A Silence Filled With Regret
Neighbors Wonder How Signs of Tragedy Could Have Gone Unheeded
There is always someone who saw something strange. Afterward. Sucked her teeth and smelled a peculiar smell. Afterward.
Noticed an abnormal silence. Afterward.
Thinking it strange the furniture was in the back yard. Afterward.
Wondering where the children could have gone.
After a horrible thing happens, there is always someone who looks back over a shoulder and thinks he or she should have, could have, would have acted differently. The neighbors into whose houses that strange smell drifted. The neighbors who saw the kids, then saw them no more.
If only.
But in a harried society, suspicions are often unchecked, until Afterward. And foul odors are left to permeate, with no one seeking the source, until Afterward.
And so it happens that four children went missing for more than eight months, their bodies decomposing in a rowhouse that their mother guarded -- not allowing anyone inside. Banita Jacks, 33, is charged with murder in the deaths of her four daughters: Brittany Jacks, 17; Tatianna Jacks, 11; N'Kiah Fogle, 6; and Aja Fogle, 5.
"How did you not see the kids? Didn't the neighbors see kids move into the house? Wouldn't you wonder where the kids were if you saw them go in and didn't see them leave?" It is the thought on so many minds, given voice by Dorell Thomas, who came by the house to mourn the children's deaths. .
Prosecutors say Banita Jacks told police, "They began dying in their sleep one at a time -- all within a seven to ten day period," court documents say. "She said that as the first three younger children died, she placed them side by side in the room in which they died." She told police the children all died sometime after the electricity was cut off. She said that no one else had been in her house from May of 2007 until Jan. 9, 2008, when marshals came to the house to evict its occupants. And found the bodies of the four girls in empty rooms.
And now people gather outside the house on Sixth Street in Southeast Washington and wonder how such a horrible thing could have happened, how four bodies could have lain dead all those months with nobody seeking the source of the horrible smell.
You go in search of hindsight -- the Would Haves, the Should Haves that now challenge Afterward and Regret. Go on down to 4249 Sixth St. SE, where it happened. And find that people have turned the light blue brick rowhouse into a memorial site. Lining the fence with teddy bears and sad balloons and brown and pink dolls and cardboard signs offering prayers that the dead children will rest in peace.
Regret is unstated. It is just there.
Shermaine Jacobs crosses the street without a coat in the cold gray morning rain. She has come bearing a teddy bear. She is somber. "I didn't know her. I just saw her a couple of times. I couldn't believe it was right across the street. I don't remember the kids. . . . Hopefully, their souls are at rest. But it's weird. People around here should have smelled something. But didn't nobody know she was here."
And here comes Ann Bailey carrying stuffed toys. A big Pooh bear for the oldest girl. Stuffed rabbits and a Minnie Mouse for the middle girls. "The baby gets two."
Bailey says she saw the man from the eviction truck run down the street screaming, "Oh my God. It's dead bodies in there!"
She watched Jacks emerge from the house and sit on the concrete steps, clothed only in a white T-shirt that came to her knees. "She is sitting there. I know that cement is cold. It didn't seem like it was bothering her."
And Bailey wonders about the smell. "That's dead flesh. That smell would come out of that door."
Bailey says the news has bothered her so much she cannot sleep. "For the kids to be in the house so long. And the school didn't know anything. Nobody knew anything. You never know what is going on in people's houses."
The rain is falling, a heavy, angry rain, smearing ink on the signs. Water is gushing from the storm sewers, pouring down the sidewalk into the black street, as if to wash away what happened. A police car sits outside the blue house. Afterward. Sitting in a neighborhood where bad things have happened. Water is gushing down the canal off Valley Avenue, as if it has somewhere to go, running to shout the sad news. And the teddy bears are multiplying along the metal fence outside the blue brick house where four children's decomposing bodies lay for eight months and nobody knew.
Lorraine White lives right next door to the blue house. She saw Jacks and the little girls moving furniture out of the house into the back yard. "I thought she and the kids had moved out," White explains.
"I used to hear them going up and down the steps" through the shared wall, White says. "Then it got quiet over there."
Then just like in the Faulkner short story "A Rose for Emily," nobody said anything as the foul odor emanated from the house. "I could smell a bad odor coming. I thought it was rats in the wall," White says. "If I had known."
For months, there was just silence and the bad smell. "We knew the water and lights had been cut off," White says, "because you could see the people come and turn the stuff off." More silence. And bad smell. Then two weeks ago, Jacks appeared at White's back door and asked for some water and a cigarette. Her son gave her a jug of water. And Jacks disappeared. White noticed she was much thinner.
"I wish I had known. Maybe I could have helped her. . . . It's not like I knew her so well I could just walk up to her and say, 'Where are your kids?' "
White opens the utility closet. The smell. The smell. The smell. Like a dead rat. "The world is crazy. Why couldn't she say, 'Hey, take my kids.'? I don't have anything either, but I would have tried."
White, who is surely not to be blamed, is tortured by the hypotheticals that reach back into the past, stopping at imaginary signposts, where she might have done something, anything to have saved those children. But like the D.C. mayor, the council, the school chief, the child welfare office, nobody went in search of the source of the smell.
The Would Haves and Should Haves pile into Courtroom C-10 for the arraignment of Banita Jacks, waiting, waiting, waiting to catch a glimpse of the woman accused of murdering her four children and letting their bodies decompose.
Then she appears: skin ashen gray, swathed in a white paper jumpsuit. Her hair matted. She shuffles as though it hurts to walk. The only words she speaks are her name. Then she is silent. As people stare. Courtroom artists trace her lips, and people wonder how she could have lived in the house for so long with the smell.
Jacks's defense attorney, Peter Krauthamer, says his client denies killing the children. And the prosecutor lists the charges, saying the children were malnourished, their bodies so badly decomposed that the medical examiner had a hard time identifying them. "She killed her four children," says Assistant U.S. Attorney Deborah Sines. "By her own admission she wouldn't allow anyone into the house. . . . . Mrs. Jacks has been keeping their bodies in the house on Sixth Street for a very long time. . . . When the U.S. marshals came to evict the defendant from the house on Sixth Street, the defendant ran up the steps and sat on the steps and tried to block them. They had to go past her. That is when they found the bodies of the four children."
Until then, nobody knew.
Grab.com
