By John Ramsey Miller

http://www.johnramseymiller.com

When I was in Miami, 17 years ago, a boy of sixteen was killed by one of two off-duty policemen late one night. Andrew Morello was the sixteen-year-old son of dear friends of mine. That was terrible enough, but what followed was a cover-up by the police for a bad shooting. I didn’t write the story for the Miami Herald because I was too close and emotionally involved at the time. And I was involved because I knew Andrew, and I knew he was a good kid who loved his parents. Andrew was dead for being in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing, at the wrong time. What might have been a tragedy turned into a life destroying event because of several things that happened afterward.

That Saturday morning I was in the shower in my home in Coconut Grove when my wife came into the bathroom and said, “John, Andrew Morello is dead. He was killed by the police.”

I learned that Andrew and three of his friends were stealing speakers from a vehicle, and the alarm went off and two off-duty cops ran out of their house and shot Andrew. He was shot in the heart, and his friends drove the van to his aunt’s house a few blocks away. She called 911. Someone cancelled the ambulance, saying it was not needed. The tape of the cancellation somehow was accidentally erased before a voice pattern could be charted. It was obvious that someone, nobody knows who, didn’t want him to live.

The female cop who shot the gun said Andrew was trying to run her down, but his two friends said he was backing up when the shot was fired. The windshield with the bullet hole in it was “accidentally” shattered by the cops before the Morellos’ independent investigators could test it. The CSI’s own test seemed to prove that the cop was not where she claimed to have been when the bullet hit the windshield and supported the evidence that Andrew was not driving toward the cop, but was turned in his seat so he could see while he was backing up away from the cops as the other boys testified. In the end, the two friends with him went to prison because Andrew died and they were taking a radio or speakers out of a Jeep. This was only really covered by the alternative newspaper, NEW TIMES, and it was covered well. The Herald wrote very little about it. The Morellos tried to have this tried by suing the police, but a judge ruled they couldn’t sue the police and closed the investigation, which was performed by the police department whose cops were involved.

The event put me at odds with Janet Reno, the Attorney General, and she and I had heated arguments about the fact that she would not investigate the police, but accepted their “evidence”, saying that I should bring her evidence of a cover-up. I told her that discovering evidence was her job. My wife can attest to her angry calls and our heated debates over the phone. At the time I knew Janet Reno a little, because I had done portraits of her for a NEW TIMES cover article. She was mad at me at the time for using a picture of her wearing bad glasses, but I doubt that was why she refused to investigate unless I came up with evidence of a cover up.

The Morellos have a large Italian family––a close knit bunch who live to love and love to live. Susie and I were taken into their family after I spent a week at the family’s pawn shop in North Miami Beach doing a piece for the Miami Herald’s Sunday Magazine titled “Pawnography”. Every Thanksgiving we had dinner with Joe and Andrea and their large extended family. Turkey and Lasagna. Andrew’s death all but destroyed that family. Not so much his death, as the unfortunate aftermath of it.

The point of this rehashing is that Andrew’s mother sent me an email saying that she wanted to write Andrew’s story. Not with a book in mind, but to tell the story from a mother’s perspective. She said a lot of her friends and family said she should forget it, that the past should left in the past. I sent her the Faulkner quote about the past. I want her to write that because I want to read it. It won’t matter whether or not it is published, because I think it will help Joe, and the family to heal and put it in their past. At least I hope so. I wrote Andrea that until she puts the past to bed, she can’t truly see her future. I know Andrew would want her to be able to do that. I received the first 13 pages and it was all I could do to read them. My wife cried as she read those pages. Of course it was personal for us and we saw the suffering first hand and love the people involved. Reliving the past can be painful but a healing experience. Losing a child is the worst fate a mother and father can experience, and after 17 years it is no easier for them.

And there were letters to the editor and calls and letters to the Morellos (all anonymous) who said all three boys should have been killed, and one that said that if they had raised Andrew right he would still be alive. How people can do this is simply beyond my ability to understand how people can be so cruel in the face of this heart-breaking event. Yes, Andrew was doing the wrong thing, at the wrong time, but he was a child being influenced by other kids. Andrews father owned a large pawnshop and he had tons of speakers that Andrew could have taken with Joe’s blessings, and that haunts his father. It all haunts his parents and friends, including myself. The Morellos are people of integrity and compassion and they didn’t deserve what happened. I believed that the shooter did nothing but make a huge mistake, and that what happened after was the true crime. I don’t believe the cops set out to murder a child, but that they over reacted in the worst way possible. Those cops, who were married, have to live with what happened––killing a child, and the rest of us have to live with the ramifications of their mistake. What haunts me most is that Andrew would have grown up and become a productive member of society because that was where he was headed, but he never got a chance to become that man.

The future is so uncertain that these days I think about the past more and more and it is clearer than it used to be. I guess my mind has polished the rough spots until it’s all glass smooth. Some things cannot be polished until they become smooth, and this is one of those. It was a horror and a tragedy and it changed all of us who were involved. Now when I write what loss does to good people, I do so from painful experience.

“The Past Isn’t Dead, it isn’t even past.”

By John Ramsey Miller

http://www.johnramseymiller.com

I have a letter I keep in a lock box that my mother wrote to me thirty years ago just after she discovered that her breast cancer had returned in a big way. That letter arrived in the brand new lock box a few days after she died, handed to me by my father. In the letter she tells me how wonderful her life was and no regrets, and how much she loved me, and how everybody needs a lock box for important papers so here’s one I bought for you. That letter is still in that lock box under my bed––a prized possession. I like to read it. My mother’s penmanship was flawless. My own is quite good thanks to public schools in Mississippi and a lot of practicing over the years.

Thirty years ago people still wrote letters, but as long distance calls grew less expensive, it became easier to call and talk than to write a letter. With cell phones we are always near enough to a cell tower to talk whenever we feel like it. With the Internet, people send electronic messages. I get e-mails from friends almost every day, and I almost never print them out. Mostly the communications are short blurbs, and messaging on the cell phone means even briefer information passing. Twitter is dumbing down America faster than evolution. I text with my wife because she is at her desk and she can check every once in a while to see if I’ve said anything worth responding to. She texts me because it doesn’t interrupt my writing time.

Back when we all wrote letters, we put a week’s or a month’s worth of news in the letter. We wrote our feelings and what life was doing to us. You’d sit with a pen imagining the person we were writing to and thinking about that person who’d be reading it. The mail came, you opened a letter, you unfolded it and you read the letter in your hand. The paper had been in the hands of the person who’d written it. You could fold it up and open it again later, as often as you wanted to for as long as the paper held up. Think of the archives filled with personal letters from the famous and not so famous. I think of Ken Burns’ Civil War series for PBS and what it would have been without the personal letters from the time that gave it texture and meaning and humanized the war. We are losing history. The e-mails are being deleted almost as fast as they are read, which probably goes to what they are worth. We don’t compose e-mails the same way we did letters. I officially name it “jit-jotting.”

Recently I sent my step-mother a letter. She is in an assisted living facility in Dallas, and I love her dearly. Her daughter told me that she reads that letter over and over again. That letter connects us in a way no telephone or e-mail on a screen can. After my father passed away my brother went through his papers and he gave me several letters I’d written to him over the years, along with pictures I’d sent in the envelopes. I could tell he’d read them over and over, and I found myself wishing I’d written him more of them.

My dead mother is somehow still alive in that letter. The letter from my mother, only matters to me now––the living half of the communiqué. I suppose after I’m gone my children will dispose of it, and that’s okay with me since nobody else will feel the connection or its importance.

I think of the books written from the collected letters between people, mostly famous, and I wonder how many will be written in the future from the collected e-mails or telephone conversations of famous people. There is a style in written letters that aren’t reflected in most e-mails and lost forever with telephone calls.

Maybe part of the reason we write books is to leave something of ourselves behind. We are all jit-jotting our way through our days and our lives, and are leaving a thinner and thinner trail as we go into the future––and it seems to me to be a bleaker place in most respects.

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Coming up on our Kill Zone Guest Sundays, watch for blogs from Sandra Brown, Steve Berry, Robert Liparulo, Paul Kemprecos, Linda Fairstein, Oline Cogdill, James Scott Bell, Alexandra Sokoloff, and more.