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6

The aftermath

FIVE apartments were heavily damaged and 32 individuals were displaced by the fire. Fire Marshalls and ATF investigators swarmed the scene. Questions of how and why the fire started were answered within 24 hours: unattended cooking with grease.

London Square’s insurance company moved swiftly to assess the scene. Within a matter of days, #716 was gutted, and all physical traces of the fire or its cause were destroyed. Somewhere along the way, the stove was removed, its whereabouts unknown.

Tulsa fire investigators officially ruled the fire “accidental,” since according to fire analysis there was no indication of foul play. Tulsa’s DA Tim Harris, however, drew a different conclusion: The deaths of the children were more than an accident—they were depraved, criminal neglect.

From this point, things moved quickly. On November 26, only a week after her arrest, the DA upgraded Miashah’s charges from child neglect to two counts of second-degree murder, one for each dead child, citing “an act evincing a depraved mind” when she fixed the children lunch and left them unattended for eight minutes to empty the trash. She had abandoned the children, he alleged, to do something other than merely empty the trash. The specifics would come later.

The charges came on the same day that Noni and Nylah were laid to rest in Crown Hill Cemetery in two unmarked patches of earth. Money was scarce for the Moses family and grave markers would have to wait. Miashah was not present when the children were lowered into the ground; she was in Pod F-18 of the Tulsa County Jail clad in an orange jumpsuit.

Noni and Nylah’s cousin, Marvin, a devout light-skinned youth, held a dozen pink balloons tight in his fist and lifted his eyes to the sky with a simple, heartfelt prayer:

“Give us a sense of peace, Heavenly Father, as we release these balloons up into the heavens that they may receive them, for we do not know why this happened to us, but we do know that you are in control. And we ask in the name of Jesus that you continue to show us the way. Help us to be normal and deal with our regular lives. We ask in the name of Jesus that you comfort us and give us the strength to move forward with this tragic situation that has occurred. We give our faith to you, Heavenly Father, as we release these balloons into the sky. We ask in the name of Jesus that you give them to the babies.”

A plethora of pink balloons filled the sky and vanished from view, finding their way to other hearts and places where someone might find them later and wonder—and perhaps in some odd way, sense the import of their journey.

Whether the children’s death was a tragic accident or a criminal act depends on which version of the story you believe: that of the scribbled, fifteen-line police report, that of the DA’s deductive reasoning, or that of several witnesses who were never questioned.

The police report stated that Miashah was “cooking with grease” and referred to the neighbor who had waved her down as a “homie.”38 But Miashah’s neighbor, Tina, contradicted this, saying that Miashah told them she was only heating, not frying, the pre-grilled chicken strips and used Pam Cooking Spray, as called for on the package instructions, rather than grease.

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“I don’t know where they got the idea that there was grease,” Tina said. “It almost makes it look like she left grease on the fire cooking. But there wasn’t any chicken cooking! It just smelt like fire. And if it’s grease fire—I’ve been in a grease fire too—you smell whatever the grease has cooked while it’s burning. So, no, I’m sorry…” she shook her head. “If they saw the pan of grease, they might have assumed that’s what was going on. I think they just drew some conclusions. And I’m not sure they’re correct.”

Chrisandria and Courtney were at the girls’ apartment only hours before the fire, and Chrisandria remembers seeing a can of Pam on the counter. The fact that the police report used the word “homie”—a black slang term meaning a friend—to describe a neighbor appeared to be a racist reference to Miashah’s African American vernacular.

“That didn’t surprise me, especially with the police department around here,” Tina said. “I mean, not all of them are bad. I’ve met some really, really good ones. But there’s some that just see us, like, ‘Oh, you live here, you must be this, well then, this must be what happened…” She paused. “And it aggravates me. You’re a police officer and you have that kind of power—and you don’t care? Because you need to care in that kind of position!”

Shortly after the fire, she said maintenance workers were quick to stop by late one evening and put heat level markers on her burner dials. “On the burners, they just put the stickers on these right after the fire,” she said pointing to the stove burners. The oven dials, however, still had no heat level markers. “I asked them about the oven control and they said, ‘Oh its fine.’ So, I’m guessing at temperatures here?!”39

The fire report was issued within 24-hours and more or less rubber-stamped the police report, listing the cause as a stove fire ignited by cooking oil due to “unattended cooking.” Chrisandria wasn’t buying it. “Even ‘48 Hours’ doesn’t solve crimes that fast.” she said.

All official opinions pointed to Miashah as the obvious culprit. Her wanton disregard for the lives of the two helpless little girls became the tantamount conclusion that colored everything that came after: Miashah had left two small children locked in an apartment to die a horrific death. On top of that, she was black.

A media frenzy ensued. The fatal accident was hammered endlessly on local news channels and across national multi-media platforms. Tulsa news channels broadcast live photos of the fire with scenes of smoke and flames pouring from the apartment with a cadre of fire trucks surrounding the fiery scene from 3:00 p.m. in the afternoon to nearly 11:00 p.m. that night.

The ensuing TV news coverage the next day was damning in its implications. A local CBS news anchor reported that Miashah had left the children “trapped” in the apartment, implying that she had purposely left them to die.40 A FOX news channel reporter confronted televisions audiences with: “Two children died that day. Somebody has to be held accountable. Who?”41

Headlines poured in across iPads and media devices: “London Square Fire, 2 children dead, 3 adults injured” and “Aunt Charged with Murder in Death of Two Children,” accompanied by a barrage of incendiary online reader comments. One reader in particular didn’t mince words: “As usual, another negro fried chicken fire… Miashah did not step out to take the trash; she stepped out to go ho’in for some crack. Life in the ghetto.” 42 43 44 45 46

The comment yielded a furious response from the other side: “I know for a fact [she] was not gone longer than 5 minutes frying no damn chicken, period, because yes she is black and knows how long to leave chicken cooking!”

In a string of 16 contentious barbs, one reader flipped the argument the other direction: “What I am pretty much saying is if this were a beautiful 20-year-old white girl you would be outraged by the accusations. As long as you are flaunting the cross, I don’t think Jesus would think much of your blatant racist views there, huckleberry, nor your absolute lack of compassion.”47

It appeared as though every media outlet—print, TV, and online—was showing a grim unflattering mugshot of Miashah with a clenched jaw and close-cut boyish crop.

Chrisandria was mortified.

“I know Miashah. I know my daughters… I have seven children. And I would leave Miashah at home at seven and eight years old because I couldn’t afford a babysitter. She would cook whole meals. She would never do this, never in a trillion years… We’re the ones who lost the babies and they treat us like criminals.”

A systemic racial divide was opening wide—one that had burned silently for decades through the ranks of law enforcement, the judicial system, and everyday conversations in the streets of Tulsa, home of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, the largest mass-lynching of African Americans in U.S. history that left the affluent Greenwood community known as “Black Wall Street” in ashes.

“I think that we’ve got really a perfect storm for police shootings in Oklahoma,” ACLU of Oklahoma Legal Director Brady Henderson said. “Trust and rapport between law enforcement and many citizens is at an incredible low. The officers start fearing for their safety and so the hands start going closer to the triggers on both sides.”48