The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives

by Dashka Slater

Sasha sleeps as Richard and his companions goof around, play fighting. Sleeps as Richard’s cousin Lloyd bounds up and down the aisle flirting with a girl up front. Sleeps as Richard surreptitiously flicks a lighter and touches it to the hem of that gauzy white skirt.

Taken by ambulance to a San Francisco burn unit, Sasha will spend the next three and a half weeks undergoing multiple surgeries to treat second- and third-degree burns running from calf to thigh.

Arrested at school the following day, Richard will be charged with two felonies, each with a hate-crime clause that will add time to his sentence if he is convicted. Citing the severity of the crime, the district attorney will charge him as an adult, stripping him of the protections normally given to juveniles. Before the week is out, he will be facing the possibility of life imprisonment.

Oakland is considered one of the most diverse cities in the country. It’s Asian and Latino, black and white, African, Arab, Indian, Iranian, Native American, and Pacific Islander. No one group is a majority. It has more lesbian couples per capita than any city in the nation, and one of the largest proportions of gay- and lesbian-headed households. It’s a city that prides itself on its open-mindedness, its lack of pretension, and its homegrown slang. (Oaklanders say hella when they mean very—and hecka when they want to be polite about it.)

But for all its laid-back inclusiveness, Oakland is also a city of stark contrasts. In 2013, the year Sasha was burned, Oakland ranked seventh among American cities in income inequality—just below New York. Its per capita rate of violent crime made it the second most dangerous city in America, but its citizens still paid some of the highest rents in the country.

there are many languages on earth that are basically gender neutral, using the same word for he, she, and it, or not using pronouns at all. You’ve probably heard of some of them. They include: Armenian, Comanche, Finnish, Hungarian, Hindi, Indonesian, Quechua, Thai, Tagalog, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Yoruba.

English, on the other hand, poses a challenge for people like Sasha who don’t see themselves as fitting into neat either/or categories like male or female. Sasha, like many gender-nonconforming people, wants to be referred to with the pronoun they.

As a child they were diagnosed with Asperger’s, a form of autism, which can make them awkward socially. But it also makes them passionate about their interests, and the passion eventually trumps the shyness.

Sasha’s best friend was Michael, a tall, gangly kid with sandy-blond hair and thick glasses who always wore a gray beanie and a green army jacket. Michael and Sasha had been pretty much inseparable since freshman year, when they met while playing the board game Diplomacy. Over time, they formed the nucleus of a tight circle of friends: Sasha, Healy, Michael, Michael’s girlfriend, Teah, and another friend named Ian.

Sasha was the brilliant one, the one who blazed through calculus, linguistics, physics, and computer programming with a kind of effortlessness.

Teachers liked to claim that Maybeck didn’t have cliques like other high schools, and it was true that the place was a refuge for kids like Healy who had been bullied in middle school. People were nice to each other at Maybeck, accepting. But the school still had social groupings, just like any other high school—arty kids, stoners, bros. “We were the nerdy kids,” Ian says. “The funny, sort of crazy, nerdy people who played video games and watched anime and read manga.”

Back then, Sasha was called Luke and they were referred to as he.

The rules of the universe were fixed: You look a certain way and so you have to act a certain way and people are going to treat you a certain way.

Other people seemed to have a file in their brain marked Gender. Sasha ransacked their own brain looking for the file, but it didn’t seem to be there.

But that night, Sasha posted on Google+: Just came out as genderqueer to my parents. Basically, I don’t identify as masculine or feminine.

They weren’t all that interested in having sex with anyone, actually. And anyway, terms like homosexual or heterosexual made no sense if you didn’t identify as one gender or another.

Gender was the word for what people felt about themselves, how they felt inside. Sexuality was the category for who you were physically attracted to. Romantic was the category for who you felt romantic attraction to. And there was a whole array of distinctions within each category as well. It was like a gigantic menu, with columns and columns of choices.

But as students and staff made the connection between Sasha and the Person Formerly Known as Luke, they absorbed the information without much comment. “It wasn’t really drama,” Michael recalls. “It was just a change.”

At another school, a student who stepped outside the usual gender categories might have been the topic of gossip or debate or at least a few raised eyebrows. But Maybeck’s small student body already included one student who was agender and two who were transgender.

“I wonder, if Sasha hadn’t been in a school where alternatives to the norm were part of the culture and accepted, if they would have been struggling more to figure out where they fit in the scheme of things,” he said. “It feels like making this discovery has really helped Sasha become themself.”

Transgender people are the victims of an astonishing amount of violence. One out of every four trans people has experienced a bias-driven assault, and the numbers are higher for trans women, trans people of color, and people who identify as neither male nor female. Of the 860 nonbinary people who responded to the 2008 National Transgender Discrimination Survey, 32 percent had been physically assaulted.

El Camino Real High School in 1968, girls wore skirts or went home.

Same at my high school, until we girls decided to all wear pants to school one day in 1969. After sending about the 30th girl home, the school decided to change the dress code, permitting girls to wear nice pants in classes. The all-male football team in retaliation protested the dress-code change with a rally held in front of the school. The entire team wore dresses and skirts to protest, saying “it wasn’t ok for girls to be boys.” A local TV station sent out a crew, and the boys made the evening news. However, the girls could wear pants in school forever after. I couldn’t help but wonder about the fragility of masculine identity the high-school football players seemed to have, connecting their male gender identity to being the only sex to be given social permission to wear pants.

O High wasn’t the best school in Oakland, but it wasn’t the worst one either, not by a long shot.

Few white families sent their kids there, but every other group did—Asians (44 percent), African Americans (33 percent), Latinos (18 percent). Oakland’s open enrollment process allowed families to apply to any school in the district, and Oakland High was a popular choice. Kids traveled from all over the city, north, east, and west, leaving behind their neighborhood skirmishes for a school they hoped might be a little safer, a little saner than the one closer to home. There was a security guard posted at the front gate to keep the craziness out, but there was plenty of craziness to be found inside.

The finish line was marked with a cap and gown and a march across the stage. That year, two-thirds of O High’s students made it. You could get there, if nothing knocked you down. But life had a way of sticking its foot out, sending you sprawling. And then you were part of the other one-third, hanging in the hallways instead of going to class, or just drifting away altogether, away from school, away from that march across the stage, into a future that was as hazy as weed smoke.

Only once you stopped going it just seemed too hard to start again. Days rolled into weeks. Weeks into months. And then at some point you realized you’d entered the future. The one you never planned on. The one where everything was going to be that much harder.

Back in her office, Kaprice looked up Richard’s transcript. He was already a junior and her program was meant for freshmen and sophomores, who are easier to get back on track than juniors and seniors. But it was clear he needed help. His grades were poor, his attendance spotty. O High was his third high school in Oakland, plus he’d spent sophomore year living in a group home in Redding, California, three and a half hours away. He’d been placed there by the juvenile authorities after being arrested for fighting when he was a freshman.

Never let your obstacles become more important than your goal.

This is my motto!

Kaprice Wilson came of age in East Oakland in the 1980s, when crack cocaine was just hitting the streets. For users, crack meant poverty—whole lives stripped down like a stolen car, the parts sold off to pay for their next hit. But for dope dealers, crack meant power and respect, fat wads of paper money, gold chains and gaudy jewelry, fancy cars.

Violence skyrocketed after Mitchell’s death as other gangsters battled for a piece of his turf as well as the increasingly lucrative crack trade. Year by year, the number of murders climbed steadily—from 114 in 1987 to 165 in 1992. The corpses weren’t evenly distributed throughout the city, though. They were clustered on the east and west sides of town. East Oakland in particular was awash in crack, blood, and bullets.

Kaprice was living too fast a life to stay at home, so she moved in with her stepsister’s family. One of the girls’ chores was to clean the guns. When boys came over, Kaprice and her stepsister would be sitting at a table with brush, rod, and cloth, expertly taking the guns apart, spinning the barrels, polishing the grips. A visitor would have to be pretty slow not to get the message: these girls were not to be played with.

The goals: go to class, get your grades up, graduate, stay out of jail, survive.

Richard’s mother, Jasmine, was already four and a half months pregnant when her grandmother took her to the doctor to get checked. She was fourteen years old and had been dating a boy two years older. He was the one who figured out she was pregnant—she hadn’t known enough to make sense of the changes happening to her body. It was too late for an abortion, but Jasmine figured she was prepared to raise a child. She loved babysitting her niece and nephew. How hard could it be?

Richard was born the summer before Jasmine turned fifteen. She split up with his father eleven months later. Richard still saw him frequently over the years, or as frequently as he could given that his father was sometimes in prison for drug offenses.

Jasmine had always hoped to continue her education. But it was a scramble just to get the bills paid and the children cared for and the house scrubbed and neat the way she liked it, no spots on the glass tabletop, no dust in the corners. When Richard was a junior in high school, she was working in food service at a residential care facility. She wanted something better for Richard.

Of the roughly six hundred African American boys who started Oakland high schools as freshmen each year, only about three hundred ended up graduating. Fewer than one hundred graduated with the requirements needed to attend a California state college or university.

The odds of landing in the back of a police cruiser, on the other hand, were much better. African American boys made up less than 30 percent of Oakland’s underage population but accounted for nearly 75 percent of all juvenile arrests.

That’s how everyone knew Richard—as the funny one, the one who made people smile. He pulled pranks like putting ketchup on people’s faces while they slept, or ambushing them with water balloons when they’d just woken up. He would do anything for a laugh—put on one of his female cousins’ sexy cropped sweaters, for example, or post a selfie on Instagram of himself dressed in a bra and a wig, gazing into the bathroom mirror with a sultry expression. I’m a THOT for Halloween, the caption explained.

In 2012, Oakland was the most dangerous city in California. According to Oakland Police Department statistics, there were nearly 2,800 assaults and more than 4,100 robberies. In all, 131 people were killed. Eight of them were under eighteen.

Richard had lost two aunts to murder—his mother’s sister Savannah and his father’s sister, Tish, who was killed by her boyfriend in 2008. Now he’d lost two of his friends.

Richard loved having a job. He was conscientious about arriving promptly, and he took care with his work, doing things right the first time and stepping in to fix mistakes made by other interns.

After that, Sasha would walk across the street to pick up the first of two buses that would take them home. The 57 was the second. In the afternoon, it was usually packed with students from a dozen different elementary, middle, and high schools. On game days, the kids from rival high schools razzed each other back and forth. It was loud, obnoxious. Rowdy. The kids were tired, wired, just sprung from school. The adults looked out the window or studied their phones. Tried not to make eye contact. The bus felt charged with daredevil energy. Hot. Muggy and musky with adolescent bodies.

Every AC Transit bus is equipped with cameras that continuously record sound and video from multiple vantage points. The 57 bus was no exception. The cameras recorded Lloyd and Richard climbing on at the front a little before five p.m. and walking down the aisle toward the back—Lloyd chubby in a zipped-up black hoodie, Richard lean in a black hoodie over a white T-shirt and an orange-billed New York Knicks hat.

Later Richard would say that it was supposed to be funny, like that prank show on MTV with Ashton Kutcher, Punk’d. He thought the fabric would smolder for a minute and then Sasha would wake up and slap it out, startled.

Jamal howls with laughter. Then, as Sasha careens toward him, he cringes and climbs onto his seat. “He’s on fire!” he yells. “Put him out!”

The wounds on Sasha’s legs were a collage of colors—red, pink, black, and yellow—but what Dr. Grossman noted immediately was that many of them were white, a leathery colorless char that looked like overcooked tuna. That signaled third-degree burns, in which the skin has burned all the way through, down to the fat below.

Dr. Grossman estimated that the burns covered 22 percent of Sasha’s body.

But studies show that more than 90 percent of juveniles who are interrogated by police don’t wait to talk to an attorney and don’t understand the rights the police have read them. They do what Richard did. They talk.

“Kids are not going to spontaneously ask for a parent,” explains Barry Feld, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and one of the nation’s leading experts on juvenile justice. “They’re embarrassed, they’re ashamed, they’re thinking in their adolescent brains that somehow their parents won’t find out. They’re thinking, How do I get out of here?”

“They read him his rights, and they asked him, did he understand? He didn’t understand,” Jasmine says. “And I know he didn’t understand because I could barely understand. When we’re in cour...