Gang Mom Page 3

  “Well, I hate to tell you this, but Aaron was shot in the back of the head.”

  “So what was the wound on top of the head, on the forehead?”

  “That’s the exit wound. The place where the bullet came out.”

  “No way. No way. There’s no way! You can’t tell me that!” Janyce shouted.

  “I have to tell you this. We’ve gotten a report from the hospital and it says he’s still alive. But, I don’t think there’s much of a chance.”

  “Who would do this? Why would they do this?” Janyce asked, sinking into numb grief.

  “We don’t know. What happened?”

  “Well, I—I was basically sleeping and I didn’t hear no gunshot or anything, didn’t hear no people or anything. Then I thought I heard the TV, got up, walked through the house and wound up in Aaron’s room. You know the rest.”

  “Do you know anyone who would want your son dead, Mrs. Iturra?”

  “No way!” Janyce repeated. “And how come they won’t let me wash my hands?”

  “We need to test them for gunpowder. It’s routine in cases like this. Everyone in a house where a shooting takes place gets their hands tested for gunpowder residue.”

  “There’s no way.” Janyce firmly shook her head. “You can test me but you are not gonna do my children. They have nothing to do with this.”

  At that point, the technician who was going to administer the gunpowder tests arrived. After a briefing by Michaud, she began testing Janyce and her kids. As ridiculous as the thought of her or her kids shooting Aaron was, Janyce knew no point would be gained by arguing with the cops. Best to take the test and get it over with. When no trace of gunpowder showed up on her hands, Janyce felt momentarily smug.

  “See, I told you,” she said.

  “It’s just procedure,” Michaud answered sympathetically.

  “Now please let me go to the hospital,” Janyce continued, looking at the kitchen clock that said 4 a.m.

  “Best to wait until the representative from Victims Services arrives,” said Michaud.

  Victims Services is a relatively new type of agency in law enforcement departments nationwide. They function as compassionate advocates for victims and their families, simultaneously helping them negotiate the treacherous waters of grief on one shore and the court system on the other.

  Michaud didn’t want to take any chance that Janyce wasn’t telling the whole truth, that she might really know who had killed her son and go after them. He doubted it, but in his line of work, you learned that anyone was capable of murder with the right kind of provocation. Best to play this situation by the book.

  At the same moment Jim Michaud was telling Janyce Iturra the grim news, Joe Brown stood at a secluded spot outside of Eugene on the banks of the Willamette River. Behind him was a station wagon, with its headlights on, illuminating the river. In front of him was raging white water, flashing in a quick torrent over rocks in the river bed. To his right, in the encroaching darkness, he just barely made out the dark forms of trees that lined the banks. To his left was a little island that had formed in the river where the water table had gotten too low. It was a perfect place for concealment. Dark, silent, alone.

  Brown reached in his pocket and came out with the crumpled pack of cigarettes he had taken from the girl’s pocketbook. He shook one out and lit it, savoring the smoke going into his lungs, calming him down. Then quickly, he emptied the revolver of the remaining five bullets. Reeling back his arm, he threw them out as far as he could. He didn’t make the rapids.

  The bullets sailed out into the water about fifty feet from the bank and fell into shallow water. Still, that was okay; the river bottom was brown. They’d just blend in. So would the gun, which he tossed in a moment later. It sank rapidly into the silt.

  There. Over and done with like nothing had happened.

  Joe Brown turned sharply and walked back to the car. He got in and closed the door. The wagon backed up and turned onto a ribbon of concrete that paralleled the river. They drove for a while, then turned down a side street, stopping to rest in front of Brown’s home. He got out, then leaned back in the open window and said to the driver, “See you tomorrow, Moms.”

  The woman he had called “Moms” watched as he ran up the driveway and disappeared inside.

  Lisa Fentress awakened from her marijuana-induced sleep to the sound of her phone ringing.

  Who was that? she wondered.

  She couldn’t be sure, and she didn’t care. She liked where she was, half asleep and half awake. Didn’t have to deal with anything. Didn’t have to see anyone. Didn’t have to have any responsibility for what she’d done. Maybe, if she tried, she could make the phone go away.

  After a while, the phone stopped ringing and Lisa floated back into cannabis dreams.

  At 5 a.m., Lisa awoke when her pager went off. She dialed the number on the digital display.

  “Aaron was taken care of,” said the voice on the other end of the line.

  THREE

  At 7 a.m., Heather Parr, the woman from Victims Services, finally showed up. She had come from home, where she left her sleeping daughter.

  As angry as Janyce was that they had to wait, she had to admit that Aaron’s shooting had so shaken her up, she didn’t know if she would have had the wherewithal to drive herself and the kids to the hospital.

  “Come on,” said Parr, and Janyce and the kids piled into a van that Victims Services had provided. Parr, ever obliging, drove quickly to the hospital.

  Once there, they ran quickly through an emergency room gauntlet of overworked doctors and nurses and orderlies. They found Aaron upstairs in the Intensive Care Unit. Standing off in the shadows was a uniformed police officer, whom Michaud had placed there as a guard.

  “We can only allow you to go in one at a time,” said the unit’s head nurse. Janyce went in first, putting on a gown and washing her hands to make sure she didn’t track in any germs.

  She found Aaron attached to a respirator, heart monitor and IV tubes. Looking down at her son, he seemed so small and helpless. You’re still my baby, she thought, gazing at his face, pristine and rested despite his serious injury.

  “Who did this to my baby?” she asked aloud.

  Suddenly, there was another person standing at her side. It was the head nurse again.

  “Mrs. Iturra, I’m sorry to bother you, but has anyone told you about your son’s condition? Do you understand the extent of your son’s injuries?”

  Janyce felt relieved. Finally, someone to tell her the truth, here and now, with none of this waiting.

  “No, I don’t know what’s going on with him. Tell me.”

  “Well, the bullet went in the left side of his head and exited out of the right. In the process, it did a lot of damage inside. There is very little, or no brain activity.”

  “But he’s still alive!”

  “Yes, but—”

  “His heart is still pumping, he’s breathing, he’s a very, very strong kid.”

  “I understand, Mrs. Iturra, but frankly, it’s not going to be long before his heart stops.”

  Despite what she wanted to believe, Janyce could tell that the woman was telling the truth. “My kids need to say goodbye.” The nurse nodded.

  As Janyce watched, the kids came in, one at a time. She didn’t have the heart to tell them that he was going to die. She just couldn’t do that to them. But they knew, the way people always know when placed in such an awful situation. Finally, when she was alone again with Aaron, she leaned over the bed and reached out to hug her first-born.

  “I can’t let you do that,” said the cop, who got out of his chair.

  “But …”

  “Ma’am, I’m sorry.”

  “Well, could I just hold his hand?”

  “Sure.”

  Janyce picked up Aaron’s hand and held it to her cheek, where it brushed against her tears. She reached out and touched her fingertips to his chest, remembering feeding him as a child, the way he sq
uirmed in her arms when she gave him the bottle, and the way he looked up at her with that broad, easy smile, happy to see her. Always. And what made it worse, what really made it worse, was that he was her best friend.

  Janyce had separated from her husband, Aaron’s stepfather, just weeks before, and while she had seen it coming, the impact was no less great. One moment he was there and the next moment he wasn’t.

  After that, she had leaned on Aaron. The kid was always there for her. Now, who could she lean on?

  When, in 1977, twenty-two-year-old Janyce Iturra got pregnant with Aaron it was not a good situation.

  Many of the Indians of the northwest tribes that Lewis and Clark had communed with in 1805 had been wiped out by government genocide. Three of the indigenous tribes had since banded together, signed a treaty with the government and lived on Oregon’s Warm Springs Reservation. Aaron Iturra’s father was one of those Indians.

  After his brief affair with Janyce, she had gotten pregnant. It was not a planned pregnancy and yet, she had no desire to abort. She traveled to Bethel, a suburb of Seattle, where she gave birth.

  Up until Aaron’s birth, Janyce had been a child of the streets. She had always been a good person, but she drank too much and just didn’t care about anyone or anything, including herself. Pregnancy and childbirth made her a responsible adult. In return, she made Aaron a guarantee. “As long as we’re together, we’re gonna make it through this life,” she promised the baby in her arms. “I’m gonna do my very best to make life the best for you.”

  Despite the drawbacks she faced in the intervening years, whether it was dead-end jobs or dead-end relationships, she always thought, “Thank God I got pregnant. Thank God I got you.”

  And Aaron was always there for her.

  “Mom, you can do this. We’ll make it. We’ll make it,” Aaron encouraged her time and time again.

  She had been a single parent living on just her income for support. She wouldn’t even let her kids work to help with the bills. Her goals, first and foremost, were for her kids to get a good education, without which she knew they would never get anywhere. Janyce herself had gone through three years at Portland State University, but had never finished. She had not graduated from college, but she wanted them to.

  As late as a few weeks before the shooting, when Aaron’s stepdad, the only father he ever really knew, left the family, Aaron was still encouraging Janyce, assuring her that things would work out for the better. And now, with him dying, Janyce felt she was reneging on her half of their bargain. She had not kept him safe and she could not save his life. Someone had come along to steal it. A thief in the night with a long, smoking gun.

  By 10:30 a.m., all signs of brain activity had ceased. The nurse came up to Janyce.

  “Ma’am I know this is a bad time. But I need to ask you a question.”

  “Which is?”

  “Do you think your son would have been willing to donate his organs?”

  There wasn’t even any anger. Janyce knew her son was dead. Only the respirator was keeping his heart going. She summoned Tina. Together, they went down the hallway and stood off to the side, in the same spot many people before them had stood, having to make the same type of difficult choice. Unlike the movies, questions of when to turn a respirator off, when to use extraordinary life-saving methods on a terminal patient, or whether organs should be donated for transplant are not made in bright doctors’ offices, or spanking-new suburban homes. Those decisions are made in dim, puke-painted hospital corridors, like the one Tina and Janyce found themselves in now.

  “What do you think, Tina?” Janyce asked.

  “Mom, there’s no choice. You know how Aaron feels about that.”

  Aaron had actually been prescient enough to have discussed the possibility of what to do with his organs if he died before his time. And now that time was here.

  “That’s what I would like,” Aaron had said. “If I saved just one other life, maybe my death would be worth it.”

  “Okay,” Janyce answered.

  She had known what she was going to do before she took the walk with Tina. She just wanted support for that decision. “I’ll sign the papers,” Janyce told the nurse. After signing, Janyce walked back into the hospital room. She leaned down and kissed Aaron on the forehead.

  “I love you, Aaron.”

  Her reply was a sudden ringing noise as the EKG flatlined and Aaron died peacefully. Janyce and the children left. Then, the medical staff went to work.

  Aaron’s body was rushed upstairs to the operating room where a surgical team was waiting. Standing to the side were five white-robed messengers of life, each carrying a single Igloo cooler well-stocked with ice. This was not “Touched by an Angel.”

  When they left a short while later, each cooler held a precious cargo: Aaron’s heart, kidneys, pancreas and liver. Janyce would later write to Tom Jacobsen, the fifty-year-old Baptist minister who received Aaron’s heart, and the four others whose lives were saved by Aaron’s organs.

  Some might consider it a fair trade—one life for five. But to Jim Michaud it was murder plain and simple.

  Michaud had heard from the officer on duty at the hospital about Aaron’s death. That made this a murder investigation now. Time to put it into high gear.

  Michaud arrived at the police morgue just as the forensic pathologist was making the “Y” incision on Aaron’s chest for the autopsy. Quickly, he changed into blue scrubs. A police photographer was already there taking pictures of the proceedings. While that was being done, Michaud called the crime lab.

  “Any luck finding the bullet?”

  “We stripped his room. Took everything out of it, peeled the carpet out. Even took a wall apart,” said a crime-scene technician.

  “And you’re telling me you found nothing?”

  “Nothing,” the technician echoed. Which meant everything from this point onward about the murder weapon was guesswork.

  There’s a ton of cops that will tell you, Michaud thought, what is an entrance and exit wound just by eyeballing the body. But it was only by examining the body under the forensic pathologist’s knife that the investigator could accurately figure out the kind of bullets, the distance from which they were fired, the forensic evidence that could eventually be used to convict the killer.

  The forensic pathologist conducting the autopsy used an electric saw to take off the skull cap and peer into Aaron’s brain. Michaud noticed chipping on the inside, in the back of Aaron’s skull, indicating the entrance wound. Over his forehead, on the side, he saw the bone chips on the outside, indicating the exit wound.

  “Any sign of the bullet, doc?”

  The pathologist shook his head.

  It must have fallen out when the paramedics picked him up, or on the way to the ambulance. Kind of like the J.F.K. bullet, Michaud thought, that had gone through the President’s neck and Governor John Connally’s shoulder and wrist, finally coming to rest in Connally’s thigh. Having lost eighty per cent of its velocity, it was just able to penetrate the skin.

  While many discounted that scenario, Michaud knew from his experience with firearms and bullet wounds that the skull could easily slow a bullet to the point where, when it exited, it had little or no velocity and literally just fell to the ground. He would instruct the technicians to comb the crime scene again.

  Soon, they were fitting the skull cap back on, and examining the entrance wound more closely, figuring out the trajectory of the bullet.

  “He was shot lying down, wasn’t he?” Michaud asked the forensic pathologist.

  “Looks like it,” the pathologist replied.

  Probably from about six feet away, Michaud figured, from the look of the wound. And there’s no speckling or any powder burns here or tattooing from unburnt powder. Yes, definitely far enough away to get off a good shot, but not too far to hinder accuracy.

  Whoever did this was able to sneak cold-bloodedly into the Iturra home and commit this execution while Aaron and his girlfri
end slept. Someone is filling a contract, Michaud thought. This was a hit, a murder that someone contracted for.

  “Turn him,” Michaud ordered the police photographer.

  Together they turned Aaron’s body over. In anticipation of the killer’s capture and the subsequent trial, the preparation of exhibits starts in the coroner’s bleak, antiseptic examining room.

  With Aaron on his stomach, just as he was when he was shot, the photographer took a photograph of him from the same angle the killer would have been standing when he fired the deadly shot. In this way, some future jury could actually picture the way the crime occurred.

  An hour later, Michaud was home. Paula had already left for work. He figured to take a shower, get into some new clothes and then head back to the office.

  Michaud put on a freshly starched white shirt, admiring how clean it smelled. And then he flashed back to the coroner’s autopsy room and smelled Aaron’s body, a combination of odors, of urine and feces released at the time of death, and flesh beginning to putrefy. Cops are good at putting that wall up between their professional and home lives but seeing such a young man murdered in cold blood, it was the kind of thing you know you’re never going to forget.

  Michaud thanked his lucky stars that Aaron had not been a fire victim. They’ve got that sweet smell to them that drove him nuts.

  FOUR

  Death is bad enough, especially when it happens to a teenager with everything to live for. It is worse when the deceased is the victim of a violent crime and his family cannot go back home because home is still considered a crime scene.

  Janyce and the kids went back to the house, where technicians were still processing evidence. The family picked up some clothes and went to Janyce’s friend Diana’s house to stay the night, until the police would let them go home.

  When they got to Diana’s at 12:30, the first thing Janyce did was call Mary Thompson. She needed to let her know what had happened. She didn’t want Mary to hear the news on TV.

  Janyce went through her purse for Mary’s number and found it. Janyce dialed, got her phone answering machine and left a message with Diana’s number. She expected to get a call back quickly. Minutes stretched into hours without a response.