Latisha's Children

Each year, the killings of Minnesota women by their husbands, boyfriends and other intimate partners are duly reported to the public. Rarely do citizens glimpse the wider costs of such crimes, particularly for the families grieving for mothers, daughters and sisters lost to violence committed in the name of love.

Over the past year, writer Maja Beckstrom and photographer Ginger Pinson have followed one such family. Since Latisha Barnes was killed by her boyfriend on Nov. 5, 2000, the lives of her mother, brother and four small children have been forever changed. A doting grandmother became mother to four traumatized children. A troubled boy was forced to share his mother's strained attention. And four small children are growing up in the shadow of violent loss.

Government programs sustain them. A murder trial sought justice. But the burden of healing the past and stopping the contagion of violence falls heaviest on a wounded family.

"My Mother is Dead"

There had been a fight the night before and now Mommy seemed to be asleep, stretched out on her back between the bed and the wall. Hungry for breakfast, 5-year-old Marcus tugged her hands and called out, “Mommy! Wake up!” Her eyes were open, but she wouldn’t rouse from her stubborn slumber.

Marcus took charge, as he often did when their mother wasn’t up to it. He was the second of Latisha Barnes’ four children, a tall kindergartner with huge brown eyes and a protective way around his family. His older brother was slow to learn things, so it was Marcus who made a breakfast of microwave popcorn to share with his brothers, 7-year-old Michael and 3-year-old Donté, and Nylah, a 2-year-old with hair soft as cotton and Latisha’s only girl. One of the children brought Froot Loops to the bedroom and dropped a few by Mommy’s head, hoping perhaps to nourish her back to consciousness.

The Barnes family had moved into the duplex on East Minnehaha Avenue in St. Paul just a month earlier, and Barbara Jandl, who lived across the street, didn’t know them well. But as the cold November Sunday wore on, past breakfast and people coming home from church services, she noticed the boys playing in the street, unsupervised and underdressed. She saw Nylah standing in the doorway, wearing only a pajama top. Jandl wasn’t surprised. She had seen that sort of thing before.

The children hadn’t always been slighted. Latisha Barnes, a pretty, plump woman of 25 with a broad face and dimpled smile, doted on her children, especially Nylah. “You are my world,” she wrote in a baby book. She dressed the toddler in Winnie-the-Pooh outfits and taught her to sing most of the alphabet song. When Latisha had money, she took the children to Camp Snoopy. When she was broke, she mixed homemade play dough with food coloring. When the children got on her nerves, she put her hands on her head, shook it wildly and sang the rap hit “Y’all gon’ make me lose my mind, up in here, up in here … ” It became a family joke. The kids would join in and everyone would end up laughing.

A year and a half before, Latisha had divorced her unfaithful husband and begun dating. Her new boyfriend, Areece Manley, was generous with money, clothes and drugs. But he was crazy jealous — slapping her for the smallest offense, checking her caller ID constantly, accusing her of having other lovers, shutting her off from family and friends. She stayed with him at first because she thought she could change him, then because she was afraid. By moving to the duplex, she had hoped to leave him behind.

On Saturday night, though, Manley had surprised her in the duplex, and they fought. Then the children saw him drive away in Latisha’s blue Pontiac.

Now it was Sunday and in the East Side duplex, lunchtime passed, and then nap time. The phone rang but the children didn’t answer. The older boys took off Nylah’s soggy diaper but could not manage to hitch on another. They tried to make dinner but the spaghetti burned.

Finally, around dusk, when the neighbors were sitting down to dinner, the children gathered around their mother and saw blood trickling from her mouth. She might be dead, they thought, not really understanding the finality of that word. Marcus prayed for an angel to come down, as he had seen on television, but the angel didn’t come. Marcus thought it was because Donté, usually bouncy as a squirrel, now could not stop crying.

Jandl saw the three boys cross the street through the rain and recognized Michael’s gangly gait and short cropped hair. He had taken rocks from her rock garden shortly after his family moved in, and she had scolded him gently. Michael became her buddy, following her around when she worked outside, trading his hugs for her attention. She was perplexed at the sight of Marcus, wearing his mother’s robe of pink and red hearts that trailed like a bridal train behind him. She opened the front door as the boys climbed the steps.

“My mother is dead,” a weeping Michael said.

“Honey, she’s probably just hurt,” Jandl said. But when Michael described the blood trickling from his mother’s mouth, she dialed 911. The older boys watched through her living-room window as a squad car pulled up and two blue-uniformed officers went inside. Little Donté, exhausted from fending for himself for more than 12 hours, fell asleep on the couch. Jandl coaxed Michael and Marcus away from the window with a promise of hot dogs and potato chips.

DIFFICULT QUESTIONS

The front door of 426 E. Minnehaha was wide open when officers Theresa Spencer and Scott Wendell arrived. The house was a mess: dirty dishes piled in the kitchen, clothes and Styrofoam bits strewn on the floor. A hockey game played on the television. The air smelled of burned spaghetti.

From the upstairs hall, officer Wendell saw Latisha’s bare legs stretched out on the bedroom carpet. He rushed into the room and found a naked child — Nylah — curled in a fetal position on her mother’s bare belly and crying.

Nylah wailed more loudly as officer Spencer snatched her up and felt her icy toes and hands. The first pair of socks she found were an adult’s, long enough to cover the toddler’s thighs.

In an instant, the children’s long, lonely day of trying to wake Mommy became the rapid-fire routine of a homicide investigation. Yellow tape went up. Latisha was identified through the title to her car. Homicide detectives arrived and searched the home. Crime-lab technicians ran cotton swabs over blood smears on the wall and picked up the cigarette by Latisha’s hand. Someone from the medical examiner’s office probed her jaw muscles to determine the extent of rigor mortis and estimate the time of death. Investigators found a car registration card for an Areece Devon Manley; an officer was sent to his sister’s home to ask where he could be found.

Meanwhile, Latisha’s three boys were brought downtown to police headquarters, where they were questioned by Sgt. Patricia Englund, a homicide detective and experienced child interviewer. Marcus had the most to say. After letting the kindergartner choose some snacks, Englund led him to a small white room, where his bare feet dangled from the chair. He still wore his mother’s silky robe.

“What are you going to eat first?” Englund asked.

“The nuts,” said Marcus.

The detective opened the bag of peanuts and the child lifted his arms so the slippery fabric slid back and bunched at his elbows, freeing his hands to crack the shells.

“Are they good?”

“Uh huh,” he said, absorbed with the task of eating.

Englund asked him about school, his family and friends and whether he had a pet. Marcus was friendly and quick to answer. Then she asked him about that day.

“Did you have any breakfast?”

“Yeah, I made it myself.”

“What did you have?”

“Popcorn.”

“Microwave popcorn?”

“Yeah.”

“Was Mom there?”

“Uh huh.” v “Was anybody there with Mom?”

“Noooo.”

“How about Dad? Is there a dad?”

“He’s mean.”

“Does he have a name?”

“Reece.” Marcus paused. “You know what he did?”

“What did he do?”

“He had a gun.”

“How do you know he had a gun?”

“Because I saw it. I was going to tell the police.”

“Where did Reece have it?”

“In his hand. Can I go to the bathroom?”

When they returned, Englund asked more questions about Reece.

“You know what he did to my mom’s mouth?” Marcus offered. “He put a gun in my mom’s mouth and shot my mom. I heard the gunshot. I woke up and heard the gunshot. I looked in my mom’s room and he said ‘Get out of here.’ He started to get out of the bed and I ran.”

Marcus was matter-of-fact, a quality common in children describing violent events they’ve witnessed. Their minds repress much of the fear and sadness that is too painful to bear.

“After the gunshot, was Reece still in there?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do?”

“I said, ‘I heard a gunshot. That was you, Reece.’ ”

“And what did he say?”

“‘I don’t care.’ He said, ‘I don’t care.’ ” Marcus seemed distressed and looked away. “I don’t know the rest.”

Englund asked a few more questions, but it was clear Marcus no longer wanted to talk. Before they left the room, the boy struggled to carefully push his chair under the table.

That evening, the four children were taken to a foster home in Little Canada. Nylah had grown attached to officer Spencer and had to be pulled from the officer’s arms when she was dropped off. Because the children were potential witnesses at a murder trial and the suspect was still at large, police decided to leave them in foster care. Their maternal grandmother sent messages through the cops: She loved them and was thinking of them. But they were not allowed to see her or speak to her. For the time being, Latisha’s children were delivered to strangers.

The police got a break two days later when they received a call from a woman who said she was Areece Manley’s girlfriend. She had read about Latisha’s slaying in the newspapers and had just discovered the missing blue Pontiac parked in her unused garage. But Manley was gone. Homicide detectives turned their hunt to Kansas City, Mo., where he had relatives.

‘I’LL BE BACK FOR YOU’

Nine days after they found their mother dead, without contact with anyone they knew, the children woke up Nov. 14 as a wan sun struggled through the clouds for the first time in a week. They were going to their mother’s funeral, they were told.

In a parking lot behind Ramsey County’s human services building on Kellogg Boulevard in St. Paul, they ran to their grandmother. “Grandma!” they cried. “Do you know what happened? Do you know what happened?”

Joy Perez, a big-boned woman with a careworn face, embraced them and held up the dress clothes she had brought for the funeral. Nylah’s red velvet dress was the only one that fit. So they raced to Target, where she bought small suits for the three boys. At Mt. Olivet Missionary Baptist Church, she dressed them hurriedly. In the sanctuary was their father, who had been allowed to leave prison for the funeral. The two older boys ran to him, while the younger children stayed with Joy. Donté asked if his mother was with angels. Nylah bounced in her grandmother’s lap through the service.

The casket remained closed. Even skilled morticians could not erase the damage of a gunshot to the head.

After the burial in Elmhurst Cemetery, they drove back to the county parking lot, where a car from child protection waited for the children. Until Areece Manley was arrested, they would remain in foster care. But they wept and clung to their grandmother.

Joy Perez did the only thing she could think to do. She dropped to her knees on the frozen ground and told her grandchildren to look at her. Searching each child’s face in turn, she asked, “Do you trust me? Do you trust Grandma?”

When the sniffling children nodded, she pledged: “I’ll be back for you. I’ll come and get you. I promise you.”

Then Joy Perez walked to her car without looking back. On that cold November day a year ago, there was no way the children could know how steadfast that promise would be.

Grandma Takes Charge

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.

Hope in a New House

Joy Perez woke at 3 a.m., chilled to the bone. The furnace had died, and the January air quickly seeped through the flimsy walls of her trailer. She piled more blankets on her sleeping son and grandchildren then turned on the oven and opened its door. It was going to be another long, hard day.

Even dressed in her habitual attire of black jeans and white Nike sneakers, Joy is a commanding woman. She has high cheekbones, a blond ponytail and large emotions, including a talent for lively metaphor and a quickness to believe that the outside world is conspiring against her.

She has a girlish side as well. When amused, she throws back her head with laughter and slaps her thigh. But in those early months after her daughter's murder, there was little cause for laughter. Grit got her through.

By noon, the repairman had not yet come. Two-year-old Nylah was whining; Joy plunked her into her highchair with crayons. Donte, 3, had taken juice without permission; Joy banished him to the back bedroom. Then she turned to make a snack for 5-year-old Marcus, who was just home from kindergarten.

In the two months since her daughter's death, Joy had gone from doting grandma to diaper-changer and rule-maker. She was determined to keep the children together and help them heal. When a relative offered to take the two youngest, Joy was deeply offended: "The kids are not cookies to hand out. ... They're staying together if I have to slop floors with my tongue."

But their energy and needs strained her patience and resources. Her rheumatoid arthritis had flared, causing severe pain in her joints. So had her Crohn's disease, an incurable inflammation of the bowel.

"It's so hard to go from grandma to this, to being the disciplinarian," said Joy as she listened to Donte wail. "But if they're going to live with me, they're going to need some rules. If Donte were crying about Mommy or he was lonely, then of course I'd cuddle him. But he's just angry."

"I don't want to stay in here!" Donte sobbed.

Exasperated, Joy walked down the hall, cracked the door and said, "As long as you're screaming, you have to stay in here!" Then she mumbled, "God, I feel like a bitch."

She had other troubles, too. That morning, she had received a discouraging phone call from her real estate agent, Debbie Wallace. Joy hoped to move to a larger house; the cramped trailer was making everyone crazy, and she didn't want her biracial grandchildren subjected to the name-calling her son Sterling endured in the largely white trailer park: "Burnt toast," "curly fries."

Wallace was looking hard for something nice that Joy could afford. But on the phone, the agent reported that Joy could not get a mortgage until she received permanent custody of the children. Since quitting her house-cleaning jobs, Joy's only income had been the Social Security death benefits she received for her grandchildren and disability payments paid for her youngest son and oldest grandson.

Her total monthly income was just under $2,000, including $100 in food stamps. With the help of a state-subsidized program for first-time homebuyers, her income would be enough to buy a house. But Joy's custody hearing was not scheduled for another month.

"They just take the spirit out of me," Joy said after the call. "I'm hoping and hoping and hoping so bad, and then there is some hitch. Some trick. Something unexpected."

The furnace repairman arrived at last, and on his heels came two early childhood education specialists to screen Nylah, to see if she needed special help. Three more people packed into the cramped, chilly trailer. Nylah was smart but easily distracted, the specialists told her grandmother after a few tests. Joy had a graver worry: Nylah was banging her head against her highchair and car seat.

"I guess the next question is what kind of a plan should we have," said the specialist from the school district. She had to shout to be heard over the television, furnace and washing machine, which shook the entire trailer while spinning the fourth load of the day. As for the head-banging: "We could get you some experts to deal with that."

"Has the furnace always been this loud?" yelled the repairman.

"Yeah," Joy yelled back.

"Well, it shouldn't be," he said. "Now, the parts are covered in the warranty. But the labor isn't."

Joy shrugged. She didn't know where the money for repairs would come from, just as she didn't know how the $409 January utility bill would get paid.

"Sometimes they do that because of some sensory deprivation," the child specialist continued. "Sometimes it can be because of emotional problems. And the treatment would be different depending on why she is doing it." Joy made no decision; it was too much to take in.

The furnace repairman finished replacing the motor and left, followed by the two women. It was suddenly quiet.

"I'm just about out of my mind today," Joy said.

MARKING A DAUGHTER'S LIFE

The daily challenges and quest for a house were distractions. But grief was always waiting, a vast reservoir that flooded Joy's mind in every quiet moment. First thing in the morning, last thing at night, Joy thought of her daughter. She remembered little things -- how Latisha would raid the refrigerator when she stopped by with the kids, hoping to find something delicious.

Joy had dreaded buying Latisha's gravestone, because she knew it would open the floodgates anew. When she could put it off no longer, she and Manuel drove one snowy Friday to Spielman's Mortuary on University Avenue. Joy sat tensely on the couch. Samples of polished granite -- 16 different colors -- were set out on a coffee table.

"Now the best thing to do at the beginning is just to look," said the funeral director, flipping through a three-ring binder of tombstone designs. "What do you think of these?"

"It's just too plain," Joy answered.

"What did you have in mind?"

Joy choked up, unable to speak.

"She wants a picture," Manuel said gently.

"It does get a little expensive," the man cautioned. "Two hundred to $400 more to do that."

"I don't care," said Joy, "I don't care." Since Latisha loved roses, Joy selected one for the lower right corner.

"Anything else you were imagining?"

"I want something with the kids' names on it," Joy said. "You know, like "loving mother of ...' " After a long pause, she said with conviction, "It is very important that their names are on there."

"Did you want to put something like "loving mother of ...' or just "mother of ...'?"

"Oh, LOVING mother," Joy said, almost offended. She spelled the children's names and chose a jet-black granite -- black and purple were her daughter's favorite colors. Joy clenched her fist to hold back the tears, then asked, "Is there any way we can get in there "loving daughter of ...'?"

"We can do it," the director said. "Keep in mind, though, that the more we put on, the more crowded it will be. But if that's important, we can do it."

Joy let it go. "Well, the kids are most important," she said hastily, rubbing a wad of blue tissue between her fingers. By the end, the gravestone would cost $900.

'ONE IN A MILLION' HOUSE

A week later, real estate agent Debbie Wallace called with great news: She had found a house near Lake Phalen. Even with help from a state-subsidized mortgage program, Joy could afford no more than $110,000, and Wallace had scoured the city.

"A house like this is one in a million," Wallace said. With 1,600 square feet, it was twice the size of the others in Joy's price range. There were three bedrooms, an optional fourth, a partially finished basement and a huge backyard. The sellers had already dropped the price and then agreed to lower it by several thousand dollars more after they heard about Joy's situation.

Joy was elated but frantic. The hearing that would give her permanent custody was still a couple of weeks away. "I have a headache, and I'm ready to swallow the tub with the deep breaths I'm taking," she said. The sellers agreed to let her sign a purchase agreement with a contingency clause. If someone else put in a bid, Joy would have 24 hours to prove she had custody.

Three days later, on Sunday morning, another bid came in. "I'm gonna lose it!" Joy wailed. After she hung up with Wallace, Joy called everyone she could think of. An attorney whose house she cleaned and another client whose husband was a lawyer agreed to help her try to get an emergency custody hearing on Monday. She left frantic messages for her custody attorney and tried to contact the court referee at home.

The next morning, she finally reached the children's father in prison. He said he didn't want custody, but he was working in a field and had no way to fax a statement relinquishing his rights. Joy was despondent. Then, just before the 10 a.m. deadline, Wallace called. The loan officer pulled some strings and got the loan approved. "I don't want to see that lady lose that house," he had said. "She has been through enough."

Later that day, Joy drove a friend to see the house, a modest story-and-a-half with gray shingles and an unpainted wood privacy fence shielding a large backyard covered in snow.

"They've got a back deck on there, a swimming pool, a fenced-in yard for the kids," Joy told her friend, then turned into the alley.

"Look at that garage!" exclaimed her friend.

"Brand new!" Joy agreed. She was already deciding which children would sleep in each bedroom. She imagined summer, when the boys would ride their bikes and she would raise vegetables. The $800 monthly mortgage would consume nearly half her monthly income, but she needed a decent place for the children to grow up.

"It was just God's blessing, he sent this house to us," she said. "And Debbie. That Debbie, she worked herself to the bone."

Finally, Joy pulled around to the front of the house and pointed to the small, snow-covered yard. "I'm going to bring all my bricks. And I'm going to build my garden for Tisha. That's the first thing I'll do."

Full-Time Commitments

On the March night they moved into the new house, after the five kids had explored every closet, flipped every light switch and finally gone to sleep in their new bedrooms, Joy and Manuel Perez opened a bottle of Korbel champagne on the living room floor. It was a rare private moment. They badly needed it.

When the couple married in 1997, they hadn't wanted more children. Joy, who was 10 years older than Manuel, had three already, including one still at home. The union between the take-charge woman with a ribald sense of humor and the intensely private man with a romantic streak and thick black mustache was to be about caring for each other, not children.

In time, the marriage collapsed over arguments about money and Manuel's habit of disappearing for days after they fought. Even so, he and Joy never stopped seeing each other. In the months before Latisha's death, they'd worked at reconciliation. They would go out to dinner or to their "love spot," a sandy bank on Harriet Island, to picnic, drop fishing lines into the Mississippi, watch boats pass and admire the view of the Cathedral.

Those quiet, simple pleasures were now in the past. Joy's grief and the relentless demands of her four grandchildren and 10-year-old son tested the limits of the couple's already fragile relationship.

SETTLING IN

Their full-time jobs became creating a home and daily routine for the children. At night, Joy and Manuel dropped into bed exhausted. Even their bedroom was just a den curtained off from the living room; the children got the real bedrooms. "The children come first," Joy told Manuel.

Manuel too was making big sacrifices. He had given up his apartment to move with Joy and the children into the new house. He also quit the job making boat trailers he'd held for seven years. It was a wrenching decision, but Joy couldn't handle things alone. There was nothing Manuel could do but stick by her side and hope things got better after the trial.

In many ways, he knew what she was going through. His brother had been murdered while staying at Manuel's apartment nearly a decade earlier.

At the new house, Manuel became the resident handyman. Within the first week, he installed a dishwasher. Next he put a sink and toilet in the basement, where 10-year-old Sterling had his room. He hung shelves for the china angels that Joy collected in memory of Latisha and installed rows of coat hooks in the porch.

He put up a basketball hoop and took down the above-ground swimming pool after 3-year-old Donte nearly toppled into it. He built a stout laundry line and a wood play structure with swings and a slide. At night, he rocked Nylah to sleep as they weaned her from her bottle.

When the weather turned warm, Manuel taught the boys, including little Donte, how to hit a ball with a bat. No one had ever shown them how. The children now called him "Grandpa."

As spring became summer, Joy planted a big garden: tomatoes, peas, celery, green beans, cabbage, broccoli, hot chili peppers for Manuel's mouth-scalding salsa and pumpkins for the children's jack-o-lanterns. Gardening was both relaxing and practical; they bought a chest freezer for the expected bounty. In the front yard, Joy planted a flower garden for Latisha. She nestled an angel statue among the purple petunias and taught the children to pick a flower for Mommy and tuck it in the angel's crossed arms.

Manuel wanted Joy to put the grief behind her. He wooed her with pink tulips, her favorite, and reset her necklace with two amethysts, Latisha's birthstone. But reminders of Latisha's absence were constant. Joy had only to turn on her cell phone, which flashed "Mom's phone." Latisha had programmed it because Joy was befuddled by electronic equipment.

STARTS AND STOPS

In the house, Joy posted handwritten rules -- take bath, brush teeth, no LYING, no temper tantrums. And the children grew. Michael and Marcus, now 8 and 6, shared an upstairs room and learned to make their beds with clean sheets and run their own bath water. Donte, now 4, started Head Start preschool and learned to dress himself. Two-year-old Nylah graduated from diapers to a potty.

The children rarely cried for their mother any more, but their grief and fear remained. Joy started taking them to a counselor named Tom Ellis at the Center for Grief in St. Paul. During weekly visits, the kids greeted Ellis with hugs and learned to describe their feelings by choosing a number on a scale of one to 10. In his cozy office in St. Paul's Midway, they let down their guard while playing with Legos and trays of heart-shaped rocks.

Ellis, who kept seeing the children even after their insurance stopping paying for his service, also helped Joy understand how the children's sadness could be triggered by seemingly unrelated events.

"For instance, I'll tell them "put your bike away.' That's something they just don't like doing. So they cry," said Joy. "But as they're crying, they end up putting their hurt for their mom into it too. ... Tom says let them cry. So I do. And sometimes now when what he said shoots through my mind, I'll go hug them."

One weekday afternoon, she and Manuel went to a rally at the state Capitol sponsored by the Minnesota Coalition for Battered Women. The couple stood at the edge of the rotunda as speakers recited sad statistics: 45 women and six children killed in Minnesota in 2000, at least 70 children left motherless.

Four of those children were Joy's grandchildren. As she listened, Joy leaned against a marble column and wept. Manuel put his hand on her shoulder.

After the speeches, volunteers wheeled out racks of white T-shirts, each bearing the name of a woman killed last year. As each woman's name was read, a relative or volunteer came forward, took a T-shirt, placed a red rose on the table and went to stand in a line encircling the rotunda. When Latisha's name was read, Joy stumbled forward in a teary daze, with Manuel following like a shadow. She lay down her rose, but could not join the circle of survivors. Instead, she thrust Latisha's T-shirt at a volunteer and rushed to the side of the gathering, where she sobbed before a display of Civil War flags as Manuel held her.

Joy's fresh grief opened Manuel's old wounds. His older brother, Ruben, had been murdered nine years earlier, shot to death while house-sitting in Manuel's apartment while Manuel was in Texas. Manuel had never gotten over his guilt. Why hadn't he been there? Could he have saved his brother? Manuel started drinking again, quietly slipping off to the garage with his six-packs.

One spring night, Manuel persuaded Joy to go out to dinner. They distributed the kids with four separate babysitters because no one would take them all. But the food had hardly arrived when the cell phone rang and they had to leave to pick up a child who was acting up. "We can't even go on a date," Manuel complained.

Joy understood his loss, but felt helpless to respond. Her attention was consumed by more pressing demands. The older boys had to testify about their mother's death before a grand jury. Joy was there to support them. Then she waited anxiously until the grand jury issued the indictment: first-degree murder. Marcus needed a hernia operation; Joy was at his side. She battled successfully to keep custody of the children after their imprisoned father decided he wanted them after all. To buy the house, she had to take first-time homeowner classes. Then, the county cut her food stamp allotment and she appealed the decision.

"I just feel so numb inside," she said one day as she stood in the kitchen cutting potatoes for the pot roast. She could see Manuel through the window, watering the new grass he had seeded over the bare spot where the pool had been. "I don't feel anything some days. I can't feel any love, like he wants me to."

SHARED AND SEPARATE GRIEF

Years before, when they first met, Manuel was attracted by Joy's big heart and habit of saying what she thinks. She loved his ability to dream. Occasionally, the spark between them still showed. At their house closing, a joyful day, they sat side by side and recalled their courtship.

Manuel happened to be downtown waiting for a bus at 6 a.m., Joy explained as she put her hand on his arm. She was working at Dayton's as a janitorial supervisor. Although they knew each other, they had lost touch, but he spotted her through the locked glass doors, where she pushed a floor scrubber.

"Do you know who I am?" shouted Manuel, banging on the door.

"Sure!" Joy yelled back.

He asked for her phone number.

"Now here comes my boss," said Joy, giggling at the memory. "And I'm yelling "7-2-3 ...'"

"And here comes my bus, and I'm going "Hurry up. Hurry up!' " said Manuel.

"And then the second week he came over and he has never left since," said Joy, turning to give him a bright look. He met her eyes and smiled back.

One day in June, Joy went grocery shopping at Steve's Warehouse, a discount store on White Bear Avenue. She was gleeful to be out alone, momentarily without kids or worries.

"This is my job," she said, steering her cart through the aisles as "Hotel California" drifted over the speakers. "My job is to take care of these children and in order to do that and do it well, I have learned where the bargains are." She picked up a few 99-cent boxes of macaroni and cheese with instructions in Spanish.

"Who cares! The kids go through it," she said. Next, she grabbed 12 cans of Campbell's tomato soup decorated with snowmen and left over from Christmas, two for $1.

Turnip and collard greens were 39 cents a can. Before leaving, she added one last item to the loaded cart -- a red plastic scrub-brush to clean Latisha's grave.

Manuel was watering the yard when she pulled up at the house. On the spur of the moment, they decided to visit the cemetery where her daughter and Manuel's brother were buried. Joy's nephew Steven agreed to watch all the children.

At Elmhurst Cemetery, Joy followed the winding road past monuments and expanses of clipped grass and finally parked at the top of a slope in the shade of a tree. Latisha's grave was next to the road -- a lush green rectangle.

"I thank God he let me have her 25 years," she said, straightening an angel and pinching a few faded blossoms from the impatiens planted around the grave stone. "He didn't have to let me have her at all."

Then she and Manuel walked up the road and around a curve to Manuel's brother's grave. They stood in silence, united in loss.

Manuel's gaze drifted to the well-tended grave of a young man, a few rows over where a rose bush was blooming. "Look at that," he said. "It's a purple rose."

"Now, you know his mama loved him," said Joy, recognizing another mother's tender impulse. "You know that's his mama's plant."

Bearing Witness

Joy Perez sat in the witness stand wearing Latisha's black pumps for courage and a white blouse bought that morning off the sale rack at J.C. Penney. Her face was red from crying. Ramsey County prosecutor Rosita Serrano handed her a glossy 4-by-6.

"Do you recognize this photograph?" Serrano asked.

"I took that picture," Joy said.

The photograph showed her daughter Latisha Barnes a few weeks before her death, with a black eye and haggard face. The winsome smile was gone.

"Why did you take that picture?"

Joy struggled to maintain composure. Her daughter had come to Joy's trailer that day with bruises and a ring of hickeys around her neck like an owner's brand, she explained. Joy sat Latisha down in the bathroom and snapped a picture she thought might prove abuse. She never thought it would be an exhibit in a murder trial.

As the jurors passed the photo among themselves, the only sound was Joy's jagged breath amplified by the microphone as she fought off tears. It was July 5, eight months to the day since Latisha had been killed. The murder trial was under way at last.

Seated at the defendant's table in front of Joy was the man accused of her daughter's murder, Areece Devon Manley. He was neatly dressed: pressed shirt, dark suit, hair shaved short, a shadow of goatee along his jaw line. Manley was a plump, sad-looking man of 29 with small features and sloping shoulders. Joy avoided looking anywhere near him.

Beyond a hip-high brass gate, the public benches were nearly full with Latisha's relatives and friends. Manuel sat near the front, his forehead pressed into his hands. Latisha's father was there. So were Joy's former foster mother and Joy's 18-year-old son. As a witness, Joy would be allowed in the courtroom only to testify and hear final arguments.

A guilty verdict was far from certain. There was no weapon, and there were no eyewitnesses except Latisha's two older boys. By the time Manley turned himself in two weeks after the murder, there were no incriminating bloodstains on his clothes or scratches on his face. There were only traces of his DNA from beneath Latisha's fingernail.

And there was no confession. Manley declared he was innocent and offered another story. He said Latisha had been killed by drug dealers to stop her from snitching on their operation. On the night she was killed, he'd returned to Latisha's duplex after buying cigarettes to find dealers harassing her, he had told relatives. He fled to Kansas City, and said he didn't learn of her death until he phoned home a day and a half later.

To prove their charge of first-degree murder, prosecutors would put Latisha's and Manley's entire relationship before the jury. They would show a crescendo of abuse that began with controlling what she wore and who she saw, and escalated to brutal beatings and threats when she tried to leave. Then when Manley could no longer have Latisha, he killed her, they claimed.

A MENACING TURN

The relationship began sweetly, though, in the summer of 1999, when Manley met Latisha outside her St. Paul apartment while her husband was in prison. She hadn't really dated since high school and was flattered by his affection, the jewelry and hotel parties, and the attention he paid to her children. Manley was a ninth-grade dropout with a felony drug conviction. But romantic prospects were few for a single woman with four children. Latisha tattooed "Areece" on her ankle and hoped that going to church or getting a job would change her new boyfriend.

Within weeks, his charm yielded to a bitter obsession. Manley, a meticulous man who ironed his T-shirts and bought Latisha outfits to match his own, cut her off from friends and accused her of cheating on him. He would hit her, clutch her neck and shove her up against a wall, Latisha's former roommates told the jury. She would scratch and plead. But he was stronger.

Eighteen-year-old Ella Hunter told jurors she once saw Manley chase Latisha down the stairs brandishing a knife. "Think I won't kill you?" he yelled. Hunter never saw how the fights ended. Following Latisha's instructions, she rushed the four children outside.

"Did you ever call police?" asked Manley's lawyer.

"There was nothing I could do about it," said Hunter.

To make money, Manley sold cocaine and something called "sherm," tobacco cigarettes dipped in embalming fluid and frequently laced with PCP, or phencyclidine, a discontinued veterinary tranquilizer that has volatile effects in humans, including hallucinations. Latisha, who before had drunk only wine coolers, started smoking the cigarettes. Every few months, she and Manley drove to Kansas City and brought back the embalming fluid in vanilla bottles. The drug made her depressed and fueled Manley's paranoia.

Soon, he wanted to know who Latisha was with at all times. He paged her constantly and paged her friends if she didn't answer. He demanded to know who she talked to and checked her caller ID.

Many of Latisha's friends and family knew what was happening but felt there was little they could do or were themselves intimidated by the pudgy drug dealer with the hair-trigger temper. Latisha had called police, but she backed off her accusations when they arrived, terrified of Manley's threats. The calls were logged as unsubstantiated.

Romerro Walker, Latisha's step-uncle, impassively told the jury of watching Manley shove his niece and slap her while seated in a car parked outside Walker's house.

"What did you do?" asked Serrano.

"Nothing," said Walker. "They weren't on my property. All I could do is stay out of it."

Latisha's friend Tammy Vaughn did try. A few years older than Latisha, she was on her porch with her friend when Manley shoved and threatened her. "You call the police on me, bitch, I'll kill you," Vaughn said he told Latisha. When Vaughn told him to take his hands off her friend, he left.

Later, outside the courtroom, Vaughn said she had urged Latisha to kick Manley out and Latisha had said she wanted to, but delayed of fear and a vain hope he would change. Frustrated with her friend's inaction, Vaughn cut her off. "And that really hurts because maybe I could have done something."

Even when Latisha left Manley and moved into a new duplex a month before her death, he didn't stay away. He helped her move, then lurked outside, looking in windows. One night he broke through the back door. 

LATE CRY FOR HELP

Three weeks before she was killed, Latisha was finally terrified enough to speak to the police. She came to her stepfather's house, sobbing, trembling, with a swollen face. He insisted they call 911 and when the police officer arrived, Latisha said she had woken before dawn that morning to find Manley high on something, wrapping her fingers around a knife and insisting that she had just killed someone. To get him to leave, she offered to drive him to his mother's house. In the car, he punched her, drew a gun and forced her into the trunk. As she lay in the darkness, he drove until the car ran out of gas on West Seventh Street. When he let her out, he threatened to kill everyone she loved if she made a scene.

Back at the duplex, he wanted to take Nylah, the toddler, to ensure that Latisha would not call police. She urged him to take Michael and Marcus to school instead. When Manley left, he took the boys, the telephone and the batteries to her cell phone.

The police officer took her statement. The investigation was still under way when Latisha was killed. Although Manley's ex-wife and two girlfriends had filed orders for protection against him after beatings and threats, he had never been convicted of battering a woman. In court, Manley's mother insisted that her son had never done such things.

By the weekend she was killed, Latisha was desperate. On the morning of Saturday, Nov. 4, she made a frantic call to the Rev. Stephen Michaels, her pastor and former brother-in-law. Manley was in her bedroom, accusing her of having another lover, Michaels told the jury. Michaels had wanted to call police, but Latisha begged him not to. ""I'm afraid if you hang up, he'll kill me,'" Michaels said she told him.

She was supposed to meet Michaels later that day but never showed. Instead, she withdrew $650 from an ATM machine, leaving just $20 in her account. Then she asked a cousin to accompany her to the duplex to pick up clothes for the children; she was scared to go alone. She had planned to spend the night at a relative's house in Mankato, Minn., but for some reason returned to the duplex instead.

Meanwhile, Manley was looking for her. At 8:30 p.m., he swung by the home of the children's babysitter. Sometime around midnight that last night, her friend Tammy Vaughn called Latisha for the first time in months and seemed to wake her. Latisha was groggy, and they agreed to talk later. That was the last contact Latisha had with anyone outside her home.

Joy Perez wasn't in the courtroom as jurors heard the details of Latisha's final day. She was back at her house, filling every moment with laundry, gardening, child care, anything to avoid thinking about the trial. She bought a dog for the kids, a little white mutt with tawny spots, named Patches. She vacuumed cobwebs off the ceiling. She chain-smoked, talked incessantly on the phone and snapped at her family. Manuel clipped the boys' hair and gave 4-year-old Donte a mohawk for fun.

"I'm gonna be surprised if my mind doesn't blow," she said. "This is more than a human being can bear."

BEST EVIDENCE

On the morning they testified, Michael and Marcus perched in the window ledge of a conference room down one floor from Judge John Connolly's courtroom, betting which cars would make it first across the Wabasha Street bridge. Tom Ellis, their counselor, gave each a rock to slip into his pocket for encouragement. Then Al Zdrazil, co-counsel for the prosecution, led them upstairs.

The jury watched as Marcus' image was projected onto a screen; the boys' live testimony was delivered via video camera from the judge's chamber, because seeing Manley might traumatize them anew. Their answers during almost 90 minutes of questioning were sometimes confusing, even contradictory. But what jurors heard made a few of them cry.

What was Areece like? Zdrazil asked.

Marcus, no longer the playful traffic spotter, swung his legs and anxiously wrapped his arms around the arms of the chair.

"He didn't like my mom."

Why do you say that?

"I seen him have a gun ... behind his back. ... I was scared. He told us to go into our room and told us to go to sleep. So, I went to sleep, into my room. ... I heard a boom."

What did you do when you heard the boom?

"I ran into my mom's room. ... Mom wasn't moving. ... It was raining out. ... He stole my mom's keys."

At first, Michael seemed more relaxed. But he flinched and went silent when Zdrazil asked him if he knew a man named Areece.

Why aren't you talking? ... Are you scared of anything, Michael? ... How are you feeling right now?

"Sad."

Did you ever see Areece with a gun?

"Behind his back."

Did he shoot the gun?

"Yes."

How do you know he shot the gun?

"I heard the gun. ..."

The trial's third week brought the physical evidence. Latisha was killed by a bullet to the head, explained the assistant medical examiner. But that wasn't all. She also was strangled so violently that a bone in her neck was crushed and her face and neck erupted in pinprick hemorrhages. There were bruises and scrapes on her arms and legs. A high concentration of the drug PCP, known in the '60s as "angel dust," was found in her blood.

But the most important physical evidence was DNA found under a bloody fingernail on Latisha's left hand. The laboratory at the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension had never before found such a large amount of someone else's DNA under a victim's fingernail. It matched Manley's genetic profile. The prosecution claimed that Latisha drew his blood when she scratched Manley during a desperate fight for her life. Manley's attorney, Joy Bartscher, suggested the DNA could have gotten there another way -- picking a scab or popping a pimple, for example.

But the prosecution was confident. After the DNA testimony, it rested its case.

JUSTICE

Finally, after 14 days of testimony from more than 40 witnesses, the case went to the jury. Joy expected a guilty verdict within an hour, but the jury deliberated into the evening. She and Manuel ate White Castle hamburgers, watched Jerry Springer and got little sleep as the wait continued.

The phone call came the next morning just after 9 a.m. Joy and Manuel arrived last in the courtroom after dropping the kids off with babysitters. Clutching a framed portrait of Latisha's children, Joy squeezed onto a crowded bench. Manuel rubbed her shoulders.

"Has the jury reached a verdict?" Judge Connolly asked.

The law clerk stepped forward to take several sheets of folded paper from the jury forewoman. After the judge glanced at them, he handed them back to his clerk.

The clerk read: "We, the jury, find the defendant guilty of the charge of murder in the first degree."

There was a collective gasp. Joy doubled over as if she'd been punched. Tears dripped from her face. It was over, finally over. Moments later, she regained a remarkable poise and took the witness stand to speak to the judge before he sentenced Manley. She showed him the family photo and told of the pain caused by her daughter's death.

Manley, impassive through days of testimony, came to life. He leaned back in his chair, bit his lip, rubbed his hand over his head. Then, as Joy described the children missing their mother, an inexplicable smirk crept across his lips.

Connolly sentenced him to life in prison, eligible for parole in 30 years.

When Joy Perez stepped out of the courthouse elevator, she was met by the brilliant lights of a television camera. She stopped to deliver a message to other abuse victims: Seek help. "Women, open your mouths, you can get out of it. You have to."

Life Moves On

The afternoon sun hung low, washing the front yard in that buttery October light that comes only when half the leaves are on the ground and half still hang in the trees. Joy Perez stood on the lawn shouting directions as a makeshift Halloween graveyard rose around her.

"Put that one in back there," she said, pointing out a spot to her nephew Steven Kelley. He bent a coat hanger to anchor the homemade cardboard gravestone.

"Why don’t you put them in a row?" he asked.

"It’s an old graveyard, Steven," Joy said with a laugh. "The gravestones are crooked, OK?"

The Perez-Barnes family was putting the last touches on an extravagant Halloween tableau. Scarecrows lined the fence. A cloth witch smacked into a tree and a life-sized plastic skeleton dangled from a tree branch. Seven squat pumpkins, all from Joy’s garden, sat by the walkway waiting to be carved.

There was one for Joy and Manuel, one for her son and one for each of the four grandkids. "It’s like it was planned for the family," Joy said. "I think Tisha sent them."

Halloween was the last holiday Latisha’s four children spent with her before she was killed on Nov. 5, 2000. After so much real fear, it felt good to laugh at the synthetic variety. And Joy knew it would be the last holiday she would enjoy for a long time. Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s all would be tainted by memories of last year’s raw grief.

"I just want to have just one last good time," she said. "I want to do it up for the kids."

She looked around with satisfaction. Her 19-year-old son, Renaldo, who now stooped to prune perennials, was coming by the house more often. Sterling, Joy’s 11-year-old son, was back home after spending time in a shelter for troubled kids. Nylah, who would be 3 in November, threw handfuls of leaves. Michael, 8, and Marcus, 6, spread straw over the make-believe graves. Only 4-year-old Donte was missing, ordered to stay inside because he’d refused to take a nap.

Marcus, who wore a black stocking cap pulled low on his forehead, carefully arranged a narrow bundle of straw in front of a cardboard gravestone. "Grandma, Grandma," he yelled with delight. "Look at this skinny person!"

Joy threw back her head and laughed, her husky voice carrying in the crisp autumn air.

Since the trial, life for Latisha’s children has settled into a comfortable routine. The boys take turns seeing a counselor each week and are doing well in new schools, a good barometer of their healing. They lose themselves in laughter now and are completely different from the shell-shocked children who were dropped off at their grandmother’s trailer a year ago. With Joy creating a loving, stable home, their future looks hopeful. Yet all the children remain profoundly touched by the loss of their mother, and will be for the rest of their lives. 

SIGNS OF HEALING

Marcus came home from school one day and said, "I miss Mom," and seemed sad, Joy reported. But he was able to express his feelings and that is a good sign. Gradually, the horrifying images of Latisha’s death were receding and being replaced by the less fearsome emotions of sorrow and longing.

Studies of children who witness violence in the home show again and again that they are more likely to become aggressive themselves. But that has not been the case with Latisha’s boys. Marcus seems especially sensitive to others’ suffering and vulnerability.

One morning in early October, his first-grade class released monarch butterflies. The children had raised them from eggs, watching their transformation from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly. Marcus could proudly describe the difference between pupa and chrysalis.

After the Pledge of Allegiance and music class where Marcus sang with gusto in the front row, the teacher led the children to the courtyard.

"It’s a nice warm day for them to come out and fly," she said, setting the mesh cage on a picnic table.

Marcus maneuvered to the front and held open the mesh flap as the teacher coaxed a butterfly onto her hand, then onto Marcus’ finger. He stared at it, wide-eyed, until it flew off and the other children rushed after it.

"He wants to fly," Marcus said with concern. "Let it go!"

The butterfly landed in the grass a few feet away. Marcus shooed back the other children and lifted a leaf that had drifted onto the monarch’s wing. Then he leaned close and whispered, "Are you OK, buddy?"

Michael is learning to read, something that even a year ago, Joy wondered if he would master. Every day after school, he sits on the bench at the kitchen table to sound out simple sentences from his homework for his grandmother. "The airplane is green. The box is green. Put the chicken in the box." Joy has hung the living room and kitchen walls with his school papers, including his first spelling test where he scrawled lopsided words in pencil: fish, boy, in.

Michael remains tender and affectionate. He brings Joy gifts of flowers or fall leaves, asks her to make his favorite Jell-O pudding or lures her attention with little favors, "Look Grandma, I’m mopping your floor."

When the children first came to live with Joy, Michael would sometimes stand mute with frustration, unable to form even a simple phrase. He still grows tongue-tied when excited, but far less often.

In recent weeks, though, he has reverted to his old pattern of wailing inconsolably at the slightest trigger. Joy wondered if he associated Halloween and the change of season with his mother’s death. One day, he sobbed because Joy was busy and he had to read aloud to Manuel. Another day it was because his swim trunks weren’t in his backpack for a school field trip. Joy tries to be patient, understanding that her grandchildren’s grief will ebb and flow, even as it recedes over time. 

CHILDREN REMAIN FRAGILE

Donte exemplifies the children’s fragility. In late September, Joy fell ill with pneumonia and after an argument, Manuel left the house for three days. It was a hard time for everyone, but 4-year-old Donte seemed most affected. At Head Start that day, he told his teacher, "Did you know somebody killed my mother?" It was the first time Donte had mentioned it.

Usually a good-natured boy with a toothy smile, Donte loved school and quickly copied the other children in activities. But he remained troubled the day after he mentioned his mother’s murder. He played with balls and hula-hoops, but refused to join the group for singing and curled up in a corner when it was time to clean up. It took several minutes for the teacher to coax him upstairs, where he refused to eat lunch. After Manuel returned, Donte seemed to spring back.

Nylah, the youngest child and only girl, has blossomed into a playful sprite with the assurance that comes from being the darling of the family. The curly hair that was falling out after her mother’s death now grows thick. She talks in complete sentences and wants to go to school like her brothers. She loves roughhousing and begs visitors to twirl her around the living room by her ankles.

"I feel like I’m raising Tisha again," Joy said one day as Nylah, eating a hot dog, climbed into her lap. "It’s that humor and that laughter. She comes running into a room and I feel like I’m 24 again and it’s my Tisha running around that corner."

Nylah still sometimes calls Joy "Mommy," which makes her grandmother uncomfortable. Joy doesn’t want to replace her daughter. But Tom Ellis, the grief counselor, said to let it be. Nylah will sort it out when she is ready.

The child who is struggling most is Joy’s own son, Sterling. After Latisha died, much of his mother’s attention was consumed by her grandchildren. Sterling, already mutinous, began acting out more. By late summer, he was refusing to take a bath for weeks on end. He took his meals to the basement to eat alone. He picked on the younger kids, once telling Nylah to put her fingers in the toaster and push it down.

When Joy asked him why he did it, he said he was mad. He used bad words at school, where he attends a special program, and when the school sent home a note, he tried to grab it from his cousin Steven and threatened him with a pair of scissors.

The day after Sterling’s 11th birthday Joy sent him to a shelter for troubled kids, where he remained for a couple weeks. Now back home, he seems to be doing better. On the anniversary of his sister’s murder, he joined the other children in writing notes to Latisha that they sent aloft tied to helium balloons: "I love you sis, … I hope to see you in the afterworld, I know I’m gonna see you again ... I love you, how much I love you, you know I do, Sterling." 

MAKING PROGRESS

Joy and Manuel’s relationship remains rocky. But Joy recently convinced Manuel to start seeing counselor Tom Ellis on his own, and he said it was helpful. And, less consumed by her own loss, Joy better understands Manuel’s.

"He’s so hurt and so lonesome because the kids get all the attention. You can imagine what he feels. He’s human and he’s trying so hard. He gets so frustrated, sometimes he can’t take it."

Money is still a constant worry. Joy feels guilty about living off the children’s Social Security death benefits and wants to go back to work cleaning houses, to get out of the house and reclaim a part of her own life. "I need to hear someone say ‘Good job, Joy.’ I need to make someone feel happy and feel good," she said. But her health is fragile. She remains weak after a debilitating bout of pneumonia that landed her in a hospital on intravenous antibiotics. Also, she has been unable to find affordable day care for Nylah. In the meantime, Manuel may search for a job.

Although Joy’s grief has become more manageable with time, it still can overwhelm her. On the night of Nov. 5, the first anniversary of Latisha’s murder, Joy woke often and looked for the clock, wondering, was this the time? Was this the time exactly that her daughter fought for her life? Was this the time the bullet was fired? Was this the time she fell to the floor?

Joy has prayed for God to let her dream about Latisha, so she can feel her daughter’s presence, just for a moment. But she hasn’t.

"I somehow put into my mind that she’s a seed somewhere, and when this world ends and everything regrows, she’ll grow again," Joy said as she clipped back a few last perennials in her garden. "And I’ll be a seed, too. And somehow we’ll be together. Maybe we’ll never see each other in the same bodies, but God keeps promising eternal life. … I’m going to trust him."

As for Areece Manley, the man convicted of her daughter’s murder, Joy still wants him to admit what he did and recognize the pain he caused. But Manley, who is serving his life sentence at the maximum-security state prison in Oak Park Heights, maintains his innocence and is appealing his conviction.

Manley’s family stands by him. "He’s seen women in his life — women he loved — be abused," his mother, Geneaver Manley, said. "That’s why I can’t understand how they could say these things. He loved Tisha and he loved those kids."

CREATING MEMORIES

When Nylah turns 18, Joy will be 61. The better part of the rest of her life will be devoted to raising her grandchildren. She plans to teach them to cook ham hocks and greens, Latisha’s favorite dish. She wants to have them baptized and somehow, to find money for piano lessons. She wants them to do well in school and dream of being judges or teachers. Most important, she wants to nurture their memories of their mother.

To help with that, she has put aside mementos in a white paper bag in her bedroom. Latisha was a poor woman, so the keepsakes are modest: the black sweater she wore for the last portrait with her children and the sash to her silky bathrobe printed with pink and red hearts, the robe Marcus wore from the house the day of his mother’s murder.

One of Latisha’s rings and the gold cross with a diamond chip that Joy bought to put on Latisha’s body for her funeral are also there, saved for Nylah. Even a half-used container of Dove deodorant is in the bag.

"Of course, it won’t be no good by the time they grow up. But they can smell it. And I can say, ‘This is what your mom smelled like.’ "

As Joy was putting everything back in the bag, Nylah ran into the bedroom. "Let Grandma see your finger," Joy said.

Nylah pointed obediently.

"No, your ring finger," said Joy and then slipped onto Nylah’s finger a tiny gold baby ring that Latisha had bought for Nylah at a pawn shop.

"I have a ring!" Nylah squealed, prancing off to show Manuel.

"Oh, your mom would be so ..." Joy began, and then choked up. It was one more thing Latisha would never see.

2002 Dart Award Judges

PRELIMINARY JUDGES:

Garry Boulden is the supervisor of Crime Survivor Services, a unit of the Seattle Police Department that serves victims of person-to-person felony crimes. Boulden worked for five years as an advocate in the Mayor's Office for Senior Citizens and as the senior specialist advocate for the police department for seven years. He is a member of Seattle's Domestic Violence Council, the Domestic Violence Criminal Justice Committee, POET (Protecting Our Elderly Together) Group, and other victim-services committees. Boulden holds a B.A. in philosophy, an M.A. in theology (ethics), and is a licensed Washington state mental health counselor.

Susan Gilmore has been a reporter at the Seattle Times since 1979. Currently a general assignment reporter, she has also covered City Hall, the environment, fisheries, politics (including a U.S. Senate race), new features, demographics and census, and she wrote for Pacific Magazine. In 1992 Gilmore was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for stories involving allegations of sexual misconduct by former U.S. Senator Brock Adams; these stories also received the Worth Bingham Prize for investigative reporting, the Associated Press Managing Editors Public Service Award, and the Goldsmith Prize. Before joining the Seattle Times, Gilmore was a reporter at the Juneau Empire and the Fairbanks News Miner.

Janet Grimley is an assistant managing editor and part of the senior management team at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She is lead hiring recruiter for the paper, oversees national newspaper contest competitions, and monitors the newsroom budget. Over the past 27 years, Grimley has worked as a reporter, copy and layout editor, and assignment editor. Before moving to Seattle, Grimley was a reporter for the Quad-Cities Times in Davenport, Iowa. She is a member of the Center for Human Services in Shoreline, Wash., and board member and past president of the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors.

Paul McElroy is an author and visiting instructor at the University of Washington School of Communications. Previously, he spent 21 years as a reporter and editor for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Chicago Sun-Times, and other newspapers. In 1979 he covered the crash of an American Airlines DC-10 at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, which killed everyone on board. McElroy's first book, Tracon, a suspenseful novel about air-traffic controllers, won both ForeWord Magazine's bronze Book of the Year Award and Independent Publisher's IPPY Award in 2001.

April Peterson is a doctoral student at the University of Washington School of Communications and a research assistant for the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. A former reporter for the Morning Call in Allentown, Pa., Peterson's interests include communications history, mass media law, representations of race and gender in the news, and entertainment media.

FINAL JUDGES:

Angelo B. Henderson is a special projects reporter with The Detroit News, covering race, crime, culture and other issues that impact urban cities. Previously, he was a senior special writer for Page One of The Wall Street Journal. While at the Journal he won the Pulitzer Prize (1999) for his account of the lives affected by an attempted drugstore robbery that ended in the robber's death. He was named one of 39 African-Americans Achievers To Watch in the next millennium by SuccessGuide magazine, and in 2000 was honored by Columbia University as one of the nation's best reporters on race and ethnicity in America. Other journalism awards include the Detroit Press Club Foundation Award (1993), Unity Award for Excellence in minority reporting for Public Affairs/Social Issues (1993), National Association of Black Journalists Award for outstanding coverage of the Black Condition, and Best of Gannett Award for Business/Consumer Reporting (1992). Henderson has also been a reporter for The St. Petersburg Times and The Courier-Journal (Louisville). He earned a Bachelor of Arts in journalism from the University of Kentucky in 1985, and is currently pursuing a degree in Urban Ministry at Ecumenical Theological Seminary.

Danny G. Kaloupek, Ph.D., is deputy director for the Behavioral Science Division of the National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Boston, where he conducts research and provides training on topics related to traumatic stress. He also holds a faculty appointment in both the Department of Psychiatry and the Department of Behavioral Neuroscience at Boston University School of Medicine. Since 1994 Kaloupek has served the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies in various roles, including service on the Scientific Publications Committee, the Program Committee, and Chair for the 1997 Annual Meeting. He has been a member of the ISTSS Board of Directors since 1998, Treasurer and Member of the Executive Committee since 1999, and Chair of the Finance Committee since 2000. Kaloupek was a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at Concordia University in Montreal from 1980 through 1989. He received his degree in clinical psychology from Binghamton University in 1981.

Mark Klaas founded KlaasKids in 1994, after the kidnap and murder of his twelve-year-old daughter, Polly. Previously the owner of a rental car franchise, Mr. Klaas is now dedicated to stopping crimes against children. Through the KlaasKids Foundation, he has promoted prevention programs for at-risk youth, stronger sentencing for violent criminals, and governmental accountability and responsibility. Klaas is regularly called upon as a resource for television and radio news channels, and has written editorials for Newsweek, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He travels extensively through the United States, encouraging innovative solutions and proven programs to positively impact issues of crime, abuse and neglect. He also works with numerous victim families and families of kidnapped children offering advice, counseling, support and expertise on ways to promote cases through the media, the court of public opinion and the criminal justice system. Besides his duties as president and executive director of the KlaasKids Foundation, Klaas sits on the advisory boards of the Center for the Community Interest, Fight Crime Invest in Kids, and the Crime Victims Report. Mr. Klaas is a member of Team H.O.P.E., a program assisting the families of kidnapped children.

Penny Owen is a staff correspondent for The Daily Oklahoman, writing both news and feature stories in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. She began her career as an intern at The Oklahoman in 1992, working up from the obituary desk to police and general assignment reporting. In 1995 Owen was one of the key reporters covering the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, and one of two staff reporters sent to Denver to cover the trials of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols in 1997. She also covered McVeigh's execution in Terre Haute, Ind. In 2000 Owen was a fellow for the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, and a William Randolph Hearst fellow at the University of Texas at Austin in 1998. She was also one of four staff members to participate in the 1999 Knight Foundation Newspapers-in-Residence program at Michigan State University, where she spent an intensive week teaching 11 journalism classes about the profession. A Navy Reserve public information officer, she served at the World Trade Center site and on the hospital ship USNS Comfort, which offered respite for rescue workers following 9-11.

is the director of photography at the

. She began her nearly-20 year journalism career at the Rocky as a lab tech, was a staff photographer for nearly a decade, and became a picture editor in 1991. Two years later she was named Director. Under her direction, the photo staff won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for their coverage of the Columbine school shootings, as well as the Robert F. Kennedy Award, Alfred Eisenstaedt Magazine photographer of the year, National headliners, numerous SND awards including a Gold Medal for photojournalism and editing, and numerous POY awards. In 1998, 1999, and 2000 her photographers won the National Scripps Foundation Award for photojournalism, and have swept the Colorado Press and AP Awards since 1994. A Rochester, N.Y. native, Reeves studied fashion and commercial photography in New York at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Reeves taught at the Colorado Institute of Art for five years, and has been part of the faculty of the Stan Kalish Picture Editing Workshop and the Mountain Workshops at Western Kentucky, and guest faculty at the Poynter Institute.