September 3, 1993 - GREENBELT, Md. (AP)
"Police used a 3-foot, 480-pound robot to disarm a man who allegedly shotgunned his girlfriend to death and barricaded himself inside their apartment. Prince George's County authorities sent the remote-controlled robot into the apartment Thursday after police were unable in a five-hour
standoff to persuade Craig Smith, 22, to surrender."
So I'm in Phillip's the other day after my eye doctor appointment, getting some lunch. And I'm standing against the wall out of the way of the woman who's packing up condiments like she's feeding a small country. I'm just hanging out, welcoming the minutes of not having to do anything cause I'm waiting for food - no work, no phone calls, no stress and no bitching - and I'm realizing that there haven't been that many moments like this recently and I'm wondering why. There's music on in the restaurant, and I realize that it's not as unnecessarily loud as it usually is in these "fast casual", better than fast food, not quite sit-down restaurants. It takes me about 30 seconds to recognize the song, which I immediately identify as a 90s pop tune, Jon Secada's "I'm Free".
First I think, "What in the hell ever happened to Jon Secada?" and then I remember that this song was important to me when my friend Cindy died - shot by her boyfriend - in September, 1993. And because I haven't thought about her in a while, and because I'm standing against a wall, what I quickly calculate is more than 12 years later, in a restaurant on a lunch break from my job, completely unfulfilled and disconnected from any sense of purpose of my own, the song hits me sideways and the tears start rolling down my face.
"I'm free/ I'm free. Things are only as important as I want them to be/We'll have a breath of sunshine/When the rain goes away/ I'm free/ I'm free..."
"Smith fatally shot his live-in girlfriend Cynthia Wilkinson, 24, and sexually assaulted an unidentified woman who was a friend of Wilkinson's, police said. The woman jumped out a window of the second-story apartment and ran to a neighbor's home to call police."
And the tears come mostly because Cindy was a beautiful person, a woman who didn't in any way deserve to die in the horrific way she did, who gave and gave until she couldn't give anymore to the guy who eventually shot her in the face, who worked and worked at this relationship until she finally decided to break it off with him. A day after she did so, completely bewildered by the concept of living without her support of every kind - financial, mental, emotional, physical - he smoked a lot of green, invited a friend of hers over, held her hostage, and called Cindy up and told her to come on over and fix the situation. Since that was her thing, fixing, and because she likely never had an ounce of fear of him, she went over, and he shot her dead. The friend escaped out the window, and a hydraulic robot that the police sent came in after Craig, found him in a closet, and, blowing out his eye, overcame him.
"Smith was charged with first-degree murder and sexual assault. Evans said that Wilkinson and Smith argued Wednesday night after she apparently told him she wanted to end their relationship. The dispute resumed Thursday morning, and Smith shot Wilkinson while they argued, Evans said."
My friend S. and I had lunch with Cindy at Friday's a couple days before Craig killed her. She'd been sick, had a really bad cold, and was still feeling it when we saw her. But she was finally ready to talk about the fact that this relationship wasn't working out, that she couldn't realize the person she could finally see herself becoming while she was still tethered to him. We encouraged her. We told her it would be great - that this was the best thing for her - that we supported her. And a week later, she was dead.
My friendship with her was interesting, and hard-won. I hadn't really liked her at first - I found her crass, and sort of aggravating. At 21, which was likely when I met her, I was much less tolerant and open, more angry. And one day, while I sat eating my dinner at a back table at the restaurant, she sat down across from me eating hers. She said, "You don't much care for me, do you? You think I'm a redneck." And because no one, NO ONE, had ever been that open about their perceptions of my opinion of them before, I was completely floored, embarrassed and humbled. And after I said something ridiculous like, "It's nothing personal," we talked about it sanely and calmly for a while, and pretty much immediately became friends. She made it her mission to connect with me. We realized that we had more in common than we didn't. And I came to admire a work ethic and common sense in her that shifted my opinions. She suffered the counsel that my closest friends occasionally have to tolerate - my insistence that a verbally abusive, intermittently-employed roofer with a serious drug addiction wasn't the best she could do, that she might could go back to school or change her day job and create a different sort of life. She paid attention to all of us (because it wasn't just me telling her this) and had really begun to believe that it was true. And then she died. And because she'd had the guts to come up to me and ask me just what in the hell my problem was, instead of just ignoring me and talking shit about me behind my back, I lost a friend, instead of just a co-worker.
"After negotiations with Smith broke off, police borrowed a robot that the fire department uses to dismantle suspected explosive devices, said Sgt. Alan Day, a police department spokesman. Transmitting the scene by a video camera, the robot at the direction of a fire department technician opened a closet door. Smith could be seen hiding under a pile of clothes and the robot's mechanical claws reached out and pulled them away."
The day Cindy died I was supposed to go see "Shadowlands" at the Olney Theatre, a play about C.S. Lewis and his wife Joy, who died of cancer, based on Lewis's book "Surprised by Joy". My boss at the restaurant called me and asked me if I'd come in and cover a shift that night, and didn't tell me whose it was. I told him no, that I had plans, and asked him whose it was, again. He finally allowed that Cindy had been hurt, but fudged on just how much he knew. And as I sat on the stairs to my living room talking to him, the news scroll came across the bottom of the television, about a hostage situation in Greenbelt, and shots being fired. He admitted that he knew, and I hung up on him, because he knew she was my friend, and he wanted me to come in and cover his ass, unaware that I was working for her because she was dead. It's still one of the shittiest things anyone has ever attempted to do, to me and to my other friends he called, because it was so weak, and so self-serving. I was in college and was always broke, so thank God I had play tickets or I probably would have said "yes" without a second thought. If I'd shown up to work and found out why I was there, ugly words would likely have been exchanged, and that wasn't the right time or place for that kind of interaction.
The Prince George's County Fire Department bought the robot known as Remote Mobile Investigator-9 RMI-9 for short seven years ago for $45,000. Capt.Victor Stagnaro, a fire department spokesman, said it was the first time the local police had used RMI-9 to catch a suspect.
I ended up at S's house with another friend of ours instead, and we sat in her basement and watched the television news. The story was big news since it was the first time they'd ever used this robot thing to apprehend someone. Once we understood that Cindy was dead, that she was the Greenbelt hostage, we cried and grieved together, and talked about things not being fair. We talked about how she'd quit smoking, a huge accomplishment for her, several months before she died, and the irony in dying anyway. We talked about how he was so much smaller than she was, and how she'd joked before that he'd never dare hit her, because "she'd throw him off the porch." The currency changes, though, when a gun is involved. Size doesn't so much matter. We talked about the Grateful Dead show that she and S. had gone to that summer, and how much fun we had dancing to stupid songs like "Whoomp There It Is" at the 94th Aero Squadron on Friday nights, because she'd started going out with us and she loved to dance.
"When Smith grabbed the clothes back from the robot and began to cover himself up again, the robot fired a high-pressure water gun to knock the shotgun out of Smith's hands and disorient him, said a police spokesman, Cpl. Keith Evans. Police rushed in and arrested Smith."
It was frankly too much to get your head around all at once. Still, we could all agree that our manager lacked a core of compassion (he had called lots of people to work, not divulging what he knew) and that was something else altogether to consider. That restaurant was a second home - sometimes a first one - for a lot of us during those years, and it's a lesson since hard-learned that life tends to shatter our ideals about even sacred spaces. You learn a lot about people by the way they handle trauma, and other people's pain. You learn the difference between someone who will shutter the place for the night so people can get their shit together, and someone who will lie to keep the doors open. I never saw him in the same way after that, although I pretended to.
Anyway, "I'm Free" was all over the radio then. I thought Jon Secada was sort of lame, to tell the truth, but I was full-on in my grunge and metal phase at the time, crazy about a boy who would pick a fight with me the next year about Kurt Cobain's motivations for killing himself, and praying that the Black Album was as light as Metallica would go. But I listened to light rock on my way home from work at night, and it was on a night shortly after she died that I heard it.
"Do you need a friend right now/In the road that you’re going to/ If you get lost just call me I’ll be there/Yes I’ll be right there/ Cause though I may not have the answer/ At least I know what I’m looking for..."
It brought her into full view for me - the attitude of redemption, the desire to be free from a life she'd never dared step out of before, the expansion of her social circle and the resulting crowd of people who were touched by her life and devastated by her death. And now, in a sense, she was free. Our whole crew went down to her funeral service, and it was amazing. Her family didn't know us, and it seemed that we were grieving a totally different person. There was a strained air in the room, which makes sense in the wake of a violent death, but it seemed like our group knew a different Cindy. It occurred to me then that she was a different person with us - a group of people who had no preconceived notions about her, who didn't judge her based on where she'd come from but on what she presented us with in the moment, and what we could see as her potential. And make no mistake - she did the same for us. At that age, I was fairly well ensconced in an attitude that needed to change big-time, and she was a catalyst. She helped me, although she didn't have to, and she probably never knew it. I can just see it, looking back, from the vantage point of my almost-35 self.
When you lose a friend unexpectedly, especially at a very young age, it informs you about the lack of any guarantee of longevity. Sometimes in the years immediately following her death, I'd feel sorry for myself or bemoan my existence, and her face would pop into my head, and I'd think how she would be so thankful for the chance to have another normally shitty day as opposed to lying dead in the ground, and it would shut me up for a little bit. As time passed, as usually happens with even the most painful of situations, I stopped being grounded so much by that thought. When I'd feel sorry for myself or bemoan my existence, her face would not pop into my head. It's a shame, how that can happen. It's a protection, too, because who wants or needs or can withstand the full force of emotional trauma forever? It's the reason some people drink, smoke, exercise, shop, or work too much - to drown out the sadness of a thought that won't go away.
The brain is constructed in an amazing way, though - to allow something like a song, a smell, a season, a tone of voice, a photograph - to take us directly back to a situation or a feeling, something that is important to who we are, regardless of how deep it's buried. This kind of thing can either hurt or heal, or, in many, many cases in my little life, hurt as a sign of healing. After twelve years, it still hurt to remember the death of a woman who reached out to me in kindness, who challenged me to check my own biases, but it was the right time to call her to mind. I still need that kind of challenge, in fact, need it currently more than I have in a long while. I'm grateful for once for the relentless music in stores and restaurants, for bringing someone to mind who I hadn't thought about in a while, whose life touched me. It didn't matter to me that people standing around could see me cry, because some people deserve our most honest expressions of emotion. My friend Cindy was one of them, and it was an honor to remember her, although truly I have never forgotten, even if it's not always conscious.
"Yes I can do without this sorrow/There’s a day after tomorrow/ So I’m leaving it behind."
"Do you see what I see
A rainbow shining over us
In the middle of a hopeless storm
Sometimes I’m blinded by my feelings
And I can’t see beyond my troubled mind
Afraid of what I’ll find
The story of our lives
But there’s tomorrow.
Chorus
Cause I’m free, I’m free
And things are only as important
As I want them to be
We’ll have a breath of sunshine
When the rain goes away
I pray, I pray.
Do you need a friend right now
In the road that you’re going to
If you get lost just call me I’ll be there
Yes I’ll be right there
Cause though I may not have the answer
At least I know what I’m looking for.
Yes I can do without this sorrow
There’s a day after tomorrow
So I’m leaving it behind.
Chorus
I’m free, I’m free
And things are only as important
As I want them to be
We’ll have a breath of sunshine
When the rain goes away
I pray, I pray.
And if you want to share my dreams
Well all you have to do is say it, say it
Let me hear you loud and clear
Cause I need you if you wanna be, if you wanna be.
Do you see what I see
A rainbow shining over us
In the middle of a hopeless storm
We’ll be safe and warm."
wow. what a staggeringly beautiful meditiation this is. I was thinking about a friend of mine who died too young, and I have felt some of the same feelings that you're going through.
Posted by: joanna | November 26, 2005 at 08:11 AM
These kinds of things are really interesting for me as someone who just met you. The beauty of an online archive, and the bittersweet beauty of a lost friendship. I'm really sorry, Laurie, because she sounds like she was a rock star.
Posted by: Killer B | August 04, 2006 at 06:54 PM