While the City Slept

November 2, 2015
A killing spotlights the inadequacy of America’s mental health system in this gripping true-crime saga. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Sanders explores Isaiah Kalebu’s 2009 assault of Theresa Butz and Jennifer Hopper, who were engaged to be married, in their Seattle home. An ordeal of rape and bloodshed lead to Butz’s death. Sanders sketches a moving portrait of the victims and then focuses on the dark odyssey of their attacker, the son of a Ugandan immigrant who inherited mental illness on his mother’s side and grew up in a household rocked by domestic violence. Kalebu spiraled into violent psychosis: he attacked his mother and once walked into a random business office, announced he was an African king, and fired the staff. The real villains, in Sanders’s telling, are Washington State’s courts and mental health system, which were hamstrung by budget cuts and failed to treat or control Kalebu’s worsening behavior. Drawing on interviews with principal figures and their families, Sanders’s meticulous narrative gives full weight to Kalebu’s crime while elucidating the human tragedy that sparked it, forming a disturbing indictment of society’s neglect of the mentally ill. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency.

Starred review from December 15, 2015
Disturbing, sometimes-horrifying story of true crime and justice only partially served. Seattle journalist Sanders won a Pulitzer Prize for the reporting on which this book is based--and deservedly. He made a complex story comprehensible ("The tributaries that feed a moment are vast," he quietly notes) without ever losing sight of two fundamental truths. Carried over into this book, those two truths remain. The first is that the lives of two innocent women were irrevocably changed, and one's ended, by the events of a summer night in 2009, when a young, mentally ill man entered their home and raped and stabbed them. More lives than theirs were changed, of course--as one person close to the case noted, "the victims weren't the only ones killed." Sanders interviewed a dozen or so of the principal figures in the case, from law enforcement officers to social workers and family members. The second truth is that the young man in question has not met with justice: he is being punished, to be sure, but mostly by being hidden away in a system in which he may be medicated but is almost certainly not being treated effectively for his illness. "One can see the combined downstream effects of a lack of preventive measures," writes Sanders of Washington state's lack of adequate funding and support for mental health care, even though mental illness is implicated in nearly half of all violent crime cases and costs the economy billions of dollars per year. The author's opening pages are among the most immediate and breathtaking in modern true-crime literature, as evocative as any moment of In Cold Blood or Helter Skelter. That immediacy does not disappear, but the careening quality of the narrative settles into a somber, thoughtful consideration of the huge issues at stake in a single act of murder. An exceptional story of compelling interest in a time of school shootings, ethnic and class strife, and other unbound expressions of madness and illness.

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Starred review from December 1, 2015

Sanders (associate editor, The Stranger) won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the rapes and murder that took place in the South Park neighborhood of Seattle in 2009. This book covers not just the horrendous summer night and subsequent trial but the entire lives of both victims and perpetrator with depth and clarity. Sanders follows the failure of multiple systems that left Isaiah Kalebu and his family without the help they needed and asked for, describing the terrible consequences of the loss of social safety nets. The stories of the victims, Teresa Butz and Jennifer Hopper, illuminate this specific tragedy, making Hopper's grace and forgiveness during the trial even more astonishing. VERDICT This book is valuable, often difficult reading. Pair with Jill Leovy's Ghettoside for powerful, if upsetting, analysis of the failures of our criminal justice system. For readers interested in social justice, mental health care, and well-written narrative nonfiction.--Kate Sheehan, C.H. Booth Lib., Newtown, CT

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2015
The facts of the story are that on a steamy July night in 2009, Teresa Butz and Jennifer Hopper were asleep in their modest South Seattle home when Isaiah Kalebu broke in and then savagely raped both women, murdered Teresa, and nearly killed Jennifer. The full context for these crimes is one of a profusion of broken mental-health, social-services, and criminal-justice systems that inadvertently facilitated the marginalization of a young man almost from the time of his birth, resulting in his collapse into madness. As clearly as the reader learns of the circuitous but seemingly destined path that brought lovers Teresa and Jennifer together, so, too, does the reader discover the equally labyrinthine trajectory that thwarted Isaiah and his family at every turn: marital discord and parental abuse, drug addiction and escalating crime. Sanders won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting of Teresa's murder. Now he uses his journalistic acuity to fine measure as he creates a page-turning indictment of a perfect storm of preventable events. Handled with delicacy and delivered with a powerful sense of both dismay and compassion, Sanders offers an unflinching portrait of the human casualties of one city's and, by extrapolation, our country's overburdened health-care and judicial systems.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)