Part IV about Amanda Jo Stott-Smith and her children. Part I here; II, here; III, here.
In the early hours of May 23, Amanda Jo Stott-Smith forced her two young children off the Sellwood Bridge in Portland, Oregon. Her seven-year-old daughter Trinity survived the 75-foot fall and, after more than a half-hour in the water, was rescued by two Good Samaritans.
Eldon Smith, her four-year-old brother, did not make it. By the time rescuers found the boy, he had drowned. This very public death has had public repercussions; newspaper editorials wonder what could have been done and what might be done now. Portland flew its flag at half-staff in honor of Eldon, and there’s debate amongst city commissioners as to how to pay for a new rescue boat.
Eldon’s former preschool did not acknowledge his death, or not more than sending home an email to class parents. Perhaps the administration was trying to protect the kids; perhaps the silence was a bid at self-preservation; maybe they felt they should have known more. But I am looking at pictures of the kids in Eldon’s class, seventeen smiling four- and five-year-olds, and Eldon is smiling, too, showing his baby teeth, and there is no way to tell, from this photo, that he will be the child that’s soon murdered.
“There hung an awkwardness in the air today, as adults gave fake half-grins to each other, slowly greeting each child to the last day of preschool.”
This comment posted to my blog at 10:40 PM, the day after my first piece about Stott-Smith and her children. It came from a woman whose son had been Eldon’s best friend. The woman, who I will call Sarah, was disturbed by what she’d seen at preschool. Also, at the treatment Stott-Smith was receiving on blogs and in the press, people calling for her public execution and branding her a monster.
“She has stood right next to me. If she is so evil, why couldn’t I tell? And if she’s not evil, what ‘broke in her’? ‘Broke in her’ are the words my homicide detective-friend used to try to help me make sense of it all (everyone should have one of these kids of friends) … As disgusted, and horrified, and frightened as I am by what she did, I can’t bring myself to believe she was evil. That seems too easy.”
I wrote to Sarah, to say I agreed it was too easy, and we became, via email, two women going down to the river, literally and figuratively, to better make sense of it all. It hurt, Sarah especially, to read random cruelties from people who did not and who did know Stott-Smith, including one from another mother at Living Savior Preschool, posted to an Oregonian blog and claiming that she “got an immediate gut feeling that she [Stott-Smith] was a very bizarre woman - her behavior was very strange.”
“At the church, any parent out of a particular box, that would have been noticeable,” said Sarah, of her fellow parent’s comment. “All these people can write these comments after she’s done this thing. Well, if they felt she was evil and creepy, why didn’t they go and intervene beforehand? They should have been concerned for the kids if they thought she was that bad.”
Before Sarah, blond with watchful eyes, leaves for summer vacation with her two children – a 12-year-old daughter and five-year-old Stefan (not his real name) – we meet for coffee. We talk about coffee. We talk about restaurants. We are both on our feet to rush after a two-year-old who’s slipped from her mother and run out the front door.
“My mom was a teenage mom, and I guess I look at it from the perspective of what my childhood was like, and think of Eldon that way,” says Sarah, when we re-seat ourselves. “I had the mom who was very immature, and sporadic, and violent, and screaming, and trying to keep me from my dad when they divorced. And I keep thinking, my god, my mom was probably not much more different than Eldon’s mom. And I could have been, maybe under a different circumstance, thrown off a bridge.”
Sarah’s voice is even; she is not asking for special consideration. The steadiness of her eyes, the stillness of her hands in her lap, says she is on to the next part of her life; I know she lives a good life, with her husband, in Lake Oswego. She will ask, later, that I do not make her mother out to be a villain; that those times have passed.
“My mom’s grown-up now, and she’s wonderful and an amazing grandmother,” she says. “But as a teenager, having a little kid – she was ostracized by her parents, and my dad left her, and I’m sure I wasn’t always easy and she had no money – you kind of wonder what all those pressures can do.”
Perhaps those pressures are what the mother on the Oregonian blog referred; maybe she saw the cracks. Sarah doesn’t think so.
“She [Stott-Smith] sat in those meetings just like a normal parent,” she says. “There was a picture of her with him [Eldon] in her lap, on the first day of school. Just like, normal. It was just normal.”
I say to Sarah, she was the mom next to you.
“Yes,” she says. “She was like every parent, suburban mom, driving a station wagon.”
I ask how her son and Eldon became friends. “Stefan didn’t talk about anybody for maybe the first week or two, but then it was clear: he always talked about Eldon,” she says. “You can go into a preschool class and you can observe the boys, and there are those boys that throw themselves on the floor and they make loud noises and they’re jumping all over the place. And then you have boys who are really rules-oriented and quiet and much more reserved and not as rambunctious. My son and Eldon were very much the same, not rambunctious, very calm; very rules-oriented.”
Sarah’s smile loses some of its warmth. “He [Eldon] was so quiet and rules-oriented, it made me wonder if he wasn’t just a classic example of a child who…” She pauses. “You know, when you’re around a parent who’s so incredibly volatile, or you’re being hit, you always try, you walk a very tight and narrow path, and you have to read people quick. So every time he saw his mother, he probably had within an instant to read whether or not this was going to be a good moment, or a bad moment. I’m not surprised about any hitting or any of that, [but] I never saw marks on him or anything like that.”
She takes from her bag a photo of Eldon and Stefan in the Christmas pageant, standing over a cradle holding the baby Jesus, in this incarnation, a Cabbage Patch doll
“So, he’s four,” she says, of Eldon. “His birthday is in August... There were talks about having all the boys over in April, for my son’s birthday, but it never happened.”
Never happened because in the midst of the divorce proceedings with her husband, Stott-Smith pulled Eldon out of school. “That was March,” says Sarah, and that she did not see Eldon again.
And again, she reaches into her purse and takes out a copy of the children’s class pictures. “He was the most adorable, out of the whole class. He’s a cherub,” she says, running her finger over Eldon’s face. “He looks a lot like [his mother]. She has that American Indian or Hawaiian or Polynesian look, and she has that beautiful hair. I still remember what his hair feels like because he had one of those, I wouldn’t say a buzz cut necessarily, but it was… clipped. And I just remember running my hands over his head and he’d have the prickly little feel but it was still soft. I remember doing that because I was so happy to meet him.”
She smiles at the photo, of a boy with big dark round eyes and the apple cheeks of a young child. “Very, very sweet,” she says. “Quiet, very quiet.”
Sarah told her son about Eldon’s death just after she received, as did all the parents in Eldon’s class, an email from the school, informing people what had happened.
“Unfortunately, my husband was leaving for Europe within half an hour of us finding out, and he didn’t want me to tell Stefan, but I didn’t want Stefan to find out at preschool,” she says. “So I waited, and as soon as my husband got in the town car and drove away, I sat down and told Stefan what happened.
“I made it so simple. I said, ‘I have some bad news.’ And he said, ‘Is that why you were crying?’ And I said, ‘Yes. And I just want to let you know that Eldon died and he’s up in heaven’ – because I honestly didn’t know what to say. I said, ‘And he can’t come back.’
“Stefan started crying and he asked what happened, and I said that Eldon drowned in the river. And I didn’t go any further than that; it just seemed pointless… I actually never heard him cry like that. It was so mournful. And he said, ‘Can we write a letter to his mother? I want her to know how much I liked Eldon.’ And it just broke my heart.
“After he’d had a little bit of time to mourn, I said, ‘Did you know, people can get mail in heaven?’ I really didn’t know what I was talking about, but we went and bought roses, and then I walked Stefan to the bridge, and we wrote him [Eldon] a letter, and we released it on these three balloons, and as luck would have it, it went straight up, and looked as if it had just been plucked out of the sky. And then Stefan said, ‘My sadness flew away with the balloons.’
“But I know he is angry, too, because he said, ‘Why did his mom let him swim in the river?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ He goes, ‘Well, why wasn’t she watching him?’ It was very much like: she wasn’t doing her job. And there was nothing I could say.”
Sarah says she does not know how many parents in the class have told their children about Eldon’s death, and does not know because “no one’s ever talked about it or brought it up.”
“We went to graduation and they had a little carnival for everybody. This was on a Friday [six days after Eldon was killed],” she says, her voice taking on a little steam. “Eldon’s name was taken off the graduation list for the class; there was no mention of it, nobody said anything. When the pastor spoke, there was no mention of, ‘Let’s remember all those who aren’t with us.’ I can see them not mentioning it to the children, but there had to have been at least subtle ways to at least honor the fact that he had been at that school.”
She pauses, seeming to summon some patience before she continues. “At the carnival, I went specifically looking for the photos of Eldon, because I knew we could take whatever photos [from the more than two hundred] we wanted off the wall,” she says. “I thought, there have to be some – because I had seen them before – pictures of Eldon and his mom and other photos of him in the classroom.”
She stops, her eyes asking, can you guess what’s coming? “They had all been removed. He’d been gone, not even a week, and he was erased. Like someone had taken a little eraser and he never existed.”
What prompted such action, what they were afraid of, Sarah has no idea. “It’s not the way I live my life,” she says.
We talk about what I previously wrote; how I thought Stott-Smith had walked the kids onto the bridge. Sarah disagrees.
“I don’t think she walked her children down that bridge,” she says. “I walked my son down that bridge, and it took a long time, dragging a five-year-old. I couldn’t imagine taking him if he were tired. I think she was screaming on the phone with her ex-husband; I think she snapped, I think she just stopped the car right there, and just, in a very short amount of time…”
She does not finish the sentence. And though it will not be released in the news for ten days, Sarah is correct; Stott-Smith was on the phone with her estranged husband, to whom she’d recently lost custody of the children, crying and telling him, “You’ve taken my joy away” and “Why have you done this to me?” – just before or after the children were forced off the bridge.
“You have to wonder why would anybody throw… what would make that break?” Sarah asks. “Whether it was a series of poor choices, or bad parents, or whatever; she got driven to a point of desperation. And I just feel so sorry for her, because she can’t take it back. And I bet you she has these moments of panic when she opens her eyes in the morning and she just wishes she could backpedal and that it’s not real. But it is real. And she just can’t change it.”
Sarah does not think the murder premeditated. “She [Stott-Smith] didn’t wake up that morning and say; she was going to kill her kids,” she says. “There’s no way she woke up and thought that.”
I tell her, I agree and I don’t. I think, somewhere, the seed of doing what she did took root; she may have been able to ignore it, maybe for a long time, but that day, through the convolution, it was the option that made sense. That this has to be the case, because it happened. Yes, Sarah says, but can there be any other reason except that Stott-Smith sought to destroy herself?
"I don’t think that Eldon’s mom believed that anybody loved her, and I think everything that she loved she threw off the bridge,” she says. “That’s what I really think. She punished herself; she punished her soon to be ex-husband, she punished her parents, she punished life. It’s almost like she threw all her anger, all her sorrow, all her joy, everything; everything that was her; that she actually had. There was nothing left for her but these kids.”
I tell Sarah what I learned a few days earlier: that Stott-Smith was over the rail of the ninth-floor parking garage when she was apprehended; that she was falling when a cop grabbed her wrist and dragged her back from where she wanted to go.
"I really believe she had no other choice," says Sarah, as we gather our things. "That's the hair between life and death, and obviously it wasn't meant for her to die. Why? That's what we're hopefully going to find out."
The Monstrousness of Empathy, here
Part V: Amanda Stott-Smith Changes Her Plea to Guilty
500 Things to Eat Before It’s Too Late: And the Very Best Places to Eat Them