On the Bridge

This is part II of a series of writing about Amanda Jo Stott-Smith. Part I is here

I went on Friday to the Sellwood Bridge. I told my husband I was going to buy watermelons, but instead I drove to the bridge. I wanted to see where Amanda Jo Stott-Smith took her children last week and, so far as we know, threw them over. I wrote about this. Today, Sunday, they buried the little boy. I did not attend the funeral because it was private.

But I did go to the bridge. To get there from the east side, you must drive on SE Tacoma Street, and then, lest you wind up going over the bridge, turn north. The closest cross street is Sixth; I parked there and wondered if Stott-Smith had, too.

I walked the long block to the east end of the bridge and saw the sort of memorial that is spontaneously set up for children who are murdered. There were stuffed bunnies and teddy bears and one Mylar balloon that read, “We’ll miss you.” There was a white board, onto which people had written their good-byes and god blesses. Some of the writing was in children’s large wobbly script, “To the bravest girl in the world! We are sorry to hear about your brother.” Tucked amongst the wilted bouquets were notes, including one from a little girl that read, “I hope you new birthday life goes well.”

I continued on the bridge itself. The walkway is narrow, perhaps four feet. Approaching cyclists do and must ring their bells; two people cannot easily pass. The bridge has two traffic lanes, one in each direction. There is no walkway on the other, south side of the bridge. If Stott-Smith walked her children onto the Sellwood Bridge, where I was walking is where they walked.

I don’t know what happened on the bridge that night. Only two living people do, the little girl, who’s been released from the hospital in good physical condition and who has been interviewed by police, and Stott-Smith. I have no idea whether she’s given any details. I can tell you different versions of what I think happened, and you’re not going to like any of them. I am telling you now: you may not want to keep reading. It’s going to make you mad and very sad and perhaps angry with me for letting my mind go where it’s gone. As I wrote last time, I am trying to understand. Saying Stott-Smith is “the definition of evil”; suggesting, as someone did on the Oregonian’s website, that the thing to do, the thing that would make us feel better, is bind Stott-Smith’s hands and feet and throw her over the bridge, doesn’t work for me. It doesn’t explain anything.

As I walked the bridge on Friday, I thought, maybe Stott-Smith did not park and walk. Maybe she stopped the car on the roadway. This seems unlikely. Had she stopped the car, she would have caused cars to jam up behind her, and been seen by cars coming from the other direction. Even on a dark night on the poorly lit bridge, someone would have seen her taking children from the car and thought, what the hell? I don’t think she could have taken that chance.

The next time you are out, or perhaps you can do this in your own living room, look at the size of four- and seven-year-old children. They’re very small. You can lift them from beneath their arms and pass them over a waist-high rail with no trouble. Two would be more trouble if they were kicking and screaming. They would have been dead weight had she taken them warm and sleeping from the car.

But I don’t think the children were sleeping, because I don’t think she could have parked on the roadway, gotten them out, thrown them over, and sped off without being seen. It’s too busy and too tight a roadway. I am not even taking into consideration that she might pause for a moment after throwing her two children over the rail and into the river seventy-five feet below.

Did she look down? Did she see them in the water? How long did she wait? She would have heard them, not merely because we know the girl, at least the girl, was crying and moaning, but because a mother, whether she wants to or not, recognizes her child’s cry. I had this happen in a hospital full of squalling newborns. Under orders to walk, I was on the other side of the building when I heard crying and knew it was my newborn and, as fast as the stitches allowed, got back to my room to see she’d been brought there, where she waited, screaming for me, for someone.

We have no idea yet how long Stott-Smith waited on the bridge after she threw her children down, or if she waited at all. If she parked her car on the roadway, she could not have waited. She would have to have gotten back in the car and driven off.

But as I said, I don’t think she did park on the bridge. I think she walked the children onto the bridge. Is it possible she made a game of the walk? This seems an unlikely scenario; that she could have had the largeness or smallness of heart to tell her children, we’re going to play a game. One does not want to see the children skipping, at one in the morning, along that narrow walkway. Though one is inclined to think, there would be no skipping. It’s scary enough in the daytime, for an adult, feeling the velocity of the passing cars, walking astride the waist-high rail. It’s too easy to go over that rail. Even when you know you have no intention of going over. Looking at the water below, I experienced the hot, wavy feeling you get in the backs of your thighs when you look down from a great height.

It’s unlikely the children experienced this. It was dark. It was late, past young children’s bedtime. Their adrenaline would have been pumping for other reasons – how mad was mommy? What was happening? And in any event, they were too small, too short to see over the railing, to see how far down the water was. What could they know of their fate? They couldn’t have known. Being thrown off a bridge was out of their purview, out of their range of experience, outside the parenthesis of what four- to seven-year olds need to know.

I am having a difficult time thinking their mother told them what she was going to do. But I have read the following, and it makes me very unhappy to know it:

“A massive search was launched about 1:20 a.m. when 9-1-1 calls started coming in from people who heard the screams of children and an adult woman coming from the river.”

So she was yelling at them. Where were they? Did she make them stand together, with their backs against the concrete railing, with its church-window-shaped cutouts? It is possible the boy was small enough to crawl through one of these cutouts. Certainly, neither of the children stood as high as the rail. They may have been stood with their backs against it, facing their mother, the wind of the cars pushing them against it. They have to have been terribly frightened: what were they doing here, with the cars passing, perhaps people honking? Perhaps their mother had to wave cars on, to say, “We’re okay, we’re fine,” and the children would have thought, are we?

I think it is more likely the mother was ranting. Perhaps she was holding the boy, squirming and crying, and pulling the girl by the hand. Perhaps she was in a mood so bad, a mood the children could not hope to navigate, that all was chaos. Perhaps she told them what she was going to do. While it seems even more heartless to inflict the information on them, I prefer this to seeing them tossed in their sleep, or being made to jump. They knew their fate, impossible as it was, and in the case of the girl, was somehow able to gird for it.

The boy, who drowned, had no chance. How, at four years old, in a moving river, in the middle of the night, do you survive? You don’t. You take in some water, and you take in a little more. I imagine his sister would have been holding onto to him; that’s what I would have done for my little brother; it’s your job. We have no idea how she held onto him; we do know they were found right next to each other. We know this from the two people who went out on their boat and found the children.

“We speculated that she had ahold of her brother because they were so close, right next to each other in the water,” David Haag told the Oregonian.

Haag and his companion Cheryl Robb are being called heroes, and I think they did act heroically, no doubt. I think everyone who has heard about what Stott-Smith did to her children wishes they could have helped; perhaps, in our minds, we are lined up on the bank of the river in the middle of the night, each offering Eldon, the little boy, one more breath. He had only his sister in the water with him. She did the best she could. She screamed. She yelled. We know this from the TV news:

 “Pati and Dan Gallagher, both 50, live in a town home near the Sellwood Bridge. They were sitting on their patio, they said, when they heard a splash, and then screams.”

A splash. One splash. They went in together.

Where was their mother? Can we imagine her standing on the bridge, watching her children drift north, wondering when they would stop crying? Was she afraid someone would hear her children? Was that what got her back in her car and gone, the fear of being caught being broadcast with each of her daughter’s cries?

Or did she just walk back to her car as the children drifted north. Or did she run? Was she crying? Was she yelling? Was she white and cold with shock? Was she pleased? Did she feel victorious? Was she afraid? Did she think twice and then say to herself, well, too late now? Did she call their names?

And would they have heard her? It was a windless night, the only reason, David Haag said, that he was able to hear the girl's screams. As I am sure her mother did.

Part III, "The Mom Next to You," is here

Comments

[steve]

Great read Nancy! Sounds like you should be granted an interview with the woman. You can go get those watermelons now.

[Eric]

How do you tell a little girl that her mother tried to kill her and successfully killed her brother in such a manner? On the other hand, millions of children all around the world are exposed to horrors every day.

It's hard to wrap my mind around it.

[Zev]

Very graphically imagined. I'm all in favor of the suggestions on the Oregonian site. Or if that's too extreme, a couple of months of daily waterboarding at the very least.

[Nathan]

I suspect she stopped on the bridge with her car. While that bridge sees traffic, at one a.m. in the morning, Portland in general sees very little traffic, let alone on the Sellwood bridge. In fact, I propse, most of the bridges of Portland are relatively quiet at one a.m. in the morning.

Also given the clarity of which witnesses express hearing, the din of road traffic had it been there would have marred the audio.

Or so I think.

[Hillary Johnson]

I would like to think of that girl as emerging tough and extraordinary, even fearless, knowing that the worst thing that could ever happen to her or any human, has already happened. Among most cultures that have shamanic traditions, the people who become shamans are usually those who have suffered and survived extraordinary catastrophes and illnesses--to the brink of death and back. This may sound corny and optimistic (because it is), but there will be enough people suggesting to this girl that she is broken and doomed to a lifetime of victimhood and thereapy. I hope instead she rages!

[Shannon]

After reading this, I had the same thought as Nathan. That bridge is not busy at that time of the morning and actually, the whole area is pretty quiet. I was also thinking you should go there at the same time, hard to do I know; I can barely stay awake past ten myself. Yet I think you would get more of the feel of the whole thing albeit creeped out at the same time.

[Nancy Rommelmann]

I have to tell you, when I read Nathan's comment, I felt as though I might vomit. It's just... it's very to go there. But I appreciate what you both have written. I've been pretty stable on this story, I think keeping a little distance from the hardest parts as self-preservation; to be able to keep working. Anyway, thank you for reading.

[sarah gilbert]

this is chilling, Nancy, and I too have been wondering very much how it happened but couldn't think too deeply about it, I can't watch the news reports on TV, I can read about it but it weighs me so. My own four- and seven-year-olds are heavy, so heavy, and it takes everything in me to imagine how much work it would be to lift them over the railing. and to think of my own four-year-old, in the water, I have to stop thinking.

I grew up in this neighborhood, or thereabouts, and have walked and bicycled across the bridge many times. it's so narrow and frightening, even for an adult, even in a car.

I agree that she must have stopped her car on the bridge. in the middle of the night, it's almost remote, not a bridge in a city at all.

[Greg]

I don't think there's any chance she stopped her car on that narrow bridge. Cars coming from either direction would have stopped to assist her thinking her car was broken down. She choose that time of the "day" to avoid attention.

The story, as a whole, just makes me angry. As a parent of two young children (5 and 7), I cannot fathom how someone could give life and then take it away.

What's especially troubling is that she surely was not able to toss both over at the same time. I suspect it was the youngest although it doesn't make any difference. Both were old enough to know they were in a bad situation.

If she was this unhappy, she should have taken her own life although I'm fairly confident that prospect scared the shit out of her. Too bad she didn't give that benefit to her children.

[steve]

Corny is good. Let's hope for Hillary's ending. This event that happened is a tragedy all around. Unfortunately, we cannot choose our parents, and these two children were given awful ones. It seems that all we can do is try to understand the history or background that led up to this. Perhaps with some understanding, we can prevent this from occurring ever again, though it surely will. Wishing the same fate for the mother is unproductive, meaningless, and self-serving. In fact, we become more like her when we think this way. In any case, I have not done much chatting online, and I think I've realized that I'm not cut out for it. So, over and out. Congratulations on your Best Coffee in PTown award. Hi to Din.

[Nancy Rommelmann]

Thanks, Steve. Well said. I, too, am so hoping for what Hillary wrote.

[Zev]

OT: I recall a conversation here recently about WWI survivors. Well, the last Australian to serve in that war has died today:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090603/lf_nm_life/us_australia_soldier

[Amy Alkon]

This belongs in New York TImes Magazine.

[Jeremy Geiger]

I must confess that I had to stop reading your narrative about 1/2 way through because it was so disturbing - as a parent of young children I could not muster the guts to read through the imagined avenues. I felt nauseous at the thought of making it a game to get them on the bridge, and could not go further today.

Please take that as a complement; I had to put it down because it was so spot on.

Out of this, I have learned something.

2 years ago we knew another woman and her 6-yr-old son very briefly who by coincidence lived near that bridge for a while. She had moved into what amounted to a space that Chuck Palahniuk might imagine: a daylight basement on the river - which sounds good in concept but was actually hugely depressing - perpetual dampness, low bunker-like concrete ceilings, bare light bulbs and worn out linoleum floors. I am sad to admit that given her very visible manic instability at times and bouts with clinical depression, upon our visit to her place I had wondered morbidly what she would be capable of in a moment of abject distress.

I felt horrible, ashamed even, for indulging such awful, seemingly condemnatory thoughts of another human being who clearly loved her child above all else, but could not physically manage her own emotions at times.

For her it was not just general instability, but seemed to be severely exacerbated by seasonal depression, perceived social alienation (she just "didn't fit in in Portland" (her words)), and manic mood swings that in my uneducated estimation likely required medication. She eventually moved to a much brighter location in California about a year ago, and is apparently doing better - though we have since lost all contact with her.

I haven't given her much thought until now.

I'm deeply disturbed that I guess I was not wrong to think that maybe the unthinkable, is possible (though I never imagined such a horror as this). I wonder if any of this woman's friends or acquaintances had similar shamed worries but ignored the ideas thinking them "indencent" - I'm sure someone is going to be asking that question of them very soon.

Truly well done Nancy. One of these days I'll get the courage to read the rest, but I have a feeling it won't be until my children are much, much older.

[MDWhite]

In 1993, Susan Smith secured her two little boys, aged 3 and 14 months, in the back seat of her car and then let it slide into a lake in South Carolina. When they pulled the car out of the water, they found the two little boys were holding hands. I think of my two little grandsons and, God in heaven, I can't imagine how anyone - no matter how "disturbed"- could do such an unspeakable thing.

[Zev]

"I can't imagine how anyone - no matter how "disturbed"- could do such an unspeakable thing."

I completely agree.