An Excerpt from Eli Sanders's New Book, While the City Slept, Which Grew Out of His Pulitzer Prize–Winning Coverage of the South Park Murder Case
by Eli Sanders
On old maps, the Duwamish River bends like discarded ribbon as it passes through a valley on the southern end of this city, winding across land that was once marshes and tribal fishing villages and then emptying into the salt water of Elliott Bay. Melt from nearby mountains carved this path, rich with salmon that fed the Duwamish Indians in the years before their last unfettered chief, Si'ahl, learned his name would be hammered by white settlers into the name of a new American city: Seattle. Not long afterward, the US Army Corps of Engineers showed up and spent a few years straightening and deepening the Duwamish for the purposes of large-scale commerce. Now the river looks more like a ribbon pulled taut.
Heavy industry lines its sides, dingy barges fill its moorings, and its last five miles have been declared a federal Superfund mega-site, so thick with PCBs, mercury, and arsenic that eating anything that lingers here is inadvisable. This is Seattle's only river. At what's been called its dirty mouth sits a mammoth artificial island built from dredged Duwamish silt: flat, paved over, and planted with tall orange cranes for unloading shipping containers at the international port. Upriver, toward the other end of the Superfund stretch, is a shallow bend that seems an homage to an earlier time, and tucked in the crook of this bend, across from a former Boeing plant where World War II bomber production helped begin the river's fouling, is the neighborhood of South Park.
In the summer of 2009, the best way to reach South Park's main strip of taquerías and tire shops was by crossing an ailing drawbridge over this bend in the Duwamish. The decks of the bridge swelled in summer heat so that opening and closing became impossible. Its two halves, and their identical brick watchmen's houses, were drifting in opposite directions. Its support pilings failed to find solid purchase beneath the toxic river-bottom muck. As a consequence, the South Park Bridge ranked as one of the least safe spans in the state.
Near the riverbank where one of the bridge decks descended into the neighborhood, on the wall of a bar called the County Line, a hand-lettered sign urging downtown politicians to do something other than the stated plan, which was to close the bridge and let residents find other ways into the neighborhood. The back route, for example, along a highway that, like the Duwamish, faintly bends as it passes by.
The land between the damaged river and the rushing highway is equal to about one square mile, a confined space steeped from its first platting in cycles of need and neglect. In the years after the Duwamish people were dispossessed, and around the time the river was being straightened, this land was farmed by Italian and Japanese immigrants who cleared the camas plants and seeded its soil with radishes, spinach, peas, and mustard greens. In search of a venue for selling their produce, these farmers helped build the Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle. In need of a bridge across the Duwamish to help get their vegetables to town, and in need of electricity and fresh drinking water, too, they petitioned to be annexed by the young city and in 1907 got their wish. South Park became part of Seattle's southern edge, and a rotting trolley bridge linking it to the other side of the river was torn down, replaced by a new bridge built from timber trestles and a plank deck. It didn't hold up long.
In 1931, another attempt at connection: the steel-beamed South Park drawbridge. Owing to time, inattention to upkeep on the part of downtown power brokers, and an earthquake that rattled its crumbling concrete at the start of the new century, this bridge presented by 2009 a dangerously decayed visage, demoralizing and perfectly aligned with the economic moment, all busted potential and uneven openings.
Closure without remedy was not acceptable to South Park's four thousand residents, by now mostly Hispanic and mostly not speaking English at home. But their demand for a new bridge was a hard one to meet the year after a financial crash, the city budget tapped out, more people than usual showing up at the river with fishing rods, hungry, casting next to warning signs posted in Spanish, Laotian, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Russian. Complicating matters, a new bridge was not the residents' only demand.
The people of South Park lived, for the most part, on a core of tree-shaded streets, many of them dead-ending at the river, or the highway, or the circumference of fenced lots that otherwise hemmed in the neighborhood, lots holding businesses like Cain Bolt & Gasket or Sound Propeller Services, lots that, when they didn't contain elemental companies in low industrial buildings, tended to hold giant spools of marine-grade rope, ship winches, metal buoys, all of it detritus washed up from the nearby port. On one inland corner of the neighborhood was something referred to by city signage as a "transfer station," a delicate way of saying city dump. No one was asking for extravagant changes to this environment. The odors from the dump, the scents of creosote drifting in off the water, the taste of ammonia blowing through cement factory fences, the howl of jets on descent toward the airport, so close that conversations below had to pause—such things came with the territory. But people who made their homes here did feel that in addition to a new bridge they deserved more police to patrol their roads, some of which appeared to be crumbling back into dirt, and better lighting so that fewer night shadows would be on offer along the main avenues, inviting unpredictable characters who trudged up from the ragged vegetation along the riverbank or wandered in from the budget motels and homeless encampments of the surrounding industrial netherland. It was hoped as well that better sewage and drainage pipes might someday stem the flooding that swamped many South Park basements when rains came down heavy, sending rats and spiders scurrying for higher ground.
All of this would likely have to wait and, if history was any guide, might well be forgotten amid demands from other neighborhoods that were not majority Hispanic, and working class, and from a trammeled river delta. It had always gone this way. So people in South Park had learned to counter inevitable disappointment with reeled-in expectations. With patience, too, when possible, sometimes helped along by a measured pleasure at the way South Park's neglect, in a familiar paradox, made the neighborhood. Made it one of Seattle's most diverse communities. Made its homes a bargain during the boom years. Made its food affordable and filling. Made it clear to those living along the botanically named residential streets—Thistle, Elmgrove, Rose—that they should not expect outsiders rushing in to make things better, that instead the mix of languages and ethnicities within this one square mile would have to get by on their own. Which meant together.
Meant, in practice, that an English-speaking white woman in South Park would mow her Chinese neighbor's parking strip and he would give her green beans from his garden, neither able to speak a language understood by the other, both frequenting the Hispanic grocer, all doing what was needed to get by, and to work on time. For the most part, on most days, this was how it went, a majority of residents abiding by an unspoken rule that to live in this place was to be implicitly drafted into doing what one could to make sure everyone made it through. In exchange, one probably wouldn't be bothered for petty things that might cause trouble in other neighborhoods, such as placing wet laundry to dry on a chain-link fence or hanging it in the trees across from the Cesar Chavez Village housing projects, damp socks joining the leaves in obscuring a view of the distant downtown high-rises.
That summer of 2009, it was unusually warm. Kids played late into the evening on the field outside the South Park Community Center, where dirt from the baseball diamond kicks into dust filtering last light. Men in white undershirts leaned against the wall outside Juan Colorado restaurant. Brisk business was done at Loretta's, a bar with a Ping-Pong table and a refurbished Airstream trailer for patrons to sit in out back.
In the middle of July, on one particularly hot night, well after the ball field had cleared and not long after Loretta's and Juan Colorado had served last call, Jennifer Dawson-Lutz could be found standing silently in the bathroom of her narrow, one-story house. It was a house wrapped in white siding that evoked wooden slats, and it was set on a block of similarly compact homes, a block where South Rose Street dead-ends near the ball field, a custom metal fabrication factory, and a stretch of freeway that bisects the neighborhood. She had just put her newborn daughter back down to sleep after a 3:00 a.m. feeding and then, before going back to bed herself, had tiptoed into the bathroom, keeping the light off so as not to wake her daughter. Outside, she heard the sound of breaking glass.
Her daughter was seventeen days old, and she herself was still recovering from a cesarean section. But she climbed onto the edge of her bathtub so she could peer out her bathroom window. Across the street and down the block was a small red house that happened to be well lit by a streetlamp. Jennifer Dawson-Lutz heard a scream. She saw a person who appeared to be falling out the window. She noticed a white curtain billowing through the window. Her mind, trying to make sense of this, suggested that someone was trying to break into the home, which she knew was shared by two women. One of them had purchased it a few years earlier; the other had moved in more recently. Both were attractive and outgoing, in their thirties, with smiles that stuck in memories, and they could regularly be seen gardening together in the front yard, or walking to Loretta's, or chatting with people they bumped into along the sidewalk.
Jennifer Dawson-Lutz went to wake her husband. She dialed 911, something she'd never done before. She got a recorded message and was on hold for what felt like a long time.
Up the block, where South Rose Street intersects with Eighth Avenue South, Israel Rodriguez was watching his eighteenth birthday party wind down. His actual birthday had come three days earlier, but the celebration was postponed in order to take advantage of a fast-arriving Saturday night. Now it was 3:00 a.m. on the Sunday after that Saturday night. Israel stood on the sidewalk outside his family's home, lit a cigarette, and smoked it near the spot where roots of a large maple tree had cracked and raised the concrete on a scale not normally seen in a city accustomed to sidewalks rearranged by tree roots. Here, the whorled roots had created a small mountain of vaulting cement whose peak passersby were forced to ascend and then descend. As Israel pulled on the cigarette, he, too, heard glass breaking. The sound seemed to come from the direction of the dead end on South Rose Street, and his mind identified it as a window being smashed. Israel found this odd for the neighborhood. He decided to head over to see what was happening.
About halfway down the block, he spotted a woman in the middle of the street. "She was white and wasn't wearing nothing," Israel would later tell a courtroom. The woman was screaming for help.
Israel ran back to his house. In the basement, Sara Miranda-Nino, his twenty-one-year-old cousin, was on her cell phone arguing with an ex-boyfriend. Israel told her to call 911, and then he and Sara ran down South Rose Street together.
Israel's eleven-year-old sister, Mariah, followed. So did a young neighborhood friend named Diana Ramirez, whose father was once Israel's boxing coach. Diana was fourteen and lived on South Rose Street just across from the red house.
Jennifer Dawson-Lutz, watching out her front window, saw them all run past. She told her husband, "Go outside, go outside, help." Then she heard one of the kids saying, "Get back, somebody's been stabbed." "And that's when I told my husband, 'Stay inside.'"
By this time, Israel and his cousin Sara could see there were two women in the street. One screaming for help. The other on the pavement. This woman, too, was without clothes, and Israel could see wounds on her.
He told Mariah and Diana to get out of there. Diana didn't listen. She knew the women who lived in the red house. Didn't know their names, but knew them by sight. They would wave to her as they were going about their days or as they were heading to and from work at their downtown jobs, and Diana would smile and wave back, say hi. Now one of the women was running in and out of the cone of streetlamp light, pounding on a neighbor's door to no avail, coming right up to Diana, looking at her, saying, "Help me." She was holding her neck. It was bleeding.
"I took off my sweatshirt," Diana would later testify. "I wrapped it around her neck to stop the bleeding. Then I ran inside my house to get towels and paper towels."
Sara recognized the women, too. "I seen them," she said on the witness stand, "but never conversated with them. They were just two women that always got involved with the community. I remember seeing them around when South Park had its festivals."
Now Sara was with the woman who was lying in the street. Her name was Teresa Butz, and the red house belonged to her. The woman calling for help, Diana's sweatshirt to her neck, was Teresa's fiancée, Jennifer Hopper.
Sara knelt. She held Teresa's head in her lap. She spoke to a 911 operator through tears, terrified, and she spoke to Teresa, too, telling her, "Please wake up, ma'am. Ma'am, wake up! Please wake up, ma'am!"
She took off her shirt and tried to wipe the blood away. She wanted to see where Teresa's major wounds were, apply pressure. It was difficult. "The bleeding wouldn't stop," she said.
There were no police officers in South Park when the calls began coming in from South Rose Street, but the neighborhood did have a fire station. It had been there for more than a hundred years and after a few relocations was now situated near the red house. "Listen to me," a 911 operator told Sara, trying to calm her. "There's a fire station less than two blocks away from you. They're going to come and help her right away. They're like two blocks away, okay?"
Sara heard this and told Teresa, "Keep breathing. The ambulance is coming. Please keep breathing."
The first officer to respond was Thomas Berg. He was driving up a steep hill that leads out of the valley that holds South Park when his patrol car radio advised him, "Stabbing on South Rose." He made a U-turn, headlights sweeping across high grass on the side of the road, and, with his siren off so as not to tip the perpetrator, sped down the hill. It was 3:09 a.m.
As Berg descended the hill, the view out his windshield tightened, from a panorama of lights in the industrial valley below to a tunnel of amber-lit arterial with darkness beyond its edges. He braked for a stoplight and cross traffic at the bottom of the hill, pulled around a pickup truck that was in his way, turned on his flashers, then raced across a stretch of flatland and under a highway overpass. He passed lots holding stacked metal drums and lengths of construction cranes lying on their sides. The dump was now on his right in the darkness.
He turned left at an intersection where a city sign for Holden Street was bolted to the corrugated-metal wall of a warehouse. His cruiser rattled over potholes, past moss-covered Greyhound buses long retired from service, past Fire King of Seattle and its pile of old extinguishers rusting in an adjacent lot, past Custom Crating and Wood Box Company.
The road Berg was on would soon dead-end at the Duwamish, but before this happened, he pulled right onto Fifth Avenue South. Past Swift Tool Company, past Rogers Machinery, and then, six blocks from the scene, Berg stopped his patrol car and waited, headlights shining on an overgrown lot. He'd often trained new officers, so he knew protocol dictated he arrive at South Rose Street with backup.
The fire truck, too, was stopped and waiting, now parked near Israel's house, several hundred yards from where the shouts were coming from, a standard procedure designed to protect unarmed firemen and medics. Still the truck's lights flashed, and its headlights beamed down the block toward the red house, as if in promise to the women and in warning to their attacker.
Berg knew the guy who was coming to watch his back while he focused on the victims, Officer Ernest DeBella. As soon as the radio told him DeBella was close, Berg headed for South Rose Street, alternately gunning and slowing his engine to try to synchronize his arrival with his fellow officer's. He passed a stack of wood pallets on a sidewalk, turned onto Eighth Avenue South, accelerated, turned his flashers back on. He passed under a canopy of maples, including the one that had buckled the sidewalk in front of Israel's house.
At the intersection with South Rose, he drove up on the curb to get around the fire truck and then stopped at a collapsible basketball hoop set up for playing in the street. It had been five and a half minutes since the call came in.
What Berg now saw stood out from "hundreds, maybe a thousand" violent crime scenes he'd walked into during his twenty-five years as a police officer. He saw Teresa Butz lying in the street, her head no longer in Sara's lap. He saw Jennifer Hopper standing above her, partly shrouded in a white towel Diana had given her. He saw blood.
The waiting medics came in behind Berg and DeBella, and then additional police cars behind them. Officer Melissa Wengard was driving one. She'd just checked in for first watch—3:00 a.m. to noon—and during roll call, she later testified, she was told to get to South Park "as quickly as possible." With Officer Nilo Dela Cruz, who likewise was sent directly from roll call to South Rose, she proceeded to "clear" the red house.
"It was a very brief clearing," Wengard said. "It's a fairly small house."
They shouted "Seattle Police!" as they entered the front door, noted blood on the floor and in the main bedroom. They looked in closets, under the bed, accidentally knocked over an ironing board, saw a large knife on the floor, checked the low-ceilinged basement. They stayed on the perimeter of the rooms as they did this so as not to disturb evidence. "We actually walk the walls," Dela Cruz explained later, on the stand. "That's what we call it, walking the walls." They found no one.
Officer Brian Downing, part of the canine unit, arrived with his German shepherd, Jack. They found a scent of interest outside the red house, just under its bathroom window, which was open, and Jack followed the scent across an alley behind the home. He pulled Officer Downing along hard—"I call it dog skiing," he said—onto the community center ball field, toward an edge of the field where a scrim of trees bumps up against the stretch of freeway bisecting the neighborhood. There, Jack lost the scent.
Someone called over the radio for the police helicopter. It wasn't available. Someone else called over the radio for a blood run. Officer Curtis Daniel Woo offered himself. He'd come to the scene without being told. "Wasn't so much dispatched," he said, "as I volunteered for the call. This is probably one of the most serious calls a police officer will go to. When something like this comes out, everybody that's working goes. You drop what you're doing and you just go, because you know the other people there are going to need help."
In the back of an ambulance, paramedic Les Davis tended to the woman with the towel draped around her and, as he worked, noticed the look on her face. It was unique to him in thirty-five years as a paramedic. "Absolute terror," he said. "I've never seen that. I've seen a lot of people."
This was Jennifer Hopper, Teresa's fiancée. Before being taken to the ambulance, she'd been heard to say, "He told us if we did what he asked us to do, he wouldn't hurt us. He lied."
Jennifer kept asking about Teresa. A second paramedic, Carlos Valdivia, told her, "Other people are taking care of your partner right now. We're here to take care of you." She screamed out for Teresa from the back of the ambulance, telling her she loved her.
Valdivia and Davis then drew a small vial of Jennifer's blood and handed it to Woo, who raced "lights and sirens" to the Puget Sound Blood Center as the ambulance itself headed for Harborview, the region's Level 1 trauma center, perched on a downtown hill distant from the Duwamish River valley.
Later, when the doctors were done, Woo walked in and asked Jennifer the required questions as gently as he could. "Name, date of birth, address," he recalled on the stand. "Asked her for the name of her partner."
Jennifer still wanted someone to tell her about Teresa.
"I lied to her," Woo said. "I told her I didn't know if her partner was alive or not."
Jennifer didn't believe him.
She held a thought she'd had standing there on South Rose Street: "I have to be able to tell people what happened."
Somewhere in the night was the man who'd done this. In the grip of what, no witness to his violence knew, though a small number of people, on hearing what occurred on South Rose Street, would get an uneasy feeling and think to themselves: Isaiah. They knew him to be a young man reeling, raging. They had feared him, and it was fear of a certain kind. Not the primal, salable fear of violence, not fright of the unexpected arriving with sudden brutality from an unknowable beyond. Theirs was fear of a known man and an outcome not yet known but likely to be grim. Fear of a person who, regrettably, had lived and delivered pain already, a man intelligent enough to impress yet with seemingly no handle on where his disjointed thoughts, speech, and actions might be headed. Or, if he did have some premonition, no firm brake, internal or external.
To the police, the most easily deduced thing was that the man who'd done this was brazen. He'd left bloody footprints and fingerprints at the red house, as if he lacked any thought of capture or consequence, and this now added to fears about his next thoughts, to the urgency of the gathering manhunt. In a basement apartment near the center of the city, a cell phone rang.
Detective Dana Duffy was asleep on a mattress on the floor, her service weapon, a .40-caliber Glock, stuffed under her pillow. She didn't feel safe in this place. It kept getting robbed, which was strange because Detective Duffy didn't have much of interest. When she left her husband of twenty-three years and found this cheap one-bedroom, she'd brought with her just the mattress, a used couch, an old TV, and a $40 microwave, the sparseness of the furnishings in direct proportion to the urgency of her need to get away.
He hadn't wanted her to be a cop, thought she should keep working as an emergency room nurse. Her father wouldn't have liked her career change, either. He was a drunk and a bank robber and, for a time, an out-of-state fugitive. Detective Dana Duffy is not one to appreciate being told what to do. Six years as a cop, first on night patrol, then in the gang unit. After that, homicide, a perch it usually takes officers twenty years to climb into. Seven years as the only female detective in homicide, left her husband along the way, and when her cell phone rang in her basement apartment that night in the summer of 2009, Detective Duffy picked it up, forty-five years old, fit and compact, adrenaline rising, ready to work. "A lot of people get up, and they'll shower," she said. "For me, I like to get there." She listened to the brief synopsis of what first responders were seeing. She put her light brown hair in a ponytail. She threw on some clothes. She grabbed a Diet Coke out of the fridge, to throw some caffeine behind the adrenaline. She got into her take-home car, an Impala, a car that, being speed oriented, she was happy to have, because the other choice for Seattle detectives was a hybrid Toyota.
Onto the empty freeway, into the Duwamish valley, onto South Rose Street, out of the Impala, into the warm morning, past the yellow tape and the top brass. "It was summer," she said. "It was a beautiful day."
At her desk at police headquarters in downtown Seattle, Detective Duffy keeps pictures of all the people whose deaths she's investigated, tacks them to the walls of her cubicle. She's lost track of how many yellow-taped murder scenes she's arrived at, all told. This one stood out. "I remember seeing the house, and seeing the curtain flying from the bedroom window, drifting through the air, with blood all down the bottom," she said. "And looking across at the neighbor's house, and seeing blood all over the neighbor's door, thinking, 'What in the hell happened?'" Teresa's body was still in the street, now covered by a yellow emergency blanket. Detective Duffy took this in and was still knocking the cobwebs out of her head when she walked through the red house. "A dynamic scene," she said. "This wasn't just a shooting where somebody's dead, and that's it. Something happened. There was a story."
The interior was a grotesque hieroglyph hinting at strong emotion and violent struggle. Investigators began bagging evidence, and Detective Duffy's mind turned to another unusual aspect. "I've never had a murder case where there's two victims," she said, "and one survives."
She got back in the Impala. She drove to the hospital. She walked into Jennifer's room, put her hand on Jennifer's wrist. She said, "Hey, Jen. I'm Detective Duffy. I'm Dana, and I'm gonna be one of the detectives working on your case."
"And I remember," Jennifer said, "the first thing I asked her was, 'Did she make it?' And without hesitation—and I was so grateful for this—she just said, 'No, she didn't.'"
Jennifer screamed.
Some time passed.
Detective Duffy pulled out an audio recorder. She turned it on. "Okay," she said to Jennifer. "Let's start at the very beginning."
Back in South Park, the Duwamish moving through another warm day. In the city beyond, people awakening to work. On television, the launch of a familiar narrative: a neighborhood in shock, a manhunt, vows to make an arrest.
But the story of a crime like the one that occurred on South Rose Street does not begin with the news. Look down into any stretch of the Duwamish, on any day, and offer a variation on Detective Duffy's request: Where is the very beginning?
The tributaries that feed a moment are vast. At the riverside, countless water molecules in motion and the din of the surrounding city. It could be concluded, standing there, that a very beginning for what occurred on South Rose Street will never be located. That one might as well ask how three drops of rain, each cast from different skies, came to float in one fouled bend in the Duwamish at the height of summer.
Even so, some stories are worth assembling. Some crimes cry out for an accounting. Some offenses indict so much, and reflect so much, that they demand attention—to what was taken, to the taker, to the trials that preceded and followed.
There were two women in that red house who, searching for love, had found each other. There was one man who, needing a halt to his psychological descent, had found nothing but an open window. All of them human with human limits, their routes winding backward through St. Louis, where Teresa grew up stubborn and tough in a large family; through the mountains north of Santa Fe, where the newborn Jennifer was cradled by two adventurous spirits; through Uganda, the country Isaiah's father fled for Seattle; and through the neighborhoods of the father's new city, where he met Isaiah's mother, where their son was raised amid difficult circumstances, and where, nearly twenty-four years later, Isaiah's disintegrating life collided with the life Teresa and Jennifer had made.
That collision, and the histories that precede it, have something to offer the present. All three lives have something to teach. Upstream then, eyes wide, against the current. 
{{ image: 1, width: 200, align: left }}From While the City Slept: A Love Lost
to Violence and a Young Man's Descent into Madness by Eli Sanders, on sale February 2 from Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2016
by Eli Sanders.
Eli and Jennifer will talk about the book, in conversation with KUOW's Marcie Sillman, on Wednesday, February 3 at Town Hall.
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