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 got hopped up on pcp, 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 became privy to the counsel that dogs my
closest friends - my exhortations that a pot-smoking, verbally abusive
intermittently-employed roofer 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 feeding her this stuff - there were several of us in
this group) 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.
"Cause I’m free, I’m free, And things are only as important as I want them to be."
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