No Matter How Loud I Shout by Edward Humes Page B

courtroom, a skinny boy with those little kid arms you could wrap your thumb and pinkie around, no problem. It seemed hard to believe he could raise, much less successfully aim and fire, a double-barreled shotgun. The police had thought that right up until he happily showed them how he did it. That was a year ago, though, and since then, Ronald has bulked up in the hall, a product of forced calisthenics and starchy foods and the march of adolescence, new muscles and goatee and a slight paunch aging his five-foot-five frame.
    â€œI didn’t do anything, I swear,” he tells his parents every time they visit, and they, of course, believe him. He is their baby, their youngest son, a kid who has never been in trouble a day in his life, but for the occasional detention at school, a cut class here and there. They dismiss his confession to the police. They have heard of terrible things that can happen to a young black male locked up in a police interrogation room; they know what happened to Rodney King. Ronald’s father, a humble and soft-spoken gentleman with a deeply lined face and the hard calluses of a man who worked a lifetime with his hands, speaks with a quiet passion about his son’s innocence, of how he knows with something that borders on religious faith that his boy, the child who came to him late in life and made him young again, could not possibly be a killer. He and his wife are no longer married, but they are living together again while the case is pending, their Ronald’s future in the balance. The case is now the center of their lives, every hearing, every motion, every casual utterance in court. To them, Peggy Beckstrand is the monster—the humorless face of the state, trying to take their child away.
    She feels their stares drilling into the back of her neck at every hearing. Peggy feels sorry for them, for the pain their family must bear, the look of incomprehension on their faces every time they hear the courtroom ring with the words, “Ronald Duncan: two counts, Section 187 of the California Penal Code—murder in the first degree.” She wonders what the Duncan family sees when Ronald comes strutting into the room, grinning and waving like a kid getting off the bus from summer camp. At such moments, when disgust wells up within Peggy, she sometimes watches Ronald’s mother and father rise and extend their hands toward him, reaching out across yards of empty space, the closest thing to an embrace they are allowed in court, where touching the accused is not permitted, the cold reality juvenile and adult systems share. To Peggy, it is as if she and the familyare looking at two different children. Will they remain so blinded by love, she wonders, when the trial begins and she hauls out the pictures of what Ronald left behind on the night of the murder? Would she be so blinded if it were her daughter Courtney skipping into the courtroom? Even after all these years in the DA’s office, it is the sort of question that can still haunt this former preschool teacher, this mother and grandmother, whose job is to be a prosecutor of children.
    But then, there are the pictures. They haunt her, too, agony and loss captured in the harsh strobe light of a crime-scene photographer’s camera. The last pictures of Chuck and Adelina Rusitanonta.
    The image will always be indelible in Peggy’s mind: husband and wife slumped in their old Mercury station wagon, engine still running, back door ajar. Shortly before 11:00 P.M. , the car had drifted slowly into a lamppost on a residential street. A man had run out onto his porch at the sound of two loud bangs followed by the sound of a car crashing, just in time to see a shadowy figure run away from the car and toward a van that seemed to have been waiting.
    Inside the car, husband and wife were still wearing their matching Baskin Robbins shirts, impossibly huge matching holes blown in their heads by a pair of point-blank shotgun blasts,