Feature —
The Lives of Others
What does it mean to “tell someone’s story”?
By Julia DahlSo I agreed to the interview. But the interview turned into a request to travel with the producers and a crew to Texas. “We want the story to be about you,” said Karen. “About your bond with Tyeisha and how you cared enough to find her killer.” Calling my fleeting relationship with Tyeisha a bond was a stretch, but in my mind, Karen was asking how much I was willing to do to help Tyeisha. The story of her death deserved to be told, and if I couldn’t convince Seventeen or any other publication of that, I figured I could get in front of a camera and help someone else tell it. I didn’t think about what it meant, journalistically, to become an advocate for someone I’d written about. Having had no formal training in the craft I practiced, I navigated articles and the people involved by my gut, and I felt I owed Tyeisha this much. It also didn’t occur to me that I’d become to Karen what Tyeisha had been to me: a subject. Just as I’d asked Tyeisha to relive Katrina beneath a magnolia tree so I could write an article about her for Seventeen, Karen was asking me to be a character in her own television report about Tyeisha.
On October 13, 2006, I met Karen and Sedgwick Tourison, another producer, at the American Airlines terminal at Baltimore’s BWI. We landed in Dallas around noon and drove to a Whattaburger restaurant near the airport to meet Dave Barsotti and Tom Overstreet, the local camera and audio guys. We all said hello, then Dave dropped a mini-microphone down my blouse, tucked a battery pack into my pants, and told me to get in the driver’s seat of the rented Jeep Cherokee. As I drove, Tom aimed his camera at me and Sedg prompted me to talk about what I was doing.
“I’m driving,” I said, lamely.
“To … ” steered Sedg.
“I’m driving to visit Tyeisha’s mom, Cabrini, and her daughter Daneisha,” I said.
We exited the freeway and made our way into Cabrini’s apartment complex. As the crew unloaded the equipment, I wondered how I would greet Cabrini. The woman’s daughter had been murdered not six months before, and here I was waltzing in with cameras and lights and four more strangers to poke at her pain. The point, obviously, was to find Tyeisha’s killer. I hoped Cabrini knew that. Karen gave the word, and I walked down the outdoor hallway toward Tom, who had his camera positioned on his shoulder, and knocked on the door. Quiana opened it, looking gorgeous, just liked I remembered her. We hugged and I stepped toward Cabrini, who was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Tyeisha on it. I wasn’t sure if I should hug her or shake her hand, but she came toward me with her arms open, and I was glad. The crew flipped on the lights, wired everyone up, and we started talking on-camera, first about Katrina, then about what Cabrini remembered of Tyeisha’s arrival in Texas. Tyeisha didn’t want to stay in Dallas a day longer than she had to. “She was like, ‘Mama, it’s all old people around here,’_” said Cabrini. So she took Daneisha and left for Houston, where her boyfriend lived. For the first time in her entire life, Tyeisha got her own apartment. Her own furniture. “She was so excited,” said Cabrini. “She said, ‘Mama, there’s no rules. I can wake up when I want.’ I said, ‘Lord, I wouldn’t want to live where there’s no rules.’_” In February, Tyeisha stopped calling. On March 9, 2006, six months to the day after I met her, her body was found in a grassy ditch at the bend of a county road.
We woke up early the next morning and met downstairs at the hotel for breakfast. Sedg laid out the day’s schedule, which began with an hour of them filming me typing on my laptop in my room. Sedg wanted more shots of Quiana and me, so we picked her up and drove to a nearby park. Quiana was six years older than Tyeisha, and more articulate and outgoing. Life hasn’t been easy for her. She is twenty-nine, and has four children. She had an emergency hysterectomy just a few months before Katrina hit. The storm washed away her home and separated her from her mother, sister, and children. She settled in Atlanta with her boyfriend, but they broke up. And then her sister was murdered.
When the cameras were ready, we said our lines. I asked her about the last time she talked to her sister, and she said it had been weeks and that she’d begun to worry. We repeated this sequence several times so they could film us from different angles. Quiana didn’t seem to mind. I remembered what she said to me months ago, when she called and told me about the murder: “I don’t want to see my sister on Cold Case Files in five years. I want somebody caught.”
After we dropped off Quiana, Sedg and Karen told me they wanted some Sex and the City shots of me, so we stopped at an upscale strip mall to do more filming. Trailed by Tom and his camera, I dutifully walked into a boutique and gazed at racks of clothing I couldn’t afford. Karen assured me that they needed shots like this to “set me up” as a former New York City magazine writer. They thought it important to play up the “fish out of water” angle: big-city girl gets caught up in a small-town murder. The whole thing was false, and I reminded Karen that I hadn’t been on staff at a women’s magazine since 2002. But in the language of reality television, three years of my life are boiled down to a shopping trip in order to facilitate a story arc.
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