Guilty When Black. Carol Mersch
second-story balcony overlooked a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood street, offering a breath of fresh air on quiet nights.
But certain things about apartment #716 were amiss. Of particular concern was the wooden railing along the second-floor walkway just outside their door, which was missing several slats. Noni was prone to let her little sister out for a walk, and there was ample room for a toddler to squeeze through and plummet to the sidewalk below. Since Noni was able to reach and unlock the door from the inside, Keahmiee and Miashah were careful to lock the dead bolt with their keys from the outside when leaving the apartment, even for a few minutes.
London Square missing slats outside Miashah’s apartment (Photo: Carol Mersch)
Also, the dials on the electric stove didn’t align with heat levels, and you could never be certain if a burner was on or off. The sisters learned that the only way to turn a burner off was to twist the knob to the right until it stopped, something their neighbor, Tina, was keenly aware of since her stove dials had no heat level markers at all. “They had all worn off,” she said. “There’s supposed to be a light that turns on when the burner’s on, but there’s been times when the light’s not on, but I know the burner is on because I feel the heat coming off.”34
There were other issues. The apartment didn’t have a smoke detector, and the fire extinguisher outside on the walkway had an expired inspection sticker. Exposed wiring could be seen sprawled along the upstairs walkway and dangling from exterior walls.
Tina worried that the wiring in the aging complex was antiquated and overloaded. The lights in her ceiling fan flickered and wouldn’t work at the same time as the fan. Finally, the entire fixture blew. The light in the bathroom short-circuited one day and threw the breaker. Then, when she plugged in a nearby oscillating fan, it sparked and blew the circuits in all three bedrooms. She hesitated to call the supervisor, since, she said, if tenants complained too much about problems, they were threatened with eviction.35
Jon Hodges and his girlfriend, Andrea, lived in the apartment below Miashah and had electrical problems of their own. “We had to have our entire apartment rewired because we had several electrical fires,” Hodges said. “Like we would be watching TV and all of the sudden the TV would go out and we would see smoke coming out of the wall. There was one time we could actually see a black line starting to burn up the side of the wall.” At that point, he threw all the breakers and called the manager.36
Nekesha Richards had recently leased an upstairs apartment in building 300. Her stove dials all had heat level markers, but the burners didn’t always turn off when she turned the dial to the “off” mark. An exposed lightbulb and its wiring could be seen hanging from the vent hood next to the grease trap directly over the burners. A single mother with two young daughters, a 4-year-old and a 1-month-old, she was frustrated with other issues in the apartment, such as a recurring infestation of bed bugs in her unit that she couldn’t seem to get rid of—a problem shared by another tenant across the way in building 700 whose child was often covered with bed bug bites.
While conditions in London Square weren’t perfect, Miashah and Keahmiee had never lived outside their home before, so they really didn’t know what to expect.
Keahmiee with Nylah and Noni, 2013
3
Not an ordinary day
ON November 18, 2013, Keahmiee fixed herself shrimp in a skillet with grease for lunch and left the skillet on the back burner of the stove. She kissed the children goodbye and left for her two o’clock shift.
Less than an hour later, Miashah heated pre-grilled chicken strips for the children’s lunch, a task that took less than five minutes. After feeding Noni, she changed the baby’s diaper and put the two girls in her bedroom to watch television. She turned the burner off and left to carry the dirty diaper and the rest of the trash to the dumpster, taking care to lock the door behind her to ensure the youngsters couldn’t get out to the walkway with the missing wooden slats.
Surveillance cameras show Miashah leaving her apartment in the far southwest corner of the building and proceeding down the outside stairs to the trash bin in the parking lot directly next to the building. After emptying the trash, she stopped at a pop machine and crossed the parking lot to visit briefly with a tenant who waved her down from a nearby building.
When she turned to head back to her apartment, she saw black smoke billowing from the southwest corner of building 700—right where only a few minutes earlier she had left Noni and Nylah secure and happy, watching television in her bedroom.
The rest was a blur.
As fire trucks, EMS, and Tulsa Police screamed into the complex, Miashah fell to the ground screaming “My babies! Somebody save my babies!” A helicopter from a local news station circled overhead, capturing the ferocious blaze and surrounding chaos. A man was seen trying to climb up the outside of the building to the porch but he fell off because the bricks were too hot.
London Square 2005 fire (Courtesy: Tulsa NewsOn6)
Courtney, Miashah’s stepfather, was the first to answer her frantic calls and raced to London Square, where he found her curled up on the ground in front of the complex, hysterical and vomiting from smoke inhalation. He watched as a policeman approached Miashah and threatened to restrain her if she didn’t calm down. Courtney wrapped his arms around her and held her tight as they watched #716 burn.
There was nothing they could do.
Miashah’s mother, Chrisandria, was completing her shift as a Tulsa school bus driver when her cell phone rang. Drivers are prohibited from using cell phones on duty, so she didn’t answer. By the sixth or seventh call, a bad feeling came over her. With the phone in her lap she punched the speaker button. What came next would change her life: Courtney was sobbing and screaming something about the babies, Miashah, and a fire.
The conversation was overrun by an urgent call from the school radio dispatcher: “TPS Route 1120, SB21. Please, come in.”
“They almost never used my government call sign,” she said. Her hand was shaking as she keyed the radio. An emotional dispatcher pleaded, “Chrisandria, sweetheart, please, please call the office!”
News from the dispatcher confirmed the alarming event. Chrisandria returned the bus to the school bus depot, picked up Keahmiee from work, and drove straight to Saint Francis Hospital. When they entered the children’s hospital room, Noni appeared to be sleeping peacefully. “Wake up, baby,” Chrisandria whispered, patting her cheek. “Wake up.”
The children were pronounced dead at 3:45 p.m. Miashah wasn’t there when her nieces died. Courtney had left her with a cousin, as by now she was covered head to toe with vomit.
4
The fallout
WHAT happened next is vivid in Chrisandria’s mind.
She had been home from the hospital only a few hours when a Department of Human Services (DHS) representative knocked on her door demanding to question Keahmiee about the dead children. This, along with the negative light already being cast on Miashah by newscasters at the scene of the fire and the utter devastation of ten grieving family members inside the house, drove Chrisandria to the edge. Keahmiee herself hadn’t stopped crying in the hours since the fire, and now DHS had dispatched a white woman to interrogate her.
“I just blacked out,” Chrisandria said. “You turn it around and get off of my porch!” she screamed. “Do you really want to come inside a houseful of crazy screaming niggers?”—she chose her words pointedly. The woman turned and left.
By this time Keahmiee was in dire emotional straights and Chrisandria drove her to Tulsa’s St. John’s Hospital, where she was sedated and kept overnight.
The