So Much Pretty (29 page)

When more doctors began using his methods there was a public campaign to discredit handwashing and instrument disinfection. (Will get examples esp. slogans about not washing.)

In 1861 Semmelweis suffered a nervous breakdown from the frustration of not seeing his methods widely applied. In July 1865 he was committed to an asylum.

He is quoted as saying: “When I look back upon the past, I can only dispel the sadness which falls upon me by gazing into that happy future when the infection will be banished . . . The conviction that such a time must inevitably sooner or later arrive will cheer my dying hour.” (544)

Semmelweis died in Wein Dobling from injuries due to beatings by the Asylum’s staff. His life and struggles are socially instructive to those of us who would like to one day become doctors, as he made a simple discovery that enabled other doctors and scientists to better understand the nature of bacteriological diseases.

The University of Medicine in Budapest is named after him as is “The Semmelweis Reflex,” a problem in which a discovery of important scientific fact is punished rather than rewarded. Semmelweis became known long after his death as the “savior of mothers.”

Audio File: Reynolds, Karen, 5/4/09
Stacy Flynn, Haeden
Free Press

Let’s see here, it’s May 4, 2009. And I’m Officer Karen Reynolds.

Right, well, like I said, she didn’t look like a girl who had committed a crime. She looked like a
kid
just waiting for her parents to pick her up. She had the same bored, distracted, anxious look, like that.

She looked tired. She looked like my kid does after track practice. My boys go to school in Elmville, thank God. I know teenagers. I got four at home, and if I didn’t know what she had done, I wouldn’t have been able to tell her apart from any of them. She looked all flushed and sweaty, but not like a killer. To tell you the truth, and this is completely off the record, I mean it,
completely
. This tape is proof I said that, too. So you can’t print it.

The thing is, there are times when I still don’t believe she did it. The powder display was all there on her hands and face when we did the paraffin. But she went target shooting in the mornings with her uncle. We got that answer from all her teachers, hell, half the school. She wasn’t the only kid with residual powder, either—but the others were boys, and they were hunters, it all looked different, and they were nowhere near the scene. There’re many people who never believed she did it.

There were no cameras in that school then. It was the craziest possible day, with the pep rally, and Spirit Day, and they were allowed to play music over the loudspeaker between classes. That’ll be the last of that.

When we booked her, she was polite, self-confident—like a mistake had been made and she knew she had to go through this process and her parents would pick her up soon. She asked when her parents would be there. She asked if anyone had been killed, or how many people, if we knew who. And looked upset when we said we couldn’t
tell her. She said she was worried about her friends. But she was composed, relieved. It seemed like a kid like her might react that way. She was in no way the kind of person that gets sent to the behavioral unit, I can tell you. She was the farthest thing from it. There were a lot of surprises with that girl.

The inmates believed it, though. She was here for a few weeks. Had a hotshot lawyer made sure she didn’t go anywhere. She got given a real hard time ’cause she was a celebrity. She shoulda been in isolation the whole time, but we got limited facilities. There’s eight women in here, and there were times when she was with them in the general population, and those were not easy times for her, I’m sure. I heard girls talking about her on the phone to their boyfriends and moms, or talking in the commissary or in their GED classes. They called her Pipe Bomb. They respected her and they hated her and I think that’s ’cause most of the girls are from around here and went to HHS or Elmville at one point or another. She got close to a girl named Lorelei Ramos, which was a smart move, because if anyone was going to start something physical, it was Ramos. She was in on a parole violation, girl wasn’t supposed to leave Kings County, got picked up here on a speeding ticket and possession, and now she’s got to call it home. Anyway. They had a real bond, for some reason. Wasn’t any two people here who looked or talked more different, but they got along.

Ramos is still here, and as you know, Piper is not. She might not have made it at all if it weren’t for Ramos making such a racket. And I can tell you, I was not happy to be the first one to see what she had done. She’s a child, after all.

I don’t mind you talking to Lorelei, if she’ll agree to it. She’d have to call you collect, and it’s up to her to tell her lawyer, and she has a court-appointed, so you know . . . they got twenty, thirty clients, might not even give a crap, as far as I know.

She’d be your best bet for figuring things out if Piper told anyone what she planned. Or you could find a girl who likes to brag. And that wouldn’t be Ramos. There’s a lot of girls like to tell you how badass
they are, but they make stuff up, too—so you have to be careful what you believe.

I just went to this training down at Elmira about this stuff, how to communicate and listen better to these girls and not let them manipulate you—’cause that’s what they’re all about, and you know we just want them to get their sentence done and be able to be okay back out there. We really do. Help them use this time to make some real changes.

It’s all about reentry now. How they can go back into the world. I tell you, I like a lot of these girls, and I know they got friends here and they get treated right by us. A lot of them got stress like veterans get—not from being in
here
. I mean, they got that post-stress stuff in their lives. The course I took said 85 percent of incarcerated females got some kind of abuse, you know, physical, sexual abuse or rape, sometimes a whole lot of it, before they were arrested. So that’s where the thing is—you help them know it doesn’t
matter
what was done to them. They got to make the right choices
now
so they can be okay. It’s up to them. You don’t got money, you feel bad about yourself, you want to score some meth, you want to smoke some crack so you feel better—but you’re gonna feel worse when you end up in jail and can’t see your folks or, even worse, your own kids. It’s all a mess, such a mess, I’m telling you.

Alice Piper, if she was guilty, had done something I’m sure a lot of them dreamed about. Hell, I think there’s girls not even in jail who’ve had those feelings.

There’s a lot of angry girls in here. That’s just how it is. Put two and two together. You can see it in their faces. None of them were shedding tears over what happened at Haeden High.

Flynn

Y
OU KNOW THE
rest. Or as much as anyone else does. A Glock 37 pistol registered to Ross Miller disappeared. A birthday check for $180 from Constant Souriani was cashed.

And then something that could have been called a school shooting happened. Could have been called a school shooting, was being called a plot. And if it was a plot, I was involved.

Tom Cutting and I continued to pay attention to what was in front of us. I had access to information and wasn’t about to see this thing turn into some kind of obstructed mess the way the White case had. It was my story—and it sure as hell was the big-picture story. I intended to keep my head up and keep focused.

Some of the things in front of me were forensics photos taken in the hallway, in front of the cafeteria, in the weight room, in a science classroom, and in the school parking lot. Familiar settings and ugly subjects. The awful irony of school decorations hanging in the background in these photographs. The incongruity of desks and posters, chalkboards and murals and lockers paired with combat footage.

The shots of the crime scene, the so-called forensics photos, were no help in figuring out what had happened. Though I pored over them, thinking there would be one detail that would reveal everything. Reveal that it started as a rivalry between teammates or was the work of a classically unstable kid. Tom knew right away that wasn’t it. His best EMT student had shown up for school that day, prepared to treat people for trauma and shock. And Tom knew better than anyone what the scene looked like. We slept at my place after it happened, and for the rest of the time we were in town, because he said he never wanted to look out of
the window at the VFD again. This period of time for us was all about aversion. About the unspoken.

I saw Kyle Potter’s mother in the grocery store one day after I had been looking at photographs of her son’s body. Some close-ups of his head and torso, or what remained. In other photographs, his body was next to two other bodies. Shoulders touching, arms stretched over chests, a hand on a thigh, part of a head resting on the HHS logo across a blood-soaked sweatshirt. In some less explicit photos, the athletic wear, the intimacy, the languid posture could almost appear to be boys horsing around. Except for the blood. I had wondered if these boys produced an inordinate amount of blood because they were so healthy, so physically strong. There was blood covering the tile beneath them: dots of blood fanned out across the wall to their right. I was surprised by the quantity of blood at first but had looked at the pictures long enough to see other things—the color of an eye, smooth skin, pinkish-white sinew. They looked like little steer. The weight and muscle of their bodies obvious even in death.

I saw Kyle Potter’s mother in line, and I did not speak to her. Not that anyone would have spoken to me. In those days right after the shooting, I was grateful to see the world as a series of concrete events, one following another. It goes like this: There is a great deal of blood in this photograph. I need cigarettes. I will go to the store. The sticker on my window says my inspection is up soon. There is Kyle’s mother, buying Swiss Miss pudding. Cigarettes now cost $7.75. I need to put the windshield wipers on because it is raining. I forgot to buy toilet paper. They put up a new sign up at the Rooster. I wonder if Tom is on call.

This new way of feeling was also helpful when replacing my slashed tires, cleaning up glass from beneath the windows in my living room, and filing harassment complaints for Dino to ignore.

Around this time I told a radio news reporter about the release of forensic evidence in what I thought was an empathetic and professional tone. But when I heard my voice the next day, I realized
I had recounted these images and given information like I was reading off a very boring list. I listened to myself while drinking coffee. I had yet to eat a full meal since reviewing the HHS photographs. Even when Tom made me dinner it was nearly impossible. I didn’t think I would ever be able to eat meat again.

The photos didn’t help with anything, and ultimately, Dino’s “evidence” provided a lot more information about himself and Haeden than it did about spring Spirit Day.

One day he called me at the paper to give me a copy of this letter taken from the Pipers’ house, again totally unredacted. I read it but didn’t get it. It could have been written by any one of my friends who decided to study business. I looked up the author—Constant Souriani, a businessman who had an aunt who had worked at the Haeden family clinic in the nineties. Already a known entity—a friend of the family, nothing new. It seemed a melancholic piece. The problems of working for “the man” and all. But Dino insisted it was crucial to understanding the case. That Souriani was an Arab. Showed me a box of books, a canceled check to Alice Piper from Souriani’s account, and an essay Piper wrote for her English class—almost as good as anything I wrote in J-school. He thought that Alice was a new breed of suicide bomb, worse than a suicide bomb, because at this point there were still so many doubts about what had happened that day. Dino had been reading on the Homeland Security website about terrorists attacking our schools like they did in Russia.

It didn’t help that the FBI had agents in town. That Dino, for the first time in his life, was working with them. I took his evidence. And I stayed close. In part because working so hard on the story prevented me from feeling it. From feeling what Alice had felt. From feeling what Wendy had felt. From feeling what these boys’ mothers and fathers felt.

I knew there was nothing to be gained from Dino’s research. The person who could put it all together was waiting in jail and more than happy to talk to me. She was unchanged. Her eyes,
her face, her smile. She was herself. Waiting for me in the visitors’ room, wearing the bright orange jumpsuit with side pockets. Could have been telling me about her latest science-fair project or fund-raiser. I thought of the butterfly garden and how, in a month, things would be blooming there again.

I would be the only person ever to interview Alice Piper. Ever to record her voice for the record. I had a story no one else could get, the thing Dino needed to close the case, and I needed to launch my career, as I had always planned, with a big-picture story from a backwater nowhere.

Audio File: Piper, Alice, 4/29/09
Stacy Flynn, Haeden
Free Press

Alice Piper, April 29, 2009. I killed Bruce Haytes, Kyle Potter, Chris Ward, Paul Rees, Rick Tompkins, Tony Belardini, and Taylor Williams, who had actually made it outside the school. I think there are still probably three or four other people in town, adults, who need to be eliminated. But other than Bruce’s brother, who I’m pretty certain about, I don’t know who they are, and it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to do it. How are
you
doing?

Stacy?

There was something wrong with them. They knew where Wendy White was and there was no way to prove it. There still isn’t, right? People who would do this would undoubtedly do other things that are ethically wrong and costly for the whole community—there’s the moral obligation and then there’s the logical aspect of it. I don’t know that there’s any other choice. It would be better for everyone, including the people with whom they were close, if they were dead.