Saturday, December 31, 2005
A young thief's lonely
death
Boy's family wants answers from detention
center
By
CLAUDIA ROWE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
Johnny Lim loved cars. So he stole
them.
Not an easy hobby for a 14-year-old
to pursue, but Johnny's older brother, an accomplished auto thief at
16, helped him along. And neither boy had to worry much about
supervision.
Their mother turned Johnny over to
his grandparents, elderly Cambodian immigrants scraping by on
fish-packing and garment work, when he was a baby. The older boy was
left to fend for himself in a group home. The youths' uncles, barely
out of their teens themselves, tried. But the Lim brothers ended up
in trouble with the law, sleeping in juvenile detention in Seattle,
anyway.
Johnny was there last weekend,
waiting for prosecutors to charge or release him, when he died. A
brain hemorrhage was the cause, possibly the result of a birth
defect undetected by his family until 8 o'clock on the morning after
Christmas -- when officials phoned Johnny's uncle, Kimhorth Lim, to
tell him the boy was dead.
"They're supposed to call when
there's an emergency," said Lim, 24, wiping away angry tears. "They
waited till he died to tell us. When he was sick, none of us knew.
No one called."
Pam Jones, interim director of the
King County Juvenile Detention Facility, who was off duty the night
Johnny died, did not respond to a request for comment. Though she
met once with the Lim family, relatives remain frustrated that they
didn't get help with funeral expenses and bitter about what they see
as few signs of caring by detention center management.
Johnny, it seems, had long been a kid
who fell through the cracks. His mother had been unable to care for
him, and though his father would call, promising to take the child
fishing or shopping, he failed -- again and again -- to show up.
Instead, Johnny cleaved to his older
brother, Sophek "Tony" Lim, who was in the county juvenile detention
center when the younger boy died and recently admitted to police
that he stole at least 20 cars, mostly Hondas.
"They had the same hobbies --
everything to do with cars -- and that was Johnny's way of hanging
out with his family," said the boys' uncle Kimhorth. "I'm not his
Pops or anything. I can't do those father things. But I'd tell him,
'If you're going to hang out, make sure you come home and stay in
school.' That was about all I could say."
His uncles spoke ruefully about their
nephew Friday in the dim Magnolia apartment where bed sheets are
used for curtains and where Johnny lived most of the time with his
grandparents.
Johnny's mother, Saroeun Lim, sat in
a corner, silently sipping tea.
Relatives warned Johnny about his
budding taste for car theft and growing criminal record. But to
little avail. He would steal cars and take them apart, just to see
how they worked.
"It's a way of learning -- the kind
of thing that teenagers do," Kimhorth Lim said. "We've all been
there. Sometimes you learn the easy way, sometimes the hard way. But
still, he didn't deserve to die."
Johnny Lim was a loyal kid, smart and
particularly good with figures, the family said, with the help of an
interpreter. He'd wanted to play football for Ingram High School,
but was cut from the team for missing practices because he was home,
babysitting a 4-year-old cousin. (Editor's Note: Football at
Ingraham High School is a "no-cut" sport, according to a coach at
the school.)
Obsessed with imported cars, he was
building his own 1994 Acura Integra out of parts he picked up -- on
the street, through hustling, wherever, the uncles said. On the
floor next to his bed lay an old auto mechanics textbook.
On Christmas in detention, no
relatives had been able to visit Johnny, but they heard that he'd
been playing in the gym. They thought everything was fine.
"We never knew about any medical
problems," said Jennifer Garman, who lives with Johnny's uncle
Kimhorth. "He was running around playing basketball like a normal
person, laughing, joking. The next day he was dead."
Matthew Lacy, the associate medical
examiner who performed Johnny's autopsy, said the boy's brain
hemorrhage could have been spurred by a tumor or infection but was
most likely caused by a congenital weakness in his blood vessels,
something that would have worsened as he grew -- invisible to
everyone until mounting blood pressure brought on a crashing
headache.
Jail staff have reported that a "code
blue" medical emergency call went out at 6:35 a.m., after Johnny
rose in his cell, holding his head and vomiting, before he fell to
the floor and died.
"It's hard to say whether anything
could have been done to prevent this," Lacy said.
The weakened blood vessel was in a
particularly tricky place to treat, he added, increasing the
likelihood that even emergency surgery might have resulted in
long-term disability.
But Randall Chesnut, a neurosurgeon
at Harborview Medical Center, who is familiar with the case --
though he did not examine Johnny -- said that in such instances,
there are often multiple severe headaches, sometimes days apart,
sometimes hours. If Johnny had reported feeling ill earlier that
evening and received help, there is a chance, Chesnut said, that he
could have been saved.
The medical examiner is continuing to
investigate, as is the Seattle Police Department.
Jared Karstetter, an attorney
representing the officers at the juvenile detention center, has
called for Ron Sims, the King County executive, to launch a formal
inquiry by a jury.
"All the facts and circumstances
surrounding this death will come out when Executive Sims holds an
inquest," he said.
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