16 Apr 2010
Copy-Paste: Nice Girls with Guns
Kids say growing up in Kingwood is like growing up in a bubble, an emerald-green suburban bubble to whose perimeter sticks a residue of brownish urban scum: convenience stores, auto repair shops and the two bars that serve Kingwood’s 58,000 residents, whose average income is $78,000 a year. To the north is Kingwood’s country cousin, Porter, where no shoes, no shirt doesn’t mean no service. To the south, along the back fences of the Kingwood Country Club, runs the long, nearly barren stretch of Hamblen Road, where kids go to have their keggers down by the river. In the story of Kingwood teenagers Katie Dunn, Krystal Maddox, Michelle Morneau and Lisa Warzeka, this perimeter — where the bubble ends and an oil-stained world blessed with neither landscaping nor a master plan begins — is where the action takes place.
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[…]two people burst into the store and started yelling. One of them (according to the girls’ confessions, police say, it was Lisa), pointed a pistol in Cindy’s face, handed her a bag and made a harshly worded demand for money. The other (police say it was Katie) held the door open. According to Ruby and Cindy, she too had a gun.As Cindy fumbled with the cash register, Katie spotted Ruby at the back of the store and warned her not to move.
Ruby felt like she was watching Crime Stoppers on television. Because the intruders were hooded, masked and gloved — “You couldn’t see one spot of skin” — she knew they weren’t planning to shoot anyone. So instead of not moving, she calmly picked up her fountain Pepsi. She could tell that the masked figure at the door, at least, was female. “They gave me the idea that they were new to this,” she says.
Meanwhile Cindy, rattled by the gun aimed squarely, if a little tremulously, at her face, suffered a sudden case of butterfingers. “You have two seconds or I’ll shoot, bitch!” the robber said, in a voice whose Hollywood-holdup toughness seemed to Ruby’s ears rather strained.
“I couldn’t do anything right to please the one in front of me,” Cindy says. “The more I did, the more she threatened to shoot me. The more she threatened to shoot me, the more I messed up.” After missing a couple of times, Cindy finally got the money in the bag. Then she began handing over cartons of cigarettes, but she picked the wrong kind. “Marlboros, bitch!” the triggerwoman screamed. “Marlboros!”
As the two girls, who had both just turned 17, ran out of the store, they dropped a carton of Marlboros at the door. Another carton skittered to the parking-lot asphalt as they hopped into their car, where police believe the other two girls were waiting, and sped off into the night with about $800, the largest take of the five robberies.
What struck Houston Police Detective Billy Stephens as most unique about the five holdups was not that the alleged perpetrators were female. Women rob stores all the time. It was not even so much the middle- to upper-middle-class backgrounds of the girls, the fact that they are thought to have used a 1999 gold metal-flake Pontiac Firebird as their getaway car, or that one was a varsity athlete and one a drill team member at preppy Kingwood High.
It was, instead, that the robberies were so well planned and executed. Had the girls resisted the urge to brag about what they had done, had they stopped themselves from giving away cigarettes at parties in a show of gangster-style largesse, they might have gotten away with it. But in Kingwood, getting away with things gets a little old.
After the initial shock of the girls’ arrests, lots of people, including a school district official and the editor of the Kingwood Observer, called the crime spree “an anomaly.” It is possible that they’re right, that the glare of publicity Kingwood suffers when one of their good kids goes bad is unfair in light of how many stay good. “Kingwood is — I hesitate to use the word ‘perfect,’ ” says Cynthia Calvert, managing editor of the Observer, who is herself a Kingwood High parent. “But it really is a place where moms and dads and their kids go out on the soccer field on Saturdays. There has not been a homicide since I have been here. Not one. We really don’t have a crime problem.”
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Kingwood High is a place so white, the brunettes look slightly out of place. It is the type of place where if you make the first cut for the softball team, the coach might give you a locker and instructions to change who your friends are and how you dress before the second cut. When people began to refer to the Fillies, the drill team, as the Whore Corps, members had to sign a code of conduct agreeing, among other things, that they would not kiss their boyfriends in the halls. At football games, the Kingwood Mustangs dash out of a giant inflated football helmet, and the Fillies sit in neat rows on the bleachers and cross their legs on cue, and territorial hoofprints mark the cheerleaders’ skirts over the left buttock, and the parents wear polo shirts that say, “Varsity Dad” or “Kingwood Fillies,” and one gets the sense that it is all as much a matter of status as spirit.
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Katie, Lisa, Michelle and Krystal may not have been the kind of stunning beauties that met with instant popularity, like Lisa’s exotic Barbie of a younger sister, Jessica. But except for Krystal, the girls were “very Abercrombie & Fitch,” says a classmate. Parents who knew them use words such as “ladylike” and “well-mannered.” Kids who knew them say they were “really sweet,” “so sweet” or “very sweet,” even though no one could tell the kinds of stories about them that one might tell at a wake or a wedding.
“None of them stood out,” Kingwood graduate Cary Dukes says of the four girls. “None of them were outgoing to the point where everyone knew who they were. They weren’t anything special.”
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The least wealthy of the four was Katie Dunn, who lived with her mom and older brother in an apartment across the street from Kingwood High. Her mom is a nurse. Her brother, the man of the house since their dad stayed in Iowa after the divorce, tried to be a father to Katie, or at least look after her at parties. At Kingwood High, extracurriculars can cost as much as tuition at a public college, but Katie’s mom scraped together the more than $1,200 it took for her daughter to be a Filly.
It was Katie’s distinctively raspy voice that a Kingwood High assistant principal identified on the convenience store surveillance tape. She is boisterous, loud, rough around the edges. At school, where she would have been a senior this year if she weren’t in jail, she knew exactly which teachers’ and administrators’ favor to curry in order to skip class with impunity. A lot of schoolmates found her off-putting, particularly her habit of “hanging on” guys, but to her closest pals she was an attentive friend, the type who would make a big deal out of someone’s birthday or microwave a pizza for her friends after school. One friend says his mom saw the preternaturally upbeat Katie as marriage material. She never talked about not having as much money as other girls. When her boyfriend broke up with her this summer, she shrugged it off. Nothing seemed to get her down.
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Lots of folks subscribe to the theory that these girls simply fell in with “the wrong crowd.” If that’s the case, which of them was “wrong”? Was Krystal, the youngest of the bunch, the corrupter? There’s little evidence to suggest that anyone outside the group was influencing the girls, and it would have been unusual if there had been. For all their varying opinions about drugs, kids in Kingwood are unanimous about one thing: Peer pressure is not a factor. If you don’t want a drag off the joint, the Kingwood party joke goes, so much the better. More for me.
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The key to being bad is to look like you’re not. “If you have the Kingwood physique,” says one former Kingwood High student who didn’t, “you’re sort of invincible.”“This is Kingwood,” is the way Kingwood graduate Cary Dukes explains it. “Everyone’s got two game faces.”
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Kingwood is a dealer’s dream. “Every kid there does drugs,” Rusty says, “because there’s nothing else to do.” You can bleed rich kids for more than the going rate, and you’re not likely to get screwed over. In the days before Houston annexed Kingwood and HPD came in, kids didn’t even worry about the cops: “They know Mommy and Daddy are taking care of it.”
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“The girls did tell me they were sober at the time of the robberies,” says Stephens. He uses a perfectly straight tone while managing to convey utter disbelief: “That’s pretty brave, to do something like this sober.”
By this time the girls were starting to get in hot water at home. Krystal was supposed to start the second session of summer school on July 5, the morning of the bakery holdup, but she was absent. Eventually poor attendance forced her to drop out.
When Katie had left home that weekend, she did so despite the fact that she was grounded, and she stayed away for three days. That’s why she was grounded yet again when the other three girls hit Jack’s Grocery, next door to the bakery, the following weekend. In all the robberies, their M.O. was basically the same: One held the door, the other the gun, and there was a lot of yelling and cursing. (“Don’t get your panty hose in a wad,” the plainspoken bakery clerk Carolyn Dunn told them when they tried to rush her.)
But at Jack’s, says Chiên Barker, a Vietnamese woman with a good deal more poise than your typical convenience-store clerk, the girls weren’t as harsh. Jack’s, owned by Chiên and her husband, Rick, occupies a soft spot in the hearts of many Kingwood youth, who remember it fondly as the only place that used to sell cigarettes to minors. More than one kid hanging out at Starbucks offered the opinion that holding up Jack’s was some sort of treason, far worse an offense than simple armed robbery. Katie, Lisa and Krystal were regular customers there, and Chiên says she would sometimes inquire after Lisa’s mother, since the two women had been friends for about a decade.
But on the day Chiên found herself with a gun pointed at her face, she had no idea that the petite masked figure wielding it was, allegedly, her friend’s daughter. All Chiên could think about was her young, motherless grandson, and what he would do without her to raise him. It was the first time in nearly 20 years of business that Jack’s had been robbed, and Chiên, who lived through the war in Vietnam, doesn’t want to tell the story. When finally she does so, her voice stays calm while her eyes fill with tears.
“I feel sorry for their mothers,” she says simply.
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There was absolutely nothing for teenagers to do in Kingwood. There still isn’t.As a result, Kingwood is the site of a sort of guerrilla war between kids and cops. Vandalism is so frequent as to seem like a hobby — there were more than 400 incidents reported last year. Kids complain that all the cops do is look for parties to bust. Asked about juvenile crime, Houston police Sergeant G.A. MacAnulty, who works at the Kingwood station, says, “That’s all we deal with out here is juveniles.”
Crime in Kingwood doesn’t make headlines very often, but when it does, it always seems to involve teenagers. This summer a 13-year-old set fire to an elementary school, doing $3 million worth of damage. A week later a 14-year-old set fire to a middle school, which will cost $40,000 to repair. Four teenagers — two boys and two girls — sent a house up in flames. In 1996 six football players and two other teens were charged with beating up one of their peers at an outdoor concert in Town Center. In 1995 nine teenagers were arrested for entering a house and beating the kids inside with baseball bats.
In one of the most sensational Kingwood crimes, 15-year-old Andrew Merritt shot and killed his mother, telling authorities that Satan had spoken to him through the heavy-metal music of Megadeth. The following year, 1994, there was another case that seemed made for Hard Copy: Eight teens aged 14 to 16 videotaped themselves exploding mailboxes, trapping joggers in pits and setting fire to air conditioners. Their misdeeds were plotted, like football plays, on a chalkboard. One of those kids was Katie’s boyfriend this summer.
Throughout all these crimes runs a chilling failure to grasp the notion of consequences. Partying in Kingwood, cheerleader Christina Ousman explains, is a way to say “you have your parents around your little finger.” The more you get away with, the higher your status.
A girl who was a friend of Andy Merritt’s, the guy who killed his mother, says the strangest thing about growing up in Kingwood is that no matter what you did, nothing seemed to come of it. During nights of aimless vagrancy, she and her friends threw Molotov cocktails and set walls on fire. Other kids threw golf balls at policemen to make them give chase. One night the girl and her friends took a track hurdle and hurled it through the window of a school. The next day the broken glass was still there, right where they left it.When her friends returned to school at the end of a week’s vacation, the glass was fixed. No one said a word about it. You could throw rocks at the bubble, but they’d just bounce back.
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The only good thing about Krystal’s sudden adulthood was that her bail would finally be set. Like Michelle, she could go home. Katie and Lisa remain in jail, apparently for financial reasons. When national reporters (who, in the wake of the Littleton, Colorado, high school massacre, are acting as if they’ve discovered the new face of American crime) have requested interviews, Lisa’s father has asked if they can pay, saying he’d like to start a tuition fund for his daughters.There are those who think the girls have learned their lesson. “I honestly and truly believe,” says one friend, “that if they got out now they would never again be a problem with the law. These girls were not the kind of girls who were involved in stuff like this.”
That begs the question: Should consideration be given to the kind of girls they are? or to the fact that where they’re from, it’s hard to learn what consequences are in the real world? Says Pudifin, without particular malice, “I just hope they get the same as if they were four black males the same age.” That would be one way to burst a bubble.
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Promise 04/29/2008 7:19:28 AM
What a pathetic attempt to slander a neighborhood. While Kingwood like many other’s has it’s crime and sadness. Kingwood has and will always be known for it’s close community. I would raise my kids here regardless of the stereo type you try to paste it with. It is rare to go any where and not run into a familiar face. I love knowing that by living here your neighbors from any of the surrounding neighborhoods consider you as much a neighbor as the one they have right next door. The only other community that attemps what Kingwood already has is The Woodlands. I hope any one reading this see it for what it is, a waste of 6 pages on a story not so much about the youth’s in question but as an oppurtunity for a liberal based news paper to slander a wonderfull family community. Jealousy isn’t a good trait to have. I hope that maturity isn’t lost to you and some day you find the safety and comfort that kingwood provides for it’s families.