Latisha's Children

Aloud knock woke Joy and Manuel Perez as they drifted off to sleep on Nov. 5, 2000. They assumed it was Latisha, Joy's 25-year-old daughter. Who else would come by so late?

Instead, a police officer stood on the front steps of Joy's small trailer in Landfall. Sit down, he urged. When he announced that Latisha had been killed, Joy's hands flew up as if to ward off a blow. "I just wanted to push them words off me," she remembered later.

Her worst fear had come true. For a year and a half, ever since her daughter had divorced her unfaithful husband and begun dating a man named Areece Manley, Joy had worried over signs of his growing violence.

One day, Latisha showed up with hickeys circling her neck like a tattoo. The next time it was bruises. Latisha's older boys cried when they had to return home after visiting Joy. Areece hit them, they said. Joy begged her daughter to leave him. "Everyone deserves a second chance," Latisha said.

Now, Joy thought first of her grandchildren, Latisha's three boys, ages 3 to 7, and Latisha's daughter, who was nearly 2. They had been in the home when Latisha was killed but were all right, the policeman said. They would stay in foster care for their safety until police found the prime suspect, Manley. Joy was not allowed to call them or see them, except at their mother's funeral.

Fourteen days after the murder, on Nylah's second birthday, Manley surrendered to police in a Roseville parking lot while declaring his innocence.

The day after his arrest, a county child welfare worker pulled up in front of Joy's trailer and helped four small children climb from the car. Joy's grandchildren were now hers.

"It was the happiest day!" Joy remembered. "They just flew to me."

But the children arrived with deep wounds. Nylah, normally buoyant and precocious, was now subdued and whiny. Her ear was infected; her frizzy hair fell out in clumps. Three-year-old Donte, who had always been overshadowed by his baby sister, had a cold and seemed more lost than usual. Michael, the eldest at 7, wept and clung to Joy. Marcus, 5, threw tantrums and yelled, "I miss my mom!"

"They put me through a paper shredder inside," said Joy, with her talent for vivid metaphor. "And I just go to my higher power and I say: "I don't know how to handle this. You have to help me because I don't know what to do.' "

Joy squeezed the children into her tiny two-bedroom trailer. Sterling, her 10-year-old son, retreated to his small room to watch television and assemble puzzles where his nephews and niece wouldn't mess them up. Meanwhile, he nursed his own loss. Latisha had not only been his big sister; she was paid by a state program to help care for her impulsive brother. Most days, she'd come by to help Sterling with homework or cleaning his room or to take him to the movies. Now, she was gone and Joy's attention was consumed by her grandchildren.

Her determination to mother her grandchildren stemmed in part from her own past. "I went through a lot of hell as a child, and that's why these children will not go through hell," she resolved.

PUTTING UP BLINDERS

Even her first name seemed like a cruel joke on a girl whose drunken mother abandoned the family when the child was 3, leaving Joy in the care of a father who punched her in the face when she talked back.

She ran away from home at 14 and dropped out of school. Later, she survived abusive boyfriends, cocaine, jail time and bankruptcy. Through all those years, she went by a nickname: Tina.

By age 45, Joy had made a life of proud and modest comfort. She had finished high school and bought her small mobile home. She had gotten help for Sterling, the youngest of her three children, a bright boy who was prone to fits of temper.

And Joy, who loved to clean, had started a housecleaning business. Her first client was Ruby Hunt, a former president of the St. Paul City Council and Joy's one-time foster mother. Hunt had referred friends and helped Joy build a base of loyal customers.

Joy had also renewed her friendship with her ex-husband, Manuel Perez, who convinced her to claim the name she had never used. "Bring a little Joy into your life," quipped her business cards.

All that yielded now to grief and her grandchildren's needs. Latisha's children took over the trailer's main room, where they slept on quilts on the floor and stowed their clothes in cardboard boxes stacked against the wall. Joy quit her cleaning jobs to devote herself to the children. Manuel came by most days after work and on weekends to help however he could.

Joy's cleaning clients found her a crib, children's clothes, Christmas toys and money for a new washing machine to replace her 17-year-old model held together with duct tape. The man who sold Joy a used van gave her back $100 when he heard of her circumstances. "Merry Christmas," he said.

When she felt grief might overwhelm her, Joy put up what she called her "blinders," the mental walls she had used since childhood to block out pain. She had never needed the survival mechanism more. The blinders funneled her attention to the tremendous task of caring for the traumatized children.

DIFFICULT ADJUSTMENTS

But the children had no such defenses. Nylah cried for Mommy to do her hair. Whenever Joy helped the toddler put on her coat to go outside, Nylah asked hopefully, "Going to Mommy?" Joy didn't say Mommy was gone, because that suggested she would return. So she would explain gently: "Mommy has died. Mommy is with Jesus now." At night, Nylah would not be comforted and Joy would lie on the floor holding her hand through the bars of the crib until she finally fell asleep.

Donte had always been exceptionally active, and Latisha had found him difficult to handle. At the trailer, he poured Joy's fingernail polish on her bed and hid a dirty diaper. If Joy got upset, he would duck and whimper: "Don't hit me! Don't hit me!" She found a scar on the back of the child's leg; Areece had swatted him with a belt, the older boys reported. Donte also carried less visible scars -- a vague fear of a bad man in the hallway.

Joy enrolled the two older boys in Maplewood schools. At 7, Michael could not tell time or reliably spell his name; he was enrolled in the second-grade special-education program at Oakdale Elementary School. His teachers laminated a photograph of Latisha, and Michael wore it proudly around his neck. "That's my mom!" he told people. He made friends and seemed outwardly content most of the time.

But at home, he would sometimes weep and cling to his grandmother, desperately fearing being left behind. And he had flashbacks. One day, his teacher poured out red paint for an art project and another boy said: "Cool. It looks like blood."

"Don't you say that!" Michael cried.

Marcus seemed most on edge, his natural alertness exaggerated into a wary vigilance. Nothing in his world was as it had been. Nothing was safe. Joy gave him a Reese's peanut butter cup one day and he shrank back. "That says Areece. Why did you get me that?"

Another time, Joy brought home some things from Latisha's apartment, including a souvenir bracelet from Valley Fair bearing Areece's name. Marcus wanted to break it, so his grandmother gave him a steak knife and let him cut it into pieces. Only then would Marcus throw it away.

The police had instructed Joy not to ask the children, especially Marcus, questions about what had happened the night their mother was killed. The two older boys would testify in an eventual murder trial; it was important that their stories remain fixed in their memories. Joy could listen and comfort, but not respond to the children's revelations. So Marcus was isolated in his grief and fear.

During the first few weeks, he seemed to do well in kindergarten at Carver Elementary School in Maplewood. Then, the day before Christmas break, he started yelling, throwing dolls, and crying for his mother. The school social worker, Heather Jacobson, wrapped him in a blanket and held him in her lap while the principal drove him home.

By January, Marcus was still struggling. He was easily frustrated and frequently refused to join activities with the other children. Jacobson arranged her schedule so she could spend much of her day in the classroom with him.

One cold winter morning, as the rest of the class gathered to glue M&M's onto construction paper, Marcus wandered to the puppet booth and intently rummaged in a box of hand puppets. Finally, he chose a velvety bluebird and pulled it onto his small left hand. Then he slid a cat over his right hand. He lifted them above his head, into the opening between the curtains. The show had begun.

"Turn around and go to bed!" the bluebird yelled in a deep voice.

Then the bird ripped the cat off Marcus' right hand.

"Aaarrgghhhh!" Marcus shrieked as the limp cat fell into his lap.

Next, the child slid a pig onto his right hand.

"Go to bed, son!" the bluebird ordered, seizing the pig. The two hands grappled and the pig dropped to the ground.

A penguin was next to confront the angry bluebird. It too was attacked and fell.

"What happened to the penguin?" asked Jacobson, who sat on the floor watching Marcus' drama.

"He killed him," the boy said quietly.