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I just got back from spending the weekend with my sister Patience, her husband Jorge (who we affectionately call Georgie) and our legion of children in honor of Jackie-boy’s fourth birthday. We did it up true Salgado style, reserving two hotel rooms at the Omni where the staff cringes everytime they see us and our brood coming round (and round and round) those brass revolving doors. Pache likes to call it “White Trash Does the Omni” as our kids (and various adults) stuff their pockets full of berries and cookies from the lobby afternoon refreshments table on the way to the elevators. It only took us five minutes to have security call into the elevator to make sure those button pushing pre-schoolers were all right from the sugar rush. Only thirty minutes more to completely lose two year old Ethan out of the hotel room and one second beyond that for year old Lucy to start saying “Buh-bye” on repeat while we searched the halls frantically.

I love Richmond, especially the neighborhood where my sister lives, just blocks from Carytown. I’ve come to see this town as our home away from home. I imagine my kids at VCU or my sister throwing kick-ass rehearsal dinners at O Burrito, just because that’s where everyone really wants to go anyway. I drive up and down those old-town streets and see me and my sister as old ladies riding our three-wheel bikes, stopping occasionally to put coins in meters about to expire. I love the way you can’t get one block in Carytown without seeing a happy puppy-dog or something amazing and soulful from a shoppe window.

Richmond has been through a lot this last year, starting off 2006 with the news that a well-loved family in the community had been brutally murdered in their Woodland Heights home on New Year’s Day. Two ex-convicts, high out of their minds, walked through Bryan and Kathryn Harvey’s front door, setting off a chain of events that would haunt the people of Richmond in the weeks and months that followed.

It was home invasion with the darkest twist. A father fighting to the last breath to defend his wife and two daughters Stella (9) and Ruby (4). A mother and her little girls trying to escape bound hands. Two killers determined to destroy their victims, no matter what evil that required. A loved one arriving after the fact for a New Year’s Day party, greeted instead by news of a quadruple homicide. As word spread from neighbor to neighbor, killers still on the loose, outrage and fear flowed like a river of rain along city streets, leaving this town in a sea of grief.

I learned the news through my sister Patience who does kindness work with the nurse midwife who delivered Kathryn’s babies in a local hospital. Susan* was in over her head trying to calm the women about to deliver. In the birth world, the sanctity of your house is everything, especially for mothers planning to deliver at home. Patience was having trouble sleeping at night along with so many other young mothers in Richmond. The fact that something so atrocious could happen anywhere, let alone to people as caring and creative as the Harveys, was hard to fathom. “It’s not that they were some symbol of the perfect family or anything like that,” my sister says. “They were just the kind of people who were living their best lives–their dreams. And they knew how to create community. People loved them for knowing how to do that. Knowing how to make that kind of loving, joyful space.”

My sister and I talked on the phone constantly that week. I wanted to know how the women in the neighborhood were faring. Every few days Patience would pack up baby Lucy in the car and take someone a meal or leave flowers on someone’s doorstep. News came that a lovely young woman adored in the birth community discovered a new tumor, after being in remission for years. It seemed like death was knocking on every door. Even the wisest women in that circle were left without words.

Within two weeks, the two men who committed the murders were finally caught. In a lengthy confession to a prison chaplain weeks later, Ricky Javon Gray said, “I don’t think sorry is strong enough. None of this was necessary.” And then this, “I just want to die.” Looking at the hate that had poured out of his altered mind and the sheer devastation that resulted, he agreed his life had no worth.

Something about all this broke my heart wide open. “Something has to be done, right?” I said to my sister the next morning. I could tell she felt like crying, too. “I don’t know how to say it, but if hate wins in this thing, if the weight of this evil stamps out the last shred of compassion–or the last bit of hope–then we’re in worse trouble than before, right?” We sat on the phone in silence. Neither one of us thought more killing or despair would solve anything, but it wasn’t our place to say. We understood that we did not know even in part what it felt like to lose someone you loved in such an incredible, vicious way. We knew nothing of whatever terror had brought Gray or Dandridge to this final moment.

That day I sat on my porch and did the only thing I know how to do when there seems like all hope is gone. I lit one of my little candles and wrote out blessings. Only this time, I tried to imagine there was a Divine Mother watching over the whole mess. I asked for words to bring about healing. I asked for peace to fill every dark and fearful place. I closed my eyes and tried to conjure up the kind of love that can face up to that kind of horror. I prayed for Patience and her wide, loving heart. I thought about Gray killing those little children and tried to remember what it was like when he was a baby before he lost the warmth of his mother’s arms. I tried to not think about something like that ever happening again.

Then I went inside and locked all my doors.

Over time, Richmond rallied, though the faultlines of crime, race and economics ran a little bit deeper. Susan kept delivering babies. The young woman with cancer died. The black family murdered by Gray and Dandridge in September received decidedly less coverage. Richmond pulled together to honor the Harveys a hundred different ways. Both men were tried. Ray Joseph Dandridge received a life sentence. Ricky Javon Gray got the death penalty. Mark Harvey, Brian’s brother called the trial “an emotional gauntlet”. Everyone reported great relief when the trial was finally over, though the pain of this loss has no end. (article here)

I’ve spent days trying to write this story, and I’m still not certain why it’s so important to me that I do it. All I know is that everytime I work on it, my tears are right there on the surface of things. In this moment, after hours of pouring through articles and news reports, I’m overcome by how fragile we are as human beings and how completely in need we are of love and careful care. I close my eyes and try to imagine each person in this story as a baby in my arms. Bryan. Kathryn. Ruby. Stella. Ray. Ricky. Mark. I try to hold this sadness and all the joy of each tender life, even though it’s impossible in so many ways.

I go over these words over and over again, spoken by Bryan Harvey while he was still on this earth:

“I don’t really believe in God. However, I think I’m a pretty spiritual person. I have a lot of faith in humans. I believe we’re capable of incredibly beautiful things (as well as incredibly evil).”

May incredible beauty be our hallmark. May peace, strange and unexpected, come to all who suffer this loss, like an unexpected rainfall. And may I meet every human eye with kindness in my own, remembering where we each began.

To read more about this story, Richmond’s Style Weekly has a gentle memorial here.
To learn more about the Foundation established in the Harvey’s name, go here.
To make a contribution to a local Richmond non-profit dedicated to helping young people living in some of Richmond’s roughest neighborhoods, check out the work my friend Julie is doing here.

Special thanks to Jorge, Patience, Susan and NVC for opening my heart to this story and for being the kind of people who bring hope and change to our fragile world. I am also grateful for John Sarvay and his excellent reporting on this story.

The art below is a gift to any and all connected to the Harvey story.

*some names have been changed in this post to protect the privacy of the individuals

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 11th, 2007 at 12:22 am and is filed under Blessings, Journal, Stories, art, birth, faith, harvey murders, hope, midwifery, neighbors, richmond. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.