Teaching is not at all like it is in the movies.
Jesse Houser’s mom came to see me before his trial for first-degree murder. He’d written poems about his crime for my English class. Poems so disturbing I’d passed them on to the security guard. No administrative action was taken, no counseling suggested.
My heart hurt for this woman, despite some of the details I’d garnered from the case, including her ongoing sexual relationship with her son’s co-defendant while her husband was on the road. She wanted me to write a letter to the court or to appear as a character witness for her 15- or 16-year-old son.
In a back corner of the school’s main office, I speak to Mrs. Houser one afternoon after my classes are finished for the day.
“I can’t go to court for Jesse, ma’am, I’m so sorry. He wrote about it, what they did? I read his words. He did it.” These last three words I say more quietly, not wanting to let them out, but feeling like I have to let her know where I stood.
“He just copied lyrics from songs. I can show them to you!”
Her desperation is frantic, and contagious. We log on to a nearby computer and Google “Insane Clown Posse lyrics.”
Mrs. Houser clicks around for a bit, sure she can find the words that match those her teenage son had turned in, words about tying up a girl, raping her, cutting her into pieces.
She swears she has a printout at home and will be back. I never see her again, not even when I go to a procedural hearing at the ancient, stuffy courthouse. Jesse stood in the front, in cuffs. I think the jumpsuit was orange, but I’ve looked at his prison photo each time he’s been moved, so I may be misremembering. He looked tiny, though his girlfriend said he was gaining weight without access to drugs.
I felt nervous for some reason. Jesse had been arrested nearly a year when I saw him at the courthouse, and I still thought about him more than seemed normal. What if I’d realized what he wrote was true? If the case could have been solved earlier? The victim had been missing for a long time; her family had lived with the uncertainty for more than a year.
