Crime reporter

The Ledger and New York Times Regional News Group, Lakeland, Fla., November 2007-Present

Tell stories of all shapes and sizes. Pitch and write dailies, features and enterprise. Employ databases and public records.
Chase and update breaking news such as murders, fires and crashes for newspaper and Web site.
Work with online producers, designers and photographers to envision and execute innovative online projects.
Write beat blog and snap photos and video of anything from a house fire to a circus rehearsal to a motorcycle stunt competition.
Established Twitter account to tweet road alerts, breaking news and dispatches straight from the crime scene.
Find sources and connect with community through online social media.

Fellow

The Poynter Institute 2007 Summer Fellowship for Young Journalists, St. Petersburg, Fla., Summer 2007

One of 16 young writers nationwide chosen for intensive six-week journalism program.
Wrote weekly features for web-based magazine, PointsSouth.net.
Pounded the pavement to find stories on a hyperlocal beat in southeast St. Petersburg.
Worked with group mates to identify and plan alternative storytelling projects and interactive web content.
Took classes in writing technique as well as audio, video and web technology.

Freelance reporter/intern

The Daily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, Mass., June 2006-November 2006

Wrote feature and hard news stories on anything from city council meetings to protests to front-page profiles of some of Western Massachusetts’s most interesting citizens.

Founder and Chief Editor

Feminist Uproar magazine, Mount Holyoke College, Winter 2004-Fall 2007

Created and spearheaded magazine as an outlet for student and alumnae writing, art and opinions, acting as a writer, editor and page designer, while working to obtain funding and regular advertisers.

Contributor

Women’s Public Voices Project, mtholyoke.edu/proj/womenspublicvoices, Spring 2007

Wrote literary journalism features for Web site featuring journalism from five women’s colleges.

Reporter

Mount Holyoke College Alumnae Association, Fall 2006-Spring 2007

Covered college events, new classroom technology and student organizing for quarterly alumnae magazine and monthly web-based magazine.

Chair

Jeanette Marks House, center for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students, 2005-2006

Served as community liaison, helping to spearhead initiative to make the community center more accessible and relevant to LGBT students of color.
Managed Mount Holyoke College student staff of six, work schedules and timesheets.

Editorial Intern

Shelterforce magazine of the National Housing Institute, Montclair, New Jersey, Summer 2005

Edited and researched articles on affordable housing, community development, and homelessness.

Editorial Intern

Off Our Backs News Journal, Washington, D.C., Summer 2004

Wrote music reviews and news summaries on global women’s issues, and designed layout pages.

Education and Awards

Bachelor of Arts, Mount Holyoke College, May 2007
American Studies with a concentration in ethnic and gender studies

Gold Medal for Public Service, “Losing the Fight” series, Division C, Florida Society of Newspaper Editors, 2009
First Place, Feature writing, “Losing the Fight” series, Division C, Florida Society of Newspaper Editors, 2009
New York Times Chairman’s Award, “Broken Silence” series and multimedia project, November 2009
New York Times Chairman’s Award, “Losing the Fight” series and multimedia project, August 2008

Susan Jones Prize for extraordinary commitment to social justice, Mount Holyoke College, 2007
Sydney J. McLean Short Story Prize, Mount Holyoke College, 2006

Winner of the 2009 Sigma Delta Chi award for non-deadline reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists and a New York Times Chairman’s award.

Young Woman Finds Courage to Speak Out on Abuse
By Shoshana Walter
The Ledger
Nov. 14, 2009

Cathy spent all day cleaning the house. She vacuumed the carpets, dusted the stereo and prepared a nice meal. She put Marika, the tomboy, in a dress. Downstairs, she hung banners: “Welcome home.”

Marika knew who was coming.

Once a month, for three years, her mother had taken her and her brother to the prison where Jimmy lived. They’d walk past the barbed wire, watch Cathy get patted down in security, and meet him outside in a courtyard littered with men in light-blue uniforms, sharing smiles and scowls and cigarettes. He called himself Daddy. Marika knew he wasn’t Daddy, although she wasn’t sure who or where Daddy was.

Back at home, it was just Marika, her mom and brother.

Jimmy wrote love letters to Cathy, they married, but he remained behind prison walls.

Then in July 1997, he moved in.

He walked through the door of their Lakeland apartment, towering and lean and smiling, no longer dressed in blue.

“Who are you?” she wondered.

His name was Jimmy Lee Wheeler.

She was 8 then. Now she’s 20, and Jimmy, now 54 years old, is in the Polk County Jail on two counts of child sexual battery, after authorities say he molested Marika Gainer 11 years ago.

“At first, he would just, like, come into my room or whatever and sit on my bed and talk to me,” Marika recalls.

Then he started doing more. “He would tell me, like, ‘I’m your dad’ and you know, ‘You’re supposed to love your dad’ and, ‘What we do is not bad, and one day we’ll be able to do more things together.’”

For a year, Marika says she kept silent as the talks escalated into caresses. Then pornography. Then oral sex and mutual masturbation.

While Cathy worked two jobs to pay the bills, Jimmy became an “instant baby-sitter,” Marika recalls. Then one day, Marika blurted out the secret to a friend.

The friend told her grandmother, who told the friend’s mother, who told police. Marika changed some of her story, and without enough evidence, the case languished in the State Attorney’s Office.

Today, as he did then, Jimmy denies the allegations. He’s told police and The Ledger that Marika lied about the abuse because he refused to give in to her every whim.

Conflicting stories are common in child molestation cases, when prosecutors frequently lack witnesses and physical evidence of alleged abuse.

There are challenges for the defense, too.

Jimmy says he’s innocent. But he faces many obstacles in trying to prove that, in part because of his lengthy criminal history.

With their inherent problems, many child sexual abuse cases are never prosecuted.

But last year, police say they heard from another girl, one with a similar story about Jimmy. Lauren, now 9, is the granddaughter of another of Jimmy’s former flames, Sandra.

Faced with a new case, police sought out Marika. Would she help them?

For 10 years, she and her mother had tried hard to forget about Jimmy Lee Wheeler.

They moved on from a domestic violence shelter to new lives, and like so many others, stayed silent.

Studies estimate 1-in-4 women and 1-in-6 men in the United States were sexually molested as children. But those who study molestation agree we’ll never know the exact numbers because most children never tell.

Sexual abuse is a crime of shame, complicated by the fact that most victims know their abusers. Studies show almost 70 percent of molesters abuse children within their families. Counselors and psychiatrists say children hide it because they feel they’ve done something wrong or because they’re taught to stay quiet.

And when caregivers learn about the abuse, they often refuse to believe or confront it. They, too, stay silent.

Victims rarely confront their abusers.

But Marika broke her silence.

And police say she did something more, something remarkable, something that made their case against Jimmy Wheeler. Because of that, he now faces charges in both girls’ cases.

Prosecutors will use the tool she gave them to try and convict Jimmy, who faces another battle in the courtroom, another fight for his freedom.

This time, Jimmy insists, he’s innocent. And this time, losing could mean spending the rest of his life in prison.

Now that the silence has been broken, it’ll be up to the courts to decide who is telling the truth. His trial was to start Monday, but Friday it was delayed.

Here, based on police reports and Ledger interviews of all the parties involved, is the story behind the case.

‘I GOT A SECRET TO TELL YOU’

The spur for Marika’s act was another girl, a knobby-kneed, wild-haired 8-year-old.

Lauren and her three young siblings were living in Michigan in late spring 2008, when their mother checked into a mental health facility, and Sandra, their grandmother, took them in.

They moved to Lakeland, where Sandra thought she could get help from Jimmy, her ex, and his mother.

Instead, in September 2008, 8-year-old Lauren told Sandra that Jimmy had touched her.

And Sandra believed her.

After all, she’d been burned by Jimmy herself.

The 48-year-old had met Jimmy in 1985 while he was serving time in prison with her brother for armed robbery.

Because Jimmy knew family, Sandra trusted him and responded to his letters. They fell in love while he was still behind bars. But it didn’t take long for her to realize he had a problem with control.

One minute he’d make her feel like the most beautiful woman on earth. “He could make you feel like you could do anything, like you were invincible,” she’d later say. The next, he was tearing her down, demanding to know where she was going, what she was doing, who she was going to see. She began to feel trapped.

When she finally worked up the nerve to break it off, he escaped from his Brandon jail work camp and threatened to kill her if she didn’t drive them both to her Michigan home. The 1987 escape charge added a year to his prison sentence.

Things had never worked out with Jimmy, but Sandra found a parental figure in Jimmy’s mother, Ruby Pyles, whom she called “Momma.” Growing up in Saginaw, Mich., Sandra and her brother never really had a relationship with their parents. Their mother, a white woman, left them at an early age to raise a family with a white man. Their black father lived in the same town, but they hardly ever saw him.

Even when Sandra and Jimmy didn’t talk, she and Ruby did.

The two women were in contact in early 2008 when Sandra began to receive letters again from Jimmy, who was back in prison for driving without a license.

The messages were the same as Sandra remembered. Back then, she’d craved “Diamond Jim’s” promises of love and devotion, the fluid, cursive strokes of his practiced pen.

But she was a changed woman now, she wrote to him. She was older and wiser and couldn’t be pushed around.

Jimmy wrote back. He’d changed, too, he said. He offered her respect. So in June 2008, she moved back to Lakeland to live with him and his mother, hoping for help with the handful of kids.

It wasn’t what she imagined.

Ruby liked things her way. She liked her house quiet. She liked it clean. She’d worked as a nanny for a prominent Lakeland family and had inherited antiques. More than 20 years later, Ruby still hadn’t removed the price tag from her sprawling Persian rug.

Sandra’s kids picked off tile in the bathroom, streaked the walls with their dirty fingers and feet. The electric bill went through the roof.

Ruby couldn’t understand why Lauren already knew how to curse. Why the TV was always on. Why Sandra was always screaming for quiet, and why, if Sandra took so many painkillers for her back condition, she always insisted on laying down. And then the children were always left to their own devices, tearing down the halls of Ruby’s little home at all hours of the day and night.

The situation grew more and more tense, until late one night, when without warning, Sandra and the children left.

It was about 10 p.m. on Sept. 22, 2008, already way past bedtime, when Sandra finally got the kids out of the tub.

The three youngest were in their bedroom, pajamas slung onto their lively little bodies. They watched television while Lauren, the oldest, remained inside the pale-yellow bathroom, wrapped in a towel, as Sandra eased into the water. The 8-year-old was unusually still.

“Sugar Mama,” Sandra recalls she said. “I got a secret to tell you.”

The night before, Jimmy had done something bad, she told Sandra.

Thirsty, she had climbed out of bed and wandered into the living room, where Jimmy was watching TV on Ruby’s red jacquard-print couch.

Jimmy later told Sandra and investigators that he got Lauren a drink and sent her to bed.

But Lauren told a different story: Jimmy explained to her how to have sex, took his penis out of his boxers and rubbed himself over her bare skin. They had oral sex. She told investigators it tasted nasty.

If she told anyone, he warned, she would get in big trouble.

Sandra clutched Lauren’s hand and crept out of the bathroom. Ruby was in bed, Jimmy in the living room. She waited until he got into the shower before she grabbed the four kids, barefoot and in pajamas, and fled the house, hurling the children into Jimmy’s car and speeding out of the dark and quiet neighborhood.

She flagged down a deputy and took Lauren to Lakeland Regional Medical Center. They called Lakeland police.

Back at Ruby’s house, Jimmy emerged from the bathroom. His mother cracked open her bedroom door. Silence.

“Jimmy Lee,” she recalls saying. “Where’d Sandra and them kids go?”

Sandra and the children were gone, and they’d left everything, even their shoes. Jimmy and his mother walked to the window and peered at the driveway. Jimmy’s Nissan Maxima was missing.

Sandra had talked about wanting her own place for a while. She’d even told Jimmy, in confidence, that she wanted to move to a shelter because she didn’t like the way Ruby treated the children. She’ll be able to afford a new place more quickly if she goes through the system, Jimmy recalled Sandra said. Jimmy explained this to his mother.

But why did she have to leave so abruptly? Why didn’t she say goodbye? Why did she steal his car?

The more Ruby thought about it, the angrier she got. Once they found Sandra, they decided, they’d call police.

Meanwhile, Sandra and the kids left the hospital for a domestic violence shelter. Members of the child protection team interviewed Lauren, and she used dolls to show what she said was done to her.

Finally, the complaint against Jimmy made its way to Detective Michele Newsome’s desk.

As with so many other sexual abuse cases, the hospital exams revealed no physical evidence of what Lauren said had occurred. Newsome faced the task of proving the allegations without evidence, a witness or a confession.

She’d seen this before. Newsome had worked countless cases since joining the Crimes Against Children Unit at LPD about 10 years ago. She’d worked on the unit longer than anyone. And she, too, had been a victim of child sexual abuse.

Newsome looked up Jimmy’s record and began pulling reports. That’s when she realized why the case seemed familiar. She’d been there, in the interview room when Jimmy denied Marika’s accusations 10 years ago.

There were so many similarities. Back then, Marika had been only one year older than Lauren. Both cases involved oral sex. Neither showed physical evidence of the abuse. And both of their caregivers had met Jimmy while he was in prison.

“Where’s Marika now?” Newsome wondered. She’d soon find out.

SILVER-TONGUED ‘DIAMOND JIM’

Marika’s mother Cathy was 38 years old when she met Jimmy Wheeler in 1995. An auburn-haired, slim, single, working mother of two, she’d been married and divorced once. She wasn’t looking for anything, especially not what she’d had.

She was tired of failed relationships. Back in Central Europe where she grew up, Cathy met an American soldier and left everything to marry him in Florida. A year later, they divorced.

And there was the man she met in a Panama City nightclub who fathered her two children but refused to commit to love or financial support.

Like Sandra, Cathy didn’t want more sweet-talking. She didn’t want sex. She certainly didn’t want someone who made promises he couldn’t keep.

She received and discarded letters from two other inmates before the nine pages from “Diamond Jim” arrived in the mail in March 1995.

“Cathy, I realize the facts! I accept and fully understand that a beautiful woman like yourself may very well have others involvement. … I only wish to become apart of you and your world, let us grow mentally and emotionally in the heart and mind; then bring to one complete fulfillment, as an orgasm of total love! One that we both are able to feel, although we are not touching.”

Cathy was skeptical. Jimmy said he was in prison with a guy she’d met once or twice – a friend’s ex. They hardly knew each other, even though Jimmy said the other inmate had told him all about her, even showed him a photograph. She assumed that’s why the other prisoners had written to her as well.

But Jimmy’s letter seemed different. She decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. She responded.

That would become “the mistake of my life,” Cathy says.

Soon they were writing and talking on the phone several times a day.

Two months into their courtship, Jimmy nicknamed her “Mrs. Wheeler.”

“Mrs. Wheeler. I like the sound of that,” she wrote.

They hadn’t yet met.

From the outset, Jimmy seemed so sure about Cathy. He made her feel special. His letters were frequent and elaborate – at one point, 53 pages long. He envisioned a happy future filled with family dinners, walks in the park, teaching “our” kids right from wrong.

He asked her to believe in this vision, and she did. Their letters became a campaign of faith and patience and hope, devoted to preparing for the day they could finally be together.

Yes, the loneliness and the preparation are hard, he told her, but it’ll be worth it: “Believe in yours, us and ours,” he wrote in every letter, signing the outside of every envelope with “L.L.L.” for “Listen, Learn and Love.”

The fantasy was so splendid, the dream so comforting, that Cathy did not think too much about the warning signs.

Jimmy shared a dream he had about her being unfaithful and challenged her to come clean. He told her to stop trusting other people and sent her newspaper clippings about dangerous criminals as proof. He said there’d be changes once he “came home.” He gave the kids different names. He sent her lottery numbers. She sent him money.

They worked to overcome each problem, for the sake of their future together.

When he got out, he wrote, they could finally be a family.

DETECTIVES HIT THE JACKPOT

It was a cool afternoon in October 2008 when Detective Newsome went to the Winter Haven home where Marika, now a gangly 19-year-old, was baby-sitting.

She invited Marika to sit in the front seat of the police car while Detective Richard Rose moved into the back. Newsome told her she wanted to talk about the 1998 case, but she didn’t bring a copy of the police report. She wanted to see if Marika’s story would stay the same.

It was the same. Except there was more.

She and her mom had been scared of Jimmy back then, Marika said without hesitation. In the police report, Marika had said Jimmy made her watch pornography, touched her under her shirt and over her underwear.

But she hadn’t told police everything he did.

Like how he’d tell her to lie down and take off her shirt. Tell her she’d have nice breasts, one day, and that he’d be able to touch them. He’d tell her to take off her pants so he could look at her privates. Tell her to perform oral sex. Tell her to stand up and undress and masturbate while he touched himself. If Marika didn’t know what to do, he’d take her into her mother’s bedroom and put on a porn video. She never said no.

“In my mind, it felt good, ’cause I didn’t know it was supposed to feel bad. … He made it sound like it was OK, like I was supposed to say yes.”

The more time passed, the more routine it felt.

Cathy was working two jobs as a cashier and a school bus driver, so she was hardly home. Marika’s brother was usually outside playing with friends. That left Marika and Jimmy in the Lakeland apartment alone.

“That’s what adults do, and that’s what we can do together. That’s not a bad thing for us to do that,” she said he’d say. At the same time, he told her not to tell anyone.

Marika kept silent, while Cathy felt trapped in problems of her own.

Jimmy was not the man she thought she’d married. He didn’t work or pay the bills. Even while he was in prison, she’d noticed Jimmy’s penchant for gambling, but she didn’t realize how far he’d go. He stole money from her purse. He enjoyed taking drugs and sometimes came home high. But his possessiveness was the worst.

He required her to run all decisions by him, even trips to the grocery store. On one occasion, Cathy received a call for a job interview. Jimmy heard the man’s voice and insisted on listening in.

Cathy feared for her safety. One time, he slapped her so hard, her nose bled. Another time, she said, he pulled out the gun she kept in the house for protection, pointed it in her face and threatened to shoot her. The next day, she gave the gun to police.

The alleged sexual abuse went on for about a year before that day Marika blurted her secret to a neighborhood friend during a conversation about boys.

Marika’s friend knew what she described was wrong. She told her grandmother, who told the friend’s mother. Her friend’s mother called Marika into her room.

“Is this true?” she asked.

Marika was dumbfounded.

“I can’t tell anyone that he does that, ’cause I’m gonna get in trouble,” Marika remembered thinking. “But they know something, so I gotta tell them something.”

She told her friend’s mother some details, but not others. And when they finally called 9-1-1, she did the same with the police.

“I didn’t want to hurt anybody or anybody to get in trouble. I felt like it was my fault, like dang, I messed up real big. … That is why the report is how it is, ’cause I bit my tongue. I didn’t tell how it was, for real, ’cause I was manipulated to not tell.”

Police arrived, and the state Department of Children and Families got involved. Cathy cooperated with authorities and turned over Jimmy’s porn collection. Jimmy denied everything. Then he got angry. A judge granted Cathy an injunction for protection against domestic violence.

But Jimmy didn’t stay away.

He insisted he was innocent and said Marika had made up the story to get back at him for not letting her take a stereo outside. She’d learned the bad words from some of the “fast girls” in the neighborhood.

“He would go to the parking lot, and my mom would go out to talk to him. I was like, ‘Why is my mom going out to talk to this guy if he did something bad to me?’ I never understood that,” Marika recalled.

Cathy never told her why.

“It’s like … when an animal attacks another animal, sometimes the animal pretends to be something it’s not to protect itself,” Cathy said. “I had to make him (Jimmy) think like I believed what he said to keep us safe.”

Cathy feared that if she called authorities, Jimmy would hurt her and the kids. And what if they took Marika and her son away? She couldn’t bear the thought.

Then one day Jimmy came into the apartment and walked upstairs while Cathy was napping on the couch.

Cathy stirred awake and followed. She found him in Marika’s bedroom, caressing the 8-year-old’s thigh.

“How could you do that? How could you touch her? Why do you touch her like that?” Marika recalled her mother screaming. “She freaked out, and they had a big fight.”

Jimmy denied everything. “I was just waking her up,” he said.

Soon afterward, Cathy packed as much as she could, woke up the kids and declared it “moving day.” They went to a shelter for battered women, and Cathy never saw her husband again. After about two years, they moved into their own house in the Inwood area of Winter Haven.

Jimmy later sent a letter to her P.O. Box address. She didn’t write back.

MARIKA CONFRONTS JIMMY

In 2008, Detective Newsome had found the perfect victim in Marika.

She was unabashedly street smart, unafraid to talk about the abuse. And she was prepared to do whatever it took to make things right.

Even though he and Newsome had talked, Jimmy still had no clue he was under investigation. He thought police were investigating Sandra for stealing his car. After she fled, he and his mother tracked her down at a shelter and called law enforcement. A Lakeland police officer escorted Sandra to Ruby’s house, and she returned the car. She and Jimmy did not speak.

He and Sandra had talked twice since then about Lauren’s allegations. He didn’t know their conversations had been recorded at the police station. Newsome hoped Sandra would be able to get Jimmy to confess. When he didn’t, she tried something different.

On Oct. 22, 2008, the detective introduced Marika to Sandra, took the two into Detective Brian Wallace’s office and shut the door.

Police transcripts show what happened next: As Marika sat beside her, Sandra called Jimmy and told him she knew about the girl he was accused of molesting in 1998. In fact, she had tracked her down and talked to her. Her story was the same as Lauren’s, she said. Are they both lying?

Yes, Jimmy said.

Marika got on the phone.

“I’m far from stupid,” she said.

“Nobody said you were stupid, Marika.”

“You’re callin’ me stupid. My name isn’t stupid. My name is Marika. Get it straight.”

“‘Get it straight?’” Jimmy laughed. “Put Sandra back on the phone.”

“Uh, no. Not really. How you gonna call me a liar?”

Police recorded it all. Jimmy denied everything. He told her she had a faulty memory. Then he began apologizing. “If you feel like I did somethin’ to you that was wrong, then I apologize,” he said.

Marika was unforgiving.

“You know what you did to me was messed up and you … well, you can’t even be a man to apologize and admit you’re wrong. You’re just gonna automatically just tell everybody that I’m a liar. You can’t just apologize and say, ‘Oh, Marika, you was a young girl. What I did was wrong. I did not mean to touch you there. I don’t know why I did it.’ You know? You cannot be a man? I mean, how old are you now? You can’t even admit after all these years that, ‘Yeah, I did that to you.’ That’s messed up.

“I don’t know if you touched this young girl or not. But, I know what happened to me was real. I know that I did not fantasize you rubbing your penis against my vagina or me going down on you. I remember the day that my brother went to the hospital; he fell at the store. You came and picked me up from my friend’s house, and you said that I had to go to the hospital, and my brother got stitches in his legs. On the way to the hospital I gave you oral. So, I don’t remember that?

“And my brother got stitches in his leg, and he has a scar there. That scar is forever, just like the scar you left on me will be forever. My sex life will never be the same. I will never be able to enjoy my sex life with my husband or whoever I settle down with in life because of what you done to me, and I have to live with that. Maybe you can forget it, maybe you can deny it, but me, Marika Gainer, I have to remember that for the rest of my life.”

Jimmy grew restless. He’d talk to her, he said, but not on the phone.

“If I go there in person are you gonna admit to it in my face that you touched me and what I’m sayin’ is true? … Because I’m not just gonna waste my time goin’ over there to talk to you for nothin.’”

“We’ll talk when you get here.”

“No, but I’m askin’ you a question. Will you admit to it?”

“We’ll talk when you get here, Marika, okay? We’ll talk. I’ll be honest with you.”

“So, it means you’re gonna tell me the truth? You’re gonna admit to what you’ve done?”

“I’ll be honest with you, and we’ll talk. OK? And that’s all I’m sayin’ right now. I got … I really do have to go. Is Sandra still on the line? Is she there or what? Because I need to holler at her before I leave.”

“She’s gone.”

“She’s gone?”

“Yep.”

“Okay, when you comin’? So I know to be home.”

“Tomorrow, I’m gonna contact you.”

“OK.”

“OK.”

“Alright,” Jimmy said. “Nice talkin’ to ya.”

Click.

On this site you’ll find links to my favorite stories, samples of my multimedia work, plus a pot of gold, your lost socks and the planet Krypton. I promise, that’s all here. You’ve just gotta read through everything, OK?

Links to stories are below. Most were published in The Ledger, a New York Times Company-owned daily newspaper in Lakeland, Fla. For photos and other multimedia work, click on the category in the drop-down menu above.

Projects completed amid daily deadlines:

Losing the Fight, A1, August 10-12, 2008
Three-part narrative and multimedia series about an after-school fight turned fatal. Awarded a New York Times Chairman’s Award and the 2009 Gold Medal for Public Service from the Florida Society of News Editors.

Broken Silence, A1, Nov. 14-15, 2009
A two-part narrative and multimedia series about a child sex abuse victim whose courage led to the arrest of her alleged abuser, and to justice for three others. Awarded the 2009 Sigma Delta Chi award for non-deadline reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists and a New York Times Chairman’s Award.

Daily stories:

Monkeys’ Escape Surprises Experts, B1, April 23, 2008
It’s a tongue-twister and a mind-bender: The pack of 15 Patas primates procured from Puerto Rico were not supposed to be able to swim. A breaking news story with color.

Twister Spins Hair-Raising Tales, B1, August 24, 2008
What happens when a tornado pays a brief visit to a mobile home park? A short but sweet story with vivid descriptions and colorful quotes.

Slaying Shocks Suspect’s Family, B1, June 18, 2009
A local rapper charged with murder in his girlfriend’s death. A thorough story, despite limited police information, with pictures and multimedia assembled on deadline.

Suspect Named in Woman’s Disappearance, A1, December 10, 2008

James Bain Freed After DNA Evidence Clears Him, A1, December 17, 2009
James Bain walked quietly across the carpeted floor of courtroom 9a Thursday morning, beaming at family and friends who erupted into applause.

Sum Whiz Kids: Daniel Jenkins Academy Wins Mathcounts Competition, B1, February 17, 2008

Two Women Escape Fire, Lose Home, B1, March 2, 2008
In less than 10 minutes, Myra Shelton, 75, almost lost her life’s work. A breaking news story that incorporated narrative elements. I took photos, video and continued to follow Shelton, writing a number of stories about her experience after the fire.

Features and enterprise:

From the Ashes Rise Generosity, Charity, A1, September 22, 2008

Prisoners Pay to Stay, A1, August 22, 2009

Residency Rule for Sex Offenders Under Scrutiny, A1, December 3, 2009
The county’s ordinance presents challenges the community must address.

Personal essays:

Girlhood Dreams Return Because of ‘Endure’ Star, May 6, 2009
A column explaining why girls go gaga over teen idols. Part sociology, part slightly embarassing personal experience.

The Poynter Summer Fellowship for Young Journalists | St. Petersburg, Fla.

A Gallery of Memory, June 23, 2007
A profile of a woman who claims to know nothing about art, even though its her business.

In Pageant’s Glow, Ushers Reflect on Glamour, July 10, 2007
A story about the 2007 Miss Florida pageant from a unique angle — through the eyes of the elderly women ushers of the Mahaffey Theater.

Pat Burgess, the owner of Salt Creek Artworks, doesn’t have a favorite painter.

She likes Cezanne, whose home she saw on a group tour of France earlier this year. She likes that other impressionist painter who cut his ear off. She is 68 years old. She likes what she likes and she doesn’t know what that is.

“I have no clue about art,” says Burgess, walking through her gallery. “Maybe it’s the expression of the face or the eyes. The sadness. Maybe I can relate.”

Burgess walks in small, slow steps. The current show is by a long-time Salt Creek artist. Every once in a while, when her vision blurs or her eyes itch, she removes her glasses and rubs her eyes. She likes his paintings, the flamboyant colors, but she can’t afford them.

Burgess inherited Salt Creek Artworks when her parents, Dorothy and Azell Prince, died nearly two years ago. Since then she has taken on all the responsibilities of running a full-time business, without much guidance.

Like her father, Burgess never knew much about art.

The Prince family turned the former maritime factory, which was then a furniture store, into an arts complex 14 years ago. It was not their idea. They never planned to run it themselves. But after a business partnership fell through and zoning regulations prevented them from changing their plans, the Princes decided to give it a try.

Azell Prince was most involved from the beginning. The last-known living employee of Thomas Edison, Azell spent most of his life performing clerical work, said his daughter. Burgess grew close to her father after her two brothers went to military school. She was there to help Azell when he began work on Salt Creek in 1993 at 78 years of age.

Azell quickly befriended the first artists to rent studio space and enlisted their help. Together they ripped up dirty carpets, installed tiles and built studio walls. A contractor repaired the plumbing and electricity. Azell himself installed track lights and painted the galleries. The space was his, but he gave artistic ownership to his tenants.

“He didn’t know anything about art. If it was up to him it would have been seagulls and beach scenes,” said Lance Rodgers, a painter and Azell’s appointed curator. “One of the things I loved about Azell is that he gave us space, he gave us freedom.”

After retirement, Azell was left with free time on his hands and looked to Salt Creek for friendships. Dorothy had begun to develop Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes and lose her eyesight. Burgess knew her father liked spending time away.

“To be perfectly frank, I think he liked being around the people,” Burgess said. “My mother was not well.”

In February 2005, after weeks in the hospital, Dorothy moved permanently into her daughter’s home. By then Azell was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Both he and Dorothy became bedridden. Burgess pushed Azell’s and Dorothy’s beds together, their heads on opposite ends, so that Azell could watch his wife as she died. They were there for months, until June, when Dorothy passed away.

Three months later, he was gone too.

“I know it’s crazy to be so attached to your parents,” said Burgess. “But I had to take care of them and watch them die. And that was horrible.”

Now Burgess lives alone. In the past, Burgess and her parents drove from St. Petersburg to New Hampshire to escape the Florida summer sun. Burgess no longer makes the trip. She has work to do. She has to send out mailings, meet with tenants and pay the bills.

“So far the building is paying for itself,” said Burgess, a former real estate agent. She now relies on Social Security benefits and a small paycheck from Salt Creek to get by. “We have never made a profit.”

There are 42 studios at Salt Creek and currently eight vacancies, although sometimes Burgess has trouble keeping track of the exact number.

“It gets so that you know some people better than others,” she said. “And then they get behind in their rent, and then collecting rent gets to be a real obstacle.”

Sometimes tenants leave their spaces without any notice. Sometimes they hang on without paying. Despite the bad track record, Burgess does not have a process for selecting renters, except for one stipulation — she has to like them.

If they say they can pay the rent, that’s good enough for her. She does not always like the art, but she never censors the artists.

“Lance did some of this radical stuff, with flags and skulls and bare boobs,” Burgess said. “I didn’t understand any of it.” Still, Burgess trusts Rodgers, who curates all of the gallery’s shows. The economy is hard on artists, she said. She understands.

On Friday morning, despite “bum knees,” Burgess makes the trek up the stairs to show a studio to a potential tenant — a woman from England who describes herself as a “starving artist.”

Burgess unlocks the door and peers inside. “This stuff was supposed to be out a while ago,” she says, to a roomful of boxes and bags. The artist is silent.

“Oh, well. I don’t care. I’m easy to get along with,” Burgess says.

She closes the door and walks around the corner to another empty room, this one occupied by cobwebs. The artist decides to take it. Back downstairs, Burgess sits beneath a portrait of her father, painted over 30 years ago.

“One of the things that keeps me going is him,” she said. “Daddy. And what this meant to him. Because he loved it. Neither of us knew he’d love it so much.”

Burgess is not crazy about the painting. Maybe it’s because the artist cut out her mother from the picture. Maybe it doesn’t have enough color.

Or maybe this time, as her voice breaks, it’s not about the art.

March 7, 2009. For blog post about a fatal pedestrian crash. The man's shoe lies in grass alongside the road.

March 14, 2009. For a story localizing the tobacco tax.

March 14, 2009. For a story localizing tobacco tax.

Jan. 16, 2008. For an article about a rider arrested for stunting on Interstate 4.

More images coming soon.

Ever since “Endure” began filming three weeks ago, something strange has happened to the young women of Lakeland.

We giggle. We blush. We fantasize.

Why? Because Devon Sawa, one of the film’s stars, is in town. Our town. Sawa is 30, but when I was 13, he was the adolescent man of my dreams. He was for a lot of girls, who watched his movies, tacked up his posters, savored his interviews in magazines.

The phenomenon was not dissimilar, I’ve heard, to Elvis. The Beatles. To Scott Baio or John Stamos or Judd Nelson, the other star of “Endure.”

Here’s the thing: On the surface, teen adulation is superficial. Jonas Brothers posters are eye candy. Interviews detailing Zac Efron’s favorite foods, quotes or makeup brands don’t reveal anything about his actual character.

But for girls in the midst of adolescence, teen adulation is an outlet to explore their growth and sexuality in the safe company of other girls.

This isn’t necessarily a natural development. Sexuality is a touchy topic for girls and their parents, especially in adolescence when girls are struck by the sudden appearance of menstrual cycles, growing breasts and bodies and the reactions of others to those changes. Adolescence comes with a whole new set of expectations.

Parents are more likely to shelter girls than boys from bad influences, more likely to tell girls to be aware of their bodies, to protect themselves from predators and sex. Don’t stay out too late, they’re told. Don’t wear that shirt, it’s too small. No, you cannot go to that concert without a chaperone. No, you cannot get a belly-button ring.

Boys are typically free to roam and get involved in physical activities while girls in adolescence often become withdrawn, relegated to more private, rather than public, realms.

Enter the teen idol. Slapped onto walls, smiling on posters, he’s cute, he’s a boy and he’s safe, even when he’s overtly sexual.

The Backstreet Boys’ debut album featured the song “If you want it to be good girl, get yourself a bad boy.” Yet, Nick Carter, the other blonde of my dreams, was 12 years old when he joined the group and about 15 or 16 years old at the time of the song’s release. The youngest member of the Backstreet Boys, he was also the most popular.

Why? Because teen idols never reject, never threaten. Their poster smiles never fade. Their interests, culled from countless Q&As, match yours. Candid facts humanize them. They understand you.

So do other girls. The obsession helps facilitate friendships, and the most obsessed put their infatuation to good use.

When I was 13, statistics showed girls far outnumbered boys on the World Wide Web. Girls online used their teenybopper interests to meet other girls, write fan articles and fiction, create Web sites and e-mail newsletters. Their obsession spurred creativity.

I always get annoyed when music and film critics, most often male, dismiss teenyboppers as mindless masses. Yes, teenybopper culture is fueled by consumerism, not a very authenticating art. But dismissing girl culture is like dismissing girls themselves. Those critics are missing something.

It’s not about the talent. It’s not about the music. Though they helped feed my obsession, my love of Devon Sawa was never about his movies.

It was about me, at age 13.

Slumber party, anyone?

Note: The first installment of the three-part series is posted below. To read the next two stories, please go to www.theledger.com/losingthefight.

LAKELAND | The knife went in easy, deeper than Tarrod Russell expected.

He pulled it out and ran. Threw the knife, pumped his legs, flew through it all. The screaming kids, the school and the playground, the homes and trees and cars and bicycles.

Thirteen-year-old Kristian Marrero-Cassola staggered toward his home and collapsed on the ground, 10 feet from his apartment door. There was a towel, pressed against the wound. His 10-year-old brother and friends, calling his name.

An hour-and-a-half later, 14-year-old Tarrod was in handcuffs, charged with murder.

* * *

This Wednesday, Tarrod Russell will face a hard decision: accept 10.3 years in prison for manslaughter or go to trial on charges of second-degree murder.

What led him here, according to police, was another choice.

On Dec. 5, Tarrod and Kristian got into a fight after school.

The two classmates at Southwest Middle in Lakeland did not know much about each other.

It started with rumors and escalated into something more. Kristian thought Tarrod had stolen his belt. Tarrod thought Kristian wanted to jump him.

They’d never fought before, but their two groups of friends had problems.

The kids called it a race thing. Tarrod, who is black, hung out with black kids. Kristian, who was Cuban and had lived in the United States a little shy of two years, hung out with Hispanics.

Southwest Middle officials say it wasn’t a race thing. It was a kid thing, a pride thing, a turf thing. Fights are common in middle school.

Whatever the cause, the fight did not end well. A couple of minutes in, police say, Tarrod pulled a knife and stabbed Kristian once in the lower left side of his abdomen.

That turned the after-school brawl into something more serious: a murder case involving two youths that affected their families and their communities – the school, a church raising a generation of black youth, and Hispanic immigrants of Polk County.

Race thing or not, their story is a tale of two lives – one Cuban, the otherblack – and two lives lost.

One dead, the other behind bars.

* * *

Tarrod Russell never saw much of his parents.

Not long after he was born, his father, 19-year-old Johnny Russell, went to prison for manslaughter, where he would return three times more.

His mother, Jacquelyn Starks, a 21-year-old single mother with five other sons by three men, didn’t have a job and was raising the children on her own. When Tarrod was 11 months old, one of his half-brothers hit him in the eye with the metal buckle of a sandal.

At the time, Tarrod’s eye seemed OK, recalled Starks, whose nickname is Deedee and who now goes by her married name of Atkins. Besides, without a car or a license or money, where would she go? She didn’t take him to the doctor.

A few days later, Tarrod’s grandmother noticed his eye looked red and watery. She took him to the hospital, where she was told the eye was infected.

Doctors said they would not be able to save it. Tarrod’s right eye would go blind.

By then, Atkins was no longer with Johnny. She was pregnant with her seventh child, a daughter, Brittnay, by another father. And she had been charged with cocaine possession and driving without a license. The incident with Tarrod brought the Department of Children and Families to her door.

All six sons were taken out of Atkins’ care and placed into the arms of their paternal grandmothers. As Atkins battled drug-related charges, check fraud, evictions and other challenges, her boys were raised by four other women.

Tarrod went to Antoinette “Annette” Austin, Johnny Russell’s mother, and the court ordered Atkins to pay $33 a week in child support.

She didn’t always make it.

* * *

For the most part, Kristian Marrero-Cassola and his family led a happy life in Cuba, well-documented in photo albums, scrapbooks and pictures dotting the walls and surfaces of his mother’s Lakeland apartment.

In Quemado de Güines, Kristian and his younger half-brother Kenny lived with their mother Katia Cassola, a former third-grade teacher, and Kenny’s father, an ambulance driver.

But the family was poor. His mother knew there were other options.

A couple of her brothers had already traveled to the United States and found success – or at least, something better. In the United States, they could get anything they needed. In Cuba, even simple items, like toilet paper and toothpaste, were difficult to afford.

So Katia submitted herself and her two children in the visa lottery, the only way she knew she’d be able to get to the United States legally.

The two boys were not too sad about the thought of leaving home for a foreign place, Katia recalled. Other people had made this journey. They knew family awaited them in the United States, and they had each other.

On Jan. 5, 2005, Katia left the boys’ two fathers behind and brought Kenny and Kristian with her to the United States.

The three moved to Lakeland, where Katia’s brothers lived. Kristian entered sixth grade at Crystal Lake Middle School, and Kenny entered fourth. They were fluent only in Spanish.

Katia thought it would be difficult for her children to make the transition into life in the United States, and in some ways it was. The three moved so much that Kristian switched schools four times. Kenny had to repeat a grade. Kristian passed school but got into at least one fight. They were all babies, said Katia, learning how to walk and talk again. But the two boys grew quickly.

Kristian found comfort in numbers with friends from Cuba, Puerto Rico and Mexico. Together, they navigated their new culture and language while preserving a sense of their past.

“LWP,” for “Latin with pride,” decorated their MySpace profiles, and the same phrase was carved into Kristian’s left forearm, alongside the scarred carving of a winged “K.”

The boys talked in Spanish together. Kristian emulated his favorite reggaeton artists, who were all Puerto Rican. He’d shaved his head like Daddy Yankee and called himself “El Matatan,” loosely translated as “the Man,” after Wisin, one-half the reggaeton duo Wisin y Yandel. Even though he was Cuban, the music spoke to him. He rapped his own lyrics, and a friend posted videos on MySpace.

While Katia took low-paying jobs with long hours, leaving no time or need to learn English, Kristian and Kenny spoke and wrote in a language she could not understand.

She hated that she couldn’t help them with some of their homework. Sometimes they spoke English in the house, and she didn’t know what they were saying. Later, when hundreds of classmates sent letters written in English after Kristian’s death, she couldn’t read them.

For about two months before the fight, the three had been living in an apartment complex on Beacon Road, where most tenants spoke only Spanish. Many came and went, unable to afford the $450 per month rent.

Katia was working a $7.56-an-hour job at a ham-packing factory in Lakeland and could not be at home when her sons returned from school.

They were left to themselves.

* * *

Annette Austin loved Tarrod Russell, there was no doubt. But she was not well.

For Tarrod’s entire life, Austin had had an invisible illness. Congestive heart failure slowed her body, while inside, her heart labored overtime to pump enough blood through her organs.

But she still cooked a lot at home, drove a car and did chores. She was also active in church. While she was well, Tarrod went with her.

Tarrod liked church. He’d see his aunts and cousins there, hang out with friends and greet his old teachers from St. Luke’s Academy, where he had attended third and fourth grades. He was eager to please, better at math than spelling and aspired one day to run his own trucking company. He liked it when teachers asked him if he needed help. He never asked for it himself.

At the church, he’d sing in the choir and serve as an usher. But in recent years Austin’s health had worsened. She became less involved. As a result, so did Tarrod.

The family never had much money. A construction worker, Tarrod’s grandfather was usually working and hardly around. Because of her illness, Austin never worked.

She was always short of breath, tired, in and out of the hospital. Tarrod would help her out of bed or to her seat on the living room couch. Then he’d go outside to play basketball or hang out with friends, or he’d play video games on the TV in his room.

“How was school today, Tarrod?” she’d ask. “Good,” he’d reply. Sometimes, he said, he meant it.

For almost a year, the three, plus Tarrod’s older cousin Darryl Glass, had lived in a small, beige house on Windsor Street, right across from Southwest Middle School, where Tarrod attended seventh grade. It was much closer to school than any of the other places they’d lived, and was a few blocks away from a park; a convenience store; and even Tarrod’s 16-year-old cousin Jacari Glass, whom he’d met for the first time two years ago. And it was slightly bigger than their most recent place on Ariana Street. They’d been evicted from that apartment in February.

Ten years ago, mostly whites lived in the neighborhood, but that had begun to change. Black and Hispanic families populated the rentals and apartments. Southwest Middle drew from this area, reflecting big changes in the racial landscape of the county.

In 1990, there were 16,600 Hispanics living in Polk County, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2006, there were 81,646, an almost 400 percent increase. Blacks numbered 54,385 in 1990 and 76,978 in 2006, a 42 percent increase.

In this neighborhood, Tarrod and Kristian lived about a half-mile apart.

Beijing, 2009

Beijing, 2009

The Great Wall, 2009

The Great Wall, 2009

The Summer Palace, 2009

Tiananmen Square, 2009

The Great Wall, 2009.

Tiananmen Square, 2009.

The Great Wall, 2009.

The Miss Florida pageant is about to begin and friends and family of the 40 contestants pour through the doors of the Mahaffey Theater. They are decked out in dresses and jewels, suits and ties, perfume and hairspray.

Neither the tall lobby ceilings, the dark, reflective beams, nor the thick, gray carpet quell their voices. They are eager fans. They want to know how their “girls,” as many call the contestants, will measure up.

But most don’t notice the other unofficial judges in the crowd. The ones dressed in more sensible style: maroon vests over white button-down shirts, black pants, black bow ties and flat-soled shoes. Compared with the glitz and glamour of the pageant-goers and the girls themselves, these women are nearly undetectable.

They are the ushers of the Mahaffey Theater, a group of volunteers whose chance at a crown would have come many years ago. As they help fans find seats, they monitor the crowd and maintain a running commentary on the pageant.

For the most part, they have had little room for glamour in their lives.

Maryann Garbaciak is 65 years old and traveled frequently for her job. Dolores Smith, 80, was busy raising five kids. Olivia Beatty, 69, tried out for a pageant once, but that was a long, long time ago.

Stationed across the theater floor, the women observe each night of the four-day-long competition until its conclusion Saturday night with the crowning of Miss Florida.

“The best part of this is watching how they dress,” Garbaciak says as she takes tickets outside the theater doors. Her eyes, magnified through thick glasses that seem to blend into her skin, wander over the crowd. Some of the pageant-goers look as done-up as the girls on stage. She speaks in whispers.

“It’s just amazing,” she says. “I never saw so much makeup in my life.”

She used to travel across the country, teaching seminars on accounting practices. Now, like the majority of the volunteers, she is retired. She likes early nights, dance numbers and people-watching. Working the pageant gives her a lot of that.

Friday’s show is about to start. The doors to the theater open and Garbaciak and Beatty slip inside to help direct traffic as some of the 1,200 pageant-goers extract themselves from the lobby and line up.

When Miss America 1999 glides through the aisle in a red-sequined gown, Beatty leans over, whispering to Garbaciak: “I feel like we should gussy up our uniforms. We’re underdressed.” The black and maroon ushers uniforms are provided to them by the theater.

Beatty is a big fan of the pageant. Each night includes group choreography, three professional singers, six professional dancers, “witty” banter between the two hosts and a soundtrack for each of the segments. Beatty judges the talent competition as delightful. Most of the girls sing or dance. One or two recite a monologue or twirl a baton.

She has a different view of the interview competition. That’s when each contestant picks a question out of a fishbowl and answers on stage. The questions sometimes cause the crowd to snicker. Like this one:

“Who would you rather have as your roommate? Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton?”

Or:

“In the movie ‘Pirates of the Caribbean,’ Johnny Depp plays the ultimate bad boy, Captain Jack Sparrow. Is your type more of a bad boy or a Steady Eddie?”

Beatty tilts her head. “That’s a weird one,” she says. ” ‘Steady Eddie’?”

She never made it to this stage of competition. In 1959, when Beatty was 17, she attended an open audition for the Miss Pittsburgh pageant. Pageant officials lined up hundreds of girls, dressed only in swimsuits.

She was the first to be eliminated.

The swimsuit competition at the Mahaffey each night is tough for everyone involved. Aside from the music playing softly in the background, the theater is quiet as each contestant struts across the stage, turning and posing at all angles for 30 long seconds. The official judges inspect the girls’ suits closely to make sure their bodies are covered and decent.

Smith had already reached her judgment.

The swimsuit segment — now called “lifestyle and fitness in swimwear” — belittles the contestants and takes the focus off their intelligence, talent, and beauty, she says.

Smith is a small woman with small lips and a little bit of lipstick. She wears white earrings in the shape of miniature triangles. Since she began volunteering at Mahaffey 16 years ago, she has seen the girls’ swimsuits shrink steadily from modest one-pieces to belly-baring bikinis.

“I know it’s entertainment,” Smith says. “But you have this beautiful dress, so dramatic. And then you come out in a skimpy old bathing suit?”

Smith, too, has had a pageant experience. Her daughter Paula was a newspaper intern in 1971 when she was assigned a story on the Miss St. Petersburg pageant. To get behind the scenes, Paula reluctantly signed up for the competition.

“She didn’t think she had any business being one of the contestants,” Smith recalls. “She wasn’t prepared.”

Paula’s talent was synchronized swimming. Because there’s no swimming pool at the Mahaffey, pageant officials filmed her routine at the North Shore pool and ran the reel on a screen during the talent competition.

Paula lost.

Smith didn’t much care. The pageant girls are beautiful, talented and intelligent, she says. They even throw their support behind important causes, competing in the pageant with their own platforms.

Last year’s queen founded an organization called HOPE based on her platform, “Helping Other People Eat.” This year’s winner, Tallahassee’s Kylie Williams, chose “Realistic Support for Our Troops.”

Smith has done quite a lot, herself. Recently, she won a key to the city for her volunteer work, but not just for the pageant. She’s worked with Meals on Wheels and cancer patients. She raised her five children with a strict hand and grander ambitions.

“This was never my bag,” Smith says of pageants. “Too much froufrou business.”