Another one of my former students became a murderer. Her name is Marisela “Chela” Romero, and she shot Rene Carrillo in the head during a weekend camping trip on Mount Lemmon. She has been charged with second degree murder and is currently free on bail.

I heard the news as I usually do, while scrambling to dress, accommodate dog needs, make lunch, and gather strewn papers and other school accoutrements while KOLD anchors expound in the background, often competing with Skinny Puppy or Primus to provide a risque underbeat to the morning. I stopped in my pink towel and actually looked at the TV. There she was, Chela, in one of those gray sweatshirts that makes freshly-caught criminals appear to have been apprehended while jogging around Reid Park on a cool winter morning. Her face, though, was blank. I couldn’t be certain it was her, my Chela, the one who had recovered from a violent auto accident in Hermosillo which had destroyed her vanity but spared her life. The one who had come into my class four years ago in a wheel chair and a heavy jaw set in determination. She wrote about the accident, and proudly showed me  Xrays of the enormous rods and pins in her legs. Eventually, she progressed from a wheelchair to a walker. Friends carried her backpack, and she made her way down the hall swinging awkwardly from side to side but with that same set jaw and blazing dark eyes.

Chela always sat in the front row. She struggled to complete her work, and eventually the walker gave way to crutches. She was no longer my student, but would still ask me to read what she had written and showed me fresh scars from the removal of the metal that had been in her body for years. The crutches finally went away, and she walked like a child, slowly, ploddingly, with feet robbed of feminine grace. She tried out for the softball team, and made the roster. She worked to overcome the legs which would not obey her, and her fierce swing earned her accolades and a write-up in the Daily Star.

On graduation night last year, I watched her walk onstage with her black robe billowing in the cool spring breeze. She wore heels, and carefully planted her feet, eyes blazing. My eyes fought back those awkward tears that arrive unsolicited as the image of her hallway determination and progress came to mind. Her future, I imagined, was bright as those blazing eyes.

Then the gray sweatsuit, the blank stare. Rene Carillo, apparently, had awakened her in the middle of the night in her tent. He was a jokester, a class clown. She had awakened angry. He had teased her about this anger, had asked her, “Well why don’t you shoot me then?” He had apparently handed her a gun. Unthinkably, unimaginably, she had pulled the trigger. She then fled into the forest, where police had found her hours after Rene’s lifeless body was flown off of the mountain.

I have always believed we are all capable of killing. It is the circumstances under which we carry out this barbaric act that divide us into those who will rot in jail and those who will don medals of valor.  It is difficult to think about Chela fondly, as I am surrounded by friends and family of the young man who perished at her hands, injured loved ones who are justifiably angry, who attended his wake and funeral, and who never saw her blazing eyes and determination to walk and wear teenage girl clothes and carry her books by herself.  It is difficult, Chela, to see you in that gray sweatsuit.