on a murder

Last night before bed I read and I read, and I found a picture of a young girl in the Sacramento Bee who was killed in my city, in the dugout beside a diamond in a bad part of town, near where she lived with her mom and they fought, she stole her dad's Camels and headed out to the park, and swung on the swings with her Goth kinda look as described by the witnesses who saw her that night, after sunset in March, twenty twelve, after dark... they say she was unlike the style in the photo was released, where she looks like any American girl in the fifties, black hair kept up from her face, the bangs cut to the neck in a tame kinda way, this was not how she looked on that fateful night, after mom and the fight when she slipped away with dad's smokes, her hair was longer and pulled mostly over one side of her face, dripping down to the dirt as she hung her sad head, wishing to see dad with whom mom was estranged... two men in their twenties who saw her that night in the park asked if she felt safe, for no one was really no adults around, and she spoke with the confidence of an untested youth, she had a fight with mom and was not going home yet, she spoke out her truth and they left her, walked away in the dark ending light... some time later, they say, between eight and nine at night, when most kids are asleep tucked in by sheets white, she must have walked over across the fields by the diamond, then stepped down to the dugout maybe to hide herself from view, thinking it was safer and really who knew, she could have been lured by one of those young men who came by, it's all speculation no one really knows why he returned to accompany her for a smoke, to hang out... for they found his DNA and hers mixed into the snipes, nine butts on the ground, maybe six they had shared, the profile was submitted and just as they feared, the national database struck a match with a man ten years older, a domestic violence charge in his file, so they went to interview him for a while... he denied being there in Rosemont that night, denied meeting the girl at all, yet his friend (the other man on that fateful night) called him out as the one he was with in the park when they asked the girl was she safe when she wasn't, and they walked along to a third man's house who told the cops the two men talked about her before leaving, the girl in the park... so the cops had their man, locked him up for a trial, which began yesterday after a long delay, the defense lawyer balking at the profiled DNA, for many people do pick up cigarrettes already smoked, in low income areas and high income, too, to take the last drag before the filter is reached -- or to take the last breath of a girl whose been beaten and stabbed and asphyxiated to death, a middle schooler who came to an end too soon, found under a bench in the morning in her hoodie, with a hickey on her neck next to where she got stabbed, she must have resisted when she was grabbed... and no matter how it is framed, who did it or why, the loss of a child, a most painful goodbye.