Two weeks ago, a colleague’s seventeen-year-old daughter was found murdered in her car in downtown Los Angeles. At first, the police said death occurred from head trauma; that someone or something had caused Lily Burk to slam her head into the inside door panel with such forced that it killed her. People read this within hours of Lily being found, both because bad news travels fast and because Lily’s father is a well-known Los Angeles journalist, and other journalists, myself included, were pushing the story forward. We passed on this information nearly as soon as we heard it, via email, blogging, the web, editorials, Twitter and telephone. The people to whom we transmitted this information could be expected to do something with it.
But transmission was not the first thing I did. The first thing I did was say, no. No, this did not happen, in broad daylight, to the child of someone I know, a child who’d attended school with my daughter; a child I saw walk for six years through the school parking lot with her mother, no. Then I got into the shower and cried. I cried for any fear Lily faced and told her how sorry I was she’d had to, and I cried for her parents, knowing the floor of the world had dropped from under them; that they were now falling through space or doing their best to not fall through space but what was there to hold on to? I imagined them wanting to reel back a day, to when their daughter was safe, or even to the time of their panic of not knowing where she was, the time of action, of phoning (we would learn) the cellular company, the credit card company, the police, trying to draw a bead on Lily, seeing she was moving further east. I imagined they would choose to stay within that panic forever rather than learn what they learned the following morning: that during much of their time of action, their child was dead. Though I don’t imagine you’d want to live in the place of not knowing very long; since becoming a parent I’ve thought it would be worse to not know what was happening to your child, to be suspended in that terror. We’ve all seen the TV news shows where the mother’s voice breaks; the five-year-old was just playing in front of the house, she says; she was just riding her bike and we never saw her again, that was twelve years ago.
I did not, in those first minutes, think of vengeance, and did not think Lily’s parents would be. I thought: there’s no room yet to include others. The wound, for a very short time, was only theirs.
And then it was ours, the wound was spread open and disseminated and, later, torn open by as many people who wanted to be part of it. This was for me where the problem began.
I was part of the problem. I do not well enough know how to sit on my hands, and shortly after reading about Lily, posted a short piece, a few paragraphs, on a well-read media website in Los Angeles. I had qualms not about the writing, but the posting. I felt as though I were barging into the room of a patient who’d suffered third degree burns, moving close to the bed despite knowing my touch might infect him, even one breath. I had not seen Lily or her parents in years; I had not known them well. What was I doing here?
I posted it anyway.
People started to forward what I’d written. I received acknowledgment. I received an email from a writer, a woman extremely friendly with the family who said she was thankful I’d written because she couldn’t express what she was feeling; that what happened to Lily “makes me want to put my own daughters back inside my body.”
I passed along that sentence to three people. I may have used it, later, in a blog post. But I stood back from writing anymore about Lily; I didn’t think it was my place; within a day there were so many people writing about her, classmates, local publications, national, international. Her death was on the TV news.
An excellent local Los Angeles crime reporter within the week gave us hard facts, very hard facts to swallow. Lily had spent several hours with the killer; she had called her parents twice asking how to get cash from an ATM machine with her credit card, and when they asked her why, she said she wanted to buy shoes. They told her the card wasn’t set up that way, and to come home. Videos taken at the ATM machine show her nonetheless trying to get money, the killer beside her, and other customers coming or going. Lily does not shout. She does not grab a bystander’s arm. She does not say, “Help me.” There was speculation online that the reason she did not do these things is because her mother is an attorney who’s done work on behalf of the homeless. That Lily, a National Merit scholar, a thespian, a writer, was herself to work this summer with the homeless, and that she was not scared of the things, the situation, the person many of us would be scared of.
She met this man near the campus of the law school where her mother is a professor; her mother had asked her to pick up some papers she needed. Lily picked them up, and while leaving, was approached by the man, at around two in the afternoon. By five, we learned, he’d driven her car, with her in the passenger seat, to a downtown LA parking lot. By 5:30, the police picked up Charlie Samuel several blocks away, for drinking a beer in public and having on his person a crack pipe. He also had the keys to Lily’s Volvo, and her cell-phone. Lily was found the following morning in the car. Her throat had been slit.
This is when I started to think of vengeance. I lay in bed for two nights, not sleeping very easily, trying to come up with what I would do with Charlie Samuel. I came up with taking him up in a small plane, flying him over the ocean, twenty or thirty miles offshore. And then opening the door and pushing him out; I accounted for his trying to take with him the person doing the pushing by harnessing the person to the inside of the plane. Samuel would not survive the fall, but if by some miracle he did, it would be pleasant to think of his terror in knowing, he had no chance to get back to shore. He was there alone. Maybe he would cry. And shortly, he would drown, or be eaten; in any event, he would eventually be eaten, and I surmised that in this way, Samuel, who’d been arrested ten times and had recently been released from prison, would be doing something beneficial. He would be feeding the fish.
This is a twist on the penal colony in the middle of the ocean fantasies I often have. And these penal colonies, I learn a few days later after mentioning my plane-drop solution to an attorney, exist today. But the attorney disagrees with my slapping culpability on Samuel, not because he, Samuel, might be innocent – the police charged him with the crime within 48 hours – but because he thinks, Samuel could not help himself.
This puts me in an uncomfortable position. I am uncomfortable with the idea of taking the teeth out of what I see as justice. I know about sociopaths; I write about them, I read about them; I’ve interviewed them. I dated one. I know about people who break, whether it’s a psychotic break, or they are beaten down, and then commit horrible acts that, when whole they would not have committed. And I understand what the attorney is saying: that if no one shows you how to live, you don’t know how to live.
But, I tell the attorney, I must believe in free will. That Samuel made a choice, and if this is the choice he makes – to slit the throat of a young girl, and within twenty minutes stand on a street corner drinking a beer – then I have no use for him, and I don’t see that anyone else will, ever. The attorney, who defends misdemeanor cases and lesser felonies, says something along the lines of my needing to believe in free will because it helps me organize the world into good and bad, but that the foundation is faulty. And that, he does not believe Samuel had any experiences to tell him not to do as he did.
I like the attorney, I like him a lot, but I think he’s wrong.
I come home and look at the story I am writing, about a mother who threw her two children off a bridge in the middle of the night. Her four-year-old drowned. I have not yet met this mother, a woman one might say, today, is the opposite of Lily’s mother. This, though both have been pilloried and pitied in the press. Do you think Lily’s mother was not blamed for her child’s death? Do you imagine there was not, within hours of the story breaking, an anonymous woman online blaming Lily’s mother for asking her daughter to run an errand? When I read this comment, I wanted to find the woman; I wanted to pin her with my eyes and ask, in a menacing way: this is your solution? To smack the parent who has just found out her daughter has been murdered? I wanted the woman to feel shame.
I found myself wanting to shame a woman I had never met, wanting to kill a man, because within days of Lily’s murder, I was one of a great many people who caused themselves to feel impacted by her death. Many of these people felt grief, and impotence; they wanted a place to go. A Facebook page dedicated to Lily’s memory has, today, 2,758 members. The ripples spread exponentially, people feeling personally involved, writing on blogs and such that they did not know Lily or her family, but they have kids; they live in LA; they drive by the law school, and they were just so, so sorry. People needed to move a little closer to the incident, to more feel the impact of her death. As I type this, an email comes through from a mother touched by Lily’s tragedy; can I help her get a message to Lily’s parents? I send her to the Facebook page.
Meanwhile, Lily’s parents say nothing after that first day, after they expressed their love and loss, nothing until yesterday, at a gathering in memory of their child.
“She could see right into our souls without even thinking about it, and she loved us anyway,” said her father.
“Her absence empties the world for me,” said her mother.
I knew this; knew it upon hearing of Lily’s murder. Knew because, for several years after my daughter’s birth, I would infrequently wake in the night weeping uncontrollably, waking with what seemed to be cobwebby star-stuff still around me, as though I had just been transported from deep space, where the truth had been revealed: the only important thing, the only endless thing, was my love for my child. I’d been imprinted with the information that she had placed me on a continuum, a cable I previously knew nothing about, could know nothing about, but which I now knew was infinite.
The day Lily’s parents found out their child was gone; I knew the cable in their hands had gone slack. They were holding it but it didn’t lead anywhere. I didn’t know how they could go on, or how we were supposed to support them.
I thought I would send coffee. My husband is a coffee roaster and when people are sick or hurting, I sometimes give them coffee beans. I printed a shipping label. I tried to write a postcard expressing my condolences; I tore it in half. I tried again. I asked my daughter to sign it, and to include the year she graduated from the school she and Lily attended. She did, but I saw she didn’t like doing it; she knew it wasn’t meaningful.
The label and postcard sat in the same place for a day, two days. It sat there for a week. I decided I could not send the coffee, because every time her father drank the coffee, he might think, I am drinking this only because my child has been murdered. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t impose myself.
Last week in Newsweek, James Ellroy wrote about Lily, whom he’d met once. Ellroy is a very good writer; he knows how to memorialize, and because I thought his piece showed some truth, I tweeted it. More than any other piece I’ve linked, others picked this one up; again, Lily’s story was spreading; again, people were moved, if not everyone.
“It’s madness and blather,” emailed a friend, of the Ellroy piece. She thought he had intruded on Lily’s death, for his own reasons. I saw it her way. I have read Ellroy’s books; know of his mother’s murder; know how he ingests other tragedies, other murders, and regurgitates them as narrative. That he might be said to be greedy for grief, and at this point, I don’t think he can help it, or would want to.
I think about tattooing on my arm, “It’s not about you,” because I am afraid I do the same thing; that I’ve done it just now.
