In Other Words

While the City Slept: A Love Lost to Violence and a Young Man’s Descent Into Madness by Eli Sanders

In the summer of 2009, two months before they were to be married, Teresa Butz and Jennifer Hopper were raped and stabbed several times in their south Seattle home by Isaiah Kalebu, a deeply troubled and erratic young man who had been repeatedly turned down for assistance at local psychiatric emergency centers. Butz died the same night, but her partner would survive. Owing to the wave of perp sketches that Seattle residents posted all over the city, police took only a few days to track down Kalebu, his pants still covered in blood.

Known as the South Park attacks after the victims’ neighborhood, the story captivated Seattle. The crime was sordid — one veteran police officer couldn’t remember such a horrific scene that ever left a survivor. But as the case wound its way through the courts over the next two years, the public became utterly enthralled with Butz’s surviving partner, whose turns on the witness stand were as uncompromising as they were generous. She spoke in halting detail about the night of the attack, grieved her partner with a lifeaffirming dignity, and publicly expressed forgiveness for the man who raped and killed her fiancée. Her unstinting account, delivered to alt-weekly reporter Eli Sanders, became a city-captivating article, “The Bravest Woman in Seattle,” in June 2011, which netted its author a 2012 Pulitzer Prize for his exhaustively researched reporting, which forms the basis for this book.

Two months after the attacks, on the very day they were to be married, in the same venue booked for their reception that never took place, Hopper held a private memorial for Butz. But it still looked like a wedding reception, with the f lowered centerpieces on each table “holding photographs of Jennifer and Teresa together, smiling hugely, arms around each other.” Meanwhile, Teresa took to the dais to sing a Patty Griffin song the couple had bonded over, the raised welts of red stab wounds and scar tissue still visibly healing on her neck.

To reconstruct the troubled life of murderer Kalebu, Sanders spent years speaking with family members, psychiatrists, police, teachers, and social workers. He was the child of a Ugandan immigrant father and an African-American mother, whose family, according to court records, was “replete with mental illness for at least four generations.” Isaiah’s maternal grandmother, diagnosed with schizophrenia, was found f loating dead in Puget Sound when her grandson was just three months old. By the time he was two, Isaiah was taken in by relatives, his mother unable to care for him after her own hospitalization for a failed suicide. Nonetheless, as a child, Kalebu appeared to be well adapted, a highly intelligent kid who loved books, bikes, and video games. But by his teens, his moods were erratic and often violent. By the time he was twenty-two, they had turned deadly.

In his one and only daylong encounter with mentalhealth services, some 16 months before the South Park attacks, Kalebu was admitted to Harborview Medical Center — Seattle’s primary emergency psychiatric facility — after walking into a financial-services office where he “fired” the staff, stated that he was an African king, and proclaimed that the building had been stolen from him during the 19th-century sugar trade.

Despite his sixty- one-year- old aunt’s pleas to the police to place him under mental-health care against his will, Harborview declined to let Kalebu stay to be evaluated. Fearing for her life, Kalebu’s aunt then filed a restraining order against her nephew. She died shortly after in an arson fire at her apartment, a crime in which Kalebu was named “a person of interest.”

Addressing the state of Seattle’s public psychiatric care at the time when Kalebu’s own mental health was in a rapid free fall, Sanders writes, “If they were poor, like Isaiah, they found themselves encountering a public mental health system that was in a state of collapse. If they were African-American, like Isaiah, they were ‘ unlikely to receive treatment’ from this system at all, another federal report found, and in the event they did receive treatment, were ‘more likely to be incorrectly diagnosed.’ ”

Sanders, as well as the book’s publicists, are marketing this book as a wake-up call to the nation’s failed system of emergency mental health. Tallying the costs of prosecuting and incarcerating Kalebu over a lifetime, Sanders estimates the taxpayer cost will be well over $3 million, a tiny fraction of which might have saved Butz from being murdered and stopped Kalebu’s descent into madness.

While t hat angle may help market t he book nationally in a country overrun by mass shootings committed by unhinged — and largely untreated — shooters, it fails to convey this book’s singular appeal: Jennifer Hopper herself. Her life and her reaction to her partner’s killing embody a core set of progressive beliefs about life, justice, and forgiveness that did not wilt or fizzle under tragedy.

In August 2011, just days before Kalebu was to be sentenced, Hopper told her story directly in a column called “I Would Like You to Know My Name.” In it, she reveals her identity, which had been kept confidential among reporters throughout two years of court trials. Though not included in Sanders’ otherwise excellent and spellbinding book, her spirited account of public mourning is a beautiful meditation on the bravery instilled in her by her late partner. She writes,

“When someone saves your life, and her life is taken in the process, how can you let it go to waste? You can’t. I feel that all the time. So I try to be the best person I can be and try to make the most of the life Teresa saved.”

— Casey Sanchez