I just finished reading While the City Slept: A Love Lost to Violence and a Wake-Up Call for Mental Health Care in America by Eli Sanders. It is the story of the murder of Teresa Butz in Seattle in 2009 and the trial and conviction of Isaiah Kalebu for that murder.
Sanders has done much research to provide detailed background of Teresa, her partner Jennifer, and Isaiah. The story builds to Jennifer’s testimony of the events of that night. The conviction of Kalebu doesn’t feel like resolution.
As the title indicates, there are many moments when there might have been intervention by mental health services. Except the commitment and the money did not support that. I found this aspect of the story particularly poignant as I finished the book around the time of the Florida school shooting last week. It’s a sad book. I don’t always care for epilogues, but I appreciated the one at the end of this book.
Eli Sanders won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing - his initial coverage of this story appeared in The Stranger, a weekly Seattle newspaper. Read his interview regarding the book in The Seattle Times.
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