One Small Moment The defense team of three lawyers and Richard L. Cruz sat at the square, compact table in judge Snyder's Missouri court room waiting for him to dismiss the jurors for the day. As he instructed the exhausted jurors, the lead counsel scrutinized Cruz's face. The normally alert steel gray eyes seemed less bright than usual, The man gestured to his client. "Are you okay?" "What is the trouble?" inquired the judge. "It's my client, Your Honor, he looks a bit ill, I'm just checking with him." Judge Charles Snyder gave the defendant a cursory glance, then dismissed the jurors. He then sent the tall, well muscled bailiff to escort the shackled prisoner to the bus that would transport him to the jail holding him during the trial. After a session with the lawyers had ended, they walked out into the marble halls of the courthouse and prepared to leave. "Is he okay?" asked the tall one, absently fingering the handle of his soft leather brief case. "Well he looks a little bit green around the gills," answered the senior member, "if he gets sick it will delay the trial. Damn," he muttered under his breath, "this trial is going to be long enough, we don't need that."." Richard Cruz's nine foot cell was a neat little room holding a cot, a small table, a toilet, and a small sink. On the small roughly hewn table by the cot, he had piled a few books, some newspaper articles, and two photographs. He lay down on his bed, his hands shackled behind him. The room was stuffy, the white walls stark, reflecting the summer heat. He lay on the bed, he knew he was going to be sick, he just didn't know when. He would have to get to the toilet, but he didn't think he could make it so he called to the guard. "Sorry, you're stuck," said the guard, watching the prisoner lying on the bed, uncomfortable in the stifling heat. Someone slid the food through the door, but he didn't want it. He tried to get up, to go to the toilet, he was surprised, he did make it, he got sick, but he didn't think it made him feel any better. If anything, he felt worse in the heat and the lack of comforts. The guard heard the commotion but didn't do anything about it. The prisoner made his way back to the bed and lay there, dozing a little. He lifted is head to see a picture of Suzann with her four children and her good job in a hospital and her husband and her smiling face. If he harbored ill will toward the government that now tried him, if he hated the system that now shackled him in the maximum security cell, he didn't hate his sister. The evening passed. He began to feel worse. He became ill more often, not even bothering to make it to the toilet each time. The guard looked in and saw the situation. He got on the radio and called the infirmary. "Hey we've got a sick prisoner. Send a nurse and some rags, and some sheets and a mop!" The guard fumed, "what a mess!" The infirmary sent a nurse. Her name was Beth Mills. She came to the block and saw the guard. "It's inmate Cruz." Beth Mills knew that this man was on trial for a series of violent murders which had rocked the nation to its moral and political core. She also knew he would probably die for it. But she was a nurse, she had compassion on him, she wanted to help him. She let the guard open the cell. "Inmate Cruz?" she said quietly. He turned his head and looked at her. She knew he wasn't dead behind the eyes. Hadn't the psychiatrist said he had no form of mental illness? Socially awkward, perhaps, committed to his skewed beliefs; the murders had mesmerized a nation which didn't quite understand that beliefs like his had always existed, but that only a few people acted on them. If descent to the federal government was prevalent in the population, not many people would dare to create a bomb large enough to destroy so many lives. The resources, the financial investment, the emotional incentive were mostly lacking. Most were content to vehemently discuss their disagreements with the government, their protest against gun laws, or their anger at how government agencies handled certain cases. Many did not understand the motives which drove people like Mr. Cruz to turn his feelings into violent protest. He seemed so "Normal" on the surface, but deep inside, thoughts formed ideas, ideas formed into concrete plans, and plans transformed themselves into reprehensible actions. Why was this? Beth Mills did not stop to consider all the nuances of Inmate Cruz's mental processes. Why he had killed so many she did not know. She only knew that now at this moment in time, lying on his cot, he looked too ill to care about anything. "Inmate Cruz may I touch you?" He nodded. First, she held the hands and unshackled them, then she instructed the guard to help him up. "Inmate Cruz on your feet." He docilely obeyed, the heat leaving little inclination toward disobedience. Beth Mills cleaned up the mess, gathered the sheets and wiped the floor dry, and tossed them into a bag. "For the laundry. You guys are so damned unsanitary not even giving this man a bucket!" She was partially angry, partially just expressing her opinion. "Inmate Cruz, I'm going to take you to the infirmary. I want you to lie down on this gurney, and we'll take you there. You're not staying here." She had a basin on her cart. She had him sit on the gurney, and gave him the basin which he promptly put to use. "Inmate Cruz," she said with little emotion, "I am going to help you. You may be on trial for murder, but you are not in a condition to do anything to me, besides if you did, I would have you pinned in no time." His eyes flickered a bit. She took the basin from his free hand, she washed it, she wetted a small rag and gave it to him. "Wash your face, inmate Cruz." He lay down with the basin beside him, closing his eyes, turning his head into the hard mattress. Beth pushed the gurney along the halls, talking on her radio to the person at the infirmary. "We have inmate Cruz, increased heart rate, BP 120/80, respiration 15, vomiting perhaps every hour, fever 101. He will need assistance in taking care of himself, I am bringing him in." She spoke with confidence. She knew how to say things. If there was any kind of respect in this jail, she had it. "Inmate Cruz, would you like me to bring you one of your books?" He nodded in the negative. "Can't concentrate on it." They made the trip in silence. She pushed him into the infirmary and settled him in. The place was just as hot as the cell, aggravating his already sensitive condition. Upon arrival he promptly reached for the basin and filled it. Patiently, Beth waited for the episode to end, and then efficiently ordered Tylenol and water with baking soda. The guard had shackled him by one hand and one foot to the gurney, and now Beth undid the shackles. She handed him a wet rag, and then put a glass into his hand. "Here, drink some of this slowly, only a little. It will help you the next time, there will be a next time, inmate Cruz." She helped him cover up with a sheet, he was chilled a little, not in much of a mood for escaping, thus the reason for unshackling him. "Inmate Cruz," she said, "Do you mind if I call you by another name? Richard? Rich?" "Rich. Just call me Rich." His answer came from far away. He closed his eyes hard and buried his head in the pillow, lying very still. "Turn on the TV." The request was short. "Can we say please?" "Damn it! please." But he was feeling too ill to put up much of a fight, so she turned on the tv and let it babble. He was sick till 2:00 in the morning, then she knew the worse was over and he would soon sleep. His fever stayed up, and she washed his face for him and pushed back the very short hair required by the prison regulations. Nurse Beth Mills had a few more patients to see that night, but she made time to check on inmate Cruz. She thought she saw a trace of gratitude flicker in his steel grey eyes. After her last ministrations, he opened his eyes briefly, for he was about to go to sleep, and made direct contact with her. She returned the gaze. "thank you." "You are welcome, Rich." Beth Mills didn't know what had led this man here. She didn't know what kind of parents or childhood he had. She only knew that here and now he had needed her help. She put her hand lightly on the shoulder of the man on trial for murder. "Good night, Rich." When he awoke in the morning, he still felt ill, but he slept and wasn't sick as often. Federal prosecutors put off the trial by two days. Inmate Cruz lay in the state between waking and sleeping and absently saw Beth Mills efficiently hovering over him from time to time, asking him if he wanted to try eating something. He tried Popsicle's, ice, but mostly slept. When he resumed his position at the table in judge Snyder's court room, feeling physically much better, he remembered the gentle hands of Beth Mills. They had acted in such contrast to the blitz of hatred and anger which surrounded him from all sides; anger which only fueled his discontent for society and its government. In the swirling Malay of emotion, the nurse's actions offered a breath of fresh air, and perhaps did more to influence his thought patterns from that day forward. There were no sudden turn arounds in his actions; no repentance; no attempt to apologize for lives lost or irrevocably ruined; only an awareness that in a world full of chaotic emotional expression, there was the concrete idea of someone being good to someone else. Mr. Cruz's trial proceeded and the prosecutor's evidence mounted against him. He was indeed guilty of crimes committed against the country, if not in his mind, then at least in the minds of the jurors who sentenced him to death. The sentence came as no surprise to Richard L. Cruz. It came as no surprise to those who followed his case with such dedication. It came to no surprise to Suzann and her husband and her four children. The story the family and the media never knew was of the woman who had aided a clinically detached man in a time of illness, something that you or I may take for granted, but that stood out in the mind of the man who felt isolated and alone in his own world, his own existence. Her hands hadn't ask why he had done what he had. Perhaps her hands served some god he didn't know. The day before his execution, he sat down and wrote to Suzann and her four children and her husband, but perhaps it was with the most feeling that he penned a short note to the prison infirmary nurse. "Upon my death I remember you, who were so kind to me when I needed it, not asking, though surely you knew; not withholding compassion from one who had taken revenge on his government. You are a good woman." lying in the death chamber covered with white sheets with the clear iv tubing running to each arm, staring at the ceiling, Beth Mills received his last conscious thought before he surrendered to the lethal drug cocktail that ended his life and ushered him to his eternal destiny.
Copyright © 2001 Shelley J Alongi |