Run You Down (Rebekah Roberts #2)(75)
Nechemaya recovered quickly and immediately became a spokesperson for Roseville. He told Anderson Cooper and Dr. Phil and Charlie Rose and anyone who would listen—and, until the Tsarnaev brothers blew up the finish line of the Boston Marathon two weeks later, the world was listening—that the community supported Sam entirely. He said that they had hired an attorney to represent him and that the rumors he was connected to the Halls were overblown. Whenever he could, Nechemaya said Pessie’s name. Pessie Goldin was the first victim in Roseville, he said on CNN and Fox and the BBC. If corrupt, anti-Semitic local authorities had not ignored her death, this tragedy may never have happened.
Chief John Gregory resigned before they could fire him, and was indicted on charges of official corruption, witness tampering, evidence tampering, and conspiracy to commit a terrorist act. The last charge didn’t stick; there wasn’t really evidence that Gregory knew what Connie was planning. It did stick, however, to both Hank Hall and no-legged Grandma Nan. Mellie’s lawyer—a regular “contributor” on cable news—managed to convince the state that her client was terrified of Hank and his father, virtually a hostage in her home, and that she was a hero for alerting authorities “the minute she realized” what Connie had planned. She had her second baby in shackles, lost custody of Eva to the state, and, in exchange for ten years in prison, made a compelling—if occasionally hostile—witness against what was left of the Hall family. Mellie testified about how the father of her children had tried—and failed—to build a bomb that could be detonated remotely, and that Nan was routinely used as a straw purchaser for firearms. Nancy Grace called her the “terrorist tart” and excoriated prosecutors for giving her a deal. During the trial, Mellie told the court that she initially “thought they were joking” all the times Connie and Hank talked through scenarios about how to achieve the highest number of dead Jews: Should we put the bomb on a bus? Or in a building? For two days #Ithoughttheywerejoking trended on Twitter, with people posting pictures of Hitler and Osama bin Laden (“The guys with the box cutters said they were taking over the plane, but #Ithoughttheywerejoking”), then ever-more gruesome images of dead bodies (“The cops said not to reach into my waistband, but #Ithoughttheywerejoking”; “KKK said not to look at a white girl, but #Ithoughttheywerejoking”).
Halfway through the trial, Hank changed his plea to guilty and took a life without parole sentence. He described Pessie’s death to authorities, and, perhaps because his story matched Ryan’s and Sam’s, they believed him. Hank admitted they’d given up the plan to place an explosive device beneath the yeshiva’s school bus because, just as Mellie had told me, he was a f*cking idiot and couldn’t make a bomb.
When prosecutors asked him why Connie targeted innocent children, Hank simply said, “He knew shooting up a playground would get a lot of attention and he wanted people to remember.”
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Roseville provided an angle for every journalist. Anti-Semitism, homophobia, gun control, child sex abuse, police corruption, prison gangs, the right-wing “patriot” movement; a health reporter out of Boston even did a series of articles looking at how terminal cancer diagnoses are delivered and whether dying patients should be monitored for changes in their mental health. The NRA was quick to trumpet the fact that Connie did not commit suicide or find himself in handcuffs, but rather was taken down by “a good guy with a gun.” After a virtual arsenal of unregistered weapons was found at the Hall compound, activists on both sides of the gun control debate seized on the fact that an ex-con with ties to an extremist hate group was not only armed to the teeth in a state with new gun laws, but at the center of a multi-state gun trafficking organization no one in law enforcement was paying attention to. People inclined to loosen regulation saw Connie’s ability to gather so many weapons as an example of the ineffectiveness of gun control laws. The other side argued that Connie’s arsenal exposed loopholes that needed to be closed and an “iron pipeline” that needed to be thwarted. President Obama called the deaths “horrific” and sent his highest-ranking Jewish staffer to the funerals. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo pledged funds for a memorial. There was a lot of talk about cracking down on right-wing hate groups and the Aryan Nations. The feds made a handful of arrests, but soon both law enforcement and the media turned their attention back to the threat of domestic terror inspired by Islamic fundamentalism.
Mike pulled me off the story at noon on the day of the shooting, right after the Associated Press reported Sam’s name. I passed contact information for Aviva and Isaac’s New Paltz neighbors to the Albany stringer and the Trib got exclusives from them. Matty gave the photo desk a picture he took of the swastika the Halls spraypainted on the yellow house and it got more than five million hits.
Despite my promise in the car on the way to the scene, I did not deliver an interview with Sam. Through Aviva, I warned him and the rest of the Kagans not to say a word to the press, and they took my advice. It wasn’t a tough sell; they were leveled by the shooting and their connection to it. Ashamed and guilt-sick, none seemed able to find solace in the fact that, were it not for Sam, many more people would have died. The media camped out in front of Eli and Penina’s apartment for ten days, but no one came outside. Not once. Neighbors brought food and were accosted, but declined to comment. On the afternoon of the Boston Marathon bombing the reporters finally packed up and left. But the damage was done. Old Avram was dead of a stroke within a month. Diny’s boys were expelled from yeshiva for fighting. A year after the shooting, Aviva was Sam’s only relative still in the U.S; the rest of the Kagans made aliyah and try to rebuild in Israel.