An American Summer

by Alex Kotlowitz

  The newspaper never published the letter, but Lisa would eventually get a license plate holder that reads: He was my son. His name was Darren.

  Here’s the other thing you need to know: from the day police arrested Michael Reed, her son’s killer, Lisa refused to hold a grudge against him. She didn’t know Reed, knew nothing about him. What she did know is this: “He was in a messed-up place, like Darren.” One week after the murder, she posted on Facebook:

  Another mother has lost her son, only this loss is different. Today the man who shot Darren has been charged with first degree murder. There is no victory here and I can only imagine the weight his mother carries. I will fervently pray for her and her son. His name is Michael Reed and he too is someone’s son and maybe even someone’s father, like Darren was. He too was lost in a dark place just like my son was before he made the decision to receive eternal life. I ask you all to pray for him and his mother, as she grieves the life of her son, just as you have prayed for me.

  Moreover, she figured that things would run their course, that “what was going to happen was going to happen.” She assumed that “he was going to jail for first-degree murder and that that wasn’t going to have any effect on my life.” She was wrong. On both counts.

  * * *

  —

  Mother’s Day descended. It was as if death knelt down—again—and swept everything aside. Her apartment had recently been renovated, and her kitchen, where she spent most of her time and which overlooked a vacant corner lot, was bathed in sunlight. There were few memories of her son. She displayed only one photo of him, from junior high school, kneeling in his football uniform, long-necked like his mom, thin as a pencil. She also kept on her desk in the living room an ashtray-sized ceramic bowl that Darren had made in middle school. (Lisa is not given to sentimentality; she keeps paper clips in the ceramic bowl.) Her bedroom was in the rear of her apartment, and unlike her kitchen received little light. She lay there in her queen-sized bed, alone, sheltered from the inquiries of friends and from the gusty summer wind which rattled her windows. At one point, in gray sweats and a T-shirt, she shuffled into the kitchen, made herself some coffee, poured in creamer and a touch of sweetener, and went back to bed, propping the pillows against her headboard. She sat there thinking about the late nights when she’d leave the kitchen light on so she would know when Darren arrived home. She remembered Mother’s Day from two years ago. Darren was locked up without phone privileges, so he had another inmate call his mom, who in turn called Lisa to wish her a happy Mother’s Day from Darren. He never forgot.

  Lisa is deeply religious. She attends a nondenominational church and leans on her faith. In bed, she recited aloud one of her favorite proverbs: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.” She found comfort in this passage, and thought the only way she would get through the hurt was to focus on God’s love for her and not on her own feelings.

  She would’ve called her mother, but she had developed Alzheimer’s, which had so progressed that she often didn’t remember Lisa. Lisa had steered away from the mothers’ groups, because she worried that they’d say, “Get out of here. Your son could have killed my child. Get out of here with that.” She navigated grief by herself, occasionally reaching out. That morning she called a friend who had lost a son to illness, wanting to know how she responded when asked how many children she had. Two, Lisa decided she’d answer. Some friends had been warning her that come July 22, the anniversary of Darren’s death, she would struggle, that it would bring her back to the day he was killed. It irritated her that people told her how she should feel. It’s just another day, she thought to herself. I refuse to give it power over me.

  On this day she knew she couldn’t fall any further. She came to realize, “I’m more than a grieving mother. We’re all more than the sum total of our worst experience. I won’t allow myself to be reduced to that single day. There’s so much more to me. There’s so much more to my life. So I need to pick up the pieces and keep moving.”

  * * *

  —

  It was a rough year that followed. The assistant state’s attorney, Cheryl Gavin, who was prosecuting Michael Reed for first-degree murder, told me that Lisa was angry. No matter how much time he serves, I’ll never have my son back, Lisa told Cheryl. You know, I want him to raise my son’s kids. They don’t have a father now. (Lisa remembers it differently. She says she wasn’t agitated, just that she was being direct about her situation.) Lisa didn’t show up for the court dates and rarely returned Cheryl’s calls. It was complicated. She was irked at her son. “I spent some time being angry with him,” she told me. “I could not imagine what he was thinking. The place I got to is, if he hadn’t been killed then, he still wouldn’t be alive today. You don’t rob drug dealers and survive.” On the anniversary of Darren’s death, two of his friends came by, both to comfort Lisa and to receive comfort from her. But she had little patience for their sorrow. I’m good, she told them. Don’t come up here with all that sadness. By that, she meant that they were all out there taking risks, and they knew the stakes. Stop feeling sorry for yourselves, she thought.

  Through Facebook she tracked down the young woman whom she’d heard had been with Darren as he lay on the parkway. Lisa wanted to know about those last moments. She wanted to know that her son didn’t die alone. The young woman told Lisa that she and her sister were on the way home, just around the corner, when they noticed this young man bleeding on the ground. In a phone call, she told Lisa that while her sister called for an ambulance, she knelt on the ground beside him. Was he still alive? Lisa asked. The young woman told her that he was. Did you tell him it was going to be okay?

  Yes, m’am, she assured Lisa.

  She said that Darren was choking on his blood, and that she took his hand. Darren’s whole body shook, as if he was seizing, she told Lisa, and then his eyes rolled to the back of his head. Lisa was weeping at this point, but mostly out of relief, knowing that her son didn’t die by himself. The young woman said that Darren kept trying to say something but couldn’t get any sounds out. Lisa wonders what it was, but “I know it begins with ‘Tell my momma…’ ” That’s what she keeps telling herself—that he always knew he could count on her.

  She finally got the strength to attend a court date. Reed had been charged with first-degree murder, and she thought it a straightforward case. But it was problematic. The key witness, Darren’s friend, had pled guilty to unlawful use of a weapon and so didn’t make for the best witness. And Darren himself had three felonies. Cheryl, the prosecutor, had no doubt that the defense attorney would revisit Darren’s past and paint him as a thug. Cheryl also told Lisa that Michael Reed argued he had shot Darren in self-defense. What do you mean, self-defense? Lisa countered. He killed my son. They came to rob each other.

  “That was a gut check for me,” Lisa told me. “They didn’t care about my forgiveness. He was fighting for his life. And their belief was that if my son had not been there, Michael wouldn’t be having the issues he’s having. ‘So, get out of here with your forgiveness. Kick rocks with your forgiveness.’ That was a real moment for me. If he was found not guilty—the way I was thinking about it is, he got away with murder.”

  Cheryl tried to break it gently, but given the problems in the case, she was inclined to let Reed plead guilty to a lesser charge, to second-degree murder. Lisa took her time. “I had to decide whether I believed what I said about forgiveness, whether I believed all the things I’d been preaching,” she told me. She prayed, and then told Cheryl she would agree to a plea deal if she got to read a victim impact statement at his sentencing. Reed and his attorney agreed to that. Twice the sentencing was postponed because Lisa wasn’t prepared, and then the third time Lisa arrived at court, Cheryl asked her for the statement, which she needed to submit to the judge. Lisa told her it was in her head. C
heryl put her in an office so that Lisa could write it out. Cheryl assumed that Lisa, like most family members of victims, would address the suffering of herself and her family. Lisa took the stand and in an unwavering voice read her statement.

  “My name is Lisa Daniels and I want to thank you for this opportunity to share my heart today by allowing me to give this victim impact statement. I understand this to be a statement in my own words that informs the offender of how the crime committed has affected me and my family. That crime, being the murder of my son Darren Easterling, has affected us all differently because Darren was more than just my son. He was a father, a brother, a nephew, and a friend to many, and his death has left a void in us all but most importantly is the loss for his son and his daughter who are ages nine and seven right now and as they grow will continue to be affected by no longer having their father.

  “My son wasn’t perfect. He made bad decisions and lifestyle choices that cost him his life. But at the end of the day none of his choices mattered because he was my son and I loved him and miss him terribly. The morning after he was killed the Southtown newspaper headline read: ‘Man shot to death in Park Forest had drug and weapon felony convictions’ and from that day to this I awake every day with the mission and purpose that his legacy will not be defined by his worst mistake. No one’s should. Not even the defendant.

  “Bishop Desmond Tutu is quoted as saying, ‘My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.’ I believe that statement to be true. I believe that we are all connected by our humanity and I cannot speak for my son’s humanity without speaking for the same humanity of the man who, by one really bad decision, took his life. I have and will always continue to speak on Darren’s behalf but today I speak for you Michael Reed. Because the truth is that things could have gone differently that day and this young man could have just as easily lost his life and Darren would be sitting in this seat needing someone to speak on his behalf. I am a mother and I know the heart of a mother. So I will speak from a mother’s heart for a child who made a horrible, horrible choice.

  “I don’t know all of the details of the encounter between Darren and Michael on July 22, 2012, but there are two things I know for sure. The first is that no matter what he did or the choices he made he didn’t deserve to die that day as a result of those choices; and the second thing I know for sure is that this young man does not deserve to spend another year, day or minute behind bars as a result of a poor choice he made. Darren is not coming back, and fifteen years of his life is not going to change that. And so I ask Your Honor to be lenient to this young man.”

  The judge sentenced Michael Reed to fifteen years, which, given the time he had served, meant he’d be out in three and a half years. As Reed was led out of the courtroom, his hands cuffed to a shackle around his waist, he turned toward Lisa, put his hands together as if in prayer, and mouthed, Thank you.

  * * *

  —

  I want to be careful here. There’s a lot to admire in what Lisa did. As Kathryn told me, when you lose a child to the violence, “it pulls out of you who you really are. In Lisa’s case, she had to dig deep into herself, figure out what she really believes in. That’s the real struggle following a loss: Who am I as a person? The deep drilling into yourself—that’s where the forgiveness comes from.” But Kathryn also talks about how forgiveness is easier when the line between victim and killer is blurred, where the victim is someone who just as easily could’ve been on the other side of the equation.

  I’ve sat in on trials where, honestly, there wasn’t room for forgiveness. At one trial the accused, Andrew Ruiz, glared at Myrna Roman, whose son he had killed. Ruiz had randomly shot Myrna’s son, Manny, as he sat in a car waiting for the traffic light to change. Ruiz didn’t know him. He was just angry after a dispute with his girlfriend, and as he got in his car that night, he announced, “It’s Halloween, and someone’s going to die.” In court, Ruiz smirked and sneered, one time throwing a gang sign out of sight of the judge. At the sentencing, Ruiz’s father seated himself behind the lead detective in the case and muttered, “Fuck the police.” Myrna is generous of spirit. She once took another grieving mother under her wings. She has helped other moms post flyers, helped them find information that might lead to their son’s murderer. She has spoken to ex-offenders, offering her support. I asked her whether she could ever forgive Ruiz, who was convicted. “If I felt in my heart that he actually felt remorse or regret for what he did, but I don’t think there’s any way with this person,” she told me. “There’s no soft spot in my heart for him.” I understood. I felt the same way.

  Lisa doesn’t want to hold herself up as somehow more openhearted. She’s not. It’s just that she knew. Her son and Michael Reed tried to kill each other. One came out alive. Lisa knows how easily it could’ve come out the other way. In the end, it had more to do with justice than it did with forgiveness. What felt right. What felt just. She has since set up an organization, the Darren B. Easterling Center for Restorative Practices, to work with troubled children and grieving mothers.

  “Forgiving Michael wasn’t something that I intended to do,” she told me. “There was just no other consideration. Michael could’ve died that day. And Darren could’ve been facing a long prison sentence. Other people’s notion of justice is that a wrong needs to be righted. I wasn’t looking for that. I was just looking for the right thing to be done. And for me that was someone speaking up on Michael’s behalf. If that had been Darren, I would’ve wanted someone to speak for him and for others to see my son for more than just the mistakes he made. That same thing I would’ve wanted for Darren, I had to be able to give to Michael.”

  Lisa wrote to Reed in prison, telling him that she wanted to help him find a job when he’s released, help get his feet back on the ground. Reed wrote her back.

  To Ms. Daniels,

  You continue to amaze me. I really appreciate everything that you have done for me as far as court. I can’t say thank you enough because being a mother and having to go thru what your going thru can really be tough and to have enough strength to forgive says a lot. Then say what you said at the sentencing really shocked me. I never had a chance to tell you how sorry I was. I never meant for any of this to happen. Ms. Daniels I didn’t know your son. I had nothing against your son. I only came in contact with your son because of Jameal. I say this to say I did not try to rob your son or his friend. Since I been fighting this case I always wanted to let you know this there is so much stuff I would like to tell you but everything has a time and hopefully when the time is right I could share those things with you face to face. I would love the help that you are offering. That means a lot to me. I would be looking forward to that opportunity if there is any way I could repay I would try my best to do honestly. Once again thank you for your forgiveness and giving me a second chance. I truly am sorry! For all this thank and God Bless. Have a Blessed holiday.

  Sincerely, Mike

  On her way to work one morning, Lisa pulled Reed’s letter out of the mailbox, took it to her car in the driveway, where she sat to read it. She knew then that she didn’t need to find out what had happened that afternoon. Nothing was going to change the outcome. She needed to focus on what she could control. And so, a few days later, she wrote him back.

  Hi Mike,

  Thank you for your letter and please know that your sincere apology means more to me than you can ever possibly imagine. Please forgive my delay in responding but I’ve been really busy working, and building the organization. I know that there are probably bundles of things that took place the day you met Darren that I know nothing about and I really appreciate you wanting to share some of that with me moving forward. Darren’s death has changed my life (and your life) forever and from that day to this my focus has been on moving forward, helping others do the same and building an organization enabling the light of Darren’s life to overshadow the experience of
his death. And my prayer for you is that the rest of your life will overshadow the few minutes of that one day. And I am here to help you accomplish that any way I possibly can. That being said, always feel free to reach out to me and share your hopes, dreams and plans for the future but don’t feel the need to share anything that happened that day. Let’s continue to move forward. Sound like a plan? ☺

  I look forward to hearing from you again.

  Ms. Daniels

  From prison, Reed told me, “I just want her to know I’m not a cold-blooded killer.” When I mentioned this to Lisa, she told me she already knew that. “It makes me sad that he got the impression that that’s what people thought of him. I never thought anything close to that. I would stand toe-to-toe with anybody who thinks that that’s who he is.”

  Chapter 3

  A Conversation: The OGs

  MAY 21…MAY 22…MAY 23…

  It was tough to locate. I was given the intersection, but all I could find was an aged two-story building, its blue paint peeling like a snake shedding its skin. A sheet of plywood covered the first-floor window. The structure looked abandoned. As I stood outside, an older gentleman pedaled by on a three-speed bike. “Methadone?” he asked. “Methadone?” Another man on the corner offered loose cigarettes at fifty cents a smoke. Then I noticed the two cameras above a white door which had a CeaseFire bumper sticker plastered on it. I knocked. I could hear someone remove a security bar, and the door opened a few inches. Through the crack I heard an unwelcoming voice. “What you want?” I told him I was there to see Jimmie Lee. There were muffled sounds, and all I could make out was the word “police.” I corrected him. “A friend,” I said. “Alex.” The door shut. A half-minute later Jimmie Lee opened the door, apologized, and beckoned me in.