They ask for a hair sample, a saliva sample. I do that, and they let me go.
Actually—wait—I should explain this. You know what they do? They have to get something like a hundred hairs. This lady stands over me with rubber gloves pulling hairs out by the root from every part of my head, and then from my arm and leg. It’s torture.
Then that Friday, I’m in my office at school and they come arrest me. I don’t even think anything’s up when they come in. I got used to them poking around the building.
But they have me stand up, they do the cuffs and my Miranda, and all I can do is laugh. It’s a weird response, I know. Not laughing hysterically, I mean I’m just sort of laughing in disbelief. It felt like a movie. But then yeah, two years later in court, the one officer testifies that when they came and got me I was laughing. I sound like a maniac.
What they had on me, what they thought they had, was a very small piece of my hair in Thalia’s mouth and my DNA on the bathing suit. I don’t know what to say here because either it was shit luck or, I gotta suggest, maybe they gave themselves a little help. They do what they can to strengthen their case because they’re under a metric shit ton of pressure to solve this thing. And I’m a solution that makes the school happy. I’m not a student, I’m not a teacher. I’m not some huge part of the community. They probably think they’ve figured it out, and they just need that little bit of extra help.
Or maybe it’s legit. I swam in that pool a lot of mornings. I’d lift, rinse off, go for a swim, shower, get to work. So sure, maybe some of my hair is in the pool. The bathing suit, I have no idea. I touched a lot of shit in that gym.
They say “DNA” and it sounds so definite, like it must be my blood or semen. And DNA evidence was this new, exciting thing back then—like this was something juries had maybe heard about on TV but just barely. They hear DNA and, wow, that’s official.
But what you’ve got is a quarter-million gallons of water in a pool with fuck knows what floating in it, and one of those things is a piece of my hair.
The thing is, the cops don’t tell me it’s a hair and some trace stuff on a bathing suit. They tell me my DNA was all over this girl, and they say the only explanation is either I killed her or I was sleeping with her. They say this at about three in the morning. Not that I know what time it is. They took my watch away. All I know is I was there for fifteen hours. They say, “Just help us understand why your DNA was on her, and we can eliminate you as a suspect. If there’s a logical reason, you’re okay. And the logical reason is, you were involved.” They tell me the age of consent in New Hampshire is sixteen, that if I slept with her maybe I’d get fired but if this was all recent it wasn’t even against the law.
I can’t understand what went on in my brain, but it seemed like a way out. I’m not even fully awake, like I keep looking at this cold-ass table in front of me, hoping it’ll turn into a pillow. So I say yes. But that’s not the end at all. Now it’s “You were sleeping with her, you were the only one in the building, you would have heard whatever went on, we have your DNA. You did this.” They say, either they nail me on murder and drug charges, or I confess to murder and they forget the drug part. And they say the drug charge would go to the feds if they found out I’d crossed state lines, which technically I did, because I had this friend in Vermont. They go, “Maybe it was an accident. Involuntary manslaughter. She slipped, she fell in the pool, right? This isn’t so bad for you, but if we get you on both murder and drugs, you look like a career criminal.”
You have to understand—this is what’s sad and funny to me now—the amount of weed I had in my house, it was nothing. The laws were harsh back then, but—I don’t know. Jesus.
Then they put the Granby face book in front of me like some trump card. It was something I did every year, wrote nicknames in there to help me remember names and faces, but then the boys’ hockey team found out and they’d sit around giving me names to write. Like I said, I was immature. The reason I wrote that under Thalia’s picture, I wrote jailbait, was some rumor one of those guys told me about Thalia and a teacher at her old school. The cops show me this noose around her neck, and I have no memory of drawing it. Maybe I did, just doodling when I was on the phone. But the hockey kids were all over that book, marking it up. My guess is, some fifteen-year-old did that. I mean, they found swastikas on some other kid’s picture, and I know I didn’t do those.
Anyway, they eventually get me saying I attacked her in my office, they get me to say I hit her head on the wall. Then they remember there’s no blood in my office and they say, “Okay, so you had some kind of poster. What kind of poster would that be?” I look back on this, and it’s like a dream, like I was hypnotized.
A couple hours later I finally remember I can ask for a lawyer. They go, “Sure, sure, but if you only make your statement after the lawyer comes, it looks like maybe the lawyer told you what to say, like maybe you’re holding back. You get this done now, we get the lawyer later, and everyone knows you’re coming clean.” They actually say this to me. But none of it’s on tape.
So they get me to write this thing, the statement, which I’m sure you’ve seen. They’re telling me what to write, I’m writing it. And they get me to sign it and read it out loud, which is the only thing they record, out of that whole night.
* * *
? ? ?
Britt asks if he blames Granby for what happened. There’s a long pause.
He says, I don’t think they set out to use me. But I think Granby leaned hard on the police to solve this, and they leaned hard on them not to look too close at the teachers and students. That school has lawyers you wouldn’t believe. They got money you wouldn’t believe.
I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, I don’t think any one person said, “Hey, let’s pin it on Omar.” But you lean that hard on people, they’ll hand you what you want. What they wanted was someone like me.
7
The adrenaline I felt walking to dinner that night was anticipatory: I knew I’d run into people, whether old classmates or folks connected to the hearing or opportunists. I knew I’d need to avoid most of them. I just didn’t know when they’d pop out at me.
The teenager at the counter had recommended an Italian restaurant a few blocks away. It turned out to be one of those places with a ridiculous amount of seating—useful for weddings and presidential primary dinners, but largely empty on a Wednesday night. Perfect for social distancing. I asked for a booth （a carapace, really）， ordered a glass of Shiraz, and immediately opened my laptop. How any woman ever ate alone in a restaurant before she could use a laptop as a shield, I have no idea.
I recognized, several tables away, Amy March, the lead defense attorney. My joy at learning her name was Amy March had been surpassed only by my delight at learning, via Zoom, that she raised her own chickens and dressed exactly like someone who raised her own chickens. She’d been a public defender for years, and was now in private practice. I hadn’t yet met her in person—our practice testimony was scheduled for the next day—but here she was, wearing a sweater dress and leggings and clogs. Her hair featured an impressive reverse-skunk effect: One streak of original black remained in a cloud of gray. She sat with two other women and a man, in serious discussion—their food long finished and their wine half-drunk. The man kept texting someone, then reading aloud from his phone. The defense had opened two days ago, and I assumed had gotten through several witnesses today.