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Brutal tragedy turns into story of healing

by Susan Reinhardt, SREINHARDT@CITIZEN-TIMES.COM

October 9, 2006 12:15 am

Doctors listed Kathy Stein’s condition as critical.

The next 24 or 48 hours would be crucial. She had suffered arterial bleeding from a single bullet fired from a .25-caliber handgun and was sent from Mission Hospitals to Presbyterian Hospital in Charlotte for advanced treatment.

While she fought for life, her attacker, Jerrell Bowman, 13, fled the scene and wondered what happened to the woman they’d stopped.

Had he really shot her? He wasn’t certain, he later testified. She drove off so fast after the gun fired that he figured he must have missed.

On the school bus, a day after the shooting, the wide-eyed child with a questionable IQ asked the bus monitor at the Cooperative Learning Center, Gail Guzman, if she’d heard anything on the news about a lady getting shot on Livingston Street.

Yes, a lady had been shot and her condition was critical, Guzman said.

Guzman later testified she’d heard Bowman and Christopher Nelson, 15, plotting the crime, but she had dismissed it as kids messing around. She said she reported what she heard to the bus driver.

She gave the following account of what she heard:

“Chris asked Jerrell, ‘Let’s rob someobody.’ Jerrell said, ‘OK,’ and Chris said, ‘I have a gun,’ and Jerrell said, ‘I’ll kill them.’ ”

Kids on the bus “say a lot of different things and you don’t always take them seriously …,” she said. “I didn’t know if Chris was just talking or if he really had a gun.”

Coming back

Two and a half days after the shooting, Stein regained consciousness. It was 4 a.m. on the first day of spring.

“My only memory,” she said of the days before awakening, “is occasionally being aware of the sound of the respirator clicking and puffing air into my lungs. Occasionally, I’d see the ceiling tiles above the bed swirling around.”

She knew being alive was nothing short of a miracle. Had she turned her head another degree things would have been much different.

“It would have finished the job,” she said.

Upon waking, she tried to speak by putting her finger over the tracheotomy tube, eventually managing to whisper descriptions of the boys to the police. She had remembered after being shot that this day would come. Cops would need to know everything. So she told them. She described their facial hair, teeth and body types.

Within a week, Bowman and the three accomplices were charged with the attempted robbery and murder of Stein.

Recovering

Her physical recovery was faster than anyone imagined. After two weeks and three surgeries, doctors released Stein and she headed home. The emotional healing would take much longer.

Fear crippled her. She spent the first sleepless night crouching within the walls of her stone house, fending off panic attacks. Hootstein kept a loaded shotgun next to him. The feeding tube remained in Stein’s stomach, along with the open hole in her throat.

Neighbors began stopping by to visit. One sobbed and said he knew Bowman well and had tutored him in elementary school. He described him as a “sweet boy” with lots of emotional problems stemming from his upbringing in a world of drugs and neglect.

Hootstein felt anger rise and dismissed the visitor. And yet the words resonated and wouldn’t leave his head. The visit brought what the couple never imagined would come of this: An attacker with a name and horrendous history. A real person. A sad little boy with a troubled and tragic life.

Legal system

On the first day of court testimony, April 9, 1998, Stein waited in an adjacent room, still afraid to see the boys who nearly killed her.

Hootstein faced them and all of his earlier notions shattered when he saw the frightened 90-pound boy sitting in shackles. He looked more like 10 than 13, he remembers thinking.

“I related these initial images of the shackled black boy in the predominantly white courtroom to a slave auction,” he said.

The judge determined the boys would be tried as adults, and in the beginning, that suited the couple fine. They had not sat in the courtroom and weren’t privy to many of the facts until months later when they reviewed the transcripts.

All of Hootstein’s anger changed direction as he considered that his wife’s shooting might possibly be a direct result of racism and the violence this country sows. Teachers and social workers testified they notified the Department of Social Services 23 times in the months preceding the attack, and that Bowman frequently coiled into a fetal position and begged his teachers not to take him home.

Jane McDonald, who was coordinator of efforts to help students with special needs in the Asheville school system, said no one heard back from DSS.

Bowman, she told the court, often came to school with a backpack, sometimes even wearing his pajamas because he wasn’t sure where he’d sleep that night. Others testified the boy had trouble understanding and controlling anger, often throwing chairs and bursting into tears.

He was a young teen crying out for help, yet no one seemed to be answering.

Meeting the teen

Four months passed, and Stein and Hootstein met with Bowman, his attorney and District Attorney Ron Moore, along with an African-American detective. They discussed a plea bargain that would keep Bowman in the juvenile system instead of the more violent adult prisons.

At the end of the talks, the detective turned to Bowman and asked if was he worth this special effort.

“Nah,” the boy said, eyes on the ground and filled with tears. “I’m not worth it.”

“Why do you feel that way, Jerrell?” the detective asked. “That scares me for you.”

“Because,” the boy said, “look what I did to her.”

In the end, round one went in favor of what the couple desired for the wisp of a teen, and the DA accepted the plea to keep the boy in juvenile detention.

Moore said he did the best he could to please the family and yet stay tough on the crime. In the past, he’d served on a commission that advocated for blended sentencing, which would allow the court to treat offenders as juveniles while they were young but monitoring and supervising their actions until they reached adulthood.

Unfortunately, the recommendation failed to pass.

“We don’t have blended sentences, but I came up with my own form of a blended sentence,” Moore said. “That night, he had attempted to stop another car, so I wound up letting him plead on that one.”

Bowman pleaded to conspiracy to commit armed robbery, common law robbery and assault with a deadly weapon inflicting serious injury, none of which carry mandatory adult prison time.

“What we did,” Moore said, “is we sent him to juvenile on the other person he tried to stop.”

One year later

Hootstein and Stein decided to meet the shooter at the detention center in Swannanoa.

“Jerrell wanted Kathy to know he was trying to save other kids at the center from making some of the same mistakes he did,” the couple stated in their proposed book, “Justice Then Peace.”

About this time, the couple took up their cause: reparative justice, promoting healing for all victims and offenders by addressing what they referred to as “wounds born of racial, ethnic and socioeconomic injustice and oppression.”

During this advocacy, wanting such offenders to receive counseling, concern and rehabilitation, Hootstein and his wife faced an army of critics and began a tumultuous journey down a path less chosen — one toward forgiveness instead of rage.

Why weren’t they furious with the shooter? Why, instead, did they want the system that failed them to pay the price of violence instead of the young boys who shot Kathy Stein?

Moore said he was caught in a tough spot, trying to figure out how to punish the crime and please the victim and society as a whole. He knew in his heart what would happen if he put a child into an adult prison.

Sentencing would be postponed until his 18th birthday. At that time, the couple once again would try to keep the shooter out of adult prison. Bowman spent time at the Juvenile Evaluation Center in Swannanoa, at a halfway house and a private boot camp for young offenders.

He failed, Moore said, to complete the boot camp program. The family contends that Bowman was set up to fail.

As a result, even though the pair once again advocated for his release into some sort of therapeutic program, the courts sent him to adult prison for at least 29 months.

Back in the courts

In March 2001, Stein filed a lawsuit against the Cooperative Learning Center for the bus driver’s failure to report the conspiracy to murder. They lost twice in the state Supreme Court.

The family sued the Department of Social Services and settled out of court. Other suits against agencies also were thrown out.

They sued the public and county school systems, which jointly ran the Cooperative Learning Center where Bowman was a student. That suit went all the way to the State Supreme Court but failed to pass.

“That suit was all about the fact we believe school bus monitor did tell us she reported it to the (bus) driver, and they failed to report the conspiracy to commit armed robbery and murder. The school had policies that did not require for the reporting of conspiracies,” Hootstein said.

He found the law an outrage. Had the school reported the teen’s plans, Stein might never have been shot.

A former state Supreme Court justice and an attorney also thought the law was wrong and wrote the Supreme Court, asking a judge to reconsider the case.

The judge ruled against them.

“In this day of terrorism, it’s outrageous that public officials don’t have a duty to report conspiracies to law enforcement,” Hootstein said. “The State Supreme Court ruled that public officials don’t have a duty to report conspiracies. That’s the insanity of this.”

Bowman turns 18

As Bowman’s 18th birthday came around, so did a new sentence — the 2 1/2 years in an adult prison.

“I was upset,” Stein said. “I talked to a reporter about the sentence I felt he deserved, and there wasn’t a single option that would guarantee a good outcome.”

No therapeutic group home. No learning job skills.

“I felt like I was saved somehow, and I felt like part of my mission was to do something to transform this terrible crime into something positive — an outcome that would make the world a better place. The sadness I felt was I wasn’t able to do that.”

Stein was quick to say she wasn’t advocating those who hurt others be set free. She simply believed there had to be better options for people like Bowman who, with the right training and therapy, might become decent citizens in their communities.

“Prisons don’t make people less violent,” she said. “If citizens thought prison was creating citizens that were more productive and safer people, less violent than when they went in, they would all be excited when a felon moved in next to them.”

Leaving the area

Within 16 months of the shooting, they gave up on the system and moved to their former hometown of Amherst, Mass. They thought it would be different up North. They were wrong, and all of their talk about reparative justice, and human rights and race relations angered many.

They wrote a judge, blasting what they believe is state-sponsored abuse and mental torture. But at one point, they were ready to give up.

“We’re having to look deep and think,” Hootstein said. “Do we just accept there’s no other way and not get in the way of a huge machine that has no other approach but to take young men and chew them up and spit them out as violent people? We’ve been advised to let the system do its job, to let things go, everybody’s got a role.”

No matter how hard they try, the family can’t let it go.

Stein said she’s sticking with the cause until her personal mission is met.

“My goal is to have my shooting somehow be a transformative process into helping things get better. I know because of my work as a physician’s assistant in a prison system what happens to young inmates in adult prisons. I know how they get used and raped,” she said.

It would be easy to stew in anger and bitterness. Instead of giving up, they turned their anger toward blank pages, quickly filling them with their story, what they hope will soon be a book: “Justice Then Peace.” The purpose of the book is to call attention to what Hootstein believes is an endless and seemingly hopeless cycle of social injustices, violence and blanket judicial responses.

Bowman and the family occasionally talked by phone from his cellblock. As more time passed, the calls became less frequent. Months turned to years, but the family never quit looking to change laws and better the lives of young people, African-American boys in particular.

Freedom comes

Then on Aug. 31, Jerrell Bowman boarded a bus from Polk Correction Institution, a medium-security prison in Granville County near Durham. By evening he was in the custody of Craggy Correctional Center in Buncombe County, transferred for the purpose of release, said Richard Elingburg, Jr., assistant superintendent of programs.

“When he came here, he was basically housed and we didn’t assign him anything,” Elingburg said. “He just would eat and sleep and get ready for release.”

That date arrived on Sept. 4.

Labor Day.

Bowman gathered his few personal belongings and slipped into a pair of prison-issued white pants, a standard white shirt and tennis shoes.

He walked out the doors with virtually nothing but his freedom, something he hadn’t had since March 17, 1998.

“It felt good,” he said a week after his release.

He had his photo identification, a Social Security card and a list of agencies in the area that could assist him. He had no job but high hopes.

He moved into the Asheville area with family members, Elingburg said, and is under post-release supervision, which is less stringent than parole.

What he said

While declining a full interview with the Citizen-Times, because, in his words, “I don’t want to put it out there like that … not yet,” Bowman did answer a few questions.

He said prison changed him for the better.

“It made me open my eyes, this reality … that anything can happen in a quick moment and can change your life.”

He also said his victim and her husband were “great people,” and they planned to stay in touch.

One day, he said, he’ll tell his story to help others, but right now it’s too soon. He’s got to find a job and the healing needed to function well in society.

Stein and her husband were eager to talk with Bowman and said they hoped agencies and the Asheville community will extend support to the young man.

Even Moore is crossing his fingers for a good outcome.

“He’s 21 and not had the same experiences as others from 13 to 21 have,” Moore said. “I hope he’s gotten some education and discipline. I’d advise him to be careful who he hangs out with.”

As for Stein and her husband, Moore is careful with his words. Both parties have a mutual respect for the other.

“I think Kathy has a big heart and is probably much more forgiving than 99 percent of the people in the world,” Moore said. “She did something in terms of making me examine him (Bowman) and not throw him away in the adult system.”

Moore said never in his nearly 16 years on the job has he seen a victim of this type of crime advocate for her would-be killer.

Stein today

Stein’s life today is hugely different than in the months after her shooting.

In the beginning, she’d tremble, fight panic attacks and hide. She was afraid to drive, scared someone would again shoot her through her car windows.

“I was a mess,” she recalled. “I wouldn’t go take the dog out without hiding behind trees.”

With time and knowledge, putting her fears into the energy of helping others, she’s back on the job as a physician’s assistant in the emergency room of a major hospital near her home.

She drives to work every day, always locking the doors. She has an escort walking her to the parking lot after hours. She tries to schedule her shift when it’s daylight.

She is surrounded in an environment where life and death tango in the form of gunshot wounds, stabbings and accidents. She prefers the role of standard cases rather than trauma.

“There are changes in things, in that you can never go back and look at the world as you once thought,” she said. “When you hear the news and traumas in other’s lives, you can’t think, ‘Oh, that can never happen to me or someone you know.’ You know for but for the grace of God that it could happen to anybody.”

Perhaps, she said, the shooting was more than just a coincidence, and that she was the one chosen to go through this because of her knowledge of abused children, prison, dysfunctional families and violence.

“I don’t think the court system was ready for someone who had all of this knowledge of what was going to happen,” she said.

Life has gone on for the couple. Seasons change, children go to college, grandchildren come into the picture.

“At this point,” said Stein, now 52, “I’m as normal as I hope to be. I can go to potluck dinners and school meetings and no one would be the wiser I’d been through this. I just got lucky. You move on, pick yourself up, dust yourself off.”

She seems unaffected by those who are mystified by her capacity to forgive and even advocate for her attacker. She truly believes he’s learned a lesson and will one day be productive member of the Asheville community.

“How miraculous,” she said, “to find myself caring about a young man who, but for the grace of God, would have been my executioner.”

Contact Susan Reinhardt at 828-232-5844 or via e-mail at sreinhardt@CITIZEN-TIMES.com.