The Best American Crime Writing (26 page)

The trial of Jonathan Miller, terrible boy, began on April 26, 1999, six days after two terrible boys carried out their slaughter at Columbine. Jonathan’s lawyers asked for a continuance, but Judge Roach denied the motion, and the trial began, with both the defense and the prosecution conceding something up front.

The defense conceded that Jonathan killed Joshua and asked the jury to convict Jonathan of involuntary manslaughter. The prosecution conceded that Jonathan never intended to kill Joshua, because, under Georgia’s felony murder statute, it did not have to prove that Jonathan intended to kill Joshua. Under Georgia’s felony murder statute, all it needed to prove was that Jonathan intended to commit the felonies leading up to Joshua’s unintended death—felony battery and felony assault—and so all it needed to prove was that Jonathan was a terrible boy. “Ladies and gentlemen, the defense is preying on your desire and the desire of all people to believe that children are innocent, that fifteen-year-olds couldn’t mean to hurt each other,” the prosecutor, Rachelle Carnesale, said in her summation. “We know better than that. We know that children every day do horrible things to other children.” Then: “The victim wasn’t the aggressor. The victim was being bullied on the bus and stood up to the bully.” Then: ‘You need to think about
what you are telling the children of this community through your verdict … It’s time for Mr. Miller to reap the whirlwind.”

The jury was out for five hours. Jonathan was found guilty of the charges of felony battery and felony assault, which meant that he was also guilty of felony murder. In accordance with Georgia’s sentencing guidelines, Judge Michael Roach sentenced him to life in prison.

I was living in Atlanta when Jonathan killed Josh. I remember reading the story on November 3, and I remember a chill passing through me, because, let me tell you, nothing serves as a better madeleine to a bully’s memories than a story of a bully killing a kid at a bus stop. Although I had never gone so far as to hit Timmy Titimski in the back of the head, I had certainly terrorized him, as Jonathan was said to have terrorized Josh, but I had gotten away with it and Jonathan hadn’t. What gave me the chill, I guess, was the sudden realization of bullying’s irrevocable consequences—the sudden realization that it might be an activity people can’t get away with, or shouldn’t get away with, or never get away with. What I never doubted, though, was that Jonathan and I were of the same ilk. What I never doubted was the basic characterization of Jonathan Miller as a bully and as a terrible boy.

Four years later, the chill still hadn’t gone away. It stayed with me exactly as the memories of torturing Timmy Titimski stayed with me, and I began doing some research into the case as a way of deciding if a boy like Jonathan could ever be forgiven. What I found at first didn’t surprise me: a website that portrays bullying as a gay rights issue—because of the abuse suffered by gay teens—portraying Josh Belluardo as the “non-gay victim” of gay bashing; people who still lived in the Port Victoria subdivision portraying Jonathan not only as a bully but as a threat to overall peace and security. In the afterlife of the tragedy, Joshua continued rising as an
angel to the precise degree that Jonathan continued mutating into an all-purpose bogeyman, and when I talked to one Port Victoria resident about real estate on Shallow Cove, this is what she told me: “What happened to Josh changed a lot of lives, not just the lives of the Millers and the Belluardos. I think most of the houses in that cul-de-sac have turned over a couple of times. People just left, and you know why? I think it’s because they know that however long that boy goes to jail, one day he’s going to get out. They know he’s coming back, and they don’t want to be around.”

I was surprised, then, when I met Jonathan’s parents, Robin and Alan Miller, and they told me that at the time of the “accident,” Jonathan was two inches shorter and nearly twenty pounds lighter than Josh Belluardo. Of course, I was not surprised that the Millers tried their best to present Jonathan as a harmless innocent—hell, they were his parents and had a reputation for defending their son at any cost—but what they told me checked out, and the surprises kept coming. Josh, as it turned out, was not weak. He was not helpless. He was more athletic than Jonathan. He was more popular than Jonathan. He had the reputation as someone who could handle himself; indeed, in some quarters, he had the reputation as something of a bully himself. He was never terrorized by Jonathan because he never allowed himself to be terrorized, and so when I asked Jonathan’s friend James Nachtsheim what he expected to happen when Jonathan punched Josh, I was surprised when he said that he expected Josh to turn around and “kick Jonathan’s ass.” When I went to E. T. Booth Middle School and talked to Pat Patterson, the counselor who runs the school’s antibullying program and who knew both Josh and Jonathan, I was surprised to hear him say that the boys’ relationship “didn’t follow the classic guidelines” of bully and bullied, because “a bully usually recognizes a victim, and that wasn’t Josh. Josh was a stand-up kid, and he didn’t allow Jonathan to push him around.” When I had my interview with Bill Head, I was surprised when he said that after he was quoted calling
Josh another victim of bullying, the Belluardos called and asked him to please stop using Josh’s name in his crusade. And when I went to the Belluardos’ lawyer and asked to speak to his clients, I was surprised by the explanation the lawyer offered for their refusal: They did not want to speak on the subject of bullying. They do not believe that Josh was bullied. They believe that he was viciously attacked. “And quite frankly,” the lawyer said, “they believe that if Jonathan had given Josh a fair fight, Josh would have kicked his ass.”

He was not a bully, then. Jonathan Miller, the bus-stop bully, was not a bully—or at least not a bully at the bus stop, and above all not a bully to the boy he was said to have killed as a result of bullying. But if he was not a bully, what was he, and why did people insist on making bullying the basis of his crime? If he was not a bully, how did he suffer the terrible cruelty of being judged a bully for life? And if he was not a bully, well, then was he still a terrible boy?

Here’s a story about Jonathan Miller and his parents—a story that Jonathan’s parents, Robin and Alan Miller, tell about their son and themselves. Jonathan was in high school at the time: Etowah. He had made it out of middle school. He had made it out of E. T. Booth despite the suspensions, despite the referrals, despite a principal who, according to the Millers, tried to crush his spirit. Here was a boy whose name was decided after his parents watched
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
. Here was a boy who, in Robin’s words, “always flew where he wasn’t supposed to go,” and all the administration at E. T. Booth wanted to do was put him on Ritalin. They convened what Robin calls “the Ritalin meeting” when Jonathan was in eighth grade. Robin stormed out, and after that it just got worse for Jonathan. “They suspended Jonathan three days for farting,” she says, “ ‘Serial farting,’ they called it. I mean,
c’mon …”
The Millers were lucky that Jonathan wanted to go to school at all after what he went through at E. T. Booth, but at Etowah the assistant
principal was creative and amenable to Robin’s input. When she called Robin to say that Jonathan was about to be suspended for being continually late to science class, Robin remembers saying, “Don’t suspend him. It’s gotten so he
likes
suspensions. Give him something he really dislikes.” So one day, when Jonathan got out of the class before science class, she was waiting out in the hall for him. “In front of all his friends, I said, ‘If you can’t make it to class on your own, your mother is going to have to help you.’ He said, ‘Mom, I can’t believe you’re doing this.’ I said, ‘I can’t believe you’re late for science class.’ And you know what? He was never late again.”

Do you see? After Josh’s death, angry mobs gathered on Atlanta’s talk-radio shows and called Robin an unfit mother. Does an unfit mother escort her son to science class? Alan could not help himself: As he drove to his lawyer’s office, he used to turn on the radio and listen to complete strangers call for his castration. Does a father who takes his two sons camping and volunteers for the Boy Scouts deserve to be castrated? They were both involved in the life of their son Jonathan. They both made sure they were always
home
for their son Jonathan. The only thing they wouldn’t do for their son Jonathan was give up on him. They couldn’t give up on him. He was a kid. He was a knucklehead. He was mouthy and reckless. But he wasn’t violent, he wasn’t mean—he was never a lost cause. Do you know what he did after he found out that he had killed Josh? He screamed for a half hour. He pounded his head against the concrete floor of the jail. He had to be put on suicide watch.

But it’s no use, is it? No matter what they say about Jonathan—that he
wasn’t
, that he
isn’t—he
was and he is. They were and they are. They are marked. Their son killed Joshua Belluardo, and they have nothing left but his cause. Alan Miller is eminently reasonable in his son’s cause, almost businesslike; he is a bespectacled man with a pinkish face and longish silver hair and the softness of Tennessee in his voice. Robin Miller is passionately volatile in her son’s cause; she’s from upstate New York, with her mass of corkscrewed
hair tied tightly back, a slight space between her front teeth, a small white scar jabbing her upper lip, and her broad forehead creased with care. They are speaking from the living room of their house, where they are surrounded by pictures of their nieces and nephews, and of their son Jeremy, and of their son Jonathan, which are all at least four years old. Their house is an hour and a half outside of Atlanta. It is a hardscrabble little house in a hardscrabble little neighborhood of the kind that used to ring the mill in hardscrabble Southern towns. They left Shallow Cove not long before the Belluardos did. The Belluardos sued them and are now in the process of suing Cherokee County School District for allowing Jonathan on the bus in the first place. The Millers’ insurance company paid the claim, but the suit—and the fees of their lawyers—has bankrupted them. They have lost everything and are fully aware that their cause is sabotaged by the awful fact that they haven’t lost enough. Their loss is consummate. The Belluardos’ loss is infinite. It’s permanent and irrevocable, and now when Robin says, “I’d just love to feel Jonathan’s face again,” she quickly adds, “I feel guilty saying that. Because Mrs. Belluardo would love to feel Josh’s face again. I wrote her a note once, but how can you tell someone, ‘I’m sorry my son killed your son?”

And so they’ve stopped trying to match loss for loss. They’ve stopped trying to convince anyone that the scales will ever be equal. In the terrible zero-sum game of life and death, they are the winners: Their son is alive. And now they want him back. They understand that he committed a crime. They agree that he should do time in jail. They do not believe that he was a bully or that the crime he committed was murder. “We still have hope that Jonathan can make something of himself,” Alan Miller says. “The Belluardos will never be satisfied with Jonathan’s punishment until they get their son back. That’s not going to happen. But we can get our son back and give him another chance.”

It’s a reasonable request and a reasonable position to take. But it’s
not all they want. It can’t be. Like the Belluardos, they want what they cannot have; they want to revoke the irrevocable. They want their boy not to be considered terrible, and now, at the end of the interview, Robin stands up and makes the plea she is consigned to make until Jonathan comes home and the Millers are able to disappear. “I just want people to know we’re not bad people,” Robin says. “That Jonathan is not a bad person. I used to be really proud of him—his kind heart. But now it’s like I’m always saying, We really are good people, we really are good people ….”

The terrible boy does not look so terrible behind the glass. He looks tired. He always looks tired behind the glass because he always
is
tired. No, to be more specific,
sleepy;
he is always sleepy behind the glass. The glass is the glass that separates prisoners from visitors. Behind it sits Jonathan Miller, talking by means of a black phone. He is 18 years old. Since November 2, 1998, he has grown five inches and put on nearly sixty pounds. He has spent nearly a quarter of his life in jail, among terrible boys and terrible men. He has grown up behind the glass—he has, in his mother’s words, been raised by the state—and he has not only spent the last four years without touching a tree or stepping on grass, he has spent the last four years forgetting what trees and grass feel like.

He is shy, slow-moving, slightly gawky. His face is long, his hair short and combed forward. He has fledgling sideburns and pinkish skin stained with jailhouse acne. He’s wearing eyeglasses with a stylish horizontal inclination—the kind of eyeglasses kids his age wear out in the world. His hands are soft and white, uncontaminated by effort. He has a soft, sleepy voice accented not by affect but by occasional complaint—a burbling institutional monotone, cued to react rather than make pronouncements. Although he no longer tries to speak over people—although he’s finally learned to keep his big mouth shut, or, at the very least, to speak
under
people, at prison
volume—he still likes to talk, and as he does, his right eye starts opening like a flower whose bloom is prodded by trick photography. He’s struggling to rouse himself and as he does, the partition between the boy raised by Alan and Robin Miller and the man raised by the state of Georgia becomes more and more apparent. He does not look like a terrible boy, but in his prison jumpsuit—whose horizontal white-and-orange stripes are, in this jail, the designation of a murderer—he has been outfitted with the trappings of a terrible man.

He is still in a county jail. Pending his appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court, he is not yet in the state prison system, but jail is jail, and behind him the turquoise pod of steel and stone looms like a cathedral. Over the last four years, he has moved from one jail to another; he is happy with this one because it allows him to keep a radio in his cell. “What kind of music do you listen to, Jonathan?”