It wasn’t obvious that the cause of death was drowning. There was water in her lungs, but all that meant was either she took several breaths in the water, or water—maybe water already in her mouth—entered her lungs during the EMTs’ attempts to revive her.
They weren’t able to perform the autopsy until the day after Thalia was found, almost two days postmortem—a lapse that would erode many positive signs of drowning, such as （I was horrified to learn） froth in the upper airways. The medical examiner ended up having to look at tissues on a microscopic level, where the results were solid if not iron-clad. The official cause of death was “drowning precipitated by injury.”
Britt had pointed out in class that the crime scene—which wasn’t considered a crime scene for days—was a mess. Water everywhere, mud tracked in, Thalia’s arm scraped as they pulled her out. The traces of blood they found later on the concrete by the shallow end, even the blood on the emergency exit doorframe—those were likely enough to have been smeared there by uncareful paramedics that no one could draw conclusions. Plus, who knew what had been washed away by the chlorine. No one came in with a luminol test for days.
There are two doors to the pool. In other words, two ways in and out—both down by the shallow end, directly opposite each other. One opens to the hallway full of trophies—the shiny new ones and the desiccated 1890s footballs—which in turn leads to the gym, the locker rooms, the lobby, the front entrance. Omar’s office was off that hallway—twenty-six feet from the pool door, according to the internet. The other door is the emergency exit, with its giant Alarm Will Sound sign, not meant to open from the outside.
Omar had a key not only to the gym’s front door （the same master key that opened most doors on campus） but one for the pool itself （a unique lock）。 So did the athletic director, Mr. Cheval. So did poor Mr. Wysockis, the assistant athletic director, who first found Thalia on Saturday afternoon, heading in for his swim. The swim coaches—Fran’s mother, Mrs. Hoffnung, among them—had keys, as did the custodians. There were a lot of spare master keys floating illicitly among the students—but not pool keys. Why risk it all for a pool key?
When first questioned, Omar said he’d had his office door open that night. （His office was where kids got their shoulders examined, their wrists taped. A desk, an examination table, a couch to wait on, a noisy ice machine.） Anyone entering the pool, therefore, would cross his line of vision. Unless perhaps someone got straight into the pool through the emergency exit, or had been in the pool already for hours. But Thalia couldn’t have been there for hours; Thalia was onstage.
Omar would have heard someone screaming in the pool, even with the pool door closed. On Dateline, Lester Holt had stood inside what used to be Omar’s office while a woman stood next to the pool and screamed. He could hear her loud and clear. I’d always found that convincing. （But Britt’s imagined voice in my head, again: Did they try it with an ice machine running?）
According to Omar’s later statements, before he left, at 11:18 p.m., he checked the building as usual, even tugged the glass-paneled pool door to ensure it was locked; it was. No, he said, he hadn’t peered through it. It would’ve been dark in there. I would remind Britt of that in the morning: If Thalia intended to swim, she’d have turned the lights on.
I switched to backstroke, slowed my breathing, watched the ceiling go by. The even slats of wood, the flags. I wanted my muscles to burn. I wanted to exhaust every thought I had about Thalia, everything I’d learned, and I wanted to exhaust my quads and hamstrings and arms. I wanted to emerge drained. Then, that night, I could sleep dreamlessly and wake up sore.
The prosecution’s theory of a motive was that Thalia was having sex with Omar in exchange for drugs—which was ludicrous, because Thalia had enough money to buy pot for the whole school. She might well have been buying drugs from him, that might have been how they knew each other, beyond his taping her elbow, but she wouldn’t have needed to barter. The state argued that as Omar and Thalia slept together, he associated her more and more with his ex-wife （he’d had a ten-month marriage） and transferred his anger onto Thalia. A great deal was made of the fact that his ex, like Thalia, was white. They posited that one night, high on drugs and jealous over her ongoing relationship with Robbie Serenho, he lost it—and everything about his ex came flooding back until in a fit of rage he strangled Thalia, bashed her head on something hard, changed her into that swimsuit, threw her unconscious body into the pool.
Displaced anger had always seemed an odd motive, though, even at the time—and by 2018 I knew more about the way prosecutors weave narratives from scraps. I certainly knew more about how rage gets ascribed to Black men.
I tried to think, in the pool, about the actual Omar I’d known, rather than the version rewritten on top of him from the moment he was arrested, the one that invited me to look back on every memory as tainted, a conversation with a murderer. He had green-flecked eyes and very white teeth. He’d bounce around the weight room like he was on springs. I told him once that he reminded me of Tigger. He’d lie down for crunches between the ergs, talk without getting winded. He seemed curious about the students, asking us not about ourselves but each other: What’s up with that kid? he’d ask. Are those two dating? Is she really the Anheuser-Busch heiress or was someone yanking my chain?
There were other scenarios, of course. Thalia and Omar scuffling at the pool edge—maybe he’d caught her sneaking in and confronted her, or maybe they’d fought about sex, or money—and, what, she fell and hit her head? And he tried to cover it up by drowning her? Or they’d been swimming together, they’d been wrestling in the water, and things got out of hand? Although you’d think, then, that this would be what he’d confessed to, rather than the story he’d told, and then recanted, about attacking her in his office and carrying her in here.
I turned it over, lap after lap, the cold of the water settling deep in my joints. The story I knew felt a lot like the stories Lance and I examined on our podcast, the ones passed down through decades of misinformation and bias. The truth was in there, but you had to dig.
There had to be something I’d missed about their relationship, or about that night. I wanted Britt to take me there. I wanted second sight. I wanted the ability to remember things I was never there for.
Someone else entered the room, a young man barely old enough to be faculty. He stepped up on a starting block at the deep end and launched himself into the water, sleek as a dolphin.
15
I had promised Britt I’d watch Diane Sawyer’s interview of Omar’s mother before our next class, so I pulled it up on my laptop as I brushed my teeth that night.
Sheila Evans was prim—small and contained as a wren. I’d learned after Omar’s arrest that his mother was a department secretary at Dartmouth, that his father died young. She struck me as old-fashioned, with her tidy hair and her clipped, careful diction. Behind her, framed family photos lined the top of an upright piano. Diane Sawyer leaned in, her face a spectacular blend of compassion and skepticism.
“When my husband passed,” Sheila said, “it was like losing the bookend to a row of books. We all tipped over sideways. But losing Omar, the shelf itself went. He was pulled out from under us.”