Haunted

Last week I had a happy story to tell. This week, I have been haunted by a tragedy in a case that I am working on.
A lot of the work I do as a lawyer involves street gangs. No matter how many times I read expert testimony about their habits and culture, I come away shaking my head and wondering how anyone would want to be involved with them. The women who associate with gang members as wives and girlfriends are always the ones I particularly wonder about.
The tragedy that has haunted me this week goes like this: In 2008, a woman I’ll call Rosanna, witnessed the murder of another woman by three gang members. Rosanna, who was twenty three at the time, had a son named Tommy, who was six years old. She testified at the trial of the gang members, and they were convicted. One got life without parole, but the other was sentenced to death.
Because of her testimony, Rosanna was targeted for death by the gang, and the police put her in witness protection. But she didn’t stay far enough away. Her mother lived in a neighborhood close to the gang’s territory, and her sister was dating a member of the gang. Rosanna still hung out with her sister, her sister’s boyfriend, and his gang member friend a year after testifying and being targeted for death.
On Mother’s Day 2009, her sister’s boyfriend and his gang member companion used Rosanna’s son, now seven years old, to lure her to her death. They put the child in their car and called Rosanna to say Tommy was sick, and they were coming to get her. After they picked her up, they took Tommy back home and then drove to a dark area with Rosanna and her sister, Maria, in the car. Now here is the part that I have thought about over and over.
On the drive to the remote, dark area, Rosanna confessed she knew she had “screwed up” by testifying. Then, as the car stopped, she noticed a security guard in his marked car nearby. Did she, the mother of a seven-year-old, call out for help? Did she try to escape? No. She pointed out the presence of the security guard to her captors, and they drove her to yet a more secluded location where they forced her out of the car and killed her while her horrified sister looked on.
I have thought about this over a million times this week. What mother wouldn’t fight for her life, knowing she was leaving a child behind? But Rosanna seems to have accepted the crazy gang logic that she deserved to die because she had been a witness against them. She seemed to accept her execution the way a prisoner, legitimately tried and convicted, would. She told her sister’s boyfriend to shoot her in the heart, not the head. She gave him all the money she had with instructions to give it to her sister, Maria, to use for Tommy, and she knelt obediently when told to and then was shot to death. I can’t fathom why she didn’t try to save her own life.
This story haunts me the way the story of Princess Diana did, when I learned she recorded a video tape in January 1997 after receiving a death threat that ultimately was carried out eight months later in Paris. Of course Diana didn’t accept assassination as being inevitable as Rosanna seems to have done. Diana fought back by preserving a record of the event. In the novel that I wrote, Dance For A Dead Princess, which was inspired by Diana’s tape, my heroine listens to the princess’ voice on that tape as she talks about arrangements for her children. Of course, that part is fiction. But no mother would willing leave behind her children, and no mother would fail to state her wishes for them if tragedy intervened.
Even in Tudor times, mothers fought for their lives to remain with their children. Just days before being transported to the Tower of London for trial and execution, Anne Boleyn walked under Henry’s window at Greenwich Place with her two-year-old daughter Elizabeth in her arms.
So why didn’t Rosanna summon the security guard for the sake of her son Tommy? Why didn’t she fight against death just a few hours after Mother’s Day ended?

Where Anne Boleyn died