MC Quixote

Kids Getting Away with Murder: The Forgotten Histories Part 27

Speardon teachers a class called "Family and Consumer Studies". It's kind of ironic that one day she started class by saying,

"We're going to do something a little different today because of Halloween, so this class isn't going to be a Family and Consumer Studies Class."

The funny thing is, I think I learned more about family in that class than any class before or after (I still don't get the term "Consumer Studies").

Speardon set-up the class with a disclaimer,

"This is a difficult class for me to teach, I want everyone here to understand this is a very personal story and I might show you some emotions or parts of myself you haven't expressed before."

"And I know it's a little risky to tell this story, but I think there's a much bigger risk if this history is forgotten."

She had us, you could hear sounds in that room I'd never heard before; there was this quality of silence and an air of respect you rarely get in a classroom here.

Speardon walked over by the door and picked up this box of tissues off the counter; slowly, she walked them to the back of the room and put them on her desk. She sat on her desk, leaning forward, her hanging legs moved backward and then forward and then backward once, twice, and then she stared down at the carpet as her legs seem to go numb and she slowly dangled her feet to a point of stillness.

"OK." She took a deep breath,

"It was Halloween 1998, I was 17 years old, and it was my mom's 45th birthday."

"This became the scariest Halloween in my life and from then on Halloween went from being scary, to just being really sad." She paused,

"Hmmm, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's pass out these copies of an article from this magazine."

She held up a copy of some Salt Lake glossy magazine. Then the teacher in Speardon kicked in and she had us get out a piece of paper to write down some key vocabulary words she had selected from the article. I remember two of the words and they didn't really go together fete, which is like a small party, and Hate Crimes. The seven to ten vocabulary words didn't really reveal my main question: "How was Speardon related to the story?"

"This article was written a few years after the events and it's titled, "Faces of Hate". I'm going to just start reading it from the beginning and I might skip around a bit."

I still remember her voice reading the first paragraph; it was a graphic description of a 16-year-old boy who was bludgeoned to death right in front of the Federal Building in downtown Salt Lake. A description of the murder of Bernardo Repreza.

The article then went back in time and described a group of high school kids who were at a Halloween party that got too big for their parents. This group of high school friends jumped in a caravan of cars and headed into town to continue Halloween festivities.

There was a description of this car with six people from the party at the intersection of 1st South and State Street. This was a group of Granite High students. Speardon pointed out that Granite High was now closed but it used to be a small high school with a diverse population, like South Salt Lake, where she lived at the time. The seven teens in the car represented this diversity with Latinos, African Americans, and Anglos.

The article stated,

"Repreza and his friends were stopped at red light when a gang of 30 Straight Edgers began taunting them. Witnesses said one of the Straight Edgers spit on Repreza's friend, Jaynell Latay Cooper, an African American, calling him a nigger. (The Straight Edgers testified that it was Cooper who had instigated the violence, inexplicably calling out some 30 people.) Suddenly, Cooper was being beaten with nunchucks and a machete, and Repreza jumped out to help him, an act that would cost him his life."

Speardon's dry, crackled voice testified,

"My cousin, Bernardo got out of the backseat of the car to try and help his friend from being butchered in the street. Immediately, Bernardo was repeatedly struck with a baseball bat until he was unconscious and then he was cut open with a six-inch hunting knife, his face beaten beyond recognition and his innards spilling out of his body and into the street. This is how my cousin Bernardo was murdered, right there in front of the Federal Building."

Speardon paused and then lookup up at us and said,

"That should have been me."

The class just sat silent trying to figure out what she was talking about. She said,

"I had the party, mentioned at the beginning of this article, for my mom's 45th birthday. I almost got in that car with the Granite High kids, but instead of me, my cousin Bernardo got in that car, and that was the last time I'd see him alive."

"And what happened to the people that killed my cousin; some of them didn't even go to trial, some got light sentences, and only one of them is still in prison and he tries to get out every time his parole comes up. They brutally killed my cousin Bernardo. Bernardo was someone everyone got along with, he was going to join the military, have a family, he had plans, all cut short by a group of hate-mongers."

I've kept the article and after reading it a couple times, it was blatantly obvious that race was involved. This was clearly a hate-crime; and the perpetrators got all the breaks because they were white, middle class, Mormon kids. If it was brown kids doing that kind of violence to white kids, there's no question it would have been life in prison or maybe even the death penalty for everyone involved.

After hearing the story, I had a different view of Mrs. Speardon. I saw her in a way that helped me survive the day-to-day Utah bullshit. I could see her pain, I could see the memory of that Halloween night present in her every movement. A tragedy she will probably never completely overcome. She went to a place that is just plain tragic. Like she'd gone past that point of the sublime, beyond the terror and no concept of beauty, just melancholy, mourning, sadness, guilt raising its head, she was and will be damaged.

She told us that they planted a tree in front of Granite High in memory of Bernardo. She said it's still there and it's been growing for over ten years now. She kind of went off and said that the school has been "For Sale" for the past eight years, just sitting there because it's in a poor neighborhood. Something about brown kids started going there, and this caused a "White Flight", and then the district just closed it down. She raised her voice,

"That school should still be open. I'm just glad they haven't done anything to the tree, if they sell the property, I'm gonna get all my family to dig up that tree so we can transplant it."

She said that this Friday she would walk a group of students down to the tree to place ribbons on the tree. There were about 40 students in the procession to the tree; Speardon leading the way. We were all silent. We tied the ribbons onto the branches and then Speardon read us a poem that was found in Bernardo's English notebook by one of his teachers.

Someday

Someday you will love,

Someday you will care,

Someday you will treasure the moments

That we've shared.

Someday you will know that love is not

A game, then you will realize that I

Am not the same
Someday you will know what it feels like

to get hurt, then you will realize you

treated me like dirt.

Someday you will listen to a poem or a song,

then you will say to yourself,

"My, I was wrong."

Someday you will love,

Someday you will care,

But on that day baby...

I won't be there.

The pilgrimage to the tree, paying our respects, and telling us thisstory, seemed the only medicine Speardon had for her sadness, her damage, herdisease. The loss of someone she loved so much, lost to racial hatred andbrutality