Читать книгу Guilty When Black - Carol Mersch - Страница 10

4

The fallout

WHAT happened next is vivid in Chrisandria’s mind.

She had been home from the hospital only a few hours when a Department of Human Services (DHS) representative knocked on her door demanding to question Keahmiee about the dead children. This, along with the negative light already being cast on Miashah by newscasters at the scene of the fire and the utter devastation of ten grieving family members inside the house, drove Chrisandria to the edge. Keahmiee herself hadn’t stopped crying in the hours since the fire, and now DHS had dispatched a white woman to interrogate her.

“I just blacked out,” Chrisandria said. “You turn it around and get off of my porch!” she screamed. “Do you really want to come inside a houseful of crazy screaming niggers?”—she chose her words pointedly. The woman turned and left.

By this time Keahmiee was in dire emotional straights and Chrisandria drove her to Tulsa’s St. John’s Hospital, where she was sedated and kept overnight.

The next morning, Chrisandria drove Miashah to the hospital so she could see her sister and try in some way to resolve the terrible event, an event that Miashah herself had yet to fully grasp. But she never made it back to Keahmiee’s room. “I think reality kind of set in in the waiting room and I lost control,” she said. “I was screaming and crying.” Chrisandria gathered her up and left.

As they were leaving the hospital, a black SUV with tinted windows raced through the parking lot toward them and screeched to a halt in front of them. In classic “Law & Order” style, several police officers emerged. They said a disruption had been called in from the hospital by the mother, reporting a disturbance between the two sisters.

“That’s not true!” said Chrisandria. “I’m the girl’s mother, and I did not call in a disturbance!” The officers then said Miashah was being arrested for several “failure to pay” warrants for unpaid fines. An internal police memo, however, states that the police were dispatched to the hospital “in reference to an arson suspect being there”—even though federal Alcohol Tobacco and Fired (ATF) fire investigators concluded arson was not suspected as the cause of the fire.37 Regardless, “They just do what they want to do,” Chrisandria said.

Miashah was handcuffed and burst into tears.

Still traumatized by the death of her nieces less than 24 hours earlier, an exhausted and shell-shocked Miashah was taken to the TPD Detective Division where she was read her rights and asked to sign a virtually blank Miranda form with only her name scribbled at the top that would waive her right to an attorney. “The police told me when they arrested me it was for restitution I owed,” she said. So, believing she had no reason for an attorney, she signed the waiver. She was then interrogated by two detectives and promptly booked into the David L. Moss Criminal Justice Center (commonly referred to as the Tulsa County Jail) on two counts of child neglect.

Chrisandria was now dealing with not only the loss of her two granddaughters, but the slow emotional demise of her entire family.

“I lost four people,” she sobbed. “Two granddaughters and two daughters who will never be the same. People don’t understand how hard this is to live with. I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. I can’t do anything.”

In the days after the fire, Chrisandria searched desperately for something of Noni’s and Nylah’s to cling to. “I was having such a hard time, and I couldn’t find any of Noni’s toys or anything around my house. And I said to myself, ‘God, please, let me find a shirt, or a sock, or anything.’ It was really too soon, but I went to the babies’ apartment and they had put up a memorial outside the apartment, and there were all these teddy bears and stuff like that. I bought Noni that doll in 2010, and she named the doll “Sheah” after Miashah. And when I went there that night, right in front was Noni’s doll. The only thing on her was soot on the bottom of her feet, where I could tell she had been in the apartment. And it was my 39th birthday.”

Chrisandria Moses outside the Tulsa County Jail (David L. Moss Criminal Justice Center) where Miashah was first locked up.