Beautiful Wounded - a story from the Deep

Old hotel on San Leandro Blvd in E. Oakland

Many of those Oaklanders displaced by the midcentury changes in West Oakland settled in the crowded eastern part of the city. Today, all through sprawling, Hispanic, African-American, Vietnamese, hipster, lively, industrial, violent East Oakland, as well as good food, colorful shops, busy parks and bustling avenues, there are streets of danger, blocks under the sway of the gun, free-market drug corners, long prostitution strolls, and the blood of fresh homicide scenes. Sometimes people here refer to parts of East Oakland as “Deep East Oakland.” Or “DEO.” Or just “The Deep.” Depending on who is saying “Deep East” or “The Deep,” it can be a term of respect — “Yeah, the dude that started this company grew up on, like 82nd, Deep East Oakland.” Or one of fear — “I had to make a delivery in Deep East Oakland today. Man, was I nervous!” When used by someone who lives there, it’s simple shorthand, a useful, unselfconscious combination of geographic explanation and self-characterization.

Born in Los Angeles but raised in The Deep, Caheri Gutierrez was recognized early as an academically gifted kid. A visionary second grade teacher at Hawthorne Elementary took her under his wing. David Silver would bring the smart little girl along to meet with his colleagues in education and take her to college campuses around the Bay Area. His big idea was that very young students, especially in under-siege places like East Oakland, should think about college, should aim for it from the time they enter elementary school. Constant awareness of its necessity and what it takes to get there would help create more driven and better-prepared learners, all the way through school. It would especially aid smart kids like Caheri. Silver had an idea to found a school based on this principle, and so assembled a team of educators and parents to design it. There was one student on the team: 10-year old Caheri Gutierrez. By the time Think College Now, a school for fourth to eighth graders, opened its doors on 27th and East 14th in East Oakland, Gutierrez was too old to attend. She was finishing up at St. Anthony’s, where she was a student leader, a bringer home of academic awards and a burgeoning volleyball star.

Gutierrez’s mother, a waitress at a Mexican restaurant, scraped together the money to send her to a parochial elementary school, then managed to get the girl from East Oakland into a public high school over across the estuary, in suburban Alameda, near the restaurant where she worked. Encinal High School promised a less perilous environment and stronger academics than Skyline High in Oakland. At Encinal, Gutierrez led the volleyball team to the Northern California finals. She was aiming for a full college ride on the strength of her athleticism and good grades.

It’s hard to say what sidetracked her. It’s hard to say what didn’t. For one thing, Gutierrez couldn’t handle the responsibility of off-campus lunch periods.

“I just had too much freedom and I started partying a lot and I started smoking.” She started cutting class, hanging around at home all day while her mother was out working.

Some of what sidetracked her — too much freedom, too much partying — could have happened to a kid in the suburbs, in one of California’s rural counties, in any big or small town. Some of it was strictly Oakland.

“When you’re young and you’re in Oakland, it’s a trend to be bad, it’s a trend to smoke weed, it’s a trend to, you know, just not care,” Gutierrez says. “I don’t know, it’s stupid. You want to be tough; you want to hang out in the streets.”

Her rampant truancy led to poor grades, she started missing volleyball practices, and in her junior year, Gutierrez got kicked out of Encinal. She was sent to Dewey, an Oakland school for students at risk of not graduating on time. She got kicked out of Dewey. Her transformation was almost complete. Then she was recruited by the Vixens.

Suddenly the girl who used to get attention for her good grades and her athleticism was getting it for her looks. It was intoxicating. In Vixen photos, Gutierrez tends to look serious, possibly unapproachable, but she was very popular at their events. She was a party girl. She was also under-age.

“I was getting attention for being pretty and having style. And I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is really fun.’ That was my lifestyle.”

She was drifting ever further away from her family, constantly fighting with her younger sister, becoming alienated from her brother, from her mother, who knew Caheri was missing school, smoking weed, who was threatening to bar her from her prom and who frequently kicked her out of their apartment on 82nd Avenue.

One day, in another vicious fight with her sister, Gutierrez said, “I’m so done with all you guys. Family is just a fucking word. It doesn’t mean anything.”

That fight happened in late summer of 2008. She was 18.

In those days, her mother worked on the cleaning crew of an office building near the Oakland Airport. Sometimes Gutierrez would help out there. One night in the fall she was running late and asked a guy for a ride, a guy she’d known only a short time. She asked her best friend to come along for the ride. They headed out around 9:30. and soon were cruising down 98th Avenue toward the airport. They caught a red light at San Leandro Boulevard. Gutierrez was in the passenger seat, her best friend in the back. They were a little stoned, not talking, listening to music.

“And all of a sudden,” she says, “I feel shocks, just really really intense shocks.” She thought the car had been hit from behind. She could hear her friend in the back seat asking “What is going on?”

Then the driver began to shout, “I’m shot! I got shot!”

Gutierrez could see that he had been hit in the hand and she tried to ask him if he was okay.

“And he looks at me,” she says, and pauses.

We’re sitting across a table, in the dimly lit, slightly dingy conference room of a violence-prevention organization in Oakland. Gutierrez has attentive eyes, pitch dark, but there’s a glint, a pilot light. Her bright smiles tend to breakout in slow motion, her long, straight, dark hair frames a face that is oval except where that small part of her right chin is missing. She tells the story without emotion, but occasionally the telling slows down. Imagine a person feeling through a dark cupboard for the ingredients to a dish she dislikes profoundly. And the cupboard is full of spiders. But she has promised to make the dish for you and so, over and over again, she reaches in.

She remembers the look on the driver’s face as he gazed back at her that night. A strange look, she says, a look of shock at what he was seeing.

“And that’s when I touched my face, and I didn’t feel anything, and I looked toward the dashboard and all of my gums, my teeth, everything was there.”

She was hit in the right jaw.

“It just exploded when it hit me, it exploded everything, and it came out of my mouth and exploded all of my teeth. And all of a sudden I just start feeling sleepy, so sleepy, oh my god I’ve never felt this sleepy before, and I couldn’t even keep my eyes open. I was like, ‘Oh, here it is, I’m leaving, this is it.’ I was really thinking ‘This is it.’”

The driver was not badly wounded. He continued down 98th Avenue. Gutierrez’ body was convulsing, her legs kicking, her mouth was full of blood, she couldn’t talk. Breathing was becoming more and more difficult. Near the airport they spotted two police cars and got the officers’ attention.

Gutierrez could see an entrance to the freeway nearby and began to calculate her chances of survival. Would she make it to the hospital if the ambulance arrived soon? She didn’t think so. She closed her eyes and thought, This is it. She thought about her family. Her mother. She wanted her mother to know that she had not died in pain. Suddenly her mind was saying Don’t give up, just try to hold on. But she was choking, kicking, holding her face together with her hand. The paramedics appeared, asked her her name. She wrote it down for them.

Then she let go of her face and everything fell out, her cheek, her severed tongue, everything.

She could hear the paramedic on her radio, “Level 1, Level 1, Level 1 trauma ...” The adrenaline was keeping her awake. She’d never been in an ambulance, she knew she was on her way to the hospital.

“I might have some hope here.” she thought. So stay up.

She remembers the bright lights of the emergency room, the shocked looks on the faces of the trauma staff, of these ER doctors and nurses who have seen it all.

“The last thing I remember,” she tells me, “was they laid me down on the bed and I just saw bright lights, really white lights, and after that I closed my eyes. I don’t want to see anything more, I don’t want to feel anything. I closed my eyes and that was it."

- from Until You Bleed - on life, violence and healing in Oakland - .99 e-book available at Amazon or as an audiobook at iTunes, Amazon and Audible. 

A place you might not want to remember

Light tower, green light, late winter evening sunlight at E 16th Ave., Oakland

In Oakland, despite the freeways, concrete monstrosities that isolate neighborhoods from one another, despite the seeming differences between various neighborhoods and people and the varieties in its character, things can seem surprisingly connected. A man gets gunned down in West Oakland and you learn he had half a dozen close cousins in East Oakland. A man dies in Fruitvale and you find out he had worked for years in the Lower Bottom neighborhood, everybody knows him over there. A police officer on the beat in Eastmont grew up in violent Campbell Village. A restaurant owner in Jack London Square is from the Acorn neighborhood in West Oakland, and he’s committed to hiring parolees from The Deep. Sometimes it feels like every green freeway sign in Oakland is only a degree of separation from everywhere else in Oakland, and a reminder of a place you might not want to remember.

- from Until You Bleed - on life, violence and healing in Oakland - .99 e-book available at Amazon or as an audiobook at iTunes, Amazon and Audible. 

No Manual: after the death of Shanika Latham

When he watched her, when he was with her, he says she reminded him of himself when he was young, of the way he'd been before his own life had taken a wrong turn.

"She had a lot of the mannerisms that I lost growing up, going through things as an adult, especially after addiction, that lifestyle and the things you see that toughen you."

It wasn't just her mannerisms that struck her dad as free and easy. Before she was shot to death in 2012 on a street in East Oakland, Mallie Latham's youngest daughter, Shanika, a college student one week shy of her 21st birthday, had seemed untouched by the things in life that strip away our joy and our trust in others.

"She had that openness and freshness," says Latham. "She made friends easily. She was just too open, but that was her personality and I appreciated it. She never had conflicts with people. You'd never see her in arguments, which in Oakland is amazing to do. So she had a lot of traits that I admired, that would have been special to me."

This is the loss that confronted Latham when his phone rang on that August morning. It's the loss, the missing light, the missing joy that will haunt him the rest of his life.

That morning when the call came, Latham was at a training, learning to teach parenting skills. He knows how important it is, especially for young men, especially in Oakland, to understand their responsibilities and the opportunities they have to raise safe and happy kids. It was nearly lunchtime and his niece was on the phone, but she was hysterical, unable to communicate. Then his aunt called.

"I knew this was bad," he tells me one gray morning a year and a half later, over breakfast at the noisy Buttercup Cafe in downtown Oakland. He rests his big frame back in the semi-circular booth, chomps on eggs and sausage and home fries. There is an undeniable sweetness in his voice, a lightness that very suddenly can disappear when an image from the past will force him to stop, to turn his head away, just a moment to recover, and then back to the talk of his painful past and his hopeful future in spite of it.

With that call from his aunt relaying a rumor that his daughter had been killed in East Oakland early that morning, Latham, in his mid-50s, had entered the strange, dark world of the survivor, a world where, besides and beyond the staggering grief, there is business to deal with. Business that is equally alien and mysterious.

A colleague drove him to Highland Hospital. But once there, he had no idea what to do.

"There's no manual for that," he tells me. "There's nobody charged with the responsibility to receive you coming in in terror, in a panic, trying to find out, is it true my daughter's dead."

At home that evening, with no idea what to do next, Latham's niece approached him. A year earlier, her brother had been killed in West Oakland. She said, "I know who to talk to, don't worry about it, there's this woman who has an agency, who deals with these situations, she helped me with my brother." Then a friend of Latham called. She told him, "I know a woman, a friend, who knows what to do, who can help you now." They were referring to the same person, the same agency, to Marilyn Washington Harris and the Khadafy Washington Foundation for Non-Violence.

Once, Harris had been in the very same place Latham was now: reeling, beyond reeling, after learning, back in August of 2000, that the rumored death of her only son, 18-year-old McClymond's grad Khadafy Washington, was true. There was no one to help her then, no one to guide her through the confusing next steps and the beginning of healing. It made the pain worse, the journey even more perilous and dark. She vowed back then that no one in Oakland would have to go through this alone again. In the past 13 years, on a shoe-string budget and with little staff, Harris has helped thousands of stunned survivors of Oakland's killed. She has walked with mothers, fathers and children in the immediate aftermath of their greatest losses. Harris knows the business that must be taken care of. She knows the police, the funeral directors, the city and the street, and perhaps more importantly, they know her, they respect her and the work she does. They know she is tough, honest and tireless in her work protecting and guiding survivors.

In some ways, Mallie Latham was one of the lucky ones. He had close friends, sturdy and attentive, to stay with him, to keep an eye on him. Many don't. Even still, he says it was the presence of Marilyn Harris that kept him sane. She talked to him on the phone that first day, then met him a day later at the funeral home.

"At the time, emotionally, I was so vacant," says Latham. "I was basically just like a robot." But Harris was with him. "I could tell what Marilyn was doing, that I could trust her, and I just told her, 'Take over.'"

A year and a half later, Latham continues to heal. He has started a grief group for Oakland men who have lost a loved one. His daughter was killed only two blocks from his East Oakland home. A few months later, his nephew was killed in North Oakland. A week after that, a homicide occurred right on his doorstep. He knew who to tell the survivors to call.

He credits Harris and the Khadafy Washington Foundation for Non-Violence for helping him get where he is today.

"If I had had to face the things Marilyn took care of, even with the support I had, even with the people I had behind me, I couldn't have got out of it sane. I wouldn't have been here now. I'd still be somewhere balled up in a corner."