When first questioned, Omar said he’d had his office door open that night. (His office was where kids got their shoulders examined, their wrists taped. A desk, an examination table, a couch to wait on, a noisy ice machine.) Anyone entering the pool, therefore, would cross his line of vision. Unless perhaps someone got straight into the pool through the emergency exit, or had been in the pool already for hours. But Thalia couldn’t have been there for hours; Thalia was onstage.
Omar would have heard someone screaming in the pool, even with the pool door closed. On Dateline, Lester Holt had stood inside what used to be Omar’s office while a woman stood next to the pool and screamed. He could hear her loud and clear. I’d always found that convincing. (But Britt’s imagined voice in my head, again: Did they try it with an ice machine running?)
According to Omar’s later statements, before he left, at 11:18 p.m., he checked the building as usual, even tugged the glass-paneled pool door to ensure it was locked; it was. No, he said, he hadn’t peered through it. It would’ve been dark in there. I would remind Britt of that in the morning: If Thalia intended to swim, she’d have turned the lights on.
I switched to backstroke, slowed my breathing, watched the ceiling go by. The even slats of wood, the flags. I wanted my muscles to burn. I wanted to exhaust every thought I had about Thalia, everything I’d learned, and I wanted to exhaust my quads and hamstrings and arms. I wanted to emerge drained. Then, that night, I could sleep dreamlessly and wake up sore.
The prosecution’s theory of a motive was that Thalia was having sex with Omar in exchange for drugs—which was ludicrous, because Thalia had enough money to buy pot for the whole school. She might well have been buying drugs from him, that might have been how they knew each other, beyond his taping her elbow, but she wouldn’t have needed to barter. The state argued that as Omar and Thalia slept together, he associated her more and more with his ex-wife (he’d had a ten-month marriage) and transferred his anger onto Thalia. A great deal was made of the fact that his ex, like Thalia, was white. They posited that one night, high on drugs and jealous over her ongoing relationship with Robbie Serenho, he lost it—and everything about his ex came flooding back until in a fit of rage he strangled Thalia, bashed her head on something hard, changed her into that swimsuit, threw her unconscious body into the pool.
Displaced anger had always seemed an odd motive, though, even at the time—and by 2018 I knew more about the way prosecutors weave narratives from scraps. I certainly knew more about how rage gets ascribed to Black men.
I tried to think, in the pool, about the actual Omar I’d known, rather than the version rewritten on top of him from the moment he was arrested, the one that invited me to look back on every memory as tainted, a conversation with a murderer. He had green-flecked eyes and very white teeth. He’d bounce around the weight room like he was on springs. I told him once that he reminded me of Tigger. He’d lie down for crunches between the ergs, talk without getting winded. He seemed curious about the students, asking us not about ourselves but each other: What’s up with that kid? he’d ask. Are those two dating? Is she really the Anheuser-Busch heiress or was someone yanking my chain?
There were other scenarios, of course. Thalia and Omar scuffling at the pool edge—maybe he’d caught her sneaking in and confronted her, or maybe they’d fought about sex, or money—and, what, she fell and hit her head? And he tried to cover it up by drowning her? Or they’d been swimming together, they’d been wrestling in the water, and things got out of hand? Although you’d think, then, that this would be what he’d confessed to, rather than the story he’d told, and then recanted, about attacking her in his office and carrying her in here.
I turned it over, lap after lap, the cold of the water settling deep in my joints. The story I knew felt a lot like the stories Lance and I examined on our podcast, the ones passed down through decades of misinformation and bias. The truth was in there, but you had to dig.
There had to be something I’d missed about their relationship, or about that night. I wanted Britt to take me there. I wanted second sight. I wanted the ability to remember things I was never there for.
Someone else entered the room, a young man barely old enough to be faculty. He stepped up on a starting block at the deep end and launched himself into the water, sleek as a dolphin.
15
I had promised Britt I’d watch Diane Sawyer’s interview of Omar’s mother before our next class, so I pulled it up on my laptop as I brushed my teeth that night.
Sheila Evans was prim—small and contained as a wren. I’d learned after Omar’s arrest that his mother was a department secretary at Dartmouth, that his father died young. She struck me as old-fashioned, with her tidy hair and her clipped, careful diction. Behind her, framed family photos lined the top of an upright piano. Diane Sawyer leaned in, her face a spectacular blend of compassion and skepticism.
“When my husband passed,” Sheila said, “it was like losing the bookend to a row of books. We all tipped over sideways. But losing Omar, the shelf itself went. He was pulled out from under us.”
Diane nodded, oozing sympathy. I preferred Lester Holt, his frank blinking. You never felt he was putting on an act.
The camera zoomed in on one of the photos: a teenage Omar, smiling like he’d just heard a joke. He looked like the guy I’d known, only with a lot more hair. When I first got to Granby, Omar had his head shaved—and because he was light-skinned and because I thought people with Arabic names must be Middle Eastern, I didn’t realize Omar was African American until late sophomore year, when he grew his hair out. I asked some teammates if they’d known, and they looked at me like I was an idiot. Angie Parker, who was Black, found it hilarious the rest of the year to point out random blond people and say, “Whatcha think, Bodie, Asian? Jamaican?”
We learned now, through Diane Sawyer’s voice-over, that Omar had gotten his BS in athletic training at UNH, where he was a track star, and while he was at Granby he’d enrolled in part-time classes there again, working toward his MS. None of that had made it onto Dateline. Omar lived in an apartment in Concord above an independent pharmacy—an hour-long commute from Granby in his rusted-out Grand Am. UNH would have been another hour from Granby, and not toward home.
Sheila said, “His little brother was lost for so long. Malcolm was only six when his father died but Omar was fifteen and I told myself, okay, my husband raised up one man, now Omar can raise his brother. But the year Malcolm’s sixteen, his brother is ripped away, too. I try to hold things together, but I’m busy fighting for Omar. We have the trial and the appeal. I got shingles from the stress, and that was debilitating. All my support team, my sister, my own mother, we’re consumed with this. What’s left for Malcolm? And we live in a small community. You can imagine how he was treated after this, even by his teachers. He’s finding his way now, but only through the strength of his character.”
I felt gut-punched—the way she articulated something I’d never been able to. My own father’s death destabilized us, but Ace’s was a life yanked from the center of us all, the last pin holding anything in place. One loss wasn’t worse than the other, but it was the second that did us in.
I found that I’d finished brushing my teeth, that I was flossing them again even though I’d already flossed.