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A Teacher in Mourning Christine Rohde speaks about the effect of Lisa NorrellŐs murder on her city and school. By Beverly Oden, Marcie Aroy, and Daniela Mohor
To Rohde, who now teaches at Hillview Middle School in Pittsburg, Lisa's murder underscored the dangers and tragedies many of these students face in their lives on a daily basis. Three reporters, Beverly Oden, Marcie Aroy and Daniela Mohor, caught up with Rohde in her classroom at Hillview on a recent school morning to talk about her experiences last year and now, and the effect of Lisa's murder on her school and classmates over the past 12 months. A transcript of that interview follows. Q. We wanted to find out how students feel one year later about Lisa's
ROHDE: It's still kind of going on for some kids. It's not over, there was no closure to it. They're s still dealing with the grief. They still talk about it as if it happened a couple of months ago. It's still very real for them, especially since the person who did it is still out there. So they have their own safety to contend with. Q. How do they feel about the person still being out there? I think they feel unsafe ... since they don't know why it happened to her. They question, "What was she doing? Did she go the wrong way? Did she dress the wrong way? Did she say the wrong thing?" It might not have been any of those things, but they don't know that, so they question their behavior and they question, not enough for me, I don’t think, but, there are still too many of them that walk home at night in the dark. There are still too many that just don't take very good care of themselves. They take a lot of risks. But they do it now knowing that there are consequences for those risks... They don't know if it was a random act of violence or was it somebody who targeted her - Does somebody watch girls go home? So it's kind of scary. Q. Who are you talking about specifically? ROHDE: The girls that felt closest to her. There were a couple of kids who were close to her who didn't want to be part of any grief counseling, who didn't connect with the other girls, and one girl they called, Shortie, that I knew of, I think she probably had one of the hardest times dealing with it. There were about 50 other kids who attached themselves to the whole situation who knew her and just took it very, very personally. A lot of kids in Pittsburg have a lot of pain in their life. They’re lives aren't so great. They relate to other kid's pain very easily and they took that on. So they'd walk by Lisa’s classroom and they'd see other kids crying and they'd cry because other kids were crying. and I received a lot of criticism because of that. The school district just wanted to pick up the carpet and sweep it under it and push it away, you know? And make it go away and I was accused of exacerbating the problem, and dragging it out longer, and making kids feel more depressed then they would have been.
Q. Because you were willing to talk about it with the students? ROHDE: Right. All the counselors were using my room during the kidnapping stage of the investigation and we had a yellow ribbon group going on in my room and that was the only consolation the kids had just to come down there. And Lisa had been at a quinceanera rehearsal and that's a very popular thing in Pittsburg, as well as in other cities, but to have been invited to be part of one, unfortunately there's sometimes some gang activity, or members who are affiliated with quinceaneras in Pittsburg, because of the large Latino population and the chance of bumping into a kid who belongs to a gang is pretty good, so all kinds of things were running through kids' minds. They didn't know who to talk to, who not to talk to, where it was safe, so my room just started with a couple of kids. I was making yellow ribbons and some kids said, "I'd like to make some yellow ribbons," and it just became kind of a healing thing, a therapeutic thing, and before I knew it I had seventy-five, eighty kids in there and they just called themselves, "The Friends of Lisa." They weren't necessarily her best friends, but they felt very close to the situation. It was a place where they could express their fear, "What if this happened to her? What if that happened to her? Do you think she's dead?" I mean, these kinds of questions were on their minds, every day, every hour of every day. I came in 6:30 every morning and I stayed until whenever the last kid left just so because once they went home they were cut off from support systems.... Q. So there was counseling for how long for the kids? ROHDE: I guess about a week after they found her body, there was a kind of set group of people who were coming in, and there were some people who saw that the kids were still coming to my room so some of the off-campus people kept contact with those kids through my classroom. Q. How long were they coming to your classroom? ROHDE: It was for a total of three, four weeks for some kids. For some
kids it was the Q. They would just stay in your room all day long? ROHDE: Yeah, they would try. I'd send them out and say, "You know, you've got to try and go back to class and concentrate a little bit." And the teachers were willing to be understanding to an extent. A lot of people don’t have a very high threshold for that kind of thing. And it makes them very nervous. And kids want to talk about things like that, or they say, "If you don't want to talk about it, then I want to go back to so-and-so because they'll let me talk about it." That started pissing off my colleagues, and I can understand why, but I couldn’t just cold-turkey the students from grieving either. But, I don't have a counseling degree, I'm just a good listener, so I had to be really careful. I had kids who were suicidal, their pain is so surface that it brought out every kind of imaginable reaction from them. Q. Mostly women or men? ROHDE: Boys and girls. Q. And the ones who were suicidal were they her good friends or the ones who were upset by the whole situation. ROHDE: Well, there were kids who were like, "Well, I want to go with Lisa, I don't want her to be alone." I mean that's the way kids think sometimes. Even suicide can be romantic. You have a kid who commits a suicide at school, then you have to watch really closely for the other ones... And they're not the ones who are writing letters and saying things; they're the ones that are real quiet. So you have to really watch for them. It wasn't a lot but there were about three or four kids we had to watch real closely who were already on the borderline before that. They need to be reminded what the meaning of life is and why they're here and what their purpose of life is and just because one person leaves us doesn't mean we have to go to join them. That's something that a school doesn't always have the facilities to handle. Some of them get that in their home and in their faith. And luckily some of the kids have church. We actually had a church youth group come into my room at lunch-time and helping the kids even if the kids didn't belong to their group. And some kids kind of picked up on that.
Q. But you said that there were some kids who didn't want the counseling? ROHDE: No. Some kids would come in and not talk. They refused counseling. And I remember one kid sitting there and saying to the psychologist, "I hope when I die that this many people care that I'm gone." And that was his only connection to the whole thing, was this sense that nobody loved him the way that everybody loved this girl. And the town just kind of adopted her, kind of like a strange phenomenon, sort of like Polly Klaas, when the whole town just comes out and adopts sort of like an icon. It was just this cute little girl who wouldn't hurt a fly and all of a sudden she's just gone and violently and horribly. Q. So only the kids who wanted counseling got it, right? ROHDE: The kids had to volunteer and come down for it. During the first few days there were quite a few outside agencies in there, psychologists from other schools were invited to come help, and they were located around the schools, but the kids, it's like those people just ended up coming down to my classroom, not because of me, but the kids foundƒ It was sort of some warmth there because they'd give it to each other. Sometimes, they'd break down and say, "It reminds me of when my mother murdered my father when I was five," and then the counselor would take them out and take them down into a room and would talk to them because all kinds of issues were coming out that weren't even related and those had to be dealt with. Q. How many counselors were involved in helping the kids? ROHDE: A good dozen every day for the first five or six days. And it
dwindled Q. Is the reason that you said before that you were being punished
because ROHDE: I'm really vocal, and that started it last year. I got in trouble talking to the press during that time, which I didn't talk to them for two weeks, but then they were misquoting and talking to people who didn't know her and that was hurting the kids. I didn't go on TV but I did talk to the newspaper. The Chronicle, they quoted pretty accurately, and finally The Ledger did, but the Times had to promise that they were accurate, because I don't know what angle they were looking at, you know they were just scrambling for angles for what maybe happened to this girl and it was kind of gross to some of these kids, that knew her, that she would be painted as sleazy, or you know. I think there's always a societal thing that "girls ask for it." When nobody would give them anything to fuel that angle, then they dropped it very fast. And when you meet the mother and you see the pictures of the kid, you feel guilty for even thinking that.
Q. What was Lisa like? ROHDE: Lisa was like if you could take the currency out of the electricity, she was like that all the time. She exuded energy. Not always directed in the right direction, but she was very social. She liked to talk with her friends and socialize, write letters back and forth to her friends, and she liked that a lot more than she liked math, science or social studies. She was a little girlish in a lot of ways. Lisa was very bright and very clever, but she struggled with reading and writing. I think that she was a little immature, she needed to buckle down a little more, but she never had the opportunity to. She was still at that 9th/10th grade socializing kind of age, her friends were the most important thing in the whole world and her mother. She was very close to her mother. Her family meant everything to her. She had a boyfriend, she kept a journal in my room and she hated writing in the journal but she would always write, because I would say, "Okay, write Adam a letter. Write what you and Adam did yesterday, some of what Adam and you did yesterday. I don't want to know everything that you did yesterday with Adam! " Her friends were very important to her, she carried pictures around, she had Tigger, so she had these very mature feelings, but she carried around a stuffed animal all the time. I have a lot of her stuffed animals still at home in a box. I don't know what to do with them. But she had them in a locker, she had them in a classroom, would lend them to other kids who asked to hold them. She was very sweet and endearing that way, the kids felt very close to her. Q. Always Tigger? [Character from Winnie the Pooh children’s books]. ROHDE: She loved Tigger. She had this thing for Tigger. Little Tigger, big Tiggers. The kids started bringing them. People bring flowers and they, the kids don't have a lot of money, so they didn't buy a lot of things, but they started decorating desks in The classrooms, and teachers would say, "I’m bringing this desk into your room because I can't stand looking at it." And they would write, "Lisa, I miss you. Lisa I love you. They made tissue paper flowers and they glued them to the desk and rosary beads. We started a showcase outside the classroom at one point... Q. Is this mostly the Latino students? ROHDE: No, it was black, white, Latino, Filipino. That's one thing about Pittsburg, is that it's really diverse and the kids areƒ They don’t see differences in each other. I mean, they are aware obviously what race people are, but there isn't a lot of division. The kids are very...tolerance is not even the right word because it's not tolerant, there's not barriers with that. Nobody would come in here and say, "Oh, there's a lot of white people in here, I'm not coming in here. There's a white teacher in here, she won't listen to me," -- It was nothing like that. It amazes me. Q. But there were there problems with youth gangs? ROHDE: At the high school? Yeah, we've had our cycles of gang involvement. Sometimes, it was black/Mexican, but ever since then it's been Mexican/Mexican. I don't know why they just want to kill each other... And it's usually off-campus groups coming in and stirring up trouble over there. Kids come in from Oakland and Richmond and they can drive through the street, wave some gang signs out the window, stir up some trouble for some kids wearing colors. Lisa didn't belong to one. No. They tried to suggest that in the paper, that maybe there was a gang related problem.... Q. And how about you personally, what was it like for you going through this whole thing? ROHDE: You know I didn't react right away because of the kids. It wasn't until we had to go to the memorial at school and they asked me to speak. The kids were standing behind me on the stage and when it was over, it kind of all hit that it was over, for me. It still makes me really sad. I had her for half the school day, so when that happens, you get to know a kid really well.
Q. How many people came to the memorial at school? ROHDE: Over two thousand. They made it voluntary because they thought we were playing it up to the administration, and not that many kids were upset, but it was standing room only. They made it during an extended lunch, and the kids didn't have to come in. Which I mean, I suggested that it be short, you don’t need to have an hour-long memorial to say what you need to say, and they invited the mom and the mom came, and she brought Lisa's uncle and they were sitting in the front row, and it was very hard to speak looking at them because nobody knows what you're going through until you look at their faces and see the pain in their eyes, but they were the strength for everybody. Minnie is a remarkable woman. She really is. I know she suffered in her own way, but she was so strong for those kids, and she allowed them to come to her house and when we had the vigil, when we walked to the mother's house, and the whole front lawn is still covered with candles on it. It was really hard to get to the mother because the press was all there, and this little girl just kind of pushed through the crowd, she's only like four feet eleven inches, and she says, "I didn't have any money to buy you anything so I'll just give you me and I'll be your daughter." And the whole crowd of people were just bawling. These kids would give themselves. They were that unselfish. Q. Do you remember what you said when you were up there? ROHDE: I said that Lisa was a gift. And I had taken a tissue box, because my room was filled with tissue boxes, because I sat there that day and I couldn't think of what to say, and I went and got some wrapping paper that had some stuffed teddy bears on it, and I wrapped the box up and just kind of used that with kids. I thought, "what would kids understand?" because, all they seem to care about where their one hundred fifty dollar basketball shoes, and their FUBU shirts, and they get so caught up in commercialism, and Michael Jordan, and they lose sight of what's really important in life sometimes. And I think the situation kind of made them question some of those things. When I thought of Lisa, I thought of a gift and what she's given us and what she will continue to give us by touching all of our lives, we will always have that forever. We will always have the gift of Lisa. And the kids sang this song that the girls wrote and candles, it was just really sweet. Q. How was it with the press? ROHDE: For the mom? Q. For everyone, for you, for the kids? It was horrible with the press because in the beginning, they didn't care who they spoke to and they didn't care how they did it. They were told where to stand and they would cheat and run and sneak in the back or come into classrooms with their cameras. It was awful and there were so many of them and they were there from five o'clock in the morning. I would come early in the morning and their lamps would already be on the street, already starting with the pictures of the school, and where they wanted to set up, and everything was just an angle for them. And it just seemed so cold-hearted at the time. I know everybody has a job to do, but it seemed very insensitive, and phony. A couple of the reporters that came out that you see on TV every night. You see what actors and actresses they really are. The makeup, and then they get in your face and they go, "okay, I want you to stand over there," and they would just pick kids by the way they looked or what they were wearing. It just made us pretty sick. And then the staff that would get interviewed were the staff that didn't even know her. Instead of saying, "Don’t talk to me, I didn't even know her," or "go talk to that staff person," they would just talk to be on TV. It's gross. Maybe during a happy time it's not such a gross thing, but during a sad time it is. And they stood around for days and they were banned from being in the building, but they would still sneak in anyway. That was kind of rotten. A couple of times on TV they announced that they maybe had found evidence or had found a possible suspect, weeks after it happened. I'd have a TV in the back room if something like that just happened to be announced and the press would be waiting right at the door, looking for reactions from the kids, from me, to see if we were crying, if we were happy. They'd come in and say, "Is anybody still crying?" It was sick. That went on for months. For some kids it will never be over for them, and when you think back what high school was like for you and what events stick out in your mind, this is going to be a trauma for them forever. Q. I heard that Lisa was angry at a boy at the party and she left. Was she someone impulsive like that? ROHDE: It might not be something you or I would do, because it would seem really crazy or risky. But kids tend to do things that are crazy or risky without thinking about it. And teenagers in general, have a sense of immunity, that nothing is going to happen to them- "I’m fourteen, no one is going to shoot me, no one is going to do this, or do that." And it's the parents that are the paranoid ones who are constantly trying to put them back on track to keep them safe. Lisa's mother would have never allowed her to walk down that road. After a while I would go to the hall, and drive towards Lisa's house and go, "There's a pay-phone there, there's a pay-phone there, why didn’t she stop? I was so angry at her for not calling her mother collect. What was going through her mind? Because it became very clear from the evidence that she got to walk a certain distance before something happened to her, and it's a pretty lengthy distance, before they found that shoe. Every kind of imaginable thing went through people's minds. Why didn't she call? Her mother had fallen asleep waiting for her and she was supposed to have a ride home but she didn't wait for her ride home and she had had an argument with her mother that morning about something, and I think like a lot of teenage girls who get spiteful, "I'll show them, and I'll just walk home," and she wasn't going to wait for someone to pick her up because that would have been five minutes longer that she would’ve had to sit in that hall. And I don't think she was thinking danger, desolate, dark...Lisa was a very strong-willed young lady. Sometimes, that gets in the way of her logic of things. And she was hurt.
Q. Were you frustrated at all with how little the police were letting
ROHDE: Nah, I would expect them not to give any details. I think they did the right thing. Until they arrested the right or wrong people without the right evidence. I don't know what happened there. That was very disheartening when that fell apart, that investigation. Having the FBI at your school, that was a trip. Her boyfriend, Adam, had to be ruled out as a suspect, because you know how everyone is a suspect until they rule you out. Her boyfriend was never the same again. Hardly ever went to school. He was a freshman, he was younger than her. He couldn't talk about it, didn't go to any counseling. There were a lot of victims besides Lisa during that time. Q. Did Lisa feel that she was more Italian-American or Latino-American? ROHDE: I think she really identified with the mother's family. Because her mother is from a big old-fashioned Italian family. The town was connected to the church and all the old families. That was the family that Lisa really knew, but yet, she was aware that, her mother or father was from Mexico. I don't think Minnie ever hid anything from her. Q. Her father died two years ago? ROHDE: Right. She had just left junior high. Then her grandmother had passed away too. Lisa was very close to her grandmother....Minnie went from not letting anyone in Lisa's room, to letting the kids go in. I think Lisa's closet, Minnie Norrell’s non-profit clothing enterprise, is Minnie's way of getting out of that, and putting those things somewhere else. Lisa loved clothes. There were lots of things that she wanted that the mother couldn't always buy her, and that frustrated Lisa as it does with most kids when the mother says no. I think in Minnie's mind she never wants a kid to not get to do something because they don't have the right thing to wear. There's lots of kids who don't go to proms because they can't afford a dress, the shoes. She doesn't want kids to ever feel awkward or out of place because they don't have the right thing to wear and she has a gift like that, her heart and sensitivity. Q. How has this affected the way you teach now? ROHDE: It's changed my whole outlook on teaching, period. I always believed kids were the whole thing, but this even brings it closer to home. There's more to kids than just sitting them in a chair and teaching them to read and write, they're whole people and you never know who's going to be sitting there tomorrow. I remember not to take anything for granted and I haven't ever since -- with my family, with my friends, nothing. I do everything knowing, appreciating what an opportunity we have. Life is such a gift. And you never know if you have it for a minute or a lifetime. No regrets if you look at life that way. |
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Christine
M. Rohde was Lisa Norrell's teacher last year at Pittsburg High School,
where the multiethnic student body of about 2,000 students largely consists
of children of poor or working class parents. Pittsburg High is one
of eight disadvantaged schools in the Bay Area recently targeted by
the University of California, Berkeley, as potential "partner"
schools to attract deserving underrepresented minorities to the university.
These partner schools were chosen in a pilot outreach program on the
basis of a number of factors, including a traditionally low rate of
enrollment at UC Berkeley and a high percentages of students receiving
free lunches and of families receiving welfare assistance.