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Bellingham, Washington

Friday, February 28, 2020

When I looked at my email account the next morning, I had 136 new messages. At first I thought I had been the victim of a

massive spam attack, but it turned out they were all from Yolanda Aguirre’s assistant, Elena Moreno—one email per interview.

Wanting to dig into them, I bypassed my daily crosswords in favor of going to work. And that’s how I spent the whole of Friday—reading

through those files. For dinner that night, Mel brought home Subway sandwiches. I ate mine and then went straight back to

reading.

Each separate interview followed the same format, and they were incredibly thorough. In another life, Yolanda would have made

an excellent detective. In every case, she began by expressing her condolences on the loss of each loved one and thanking

the participants for agreeing to talk to her.

The files contained the deceased individual’s redacted last name, their date of birth, and date of death. Wherever possible, they also included information on next of kin as well as the identification of the person being interviewed—mother, sister, brother, and so on. Yolanda phrased her questions in a way that made it clear that she was interested in the family dynamics in play both prior to and after the death of their loved one. She charted each victim’s drug usage and police interactions—including case file numbers—preceding the fatal overdoses. Yolanda also included in meticulous detail each family’s interactions—or lack thereof—with law enforcement in the aftermath of each death. The final section of each interview covered the ongoing struggles of the bereaved family members, including, in many instances, the custodial outcomes for any surviving minor children. Several files in, I realized that every one was a step-by-step depiction of a family tragedy—of early promise and aspirations wiped out sooner or later by the scourge of drug abuse.

Some of the interviewees replied reluctantly, limiting their answers to as few words as possible, but for others Yolanda’s

interest in what had befallen them seemed to have breached a dam, allowing a flood of emotions to spill out. Like Matilda

Jackson, rather than simply revealing the bare bones of the story, they wanted to tell all of it.

Several of those hit close to home. Over and over families related tales of trying to encourage their sons or daughters or

brothers to get help, of holding interventions, of begging and pleading for the addict to make changes in their lives. Naturally

those generally didn’t work. Help imposed on someone who doesn’t want it is so much wasted breath and, in many cases, so much

wasted money and effort as well. Until addicts are ready to make those changes for themselves, stints in rehab are less than

useless.

In other words, reading through the interviews was tough going for yours truly. It reminded me about that little kid, cheerfully digging his way out of a room filled with horse turds. When someone asked him why he was so happy, he replied, “With all this horse shit, there’s bound to be a pony in here somewhere.”

I had worked my way up to file 18, and that’s where I found my pony. His first name was Raymond. His body had been found on

June 9, 2013, near the railroad tracks in Seattle’s Golden Gardens neighborhood. Because the body was found next to the track,

the initial assumption was that he’d been hit by a passing train. A subsequent autopsy revealed that he had died of a fentanyl

overdose. The autopsy also revealed that he suffered from a TBI—a traumatic brain injury.

At first the family history as related by Ray’s daughter Leann sounded like the proverbial American dream. When Ray graduated

from Shoreline High School at the north end of the Seattle metropolitan area, he had done so as valedictorian of the class

of 1979 where he had also been voted most likely to succeed. After being a star athlete throughout his high school years,

once Ray enrolled at the University of Washington, he became a redshirt addition to the U Dub’s Huskies football team where

he played tackle all four years.

After graduating with a degree in Civil Engineering, he married his high school sweetheart, Meredith, and went to work for

an engineering firm that specialized in airport facilities. His first project involved working on an addition to SeaTac’s

already massive parking garage.

Together, he and Meredith had three kids. They bought an older home in the Green Lake area and everything seemed to be hunky-dory. Then, in 1997, he made the fateful decision of taking his son, Andrew, to a Seattle Mariner’s home game as a father-son outing to celebrate the boy’s tenth birthday. After leaving the Kingdome, they had been walking back to their vehicle when a passing motorist suffered a medical emergency and plowed into them. Ray managed to shove his son out of harm’s way, but he himself suffered life-changing injuries, including multiple broken bones and a massive concussion. After that, he was never the same.

Unable to return to work and plagued by chronic pain, he ended up on opioid painkillers where he eventually became addicted.

Not only that, his personality changed almost overnight. Before the accident, Ray had been a friendly, easygoing guy. Now

he seemed to have a hair-trigger temper, and Meredith was his usual target. Leann, one of Ray’s daughters, was the family

spokesperson in this case, and reading her version of the story in Yolanda’s interview was heartbreaking.

Leann: It was like a stranger had moved into our house. Dad wasn’t our dad anymore. He was angry all the time, and the smallest

thing could set him off. If we kids did the least little thing wrong, he would be furious. Mom told us that it wasn’t his

fault, that he was sick and couldn’t help it, but that didn’t make it any easier to live with. And because she was always

trying to intercede for us, she usually ended up being his target and taking the brunt of his anger.

Yolanda: He was violent?

Leann: Absolutely. He was a big guy. When we were little she used to call him her Gentle Ben; after the accident, he was downright

dangerous. One time he picked Mom up and threw her across the living room like she was a rag doll. Luckily she landed on the

sofa.

That was the first time she called the cops on him. We kids were terrified. We thought he was going to kill her. They took him to jail, but he was only there overnight because she refused to press charges. She never did press charges, even though the same kind of thing happened time and again.

By then it was clear that he was hooked on drugs. We kids were the ones who told Mom that he needed to move out, that it was

either him or us. We said if he didn’t leave, we would all go to Shoreline and live with Grandma and Grandpa.

At that point Mom rented an apartment for Dad in Ballard so he could live there. The problem is, the apartment was still within

walking distance of the house, so although he wasn’t actually living with us, he was still there almost every day and even

angrier than he had been before.

My sister, Marlise, left home and joined the military as soon as she graduated from high school. When Dad ended up getting

evicted from his apartment, Mom let him come back home. It was like she was addicted to him and couldn’t abandon him.

Once Andrew left for WSU, he was gone for good, too. By then the ongoing drama was too much for me, and I went to live with

Mom’s parents in Shoreline for my last two years of high school.

That passage hit me hard. Kyle Cartwright wasn’t the only kid on the planet who, as a last resort, had been forced to turn

to his grandparents for help.

Yolanda: But the domestic violence continued?

Leann: It seemed to be better for a while. Maybe, without us kids there, things weren’t quite as stressful. But as far as I was concerned, out of sight was out of mind. But then in 2013, things heated up again, and Mom started having to call 911. Law enforcement responded several times. It’s a miracle he didn’t kill her. Then one day Dad left the house without telling Mom where he was going and never came back. His body was found two days later in Golden Gardens.

Yolanda: He was still living with your mom at the time he disappeared?

Leann: For years, he lived down in the basement and she lived upstairs. When he didn’t come home, Mom was frantic. She called me

in hysterics and begged me to come help. I had recently graduated with my master’s in nursing. Since I didn’t have a job,

I came home, and it’s a good thing, too.

Mom had always been the strongest person I knew. She had spent years doing everything within her power to help him, but once

they found his body, she was a complete basket case. After all those years of looking after him, she just couldn’t cope anymore.

I’ve never seen anyone so broken. Marlise is career navy and wasn’t able to get leave, and Andrew had hired on to a new job,

so I stepped up. I’m the one who had to deal with everything—the cops, the M.E., the positive ID, and the funeral arrangements.

That one struck me, too. Here were three kids, not unlike Kyle, who had grown up under challenging circumstances as far as

their parental units were concerned. Not only had they all survived, they had thrived. They were self-sufficient, responsible

adults. Maybe the same thing would be true for my grandson as well.

Yolanda: You were there when detectives came to make the notification?

Leann: Yes, I was. Mom insisted that the whole thing had to be a mistake and that Dad couldn’t be dead, but of course he was. They found his ID in his wallet, and that was one of the reasons they said it was unlikely it was a robbery. Nothing was taken, not even the two hundred-dollar bills they found in his wallet.

I almost jumped out of my skin! Holy crap! Are you frigging kidding me? Two hundred-dollar bills?

I wasn’t aware I was talking to myself, but I was, enough so that I disturbed Sarah. She raised her head off her rug and gave

me a look as if to reassure herself that I was all right. But I wasn’t, not at all. I was beside myself, because I really

had found that damned pony!

I had started that day with two overdose cases linked by DNA. Now one of those was linked to yet a third case by the presence

of Darius Jackson’s two hundred-dollar bills. Yes, I was definitely on the right track, and no matter how many more files

Yolanda Aguirre sent me, I was going to read every one of them word for word.

Eventually I settled down and got back to reading. Yolanda’s subsequent questions led Leann through the immediate aftermath

of her father’s death.

Leann: Mom never recovered. She believed that if she had somehow taken better care of my father, he wouldn’t have died. That wasn’t

true. You can’t save someone who isn’t interested in saving himself, but she never got over losing him. She committed suicide

five years ago. Her suicide note said, “It’s all my fault.”

Yolanda: I’m so sorry. What a tragedy. How are you, your sister, and your brother doing?

Leann: Marlise will be retiring from the navy in a couple of years. She’s trying to figure out what she’s going to do with the rest of her life. Andrew is married with two kids. He lives in Greeley, Colorado, where he’s a high school special ed teacher.

Yolanda: And you?

Leann: I’m still single. I’m a nurse and work at the U Dub Hospital. In my spare time, I volunteer on a suicide prevention hotline.

It’s the best I can do.

That was the end of the interview. I didn’t have to see Leann’s face to understand the hurt and lingering heartbreak in those

last few words. Leann’s mother had tried and failed to save her father, and Leann had failed to save her mother, and seven

years later, Leann was still trying to save everyone else.

At that point, she was still Leann Nolastname as far as I was concerned. We had never met, but from that moment she became

one of my clients. She still believed that her father had died due to an accidental overdose. I, on the other hand, was pretty

sure Raymond had been murdered, and one of these days I hoped I would somehow bring his killer to justice not only for him,

but also for his kids. All three of them deserved it, but most especially Leann. Her mother had borne the brunt of her husband’s

physical violence, but Leann was the one still carrying the weight of the emotional fallout his death had left behind.