our own and it’s impossible to gaze at a murdered child without thinking of your own precious ones at home.
But we steel ourselves to do what has to be done.
After a few moments to collect myself, I reached for the envelope, pulled out the photos and looked at them.
I gasped. I’d never seen anything more horrible.
The child had lain, partially submerged in fetid water, her little face upturned to the elements, in the Houston heat and humidity, for more than two days. Animals and the ravages of exposure had peeled away the skin from her face. Her eyeballs were missing, as well as eyebrows. Most of her nose had been eaten off. Her lips were pulled back in a grotesque death-grin. Several of her front teeth were missing and her tongue protruded, swollen, from what remained of her lips.
From the black, curly hair on her head, the parts of her neck and head that had not been submerged in the water and what remained of the skin on her body, I could see that she was African American. From additional photographs taken at the autopsy, I could also see the starvation, the bruising, the burns... the torture.
It was so overwhelming that for a long moment, I feared that I would not be able to go on.
But I had to. She needed me. She was depending on me.
Numbly, I pinned the ghastly photos onto the right-hand side of my drawing board, which rests on my aluminum Stanrite 500 easel.
The human brain, I have learned, has a powerful ability to block out things it’s not prepared to handle. In some cases, this can be a blessed coping ability, but I knew I didn’t have that luxury. I have to be able not just to see the grisly scene set before me, but to look past it, so that I can create something beautiful out of something horrific.
I have to do it. They’re counting on me, those lost little souls.
And so are the detectives.
Through the years, I’ve developed certain techniques to enable me to handle the stresses and strains of my job. If I have to do a post-mortem drawing of an unidentified victim, especially one found exposed to the elements and particularly a child victim, then I turn on a television set and place the screen to my left as I face the paper with the gruesome photographs arranged to the right of it.
I try to find a compelling news program of some kind—not a tacky soap opera-esque talk show or one of those screaming cockfights between extreme points of view—but a reasoned, thought-provoking and informative debate on some issue or other that can hold my attention for at least a few minutes.
This serves as a distraction, a protection from the jarring emotional jolts that come with staring for a long time at faces brutalized beyond recognition.
I keep a small television set in my office. Normally in the mornings, even at home, I don’t watch television. I prefer to eat my simple breakfast of fruit and juice in peaceful silence while I gear myself up for the day’s stresses. (Just driving in Houston is stressful enough.) On that particular morning, I hadn’t even listened to the radio in the car. I’d plugged in a Diana Krall CD and listened to her sweet, mellow tones instead.
Now that I had pinned the photographs to my drawing board, I reached for the TV set as if I were treading water in heavy seas and it was a lifeline tossed to me from a boat. Positioning it to the left of my drawing board, I glanced at my desk calendar and watch to remind myself the day of the week and thereby remember what program might be on television at this time.
The date was Tuesday, September 11, 2001.
Everyone remembers where they were on 9-11 when they first heard the news, when they first saw the awful, terrible images over and over, the planes crashing into the Twin Towers in screaming fireballs, people running, bodies falling from the sky.
I was transfixed in horror, not believing what I was seeing. I wished I could look at the images without seeing them or otherwise somehow will them to go away, to stop, to turn back the clock, to make it not happen.
People were dying in front of my very eyes and there was nothing, nothing, nothing I could do about it. Like many other Americans and people the world over, I prayed. At least, as best I could, not even knowing how to pray about the things I was seeing or what to say, how to form words out of the unspeakable.
I stared at the massive horror unfolding on the TV screen until I couldn’t bear it any more. Then I forced myself to turn and face the smaller horror staring back at me from my drawing board.
This time, I wept.
As time passed, I sobbed awhile, prayed awhile, watched TV awhile, tried to concentrate on how I would do the sketch, watched some more TV, cried some more...
Then from a place so deep within me that it had no name, a still, small voice seemed to say, You can’t help them. You can pray for them, but you can’t help them. But you CAN help her. You can bring her back home. You can give her a name. You can help her restless little soul find peace.
It was a strange sort of comfort—for lack of a better word—that I just can’t explain. The unbearable images coming at me from the television screen somehow enabled me to bear the ghastly image pinned to my drawing board.
On that terrible day in September, I realized that I had to take the negative energy that was unleashed in me as I watched the violent attack on our citizens and use it as a force of good. I could take all the power and majesty of my own grief, fear, rage and horror and USE it. I could funnel it into the task before me.
And so I did.
Cried awhile, prayed awhile, tried to draw awhile.
While black plumes of smoke from the north and south towers of the World Trade Center billowed skyward and news anchors scrambled to their desks, I tore myself away from the sight and studied the photos of the little girl whose tiny life had been so violently snuffed out.
What I had to do was basically a skull reconstruction, because most of the flesh on her face had already rotted off due to water damage.
Steeling myself, I began.
I started, as always, from the top. This keeps me from smearing the pastel chalks with my hand as I lean on the paper. Usually, I do my sketches in warm black and white, but I knew that for purposes of identification, it would be better to use full color on my rendering of the little girl. With a black-and-white sketch, I can usually complete the job in an hour or so, but since this was a full-color reconstruction, with little to go on, it would most likely take me half a day.
That is, under normal circumstances. But 9-11 was anything but “normal.”
The top of the child’s head was relatively intact and I could see from the photographs that she had short, black hair, so I drew that. I knew I could go back later if I wanted and give it more of a style. The forehead was visible, so I was able to match the color of her skin as I worked my way down to her eyebrows.
Before I got very far, the phone rang. It was Dr. Baker, the medical examiner who had done the autopsy on the child.
In a kind, gentle voice, he said, “I know you don’t have much to work with there with those photos.”
“That’s true,” I agreed.
“Would you like me
