The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013

by Dave Eggers

  Hess, who investigated child abuse cases for the police force’s family violence unit, had a very different impression of Hannah. The detective had been alerted to Andrew’s grave condition when the boy was transported to a nearby hospital the previous afternoon and, as was protocol, had begun looking into the circumstances surrounding the boy’s unusual and rapid decline. Haller, who took notes documenting her conversation with Hess and later testified about it under oath, recalled the detective’s certainty that Hannah had tried to kill Andrew. According to Haller, he told her, “Look, she’s pregnant and she has all these kids, but it was just too much for her. So she had to find a way out.” (Hess did not respond to interview requests for this article but has previously denied Haller’s version of events.) Haller was stunned by the accusation. “I kept denying that Hannah could do such a thing,” she told me. “Hannah would never harm a child.” Even setting aside her loyalty to her friend, the detective’s theory made no sense to her. “Andrew’s adoption hadn’t been finalized,” Haller said. “If Hannah had been looking for a ‘way out,’ she would have called the adoption agency and told them that she and Larry couldn’t go through with it.” Hess was unmoved. Before he left, Haller recalled his saying, “You might want to prepare for the media.”

  Hess’ suspicions had developed the previous evening during an interview with Hannah, who had consented to talk to him without an attorney present. The medical staff at Driscoll Children’s Hospital had determined that Andrew had nearly twice the normal level of sodium in his blood—a highly abnormal finding—as well as bleeding in the brain, and as Hess questioned her, he tried to ascertain what had happened. But Hannah, who was bewildered by Andrew’s condition, had no ready answers. Impatient to return to the boy’s bedside, she gave a hurried, disjointed account of the day that omitted critical details, such as how she had found Andrew in the pantry unattended, and she made only fleeting mention of his unusual eating habits. Hess became exasperated. “I don’t see what caused the trauma to the brain,” he said. “I don’t see what caused the high salt content. That’s what I’m trying to get you to tell me.” With no obvious explanations to consider, he focused his attention on Hannah. “Did you at any time strike him?” Hess asked. “Push him?” Throughout the interrogation, which spanned more than two hours, Hannah insisted that she had never harmed Andrew.

  Hannah did describe how she and Larry had at first tried to treat the boy’s symptoms themselves, often volunteering more information than the detective had asked for. When Andrew started “breathing funny,” she told Hess, she had administered asthma medication with a nebulizer, hoping to open up his airways. And when he became “less responsive,” she had pulled out her old EMT books to assess what was wrong. Larry had also tried to rouse him by giving him a warm bath. “I wasn’t thinking, obviously, or I would have just taken him to the hospital,” Hannah told the detective. She had studied years earlier to be an EMT, she explained, and although she had never worked as a paramedic, she had felt confident in her training. “I was just trying to fix it—to do anything I could to fix my baby,” she said. When Andrew’s condition worsened, she and Larry had debated whether to call 911 or go to the nearby urgent care clinic, a concern because Andrew lacked health insurance. (CPS had not yet sent them his Social Security card, which they needed to get him insured.) She and Larry were under tremendous financial strain, she admitted, but she stressed that they had rushed for help as soon as they realized how critical Andrew’s condition was.

  Hess remained skeptical of Hannah’s account. “It should be noted that during the entire conversation, Hannah Overton showed almost no emotion,” he later wrote in his police report. In the context of a criminal investigation, the calm that she had always exhibited in the midst of crisis was suddenly a liability—an indication, perhaps, that she was cold-blooded enough to have killed a child.

  A pediatric critical care specialist who treated Andrew at Driscoll, Alexandre Rotta, grew equally troubled. EMS records show that the boy was admitted with no more than a bruised knee and sores on his right elbow, but during his hospitalization, other significant black-and-blue marks emerged—in particular, on his trunk and nose. EMTs and hospital staff had vigorously poked and prodded the boy as they attempted to revive him, first at the clinic, then in an ambulance, then at Christus Spohn Hospital, where he was initially taken, and finally at Driscoll, where he was transferred to the intensive care unit. CPR had also been performed for an extended period by Hannah and later by medical personnel, who had squeezed the boy’s nose and administered chest compressions for 35 minutes. But Rotta was alarmed by his overall appearance. “This was not a child that came into the office looking well, with a story of, you know, ‘He’s just a tomboy, and he falls and hits himself,’” Rotta would later testify. “This is a child that came in [to the emergency room] in cardiopulmonary arrest and was dying. So it is the context and the totality of the injuries that worried me . . . I was convinced that we were in the presence of a crime.”

  Within hours of Andrew’s arrival at the hospital, the Overtons’ home had been searched, and soon more facts seemed to bolster the notion of abuse. There was Andrew’s bed—just a bare piece of plywood, with no mattress—and a “security camera,” as the baby monitor was later called at trial, trained on it. There were the charred remnants of his Spider-Man sheets in the fire pit. And then there was the abnormally high sodium level, coupled with Hannah’s account of feeding him Creole seasoning after he had misbehaved. Taken together, the disparate details formed a disturbing picture. It did not matter that Haller, who had seen Andrew in the days leading up to his hospitalization and who was frequently in the Overton home, had never observed any suspicious bruises or indications of abuse. In the eyes of law enforcement, Hannah and Larry were not grieving parents but perpetrators of an appalling crime. As Andrew’s condition deteriorated, CPS barred the Overtons from visiting their son. They were not allowed to be at Andrew’s bedside on the evening of October 3, when he experienced massive organ failure. He died at 9:30 p.m.

  The death of a child—particularly a sudden, unexplained death in which abuse is suspected—evokes strong emotions, even among seasoned investigators, doctors, forensics experts, and prosecutors. A more thorough investigation would have uncovered ample evidence to suggest that Andrew had an undiagnosed eating disorder, raising the possibility that he had unintentionally consumed too much salt on his own. But law enforcement officials are accustomed to handling child abuse cases, not medical mysteries, and salt poisoning is rare enough that most emergency room doctors will never encounter a case during their careers. Against the backdrop of possible abuse, authorities wasted little time. Larry was charged with injury to a child for failing to get Andrew timely medical attention. The onus for the boy’s death fell on Hannah, who was charged with capital murder.

  The state’s case would be predicated in part on the findings of Ray Fernandez, the Nueces County medical examiner, who ruled Andrew’s death to be a homicide. Fernandez determined that the boy had died as a result of acute sodium toxicity, with “blunt force head trauma” as a contributing factor. That Andrew had sustained a head injury was based on the presence of a half-inch area of hemorrhaging under the scalp. There was no evidence of external bleeding or injuries to Andrew’s head, however, and at a pre-trial hearing, Fernandez conceded that the hemorrhaging could have been related to elevated sodium in the blood. State district judge Jose Longoria, who would oversee Hannah’s trial the following fall, would later rule Fernandez’s finding of blunt force trauma to be inadmissible because it was not based on sufficient data or reliable methodology. Nevertheless, the idea that Andrew had sustained a head injury propelled the case forward, further casting Hannah as an abuser.

  That perception would throw her other children into the investi gation as well. During a wide-ranging interview with a social worker to determine if he had ever been abused, Isaac mentioned that he and his siblings had been given pepper, which he described as “spic
y stuff,” as a punishment for lying. (A former pastor of Hannah’s had advocated reprimanding children when they were dishonest by putting a single red pepper flake on their tongues.) Given that Hannah was suspected of poisoning Andrew with Creole seasoning, the suggestion that the Overtons had used pepper to discipline their children raised immediate concerns. On October 3, while Andrew was still hospitalized, the agency removed Isaac, Isabel, Ally, and Sebastian from their parents’ custody, placing them in two separate foster homes in Beeville, sixty miles away. The following day, family court judge Carl Lewis awarded temporary custody to Hannah’s mother and stepfather. Larry and Hannah were granted supervised visits. Once reunited with their children—who were terrified by the ordeal—Larry and Hannah had to break the awful news to them about Andrew. Weeping, they told the children that their brother had gone to be with Jesus.

  A funeral for Andrew followed at Seaside Memorial Park, alongside Corpus Christi Bay, at which Pastor Rod Carver officiated. He and Noreen had recently lost their own son, who had been stillborn, making his grief particularly acute. As he grasped for the right words to convey the depth of pain a parent feels over the loss of a child, he noticed a row of unfamiliar faces. “Hess and a group of CPS workers were standing in the back with dark glasses on, their arms crossed, scowls on their faces,” Carver said. “That was the most uncomfortable service I have ever done. It was very tense. By that point, Hannah had completely broken down emotionally.”

  Corpus Christi’s introduction to Hannah came the following week, when she and Larry were arrested and led past a bank of TV cameras outside the Nueces County jail. News reports that followed, prominently featuring their grim-faced mug shots, cast the Overton home as a house of horrors. (“More shocking details on abuse suffered by four-year-old before death,” began one breathless report.) Veteran defense attorney John Gilmore, whom the Overtons had retained using funds raised by their church, was stunned to learn of the arrests from reporters, who called asking for comment. “Channel Three, Channel Six, Channel Ten, the Caller-Times—they all knew ahead of time,” Gilmore said. “Hess had given me his word that he would tell me if and when warrants were going to be issued, so that Hannah and Larry could turn themselves in.” Instead, law enforcement officials had apprehended the Overtons by making a felony traffic stop, a practice usually reserved for suspects believed to be armed and dangerous. With guns drawn, police officers had surrounded Hannah and Larry’s car as they returned from an errand, forcing them to the ground and handcuffing them. “It was like they were arresting Bonnie and Clyde,” Gilmore said.

  The media coverage of the case stirred widespread outrage. The Corpus Christi Caller-Times’s online comments section filled with the vitriol of readers, some of whom called for Hannah to receive the death penalty. (“You can just tell by looking at her how evil she is,” one wrote.) Fueling the public’s antipathy was an affidavit written by a CPS child abuse investigator named Jesse Garcia, who claimed that Hannah had admitted to forcing Andrew to drink two cupfuls of “chili with water” and quoted her as saying that she then “beat the shit out of him.” Garcia never produced any documentation or witnesses to corroborate his claim, and internal police memos show that law enforcement officials doubted the veracity of his story. Hess disavowed Garcia’s account at a court hearing regarding the Overton children, and prosecutors never entered Garcia’s affidavit into evidence or called him to testify at Hannah’s trial. (He was subsequently fired by CPS after having three car accidents on the job in less than six months.) But the damage was done: that Hannah had confessed to force-feeding Andrew and beating him was repeated, uncorrected, on the local news.

  Even more devastating to Hannah were the actions that CPS took that January. Days after she gave birth to her daughter Emma, CPS took the newborn into protective custody. At a subsequent family court hearing, in which Hannah’s civil attorney argued that she should be given access to the infant so that she could continue nursing her, Judge Lewis returned Emma to her parents, but with conditions. The Overtons had to remain at the Carvers’ home, where they had been staying to avoid the camera crews that were camped out on their own doorstep, and they were never to be left alone with the baby. Hannah—who had already lost a child and was now living apart from her four older ones—was in a fragile state of mind. “There were days I had to remind her to eat, to brush her teeth, to get out of bed,” Noreen told me.

  The Carvers, like most members of Calvary Chapel, never doubted her innocence. “Knowing Hannah, it was inconceivable that she would ever hurt a child,” said Noreen. Hannah’s supporters included a young churchgoer named Dawn Werkhoven, who had lived with the Overtons the year leading up to Andrew’s death. Hannah and Larry had taken her in after her marriage ended in divorce, giving her their extra bedroom while she got back on her feet. “I never saw Hannah be anything but patient and loving with all the kids,” the now-married mother of two told me. Being in the Overtons’ home had afforded Werkhoven an intimate view of the family. Her bedroom was just a few feet away from the children’s rooms, which were always open; their doors had been removed so that the kids could easily come and go as they pleased. The children liked to hang out in her room and talk to her, particularly Andrew, who always visited her for an extra hug before bedtime. “If anything had been wrong, I would have known it,” she insisted. “Would I really have stayed with a family that would abuse a child?”

  The most unsettling aspect of The State of Texas v Hannah Ruth Overton, which got under way in August 2007, was how effectively a woman who had spent most of her life as a do-gooder could be recast as a monster. The particulars of her crime, as sketched out by the prosecution, were vague; assistant district attorney Sandra Eastwood, a passionate child advocate, conceded in opening arguments that she was not sure how Hannah had made Andrew eat so much salt. “We don’t know precisely how she got it down Andrew, but we know that he was very, very obedient,” Eastwood told the jury, standing before the TV news cameras that Judge Longoria had allowed inside the courtroom. “And we do have some evidence of bruising to his nose [which could indicate] his nostrils were squeezed and he was made to drink it.”

  Over the course of the three-week-long trial, Eastwood sought to convince jurors that a mother with no history of violence or mental illness had force-fed her child to death—a scenario that each prosecution witness helped, incrementally, to suggest was possible. Patricia Gonzalez, a nurse at the urgent care clinic, told the jury that Hannah had not behaved like a panic-stricken parent and had “had a smile on her face” as she performed CPR on the boy. Another nurse, Dina Zapata, remembered Hannah smirking as she tried to resuscitate him. Both women’s accounts were problematic; Gonzalez had never made a statement to police and was testifying from memory after nearly a year’s worth of negative media coverage, while Zapata had failed to mention anything about Hannah smirking when she wrote her initial report about the incident. Yet the image they conjured—of a woman grinning at the sight of a comatose four-year-old—was devastating. Gemma Mitchell, a phlebotomist, recalled overhearing Hannah tell medical staff that Andrew had stopped breathing after he was “punished.” No one could corroborate her story, and under cross-examination, she admitted that she had never told anyone this fact until taking the stand. Still, the overall impression was a damning one.

  Other witnesses testified that they had detected signs of abuse. One paramedic recounted how he had seen two sores on Andrew “that looked to me like cigarette burns because they were round.” Another paramedic also believed the sores were cigarette burns, though he admitted he had only looked at them “from a distance.” Fernandez, the medical examiner, said he had observed “burnlike scarring” on Andrew’s arm that had likely been caused by “contact with a hot surface.” But neither Larry nor Hannah smoked. Not until shortly before closing arguments did jurors hear from the defense’s expert witness, a Harvard-educated pathologist and assistant medical examiner in San Francisco, Judy Melinek, who offered her opinion that the sores w
ere consistent with mosquito bites that had been scratched and picked at.

  The prosecution’s most persuasive testimony came from Rotta, the pediatric critical care specialist who had originally expressed concern that Andrew had been mistreated. “A comment someone made was that it appeared that this child had been in a fight with a porcupine,” the physician stated. “There were so many bruises and scratches that it would be difficult to describe them all.” Rotta allowed that the appearance of Andrew’s body may have been due in part to the fact that he was coagulopathic, or not able to clot blood properly, a condition that occurs after a person has gone into cardiac arrest and can cause excessive bleeding and bruising. But he was adamant that the boy’s death had not been accidental. Andrew had never been diagnosed with pica, Rotta reminded jurors. “We have a child that was well until that afternoon, that had behavioral issues, that was having temper tantrums, that was then given something . . . probably to punish his behavior, that then goes into cardiorespiratory arrest.”

  Rotta stopped short of describing the manner in which he believed Andrew had been made to eat a lethal amount of salt—a dose that, after analyzing Andrew’s blood, he determined would have consisted of 23 teaspoons of Zatarain’s Creole Seasoning or 6 teaspoons of salt. The physician only said that the scratch marks he had noticed on the boy’s neck had been caused, he believed, by another person. The marks “could be consistent with many things, including a fight, an altercation, someone trying to hold this child’s neck forcefully,” he said.

  Andrew’s former foster mother, Sharon Hamil, who was devastated by the boy’s death, testified that Andrew had not exhibited significant developmental or behavioral problems, aside from his speech delay, during the time that he lived with her—a characterization that was rebutted by numerous members of Calvary Chapel later in the trial but that cast Hannah’s credibility into doubt. “He was always happy,” Hamil testified. She believed that Andrew’s eating habits were not the stuff of pathology but those of a growing boy. “Andrew liked to eat every day, all day, any time,” she said.