Page 35 of Den of Iniquity

Chapter 16

Bellingham, Washington

Friday, February 28, 2020

When I looked at my email account the next morning, I had 136 new messages. At first I thought I had been the victim of a massive spam attack, but it turned out they were all from Yolanda Aguirre’s assistant, Elena Moreno—one email per interview. Wanting to dig into them, I bypassed my daily crosswords in favor of going to work. And that’s how I spent the whole of Friday—reading through those files. For dinner that night, Mel brought home Subway sandwiches. I ate mine and then went straight back to reading.

Each separate interview followed the same format, and they were incredibly thorough. In another life, Yolanda would have made an excellent detective. In every case, she began by expressing her condolences on the loss of each loved one and thanking the participants for agreeing to talk to her.

The files contained the deceased individual’s redacted last name,their date of birth, and date of death. Wherever possible, they also included information on next of kin as well as the identification of the person being interviewed—mother, sister, brother, and so on. Yolanda phrased her questions in a way that made it clear that she was interested in the family dynamics in play both prior to and after the death of their loved one. She charted each victim’s drug usage and police interactions—including case file numbers—preceding the fatal overdoses. Yolanda also included in meticulous detail each family’s interactions—or lack thereof—with law enforcement in the aftermath of each death. The final section of each interview covered the ongoing struggles of the bereaved family members, including, in many instances, the custodial outcomes for any surviving minor children. Several files in, I realized that every one was a step-by-step depiction of a family tragedy—of early promise and aspirations wiped out sooner or later by the scourge of drug abuse.

Some of the interviewees replied reluctantly, limiting their answers to as few words as possible, but for others Yolanda’s interest in what had befallen them seemed to have breached a dam, allowing a flood of emotions to spill out. Like Matilda Jackson, rather than simply revealing the bare bones of the story, they wanted to tell all of it.

Several of those hit close to home. Over and over families related tales of trying to encourage their sons or daughters or brothers to get help, of holding interventions, of begging and pleading for the addict to make changes in their lives. Naturally those generally didn’t work. Help imposed on someone who doesn’t want it is so much wasted breath and, in many cases, so much wasted money and effort as well. Until addicts are ready to make those changes for themselves, stints in rehab are less than useless.

In other words, reading through the interviews was tough goingfor yours truly. It reminded me about that little kid, cheerfully digging his way out of a room filled with horse turds. When someone asked him why he was so happy, he replied, “With all this horse shit, there’s bound to be a pony in here somewhere.”

I had worked my way up to file 18, and that’s where I found my pony. His first name was Raymond. His body had been found on June 9, 2013, near the railroad tracks in Seattle’s Golden Gardens neighborhood. Because the body was found next to the track, the initial assumption was that he’d been hit by a passing train. A subsequent autopsy revealed that he had died of a fentanyl overdose. The autopsy also revealed that he suffered from a TBI—a traumatic brain injury.

At first the family history as related by Ray’s daughter Leann sounded like the proverbial American dream. When Ray graduated from Shoreline High School at the north end of the Seattle metropolitan area, he had done so as valedictorian of the class of 1979 where he had also been voted most likely to succeed. After being a star athlete throughout his high school years, once Ray enrolled at the University of Washington, he became a redshirt addition to the U Dub’s Huskies football team where he played tackle all four years.

After graduating with a degree in Civil Engineering, he married his high school sweetheart, Meredith, and went to work for an engineering firm that specialized in airport facilities. His first project involved working on an addition to SeaTac’s already massive parking garage.

Together, he and Meredith had three kids. They bought an older home in the Green Lake area and everything seemed to be hunky-dory. Then, in 1997, he made the fateful decision of taking his son, Andrew, to a Seattle Mariner’s home game as a father-son outing to celebrate the boy’s tenth birthday. After leaving the Kingdome,they had been walking back to their vehicle when a passing motorist suffered a medical emergency and plowed into them. Ray managed to shove his son out of harm’s way, but he himself suffered life-changing injuries, including multiple broken bones and a massive concussion. After that, he was never the same.

Unable to return to work and plagued by chronic pain, he ended up on opioid painkillers where he eventually became addicted. Not only that, his personality changed almost overnight. Before the accident, Ray had been a friendly, easygoing guy. Now he seemed to have a hair-trigger temper, and Meredith was his usual target. Leann, one of Ray’s daughters, was the family spokesperson in this case, and reading her version of the story in Yolanda’s interview was heartbreaking.

Leann:It was like a stranger had moved into our house. Dad wasn’t our dad anymore. He was angry all the time, and the smallest thing could set him off. If we kids did the least little thing wrong, he would be furious. Mom told us that it wasn’t his fault, that he was sick and couldn’t help it, but that didn’t make it any easier to live with. And because she was always trying to intercede for us, she usually ended up being his target and taking the brunt of his anger.

Yolanda:He was violent?

Leann:Absolutely. He was a big guy. When we were little she used to call him her Gentle Ben; after the accident, he was downright dangerous. One time he picked Mom up and threw her across the living room like she was a rag doll. Luckily she landed on the sofa.

That was the first time she called the cops on him. We kids were terrified. We thought he was going to kill her. They tookhim to jail, but he was only there overnight because she refused to press charges. She never did press charges, even though the same kind of thing happened time and again.

By then it was clear that he was hooked on drugs. We kids were the ones who told Mom that he needed to move out, that it was either him or us. We said if he didn’t leave, we would all go to Shoreline and live with Grandma and Grandpa.

At that point Mom rented an apartment for Dad in Ballard so he could live there. The problem is, the apartment was still within walking distance of the house, so although he wasn’t actually living with us, he was still there almost every day and even angrier than he had been before.

My sister, Marlise, left home and joined the military as soon as she graduated from high school. When Dad ended up getting evicted from his apartment, Mom let him come back home. It was like she was addicted to him and couldn’t abandon him.

Once Andrew left for WSU, he was gone for good, too. By then the ongoing drama was too much for me, and I went to live with Mom’s parents in Shoreline for my last two years of high school.

That passage hit me hard. Kyle Cartwright wasn’t the only kid on the planet who, as a last resort, had been forced to turn to his grandparents for help.

Yolanda:But the domestic violence continued?

Leann:It seemed to be better for a while. Maybe, without us kids there, things weren’t quite as stressful. But as far as I was concerned, out of sight was out of mind. But then in 2013, things heated up again, and Mom started having to call 911.Law enforcement responded several times. It’s a miracle he didn’t kill her. Then one day Dad left the house without telling Mom where he was going and never came back. His body was found two days later in Golden Gardens.

Yolanda:He was still living with your mom at the time he disappeared?

Leann:For years, he lived down in the basement and she lived upstairs. When he didn’t come home, Mom was frantic. She called me in hysterics and begged me to come help. I had recently graduated with my master’s in nursing. Since I didn’t have a job, I came home, and it’s a good thing, too.

Mom had always been the strongest person I knew. She had spent years doing everything within her power to help him, but once they found his body, she was a complete basket case. After all those years of looking after him, she just couldn’t cope anymore. I’ve never seen anyone so broken. Marlise is career navy and wasn’t able to get leave, and Andrew had hired on to a new job, so I stepped up. I’m the one who had to deal with everything—the cops, the M.E., the positive ID, and the funeral arrangements.

That one struck me, too. Here were three kids, not unlike Kyle, who had grown up under challenging circumstances as far as their parental units were concerned. Not only had they all survived, they had thrived. They were self-sufficient, responsible adults. Maybe the same thing would be true for my grandson as well.

Yolanda:You were there when detectives came to make the notification?

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