Erica Michelle Maria Green

Her name is Erica Green. She was three years old. Her mother is being charged with murder.

This doesn't sound like a success, like a happy thing, but trust me, it is.

I like to watch those true-crime shows, the autopsy shows where two fibers and a drop of motor oil prove the case, the ones where new technology solves a decades-old murder. I love those shows. I curl up on the couch and never get grossed out and I can pretty much tell in the first five minutes if it was the husband or the boyfriend that did it--and it's always the husband or the boyfriend, really.

My favorite cases are the ones that start with a skeleton. Bare, cold bones. Because you always think that there's nothing there, nothing for the investigators to work with. This isn't true of course, you can learn a lot from just bones. Age, height, race, gender, most of the time cause of death. Even though I know this, I'm still surprised when the bones start to speak, start to reveal hidden truths.

Bones seem like the most basic thing, like a blank canvas. We put ourselves onto our bones: muscles where we move, too much fat because we have a sweet tooth, skin that's tanned or not, hair that's styled or plain, clothes, makeup. We build ourselves outward and so, I think, it seems like we loose something fundamental when those things get stripped away. When it all falls away, when the bodies we have built are down to clean bones, then we are gone, and the life that we built is gone. And there's no getting it back.

Except that sometimes, there is. As it turns out, your face--the part of you that is most you--follows a pattern. Once race and age is determined (pretty easy to do, once you have a skull in hand), it turns out that there is a certain thickness to cheeks, forehead, chin. Measure those out, overlay a skintone, and there you have it, a face! A person. A personality, almost.

In April of 2001, police in Kansas City, Missouri found the body of a little girl, decapitated and left in trash bags. She matched no outstanding missing persons reports, and normal means of identification failed. She had no name and no face. So the police gave her one, building out her features like the life she would never be able to build. And they gave her a name, Precious Doe, better than the traditional "Jane" because there was something so terribly touching about her and her awful fate.

Then they spread her picture everywhere they could. Law enforcement, media, internet, posters on walls and doors and telephone poles all over the country asked over and over, "Do you know this girl?"

Stalin said that one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic. He was right, of course. The human mind can't really comprehend large numbers like that. Entire villages wiped out by war or famine or disaster, we can't really imagine it. We can handle one person at a time, because that's all the heartbreak we can take. I think sometimes that Stalin overshot that number a little.
How many people are going to die in some kind of violence today in the U.S.? How many in Michigan? In Detroit? Are we going to know all their names? Hear all their stories? Probably not. And if someone tries to tell us, on the news or in the newspaper, most likely we will turn the channel or the page. It's cold and it's callous and maybe we don't like admitting it out loud, but the fact is, we don't care. Unless there's something sensational to latch onto--the victim is pretty, or pregnant, or famous--we have more important things to concern ourselves with. Things that matter to us, if we are being honest, more than the sudden stop of a life being built. It's not just a million deaths that fade into an anonymous haze, it's deaths over there, across the street or the nation or the world, just on the other side of our own circle of caring.

Maybe we need that distance, that not-caring. Maybe without it the sum total of cruelty in this world would swamp and drown us. Maybe we hope that if we each pour our love out over our own circles, all those circles will overlap and everyone will get covered even if we, as individuals, don't cover everyone ourselves. It never quite works like that, though, people always fall through the cracks. Are forgotten. Un-covered. And that's why, even if it is necessary, it's an awful thing to stop caring, to draw that line that cuts someone else out.

The police and the people of Kansas City did not place the broken body of an unknown child outside their circle. For four years, they kept caring, and kept looking until they had an answer. A real name. A real face. A life. And from there, they hoped, some justice. It paid off for them recently, they got their name, and their face, and the beginnings of justice and explanation.

Her name was Erica Michelle Maria Green. But she was always precious.