My mother died on my first year of college. Killed on a drizzly dawn in early September. Break-and-Enter and Robbery, that's what the police said. Drunk teenagers with guns wanting to prove their macho.

I came back for the trial and the investigation. The police prowled the house and declared my house was a crime scene. The cops were hard-faced and grim with a chilly edge in their gaze when I came in to pick up Gran and to testify mother’s condition.

I dropped Gran at her house and rented out a one-star motel down the street, where rooms are prison cells with broken-hinged door and smashed mirrors still unreplaced.

Pictures of my mother's deformed body were plastered on every news channel, though most of the screen time was focused on the teenage boys. The perpetrator, Jan Kuziko was younger than me. His face was bright, innocent—the face of a person with a future. His expression was bloated and buffy with shame and guilt in the picture the police showed me and in the shaky footage, and a part of me crumpled when I envisioned this young man's life would be wasted by a single mistake.

Yet, I locked myself in the restroom, bathed and scrubbed for three hours at midnight, turned the lights on and off until the bulb blasts. I cried, I cried, then I cleaned myself, then I cried some more.

The other part of me—the mean, angry part—crumpled, because I thought even life sentence was too much of a mitigated punishment.