Guilty When Black. Carol Mersch
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“I don’t know where they got the idea that there was grease,” Tina said. “It almost makes it look like she left grease on the fire cooking. But there wasn’t any chicken cooking! It just smelt like fire. And if it’s grease fire—I’ve been in a grease fire too—you smell whatever the grease has cooked while it’s burning. So, no, I’m sorry…” she shook her head. “If they saw the pan of grease, they might have assumed that’s what was going on. I think they just drew some conclusions. And I’m not sure they’re correct.”
Chrisandria and Courtney were at the girls’ apartment only hours before the fire, and Chrisandria remembers seeing a can of Pam on the counter. The fact that the police report used the word “homie”—a black slang term meaning a friend—to describe a neighbor appeared to be a racist reference to Miashah’s African American vernacular.
“That didn’t surprise me, especially with the police department around here,” Tina said. “I mean, not all of them are bad. I’ve met some really, really good ones. But there’s some that just see us, like, ‘Oh, you live here, you must be this, well then, this must be what happened…” She paused. “And it aggravates me. You’re a police officer and you have that kind of power—and you don’t care? Because you need to care in that kind of position!”
Shortly after the fire, she said maintenance workers were quick to stop by late one evening and put heat level markers on her burner dials. “On the burners, they just put the stickers on these right after the fire,” she said pointing to the stove burners. The oven dials, however, still had no heat level markers. “I asked them about the oven control and they said, ‘Oh its fine.’ So, I’m guessing at temperatures here?!”39
The fire report was issued within 24-hours and more or less rubber-stamped the police report, listing the cause as a stove fire ignited by cooking oil due to “unattended cooking.” Chrisandria wasn’t buying it. “Even ‘48 Hours’ doesn’t solve crimes that fast.” she said.
All official opinions pointed to Miashah as the obvious culprit. Her wanton disregard for the lives of the two helpless little girls became the tantamount conclusion that colored everything that came after: Miashah had left two small children locked in an apartment to die a horrific death. On top of that, she was black.
A media frenzy ensued. The fatal accident was hammered endlessly on local news channels and across national multi-media platforms. Tulsa news channels broadcast live photos of the fire with scenes of smoke and flames pouring from the apartment with a cadre of fire trucks surrounding the fiery scene from 3:00 p.m. in the afternoon to nearly 11:00 p.m. that night.
The ensuing TV news coverage the next day was damning in its implications. A local CBS news anchor reported that Miashah had left the children “trapped” in the apartment, implying that she had purposely left them to die.40 A FOX news channel reporter confronted televisions audiences with: “Two children died that day. Somebody has to be held accountable. Who?”41
Headlines poured in across iPads and media devices: “London Square Fire, 2 children dead, 3 adults injured” and “Aunt Charged with Murder in Death of Two Children,” accompanied by a barrage of incendiary online reader comments. One reader in particular didn’t mince words: “As usual, another negro fried chicken fire… Miashah did not step out to take the trash; she stepped out to go ho’in for some crack. Life in the ghetto.” 42 43 44 45 46
The comment yielded a furious response from the other side: “I know for a fact [she] was not gone longer than 5 minutes frying no damn chicken, period, because yes she is black and knows how long to leave chicken cooking!”
In a string of 16 contentious barbs, one reader flipped the argument the other direction: “What I am pretty much saying is if this were a beautiful 20-year-old white girl you would be outraged by the accusations. As long as you are flaunting the cross, I don’t think Jesus would think much of your blatant racist views there, huckleberry, nor your absolute lack of compassion.”47
It appeared as though every media outlet—print, TV, and online—was showing a grim unflattering mugshot of Miashah with a clenched jaw and close-cut boyish crop.
Chrisandria was mortified.
“I know Miashah. I know my daughters… I have seven children. And I would leave Miashah at home at seven and eight years old because I couldn’t afford a babysitter. She would cook whole meals. She would never do this, never in a trillion years… We’re the ones who lost the babies and they treat us like criminals.”
A systemic racial divide was opening wide—one that had burned silently for decades through the ranks of law enforcement, the judicial system, and everyday conversations in the streets of Tulsa, home of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, the largest mass-lynching of African Americans in U.S. history that left the affluent Greenwood community known as “Black Wall Street” in ashes.
“I think that we’ve got really a perfect storm for police shootings in Oklahoma,” ACLU of Oklahoma Legal Director Brady Henderson said. “Trust and rapport between law enforcement and many citizens is at an incredible low. The officers start fearing for their safety and so the hands start going closer to the triggers on both sides.”48
7
The witness
AFTER fading from the headlines for several months, the case erupted again after a March 13, 2014, preliminary hearing when Assistant DA Sarah McAmis purported to have evidence that Miashah had left to do more than just empty the trash—she had gone to another apartment building to buy drugs. The fire that killed the children, she contended, resulted when Miashah willfully left a pan of hot grease heating on the stove to pursue a drug deal with a neighbor.
While the Fire Department’s original determination that the fire was “accidental” might have been grounds for child neglect, the fact that the girls’ death occurred in conjunction with a crime allowed McAmis to press for a conviction of felony child neglect—defined in Oklahoma criminal code as grounds for second-degree murder.
To do this, McAmis had to prove that not only did Miashah cause the girls’ deaths by deliberately locking them in the apartment with a pan of hot grease cooking on the stove, but that she left for the purpose of transacting a drug deal. Emptying the trash, McAmis claimed, was merely something she did on the way to buy drugs.
“Child neglect” in Oklahoma means “the willful or malicious neglect of a child under 18” and is altogether unforgiving, offering prosecutors broad latitude in its application.
McAmis’ star witness was Torrance Williams, the tenant in building 400 who supposedly waved Miashah down. Williams, a husky, 20-year-old black man, was physically disabled and had moved to London Square with his family two months before the fire. His wife’s sister had attended high school with Miashah.
McAmis alleged that Williams made a statement to Tulsa police detectives on the scene that Miashah had come to the apartment around the time of the fire and confronted him about a dispute with his cousin over drug money that she owed for marijuana. McAmis contended that Williams specifically told detectives that Miashah was acting, in his words, as if she were high, that she was aggressive, that she was paranoid, and that her eyes were wide.
Tulsa County District Court Judge David Youll was presiding over the preliminary hearing in Miashah’s criminal case.
When Williams took the stand, McAmis quickly led him to her point. His answers were not what she expected.
“You formed an opinion that she was under the influence of something, this female. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“All right. And what led you to form that opinion.”
“I mean, ’cause you could tell. Just like it wasn’t hard to see that she was drunk off dope. She was drunk off (unintelligible) or (unintelligible)—I mean, like she was just slurring her words. I mean, I know that. But I don’t know nothing about buying—about anything like