Under the harsh glare of the public,
recovery from trauma is very difficult

Greg Lewis, still dazed, his emotions raw, relented. He would speak to the broadcast reporter perched on his lawn. After all, what could the guy ask? How Christa became an honor student while playing three sports and working at a donut shop on weekends? The reporter fired: "Was your daughter the member of a gang?"

Greg Lewis erupted.

"A gang? A gang? You want to see Christa's gang? There they are," he said, pointing to two-dozen girls marching down Keystone St. They were members of Christa's lacrosse team coming to share their grief. "That's Christa's gang."

Two days earlier, Friday, May 3, at a carnival in Russo Park, Cottman and Torresdale Aves., Deidre Frazier, a 17-year-old Lincoln High student, plunged a dagger into the heart of Christa Lewis, killing the 16-year-old St. Hubert's student. The motive? No one knew, yet everyone speculated.

Reporters scrambled to assemble the details from sketchy police reports and questionable eyewitness accounts: Before the fatal blow, the girls stood nose-to-nose, each backed by an unknown number of friends. With the gang-beating death of Eddie Polec still haunting the Northeast, reporters raised the specter of a similar attack.

The problem? Christa Lewis did not belong to a gang.

"They would have known it had they looked at the (facts)," said Greg Lewis, whose abhorrence for the press remains virulent. "It's so obvious. With sports, school, and work, when did she have time to be in a gang?"

And for Greg Lewis and his family, this makes the healing so much harder.

This week, the Lewis family sits down for their first Thanksgiving without their oldest child. Next week, it's back to court to learn if Christa's accused killer, Deidre Frazier, will be tried as an adult.

Their journey is just beginning.

In the spotlight

When captured in the spotlight, few crises are as traumatic as the murder of a loved one. Personal anguish is magnified for public consumption, snarling the recovery process.

"When a loss is experienced because of human malevolence, the survivors experience rage, the desire for vengeance, and a sense of utter helplessness. They couldn't do anything to prevent it, and they can't do anything to fix it," said Dr. Sandra Bloom, executive director of the Sanctuary, Friends Hospital's new trauma treatment center. "Life will never be the same."

What's left is an overwhelming, indescribable sense of vulnerability. "What is safe? Who can you trust? Your child, in some homes the center of the family unit, is dead," Bloom said.

Then add the media glare, the overwhelming compassion of strangers, the unwelcome celebrity status, and the dissection of the victim.

"I've racked my brain trying to figure out why people have become so interested and concerned about this crime," said John Polec. "I think it's the senselessness of it." And the location.

In tranquil Northeast Philadelphia, "murders, especially like these, which were so violent, so vicious, are so rare here they (shocked) people who thought it could never happen in their community," said City Councilman Brian O'Neill (R- 10).

Northeast Philadelphia's 2nd, 7th, 8th, and upper 15th Police Districts consistently rank near the bottom for homicides. In 1993, the year before the Polec killing, the number of city murders hit 403. The Northeast, with 40 percent of the city's population, registered only 16.

"That's why they were highly publicized. It was almost like Eddie was worth more than some kid somewhere else in the city who gets six lines on the news," said Polec.

Arguably the most notorious local murder in decades, Polec's skull was crushed by bat-wielding Abington teens avenging a rape that never occurred. Amplifying the tragedy, the city's 911 emergency system failed, delaying aid by at least 45 minutes.

"It's still a nightmare," said Polec on the second anniversary of his son's death. Determined to keep Eddie's memory alive, over 1,000 Fox Chase residents gathered that night for a prayer service, a sign the community and the Polecs are working through the trauma.

The Lewises have miles to go.

`I can't be angry'

Joann Lewis is more withdrawn; Greg angrily paces. "I keep it to myself," he said. "I can't go out and be angry at everybody because of my situation. I have to live with it. I run this family. If I don't show strength, than who will follow me? If I fall apart and show anger, I'm just as bad as the women who killed Christa."

Then, with his anger subsided, he quietly admits: "I miss my daughter."

Ask nine-year-old Bud about the accused killer and he calmly talks of taking a baseball bat into the courtroom. Therapy has not calmed his rage.

Cory, 14, now the oldest daughter, giggles defensively when asked about life without Christa. "I finally have my own room," she joked.

"She laughs," said Joann, "so she won't cry. She wouldn't go in (Christa's) room for weeks until we took everything out and threw it away."

Five-year-old Evan sees the tragedy through innocent eyes. He constantly hugs a Dreamsicle sculpture of an angel and a little boy. "That's Christa," he said, "and she's watching over me." He puts it on his window sill when he goes to bed and brings it back down in the morning.

For the Lewises, the shock endures.

"And it can last months," said Bloom. "The brain undergoes a chemical overload. And it occurs repeatedly."

Joann often expects Christa to bound through the front door. "That's when it hits you," Bloom said. "You realize they're not coming back. It's usually accompanied by a numbing that leads people to mistakenly believe you are handling it all well."

Kristie Polec, Eddie's sister, described worrying she'll "get a phone call that somebody else in the family has been taken away."

Greg and Joann staggered into the whirlwind the moment they saw paramedics and police swarming over their daughter's lifeless body. "I thought she got hurt on a ride," Joann said. "They told us nothing."

At the Frankford Hospital trauma unit, powerless and bewildered, they watched doctors and nurses swirl about in a dizzying struggle to resuscitate their daughter. "I knew it was bad when I saw the priest," Joann said.

They learned later that Christa died on the field seconds after the knife punctured her aorta. Her last words: "Guys, I can't breathe."

When Greg and Joann arrived home that morning, Evan ran into their room to ask about his sister. Sobbing, Joann told the truth. The boy screamed, darted downstairs, grabbed Christa's photograph, hugged it, and cried. "He carried it for two days," she said.

The unspoken name

There was no time to dwell on the accused killer. "My main concern was everybody here," said Joann.

In the Lewis house, Deidre Frazier is rarely mentioned by name, even as she haunts the household. "Bud hates that girl," Joann said.

"If the death is caused by a natural disaster, the internal turbulence dissipates because you can explain it away as an act of God," said Joseph Foderaro, the Sanctuary's program director. Not so with murderers. "The energy we put into finding who did it isn't only to keep the world safe, but to find a face to attach to the badness that's just happened."

While Frazier remains an abstract to Evan, Bud has placed her face on his fury. And it won't soon dissipate.

Shortly after sentencing, Thomas Crook, convicted in the Eddie Polec killing, mailed John Polec a letter of apology. It went into the trash. "It wasn't something we wanted to keep," Polec said.

Though society is "sickened' by "thoughts of revenge," it goes "hand-in-hand with victimization," notes Richard Cress of the victim support group DOVE (Dignity of Victims Everywhere). "It's what we do with (these thoughts) that counts. Rarely is the fantasy ever carried out."

Bud gets stomach and headaches.

Greg, without mentioning her name, slices through Frazier's preliminary testimony.

Frazier pulled the knife, she said, "to scare (Lewis and her friends) away from us. It just went further than that."

"If she was so afraid," Greg said, "why did she come back to the carnival? Why didn't she just stay home?"

Police have contended Frazier went home to get the dagger that killed Lewis. Frazier claims she always carried the weapon out of fear after a previous attack.

"If she feared for her life, why didn't she wait for the police? If she was in danger why did she hang around the carnival until it closed?" Greg said.

According to Frazier's statement to police, Lewis told Frazier she and her friends "were in their park and we were disrespecting them by coming in and acting like we owned the park." She struck Lewis only after "a couple of other girls started punching me."

At the hearing, Frazier's court-appointed attorney George Newman fired the first shot of the defense strategy. "You've got people who were provoking, who (were) starting a fight. (Lewis is) not a victim."

Dissecting Christa

Kathy Polec warned Joann Lewis it would happen. Lawyers tried to smudge Eddie's image, even claiming he purchased alcohol for underage friends. "Defense attorneys will find the smallest thing and blow it up," Polec told Joann. "They don't seem to have any ethics."

"We often blame the victim," said Friends' Dr. Bloom. "It starts with questions: Why was she at that place? Why didn't she fight back?"

Or, in Christa's case, why did she stand so defiantly? As a friend said after Christa's funeral: "Christa wouldn't back down. She just wouldn't. If only she hadn't been so stubborn."

The most deceptive question of all: Maybe she started it by gesturing at Frazier or mouthing off?

"As if that excuses murder. It's just more blaming the victim, " said Bloom. Implying Christa was a gang member creates the impression (and a defense tool) that Frazier is less culpable. It's a mind game, Bloom said, one frequently played by the public.

"People cannot handle living in a violent world. There is no reason Eddie Polec or Christa Lewis should be dead. So we explain it away by saying `I'm okay because bad things only happen to bad people. If I'm good, I can control what happens to me.'" Exposing their faults is one way of explaining away their murders.

Bloom also faults the media: "They focus (too much) on the life of the victim, when the only thing that's relevant is the life of the perpetrator."

The media muddle

"From the beginning there was an understanding," said John Polec. "If we could talk, we would. If we said no, it wasn't that we were putting up a wall, we just weren't ready to talk.

"We understood (the reporters) had a job to do. I was to make sure there was no misinterpretation of anything that was said." Weighing on Polec: Angry Fox Chase kids ready to retaliate should the Polecs appear to endorse the notion.

"Reporters are human beings willing to hear what we feel," said Bloom. "That's why so many families welcome them into their homes when they are vulnerable. They want someone who will listen.

"But a disreputable member of the press can do great harm. Remember, people say all kinds of things under stress. Print (or say) something carelessly, and you become another perpetrator."

"It's a betrayal," Foderaro said.

"I'd get calls from reporters asking how I felt now that she's (Frazier) out on bail," Greg said. "How do you think I feel. These are educated people who go to college to study Journalism, and they ask .50 cent questions. And they will keep asking dumb questions (until) they have a murder victim in their family."

WPVI-TV's morning chat show <AM Philadelphia> requested an interview for the Monday after the killing, Greg said. "(They) didn't even say (they) were sorry for our loss. No remorse. No comfort." No show.

"The press must understand that when it makes a connection with a family, it does so with credibility and power at a time the victim's family is incredibly disenfranchised and powerless," said Foderaro.

Two weeks after Eddie's death, the damning 911 tapes, featuring brusque, impatient operators, were released, and the national media circus pulled into town.

Throughout the four-day Thanksgiving weekend, reporters pounded the Polecs with "How do you feel" questions. "We didn't know anything about the system breakdown," Polec said. "We didn't have any information." The Polecs bunkered down until, that Sunday, when they were briefed by Mayor Rendell. "The next day we opened our doors," Polec said, and the headlines screamed: "Eddie Polec's father speaks on 911."

"All I said was the 911 call-takers didn't kill him. That's all. I didn't want 911 to become the issue" and divert public attention from the crime, Polec said. The 911 breakdown "was a major problem," but the "sideshow to what these kids did."

What gnaws at Greg Lewis is what he perceives as the media's reliance on tainted eyewitness claims over solid facts before raising the specter of gangs.

"Why didn't they go to the 15th District to see if there had been any gang activity," Greg said. "Ask: `Any gang violence this week?' Is there a ring leader? Any drive-by shootings here?' I wouldn't comment. I wouldn't give them an answer." That, he concedes, made the situation even worse.

Lewis said he will break his silence after the trial. "And then only to the reporter I like that day."

The neighbors respond

"Evan said to someone on the news that he wished he had a hot meal," Joann said. "All of a sudden, we're getting roast beef at our door, lunch meat platters, you name it. We got so much food I cooked only once in three weeks."

"This illustrates so clearly" that Northeast Philadelphia "is a community of neighborhoods," Foderaro said. "Historically, saying good-bye has been a social experience. But today there are suburbs all over America where people are killed and (neighbors) don't get depressed, and there isn't this outpouring of people asking what they can do to help.

"What's amazing is how the `rules' are different here. This is truly a community."

"People who respond best have a connection to their community. They respond and support the victims, they tolerate the horror of listening to traumatic stories and do not shut it off. They will provide support to the family, whatever the circumstance requires," Bloom said.

Nothing signifies that more than the Dreamsicle angel figurines that poured into the Lewis home.

"That's Christa's lyric," said Joann, pointing to a framed poem written by a stranger, who also brought a Dreamsicle of an angel blowing a kiss.

"That one with the duck?" Joann said. "That Dreamsicle came from one of Christa's friends. I never knew it, but Christa's nickname was Duck."

Evan's favorite is the angel and a dog. "It's Christa and Jake," he said, clutching it into a hug. Jake, the family dog, unexpectedly died of lung cancer six weeks after Christa.

"I told Evan Christa took Jake with her so she wouldn't be alone," Joann said.

Then there are the portraits by classmates, and the over 2,000 letters from grieving strangers who wanted the Lewises to know they were not alone.

"The reality of (these tragedies) yields a rude awakening," Cress writes in the DOVE publication <Victims and Survivors>. "It could happen to them."

"Some neighbors are scared to talk," Joann said. "They get nervous. I've had to tell people, `Look, talk to me. If I don't want to, I'll tell you to shut-up."

"It's hard for them," Greg said. "All you have to do is say, `Hey, Greg, how is everything today. But they're afraid to do that."

And some are guilt-ridden over the tragedy.

One member of the Mayfair Athletic Club, who sponsored the carnival (and refused all on-the-record interviews), replays the event endlessly, searching for ways he could have prevented the killing or kept Christa alive until medics arrived.

"Rationally, there wasn't anything he could have done," Bloom said. "He's acting like a normal human being."

So are the Lewises.