While the City Slept: A Love Lost to Violence and a Young Man's Descent into Madness

by Eli Sanders Narrated by Rene Ruiz

Overview

On a summer night in 2009, three lives intersected in one American neighborhood. Two people newly in love--Teresa Butz and Jennifer Hopper, who spent many years trying to find themselves and who eventually found each other--and a young man on a dangerous psychological descent: Isaiah Kalebu, age twenty-three, the son of a distant, authoritarian father and a mother with a family history of mental illness. All three paths forever altered by a violent crime, all three stories a wake-up call to the system that failed to see the signs.

In this riveting, probing, compassionate account of a murder in Seattle, Eli Sanders, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his newspaper coverage of the crime, offers a deeply reported portrait in microcosm of the state of mental health care in this country--as well as an inspiring story of love and forgiveness. Culminating in Kalebu's dangerous slide toward violence--observed by family members, police, mental health workers, lawyers, and judges, but stopped by no one-While the City Slept is the story of a crime of opportunity and of the string of missed opportunities that made it possible. It shows what can happen when a disturbed member of society repeatedly falls through the cracks, and in the tradition of The Other Wes Moore and The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, is an indelible, human-level story, brilliantly told, with the potential to inspire social change.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

11/02/2015
A killing spotlights the inadequacy of America’s mental health system in this gripping true-crime saga. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Sanders explores Isaiah Kalebu’s 2009 assault of Theresa Butz and Jennifer Hopper, who were engaged to be married, in their Seattle home. An ordeal of rape and bloodshed lead to Butz’s death. Sanders sketches a moving portrait of the victims and then focuses on the dark odyssey of their attacker, the son of a Ugandan immigrant who inherited mental illness on his mother’s side and grew up in a household rocked by domestic violence. Kalebu spiraled into violent psychosis: he attacked his mother and once walked into a random business office, announced he was an African king, and fired the staff. The real villains, in Sanders’s telling, are Washington State’s courts and mental health system, which were hamstrung by budget cuts and failed to treat or control Kalebu’s worsening behavior. Drawing on interviews with principal figures and their families, Sanders’s meticulous narrative gives full weight to Kalebu’s crime while elucidating the human tragedy that sparked it, forming a disturbing indictment of society’s neglect of the mentally ill. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency. (Feb.)

From the Publisher

One of Library Journal’s 10 Best Books of the Year
One of Mother Jones’s 20 Notable Books of the Year
One of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Best Books of the Year

“Expertly crafted . . . [Sanders’] evenhanded reporting and emotional commitment to the story make for gripping reading.” —The Washington Post

“A heartbreaking—and compelling—story from every angle . . . Americans have long been fascinated by true-crime stories, from Truman Capote’s 1966 masterpiece, In Cold Blood, through this year’s binge-worthy TV series Making a Murderer. The bad guy is always mesmerizing. What makes a person go to that dark side? Sanders works hard to provide the answers. . . . [He] does a terrific job of telling the life stories of all three principal characters.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

“[A] disturbing, sometimes-horrifying story of true crime and justice only partially served.” —The Huffington Post, “11 Books That Grab You from Page One”

“Inspiring . . . From a harrowing crime, it draws powerful lessons for our mental health and criminal justice systems that can’t be ignored.” —Sister Helen Prejean, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Dead Man Walking

“An arresting narrative . . . Certainly a story worth telling with lessons well worth learning. . . . It’s heartbreaking all the way around.” —The Seattle Times

“Written with great sensitivity and even greater beauty.” —Jeff Hobbs, New York Times bestselling author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

“Gripping . . . Moving and unsettling . . . Told with incredible sensitivity.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“While the City Slept reveals the American landscape of a horrific crime. Eli Sanders, with a rare quality of attention, does this clearly and judiciously. Because of his outstanding reporting, we see not only the complex workings of one’s environment on the course of one’s life, but also how what we consider a tragedy is almost an inevitability—and how, of course, it doesn’t have to be.” —Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, New York Times bestselling author of Random Family

“Compassionate . . . A meticulous indictment of the way America reckons with mental illness.” —Mother Jones

“Engrossing, elegantly written . . . A story that we need to hear.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“A gripping and sensitive account.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Riveting . . . Absorbing and meticulous.” —BookPage

“Told with care, compassion, and the kind of details that will force you to catch your breath.” —The Stranger

“The author’s opening pages are among the most immediate and breathtaking in modern true-crime literature, as evocative as any moment of In Cold Blood or Helter Skelter.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Astonishing . . . Pair with Jill Leovy’s Ghettoside for powerful . . . analysis of the failures of our criminal justice system. . . . It’s heartbreaking, infuriating, required reading.” —Library Journal, starred review

“An unflinching portrait of the human casualties of one city’s and, by extrapolation, our country’s overburdened health-care and judicial systems.” —Booklist, starred review

“Gripping . . . Moving . . . Sanders’s meticulous narrative [is] a disturbing indictment of society’s neglect of the mentally ill.” —Publishers Weekly

“This book is important. . . . Sanders writes with an uncommon empathy. . . . On both a human level and a policy level, While the City Slept makes a vital contribution and deserves a wide and receptive readership.” —NWLawyer

“The great achievement of this book is that it shows how any crime is ultimately a failure of systems and of citizens, and that to some degree we are all complicit when a person who needs help is cast aside. To show empathy for a criminal, especially a criminal who has committed such a violent act, ennobles the process and purpose of journalism.” —Dan Zak, author of Almighty

“Superb, pulse-pounding . . . Moving and mesmerizing . . . Grimly fascinating . . . Hair-raising . . . Sanders . . . is extremely sure-handed in his recreations of the lives, loves, and losses of his protagonists. . . . Every public official in a position to effect change in the mental health system ought to read this book and reflect deeply on its lessons. The rest of us can simply be moved to the tears summoned by the enduring love, tentative hope, and inconsolable pain of this searing human tragedy.” —BookBrowse

“The book is wholly remarkable, and the heartbreak it delivers is a heartbreak we all share responsibility for. . . . Sanders has a deft hand and a sensitive approach and avoids the sensational. . . . [He] has given us the tools for a needed conversation, and it is high time that we started it.” —The Seattle Review of Books

Library Journal

★ 12/01/2015
Sanders (associate editor, The Stranger) won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the rapes and murder that took place in the South Park neighborhood of Seattle in 2009. This book covers not just the horrendous summer night and subsequent trial but the entire lives of both victims and perpetrator with depth and clarity. Sanders follows the failure of multiple systems that left Isaiah Kalebu and his family without the help they needed and asked for, describing the terrible consequences of the loss of social safety nets. The stories of the victims, Teresa Butz and Jennifer Hopper, illuminate this specific tragedy, making Hopper's grace and forgiveness during the trial even more astonishing. VERDICT This book is valuable, often difficult reading. Pair with Jill Leovy's Ghettoside for powerful, if upsetting, analysis of the failures of our criminal justice system. For readers interested in social justice, mental health care, and well-written narrative nonfiction.—Kate Sheehan, C.H. Booth Lib., Newtown, CT

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2015-12-07
Disturbing, sometimes-horrifying story of true crime and justice only partially served. Seattle journalist Sanders won a Pulitzer Prize for the reporting on which this book is based—and deservedly. He made a complex story comprehensible ("The tributaries that feed a moment are vast," he quietly notes) without ever losing sight of two fundamental truths. Carried over into this book, those two truths remain. The first is that the lives of two innocent women were irrevocably changed, and one's ended, by the events of a summer night in 2009, when a young, mentally ill man entered their home and raped and stabbed them. More lives than theirs were changed, of course—as one person close to the case noted, "the victims weren't the only ones killed." Sanders interviewed a dozen or so of the principal figures in the case, from law enforcement officers to social workers and family members. The second truth is that the young man in question has not met with justice: he is being punished, to be sure, but mostly by being hidden away in a system in which he may be medicated but is almost certainly not being treated effectively for his illness. "One can see the combined downstream effects of a lack of preventive measures," writes Sanders of Washington state's lack of adequate funding and support for mental health care, even though mental illness is implicated in nearly half of all violent crime cases and costs the economy billions of dollars per year. The author's opening pages are among the most immediate and breathtaking in modern true-crime literature, as evocative as any moment of In Cold Blood or Helter Skelter. That immediacy does not disappear, but the careening quality of the narrative settles into a somber, thoughtful consideration of the huge issues at stake in a single act of murder. An exceptional story of compelling interest in a time of school shootings, ethnic and class strife, and other unbound expressions of madness and illness.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169091069
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	02/02/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	525,626

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