To the Bridge

by Nancy Rommelmann

a blood clot and died in Dec...

After Eldon was murdered, everyone had been angry with Amanda, for reasons that were obvious. Now, people seemed angry with Jason, for reasons that were sometimes opaque.

The tour’s next stop was a strip-mall pawnshop. Molly said Jason used to sell stuff here, that he habitually stole jewelry from the women in

his life. I said I’d heard that. Molly asked if I knew that Jason and the woman to whom he was now married had dated in high school.

On July

6, 2009, DHS had opened a temporary “Child Welfare Case Plan” for Trinity, wherein the “Child (is) in the home, DHS has custody.” By October, with Trinity “still a current ongoing assessment,” a schedule of planned visits was enacted. Though the reports were heavily redacted, the schedule appeared to have broken down immediately.

The meeting eventually took place on November 24. “Trinity was quiet but friendly during my visit,” the caseworker noted. The next meeting appears to have been on January 20, 2010. Despite the report’s redactions, the number of in-person meetings with Trinity between October and January, as noted in the reports, appeared to be two.

Coburg was also, I would later confirm, where Amanda found out the provenance of Eldon’s name. In

early 2009, Amanda had driven to Coburg looking for Keli Townsend, whom she suspected of being romantically involved with Jason. Jason had denied this. Jason’s mother also told Amanda she was wrong, that Jason and Keli had been friends since high school and that was all it was. Amanda did not think that was all it was. She knew Jason had been spending

time with Keli. Eldon had come home with stories about going to the park with her; Trinity had talked about playing with Keli’s dogs. Believing that Keli lived in Coburg, Amanda had gone to Coburg City Hall, where she asked for Keli’s address. Amanda was told that informati...

Eldon, up the street; maybe Amanda co...

her son had been named after the father of the woman she suspected her husband was having an affair with. Or maybe she didn’t ask again.

Ryan Barron had been okay initially with

Jason staying with him and Sara. But his friend had become spooky and gross. Sara would look under the bed in Jason’s room and find thousands of crumpled-up napkins or a bowl of vomit with a T-shirt stuck in it. She’d had it by September and asked Ryan, “What is going on with your friend?”

Jason had been using OxyContin back in 2001, though not in crazy amounts; he had been heavy, heavy into weed back then.

Jason would chew Vicodin like candy every five

minutes. They had no effect. He was taking up to twenty-five or thirty OxyContin pills a day, and he was doing Dilantin. He tried phenol patches and MS Contin. He would sit in front of the television in a daze and pass out. Sara saw all this.

Jason was in no condition to provide what anyone needed. Any environment he walked into these days, everyone else paid. Maybe it had always been this way. Ryan had lost his job during the time he was partying with Jason. Ryan didn’t want to pay anymore. And Jason would find a way to skate through; he always seemed to. He knew how to hustle.

When Ryan was still partying with Jason, they would sometimes score along Northeast Eighty-Second Avenue, a miles-long strip of cheap motels, tire stores, and Asian steam-tray restaurants.

Ryan and Jason would head over in the afternoons, sit at different cheap-ass bars with about fifteen other people, everyone drinking lite beers and waiting for the dealer to show up and then going single file into the bathroom with the dealer to get their eight ball or whatever. Jason had been going there for years. He was tight

with this woman named Shannon, whom Ryan met a bunch of times. She was a former prostitute and slept on the floor of someone else’s trailer. She told Ryan she had a stage-four brain tumor.

Jason would give Shannon money, give her rides, buy her lunch. Maybe it got sexual; Ryan had ...

pain pills, and sometimes Jason shared those. He was kind...

Ryan had gone over to Burr’s a few times with Jason, had watched Jason help Burr in and out of bed with a sling, watched Jason cut up lines of coke for the guy. It was sad all ar...

Befriending people with access to drugs was a way to get closer to the source, and that, Ryan knew, was something Jason always tried to do.

Ryan called Jason’s boss at Ricoh.

Ryan had always known Jason as the guy who constantly handed out his business cards, the guy who tried to be impressive because he needed an identity to hang on to, and that inside, Jason was empty.

the entire time she knew Jason, she never saw him express any emotion but anger, and that nothing seemed to affect him.

Jason showed up at Ryan’s house later that night. He was driving a pickup truck he had rented with a company credit card. Eldon was with him. Jason was visibly impaired, very high

Ryan did not want him in the house, but he also did not want Jason driving. Ryan got in the truck and drove Jason and Eldon to

nearby Motel 6. He took off Eldon’s shoes and got him in bed. Eldon, who had just turned four, went right to sleep. Ryan told Jason he had to chill, to get some rest. Jason instead pulled out a bag of coke and said, I can’t take this with me. I’m just going to cook it down.

Ryan watched Jason make the crack cocaine. He could not stop him. He also could not leave.

Sara told him he could not leave Eldon, which of course Ryan would not do. He stayed as Jason smoked the entire eight ball, until he was nodding out and asking Ryan to drive him to Eugene. Ryan told Jason to sleep it off and that he needed to call him first thing in the morning, that Ryan would need to

know that he and Eldon were okay. Jason did not call Ryan in the morning. Instead he got behind the wheel of the rented Ford F-150 and smashed into the back of a Dodge van parked four blocks from his and Amanda’s house in Tualatin. He drove away from the accident. Several people witnessed the hit-and-run and called the police.

By the time Officer Chris Kish caught up with Jason, he was parked on the corner of the house he had not been living in all summer. There was significant damage to the front end of the F-150, primarily on the passenger’s side. Officer Kish asked Jason what happened. Jason said that an early 1990s fo...

said he chased the Volkswagen for several minutes before he lost sight of it. He further explained that a passenger had jumped out of the vehicle and took off running; he chased the passenger but lost him. Another officer had spoken with witnesses, who said there had been no Volkswagen ...

crash from inside his house and, seeing his rear bumper smashed in, followed a trail of debris and leak...

“The first thing I thought when this happened was ‘Jason contributed,’” said Isaac LaGrone. “I want to say he’s a psychopath.”

Jason in late 2001, when he hired him at Ricoh for a two-week temp position.

“He was good!” Isaac said. “He could sell ice to an Eskimo. He could sell you the dream.”

At the time, Amanda was working as a receptionist in downtown Portland, not far from whe...

he made her quit her job, because he was jealous. He was jealous of everyone!

When Trinity saw him at Eldon’s funeral, she ran into his arms. Isaac said, “She’s shouting, ‘It’s my Uncle Isaac!’ and these people are thinking, ‘She’s got a black uncle?’”

He had been trying to reach Jason since the funeral, to find out how he was doing, how Trinity was doing. Jason never called back. Isaac at first attributed the cold shoulder to stress. Later, he saw it as another sign that a near-decade-long friendship was a sham, a game Isaac had not known he was playing.

“He’s like a pimp.” Like a pimp? Isaac repeated, “He’s like a pimp.”

I thought Isaac was using the terms “pimp” and “psychopath” synonymously to indicate a person who could make you believe what he wanted you to believe, who could “sell you the dream,” when really you were fulfilling his dreams, his needs.

you can write about sociopaths, you can read all about them, and chances are you will not recognize one when he is taking you in.

I wondered, after being taken in by Mario, if sociopaths played long games or only short ones, where they got a quick hit off your shame.

“Psychopaths take great personal pride in their deceptions and extract tremendous joy from them,” Dave Cullen wrote in Columbine, his exploration of the Columbine massacre and shooters Dylan Klebold