Asked, Not Answered

A lawyer’s questions after a courthouse shooting.

The author at the United States Supreme Court, standing in front of portrait of Justice Earl Warren.

Concern warning: a fatal shooting.

I was a poet before I was a lawyer and lawyering did not come naturally to me. For a long time I spent my days inside courtrooms, conference rooms, and judges’ chambers, but I came to these spaces from a working-class Baltimore neighborhood. I had to learn to speak like a lawyer, think like one, dress like one. Mostly when I imagine myself in those places, I think of the questions I asked or struggled to ask.

New lawyers fumble with the words. They don’t teach you how to question witnesses in law school. There’s a certain way of framing the questions themselves and there’s a tone of voice you use to ask them. Good lawyering is about stance, too: the way you square your shoulders, hold your yellow legal pad, move your eyes. You learn to control your surroundings by signaling your right to interrogate them. You are the one who asks the questions here. When people hate lawyers I think that very often they are reacting to this way lawyers have of questioning the world as if the world owes us answers.  

I watched my first trial from the jury box when I was in college. I borrowed one of my mother’s Fashion Bug dresses in lieu of my jeans and tee shirts. At some point during the first day, the zipper in the back broke. The judge sent me, teary-eyed, to see a woman who worked in the clerk’s office. She was very kind and she lent me her sweater to wear, told me just to bring it back the next day. I don’t remember much of anything else about the case except that the plaintiff had been a passenger in a taxi. When we retired to deliberate, no one disagreed about anything. No one had any questions about the evidence or what we should do with it. We wrote down a number on the verdict sheet and we all went home.  

Then there was the O.J. Simpson trial. Whatever you think of the verdict in his case, Simpson’s defense team was a group of lawyers at the top of their game. I was in law school then. Each member of the Dream Team had a different style, a different approach to the job. Johnny Cochran swaggered. Barry Scheck was a New Yorker cruising in a sea of Californians. Robert Shapiro always looked like he had a bigger deal to put together somewhere else. All of them were cocky in the most virile sense. Cockiness is a way of wielding power, of holding space physically so that everyone else listens to your questions. Watching them, I learned things. You can stand at the podium or at counsel table or you can walk around in front of the jury box, but you cannot look down, not for a second. You must not lose control of the narrative you are telling because you won’t be able to reclaim it. Ask leading questions, make the witness answer yes or no. Isn’t it true that you were at work on Tuesday evening? You would agree with me, would you not, that the lighting in that room was dim?

I was a poet before I was a lawyer and lawyering did not come naturally to me. For a long time I spent my days inside courtrooms, conference rooms, and judges’ chambers, but I came to these spaces from a working-class Baltimore neighborhood. I had to learn to speak like a lawyer, think like one, dress like one.

Trials are theater. Criminal lawyers improvise their lines because they don’t know all the evidence ahead of time. Civil trials, on the other hand, are written in advance. The plaintiff and the defendant spend months behind the scenes asking and answering each other’s questions. They work out the thorniest evidentiary problems before trial. Once the jury is seated, a lawyer can confidently ask her questions because she knows what the answers will be. I liked that about civil trials. I didn’t want to improvise, I wanted to declaim, to lawyer through language by way of elegantly worded questions and arguments. For a person who was deeply insecure about her place in a classist but not always eloquent enterprise, this was a way to exercise a little power.

On the morning of February 13, 2013, I was in Wilmington to begin a trial. It should have been a big deal, this case, a coup I could put on my resume and talk about at the awful cocktail parties bar associations put on. Delaware’s Chancery Court is the Supreme Court of corporate law in the United States. I was there to ask the court to dissolve a company on behalf of one of the owners. I brought with me boxes and boxes of trial exhibits, hundreds of pages of corporate documents, minutes, emails. I had spent weeks planning out the questions I would ask the witnesses. I would have drawn a long line down the center of a legal pad, written all the things I wanted to ask about on one side of the line and left the other side blank for notes I’d take as the witness testified.

I did not get to ask my questions. As I walked into the courthouse lobby, one of the boxes of exhibits in my hands, Thomas F. Matusiewicz of Hidalgo County, Texas stepped forward, raised his arm, and shot two women dead. One of them, Christine Belford, had been married to Matusiewicz’s son, David. The divorce and custody proceedings between them were drawn out and ugly. Several years before, David had abducted his and Christine’s two children and flown with them and his mother, Lenore, to Nicaragua. At the time of my trial David had only recently been released from federal prison for that offense. He and Christine were in court that morning because David had filed a request to reduce his child support. David and his parents drove across the country in a car loaded up with weapons, rope, and duct tape. The other woman Thomas murdered, Beth Mulford, had accompanied Christine to the courthouse for moral support. Christine was terrified of her ex-husband and his family, and she had good reason to be. As prosecutors discovered, the Matusciewiczes had been stalking her online, recruiting friends and neighbors to spy on her, to report about her daily activities, for years. David supervised all of it from prison.

In many of the photographs that appeared on front pages in the following days, a small fortress of cardboard bankers boxes sits on the lobby floor, crisscrossed by yellow crime tape, spattered with blood. Those were my exhibits. Somewhere inside one of the boxes was my legal pad with all my questions written on it.  

On the morning of February 13, 2013, did not get to ask my questions. As I walked into the courthouse lobby, one of the boxes of exhibits in my hands, Thomas F. Matusiewicz of Hidalgo County, Texas stepped forward, raised his arm, and shot two women dead.

The shrunken glove is one of the most iconic, enduring images to emerge from the O.J. Simpson trial. I feel for Christopher Darden whenever I see one of the photos, Simpson looking at first perplexed and then triumphant as he lifts his hands up for everyone to see. The gloves don’t fit his hands. He yanks on them, scrunching up his face with the effort of it. The Dream Team mills around behind him, next to him, framing him with their bodies lest the jury miss the crucial point. Darden’s face freezes. Moments before he had launched a question, sure of himself, caught up in his pursuit, and then the question hit the ground and bounced back at him. Later on Johnny Cochran made strategic use of the happy coincidence of rhyme in his closing argument. “If it doesn't fit, you must acquit.” Fit, acquit. Darden asked the question and the answer destroyed the prosecution’s carefully cultivated narrative. How dangerous the right question can be.

What happened next, after the gunshots, is a blur. I remember running. I remember that I still carried one of my many boxes of exhibits, held it out in front of me, and so I ran awkwardly, trying to keep the box level, so it wouldn’t spill or drop. It was the stupidest thing, holding on to the box. I don’t know why I didn’t throw it off to one side, kick off my shoes, and really run. I probably could have put several city blocks between me and the gun in a short amount of time, but instead I carried the box and hid behind a car in the parking garage next to the courthouse. I didn’t want to be outside in the open. I wanted to hide inside a box made of bricks and metal. A few hundred feet away, Thomas Matusiewicz put a bullet into his head.

Once the scene was secured I was questioned by police, and then released to my hotel room. I went home a few days later. It is interesting to me now that hardly anyone asked me any questions about the shooting. The law firm I worked for was just “uncomfortable” with the amount of media attention I was receiving because of tweets I posted from the parking garage. My mother asked if I was okay and when I told her I was she was satisfied and that was that. The man I was married to, my first husband, was annoyed about my related tweets. He worried I would lose my job. No one asked me what I saw or what I did or how I felt, and no one asked me what I would do now that it had happened.  

I left my husband later that year in a chaotic way, and spent the next year or so reeling, trying to rebuild my life, and when I failed at that, I wrote. I got admitted to writers’ workshops where I wrote poems and read them aloud to people. None of the poems were about the shooting. They were about my bad marriage, my bad mother. They were about law, and all of the things that are wrong with law, how it classifies and others people by definition.

I could not bear to be in courtrooms anymore. This was partly because of what I had experienced in the courthouse lobby, yes, but it was also something more nebulous. I quit my job. I moved from Baltimore to Roanoke to pursue a graduate degree in creative writing. I rented a tiny studio apartment, filled it with books and IKEA furniture, took classes in poetry and essays and short fiction, with people who were half my age. I taught Freytag’s Pyramid to undergraduates and led workshops of their poems. When the discussion lulled, I jumped in with questions: How is this structure working? What about the lineation? What is the argument this piece is making? I struggled to pay my bills. I wrote more poems about my mother.

I could not bear to be in courtrooms anymore. This was partly because of what I had experienced in the courthouse lobby, yes, but it was also something more nebulous. I quit my job. I moved from Baltimore to Roanoke to pursue a graduate degree in creative writing. I rented a tiny studio apartment, filled it with books and IKEA furniture, took classes in poetry and essays and short fiction, with people who were half my age.

The pandemic began in the spring of my second year. I packed up my little apartment and came back to Baltimore. I learned how to use Zoom, had groceries delivered, read books. The courts were all closed. For the first time in years I had no reason to ask questions of anyone else. One morning in February 2021 I woke up with the first line of the poem/essay that became my book, Bullet Points: A Lyric.

Writing the book meant researching the trial that followed the shooting. David, his mother Lenore, and his sister were tried for cyber-stalking Christine. They had deployed an impressive if horrifying set of tactics to obtain information about Christine’s private life, and these tactics revolved around Facebook. David friended people – even though he was in federal prison serving time for kidnapping his children – and convinced them to keep tabs on his ex-wife. These “friends,” in turn, friended Christine. They sent David screenshots of Christine’s posts. When she moved, they sent him pictures of the new house and the new address. In the meantime, Lenore was remaining involved in her grandchildren’s lives and gathering intel.

Order the book…

Someone put up a webpage about Christine and the children and tried to make a case there for Christine’s depravity and the unjustness of David’s conviction. I write more about the accusations in my book; just know that they are ludicrous. Only the most gullible person would believe the story, and yet, there it is, on the internet, perfectly confident of itself and its right to exist. I am sure that the person who put the webpage up believes every word of it. This kind of credulousness can only live where no one asks questions except to further a narrative. The narrative lives inside a system it has written for and about itself. 

I am the sort of poet who thinks a lot about form, the look of the text on the page. I’m working out the form before I start writing at all. My early attempts at writing about the shooting were shaped like boxes, as if I could fit the enormity of the experience into something easy to carry. They didn’t go anywhere, though. I’d get a decent line down and then a few more passable ones but then the poem would exercise its right to remain silent. When I got my inner lawyer out of the picture, when I no longer was asking questions toward an answer expected or demanded, the words came, and they arrived in long, rangy lines. They swarmed across the page, from one edge to the fold, claiming space and air to breathe in. But I haven’t tried a case in years.

I’m still a lawyer, but I don’t go to courts anymore. I don’t even look the partanymore. I come to the office in sneakers, and I write other people’s motions and appellate briefs. I am happy to go on doing that indefinitely. It’s what I do well.

On my own time I write poetry and essays that other lawyers don’t read. I have become anomalous, a person intimately familiar with the hearsay rules but unwilling to utilize them in the courtrooms where they live. I find that I prefer writing poetry because I can begin without an end in mind, but I like full sentences because they keep on moving. I have no expectation of an endpoint or an easy summing up.  

To write about the shooting, I had to drop the questioning and begin again with questions.