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
