Angie

For most of when Angie was growing up, a youth that wound through several different foster homes, her big brother Gordy walked her to school and sometimes even went to her parent-teacher conferences. If she got in trouble, the school called him. He signed her report cards. Neither of them had much of a childhood since they had to grow up on their own so quickly, but they had each other. Broken people raising broken people, she says.

“That’s why he went crazy on that guy. Because it was me.”

Angie was three when her mom got a call in El Paso that her brother, then six, was being taken away from their grandma.

“He’s still got scars all over the top of his head,” she says, from the beatings. Sometimes their grandma would leave him locked in the bathroom alone for days, throwing in a brown paper bag of food once in a while.

Their mom went to get him, brought him back home to El Paso, and was almost immediately back on drugs with her then-boyfriend, Chris, whose parents offered to take the kids in to live with them in Augusta, Kansas. Angie remembers life with the Turners for those several months fondly.

Then the state came and took them away. The two siblings’ short but peaceful stay with the Turners ended, replaced by a long chain of faces and foster homes.

Angie didn’t kill the victim, but she received the same charges - murder in the second degree and aggravated kidnapping - as her brother and another young woman, who later testified against both of them. It’s true - Angie was there, in the field that evening when her brother swung an axe into a young man’s face, the face of the same young man who had stalked and harassed her for months after barely talking to her during their concurrent stints at a mental care facility, the same guy who had sent her a strange letter with letters cut out from magazines and then at some point, bizarrely, stolen a car with her brother.

“I deserved the time that I got,” she says now, and she’s somber but matter-of-fact. “I was a young and stupid kid - I had no business being where I was at 16.” She says it in a way that many of us might tell a hard but simple truth - the way someone might admit I can be stubborn or He lost his job.

“I blame myself,” she says. She had pushed him to do something, to handle it. “My brother’s really crazy. I knew to a point what I was doing - but I didn’t know it would go that far.” The words surge out of her as she revisits a clearly familiar neighborhood in her memory, and she describes that night in the field - the strange, eerie atmosphere she felt when she first climbed into the car with the other three people; the tension she felt, glancing back and forth at the others drinking beer and smoking weed on what should have been a typical night for country kids like them; then, suddenly, the sound and the blood and the young man screaming, a scene out of a horror movie; and she was running through the night, hiding from the others in the dark; and then she was suddenly in the brightness outside of a strip club, where a biker put quarters in the payphone for her to call for a ride home.

Now she’s suddenly quiet, and she angles the phone away from her face as she cries. The camera falls back, pointing upward, and all I can see is the top of a headboard, a plain corner where beige walls meet a white ceiling, and it could be any other room in any other apartment in any other place.

A few days before what would have been their wedding several years ago, Angie found her fiancé had been using drugs, a huge truth revealed by a small bag of powder left in a pocket in the dirty laundry pile. She left, immediately, with nothing but a suitcase, and ended up in Arizona. An array of old friends, the lifelong bonds of being incarcerated together, saved her, offering places to stay when she had none.

A couple of months later, K’s family and friends called Angie, begging her for her help. K eventually called her, too, now 100 pounds lighter and now on meth. Angie came and, with their cousin, drove her to an in-patient treatment center, hours away from anything.

“I said if she could do all this and finish, she can come down to Arizona, and maybe we’ll work on us.” Instead, K left rehab, along with some other substance-addicted friends, and then, “She stole my taxes, stole my jewelry. She had my stuff all re-routed, all my mail. She got in my bank accounts.”

After that, Angie went two years without dating, spending that time helping a couple of friends get back on their feet instead. While working on one friend’s house a few years ago, she met J, a disabled vet whose 11 years in the military left him with shrapnel in his back and legs. They’ve been together since.

Angie was well into her prison sentence in the late 2000s when she saw her case file from the foster care system for the first time, sitting in the office of her case manager during an effort to track down her birth certificate.

It was the first time she had ever seen or even knew of the existence of the numerous cards, stuffed animals, and other presents that the Turners sent over the years. The handwritten notes wondered out loud where the children were, reminding them that “Grandma and Grandpa love you.”

When Angie was released in 2010, she was eager to reconnect, only to find out they had died recently. She had just missed them.

It was from the dusty foster care case file she also learned that it was her mother’s veto that had initiated her children’s removal from the most loving, peaceful home they had known. The revelation would later split the family, several relatives furious with her mother for the move, then furious with Angie for forgiving, defending, and re-establishing a relationship with her. Today, those relatives still don’t speak to either of them.

Angie served about 15 years in prison, and throughout their sentences, served apart yet in sync, she and her brother stayed in touch. But something changed several years after she got out.

About five years ago, he stopped talking to her. The last time she went to visit, he refused to see her, even though she had rented a hotel room for the night, even though she waited in that visiting room for over an hour. He kept refusing. Then he sent all of her letters and pictures back home to her.

At first she was distraught, but she understood. In the years before, he had been trying to fight his case and had sent his money home to try to find an attorney. He thought he was getting out, and then it fell through. He wasn’t getting out. And now Angie was home.

It was the first time she ever had to heal herself on her own, Angie says, “but I feel like I was able to soothe myself in a healthier way, because he would have made me feel bad about everything. Him letting me go was giving me my freedom.”

As she came to accept the new kind of space between them, Angie began to see her brother more clearly. As her birth mom told her - “Maybe the person he found himself to be is the person he needs to be to do his time.”

Shortly after she got out of Topeka Correctional Facility in 2010, Angie was nearly double the age when she arrived there in 1996. In the months following her release, she worked at a handful of IHOPs in Topeka and Wichita, forbidden to work mornings because of her felony record. Early one morning, before the shift change, the hot water tank broke. With her vocational training and experience from her incarceration, she had the hot water repaired and the store functional within two hours. She was promoted to a traveling manager, tasked with “fixing” stores when fights broke out and other staff were too scared to break them up, working 12-hour days, six days a week. For two years, with her parole officer’s approval, she traveled across the state, improving stores in south Kansas, where she was offered a general manager role in one city - “but I couldn’t do it. It smelled like cowshit down there.”

When she broke her foot, they fired her. She and her then-girlfriend K, who wanted to get into a welding school in Tulsa, moved to Oklahoma, and the job search for Angie was brutal. She couldn’t get a serving job because of her record and lack of liquor license. She had graduated in the top of her vocational training class in Topeka, so she felt confident applying for a job in heating and air. She landed an interview. At one point, she drew out a detailed blueprint for the interviewer. She diagrammed where the returns would go, and he marveled at how it was one of the best he had ever seen - but said he couldn’t hire her because of her background. Then he asked her out for drinks.

She finally landed a job at a call center booking hotel reservations. In two years, she moved up quickly to a management job. While she struggled with the computers, she was good at booking the reservations others couldn’t.

“I could sell flavored air,” she says. “I understand people - I just listen, get the drift of what they’re wanting.”

With her experience, the call center recommended Angie for a better opportunity. She drove from Wichita to Oklahoma City for the interview, but the woman stood her up. She rescheduled for later in the week - and the woman stood her up again. Three days later, Angie received an offer for a third shift housekeeping position - “with my pretty brown skin and that criminal record.” The same thing happened at WalMart - her work history at IHOP for four years landed her a managing job, and she was all but formally hired. The day after her drug test, she checked the mail. Walmart had sent her a copy of her mugshot with a note telling her not to come to work.

Angie’s health began declining recently and fairly suddenly. Minor breathing problems grew into a complete dependence on inhalers and cough syrup. Most recently, she had to give up her job as a server because she couldn’t breathe to do the work. At one point, she lost her voice completely and had oxygen delivered to the house. 

She wonders now if her health problems had anything to do with asbestos exposure while at Topeka Correctional Facility. Angie was one of the TCF residents who worked on the crew for dormitory remodeling - and also one of the work crew members whom TCF failed to provide respiratory protection, training, supervision, assessment, and monitoring. The crew broke up the flooring, releasing all kinds of dust into the air. In 2010, the EPA released a report detailing how TCF and Kansas Department of Corrections officials violated the Clean Air Act and the Toxic Substances Control Act by failing to test for asbestos before the remodeling projects and failing to provide proper equipment and training. The investigation, initiated by a labor union representing state corrections officers, found that asbestos was in thousands of square feet of floor tile throughout the Topeka prison - in numerous staff lounges and offices, the dental clinic, restrooms, the library, and throughout the hallways, and found similar results and several other KDOC facilities. 

Recently, Angie to the pharmacy to pick up her inhalers. She didn’t have insurance, and the total was $900. She wouldn’t be able to pick up just one item. She stood at the counter, dumbfounded, and cried. 

“I live on these things,” she says. “I use them six to ten times a day.”

The pharmacist began calling doctor’s officers and found her a variety of inhaler samples, and her total for three others went down to $300. 

“But that was a one-time deal.”

Her brother is different these days, Angie says, “His eyes are different, from the way he used to look at me.”

When he was still accepting her visits, she would tell stories from when they were kids - and he just followed along, listening in a way that Angie couldn’t be sure he even remembered.

Angie hopes he decides to talk to her again. She prays for it, but she also knows things are different between the two of them - maybe permanently, maybe not. Perhaps pushing her away was the only option he had in coping how she is free while he remains in prison.

“There’s a puzzle piece that will forever be missing,” she says. “But if I sit here trying to find one piece for a lifetime, I’m going to miss all the other ones. I only get one ticket at life, and I can either use it for one ride or ride all of them. I’m taking as many rides as I can.”