habeas corpus petition shows a young man failed by society. Raised in a brutal home with an abusive, drug-addicted mother, he never stood a chance. Add to the lessons of the home—that random violence was the way of the world—the ho
rrors of the schools and streets, the violence of gangs and police. The youth faced a life of kill or be killed. With no father, an out-of-control mother, and a war zone of a neighborhood, joining the gang was a survival strategy of last resort, a place of belonging, acceptance, and protection. Always moved between homes, with different rules, at best he had his great-grandmother, who was far from a loving, nurturing influence. She was overly restricting and controlling, only fostering rebellious tendencies in the confused youngster. And in the gang he was taken under the wing of older members who made him feel worthwhile and important, but in exchange, used him to do their dirty deeds. And thus on August 31, 1984, Tiequon Cox acted at the behest of the older OG, Darren Charles Williams.
He was an inevitable symptom of a racist society. Centuries of historical mistreatment created him: slavery, Jim Crow, separate and unequal, broken homes, degraded schools, abandoned neighborhoods, poor health care, and an abusive police department. Tiequon and thousands like him are what you get. He simply became what was unloaded upon him. He reflected what he saw. What right does his maker have to destroy him?
* * *
A guard looking at his prison photo shakes his head. “Evil,” he says. “The guy is just plain evil.” “He’s a stone-cold killer.” In the picture stands 240 pounds of pure muscle, scowling. The file through which the guard thumbs tells a story bare of redeeming qualities.
The psychological analysis: “Antisocial Personality Disorder.” Cox is a sociopath, one who refuses to live by societal norms. The sociopath is an outlaw, seeing the law as something for others to follow. He knows what he is doing, and knows it’s wrong. But he does it anyway. He doesn’t care. He has no remorse, and feels no guilt. Others are merely a means to his ends. He is an assassin. He makes his name in blood. Even in the violent world of gangs he is an outlier.