Nov. 23 2009 - 1:22 am | 119 views | 0 recommendations | 0 comments

Desmond Turner and Jesus Christ: ‘Everyone has a story’

On Friday, Desmond Turner was sentenced to life without parole, plus 88 years, for the more than two dozen charges associated with the 2006 execution-style slayings of an Hispanic family of seven in Indianapolis.

It was the third and final phase of a criminal trial that began in October, and a case that began nearly three and-a-half years ago. But it was more than just a sentencing. When Turner waived his right to a jury trial back in September — in exchange for the state’s dropping the death penalty option — it virtually ensured that the final phase of sentencing would be a formality.

Judge Robert Altice, who handed down Friday’s sentence, had already determined last month that life without parole was an appropriate punishment. Since the ultimate decision for a formal sentencing was his and not a jury’s, everyone in the courtroom already knew the judge would go LWOP.

More significant was the opportunity presented to both Turner and the surviving family members to make public statements before the judge. Those statements, and what they mean, are what’s had me thinking over the weekend.

On the part of the victims’ surviving family, there was heartbreak in abundance. Ten-year-old Jasmine Albarran was seven years-old when her father, Magno Albarran, was killed on Hamilton Avenue. Earlier last week, I had dinner at her home with her mother, Kimberly Fischer — Magno’s ex-wife — and Jasmine showed me the scrapbook she had kept since the murders. There were drawings of her father looking down on her from heaven. There were pencil-written letters to him on blue-lined paper, telling him how much she missed him. There were photographs of her and her cousins — children, aged eleven, eight and five, who were murdered that night along with Jasmine’s father.

Despite it all, she was still a child. She taught me how to contort my hands into a strange shape so that it looked like a snake’s head. I wasn’t very good at it, but finally managed with her help.

In court, she was very brave and calm, almost detached — as one imagines she must be to deal with the immensity of insensate horrors even the adults in her life cannot explain.

“Christmas will be coming soon and this is my present to my Daddy and the rest of the family,” she said from the stand. “I got to tell the judge how much I love and miss all of you. And that this should not have happened to any of you, and how much I still needed you.”

After court, Jasmine saw me and checked to see if I could still shape my hands into a snake’s head. I regret to admit I had forgotten how.

There was great strength. Kimberly Fischer, Jasmine’s mother and ex-wife of Magno Albarran, said she did not want to be viewed as a victim: “As I stand before you, I ask that you view it as a survivor’s statement,” she said to the court. “You see, if I continue to be a victim, then evil prevails, and I will not allow that to happen.”

After describing in gut-wrenching detail her memories of the seven who died; after relating her urge as a mother to try to heal her daughter’s emotional wounds, she still found an opportunity for grace — for a scrap of hard-earned, if bittersweet magnanimity, when she addressed Turner:

“Desmond Turner, I came here today not to judge you, but to give you opportunities –the opportunity to learn about the lives taken that day,” she said. “For if you had known them personally, I assure you we would not be in this court room today.”

WHAT LINGERS

Before she left the stand, Kim Fischer added, still addressing Turner, “I also pray that one day you will take the opportunity to tell the full truth of what took place that night and who was involved.”

Fischer, like most of the other surviving members of the Albarran-Covarrubias family, believe that Turner and his alleged accomplice, James Stewart, are only two among many who are responsible for the deaths in one way or another.

Some family members, who for now shall remain nameless, have confided that they believe the massacre was a pre-meditated assassination. They cite the fact that hundreds of dollars in cash, plenty of jewelry, and several guns were left at the crime scene, despite the home’s having been ransacked. They cite witness testimony that never surfaced at trial, which puts as many as five people leaving the home after shots were fired.

They cite gaps in the investigation that are big enough to drive a truck through. Like the pickup truck that was owned by neighbors embroiled in a longstanding feud with the victims, which matched the original description of the getaway vehicle. It was never investigated. The truck that was examined never produced a trace of blood or DNA — despite copious amounts of blood splatter at the crime scene, where bodies were riddled and exploded with a high-powered assault rifle.

Turner’s lawyers, and Turner himself, cite the complete absence of physical evidence tying Turner to the scene. Most people I know who are familiar with the case believe the Judge’s verdict was just, but, like Fischer, question just how much of the truth remains hidden, how many co-conspirators may possibly remain unpunished. So when Turner said in his statement to the court on Friday that “somewhere, the truth of the matter got lost,” it didn’t fall on completely deaf ears.

When he steadfastly maintained innocence, adding, “now I know how Christ felt when he died for our sins,” I don’t think it garnered much sympathy.

Esmeralda Espinoza, a 19-year-old niece of murder victim, Emma Valdez, through eyes streaming with tears, summed up the anger the family feels. “Life without parole is a huge courtesy,” she said. “(Turner) deserves so much more [worse].”

She scoffed at the common sympathies extended to killers who grew up hard, under the duress of poverty or violence. Lots of people grow up hard, but not everyone has the capacity to kill seven innocent people, including three children, she said. “It takes a monster to kill a child.”

“Everyone has a story,” she added.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what she said. I’ve been thinking about Desmond Turner’s “story.” I’ve been thinking about the terrible things I’ve heard about his childhood, and whether they matter. If a man can kill children yet see himself as christ-like, I wonder whether anything we think or believe matters at all.

I wonder anew, as I seem to every other day, about the motivation behind my documentary — where it’s going, what it seeks to explain. I believe it is as important to explain what created the monsters who committed this murder, as it is to protray the lives of those who died in commemoration. But at what point does one betray decency in favor of a good story?

At what point does the quest for a more whole truth defeat all hope for closure? At what price truth?

Everyone has a story. Whose do we attend? Whose are better left covered, so that we may believe in our better angels and thereby survive?

Turner is no Jesus Christ. But both he and Jesus Christ have stories. Everyone has a story. How we tell them does nothing less than to build and destroy empires, to inspire our best and basest impulses — to love, to heal, to fear, to kill.

The survivors ask themselves these questions each day. For now, I take my cues from them. Their loyalties are divided between a desire for the whole truth and a desire for some kind of justice, however incomplete. Though I try to keep an emotional distance, mine are, too. I hope the film will be the better for it.

The jury trial for Turner’s alleged accomplice, James Stewart, begins in a few weeks. Stay tuned.