We Are Called to Rise (26 page)

34

Avis

Coroner’s Inquest Rules Killing of Las Vegas Woman Justified

Las Vegas, Apr. 17—
Las Vegas Police Department officer Nathan Gisselberg was exonerated of all charges in the killing of Arjeta Ahmeti last month.

The Clark County Coroner’s Inquest ruled that the shooting was justified. The inquest met for six hours. The district attorney called seven witnesses to testify, and read a number of questions requested by the Ahmeti family’s lawyer. Attorneys for LVPD waved off questions after the proceedings.

Jeremy Price, president of the Las Vegas chapter of the ACLU, and Fatmire Bardici, of the Albanian Society of Clark County, expressed dismay at the ruling.

Since the inception of the coroner’s inquest system in 1976, only one shooting has ever been ruled unjustified, and in that case, it was the number of bullets released in a residential neighborhood that elicited the ruling, not the death of the victim.

I’VE HANDLED THE CLIPPING SO
many times that the paper has slight, sweaty finger marks. I was there, of course, at the inquest. With Lauren and Jim and Rodney and Corey Stout’s wife. Darcy didn’t come. That was good. And, of course, there were the photographers and the reporters, the cameramen, and the head of the ACLU, someone from Catholic Refugee Services, a few Albanians, a local imam, a steel-haired woman whom I later saw identified as the principal of Bashkim Ahmeti’s school.

Nate and Mr. Ahmeti sat at separate tables, each with an attorney. Several people, lawyers I suppose, sat at the district attorney’s table, just in front of the judge. Nate had a lawyer, but the DA was as good as his lawyer. Mr. Ahmeti was older than I expected him to be, old to have such young children. His hair was gray; it wound into long curls at his neck. He wore, even for this formal process, a shapeless old sweater, and wool pants with a pale herringbone texture, and shoes that looked like he had owned them his entire adult life.

I could barely stand to see him sitting there. Old and odd and poor. Like someone who would go to all the city council meetings and speak. He kept glancing behind him nervously. When the door swung shut, he jerked, and his chair scraped loudly across the wooden floor. Nate sat perfectly still. He never looked around. His back was massive by comparison.

I wondered what the old man was thinking. There was no chance that the shooting would be ruled anything but justified. Certainly not a decorated Iraqi vet, a local kid, with a father that lots of people knew. If the inquest ruled the shooting a criminal act, the DA could, and would, choose not to prosecute. Everybody knew that. We all knew that. Maybe Sadik Ahmeti didn’t know that.

Nate testified. Corey testified. The officers who were called in and who had pulled up just as the shooting happened testified. They each described a woman who was irate and out of control. At one point, she had her son by the neck. She was yelling that it would be better if she and her children were dead. She called for Allah. She reached in her pocket and pulled out a long silver object. Nate was thinking of the boy. He knew it would take less than an instant to slit the boy’s throat, if the object had been a knife, if the woman were as crazy as she seemed. She was calling to Allah, saying she and her children would be better off dead.

One witness—who looked terrified through the whole thing—said that she didn’t see the ice-cream scoop or the knife. She said the mother sounded frightened. That the mother looked like she was protecting her son from the police. That the officer took out his gun, and the mother was afraid.

Sadik Ahmeti and his attorney kept consulting. They submitted questions on yellow cards, furiously writing them as each witness spoke. The DA read each question to himself, and then set card after card on the table, without saying what was on the card, without asking any question. He did read one. He asked the frightened bystander, “Why did you think she was protecting her son?” The bystander said, “Because she is a mother. That’s what mothers do.” She seemed not to realize that this answer had no impact, that it did nothing to suggest that Arjeta Ahmeti was acting rationally. She seemed pleased to have said something on the victim’s behalf.

There was a tense moment. Another bystander, a man, much more confident, said that he heard Corey Stout asking Nate, “Why did you do that?” and “What knife?” It was damning, the way he put this information out there. He wasn’t nervous, that witness, and he didn’t try too hard to be convincing. He simply said what he heard, loudly and clearly. I saw Nate scribble something on a yellow card, give it to his attorney. But his attorney did not give it to the DA.

There was a rustle in the room; Mr. Ahmeti’s lawyer handed the DA two yellow cards. The DA read them but did not ask the witness whatever questions were written there. Mr. Ahmeti’s attorney scribbled wildly, trying to get another card to the DA, but before he was finished, the DA had accepted the man’s testimony and motioned for him to sit back down.

Corey Stout was called back to the stand. The affair had had the opposite impact on him. Whereas Nate had gotten larger and stronger over the last month, Corey looked thin. And sad. His sadness was the most palpable thing about him. I don’t even remember what he said, how he explained what the witness had overheard, because the sadness that emanated from him dampened everything in the room: the anger, the self-righteousness, the desperation, the fear. Every other emotion there paled by comparison to Corey Stout’s sadness.

I had the thought that he would not be a policeman next year.

When it was over, when the jury had deliberated less than an hour and had given its verdict to the judge, when the judge had read the verdict, when the news reporters and the cameramen had started to make the room hum with their questions and their talking and their requests for information, Lauren and Jim and Rodney and I left. We waited in an atrium downstairs until finally Nate arrived, waving away reporters with his hand. The first thing he did was lean over and hug Rodney. They held each other a long time: the burly blond soldier and the shrunken uncle in his wheelchair. I had loved each of them from the moment they were born.

When Nate stood up, I hugged him and felt the flutter of his heart, beating rapidly, beneath his broad chest. I thought of the little boy with the football, running on bare tiptoes into his father’s arms.

ALONE THAT NIGHT, I RAN
the hearing over and over again in my mind. I couldn’t stop seeing the trembling back of Sadik Ahmeti, the way his lawyer kept scribbling questions, faster and faster, the way the DA seemed to ignore one question after the other.

I did not want my son to go to jail. I did not want my son to be convicted of murder. But if LVPD had a case, if LVPD believed that Nate was justified, then why did today feel like a charade?

THE PHONE RANG JUST AFTER
nine at night. The phone in my new house didn’t ring often. Most people called my cell. I am not even sure why I hooked up the landline.

I hit my hip on the corner of a desk as I raced to get the call. I wasn’t used to where things were. It was the first time I had lived in a new place in almost thirty years. It took me a while to remember that bump when I saw the blackish mark turning green a few days later. “How’d I do that?” I thought. “Where did that come from?” For a second, I thought Nate had somehow done it.

“Hello?”

“Mom?” It was Lauren. I could hear the strain. My heart started to race, very quick, a bit ragged. Just like that.

“Hi, Lauren.” I made my voice cautious. I was afraid.

“Mom, can you come over here? I need some help.”

There was a huge bang in the background, as if someone had pushed over a bookcase or slammed a door. “Lauren! Who are you talking to? Who’s on the phone?” I heard my son’s voice, though it was not a voice I knew from anytime before this year.

“Nate? Nate, I’m calling your mom.”

“My mom? My mom?” His voice roared in the background.

“Mom, I have to hang up. I’m sorry.”

And
click,
the phone was dead.

I SHOULD HAVE CALLED 911,
of course. I knew that. But I hadn’t yet decided. I was still fingering the clipping, trying to get my mind around the relief that Nate would not be tried for an unjustified shooting and around the fear that he had been allowed to get away with it.

Instead, I found my sandals, grabbed my purse, and flew out the door. Nate lived in Southern Highlands, at least a twenty-minute drive away. I took Warm Springs and then the Beltway. I thought it would be the fastest, but I had forgotten about the construction at the interchange, about the lanes closing down at nine each evening. I saw the snaking line of traffic as soon as I came up the ramp. Semis trying to get to LA, and a motorcyclist speeding fearlessly between the creeping rows of cars. There was no way back and no way forward. It took an extra fifteen minutes.

There weren’t many streetlights leading to Nate’s house. Huge tracts of land, partially developed, master planned but abandoned when the real estate market crashed and everyone in construction lost their jobs. Lots of Las Vegas looked like this now. Short streets of carefully designed houses, small playgrounds with swing sets but no swings, roads paved in disconnected bits, construction equipment parked, for months, on the empty lots that were supposed to be your neighbors’ homes.

There was just one light on at Nate’s, and the house was silent.

I didn’t stop to think about why. I was parked and out of my car and ringing the doorbell before the engine gave its last dieseling cough.

Nate answered.

“Mom, we don’t want you here. It’s almost ten o’clock. We’re going to bed.”

He stood in the doorway, and I thought again how big he had become. Every time I saw him, he was larger.

He was still my son, and I was not afraid of him.

“I want to talk to Lauren. Let me come in.”

I thought he might resist, but he stepped aside, and I walked in. I still find that surprising, given what had happened.

Lauren wasn’t in the living room. I called her name.

Nate neither helped me nor stopped me. There was silence.

I walked to the kitchen, called Lauren’s name again. By this time, my heart had started to beat faster.

“Lauren?”

They must have fought in the family room. Nate had not even tried to hide it. The coffee table was pushed on its side, and the overstuffed armchairs had been shoved askew. The rug was pushed up into a wave of fabric against one of them, which made a lamp wobble and then teeter precariously when I stepped on the far edge of the rug.

“Lauren?”

I know my voice sounded frightened. Had my son killed a second woman? Pray God, I had this thought.

There was the squeak of her voice from the hall bathroom. I asked her if I could come in. And then I opened the door, gently.

I don’t know where Nate was. He had not followed me.

She was there, sitting on the closed toilet lid with a bag of frozen peas in her hand. Her nose had been bleeding, her left eye was swelling shut, there was a distinct cut at the left corner of her lip. She had been crying, so that her right eye was almost as swollen as the left. When she stood up, I saw the red marks of five fingers on her bare right shoulder. Had he held her with one hand as he punched her with the other?

Lauren was slight. Taller than me, but at least twenty pounds lighter, with fair, translucent skin. That she could take one of Nate’s punches, and stand, was surprising.

My head was reeling, and my stomach was sick, but I opened my arms, and she fell into them. I held her, stroked her hair, made a humming sort of sound in my throat. But I was just going through the motions, because my heart was beating, and in my head, everything was flashing by. Nate at seven months, Nate at seven, Nate in high school, Nate when he joined the Army, Nate when he stood in the doorway tonight, huge, and then when he let me in. How could this be happening?

“I think we should take you to an emergency room.”

“No!” Her no was so fast, so adamant, she pulled slightly away from me.

I pulled her gently back in, so I wouldn’t have to look at her while we had this conversation.

“You could have a broken bone. Or a concussion. You need to see a doctor.”

“No. Please, Mom, please. I am not ready to see a doctor. Please, just stay here with me.”

And I protested awhile, but in the end, that is what I did. Nate had disappeared by the time we left the bathroom. Maybe he left the minute I came in. But he was not there. I did not have a chance to confront him, to attack him, to question him, to apologize to him, to . . . to what? He was not there, and he did not come back that night.

So I stayed with Lauren.

I made her tea, and a muffin with raspberry jam. I held the frozen peas on her eye, and she lay on the sofa while I did this, and we watched a Lifetime movie with the sound off. Eventually she fell asleep, and when she let me, I persuaded her to stumble into bed, and I stood there and stroked her hair until she was deeply asleep again, and then I sat on the sofa and watched television with the sound off all night long.

In the morning, Lauren told me that she was going to go to a friend’s house for a few days, that she would tell her friend something, maybe the truth, but please, let her handle it, let her decide. I stayed while she packed a case, and we left together about ten. Nate had not returned.

THAT NIGHT, THE PHONE RANG
again. Lauren had texted me in the afternoon. Said she was fine. Said she had spoken with Nate. I had replied that she could come to my house, she could stay with me. She did not respond to that text.

So the phone rang again. Even later. I was already asleep. This time, nobody spoke. I heard breathing, and something slight in the background, but nothing else.

“Lauren?”

Nothing.

“Lauren, is that you?”

The phone clicked off.

I lay awake, wondering if it was Lauren. If it was Nate. If Lauren had gone back to Nate.

I thought of Sadik Ahmeti berating his wife, and I thought of him raising two small children. I thought about an eight-year-old boy and a three-year-old girl without their mother. I thought of my son’s part in that. I thought of Emily. I thought of Rodney and me when we were kids. I thought of Nate.