No One Cares About Crazy People Read online

  A year after that, a local reporter raised the question of why no trial date for Vassey had been set.3

  The trial date was finally scheduled for April 18, 2016, in Brunswick County Superior Court. In the meantime, the presiding judge, Richard T. Brown, granted Vassey’s request for a bench trial, a proceeding with no jury in which the judge alone renders the verdict.

  The lawyers agreed after a day of argument that the detective sergeant could not be found guilty if Judge Brown determined that he had reacted reasonably in his belief that Vidal was about to kill an officer with the screwdriver. Or pick, depending on who was testifying.

  In the trial, Vassey testified that Vidal had the tool raised over his head and was going to stab Thomas in the temple. How the young man could have carried out this maneuver while facedown on the floor was not made clear.

  On the ninth day of the trial, Judge Brown heard defense testimony from Moira Artigues, a forensic psychiatrist of seventeen years’ experience with an office in Cary, North Carolina, about 150 miles north of Brunswick County. She had been hired to testify by the North Carolina Police Benevolent Association at a rate of $310 an hour. Dr. Artigues had never interviewed or met Keith Vidal. She testified that she had reviewed the boy’s medical records from 2013 and found that he had expressed “suicidal” thoughts then. She also stated her belief that Keith harbored homicidal thoughts. Her evidence here seemed to be word of mouth: from Vidal’s mother and doctors’ comments in the past two years that Keith “had suicidal and homicidal ideations.” (Mary Wilsey herself testified that her son had been depressed but was not a danger to others.) Under cross-examination, Dr. Artigues admitted that she had not reviewed Vidal’s most recent records, from two weeks before the shooting, when his behavior had taken its sharp turn for the worse.4 Newspaper reports do not show the prosecution boring in on this statement of omission.

  Vassey admitted in testimony that he had been taking blood pressure medicine and sleeping medication at the time of the shooting, and also hydrocodone, a painkilling drug prescribed for him after oral surgery.5 Artigues testified that she did not evaluate Vassey’s mental condition, “but could have.”6 Again, the remark’s implications were left unexplored.

  On Friday, May 6, 2016, Judge Brown delivered his verdict in the Bryon Vassey case: not guilty. “This has been an extremely tragic and emotional case,” the judge remarked. Sheriff’s deputy Samantha Lewis-Chavis, the second officer on the scene, was in the Brunswick County courthouse in civilian clothes on the day the verdict was announced. F. T. Norton of the Wilmington Star News spotted the woman and reported that Lewis-Chavis “emerged from the district attorney’s office with wet eyes. She declined to comment as she hurried alone into an empty elevator. Her sobs could be heard coming from behind its closed doors.”7

  A young reporter named Lindsay Kriz had joined a small newspaper in the area called the Brunswick Beacon just before the trial, and she took part in the massive local coverage. After it ended, Kriz found herself musing over an all but forgotten peculiarity: that transformation of Keith Vidal’s small screwdriver into a “pick,” or, as some outlets took to calling it, an “ice pick.” This was the transformation that had begun with District Attorney Payne’s admonition to Judge Jack Hooks.

  Kriz laid out her disquiet over “unanswered questions” in an 850-word essay that the Beacon published on May 17. “One of my questions is: What’s the deal with the screwdriver?” she wrote. “This has plagued me basically since I first heard about the case when I started this job in March.”

  Kriz described a telephone conversation with Mark Wilsey, in which Keith’s stepfather acknowledged to her that the young man had been holding a screwdriver. A few minutes after that, Wilsey called Kriz back to ask her “why other news outlets were saying [Keith] was holding an ice pick instead of a screwdriver.” Kriz replied that she didn’t know. She hadn’t previously been aware that an ice pick had been mentioned. As the trial started, “I learned the defense was claiming that Vidal had an ice pick.” Kriz’s doubts about the accuracy of the description of the tool increased as the trial went on. “I will never forget Boiling Springs Police Cpl. John Thomas, on the stand, being shown [an] ice pick by the defense and saying, ‘Sir, I have never seen that before in my life.’”

  Kriz became convinced of her doubts, she recalled, as the anomalies mounted. “Vassey testified he retrieved the pick from Thomas. Thomas [had taken] it from Vidal’s hand and passed it to Vassey, who put it in his pocket and brought it to the Boiling Springs Police Department. You’re not supposed to tamper with evidence, especially at a scene where somebody died. What Vassey said he did seemed valid as far as keeping the weapon away from anyone else who might want to use it, but this was never really addressed in court.”

  And finally, there was the matter of four words, spoken by Mark Wilsey, picked up on Officer Thomas’s recorder, and included in the transcription heard at trial: “I’ve got the screwdriver!”

  Then Kriz presented her own closing summation: “After Vassey was acquitted, Wilsey Sr. said he was not allowed in his house for hours after the shooting and that’s when [Keith’s] screwdriver would’ve been taken from the scene.

  “He said that’s when the cover-up for Vassey started.”8

  The ordeal of the Vidal family broke into the news at around the time I was commencing research for this book—that is to say, after the membranes of sanity had broken beneath both of my sons. I want to say that the case of Keith’s death stood out in my mind because of the pathos it embodied. Yet pathos pervades every act of destruction against a person who is mentally ill. A likelier truth is that the story gripped me because I was looking for it.

  To begin consciously searching into the world of mental illness is to see it snap into focus before your eyes. It is everywhere. It has been hiding in plain sight, awaiting notice. Its camouflage is little more than the human instinct to reject engagement with the pitiable, the fearsome, the unspeakable—and to close our eyes to the moral obligations that those states of being demand of us. To focus one’s heart and consciousness on the mental illness is to see abstractions transmute to flesh and blood, as they did for me in the death of Keith Vidal, which occurred eight years after schizophrenia had tormented my own son Kevin into suicide.

  Mention mental illness, and the friendly woman who has trimmed your hair for years opens up about her stricken son. The assistant principal nods and tells you of her aunt, once a promising pianist, who has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals. (“In and out”—that is a phrase you will encounter often.) Your cardiologist and his wife have sunk thousands into the care of his delusional sister. A man you’d thought you knew well mentions the son he’d never talked about before, who disappeared from home at age seventeen, wrote a semicoherent letter from San Diego a few weeks later, and has not been heard from since. The clerk at the hardware store is a stabilized schizophrenic, and you never had a clue. Or you had a clue and you didn’t pick up on it. Or you had a clue and picked up on it and then put it aside. Out of mind, so to speak.

  These are the kinds of stories you learn when you shift your focus a millimeter or so, until it aligns with what James Agee called “the cruel radiance of what is.” Then the stories never stop. Newspaper and online reports that you might once have given a glance before skipping on now command your gaze in boldface. Television footage of a body lying facedown on a city street will hold your gaze and prod you to murmur, “Mentally ill?” and you will be surprised at how often the answer turns out to be yes.

  Mental illness could not have been further from my thoughts on a May afternoon in 1976. That was the day I met the woman I would marry. I spotted her as she came down the aisle of a Boeing 707 that was taking on passengers at LaGuardia Airport. We were both walk-ons. Such a thing was still possible back then. I had already boarded and was watching the stream of new arrivals from my aisle seat, on the right, when there came Honoree Fleming. I loved her before she sat down next to me. She had Irish-green e
yes and wore her Irish-auburn hair to her waist, and she was quite beautiful, but that was not all that captivated me. She moved with a palpable grace and serenity, and there was gravitas in those green eyes, and I sensed a tremendous intelligence, and also gentleness, and then she looked at her boarding pass, and then at the empty seat next to me, and I stood up and moved aside, and later, and ever afterward, I realized that everything that had happened in my life had to happen as exactly and minutely as it had happened to bring me to this moment when I stood up and stepped aside as this woman, whose own history had to have unfolded as precisely as mine, moved to sit next to me.

  A pair of walk-ons.

  Honoree had received her PhD in biophysics at the University of Chicago two years earlier, after earning Phi Beta Kappa honors at New York University, and she had remained on in a postdoctoral position to study steroid hormones. What I could not have imagined until she told me later—all that city-girl ease and assurance—was that Honoree had overcome a family legacy of poverty, hard immigration, and childhood bereavement. Her mother had grown up in a hamlet of three thatched-roof houses in County Mayo, Ireland. She was one of nine siblings in a house with a dirt floor, and she walked barefoot several miles to school and back each day. In 1928, at age seventeen, Honora Reilly left the desperate household to relieve its cash burdens. She sailed to America on her own and made her way by train to Omaha, Nebraska, where relatives lived. It had not taken long for this country lass to decide that Omaha’s lights were not bright enough for her, and she boldly moved on to Chicago—where she was greeted by endless storefronts with signs taped to the insides of their windows: NO IRISH NEED APPLY.

  The young immigrant found work on Chicago’s South Side as a nanny. Sometimes on weekends she would pull together a small stack of books and wander the footways of the University of Chicago, clutching the books to her chest, just to get a sense of what it might be like. She told this story to Honoree not long before she died.

  Honora later moved on to New York, where she met and married a maintenance man of English descent named Berkeley Fleming. She bore his four children—three sons and Honoree, the youngest—before alcoholism overtook him. One of Honoree’s earliest memories is of standing by the kitchen sink in the family’s Washington Heights apartment and watching her father pull all of his teeth out, one after another, with a pliers, to relieve the pain in his gums. He died the following year, when Honoree was five. Her first words to her mother upon learning the news were, “How are we going to survive?”

  They survived. Despite her background of poverty, Honora maintained a fierce faith in the power of learning. Among them, Honoree and her three brothers earned four bachelor degrees, two master’s degrees, and two PhDs. Honora herself, having put her husband through engineering school, returned to school at age fifty-nine to take courses in biology and other subjects that would allow her to become a practical nurse.

  Honoree had boarded this flight from New York to Chicago following her successful interview for a position at a research laboratory at Mount Sinai Hospital. After the interview, she’d sat in on a few sessions of a science convention there. The last speaker of the afternoon had canceled, and so she had decided on impulse to head for LaGuardia early. At the ticket counter, another departee from the conference, a rather large fellow, had attempted to step in front of Honoree. Washington Heights fought back. Honoree pushed the line-jumper away and claimed the ticket that would have gone to him. I joked to her ever afterward that had she not stood her ground, I might have married a large, surly male scientist. As for Honoree, she remembers deciding against pulling her seven-hundred-page text on steroid hormones from her flight bag on the chance that it might intimidate the interesting-looking man in the aisle seat.

  As for the interesting-looking man, I was returning to Chicago after completing several days of interviews with television executives for what was to be my first book, a critical examination of TV news. I had taken a leave of absence from my job as a newspaper columnist and rented a sublimely ugly old two-story fieldstone pile on the southern tip of Lake Michigan, ninety miles southeast of the city. It sat on a pinnacle that descended to a narrow beach, and faced a leafy gravel road chockablock with similar houses—summer residences for the Chicago Mob in the 1920s, as local legend had it. For two or three nights in August, the city’s towers were silhouetted, tiny but visible, by the setting sun.

  I had planned to use the house as my solitary writer’s retreat. It did become my retreat, but not solitary. Honoree came to visit on weekends, taking the South Shore railroad to nearby New Buffalo, in Indiana. We invited friends and swam in the lake and grilled food and loafed and drank Chateau Margaux wine at a price that was, as we realized later, ridiculously cheap.

  Within a few weeks we were discussing how to bring up our children. We agreed that we would be loving but firm. I jokingly conjured up a figure from then-recent presidential politics and assured Honoree that I would be as fiercely disciplinary as Nixon’s crew-cut consigliere, the Watergate conspirator H. R. “Bob” Haldeman.

  That summer ended with Honoree having to leave for New York and her new career. My book was finished, and I would soon give up the stone house and go back to Chicago. On a rainy night in late August, the two of us drank jug wine under dim yellow lamplight on the rear porch, the lake below us invisible under the wind, and wondered about our future. I was a little emotional. All right, I was a blubbering mess. The thought of our nine-hundred-mile separation worried me. Honoree was subdued, but serene. We were in love. We would find a way. She was right. We lived apart for a year, met up at least once a month, spoke by telephone every night. At the end of that year, I quit my media job in Chicago and packed up and went to New York to be with her. We shared her small apartment on East Eighty-Fifth Street. In front of the apartment was a manhole cover that clattered every time a car drove over it. I hate sharp noise. I have never cherished a noise as much as I cherished that one.

  We were married in October 1978 at the Ethical Culture Society across from Central Park. After the ceremony we took a taxi to our new apartment on West Eighty-Sixth Street. At the apartment, still in her wedding dress, Honoree supervised the making of hors d’oeuvres for our guests. It was the best and only wedding I’ve ever had.

  Dean Paul Justin Powers was born on November 18, 1981. He arrived three weeks late and on my fortieth birthday. I told Honoree that a necktie would have been just fine. But the fact is that I cherished this boy from the moment I saw his bright, questioning eyes. I’d never particularly expected to have children, or thought much about it, through my extended years of bachelorhood. Now, all my abstract notions of children as “options” that brought “responsibilities” and presented “challenges” and “impediments” evaporated against the reality of Dean’s corporeal warmth, his sacred helplessness and gratitude for nourishment, the daily lengthening of his fingers and thumbs. I soon forgot what it had been like living for forty years without a child. A son.

  Dean grew to be a dreamer in his toddler years, and he remains a dreamer. I’d found work, and I wrote my articles and manuscripts at home while keeping an eye on him, with Honora’s help, in our seventeenth-floor apartment, just opposite the building where Babe Ruth had once lived. Across Central Park and a few blocks north, Honoree worked as a research associate at Mount Sinai Hospital, studying the effects of steroid hormones upon cultured uterine cells. Every day I loaded Dean into his canvas-and-aluminum carrier, strapped it to my back, and took him on trips up to Broadway for visits to the dry cleaner, the wineshop, the supermarket, the little Greek takeout where roasted ducks turned on a spit. When I came to live in New York I had brought with me a Midwesterner’s wariness, but with Dean fastened to my back—I could feel his bouncing and rocking—an irrational feeling of indestructibility always enveloped me. Who, however depraved, could possibly bring harm to such a radiant, glad child? Who, or what?

  By age two, Dean had taken on many of his lifelong physical characteristics: a head of thic
k tousled brown hair, hazel eyes that approximated Honoree’s green ones, and a solemn expression that mirrored my own. Our daily excursions by now involved our meandering hand in hand the half-block from our building to West End Avenue and across it into Riverside Park. One of New York’s thousands of iron sidewalk grates, probably once used for delivering coal, lay in our path to the street corner. Dean could not pass this grate without stepping on it, pausing, and bending over to peer down into its darkness. His peering could take awhile. This often caused a flash of anxiety in the Midwestern father: these grates were known to give way once every so often. Yet I never really worried. I still irrationally thought of my son as indestructible, and myself as indestructible in his vicinity. And only now do I find myself discovering—and resisting—a metaphor in his gaze into the depths.

  Once inside the park, my son made straight for the playground equipment. He loved to climb the steps to the pinnacle of the slide. There he would pause and stand, casting his eyes across the Hudson into New Jersey, until the children following him were stacked up in a kind of kid gridlock. Usually I could snap him out of it, but sometimes his motionless gaze persisted. What was Dean looking for, or seeing, that the children behind him could not? By the time he was four, our excursions were growing into adventures—or as Dean would say, “vaventures.” We walked up to Eighty-Sixth and Broadway and got on the IRT subway (“the sunway”) for the long ride down to the tip of lower Manhattan, where we would catch the ferry to Ellis Island, craning our necks to admire the stately green woman holding the torch aloft, whom Dean called the Snatue Delivery. Or we cabbed it over to the Museum of Natural History to check out the giant fiberglass blue whale and the dinosaur skeletons, along with an obligatory stop at the African diorama that features the young baboon, having rounded a bush and skidded to a halt in front of the welcoming viper. Dean always became thoughtful looking at that one. I had to wonder what ideas a son assembled as he absorbed a scene of nature in all its drama and the imminence of ugly death.