Feature —
The Lives of Others
What does it mean to “tell someone’s story”?
By Julia DahlThe next morning, the three refugees climbed up to the roof, and at the end of the day were lifted to safety by an Army helicopter. After several sweltering days in the gym at the University of New Orleans, they boarded a bus to Atlanta, where Quiana had friends. Through a series of fortunate coincidences, Tyeisha got in touch with her mother, who had Daneisha and was in Dallas. Her on-again, off-again boyfriend was in Texas, too. Tyeisha decided that’s where she should be.
On Friday, September 16, 2005, I dropped Tyeisha off at the Atlanta Greyhound station. She bought a ticket to Dallas and set off for the fifteen-hour ride. Six months later, Tyeisha was dead. She was found in a ditch beside a rural road in Fort Bend County, Texas. She’d been shot in the back of the head.
I learned about Tyeisha’s death from Quiana, who called me one night in March 2006 and whispered, “Tyeisha’s gone.” When she hung up, I went to my computer and found an article in the Texas paper: there was a sketch, and though her features were exaggerated, it was clearly Tyeisha. The article said the body they’d found had tattoos: Daneisha, RIP Larry. I remembered those tattoos. I’d asked about them as we sat on a bench outside the church. Larry was Tyeisha’s father, who had died, she said, about a year before Katrina hit.
I called the number in the paper and asked to speak to the detective in charge. I explained that I hadn’t seen or heard from Tyeisha in months, but I told him what I knew: that she’d survived Katrina, and that she’d apparently gone to Texas to be with her mother, daughter, and boyfriend. He asked me to fax him a copy of the article I wrote for Seventeen. He said they didn’t have many leads. I gave him Quiana’s number, and he promised to call me back. I called Seventeen, thinking that if the editors would allow me to write about her death, I could finance a trip to Texas. I could help find her killer. The impulse was a combination of personal outrage (I’d never known anyone who’d been murdered), curiosity, and ambition. I knew the victim and already had the family’s trust. I began having visions of writing the In Cold Blood of the Katrina diaspora. But there was a new editor on the Drama section, and she didn’t sound terribly excited about the idea. She said she’d talk to the editor-in-chief and get back to me.
Days passed. My editor called and said they might want to mention Tyeisha’s death in the next issue, but that they didn’t want a story about it. “It might be too morbid for the readers,” she told me. In my three years covering crimes for Seventeen, I had written about four female murderers, about stabbings and suffocation and gunshots to the head. The editors I’d worked with talked a lot about what their readers “wanted.” Those readers’ attention spans were short, apparently, and their eyeballs had to be hijacked with big, red letters and shocking graphics. When my story about Nakisha ran, “She killed her mom” was splashed in red letters across the first page; pictured below was a hunting knife “similar” to the one she’d used, and opposite was a grainy yearbook snapshot of Nakisha with stab marks Photoshopped all around her. I called to complain. My editor was polite, but said they knew what was needed to grab the readers’ attention in this “media-saturated” environment.
Of course, I was as culpable as the editors at Seventeen. I did the reporting that revealed nuance and uncertainty, and then did what I was told and turned in simplistic, straightforward stories with immutable lines between cause and effect. So why didn’t Tyeisha’s unsolved death make the cut? It occurred to me that the story didn’t fit the fiction of the magazine. The rigid code that dictated a certain number of pages be given to fashion, celebrities, and make-up also assured that lines didn’t get crossed. Tyeisha’s story had been one of triumph over tragedy. To have her escape Katrina and six months later be found by a roadside in rural Texas was just too complicated.
But I didn’t push. I dashed off pitches to various other publications I thought might be interested in her story: Texas Monthly, the Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times. No one bit. So I let go. Quiana and I talked every few days, then every couple of weeks. The case went nowhere.
Six weeks later, I got a call from America’s Most Wanted. Karen Daborowski, a producer, had read about Tyeisha in the Houston Chronicle and said they wanted to do a segment on her death. “Maybe we can find her killer,” she said. I had not watched America’s Most Wanted in years. In fact, had you asked me about the show the day before Karen called, I probably would have said it had been pulled by Fox a long time ago. But what I remembered as a mildly creepy combination of Unsolved Mysteries and A Current Affair had been airing nonstop every Saturday night since 1988. The show was still hosted by a man named John Walsh, who’d been thrust into the spotlight in 1981 when his son, Adam, was kidnapped and murdered. To date, it has helped catch a thousand fugitives.
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