why she had traveled such a stormy and treacherous trail. Was violence in her genes, or was she warped by early trauma? I found ample evidence of both.
* * *
Despite their sometimes contradictory viewpoints, Shanna’s relatives agreed on one thing: Her mother was kind and gentle. It was in the spring of 1978, a lovely afternoon in Kalamazoo, Michigan, when Delores “Dee” exited the laundromat. She carried a big basket of laundry, still warm from the dryer. She didn’t have a car, but it was only four blocks to her apartment. Many people were out and about that Monday, enjoying the sunshine as temperatures climbed into the seventies. It’s not known what Dee was thinking, but it’s unlikely she was concerned for her safety. She was in the middle of the sidewalk in broad daylight, doing the most ordinary of tasks. No one expects a trip to the laundromat to be hazardous. But for Dee, on that tragic day, it was.
Troy Samuels knew he wasn’t supposed to be driving. The eighteen-year-old was epileptic and couldn’t predict when a seizure would overtake him. He had no warning on that ghastly afternoon, and probably no memory of what occurred. His car left the road, veered onto the sidewalk, and plowed straight into Dee.
She was twelve days away from her twenty-ninth birthday, but her young life ended on that sidewalk, with the freshly laundered linens scattered around her. Because of Troy’s bad decision, many lives were altered. His selfishness caused a chain-reaction of dark events with consequences that reached into the next century.
Dee’s sisters remember that she was happy on the day she died. She was about to be reunited with her two youngest children, Shanna Kay, almost three, and fifteen-month-old George. Employees of the state of Michigan had removed the toddlers from her home two months earlier because of her abusive boyfriend, Alva “Al” Jenkins. Al was also Shanna Kay’s father, and while Dee’s sisters insist that he never physically harmed the children, they recall that he beat Dee daily. She was caught up in the classic cycle of the battered woman, trying and failing repeatedly to break free from her abuser. But this time, she had somehow mustered the strength to convince Al to move out. Social workers had approved the return of the toddlers, and Dee was elated to learn they’d be coming home soon. She wanted the place to be perfect for their return and had walked to the laundromat to wash the children’s bedding.
How did Dee become involved with a violent man? It probably seemed normal to her, her sisters suggest. Abuse was a family pattern, and Dee witnessed her father’s cruelty to her mother. Fabian Zaragozate was born in Puerto Rico in 1917, the twenty-third child of Adela Zaragozate. His siblings had all arrived via multiple births, twins and triplets. Adela’s first singular birth should have been easier, but there were complications, and she did not survive. Fabian was raised by his older sister, Francis, an allegedly abusive woman who took her anger out on him with harsh punishments. They moved to Michigan, where Fabian met Ruthie Anne Maples at a Kalamazoo bowling alley where they both worked. “My mother was a pin setter,” Camila explains. It was her job to set the pins upright after each game.
Fabian was a musical genius, and according to family lore, he could play any instrument without training and quickly mastered the horn, piano, and guitar.
He was a dozen years older than eighteen-year-old Ruthie Anne, and her parents didn’t approve of him because of his dark skin. But she rebelled and married him in the summer of 1948. They had seven children in quick succession. “We were stairstep kids,” Camila notes. “Some of us weren’t even a year apart. Before I was born, my father ran the dump here in town, and our family lived next to it. My mother told my father that it wasn’t healthy for kids to be playing around all that garbage, so they moved to a house on twenty acres on the outskirts of town.”
Camila’s earliest memory was captured on film—seven beautiful children, posing in front of the Christmas tree. Three brothers and four sisters, most of them grinning for the camera, appear excited about the holiday. “It was Christmas Eve,” she remembers. “Our mother let us each choose one present to open that night.” The two oldest sisters, Dee and Isabella, picked the biggest gifts with their names on them. The boxes contained matching dolls