THE LONG SHADOW OF SMALL GHOSTS-Laura Tillman

felt that was plagued by spiritual cancer. In two thousand and eight, journalist Laura Tilman covered the story for the Brownsville Herald. The questions it raised haunted her, particularly one asked by the sole member of the city's Heritage council to oppose demolition. Is there any such thing as an evil building. Her investigation took her far beyond that question, revealing the nature of the toll that the crime exacted

on a city already racked with poverty. It sprawled into a six year inquiry into the larger significance of such acts, one so difficult to imagine or explain that their perpetrators

are often dismissed as monsters alien to humanity. With meticulous attention and stunning compassion, Tillman surveyed those surrounding the crime times, speaking with the lawyers who tried the case, the families, neighbors and relatives, and teachers, even one of the murderers, John Alan Rubio himself, whom she corresponded with for years

and ultimately met in person. The result is a brilliant exploration of some of our age's most important social issues, from poverty to mental illness to the death penalty, and a beautiful, profound meditation on the truly human forces that drive them. It is disturbing, insightful, and mesmerizing an equal measure. The book that we're featuring this evening is The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts, Murder and Memory in an American City,

with my special guest journalist and author Laura Tilman. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for agreeing to this interview. Laura Tilman, thanks so much for having me. Thank you very much. Incredible story again, just an amazing another slice of a Marria, Canada that we knew nothing about. Incredible. Let's talk about how you came to be involved with this.

Let's talk about that you were. You say that you were about midway through your first year as a newspaper reporter when you walked to the apartment in Brownsville, Texas where a couple had murdered their children. So tell us before this investigation how much you knew of this. It wasn't really your forte But what did you know about this crime before you came to this assignment? And then tell us about this assignment In the first six months as a reporter.

reporters did tell me about it. There was a file cabinet in our office that I remember was filled with pages of documentation from the first trial of John Allen Rubio, and in that filing cabinet was a copy of whose written confession, and I remember reading that and finding it really disturbing and difficult, especially because there were all of these tiny details of things that had happened that were so specific, and it just made the crime really come

to life in a difficult way. So that was kind of the first time that I started hearing about the case, and then as time went on, I was sent to go to the building where this crime had happened because of this debate of whether or not it should be torn down, and that visit made a big impression on me right away, mainly because it seemed like people were suddenly voicing these questions and concerns that had something to do with the building and the case that really had

to do with much more profound meditations on the meaning of that case and their community and their lives, of what it said about their town that something like this could happen there, And this question emerged of whether the building itself was sort of being blamed for human crimes, and also whether there was a parallel to be found between the execution of this man, John Allen Ruveo on death row, and the destruction of this apartment building.

to effectively cross examine her. Because of this, John was granted a second trial, but it took some time for that to happen. That didn't actually happened until twenty ten, So we're talking about two thousand and eight when I was writing about the building, which is midway between these two different trials.

the status of the poorest in America. And it's proximity to Mexico. So tell us where it is close to and tell us a little bit about Brownsville, so we can set the stage for this story too.

hundred and fifty miles around within the United States. So it's an area where the best and brightest has been kind of subject to a brain drain, where they often leave and go to Austin or go to other parts of the country looking for higher education or better jobs. So that's part of what contributes to it. It's a very beautiful area. Geographically, there's it's sort of a subtropical area.

It's not when people picture the US Mexico border. I think a lot of the time they picture the Sonora Desert in Arizona, where they picture the deserts around El Paso and Warez. That's that's not what we're talking about when it comes to Brownsville. This is a fertile river valley. There's a lot of citrus sugar cane grown here. It's a place where there are lakes and palm trees interspersed among the houses. And they're also different parts to the city. Not all parts of the city are as poor as

the section where this crime takes place. This crime takes place in an area called Barrio Buenavida, which is translated as the good Life. Ironically, unfortunately, this is one of the poorest areas of the city and therefore of the country. It's a place where a lot of the crime centers in Brownsville. It's a place where there are a lot of transient people who are on their way somewhere else,

who are very vulnerable. And it's also a place where drugs and prostitution kind of center in the city as well.

you could call them that. As I was reporting on this, but when I began, there was a staircase on the back that was sort of halfway falling apart, doors and windows that looked like they had kind of fallen apart years ago and just been left to deteriorate. This is actually building in one of the central areas of the city. It's just blocked from the federal courthouse and the police station and the county courthouse, and in fact the newspaper building.

But I think it's carried different legacies over the years. When I talked to Minerva about it, a lot of her memories of the building were from her childhood, because it had been there, you know, as long as she'd been alive. She'd been living in that house her whole

life and was very used to it. But it had kind of turned from a place where humble shrimpers and their wives lived, where there was a gas station at one point and a small store, to a place that was one of the cheapest places in the city to live, but was not kept up and had become a place because of the murders that was kind of haunted by that legacy. I remember an instance where I went was finally able to go inside the building, and Minerva told

me to get some holy water. So there was a sense that not only was the building kind of haunted by the murders, but that the people who surrounded it and who came into contact with it were also similarly haunted or sort of affected by it. People said they heard the sounds of the kids screaming at night and things like that, and it just had become an eyesore on the community. At the same time, this is a historic building because of its age, it has some historic

status in Texas, and that gave it a measure of protection. Really, without that measure of protection, I wouldn't have written a book at all, because I think the building would have

been destroyed long ago. But because of its historic status, there was this sort of necessary gureaucratic debate over what funding could be used to demolish it, whether they would need to document it in some way, whether there was an argument to preserve it and turn it into something else, and that really fascinated me, because when you see something that so many people have written off as not only just unappealing and unattractive, but in fact perhaps haunted or cursed,

and then there's this idea that you could go beyond that and you could turn it into something that would actually help people prevent the kinds of crimes that had occurred inside. It seemed like such a revolutionary concept because it was just so far away from the way that most people perceived this place. So I think that that was a big driving factor for me in the beginning of writing this was really to question, well, what do

we do when these crimes occur? Is there some sort of constructive way of making meaning out of them instead of writing them off as simply horrible events that come and go, or a way to act in the spirit of prevention instead of destruction. And I think that goes back to also the way that we look at prisoners in our country, do we try to genuinely rehabilitate them?

When we look at criminals, do we act in the spirit of punishment or rehabilitation and in a way try to appeal to the best of ourselves, our most maybe not leave hopes for how we can make the world better. And so one of the things I think I confronted when talking to people was a question of whether I was just being my knee and my pursuit of those answers, or whether there was really a chance for something, something good to be made out of this somehow.

you have conditions? Tell us just a little bit about that first beginnings of the correspondence between you two.

I think when you see the building and when you see the apartment that they lived in, it's so bleak that for most of us it seems like a horrible place to live. And he talked about it with gratitude and the sense that, you know, his family was happy, which is I think a complicated issue. Also is the way that he kind of rewrites his own history and puts rose colored glasses on a lot of the things that happened even before the murders occurred. But I wrote

to him, you know, asking a few questions. He wrote back saying he would answer my questions, but that that would be the end of our correspondence. And then once that exchange occurred, I continued writing to him, and he continued writing back to me for a long time. And it was sort of surprising at first to get these letters from him and to see that he was so

willing to talk about things. He had said at the beginning that he didn't want to talk about the crime itself, but even that in time he sort of volunteered his thoughts and feelings about in a way, that was the part that I was least interested in talking to him about, because there's just so much documentation available not only of him testifying about the crimes, but of many other parties

who investigated and analyzed them. So for me, I was mostly interested in his life, who he was, how a person from childhood eventually becomes a person who commits a crime like this, and whether there was any sort of hope of finding measures that we can look at that might prevent more of these kinds of things from happening. There weren't any conditions per se, But one of the things I was most concerned about was making it very clear to him that our subject was one of Our

relationship was one of journalists and subjects. And when I wrote to him, I didn't write him the kinds of letters that you might expect someone would receive in prison, letters to keep them entertained or to connect with them on a sort of human or emotional level. My letters were really lists of questions that were designed to be a long term, sort of interview process between me and him.

And you know, there were some moments along the way when, for example, he asked me for a comic book for his birthday at one point, and I had to kind of clarify and drive home the fact that you know, that didn't really fit in with the relationship that we had, because I think for someone like him, who you know, has been around the media covering his case but hadn't engaged with many journalists before in an interview sense, that he was still a bit unclear about what that meant.

So let's talk a little bit about this superstition and talk about his mother Hilda, and also talk about just his early life and what you discovered.

help you. And that's an important part of the col sure in Brownsville and on this part of the border. There's also this kind of inverse version of that called brujeria, which is more equivalent to witchcraft, which is a negative version of this in which someone is actually cursing other people, putting the evil eye on them, helping people to maybe manipulate others in different ways. And so both of these

were present, I think in Hilda and John's lives. Hilda, John's mother own mother was believed by some in their family to be a bucha which to practice witchcraft, and this was something that from a very young age on sort of saw in his family, and one of the psychiatrists who evaluated John Hilda found that instead of doing what she said a good mother might do and kind of discouraging him from certain suppicious illusions as a young child.

But I think a lot of us have a kid, maybe we're playing with Aligi board, or we get sort of nervous about a person in our neighborhood that we think seems creepy or things like that. Instead of sort of reassuring him that everything was okay, she kind of fueled these delusions and belief and that was something that this psychiatrist believed to eventually turn into grander delusions as he got older.

with these abusive parents and mother who is a drug addict. But that is kind of the extreme version in some ways of of what may have actually occurred, and we don't have any kind of balancing factored here. You know, what was hill the what was Hilla thinking when she

encouraged these delusions or agreed with these delusions. But one of the things that you can't help but wonder is if she might have encouraged those delusions because it ensured that they would get these checks that were keeping their family afloat that you know, her son was diagnosed with an emotional disturbance, and because of that, you know that they were they were eligible because he was a special

at all these different things to get some assistance. So that that's one of the the difficult things, you know, looking back, and one of the things that I most wish is that I could have spoken to her to really understand more of that context. But from what we know, Yeah, John was delusional. He talked about seeing things, hearing voices

to his siblings the way kids do. They might have just agreed with him that they heard him too, to sort of be in on a ghost story or thinking it was kind of fun, while for him maybe these things were more real or genuine that he was hearing

and seeing. And one of the other things that the psychiatrist that I was talking about, who talked about Hilda mentions is that John had this kind of superhero complex that he developed, where because he felt so powerless in his life, he started to sort of pretend that he was much more powerful than he really was, that he had great abilities to do special things. And later on this belief was referred to as this idea that he was the chosen one, that he had some kind of

divine mission from God. And that's an idea that kind of manifests when we look at what actually happened in their apartments.

He meets a woman named Gina and she has a child, So what happens with his dream and in terms of ambition and jobs, occupations, what happens with him? What does he do?

and then he starts sorry about that. He starts pursuing the military and taking the exam for entry and failing it over and over and over again. And this is really devastating for him because he didn't have another plan in mind. And at that point, John is really taking a lot of drugs. He meets Angela, who is the woman who will become his common law life at that point. But just to sort of outline I guess a bit more what happens to his dreams and what happens to

his job prospects. He's doing things like working at fast food restaurants. At some point, his mother suggests that prostitution might be a good money making option for him, which is extremely disturbing, and he's just kind of floundering and frankly imitating the behavior that he saw when he was growing up among his mother and her friends in terms of taking drugs and kind of floating from from place to place and job to job. And it's an extremely

troubled time. The other thing that's so difficult about this time, I think we can say in retrospect is that for most people with schizophrenia, this is about the age when that first emerges, when people had their first episodes, and that fits in very very nicely with John's age when he's graduating from high school.

damaging his brain cells on a regular basis. And while in high school there was his swim coach, and there was RTC, and there were people watching his progress in special ed. When he's on his own graduated, he's kind of just you know, has no parental or adult figures in his life to see what he's doing and try

to steer him, you know, on a better path. He's just a kind of immature even for him, age teenager who's now self medicating and is using drugs as a way to escape, as a way to entertain himself, and it's just it's, yeah, everything's just kind of starting to form into this perfect storm. At that point.

how small an apartment? And the thing that I wanted to mention because this I thought was unbelievable. Later you ask, jeez, I didn't really see a window. It was there a window in this entire apartment that all these people were living in. So tell us about those conditions.

have a third child together. That's both of theirs, and at one point they're homeless, they're sleeping on a mattress in an alley, they're sleeping in abandoned buildings, and See comes and sees these conditions and gives them the kind of choice of whether to, you know, bring the children to a relative's house in this case, Angela's mother, or to take them away, and they choose to bring them

to Angela's mother's house. But eventually, after they get the kids back, they find this apartment in the building that we've been discussing, and it's this apartment that at one point was the first floor of a building that was designed to be a gas station, and so the first floor of the building was never really meant to be apartments, and when it was split up into apartments, it was

just sort of cut into these hallway shaped units. And that's what accounts for not being any windows, because you have an apartment that's sort of a hallway in the middle of a bunch of other hallways, and there's a door on the front, and there's a door on the back, and there's a little window.

be a really, really difficult place to live. Regardless of the fact that this apartment was also inhabited by many people. There was a couple, John and Angela, their three kids. By the end, there was Hilda, John's mother at times living there, sometimes with a boyfriend. There was a transgender prostitute living there with them named Urbina who at times had her boyfriend Panguino come and stay or would even

bring men back there at times. So it was this very, very full place that was filled with you know, junk that they'd kind of collected, videotapes, porn magazines, just a really really desolate place and not not a good place to raise kids, certainly, But you know, the mission of

Child Protective Services is to keep families together. And this apartment, the fact that they had found an apartment, the fact that John had found a job at a certain point, was was doing drug testing, that the parents were taking parenting classes. They really were doing a lot to try

to show that they wanted the kids back. And so even though this apartment was, you know, very troubled, I think the version of it that CPS saw before their visits ended wasn't as crowded, probably was cleaner and maybe maybe seem like a like a safer place for kids to be.

a problem with food stamps. So tell us a little bit about this confluence of events that happens, and then why are they going to the hospital, And tell us about what happens how they get to this hospital, but tell us what was happening before in terms of his drug use in huffing.

of the kids would lose their food stamps. This was, unfortunately, one of those pieces of evidence that just sort of went missing, that didn't seem to be in any of the documents when I tried to find it again to just really understand exactly what was at stake, but there was a problem with the food stamps that was clear, and they needed to go and get the social Security

number for one of the kids. They believe that they could get that at the medical center, and so John goes and he asks a sort of friend of a friend for a ride, goes and knocks on the door of their house and he knows they have a car. They drive them over. The family just sort of seems despondent, and they get to the hospital. They don't seem to be able to locate what they're looking for there, and then they take the bus back to their neighborhood and

end up in Market Square. While they're on the bus, it seems like John is getting more and more paranoid, and he thinks that another child is trying to hand one of his kids a poison piece of candy. And then when they get off the bus, they see a woman who he believes has what they called the mark of the Beast on her forehead. That she scratches on her forehead that indicate that she's evil, and that she gives them a certain look which they interpret as the

evil eye that she's cursed them. I should say that this idea of the evil eye. The mall veokle is one of the more sort of accepted and common cultural concepts in that area. That you know, even when I was working at the Brownsville Herald, if someone would admire my outfit and they'd be looking at me for an extended amount of time, they felt they had to go up to me and touch me to sort of diffuse the looks that they had just given me. So, you know,

this is a common belief in any case. Those are kind of the events that start leading up to what happened.

I think also that you know, Angela and in the second trial and since then, has tried to make it clear that she she really didn't have as much of a role in the crimes as maybe was once said or believed, and that really she really John was the one responsible. So that that's something that's kind of changed over time, and the account for that, what accounts for

that change is unclear. Part of it, I think could be that, you know, when this all happened, John and Angela were really in love, and that she was kind of captivated by him. And after the crime occurs, you can see that her first instinct is to kind of protect him because in part because she has a very low IQ and I don't think she totally understands, you know, the extent of what's going to happen to them or

to her. But later on she's not so quick to sort of come to his defense or to try to help him by claiming more responsibility.

of disconnected from what comes next. Yeah, so he kills the hamsters with a hammer and.

choke them and stab them and decapitate them. He thinks that one of his daughters is speaking in the voice of his grandmother, who, as we discussed earlier, he always thought was a witch. So there's this kind of and there's also a strangeness to the events in the sense that you know, he thinks the first two kids are possessed and they're killed, but the third one, you know, he's asleep for a while, and then hours later they

do the same thing with him. They also become convinced that he needs to be killed too, and then they walk to the grocery store to buy some milk, which I think is another detail that to me, you know, he walks, he walks to the grocery store to buy milk, which would have sensibly be for something they'd buy for

their kids who are now dead. And you know, there are just a lot of there are a lot of things that go on that are just horrific and so not of a piece with this man, who, though irresponsible and using drugs and kind of going nowhere in his life, has never physically abused his kids before kind of knows. I think that you can cut and run on your

responsibilities from the examples in his life. So there's this idea put forward by the prosecution that they felt they needed to kill the kids because you know, he wanted to escape and go start a new life elsewhere. But to me, that doesn't really make sense because he could have easily done that regardless.

kids and did it in this extremely brutal way. And also immediately, you know, when when the police arrives, you know, confesses everything to the best of his ability to remember for it, which I think also when you read his confession, when you read transcripts of his videotape confession, he says things like he thought that it was a seventy two hour time period that they were in the apartment, which makes absolutely no sense given the timeline, and is the

kind of thing that only, I think someone who's in this kind of psychotic break with reality would would find reality so distorted at that point that they could think many days of past.

as a paranoid schizophrenic. But let's get to your correspondence, because again you said early in this book and laid it out, that you didn't want to just have an account of these crimes to you know, recounting of the details, or an easy depiction of somebody as a monster, or just to carry on on the myth of what may have happened. So what did you find in your correspondence? What did you talk about? But what did you discover again when you asked them about his children? When it

talks about remorse. Again, you didn't initially get into this, but what was your sense of who he was in terms of his love for his children, in terms of his actual mental illness. You've corresponded him for quite a while. Tell us about that.

of grandeur. There are certain things that he said to me at times, you know, that that he was kind of the one who held this family together and that without him, they've all sort of gone in different directions. Which the fact that someone could not could not be self reflective enough to realize that it wasn't really just him not being there, but the fact that he committed this horrible crime, that that caused this risk in his family to occur. So he has some kind of ideas

of himself that don't necessarily square with reality. But at the same time, he's he was And I include big sections of his letters in the book because I think that when you hear about what he did, it's so difficult to have any kind of empathy for him as a human being. And then when you read these letters, he's just so human and sort of non threatening, and he has had such a difficult life and has had, you know, hopes and dreams, many of them very humble

hopes and dreams. You know that that maybe he would have a house and he'd have a family, and maybe he'd joined the military, which you know, most most people, if they want to join the military, are able to do so. It's it made a big impression on me, I would say, just to get these letters and to

hear his voice. And part of the way I structure the book was to put the crime about halfway through because I wanted people to read and hear these letters the way that I did, before you really hear the full extent of what he did, so that you can kind of weigh one against the other. And I think some people walk away and they just still don't really

feel any sympathy or empathy for this guy. You know, what he did is too terrible, and and maybe he's not self reflective enough about that, or his reflection doesn't feel authentic to them. But I think for a lot of other people read You read these letters and you can't help but kind of feel transformed that someone who's among the worst criminals that we have in our society could also be someone who's so vivid and real and

who's also had such a difficult life. That for me was one of the really important challenges of this book, I think, was you know that in our world a lot of the time, perpetrators of crimes have also been victims of crimes at different points of their lives. And how do you square those two things? How do you look at a person and see both of those things at once and not try to sort of divide everyone into two different categories.

But at the same time, he didn't have the attitude that a lot of these other killers in trying to deny his responsibility. Tell us a little bit of how he felt about this death penalty and punishment for what he had done.

the trial that would normally occur didn't happen. And then in the second trial, by then I think that you know, he had been on medication for some time, he'd been on death row for some time, he'd had time to grieve, and his thoughts on it had kind of changed, and he wanted to fight, you know, for a chance at life in prison. And actually the law had changed between

those two trials. During the first trial, if the option of life without parole was not available to the jury, but during the second trial, during the second trial, actually it wasn't made available to them either because he was kind of he was kind of still con considered under the law as it had stood when he committed the crime. But by the time of the second trial, another person who would be up for it for a similar case would have the jury given the option of life without parole.

And I think even though in reality, someone who commits a crime like this would never be given parole by a parole board, that idea, the sort of abstract idea that you could one day allow this person to walk free, is too disturbing for mostures. So they are kind of pushed toward toward giving them death, or had been pushed toward giving them death.

is a very unequal power dynamic in that relationship. And I had read a book called The Journalists and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm when I was I'm sure you're familiar with and a lot of your listeners are familiar with, but just to sort of talk about it very succinctly, you know, one of the things that Janet Malcolm is analyzing in that book is the inappropriate nature of the journalist Joe mcguinnis's relationship with believes Patrick McDonald for the

book that Joe McGuinness wrote called Fatal Vision, in which you know, Joe McGuinness is kind of manipulating this man into thinking that he's still writing a book about his innocence, even once he's changed his mind and starts writing a book about his guilt. And so that was a real

guiding light for me. I think when I was writing to John and just through the whole process was trying to, you know, not just not manipulate John outright, but really try to think about, like, what's the responsible way to conduct this relationship, because it's so easy when someone is in a position of absolute, you know, powerlessness, to take advantage of that and to benefit from that because you're

the person writing to them, you're their lifeline. Maybe you're the one who could help them get a new trial. It's depending on what you write. And I just tried to be really clear with John, make him no promises.

But also I still felt as I was writing his letters and receiving letters that you know that it's so easy to sort of write what you want about someone when you never have to see their face or look in their eyes or really fully digest their humanity, and you know that there's a person on the other end and that you're writing something that really could shape their

life or their death or how they're remembered. And so I just wanted to go, I think, for that very simple reason, and see him and talk to him in person. And also, you know, I think as a reporter and a writer, you want to be able to describe someone accurately. There's a difference between being in conversation and just seeing a videotape. And so for all those reasons, I just really wanted to actually have that experience of meeting him.

But you know, he just didn't seem really that inquisitive about it, which again I have to wonder is maybe a symptom of schizophrenia, that there's sort of a lack of being able to see beyond yourself, and that you know, even when I visited him, he asked me very few questions about myself, even you know, I'd been writing to him for years and and part of it was because I had kind of very carefully kept it a depersonalized

relationship between the two of us. That I wasn't in the habit of sort of offering up information about myself and my life in the letters. But you know, he just wasn't that what isn't that inquisitive about about that stuff?

very dangerous behaviors. At the same time, it was an opportunity, I think, for him for the first time, in his own words, to kind of tell the story of his life, because up to this point, everything's been really written about him and about his case, but never are really engaging his perspective on any of it. He wasn't able to testify during the trials strategically because you know, that was a decision that's typically made in these cases by the

defense team. And so, yeah, it's interesting to hear you say that. At the I wanted to add though, that once the book was published, I got a letter from him saying but that he understood that we were not friends, and that I was a journalist and he was the subject, but that this book for him was like an answered prayer, which was not something that I was my sort of goal in writing it was to answer his prayers. But you know, he he seems to feel very positively about the project.

this won't have her happen again. But this confluence of conditions, circumstances, mental illness, drug use, poverty, the history of the community, superstition. What did you come away from after at the end of this book with what was the biggest lesson or thing that you learned from this complex event that can't be looked at in a one dimensional way? What did you take away from this entire event?

or a lesson out of the event. I don't think that the event itself is meaningful, but I think that there is an opportunity once the dust has settled in cases like this, because sadly, you know, I think a lot of communities have seen a case that was a real trauma, a real collective trauma that went beyond just the people involved, that there are constructive things that we can do to work together to make meaning out of our future, to sort of take something like this and

work toward prevention. And you know, as you say, I don't think it's sort of a direct correlation all the time that you can say, you know, if we do this thing, or that we can prevent these crimes unilaterally from happening. I don't think that's fair also to the people involved, because then you're sort of pointing fingers at you know, the CPS agents or the families, And I don't think that it's fair to kind of directly point a finger at them for a crime that they didn't

commit themselves. You know, they didn't they didn't intend for things to manifest in this way. But I think that you know, one of the things that happened in the aftermath is that the community planted a garden behind the building and they named it after the kids, and since then, community gardens have popped up all over the city. They're you know, hundreds of people who are growing vegetables for their families, who are selling them at farmers' markets, and

who are making more income. And that's not the kind of thing that you can say prevents murders, but I think that there's a lot of subtlety to the way that people come together, make each other feel cared about and valued, make each other feel like if they have a problem, that there's someone to turn to, that there are resources available for them, and to sort of also keep an eye out for the most vulnerable people in our communities and see how they're doing and if they

need help. You know that there's a lot, there's a lot that can happen afterwards that can be positive, even in the shadow of something so dark and painful. And I think the mistake or the mistakes maybe to not the right word, but the app is that it's so painful when these things happen that people want to forget, they want to erase and they want to move on, and they don't want to dwell inside of these events and contemplate them and contemplate the future in the light

of them. And so that's kind of what the building has forced the community to do in Brownsville, that there's this memory that's just stuck around and force people to kind of reckon with this crime over and over and over again. And I just think that there's value in that. I think there's value in the aftermass, and there's value in thinking about things that are really really hard to think about.

you do Facebook? Do you have a website? Can you tell us a little bit about that.