Ms. Tompkins may be sustained by faith in this difficult time, but the same can’t be said for many of her Rainier Valley neighbors, who fear some new killer now stalking their streets.
Ms. Janie Griswold, who has lived next door to Etta Mae Tompkins for the past twenty-five years, is very disturbed by what happened last Friday. “It’s one thing for drug dealers to go around killing other drug dealers,” she said. “But when they can walk right up to someone’s front door and just start blasting away, it’s scary.”
Attorney Amy Duckworth, who now works for Gavin, Gavin, and Plane, a Bellevue area law firm, was one of a number of students who worked on LaShawn Tompkins’s case as part of the Innocence Project, an organization devoted to post-conviction examination of DNA evidence. It was their efforts that revealed Mr. Tompkins had been wrongly accused and wrongly convicted.
“I was there in Walla Walla the day LaShawn walked out of prison,” a tearful Ms. Duckworth said in a telephone interview. “It was so inspiring. He just hugged me and thanked me for everything we had done. He was glad to have a second chance. We all put so much work and effort into this, and now to have him end up murdered is a real tragedy.”
He probably had plenty of second chances, I thought. This one turned out to be his last second chance.
And so, while friends and coworkers grieve over the death of LaShawn Tompkins and while investigators try to piece together what happened, plans are moving forward on funeral services that are expected to be held sometime later this week-most likely at the King Street Mission where he worked.
To have a young life redeemed and then so senselessly lost is, I believe, a peculiarly American tragedy.
I was about to go on to the next article when my cell phone rang. As soon as I saw the Queen Anne Gardens number on the readout, my heart fell. Lars Jenssen is an old-fashioned kind of guy. He doesn’t like cell phones, and I knew he would call me on mine during work hours only as a last resort and for the worst possible reason.
“It’s Beverly,” he said.
“How bad?” I asked.
“Ja, sure,” Lars answered. “It’s pretty bad. I hated to call and worry you, but I t’ink you should probably come now.”
Lars is an old Norwegian, a retired halibut fisherman, whose accent gets markedly worse the moment he comes in contact with a telephone.
“I’m on my way,” I said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Driving down 405, I called Mel at work and told her what was going on. “I’ll let everyone here know,” she said. “If you want me to, I’ll drop everything and meet you there.”
“No,” I said. “That’s all right. I’m okay.”
Which wasn’t exactly true. This was hitting me very hard. Beverly Jenssen was my last surviving elder. She and my grandfather had been estranged from my mother and me for many years both while I was growing up and long into adulthood. My grandfather, a man of unbending principles and scant human kindness, had thoroughly disapproved of the fact that my mother had not only gotten herself pregnant outside the bonds of holy matrimony but had also adamantly refused to “do the right thing” and give me up for adoption. It was only in the past ten years or so-and long after my mother’s death-that I had established a connection with them at a time when my hard-nosed grandfather had been on his last legs.
It was then, after all those years, that I had learned how my grandmother, forbidden by her husband to have any contact with either my mother or me, had faithfully followed as many of my exploits as she could. She had kept voluminous scrapbooks that included clippings of everything to do with J. P. Beaumont. Some had been as early as Cub Scout endeavors. They included high school athletic competitions and later news mentions drawn from my long career at Seattle PD. There had been copies of Scott’s and Kelly’s newspaper birth announcements as well as a mention of Karen’s and my divorce proceedings. Wifely duty had kept Beverly from contacting me against her husband’s wishes, but seeing those secret scrapbooks, ones my grandfather had known nothing about, had told me everything I needed to know about Beverly Beaumont’s selfless love and constancy.
And then she met Lars. That had been an incredible bonus for all of us. Widowed by then, Beverly had come to help out at the memorial service for my late partner, Sue Danielson. Somehow my grandmother and Lars, my AA sponsor, ended up doing dishes together in the party-room kitchen at Belltown Terrace and had hit it off. They had married within months of meeting, and everything had been fine. Until now.
At Queen Anne Gardens I parked in the visitors’ lot and then signed in. “She’s not in their apartment, you know,” the desk clerk told me. “She’s been moved to our Care Center.”
Euphemistically speaking, Care Center was assisted living code for ICU. I thought they should have called it IWU-intensive waiting unit. There were two beds in the room, but only one was occupied. Lars, leaning on his cane and staring off into space, was seated next to Beverly. When he saw me he smiled and made an effort to rise.
“Sit,” I told him. “What’s happening?”
He shrugged and sank back down. “She’s sleeping now,” he said. “But she was asking for you earlier. That’s why I called.”
I looked at Beverly sleeping. I had never before seen her without her false teeth. That alone made her seem less dignified and far frailer. Somehow she appeared to be much smaller than I remembered, even though I had seen her only a few days earlier, shortly before Mel and I left for Ashland. At the time she had still been in their apartment. There she’d had Lars to see to it that she got wheeled back and forth to the dining room and to make sure she was eating. I doubted she was taking much nourishment now.
“Is she in any pain?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “She’s yust tired. We both are.”
A glance at Lars’s weathered face told me that was true. His eyes were red-rimmed and watery. “We had some good times,” he added. “But she’s ready to move on.”
I looked around the room. There was no heart monitor. No oxygen equipment. “Isn’t there something we should do? Some treatment? Something?”
Lars shook his head and gestured toward the bright yellow do not resuscitate placard that had been affixed to the door. “No.” he said. “There’s nothing. She yust needs to rest a little.”
“And so do you,” I said. “I’m here now. Why don’t you go take a nap?”
I was surprised by his ready agreement. “Ja, sure,” he said, getting shakily to his feet. “I t’ink you’re right.”
Left alone in the room with Beverly, I sat there for a long time simply watching her sleep. She seemed serene, untroubled, and unafraid. Leaving her asleep, I went out into the corridor and placed the necessary calls, telling Scott and Kelly what was going on. They both wanted to know if they should drop everything and come home.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “When I figure it out, I’ll let you know.”
“Have you talked to her doctor?” Kelly demanded. How my daughter somehow had transformed herself from a headstrong, dippy teenager into an amazingly practical adult is one of the mysteries of the universe, and it never fails to surprise me.
“Not yet,” I told her. “But I will.”
Ten minutes after I finished giving the news to my son Scott, my cell phone rang. “Sorry about this,” Dave Livingston said. “Anything I can do?”
Dave is my first wife’s second husband-Karen’s official widower. He’s also my children’s stepfather. I suspected that Kelly was the one who had seen fit to call him and let him know, but it could just as easily have been Scott. Dave is a likable guy and both my kids look up to him. Either way, I was glad someone had notified Dave, and I was touched that he had gone to the trouble of calling.
“No,” I said. “For right now, I guess it’s just a matter of waiting.”