Читать книгу Boy With A Knife - Jean Trounstine - Страница 10

1. MEETING KARTER

For many kids in New Bedford, Massachusetts in the 1980s and 1990s, the world was a minefield. They saw fights in school and at home. In a 2009 letter, Karter wrote that it was “common” for high school students to attack junior high kids. Even when he was jumped in school—and he was jumped five times before he got to high school—Karter said, “I just took a beating . . . I never threw a punch.” As a result of this environment, however, Karter felt he needed a knife for protection.

Karter’s first knife was given to him by his father. It was a double-edge non-folding style with a leather sheath. Karter later obtained other knives. Once he stole a paring knife from a silverware drawer at a friend’s house because he had to walk home through an unknown neighborhood and didn’t feel safe without it. The knife he owned when he was sixteen was a buck knife, a folding type with a fixed blade. Karter had gotten it from a friend in a casual exchange for a couple of donut holes. It was four or five inches long, and Karter preferred to carry it with the blade open in the pocket of his pants or shirt. He didn’t mind if it stuck holes in his clothes; he knew that this knife—advertised as being designed for opening boxes or cutting twine—was his security.

With a knife in his pocket, Karter took his place among the one in three adolescent boys who, in 1993, were armed when they went to school.¹ Some students felt that school had become a frightening place and saw weapons as the answer to bullying; others carried a knife to harass or to intimidate; still others relied on weapons to please their friends or to command respect.² Before the proliferation of security monitors, metal detectors, and emergency notification systems in schools, a few students in the nearby town of Mattapoisett kept sticks with a ball and chain in their lockers.³ Across the country, others stashed guns in their cars.⁴ While Karter was fascinated with guns, he wrote in 2008, that “to get one in his neighborhood, you needed money and to know the right people.” Thus, he settled on a knife in his pocket, making what he later called in an essay he wrote behind bars, “a devil’s bargain.”⁵

In January 2008, when I first visited Karter in prison, I knew little about knives and even less about the rough-and-tumble lives of teenagers from New Bedford. I had received five letters from Karter in which he wrote freely about all that he had done to transform himself in prison over the past fifteen years. In one of his letters, Karter invited the community college class I was teaching, Voices Behind Bars: The Literature of Prison, to visit him in prison. Several of the students, a culturally diverse group struggling financially as well as academically, agreed to take the hour trip, in spite of the fact that the semester was close to ending. They wanted to meet Karter Reed, a convicted murderer. And, I have to admit, so did I.

It was a bitterly cold winter day and we were bundled up in parkas, boots, and an abundance of wool as we piled into cars to head for the Massachusetts Correctional Institution–Shirley, forty-two miles northwest of Boston. At the time, MCI-Shirley held 1219 of the approximately 11,000 men and women serving state sentences in Massachusetts; the facility was meant to accommodate slightly more than half that capacity.⁶ The prison had opened its doors in the 1970s, and by 1991, it housed prisoners who were considered minimum- and medium-security risks.⁷

My students and I had been invited by Karter to take in a presentation by Project Youth, a statewide program run by prisoners. The program functioned as a more civilized version of the popular 1970s documentary Scared Straight!, which aimed to frighten kids from committing crimes by having them come face to face with prisoners. Participants in Project Youth meant to educate, they told us, not terrorize. Karter was one of the organization’s leaders at MCI-Shirley. The visit was authorized by prison authorities who wanted the public to believe that the punishment system was able to rehabilitate prisoners. But, as former prisoner Ronald Day said to graduates at a 2014 Cornell prison education ceremony behind bars, “Few people are rehabilitated in prisons. Fewer still are rehabilitated by prisons. But a few rehabilitate themselves in spite of prison.” ⁸

The prisoners gravitated to Project Youth for several reasons: to face their crimes; to gain value from teaching others; to experience humanity amid the prison’s stone walls; and to share remorse. Prisoners told their stories to students, who, frankly, were some of the only people who would listen to them. Correction officers allowed the programs, though some quietly sent the message that we should be suspect of everything we were told. I was fairly certain the participants in Project Youth would be forced to screen out any controversial comments that disparaged the prison. Still, I hoped that the men might dispel the stereotypes of hardened convicts, and that my students might see the faces behind the crimes.

Upon arriving at the prison, we found a squat building that served as the entry point where visitors were searched. My students joked with one another that they were grateful not to be asked to lock up their hats, gloves, and scarves along with their jewelry and wallets. Crossing a patch of frozen yard, we entered the main prison block. Inside, the space was boxy and barren, far from noise and commotion; more like an anteroom, but typical of the undistinguished modular units popular these days in prison construction. Nothing but an occasional instructional poster hung on the walls. Cold light shone on the row of hardback chairs set up for the prisoners. In this no man’s land, between inside and outside, the prison held programs with students from the free world.

We took our seats across from a row of nine prisoners who sat about twenty feet away, all dressed in prison blues. Karter sat at the end of the row. I recognized him immediately from photos I’d found while searching the Internet about his crime. At thirty-one, he was not much older than my students, though his face had aged from that of the fair-skinned, sandy-haired boy he was when he was first sentenced to life in an adult institution. He watched us with curiosity.

The event began with a man who identified himself as “Boogie.” Boogie strolled back and forth in the space in front of us, and, like a comic, tried to loosen up the somber-faced audience with a few jokes about being incarcerated. He said he was a thirty-eight-year-old, 100-percent black man—that made everyone laugh. He then gave us a rundown on what we were going to hear. We settled in, enrapt, as if watching a show. Boogie didn’t say why he had shot and killed a rival gang member at age nineteen in a turf war over drugs. Just that he had done it. Then he said he had been sentenced to life with no opportunity of parole. That revelation took the air out of the room, the fact that this man in front of us would likely die in prison. That year, 8.7 percent of state prisoners in Massachusetts were serving a life sentence without parole, four times the national average.⁹ By 2015, 1009 prisoners out of 9670 were serving a first-degree life sentence in the state, close to 9.5 percent.¹⁰ It was difficult for some of my students to comprehend death, much less death behind bars.

After Boogie was finished, an Asian man stood. I guessed him to be about twenty-two, though his unravaged face suggested that he could have been as young as seventeen. At that time, Massachusetts still prosecuted seventeen-year-olds in adult courts, and if found guilty, the boys did their time in adult facilities.¹¹ This would change in 2013, when the criminal age of responsibility would become eighteen.¹² (As of 2015, nine states are still holdouts on this point.¹³) The young man did not move from the front of his chair as he unwound a story of gangs, guns, and drugs, and of being turned in by his buddies, who made a deal with the federal authorities. I’d heard this story before, of young kids who got involved in drugs, with one tapped to turn in the supposed kingpin. He also said he had shot someone in a drive-by in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The admission elicited audible gasps in the room, as Lawrence was next door to Lowell, not far from many of my students’ homes.

We heard several more stories like this. Some of these men had been incarcerated for more years than many of my students had been alive. Most had come from poor families; drugs and alcohol permeated their lives. Almost all had been abandoned by someone—parents, children, or spouses. They were not making excuses. They recognized that their actions had killed another person. But it was hard to know the losses they caused and to see their humanity at the same time. A kind of grief permeated the room as the stories unfolded. One speaker stated it simply when he said that if he had only one word to describe what prison life was like, that word would be loneliness.

Karter watched each man closely, and I watched Karter. He alternated between nervously hunching over in his chair, eyes darting around the room, and seeming relaxed and comfortable. He nodded and smiled when a fellow prisoner’s line provoked laughter, enjoying this space outside his daily life, away from the early wake-up, chores, chow, and isolation.

By the time Karter rose, the last to tell his story, everyone knew who he was. He moved silently to the center of the room. He had rolled up the sleeves of his light-blue shirt very precisely. He still looked so much like the boy in the courtroom whose picture I had seen—a teenager in an overly large striped shirt, with a shock of hair almost covering his eyes. He spoke without really looking at anyone. But as he eased into his talk, I detected waves of vulnerability in his choked-up voice. He took us into his past, and before we knew it, we were in a classroom in a Dartmouth, Massachusetts, high school in 1993.

It is not an exaggeration to claim that what I heard next changed my life.

Karter’s presence at MCI-Shirley was no anomaly; it was entwined in our country’s complicated history of dealing with children in conflict with the law. The way our policymakers have imprisoned juveniles stems directly from whether or not we see youth as different from adults, and if we afford all children the same rights whether rich or poor, white, black, or brown.¹⁴

The early American settlers were influenced by their British legal forebears in policymaking, specifically in determining when youth ended and adulthood began. The eighteenth-century lawyer William Blackstone, who in 1753 explicated English doctrine in his Commentaries on the Law of England, saw the intention of “malice” as defining the age of youth culpability.¹⁵ Blackstone and his peers attributed some children, no matter their age, as having “vicious will.”¹⁶ Blackstone wrote: “One lad of eleven years old may have as much cunning as another of fourteen. . . . Under seven years of age indeed an infant cannot be guilty of felony; for then a felonious discretion is almost an impossibility in nature: but at eight years old he may be guilty of felony. Also, under fourteen . . . if it appear to the court and jury, that he . . . could discern between good and evil, he may be convicted and suffer death.”¹⁷

Sentencing young people to death didn’t sit well with everyone, however. In 1787, Quaker reformers set up the first penitentiaries as a way to deal with “the moral disease” of crime.¹⁸ Boston College law professor Sanford J. Fox wrote that these early prisons in Pennsylvania and New York “reduc[ed] the number of offenses that warranted the death penalty and introduced as an alternative periods of long-term incarceration.”¹⁹ Long-term incarceration meant isolation. But there were severe drawbacks to solitary confinement as a way to achieve reflection and penitence.²⁰ There were other systemic problems as well. In one Philadelphia prison, there were “subterranean dungeons for those under sentence of death,” and “in one common herd were kept by day and night prisoners of all ages, colors and sexes. . . . Parents were allowed to have their children with them in jail, and these youthful culprits were exposed to all the corrupting influences of association with confirmed and reckless villains.”²¹

Because housing young lawbreakers with adults created a “classroom for crime,” chaos resulted in these early prisons.²² Children of prisoners might seek a life of crime if reformers did not make changes; these reformers wanted to separate neglected and criminal youth from adult prisoners.²³ Their solution in New York, and soon after in other states, was to “rescue” children by forming Houses of Refuge, where pre-delinquents or those not beyond help, so-called “proper objects,” could be saved from “pauperism” and “criminal conduct.”²⁴ In 1825, “child savers” opened the New York House of Refuge, initiating what Nell Bernstein called “a mechanism for gaining control over children of the poor . . . a race- and class-driven enterprise intended explicitly for ‘other people’s children.’”²⁵ The child-savers could choose to save some children and abandon others, as reform was never intended to be across the board for all children.²⁶ Dr. Alexander Pisciotta, professor of criminal justice, spelled out how white children (mainly boys) were incarcerated until they were twenty-one, and how reformatories meant schooling, religious instruction, and an apprenticeship by a “racist and sexist” guardian—the state.²⁷ Such institutions could be profitable. Oliver Warner, Secretary for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, reported in 1865 that the income earned by labor from its child charges at the Boston House of Reformation was “considerable.”²⁸

The concept of parens patriae—the doctrine that gave the state power to serve as guardian and allowed courts to intervene in the lives of neglected and criminal children—was first judicially recognized in the US in 1838, though blacks and girls were treated differently by this so-called benevolent baby-sitter.²⁹ Blacks were trained for menial positions and barred from admission to reformatories until a separate reformatory for them was opened in 1848; girls were trained for their “proper place” in domestic positions or as wives.³⁰ Parens patriae allowed the court to decide the juvenile’s “fitness for treatment, and that meant it was at the court’s discretion.”³¹ By the middle of the nineteenth century, some parents protested children being taken from their homes, as it was clear by now to the public that children who were poor were often lumped in with those who were delinquent.³² A report by the Boston Bar Task Force on Criminal Justice stated that the philosophy shifted from “a religious and educational approach to an emphasis on providing a better family life and vocational training.”³³ But localities varied greatly on which kids were sent to adult prisons and which went to a not-so-benign foster home or training school.³⁴

The first juvenile court was created in Chicago in 1899, and the movement spread rapidly across the United States.³⁵ In 1906, Boston’s juvenile court was created.³⁶ Early juvenile courts were known for being non-adversarial and more relaxed than their adult counterparts, though the juvenile judges’ wide discretion created problems, as they had the power to order children to group homes or shelters without clear evidence that the child had committed a crime.³⁷

Even as the seeds of a juvenile court system were being sown, the fear of youthful lawbreakers and the need to punish them—and in some cases, punish harshly—never disappeared, no matter what rehabilitative models developed.³⁸ As a result, the adult system was never totally off-limits for children.³⁹

To understand Karter Reed’s story, we must leave MCI-Shirley, where my students and I sat stunned in a kind of pained wonder. We need to go back down the highway, past the fast-food restaurants that have sprung up along a once-quiet Route 2, and head fifty-four miles south, to a world far from Boston and its renowned universities. Past rural towns, each with sturdy pride in its distance from the bustle, with no-nonsense names like Ashland, Holliston, and the more affluent Dover; we bypass the busy high-tech belt of Route 128 that tightened in the 1990s when the tech market bottomed out. This drive leads to old roads with dim highway lights where cars race to get home or campers veer away from Cape Cod. Route 24 turns into Route 140, angling past the town of Fall River and ending in a narrow strip bordered by water. Here we find New Bedford, the city of ships where Karter Reed was born.

After I met Karter at MCI-Shirley, I visited New Bedford several times between 2008 and 2012 to learn more about the place he came from. Karter once wrote in frustration about his hometown that “there’s absolutely nothing [t]here but drugs, guns, and crime.” His statement was partially right. The first teen in Massachusetts tried and convicted of murder in an adult court was from New Bedford: Antonio Ferrer, a fourteen-year-old charged in 1992 with shooting a man.⁴⁰ Only two years before Karter’s crime, in 1991, New Bedford was deemed by the FBI as “the most violent city in New England.”⁴¹

Called “Heroin Heaven” in 2009 by a user on the crowd-sourced Urban Dictionary, New Bedford has certainly seen its fortunes change dramatically over the last few hundred years.⁴² Back in the 1700s, it was a quiet New England fishing and farming village. Barely a century later, the city had become a top-notch whaling port and manufacturing hub. In his 1851 classic Moby-Dick, Herman Melville described New Bedford’s “patrician-like houses” and “opulent” parks and gardens as some of the most striking in America.⁴³ However, even back then you could already see the discrepancy between the haves and the have-nots if you looked closely at Melville’s Spouter Inn, which he describes as a “dilapidated little wooden house” that “looked as if it might have been carted here from the ruins of some burnt district.”⁴⁴ Even “the swinging sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it.”⁴⁵

While whaling sagged a few years after New Bedford had formally incorporated in 1847, the textile industry aided the city’s economy.⁴⁶ The population burgeoned as hopefuls arrived to work in the mills; the Irish, French Canadian, and Portuguese joined the Native Americans, Africans, Azoreans, Cape Verdeans, and Brits who already dotted the city’s landscape.⁴⁷ Long before federal officials tore into the Michael Bianco textile factory in 2007 and arrested approximately 360 out of 500 workers, separating mostly Central American “illegals” from their children for deportation, we might have heard Karter’s words in a 2008 letter without a trace of irony: New Bedford was a place “hospitable to immigrants.” ⁴⁸

By the late 1880’s, New Bedford pulsed with industry. At the height of its prosperity in 1920, there were seventy mills producing high quality goods for twenty-eight cotton companies.⁴⁹ Unfortunately, this was the calm before the storm. In 1928, a labor strike paralyzed the city, as 20,000 workers rose up against the mill owners because the over-production of goods was cutting their wages.⁵⁰ The workers were out for six months, and many had to take pay cuts to get their jobs back. Then the Depression hit. Tens of thousands of jobs in the textile and apparel industries disappeared and the exodus out of the city began, and New Bedford’s economic health grew weaker. Important manufacturers moved to states where cheap labor was readily available.⁵¹ Fishing commerce provided the one bright light, but it wasn’t enough to help New Bedford attract new industry. While other parts of the state began to expand, the city’s population declined. That decline and the loss of business destroyed any chance of recovery. Industries in aerospace, electronics, defense, and medical research headed elsewhere.⁵²

By 1993, while most of Massachusetts was coming out of the recession that had begun in the late 1980s, economic improvement was still nonexistent in New Bedford.⁵³ The city had no champion to drag it out of its financial plight, no Senator Paul Tsongas to help secure federal monies to remodel its mills—as did Lowell, another gateway city that had once boomed with textiles and manufacturing. Called “gateways” because immigrants looking for the American Dream had settled in these older industrial areas, the towns of New Bedford, Lowell, Lawrence, Worcester, Springfield, and others were labeled the “tenements” of the state, providing cheap housing to new inhabitants and minorities.⁵⁴ For this distinction, these cities were looked down upon and often ignored by those in power. When Governor William Weld formed the Hispanic Advisory Commission in 1993, not one representative from southeastern Massachusetts was appointed, despite the large number of Hispanics residing in the state’s southeastern cities.⁵⁵

While New Bedford was struggling for recognition and support to help its citizenry during the twentieth century, the fledgling system for juveniles was undergoing transformation. The idea that children’s conduct was strongly influenced by their social and familial environments had gained favor.⁵⁶ Proponents of a separate juvenile system expressed concern that because children were not the same as adults in terms of accountability, they did not deserve the same punishment.⁵⁷ This stance would later find support in brain development research showing that adolescents are different from adults, but this was still far in the future. Instead, children were seen as more influenced by their surroundings, and some, able to change their ways.⁵⁸ All of these notions would be considered and challenged as the century progressed, and teens like Karter would be caught in the crossfire.

In the early part of the twentieth century, a family-like atmosphere was what administrators strived for in juvenile detention facilities.⁵⁹ But equitable care for all juveniles continued to be a myth, as children with criminal offenses were seen to have behaved “wickedly.”⁶⁰ As of 1921, the state of Massachusetts could send those between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one to any facility, including to adult courts if they were accused of a crime punishable by death or life imprisonment.⁶¹ It would take until 1948 to modify this and restrict at what age a child could be sent to adult court; that year, the state would give jurisdiction to a Youth Services Board, forerunner of the Department of Youth Services.⁶² The idea that permeated the system was still parens patriae, a sort of father knows best, in spite of charges of racism in foster homes and, at other placements, complaints of “whips, paddles, blackjacks and straps.”⁶³

Juvenile courts of the period were to emphasize the youthful nature of those who came before them. Across the country, children in these courts were “adjudicated,” not tried and sentenced as in an adult court of law. But scholar Sanford J. Fox said that in spite of its goals, “It was clear that juvenile courts were really deciding criminal responsibility.”⁶⁴ Children had limited civil rights compared to adults. Justine Wise Polier, a New York judge, wrote that “youth charged with offenses sat for hours in airless waiting rooms. Noisy verbal and physical battles had to be broken up by court attendants. The hard benches on which everyone was forced to sit and the atmosphere, like that in lower criminal courts, resembled bullpens more than a court for human beings.”⁶⁵ In the 1930’s and 1940’s, legal activists began challenging the powers given to juvenile court judges.⁶⁶

The middle part of the century would see changes in laws regarding juveniles, what rights they should be afforded, and the courts that held jurisdiction over them. In a 1948 decision, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas challenged what Massachusetts Judge Jay Blitzman called “the closed world of juvenile court.”⁶⁷ Douglas said the Fourteenth Amendment meant that no child could be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of the law, and “prohibited the use of a coerced statement made by a juvenile in a state court.”⁶⁸ In 1966, the case Kent v. United States gave juveniles the right to a hearing before a judge prior to being transferred to an adult court.⁶⁹

Other due process rights for juveniles were gained—and lost—through cases that came before the Supreme Court. A 1967 case, In Re Gault attempted to assure that due process would be followed in the juvenile courts.⁷⁰ With Gault, Justice Abraham Fortas said “Neither the Bill of Rights nor the Fourteenth Amendment is for adults alone,” and juveniles gained—again, on paper—the right to counsel, the right to confrontation/cross-examination as well as the right against compelled self-incrimination.⁷¹ However, in 1971, the ruling in McKeiver v. Pennsylvania, prohibited youth from having a constitutional right to a jury. It was feared that “such a step would signal the beginning of the end for juvenile courts.”⁷²

As juvenile crime and homicide rates rose in the 1980s, those who considered children as culpable as adults, i.e. “criminals who happen to be young . . . responded to the realities and perceptions of youth violence by facilitating the prosecution of children accused of violent crime as adults.”⁷³ Karter Reed had no understanding of the charges soon to be levelled at his kind in the 1990s by political scientists such as William J. Bennett, John J. Dilulio, Jr., and John P. Walters: “America is now home to thickening ranks of juvenile ‘super-predators’—radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters . . . [t]o these mean-street youngsters, the words ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ have no fixed moral meaning.”⁷⁴ While this ideology would be proven wrong, the policies it inspired would proceed into the twenty-first century.

The concept of criminal court transfer was one of such policies. Transfer—when a juvenile is sent to the adult court system, loses his status as a minor, and becomes legally culpable for his behavior—is still in dispute today.⁷⁵ We know now that transferring juveniles to adult courts has not made us safer, as juvenile transfer laws have been proven to be ineffective at deterring crime and reducing recidivism.⁷⁶ And yet, legislatures in nearly every state have expanded transfer laws to allow or require the prosecution of juveniles in adult criminal courts.⁷⁷ In 2015, forensic psychologist Robert Kinscherff, who testified for Karter at his trial, pointed out that our current policies have “criminalized” children.⁷⁸

The house on Hillman Street where Karter spent his teenage years was gray-blue with bright blue shutters. There was a Portuguese bodega across the street, a common sight in this part of town called the West End. Although there were some single-family homes, most everybody lived in what Karter called “three-story tenements or projects.” The area was known for having the largest share of New Bedford’s eighteen federally and state-funded housing developments. While Karter was growing up, Cape Verdeans, Dominicans, and Puerto Ricans intermingled uneasily with the older Irish immigrants—boys cracking jokes while hanging out in doorways of bodegas, looking for something to do instead of going to school. There were language barriers and cultural boundaries.

Karter, born in 1976, lived primarily in the West End, where he wrote in 2008, in one of his first letters to me, that “few had driveways, much less garages.” The West End was in the middle of the city, and Karter said families in that area lived “paycheck to paycheck.” They were as overwhelmed by drugs and crime as those who lived in the North or South End, which Karter described as “equally poor.” But even the well to-do Sassaquin section and some of New Bedford’s downtown with its elegant restored old mansions were a far cry from the more affluent areas of Dartmouth, a town barely four miles down the road.

By 1990, of New Bedford’s nearly 100,000 residents, over 6,500 were Hispanic, mostly from Puerto Rico but also from the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Central and South America.⁷⁹ About 87 percent were white, including the many Irish, Welsh, German, Polish, French Canadian, Scotch, and Portuguese Americans who had migrated for work, hoping to leave poverty behind in their homelands.⁸⁰ About 12 percent were self-described as black, meaning not only African Americans but also Cape Verdeans, Azoreans, and Pacific Islanders. The remainder included a small minority of Asians and Native Americans.⁸¹

Longtime residents became devoted to the city, as often happens in neighborhoods where associations seek to assist struggling citizens and help police rout out troublemakers. In 2011, a year after my first visit, I met Loretta Bourque, who at age ninety still ran a community group in her neighborhood. She bemoaned how even during the Great Depression, everyone in New Bedford got along better than they did in the 1990s.⁸² But like many who were born in the city, she had chosen to stay, believing in New Bedford’s potential. So, too, had Helena Marques, a Portuguese immigrant who grew up in the city and ultimately became executive director of the Immigrant Assistance Program, whose goal was to aid immigrants in adjusting to their new country.⁸³ As a girl, she had once been picked on at Keith Middle School—the same school Karter attended—for being an immigrant.⁸⁴ Marques was all too aware of how stereotyping unfolded. The city’s mocking nickname, “New Beige,” was a play on the way the town’s name supposedly sounded to the first Portuguese people who stepped foot in “New Beigeford.”

Ken Resendes, another leader of a local neighborhood group, said that in the era of Karter’s crime, tension flooded the city more than in later years.⁸⁵ I met Resendes in a New Bedford Dunkin’ Donuts, and he talked about the historical separation of neighborhoods. He agreed with Karter that poverty was widespread in New Bedford, and that the North End had always been the safest neighborhood, claiming the newest and best-kept houses. In the South End, drugs had infested the streets. He drove me around that part of the city and pointed out old mills, restaurants, and churches that looked weathered and desolate. Suspicious fires at a small company had left several grass lots burned black, and boarded-up storefronts stood next door to falling-down businesses with names like Squeaky Clean Laundry. In infamous Weld Square, before an attempt at a cleanup, prostitutes mingled among the many elderly residents while kids played in the street.

The revitalization of New Bedford’s waterfront had begun in the years I visited, and a spring day meant the smell of the sea and the sound of seagulls overhead. The downtown wharf area would soon pulse with restaurants and nightlife. The city worked hard to preserve its historic buildings and advertised its actively growing seaport and shipping industry. But in 1993, the Whaling City’s renowned fishing industry had been decimated by drug use.⁸⁶ According to Hans Schatte, a local journalist, part of the problem after the recession of the late 1980s was that the city government failed to develop a recovery plan.⁸⁷ The Standard-Times ran Schatte’s long exposé calling for the need to educate the city’s residents and train them for a new job market. In the year of Karter’s crime, fewer than half the adults aged twenty-five years or older over had a high school diploma. Fewer than 9 percent had earned a bachelor’s degree, and most college graduates moved away. Fall River’s Bristol Community College would not develop a satellite campus in New Bedford until 2001, and for many residents the newly established Dartmouth campus of the University of Massachusetts was too expensive. According to Schatte’s article, New Bedford’s historical dependence on low-skilled jobs had “shredded” residents’ “ticket to the middle class.”⁸⁸

This economic dead end showed up in the exodus of businesses from the area. Between 1985 and 1993, twenty major employers moved away: Goodyear Tires, Stride Rite Shoes, and Morse Cutting Tools, many having been offered tax incentives in other states or choosing to ship jobs overseas, where labor was cheaper.⁸⁹ While Boston had developed over 445,000 jobs after the recession, in New Bedford the unemployment rate was more than twice what it was in state capital⁹⁰—the tenth-highest in the nation.⁹¹ Without work and accessible educational opportunities, local populations suffered; poverty always lurked around the corner and crime was not far behind. Community members, barely scraping by, experienced rising levels of petty theft and aggravated assault, both attributed to the economy.⁹²

From Karter’s letters and his parents, Sharon and Derek Reed, I learned about how he and his family fit into this picture.⁹³ Sharon was a blend of Irish and Polish, while Derek was of Irish, Portuguese, and Native American descent. Karter’s father’s family had made its way to the “city of ships” from Tennessee, while his mother was born and raised in New Bedford. The couple first met in 1975, at a party. At nineteen, Derek, with his charismatic smile and lanky athleticism, was an obvious bad-boy type. He already had two children with one woman and a third on the way with another. He had done time for armed robbery, but he was not yet on hard drugs—that would happen after one of his best friends died suddenly by drowning, followed by the death of his mother.

Sharon, whose surname was coincidentally also Reed, grew up a few blocks from the Hillman Street house. She said that although she was just seventeen years old and knew that Derek was living with another woman in the projects, she ignored all the warning signs. He complimented everything about her, from her gazelle-like body to her long hair that fell in a sheet across her back. They began dating and, not long after, moved in together. Months later, on June 6, 1976, when Derek was twenty years old and Sharon seventeen, Karter was born. He was premature, weighing only 3.7 pounds. Both Sharon and Derek told me they adored their child. But Sharon had essentially grown up without a mother, and Derek without a father. Karter would later say that “although [his] mother and father did the best they could, they had no idea how to be parents.”

Despite the difficulties and the poverty, early on they were a happy family. Derek said Sharon was the best thing that ever happened to him, and Sharon believed her new husband would finally settle down. After Karter was born, their daughters Katie and Karla came along in 1979 and 1985. Derek found steady employment working the second shift for a rope company. He took Karter four-wheeling, advised troubled neighborhood kids who were motherless or fatherless, coached Little League, and took the family on occasional vacations. Karter said that everyone loved his parents: “If they knew you needed school clothes, they’d get them for you.”

Sadly, the good times wouldn’t last; by 1993, Derek was in prison, having been sentenced to eighteen to twenty years. He’d been busted near Cape Cod in 1991 after selling ten ounces of uncut cocaine to an undercover agent for $6,000. Sharon had thrown him out for the third and final time just before the arrest, determined to forget how he had once attacked and choked her, then beat the neighbor who responded to her cries for help. She was drinking a lot and had a new boyfriend, whom Karter hated. Aside from babysitting other people’s children, Sharon wasn’t working, and without Derek’s income—some of it coming from drugs—the family was on the edge of being evicted. Karter’s world was falling apart.

Then came April 12, 1993.