Feature —
The Lives of Others
What does it mean to “tell someone’s story”?
By Julia DahlThat night we flew to Houston, and the next morning we showed up at the Fort Bend County sheriff’s station. Inside, Detective Campbell—who Sedg had warned me was “all business”—opened his case file, and pulled out color photographs of the crime scene. There she was: lying in the grass, her skinny legs sticking out from under a yellow tarp. She had on the same blue jeans and belt she was wearing when I met her. The grass around her body was long and lush, green and damp. I wondered if it rained on her while she laid, eyes wide open, in the clover. She was found just a few feet off the road, and according to Campbell, had been shot there. There were minimal wounds other than the fatal bullet wound, which Campbell said suggested that she had been killed by someone she knew. Campbell told us that when he visited her apartment, “it was organized and homey. Like she was focused on raising a child.” He showed us birth certificates and FEMA correspondence. She’d kept her papers in a shoebox. “She was doing all the things she should,” he said. “She was setting up her future.”
The big Texas sky was crowded with clouds in every shade of gray as we drove past fields of cows and ducks, past an old country homestead with a gated family cemetery in the front yard, past Trav’s Roadhouse, to the bend in the road where Tyeisha was murdered. A house sat just a few hundred yards away, but Campbell interviewed the people there, and they didn’t hear the gunshot. “The TV was probably on,” he said. As Tom and Dave set up the shot, I stepped onto the grass, half expecting to feel some sort of ghostly presence. The sun shone through the clouds, but I tried to imagine the road at night. I tried to see her in her last moments. I tried to feel her fear. But I couldn’t. All I could do was what I was doing, standing before the cameras to make sure she was not forgotten.
Months went by. And then a year. Occasionally, I would get a phone call from Karen, saying they were planning to air the show soon, but then she’d drop out of contact for a couple of months. At one point, it had apparently been slated to run as part of a special Hurricane Katrina hour in late 2007, but then she told me it was “so strong,” they wanted it to anchor another episode. Tyeisha had been dead more than two years when the segment finally aired on March 22, 2008.
I was back in Georgia that weekend, visiting my boyfriend’s family. We got take-out BBQ from a local rib shack and gathered in front of the TV. Before each commercial break, they teased my segment: “Coming up: a magazine writer leaves behind the glitzy New York fashion world in a quest for justice.” I covered my face as they pasted my voice over clips of Sarah Jessica Parker adjusting her skirt on the street and cringed at the reenactments. The “Julia” in the segment had a big apartment with leather couches, and the “Tyeisha” was much more conservative than the tattooed girl with messy, maroon-tinted hair extensions I’d met in Georgia. They flashed images of the real Tyeisha on the screen, but my face was the most prominent. The piece even ended with John Walsh giving me a “personal thanks” for being involved.
To me, the compelling story is still Tyeisha’s. How, like thousands of her friends and neighbors in New Orleans, she was torn from her support system, separated from the people who looked out for her. She’d tried to rebuild a life for herself and her child in a new state and instead became the victim of a brutal murder. But no one else seemed particularly interested in that story. According to the Centers for Disease Control, homicide is the second leading cause of death for black women between ages fifteen and twenty-four, but even to America’s Most Wanted, Tyeisha’s tale was only worth telling in relation to me.
I suppose I knew that the press tends to illuminate the exceptions, the extremes. The plight of the family with septuplets instead of the more common burden of unexpected twins; the detained immigrant with the amputated penis instead of the thousands with untreated depression. The impulse is understandable, and certainly an oddball story can draw attention to a worthy issue, but what of the issues inside the more common stories? By their very nature, such issues—like mental illness in immigrant communities, or the high murder rate among young black women—are more intransigent, harder to untangle and fit into a facile narrative. I imagine that maybe Jill Leovy, a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, was thinking this way when she created The Homicide Report, a blog on the paper’s Web site that attempts to report on every single homicide in Los Angeles County; last year, there were 324. As the explanatory page puts it, “only the most unusual and statistically marginal homicide cases receive press coverage, while those cases at the very eye of the storm—those which best expose the true statistical dimensions of the problem of deadly violence—remain hidden.”
It remains to be seen whether my appearance on America’s Most Wanted will lead to the capture of Tyeisha’s killer. Two months after the show aired, there are no promising leads, but I believe I did the right thing, as a human being and as a journalist, when I realize that had I walked out of that Georgia church ten minutes later, or turned left instead of going straight out the door, Tyeisha Martin—not yet twenty years old, mother, sister, daughter, hurricane survivor—would have died not only too soon, but in silence.
CJR
