by Elle Johnson
When Karen was killed, newspaper accounts reported that the Burger King robbery had been the first such crime for Alemar and his codefendants. But that wasn’t true. From the presentencing investigation report, the parole commissioners knew, and when questioned, Alemar confirmed, that on March 20, 1981, the three boys had robbed another fast-food restaurant, a McDonald’s on 204th Street and Bainbridge Avenue in the Bronx. “That was the first one,” Alemar said, making it seem like the boys had done only two robberies in total. But at a later hearing, when answering a different question about whether or not he was prepared to use the gun he carried into the Burger King, he let slip that because he had done two robberies before, “I knew for myself that nobody was going to get hurt, because we just weren’t there to hurt anybody.”
By the ninth and what would be his final parole hearing, Alemar was ready and willing to honestly answer the commissioner’s question: “Were you robbing numerous locations at that time?”
“Yes, we robbed several places,” he said.
“But you just got caught when this occurred?”
“On this one, yeah.”
THE WHEELMAN IN THE crime, Luis Torres, never admitted to the other robberies. Unlike Alemar’s raw and brutally honest responses to the commissioners’ questions, Torres seemed to be lying, or at least conveniently concealing the whole truth. The commissioner called him on it, saying, “Your role looks like it was a little bit more than what you’re remembering today.” As the wheelman, Torres had some deniability when it came to what happened inside the Burger King. The truth was, Torres wasn’t there when Karen was killed.
During the robbery, Torres sat in the car, parked a block away from the Burger King. Far enough away that he couldn’t see the restaurant or hear the shotgun blast that took Karen’s life. The first Torres knew about anybody getting hurt was when Ramirez rushed back to the car, carrying the shotgun. Then Alemar jumped into the back seat, with a wad of cash and a .38-caliber handgun. Torres said they mumbled that the gun went off and that it was an accident, but they didn’t specify exactly what the accident was. They went back to Alemar’s house, where they divided up the money—which, according to the parole hearing transcripts, was $1,651, much more than the $241 quoted in the newspaper. At Alemar’s home they turned on the news, and that’s when Torres said he “realized it went wrong.”
During that first parole hearing, Torres didn’t think to apologize for Karen’s death until the commissioner asked him, “You’re sorry that happened, right?” Torres replied matter-of-factly, “Yes, I am.” And left it at that. He never used the word “sorry”; instead, he said he “deeply apologized.” He made a perfunctory statement that included all the clichéd phrases about the pain he had caused the family and how he wanted to turn back the hands of time, without demonstrating any of the actual depth of feeling those phrases were meant to convey. The parole board continued to deny his parole, stating in its official decisions that the denial was due to Torres’s “lack of remorse and minimization of [his] actions.” The board decided that his release was “incompatible with the welfare and safety of the community.” He was deemed “a serious risk” because “the crime represents a propensity for extreme violence.”
Despite all this, the hearing transcripts reveal the commissioners were conflicted about Torres. He was a model prisoner. Even better than Alemar. He had a long list of achievements. Torres had earned a GED, a BS from Marist College, a paralegal certificate, and a bilingual studies certificate. He also learned vocational trades like welding, carpentry, plumbing, and machine repair. At one point he was the prison’s auto mechanic, responsible for maintaining all eighty-seven vehicles at the facility. Because he had a clean disciplinary record in 1992, he earned an outside pass and was assigned the job of driving the prison bus and taxi. Every time Torres came before the board, he had learned something new or earned a new certificate.
At his seventh parole board hearing, the commissioner said, “I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Torres, on paper this is probably one of the most difficult cases I have seen. . . . You have commendations and certificates and things that you don’t see everyday. So clearly you’ve done a lot of work on yourself and it shows potential growth and development over the years.” That was the problem for me. Taking classes, earning certificates, and improving his chances for employment on the outside didn’t mean he had changed. I still blamed Torres for what happened to Karen. Torres supplied the guns, a sawed-off shotgun and a .38-caliber pistol. Then he lied about it to the parole board.
Sounding impatient and full of attitude, Torres first said he’d found the shotgun in his backyard and sawed off the ends himself. He insisted he kept the shotgun for his own protection. “The neighborhood I come from, it’s a rough neighborhood.” He explained this with no self-awareness whatsoever that he might have been responsible for that condition. He denied an earlier statement in his presentencing report that he had rented the .38 from a friend. Now he said he guessed Alemar had the .38 at the time. There were many discrepancies between what he had said for the official record after he was convicted and what he was saying decades afterward to the parole board. It wasn’t until a later parole hearing that Torres came clean about where the guns had come from: he’d stolen them. Before he helped rob the Burger King, Torres on his own had burglarized a house. He told the commissioners, “I obtained the firearm and the shotgun during a previous burglary.”
I was not impressed by this unexpected although not altogether surprising confession. I needed Torres to be full of remorse, especially after Alemar’s unexpected impressive transformation and dedication to being better for Karen. It seemed to me that Alemar was genuinely trying to figure things out, while Torres just wanted to prove that he had changed. Even if he really hadn’t.
In order to forgive Torres—and therefore, down the road, Ramirez—I needed proof that he was sorry. Not just because he had been in prison for thirty years, but because Karen had lost her life. My forgiveness was conditional and had limits. It didn’t feel like true forgiveness. What was forgiveness, anyway? I tried to remember what had been said about it from people like Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela. The platitudes about only light driving out darkness and forgiveness liberating the soul, its being an attribute of the strong, didn’t help my particular situation. Even though I was an atheist now, forgiveness had been an essential part of my Christian upbringing—the idea of loving your enemies and turning the other cheek chief among the beliefs I had been taught to follow in elementary school. But I knew from my high school peers that in the Jewish faith, forgiveness was conditional on teshuva—repentance. Torres had not done that. Although I subscribed to the saying that we should forgive people for what they do, not who they are, I was angry at Torres for what he had done.
Letting go of my anger at Torres meant sympathizing with him, somehow putting myself in his shoes. Again, I tried to think of Torres as a character I was writing and what that character would be feeling. I could see how that character’s blame could be mitigated—he had been in the car. Torres didn’t see Karen. He never saw her alive. He never saw her with her face blown off. I could understand that he probably didn’t think it was his fault. I could imagine the fear and panic he must have felt, thinking his life was over. I felt it rising in my own throat. The sense of being suffocated. Losing one’s freedom. Making a mistake that could not be corrected—at least not immediately, but maybe over time he could prove that this one mistake did not define who he was. Maybe he did think that by taking every opportunity, every course the prison had to offer, he could prove he was worthy and deserved to be freed. Maybe that was his way of making amends. But it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough. No amount of classes or certificates could ever make up for taking a life. How could it? What could he possibly do to make that right?
Then something happened.
By 2006 Torres had been granted privileges to work outside the prison. He drove a van. He left the site. He had so man
y skills he was asked to work in construction. One day while in the field he heard a commotion, then saw a man buried alive. Without a second thought for his own safety, he rushed to help. Using only his bare hands, he dug the man out. He saved a man’s life.
By his seventh parole hearing, the story was well known. Still, the commissioners wanted him to tell it. It’s thrilling. The prisoner who took a life saved a life. The man Torres saved wrote letters on his behalf. Everyone was rooting for Torres to get out—except for the family of the girl he had killed. It made me feel petty. Incapable of compassion. The well of my sorrow was too deep to climb out of, even if it was filled with his good deeds. But my forgiveness didn’t matter. Torres had finally, accidentally, found a way to prove that he was worthy of a second chance. After his eighth appearance before the parole board, Torres’s parole was granted. Even I have to admit it’s a good story. A life for a life. I couldn’t have written it any better.
Torres is out. There’s nothing I can do but accept it. This is not a feeling of forgiveness so much as resignation. And I was still no closer to understanding how to forgive Santiago Ramirez. His next parole hearing date was less than a year away.
Chapter Nineteen
Santiago Ramirez was taken into custody by the FBI on Sunday, April 12, 1981. He stayed in detention until April 27, then was flown back to New York, where he was picked out of a lineup by witnesses from the Burger King who identified him as the shooter. The second gunman and the wheelman turned themselves in to the Daily News and the NYPD in the Bronx on April 13. I don’t remember how I found out Karen’s killers had been arrested, if my mother told me or I read it in the newspaper. I do remember being relieved that the anguish of knowing Karen’s killers was out there, walking free, was over. There would be justice for Karen.
This reprieve was temporary. Relief quickly gave way to depression. At least when the police were looking for the killers, I had something to hope for, a definable end to this trauma: capture, arrest, conviction. Now all I was left with was unending grief and no idea how to quell the mourning pain. Once the killers were in custody, the dead girl, the murdered daughter of a homicide detective, was out of the news. The story was over. My parents and I didn’t talk about Karen or discuss the murder anymore. Outwardly, everyone acted as though it was time to move on—except I wasn’t ready. I felt like I had been pulled down through the floor into a bottomless sorrow.
My father resumed his regular weekend visits to see his mother in the Bronx. I went with him at first. Riding in the car, just the two of us, he listened to the radio, I looked out the window. We never spoke about what had happened between us, him beating my mother and my coming to her defense by beating him back. I had already blocked the incident, my mind protecting me from another trauma. Aunt Barbara was protecting herself, too. She called my mother and asked that I not come around anymore. Seeing me was a too-painful reminder of the daughter she had lost. I stopped going to the Bronx.
I stopped doing homework. I stopped caring about getting good grades and pleasing my parents. I stopped worrying about whether or not I was liked or had friends. After classes, I left school quickly and retreated to the sanctuary of my room.
I’d lost my bearings, but I knew one thing: I wanted to be free. I wanted to get away from my father’s rules, my mother’s expectations. Ironically, that meant I had to do what was expected of me and follow the rules so that I could get into a good college and move away. With senior year approaching, this was my last chance to participate in activities that would look good on my college applications and prove I deserved to be admitted. It was like trying to get parole—taking classes, earning certificates, doing activities, to show I was worthy of freedom.
The SATs were my first hurdle. Less than a month away, I was resigned to not doing well my first time out. I knew that a few months later I would have another chance to take the test. I was focused on the summer and my plans to work as an intern at the Cloisters museum.
The Cloisters was part of the medieval collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Except the Cloisters wasn’t anywhere near the Met. The Cloisters’ art collection was housed in a sprawling medieval-looking compound that resembled a European monastery on top of a hill and was so far uptown in Manhattan it was almost in the Bronx. The building’s design featured four cloisters—hence the museum’s name—that had been purchased from several French abbeys, convents, and monasteries and rebuilt stone by stone inside the museum. The Cloisters was magical. But it was in a troubled neighborhood. I was worried my parents would change their minds about letting me go. But they agreed this internship would look good on my college applications. They signed the permission form and extracted a promise from me that I would never take the dangerous, even if faster, A train to get there.
That summer, my daily commute on the M4 bus took two and a half hours each way. I always sat in the first forward-facing seat, next to the window on the right-hand side of the bus, closest to the sidewalk. I wanted a better look at the shifting landscape of Madison Avenue. I watched the white Upper East Side of Manhattan, with its storefront art galleries, redbrick buildings, brownstones, and doormen in blue uniforms with gold braiding standing outside apartments morph into the dilapidated tenements with gargoyles propping up windows, sitting atop fake columns, in Spanish and Black Harlem.
The bus terminated outside the grand stone entrance of Fort Tryon Park. There was a pay phone to call the museum and request the employee van that shuttled us workers through the beautiful albeit crime- and rodent-infested woods, so overgrown and leafy green that summer, and full of hidden dangers.
The design of the Cloisters was patterned after a Benedictine monastery, which, instead of highlighting the isolation of individuals, used architecture to emphasize the sense of community. I loved being there. I left home in the early-morning dark and returned in the late light of summer nights. The building overlooked the Hudson River and had a panoramic view of the tree-lined New Jersey Palisades on the other side. The religious imagery of the medieval art was comfortingly familiar. The annunciation, the virgin birth, the resurrection. I didn’t believe in those stories anymore. The blind faith of my childhood was gone. I appreciated the stories from a distance, though, as salves meant to lessen and distract from the traumas that befell medieval life, the horrors of illness, the randomness of death.
I gave tours to awed tourists from abroad, bored teenagers from expensive summer camps on Long Island, and boisterous church groups from the outer boroughs. I designed all my tours to end with the Unicorn Tapestries—seven insanely beautiful wall-size tapestries woven in the early sixteenth century that told the story of a unicorn hunt, an allegory for either Christ’s resurrection or the hunt for love. I spent hours in the room where they hung, studying the details in the figures, finding the intricately woven flora and fauna in the background. I was drawn to the sixth tapestry, in which the unicorn is viciously slain by hunters, stabbed in the throat and flank, with another hunter’s sword poised to pierce its neck. The unicorn is tossed limp-necked over the back of a horse and carried off, only to be miraculously resurrected in the seventh, final tapestry. Blood still dripping from its wounds, the unicorn sits regally in a field of flowers, enclosed by a wooden fence, chained to a tree by a golden tether. A pretty prison. Caged but still alive, patiently waiting to be freed.
When my shift in the galleries was over, I would disappear through one of the many secret passageways that led to the hidden employee-only spaces. I spent hours in the upstairs library researching or down in the workshop learning medieval crafts—calligraphy, tapestry weaving, gilt painting, stained-glass window making. It was a job, but it felt like freedom. For the first time ever, I was sad to see the summer end.
Senior year I focused on getting into college. I stayed away from classes that would pull my grade point average down, like calculus and organic chemistry, and substituted drama and Latin. Now instead of being on my high school’s science core track with the hardcore nerds, I wa
s taking classes in humanities, surrounded by theater and art geeks. That put me out of sync with the classmates I had been with for three years, including Lisa. We saw each other in the hallway and exchanged pleasantries about our parents, the SATs, and her new boyfriend like nothing had changed. And between us, it hadn’t. Our friendship was the same. I was different.
How much I had changed became clear when I was asked to give a speech at a school assembly for Arista, my high school’s branch of the New York public school system’s honor society. I faced an auditorium full of students, teachers, and parents and quoted Shakespeare, to thine own self be true, and advised my peers not to worry about what everybody else wanted for them. “Follow your purpose,” I said. My purpose was just to be me, whatever that entailed. There was no right or wrong. And if your purpose was to take a life, my purpose was to stop you. There was no obligation to your race, your gender, your school, or your parents.
People asked if I had written the speech all by myself. I was able to laugh off the backhanded compliment because I had support. I had made friends. Best friends. Three girls I never would have met in the science classes I used to take. Cathy was proud Queens-born Irish with long, straight black hair down her back and unrequited crushes on boys that fueled her poetry. After school we went to Gaby’s Pizza for a slice, played Ms. Pac-Man in the arcade, then hung out for hours at her house on the other side of the Long Island Rail Road tracks. Judy was Black and Jewish, soft-spoken with a powerful singing voice. She took me to my first Messiah sing that Christmas, and invited me to sleepovers at her house, where I met her older brother, a trumpet player at the Queens College school of music, who became my first boyfriend. Dominique was second-generation Haitian, unapologetic and brutally honest. She liked to keep her own company and showed me it was okay to do the same. In my senior yearbook, she wrote that I was one of the few people with whom she felt comfortable enough to show “the real me. I’m not really as cool and tough as I pretend and I think you realize that. But with you I don’t worry about that. I think we can even sit around together and not say anything. Sometimes I really wish we were related.” With these girls I had the kind of friendship I’d convinced myself I would have had with Karen. Close, connected, with real understanding, and effortless. But looking back on my teenage relationship with Karen, I can see that something about it just didn’t add up. On the surface we had so much in common, and I wanted that to be true. But if I was being honest, I had to admit that Karen and I never would have been friends.
