Murky Waters

All that can be said with any certainty is that if this were an unresolved case about four found by the riverbank with bullets in them, Quinn would not sound and the torment of the families would have to wane. Around 53rd and Lindenwood, an incident with guns would have at least made some sense.

 Late in March, Council members Jannie enormous question mark. Blackwell and Anna Verna convene a hearing to review the drownings. In the weeks preceding this gathering, police commissioner Richard Neal has ordered detectives to reinterview everyone they initially spoke to, plus dozens more.

The survivors sit outside the railing that normally serves to separate Council members from onlookers. The older ones seem crippled by their pain. Chanel Ruffin has warned about her mother, Joyce-how the last such hearing so overwhelmed her that she required hospitalization. There is a sense among those who know Joyce that she has somehow departed, and when her sister Pear lie Herring introduces her, Joyce’s hand feels soft and flat, without bones. She keeps touching things – banisters, benches, columns-as if to ensure that their densities will stop her hand, and that she is still of the world of matter.

When the hearing begins she sits quietly, clenching her mouth and shaking her head as Capt. Quinn testifies that "the patents were not aware of a lot of the things the boys did." Not until Kenyatta’s uncle, James Weston, testifies, does the anger finally boil over. "That Monday night we were in a panic. I’m out in my car searching for the boys and a cop pulls me over for running a stop sign. I tell him, ‘Our boys are missing! Our boys are missing!’ And what does he do? He keeps me there 20 minutes, sitting in his car, talking on the radio. Then I went to the scene of the crime the first night and there wasn’t anybody back there. No [police] tape! And they’re saving they’re doing a thorough investigation? I’ve determined the tape was unnecessary," Capt. Qumn says. "The area was already walled off and sequestered … "     "Why did we find and wrenches and stuff that belonged to our bovs?" Weston demands. "No consideration at all! And the medical examiner not asking us about the autopsy’"

"The law does not require … ,. Dr. Mir-chandani intetjects.

"You didn’t want to let us in the room!" Weston yells, pounding his fist on the table. "To see our deceased!"

"Please address the panel," Councilwoman Verna savs. But Weston doesn’t take his eves off Mirchandani.

"No! No! No! You told me I could see!" he says, getting up and walking away with his head in his hands. "You told me I could see."

Like other survivors who follow, Weston’s thoughts come in seemingly unordered clumps-allowing the police to dismiss the families’ point of view as one perhaps rich with meaning, but irrelevant meaning. The hearing format requires debate and counter-debate, the ability to tell a story from beginning to end. To the cops, the boys’ story, even if incomplete, is one that begins at a certain time and ends at another. But chronology, straight-ahead narra ti ve, has little place in the families’ telling. They even convey a certain irritation when asked questions that attempt to put the story in some sort of conventional sequence. There is a sense that they’re being asked to reduce the fullness of the boys’ lives to a series of unconnected dots, to ignore the way people know each other and are held together by millions of tiny, unremarkable moments that can’t be individually seen or collectively explained. "Tell everything about my boy if you can," says Willie Mae Hamer. "Not just what the police say."