As the Wicked Watch(80)
A receptionist announced our arrival, and Adele strolled out mere seconds later to greet us, suited and booted and camera ready.
“Ms. Manning,” she said. “Thank you for coming.”
“Ms. Constanzo, it’s nice to meet you. This is Scott Newell.”
“Please follow me,” she said.
Her office was around the corner, sparsely decorated save for a life-size painting depicting sad brown faces with piercing eyes that seemed to be staring right at me, crying for help.
“Ah, the painting,” she said. “Haunting, isn’t it? It reminds me who I’m fighting for.”
She took a seat behind her desk. Adele Constanzo is a picture of contrast. The sternness of her voice belies her disarmingly youthful appearance, but her strident attire—no color, no texture, no thought put into it—is professional and to the point, much like her personality.
“When I first started following your coverage of Masey’s disappearance, I could not have imagined that I would become involved in this case.”
She looked at Scott. “I’m sorry, Mr. . . . ?” she asked.
“Newell. But you can call me Scott,” he said.
“All right, Scott, do you plan on turning that camera on?” she said, and then to me: “You want a taped interview, yes?”
“Absolutely!” I said.
Her style was a bit harsh but quickly forgotten once she started to tell me about the accused and how they got trapped in a tunnel of misperception, errors, and lies. It was such a familiar parable, I could almost finish her sentences.
The day the body was discovered, a neighbor, an older African American woman, called 911 to report that she’d seen three African American boys hanging out beneath the “L” tracks. Not just once but three separate times the week before the sheriff’s inmates discovered the body.
“She told police they were behaving suspiciously,” Adele said.
I suspect the neighbor, like so many have done, may have fallen into the trap of believing Black boys congregating in a field must be up to no good, even though she is Black herself. It’s part of what we have been conditioned to view as the criminal profile. And sadly, that profile is often a Black boy.
Adele continued. “The third time she spotted the boys, she recognized two of them. The family attends her church, and she knew all of them by name. Police apprehended the brothers when the family arrived at church last Sunday, put them in the back of a squad car, and told their parents to meet them at the police station. There police questioned them with their parents present, but we don’t know what the officers said to the boys while they were in the squad car.”
The boys admitted they used the playground sometimes as a shortcut but denied hanging out there.
“Tell me about the boys. Have either of them ever been in any trouble?” I asked.
“Interesting that you should ask. When the older boy was in the sixth grade, he got expelled for bringing a kitchen knife to school in his backpack,” she said. “At that age, kids go through a lot of changes, you know. He said he was being bullied, and out of fear, one day he walked past the kitchen and grabbed a knife from the drawer on the way to school.”
I shifted in the seat. The attorney picked up on my discomfort.
A knife is not sounding good.
“I’m not talking about a switchblade, okay? I’m talking about an ordinary kitchen knife and a kid who was afraid of being jumped after school. Was it the right decision? No. But it doesn’t make him a criminal, either. He made a mistake.”
I would have to mask my feelings better around this woman. She was a mind reader.
“His father emphasized that he was certain his son never would have used it. Carrying it made him feel safe. But he was expelled and sent to an alternative school to finish out the semester. He was allowed to return to his regular school in the fall. There hasn’t been one incident since then.”
“Do police know about this incident?” I asked.
“The stepdad figured he’d come clean so they could all go home. And that night they did. But then, the next day, a police cruiser was waiting for the kids outside their school. This time, the younger boy’s friend was with them—the other eleven-year-old. He lives with his grandmother. His mother got mixed up with the wrong guy and she’s serving seven years in a federal penitentiary in Missouri. Mi—”. She almost slipped and said his name but caught herself. “This boy is part of a program that takes children of incarcerated adults to visit their parents in prison.
“The boys said police convinced them to take a ride to the playground to demonstrate how they cut across the field. They said the police were nice to them but kept asking the same questions over and over. Obviously, as an attorney, I would never have allowed any of this to happen. They even asked the oldest boy if he liked girls, and ‘Have you ever seen your dad hit your mom?’ I think the police were trying to assess their tolerance for violence against women, but it was inappropriate. The boys said the police never mentioned a body, and neither did they.”
Constanzo said the boys told their parents what had happened. The brothers’ stepfather was livid that police talked to the boys without him or his wife present, and especially because they’d asked if they’d ever seen him hit his wife. He called the department to complain, and a detective and two officers followed up and came to the family’s home that night. A more affluent couple with their lawyer on speed dial, or simply more educated about how to handle these matters, wouldn’t have answered the door.