vans. The ambulance hooted and swerved, making its way past the cars slowly. The streets were littered with the detritus of protests and rallies, bits of burned tire and rubbish.
It had been thirty minutes since the radio first cackled when West finally reached the police station. He and his partner navigated through a throbbing crowd that had gathered by the gates. The paramedics pulled up to the interior courtyard. Police were milling around, and three agitated young people stood over a form covered in a gray blanket, lying on the cement near a corner of jail cells. West hopped out of the ambulance and rushed over.
“We lifted the blanket and we were shocked to see a white person,” West recalled when I met him at a mall restaurant in the upscale suburb of Claremont in 2012. Amy had been, he would later say, “the cherry on top” of the general trauma of his work; a few years later, he was hospitalized for post-traumatic stress disorder and alcohol addiction. He was long sober now, a round-faced man with jet-black curls, pale café-au-lait skin, and a toothpaste-commercial smile, who, with his wife, ran seminars for at-risk kids in the down-on-its-luck colored neighborhood in which they lived. How strange, he thought on that August 1993 day, how really unusual to see all that wet blond hair in tangles. West bent down and pressed his hand to Amy’s wrist and then her neck, searching for a pulse. Nothing.
He examined her bloodied body and found what Rhodes had not: in addition to the crack above her brow, she had suffered two large fractures on the back of her head and a deep stab wound in her chest.
“What struck me most is that she had long boots on,” West recalled nineteen years later. But his memory, which seemed to him so sharp and true, was flawed. In fact, the medical examiner’s photographs show that Amy was wearing black lace-up oxfords with a 1990s-style square toe and square heel.
“Is she okay?” Evaron asked. Maletsatsi and Sindiswa stood behind him. Shouldn’t she be taken immediately to the hospital? And then shouldn’t someone call her parents? What about her car? The women were becoming increasingly hysterical, and had begun to shout questions. The paramedics didn’t answer. They pulled the blanket over Amy’s damp, unmoving face.
That evening, after Amy’s friends had gone home, a contingent of gruff police officers swept into the small station, questioning everyone, the cops even, taking over rooms and telephones. These men, with their jowls and barrel chests and packs of quickly disappearing cigarettes and bottomless cups of black coffee, were the Riot and Violent Crimes Investigation Unit, and they would begin the inquiry into Amy’s murder.
The big bosses were not thrilled about this particular crime; the entire nation was already experiencing an extended anxiety attack over the threat of mass race-based violence, and now this? The top brass was prepping for a major governmental transition, and everyone was hoping to avoid bloodshed. Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners had been freed in 1990, after twenty-seven years. Soon thereafter, he and his comrades conducted protracted negotiations with the apartheid leadership, with the end goal of free, democratic elections in which people over eighteen of all races could vote. Everyone recognized that in a country with, roughly, a 10 percent white population and a 90 percent nonwhite population, free elections would mean the end of minority rule. The country remained in flux.
Foreign governments disapproved of apartheid and so South Africa had been subject to trade and arms embargoes. The country’s leadership and its white citizens had become global pariahs. Apartheid had become the cause du jour among American and European pop stars and actors. Mandela was an international hero and, despite laws and legal titles, his influence extended to most black South Africans, as well as a growing number of white, colored, and Indian
It had been thirty minutes since the radio first cackled when West finally reached the police station. He and his partner navigated through a throbbing crowd that had gathered by the gates. The paramedics pulled up to the interior courtyard. Police were milling around, and three agitated young people stood over a form covered in a gray blanket, lying on the cement near a corner of jail cells. West hopped out of the ambulance and rushed over.
“We lifted the blanket and we were shocked to see a white person,” West recalled when I met him at a mall restaurant in the upscale suburb of Claremont in 2012. Amy had been, he would later say, “the cherry on top” of the general trauma of his work; a few years later, he was hospitalized for post-traumatic stress disorder and alcohol addiction. He was long sober now, a round-faced man with jet-black curls, pale café-au-lait skin, and a toothpaste-commercial smile, who, with his wife, ran seminars for at-risk kids in the down-on-its-luck colored neighborhood in which they lived. How strange, he thought on that August 1993 day, how really unusual to see all that wet blond hair in tangles. West bent down and pressed his hand to Amy’s wrist and then her neck, searching for a pulse. Nothing.
He examined her bloodied body and found what Rhodes had not: in addition to the crack above her brow, she had suffered two large fractures on the back of her head and a deep stab wound in her chest.
“What struck me most is that she had long boots on,” West recalled nineteen years later. But his memory, which seemed to him so sharp and true, was flawed. In fact, the medical examiner’s photographs show that Amy was wearing black lace-up oxfords with a 1990s-style square toe and square heel.
“Is she okay?” Evaron asked. Maletsatsi and Sindiswa stood behind him. Shouldn’t she be taken immediately to the hospital? And then shouldn’t someone call her parents? What about her car? The women were becoming increasingly hysterical, and had begun to shout questions. The paramedics didn’t answer. They pulled the blanket over Amy’s damp, unmoving face.
That evening, after Amy’s friends had gone home, a contingent of gruff police officers swept into the small station, questioning everyone, the cops even, taking over rooms and telephones. These men, with their jowls and barrel chests and packs of quickly disappearing cigarettes and bottomless cups of black coffee, were the Riot and Violent Crimes Investigation Unit, and they would begin the inquiry into Amy’s murder.
The big bosses were not thrilled about this particular crime; the entire nation was already experiencing an extended anxiety attack over the threat of mass race-based violence, and now this? The top brass was prepping for a major governmental transition, and everyone was hoping to avoid bloodshed. Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners had been freed in 1990, after twenty-seven years. Soon thereafter, he and his comrades conducted protracted negotiations with the apartheid leadership, with the end goal of free, democratic elections in which people over eighteen of all races could vote. Everyone recognized that in a country with, roughly, a 10 percent white population and a 90 percent nonwhite population, free elections would mean the end of minority rule. The country remained in flux.
Foreign governments disapproved of apartheid and so South Africa had been subject to trade and arms embargoes. The country’s leadership and its white citizens had become global pariahs. Apartheid had become the cause du jour among American and European pop stars and actors. Mandela was an international hero and, despite laws and legal titles, his influence extended to most black South Africans, as well as a growing number of white, colored, and Indian
Similar Books
