The Officer's Daughter

by Elle Johnson

  I could count on one hand the times Karen and I had done things together: her Sweet Sixteen and mine; her sleepover, then mine. There were photographs of all us kids in the basement of my house. Mugging for the camera in shirt sleeves, tank tops, and shorts—the summer. There was my memory of another visit sitting cross-legged in my closet when Karen taught me how to kiss a boy by practicing on a pillow. Only two months older than me, she was worldly-wise. There was a spring weekend when heavy winds whipped across the Triborough Bridge and Aunt Barbara said they couldn’t make the trip out to Queens in her VW bug. I watched the weather, hoping it would change. My disappointment was bitter and profound. Life felt unfair, and I was inconsolable when the day passed and I didn’t get to see Karen.

  Usually I saw Karen when I went with my father to see his mother in the Bronx. Karen was the reason I went in the first place. After sitting with Grandma, we would amble up the block to visit the rest of the family. We came together in Aunt Barbara’s living room or squeezed around the small kitchen table having cold drinks in the summer, hot in the winter. We sat with our parents. An official state visit of sorts. Subdued, smiling, sometimes laughing knowingly at the ridiculousness of adults. We waited patiently to interject the appropriate anecdotes about what was going on in our lives—report cards with all As, awards for extracurricular activities, an acknowledgment in the local newspaper or church newsletter for myriad other accomplishments. The things parents cared about. Never anything bad, unfortunate, or unhappy. Never anything about how we felt, just how we were doing in our respective worlds. We never ventured off on our own to play when we were kids or as we got older to gossip and reveal our secrets—hopes, dreams, and fears—as I imagined we would have. When I did go up to Karen’s room it was to see a new piece of furniture, a new item of clothing. Sometimes she’d excuse herself and leave to get back to homework, chores, or whatever weekend plans she had. And I wished I could go with her. But most of the time when I went to the Bronx with my father, Karen wasn’t home.

  I was afraid that I was the cousin Karen was forced to see. The relative she had to invite to her sleepover because her parents made her. The same way she had to invite me to her sweet sixteen. The reason she came late to mine, because she didn’t really want to be there. Maybe every time I went to visit Grandma, Karen made herself scarce on purpose. I winced, stung by the realization that I didn’t know what Karen really thought about me. She was always friendly, but I wasn’t sure she was really my friend. Or that I was hers.

  I could have called Karen more on the phone, made my parents take me to see her more often. But I didn’t. Maybe I liked the idea of us being friends more than I wanted us to be friends. Maybe I didn’t know how to be friends. Or maybe what I wanted from Karen was acceptance and approval of who I was. Then maybe I could have been free to be myself.

  Chapter Twenty

  When I was sixteen, my sixteen-year-old cousin, Karen Marsh, had her face blown off by a sawed-off shotgun in a robbery gone awry at a local Burger King in the Bronx. Her brother Warren Marsh asked me to write a letter against granting parole for Karen’s killer, Santiago Ramirez.

  After Karen was killed I decided there was no God. I was in charge of my life, my destiny. I was in control. I was God. Except for one thing.

  Everyone dies. Everyone. Including sometimes beautiful and smart sixteen-year-old girls with their whole lives ahead of them. Maybe Karen died sooner than she should have. But maybe she would have walked out of that Burger King and been run over by a bus. Maybe she would have found out that she had cancer and died anyway. And then who would we blame? Not Santiago Ramirez, the man who pulled the trigger.

  He said it was an accident. He’d never handled a sawed-off shotgun before. He didn’t mean to kill her. But he fled to California because he knew the only thing worse than killing a cop was killing a cop’s child—which Karen was. Her father was a decorated homicide detective. My father was a parole officer. And Santiago Ramirez was right. If the Daily News had not printed his side of the story and if the FBI had not brought him back safely, my uncle and my father would have found him and killed him. More death, more dying, more families ruined. More pain. But not for Karen.

  Karen died instantly. Shot at point-blank range. With one blast, it was over. The rest of us are the ones who are in pain. And now that Santiago Ramirez is up for parole, thirty-three years later, it’s like we are a bloody open wound all over again.

  We aren’t asking the parole board to punish Santiago Ramirez for Karen; we’re asking the parole board to punish him for us. For the pain we continue to live with every day. Because for the family, it’s not over. Memories of Karen surface on her birthday and mine. Then again on the day she was killed, on the day she was buried, on the day Santiago Ramirez was caught, and on the day he went to trial. And now there will be a new day—the day Santiago goes before the parole board. I’ll be forced to remember this new day until his application for parole is accepted or if rejected for the rest of his life—or ours, whichever ends first. Because death is the only way this pain ends. Unless we can somehow figure out how to forgive.

  I once heard it said that forgiveness is being able to accept that you can’t change the outcome. I’ve heard people say, “Don’t put a question mark where God has put a period.” But I am God, so I should be able to stop this, to forgive—if for no other reason than not forgiving hurts only me.

  I don’t know how to forgive Santiago Ramirez. But I know it’s not going to happen as long as I exercise my power to keep him locked up. As long as he is inside, I am invested in his worthlessness. In the idea that he was a bad person who took a good life. He’ll never be able to replace Karen’s life. He’ll never accomplish what we would like to believe Karen would have or could have done. But we should make him try. He owes us a good life. A life as good as the one Karen would have lived. A life spent trying. Working hard. Being better. I say let Santiago Ramirez out and let him live up to that. Let him out and let’s see if I can start to forgive. Because it truly is madness to continue this way with no end in sight.

  I know this is not the letter my cousin Warren expected me to write. But we know from Karen’s death that life is full of the unexpected. And learning to deal with the unexpected is what life is about. Karen never had that chance. We do. I submit this letter to the parole board so that Mr. Ramirez, my cousin Warren, and I can finally be set free.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The copied pages of the transcript were littered with thick black marks. Slashes of permanent marker covered names, job titles, and any identifying nouns or adjectives of everyone except the guilty parties—Ramirez and his codefendants. Curiously, even Karen’s name was blacked out. Meant to conceal and protect, these black marks had the opposite effect, and made me think even more about who was being redacted from the story.

  By the time I received all the parole hearing transcripts for Santiago Ramirez, he had been in prison for thirty-three years. “I’m kind of nervous,” Ramirez said during the early parole hearings. In the transcripts his words faltered, his speech was halting. The commissioners were solicitous and reminded him to take his time. But he couldn’t, saying, “This is a very important moment in my life.”

  Ramirez was doing everything he could to earn parole. He had completed every program the Department of Corrections asked him to complete. He said, “I’m always trying to become a better person every day, you know. And I have to be empowered with different skills and different information to do so.” He completed aggression replacement training and worked with the Youth Assistance Program (YAP), for which he wrote a training manual called Breaking the Cycle and the Chains. He had held numerous jobs with titles so broad and vague I could only guess at what they entailed: utility gang, laundry operator, gymnasium porter, maintenance laborer, industry worker, typist, clerk, teacher’s aide, lawn and grounds.

  At one hearing, he explained his work ethic. “Sometime ago, I read a saying in a classroom, ‘The descent to hell is ea
sy, the gates are open day and night, but to reclimb that slope and reach the upper end, there is labor.’” He said every job he had felt like “I’m climbing that slope. I know I have a ways to go and a lot of hard work ahead of me.” He found his true calling in asbestos removal. Removing asbestos was something he really enjoyed. He said, “It allows me to really give back . . . knowing that I’m doing the right thing and that I’m going to help other people not become exposed to asbestos . . . I take pride in trying to protect life and preserve life.” This sounded ridiculous to me. He was either delusional or desperate to appear as though he had changed. He wanted to be free, and asbestos removal had earned him the privilege of working outside the prison walls. He’d had a little taste of freedom and was determined to get out for good.

  Even though his own appeals were over, he worked at the law library. He had jobs as a paralegal, a law clerk, and a legal research course instructor, helping other inmates. To the parole board, he said these jobs helped him to realize “that I have to follow the rules and regulations, because I’m an example. I’m going to need that attitude upon my release to respect the laws and the rules and regulation of society.”

  He was also concerned with the rules and regulations of religion. “I rekindled my relationship with God.” Besides working for the chaplain, he had completed the New York Theological Seminary Certificate Program. Karen’s murder had made both of us change our mind about God. I lost my faith and he found his, keeping the balance sheet of believers and non- even on both sides. That seemed to be even more proof that religion was man-made, a salve to ease whatever pain we were experiencing. Religion had helped Ramirez clean up his act in a quest for freedom. He said God had “given me the strength to become the man that I am.” The man that he had been was troubled.

  Ramirez had “received numerous disciplinary tickets for various violations of institutional rules,” including an assault on staff, violating direct orders, and possessing contraband and drugs. One commissioner described Ramirez as a “vicious killer” and said, “Based on your disciplinary history and despite your lengthy incarceration, you have failed to conform your behavior as a civil and potentially law-abiding person otherwise would.” That’s because Ramirez was a drug addict.

  Ramirez started using drugs in 1976, when he was fifteen years old. He told the commissioners he started out with marijuana and alcohol, then progressed to LSD, mescaline, cocaine, and finally heroin. He said he turned to drugs because he liked the way they made him feel. He also liked the lifestyle that went along with drugs and “the attention I was getting from the street.” After barely graduating from high school, he worked at a print shop, where he did drugs on the job, “which is very dangerous because I’m around machinery, equipment that can rip your hand right off your body. Dangerous for the other people that I’m around.”

  He admitted that “in fact, I didn’t stop using drugs until fourteen years into the sentence, which was 1995.” He got clean in December of that year and credited the judge in his case. “This may sound strange, for the sentence he gave me. Because had he given me anything less, it would have did me no good. I still would have continued to use drugs.” He said he had a total disregard for the law and lack of self-respect due to feelings of abandonment. For this he blamed his family situation.

  In a familiar prisoner refrain, he said that although “I had my mother, I never had that male figure.” At early parole hearings, he said, “My father returned from Vietnam addicted to heroin. My uncle committed suicide while in prison, and my grandfather moved away.” It reminded me of the mantra I used to express how Karen had been killed. But over the years, Ramirez changed his phrasing. The sentence structure was improved to include how the events had affected him. So in later hearings, he said, “My father returned from the Vietnam War addicted to heroin. I felt alone. My grandfather moved to another state. I felt abandoned. My uncle committed suicide in prison, and I felt betrayed.” Even if what he said was true, it felt like he had been coached. I doubted this enlightenment had changed him. Was he speaking his truth or merely telling the parole board what he was told they wanted to hear?

  It came as no surprise to learn that Ramirez had been high when he committed the robbery. “On that particular day, there at work, I began my lunch break taking a tab of acid, smoking a joint, and having a beer. After work I continued to smoke weed, and I continued to drink a couple of beers, and that was the events leading up to the robbery.” Over the course of nine parole hearings and eight postponements spanning thirteen years he revealed the details of exactly what happened and why.

  It all started with a traffic ticket.

  Ramirez was caught driving without car insurance. He went to court, where the judge imposed a $500 fine and suspended his license until the fine was paid. Even though he was working, “making a pretty decent buck at the time,” he decided to commit a robbery to get the money. Ramirez was the mastermind; he picked the place to rob. The night before the robbery, Ramirez, Alemar, and Torres cased the Burger King restaurant on White Plains Road. They went back the following night around eleven thirty, right before closing. “One of my codefendants was armed with a .32 [sic] pistol. I was armed with a loaded sawed-off shotgun.” The Burger King restaurant was underneath an elevated train station. The three men lay in wait. They stood off to the side, watching to see when they could go in. An employee showed up late, and when another employee inside opened the front door for her, they went in as well.

  On the other side of the restaurant was the kitchen, the manager’s office, and an open waiting area before the back exit. Ramirez said he “forcefully told all my victims to proceed to the back of the restaurant,” the waiting area. He yelled at them to lie facedown on the ground. The plan was for Ramirez to get to the back exit so that when Alemar, his codefendant with the .38-caliber pistol, got the money from the safe in the manager’s office, they could quickly “get out the restaurant and go on our way.” Ramirez moved toward the exit. But as he tried to step over the people on the ground, he stepped on somebody’s leg. “They moved and I lost my balance and I fired the shotgun.”

  A commissioner says in a later transcript that there were reports “a tray had fallen and the noise may have caused Ramirez to turn around suddenly.” After hearing this, Ramirez amended his account and said, “The trays fell, and I tried to use the trays as leverage to step over the victims. As I stepped onto the tray, I guess my weight might have been too much and one of my victims moved, and I pulled the trigger.”

  Either way, the shotgun, loaded with buckshot, went off with a loud boom. Ramirez said he was maybe “three feet, four feet, five feet away” from Karen and Desiree Henderson, both lying facedown. No one screamed. Or made a sound. Everybody was quiet. Even Desiree, who was hit by buckshot in the face and neck and suffered permanent hearing damage. Karen was hit in the head and killed instantly.

  I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. I realized this was the most detailed and probably accurate description of the robbery that I had come across. I always thought Karen was standing at the cash register when she was shot, not lying facedown on the floor. What I had envisioned for all these years was not true. Karen had not stared down the barrel of a shotgun. I found solace in the thought that maybe Karen hadn’t seen it coming. Maybe she felt no pain. Or very little and certainly not for very long. Maybe she had no idea that she was going to die.

  Ramirez was in shock. Too stunned and scared to speak, he was propelled toward the exit as the shotgun went off. He yelled at his codefendant, “Let’s go!” He waited “a couple of seconds . . . three or four seconds.” But when Alemar didn’t come out of the manager’s office or respond, Ramirez said, “I just ran out of the store.”

  Except he didn’t.

  He left something out of the retelling: he reloaded the shotgun.

  “Witnesses who looked up, after the shot, saw Ramirez calmly and methodically empty the gun of the discharged shell and place a new one in it.” Only after a commi
ssioner jogged Ramirez’s memory with this statement did he concede, “I don’t dispute the record.” The question was why he reloaded.

  Over the years he offered a litany of excuses, including that he had no excuse. He repeatedly said he was shocked, scared, and afraid. Once he said, “I really didn’t know what would happen next so I reloaded the gun to maintain control.” At another hearing he explained that he had done it “instinctively”—even though he also claimed “I had never fired a shotgun before or a gun.” He said he knew how to reload a shotgun only because he had watched it on TV. At a later parole board hearing, he admitted that this idea of reloading the gun “instinctively” had come from working through this issue with someone at the prison.

  Over the years, the commissioners dissected every angle of this moment, trying to understand the motives and therefore the man. “I mean, one reloads a weapon because you perceive there is still a danger to yourself or still the need to have a loaded weapon, right?” “If it was an accident and you were so shocked, why didn’t you just panic and take flight, at that point, instead of reloading, carrying on with the robbery?”