Innocence Undone, Part Three: Successes, failures

KETCHIKAN, ALASKA - Kalie McArthur shut down on the sidewalk in front of City Hall.

With her head tilted slightly to the side like a department store mannequin, the girl’s eyes went blank. A moment earlier she had been chattering about playing followthe-leader as her family walked to Burger Queen for lunch.

Then she was frozen in time.

Seven-year-old Michael Starr saw she’d fallen behind and knew just what to do. He grabbed her and told her to come along.

“Follow me,” Kalie said and “I want to go to the Mexican restaurant tomorrow. I want to started walking again, as if hitting her play button after a 30-second pause.

Later, as the Starr family talked over milkshakes, burgers and salads, Kalie fell into one of her many bouts of repetition: go to the Mexican restaurant tomorrow. I want to go to the Mexican restaurant tomorrow. I want to go to the Mexican restaurant tomorrow. I want to go to the Mexican restaurant tomorrow. I want to go to the Mexican restaurant tomorrow. I want to go to the Mexican restaurant tomorrow. I want to go to the Mexican restaurant tomorrow. I want to go to the Mexican restaurant tomorrow.”

Her mother, Cindy, interrupted: “OK, eat your salad.”

The children laughed.

Kalie defines the daily life of the Starr family. She’s done so since she was sexually assaulted at school in 2004. Once able to function in many ways as just another member of the family, the mentally disabled girl now demands the time and attention of a tantrum-prone toddler. She is well-loved by her two siblings, her mother and her stepfather, but her mental state has become a familiar frustration for all.

Michael and his 10-year-old sister, Lora, long for their mother’s attention, too often consumed with efforts to calm Kalie. Her husband, Charley, misses the intimacy overshadowed by exhaustion and frazzled nerves. And Cindy Starr struggles with what in many ways feels like the death of a child. “She’s here, but she’s not really here,” Cindy said.

During the lawsuit that followed the Sept. 14, 2004, assault in a stairwell at Rampart High School, experts disagreed about whether Kalie’s mind was noticeably different and whether she was traumatized. Robert Harris, 15 at the time of the assault, was convicted of unlawful sexual contact on a helpless victim.

For the family, there’s no question. “It’s overwhelming now,” Cindy Starr said. “She’s stuck in some place.”

In June 2006 the family moved to Ketchikan, an 8,500-population island town tucked in a piney rain forest between the Tongass Narrows channel and the mountains of southeast Alaska. Cindy Starr, who worked as a speech pathologist in Colorado Springs, came across a job opening in a professional journal and considered the prospect of a small, friendly town a throwback to a safer time. An escape, she said, from the painful memories and litigious wrangling that had become her life.

In some ways they’ve succeeded in rebuilding. Kalie, thanks to a settlement with Academy School District 20 and assistance from the state of Alaska, is beginning to get the one-on-one care she needs. Cindy works as a speech pathologist for the local hospital. Charley Starr, a longtime photojournalist, opened a studio and has become the town photographer for school photos, sports portraits and weddings.

Michael and Lora love their new school, and the family found a fixer-upper on the waterfront with an apartment above for Kalie to live in. Kalie cannot live unattended, and the family hopes to eventually hire a live-in caregiver. For now, Kalie’s older sister, Jenny, 23, also from Cindy Starr’s first marriage, plans to stay there. Kalie also has a brother from that marriage, 19-year-old Kyle, who occasionally returns from college at the U.S. Naval Academy to help out.

Yet each moment hinges on an unstable mind that draws comfort from the clutch of a plastic dinosaur and can descend into a dark place on unexplainable cues, especially in public.

The family

On a rainy Saturday morning before their lunch at the Burger Queen, Michael played basketball at the Gateway Recreation Center. He collided with another player and the two collapsed.

The chirping shoes and echoing chatter of the noisy gymnasium ceased while the crowd waited for them to get up.

Cindy didn’t notice.

She stood in a common area outside the court separated by a see-through Plexiglas wall, nervously eyeing Kalie and the baby boy sitting nearby. Kalie, who is 21 but looks about 10 years younger, has been known to pinch or hit small children since her sexual assault. The baby had crawled dangerously close to Kalie, who sat on the floor reading a book about a caterpillar. She had been what her mother called “trippin’” this morning.

Michael was fine, and play soon resumed. When he later left the game, Cindy praised his performance in an attempt to show she’d at least made an effort to pay attention.

There was a time, she said, when she and Kalie could sit in the stands with the rest of the crowd, and when she could give equal time to her three children.

These days, Kalie gets too agitated.

The price is lost time with Michael and Lora, a precocious but shy fourth-grader who grows more withdrawn the more Kalie acts out.

Kalie’s demands haven’t been easy on the Starrs’ marriage, either. At the end of a long workday, her incessant repetition sometimes turns small disagreements into fullblown arguments.

On Dec. 14, Michael and Lora played downstairs. Cindy sat on the sofa, Kalie nuzzled next to her. Charley sat across the room. Cindy noted that she and Charley don’t get many opportunities to sit together anymore.

In November, the couple renewed their wedding vows on a vacation to Las Vegas with Michael and Lora. Cindy’s exhusband, James McArthur, came to Ketchikan to watch Kalie.

The Elvis-impersonator-led ceremony, the Starrs said, was a way to reaffirm their commitment to each other.

Ups and downs

Before the assault, Kalie was relatively easy to manage. One psychologist who gave a deposition during the lawsuit said the family was on “cruise control.”

“They had things figured out,” said Doris J. Shriver.

Now, Kalie’s days — and even minutes — fluctuate wildly.

Cindy has learned tricks to calm her daughter’s anxiety. A hand over the eyes or a finger across the lips, for example, will stop her when she can’t stop repeating something.

A tight embrace quells her shaking.

Michael dispensed advice of his own to a visitor: “Beware of Kalie in the car. You never want to sit by her.” He showed a scratch on his hand to illustrate his point, earned as he tried to buckle her seat belt.

After church on Dec. 16, Kalie struck a woman in the buttocks and fell into a state of frantic repeating. By lunchtime, though, she had calmed.

“I look at you,” she said to her mother in the Ocean View Restaurant. “I look at you,” Cindy responded.

“Staring contest!” Michael yelled.

The day before, while Christmas shopping at Wal-Mart, Kalie was subdued and seemed to enjoy shopping with her mother.

Later, at a different store, she knelt on the carpet, letting go of the two plastic dinosaurs and the purse she’d been clutching. She fixated on the floor and repeatedly slapped it with her hand. A woman, looking uncomfortable with the situation, reached around her to fetch an item off a peg.

Cindy helped Kalie rise to her feet, but then Kalie bumped a man passing by.

“Did you bump the man?” Cindy asked.

“I bump the man.”

“Please don’t bump the man,” Cindy said.

She’s not quite sure if her daughter will become what she once was. There are some signs of improvement — she hasn’t ripped her skin open in public in months — but the slightest changes in her routine can wreak havoc on her mind.

Nagging questions

In quiet moments, Cindy Starr wonders what goes on in her daughter’s mind. She believes Kalie suffered previous abuse — sexual, physical or emotional — at Rampart High School.

According to depositions from workers at Rampart, Harris took Kalie to other parts of the school prior to Sept. 14 and was sometimes seen bringing her around other boys.

During sessions with her therapist and in conversations with her mother, Kalie makes cryptic comments in which she says other boys’ names and talks about being hurt by them.

The matter wasn’t pursued, because Kalie is considered an unreliable source for legal purposes. Harris denies abusing her or allowing others to while she was in his care.

In an interview in December, Harris suggested the ideas were confused in Kalie’s mind.

On Dec. 16, Michael and Lora, hands covered in flour, rolled out cookie dough at the kitchen counter.

At the dining room table, Kalie nibbled at her salad when Cindy, somewhat apprehensively, decided to ask her about what happened in Colorado Springs at the request of a reporter. It was the first time in more than a year the subject had been broached.

Kalie talked about a stick with a tennis ball, which she once used to clean scuff marks off the floor in the hallway outside special education Room 111 at Rampart High School with Harris. She said in fragmented speech that she was hit with the tennis ball.

She talked of a boy named Jeremy and of Robert. Sometimes, Cindy said, other names have come up.

Cindy gently probed, asking about Colorado and what happened at school.

As they talked, Kalie rubbed tears from her eyes, one of just a few times she’s cried in her life, her mother said. Cindy tried to reassure her, and Kalie repeated her mother’s assurances.

“Robert doesn’t hurt me anymore,” she repeated six times. “Go away, Robert!” she later said a dozen times more.

“Listen to me,” Cindy said. “You are OK. You are OK. That was a long time ago, and we are good now.”

Kalie forced out the words. “We’re good. We’re good. We’re good. I’m thinkin’ about my salad. . . . I’m thinkin’ about the kids. Cricket and Michael and Lora.” Cricket is the family’s dog, a papillon/Chihuahua mix.

When Cindy asked what made her sad, Kalie said: “The water tears in my eyes. That made me sad. The water tears in my eyes.”

The next day, Kalie hit students on the bus on the way to school. When the bus arrived at school she asked caregiver Charla Keene, “Do I have to take my clothes off?” Her mother and Keene believe she says such things because of the assault.

The family holds out hope that Kalie will return to a semblance of her old self, and that life in Ketchikan will somehow evolve into a happier time like those often-talked-about moments before Sept. 14, 2004.

But that hope is tempered with doubt.

“I think that we’re hoping,” Cindy said. “It’s kind of like, oh there’s a little light. Is that light over there going to give us some hope and sanity.”

It’s a light that flickers with every repetition.