Sadie(71)
Bleeding?
ELLIS JACOBS:
She broke the bathroom window, and she didn’t get through it clean. It tore up her arm.
WEST McCRAY:
You never told Joe about that window. You didn’t tell Joe about any of this until he told you about talking to me.
ELLIS JACOBS:
Yeah, that’s right.
See, Darren’s room is off-limits and I figured I’d lose my job if Joe got wind. I got like, no rules working there except that one and it’s the easiest rule in the world not to break so … I just left it. I didn’t know how long it was gonna be before Joe had the sale and I needed that money ’til it wasn’t there anymore. Soon as the Bluebird got bought, he let me go and I just … they’re gonna tear the place down. It seemed pointless to me to bring it up.
WEST McCRAY:
Okay, so let’s keep going from the point where she broke the window and cut her arm and you found her.
ELLIS JACOBS:
She cut it up enough it needed stitches. She didn’t get any, but it looked deep enough to warrant ’em and that’s when I realized how bad she must’ve wanted in his room. So I get in there, and I see her and she sees me and she pulls out a switchblade and she puts it to my throat and she asks me—she asks me … Jesus, this is hard to say out loud.
WEST McCRAY:
What did she ask you, Ellis?
ELLIS JACOBS:
She asked me if I was like him.
WEST McCRAY:
Like Darren?
ELLIS JACOBS:
Yeah.
WEST McCRAY:
What did she mean by that?
ELLIS JACOBS:
She wanted to know if I … if I … how she put it was … God, it’s ugly.
She asked me if I fuck little girls.
WEST McCRAY:
Those were her words?
ELLIS JACOBS:
Her exact words. She had a knife against my throat and she asked me if I was … like Darren, and that’s what she meant when she asked. And of all the things she could’ve said, I wasn’t—that wasn’t anything close to what I was expecting.
WEST McCRAY:
What did you do?
ELLIS JACOBS:
I told her I didn’t know … I didn’t know about Darren. I told her how I met him online in a game and all that. She was … Okay, so when my parents kicked me out, I had to rely on other people seeing through me, you know what I mean?
WEST McCRAY:
Explain it to me.
ELLIS JACOBS:
Well, like when I was too proud or I was too angry … I was always putting on a front to keep people from giving me what I needed. I’d hurt them. Not—not physically, but I’d just put my pain on them because I didn’t know how to ask for help. So I always try to remember that, about other people. I always try to see past them and give them help, if I think I can.
WEST McCRAY:
So you decided to help her?
ELLIS JACOBS:
A little. I mean—it was more that I was shitting myself and I had a knife at my throat and I really thought I was gonna die, man. She was crazed. She just had this … wild look in her eyes … and that was all I had to work with, so I worked with it.
WEST McCRAY:
You talked her down.
ELLIS JACOBS:
I guess so.
WEST McCRAY:
How did you do that, exactly?
ELLIS JACOBS:
I said she was hurt and I could help her and she could tell me about Darren, because I didn’t know. I could kinda see that she … she was tired, man. She just looked like she was done. So I had that on my side. I think that was part of why she lowered the knife … but also, I guess—okay, so in the moment, I believed I was going to die. I truly believed that she was going to kill me. But after she left … I don’t know. Hindsight’s twenty/twenty. But after, I don’t think she would’ve gone through with it. Still cried like a damn baby when she let me go, though.
WEST McCRAY:
Walk me through what happened next.
ELLIS JACOBS:
We went back to the main office and I fixed up her arm, and she told me about—she told me about Darren.
WEST McCRAY:
By all accounts, Darren had been a very good friend to you. I know you offered to hear her out as an act of self-preservation but was that all there was to it? Did you believe her?
ELLIS JACOBS:
I mean, when someone comes at you with a knife and they’re not trying to shake you down for money or something like that, and the first words out of their mouth are askin’ if you mess with little kids … there’s got to be something to that, right? And even though I … I swear I never knew the Darren she was talking about, she found this—she found this stuff in his room.
WEST McCRAY:
What kind of stuff?
ELLIS JACOBS:
She’d found a bunch of fake IDs and they were all—they were all Darren, the pictures on the IDs, but they all had different names. And none of them were Darren’s name.
WEST McCRAY:
Do you remember any of them?
ELLIS JACOBS:
Just Keith, like you said. She said she knew him as Keith. And then the other things she had from his room were, uh … they were tags.