My Blog 2

Amarillys Dias waited for John Silva to return from Kueait/Iraq and Afghanistan. She couldn’t have seen the detours ahead. But “she kept on fighting, for him and for them.” The engagement began as notification more than proposal. John A. Silva was an inmate in the Shawnee Correctional Center, a state penitentiary in southern Illinois, serving a six-year sentence for a home invasion in which he had struck another man with a frying pan. Amarillys Dias was his off-again, on-again girlfriend since the sixth grade. It was early 1996. She had driven six hours to visit him between bar-tending shifts. The two faced each other across a cafeteria table. He rested his tattooed arms on top. She noticed something unusual: a loop of blue prison-safe dental floss on the ring finger of his left hand. She had not seen this before. “What’s that?” she asked. That, he answered, was his hope. “It’s a reminder that when I get out of here we’re going to have a future, and I’m going to marry you, and

HOME OF THE HOMELESS Those who once lived on edge fell off, fueling West Coast crisis A worker uses a tractor to clear a large homeless encampment in the woods near Seattle’s Ravenna Park neighborhood. “It’s a sea of humanity crashing against services, and services at this point are overwhelmed, literally overwhelmed. It’s catastrophic,” said Jeremy Lemoine, an outreach case manager with REACH, a Seattle homeless-assistance program. SEATTLE — In a park in the middle of a leafy, bohemian neighborhood where homes list for close to $1 million, a tractor’s massive claw scooped up the refuse of the homeless — mattresses, tents, wooden frames, a wicker chair, an outdoor propane heater. Workers in masks and steel-shanked boots plucked used needles and mounds of waste from the underbrush. Just a day before, this corner of Ravenna Park was an illegal home for the down and out, one of 400 such encampments that have popped up in Seattle’s parks, under bridges, on freeway medians and along b

HOME OF THE HOMELESS Those who once lived on edge fell off, fueling West Coast crisis A worker uses a tractor to clear a large homeless encampment in the woods near Seattle’s Ravenna Park neighborhood. “It’s a sea of humanity crashing against services, and services at this point are overwhelmed, literally overwhelmed. It’s catastrophic,” said Jeremy Lemoine, an outreach case manager with REACH, a Seattle homeless-assistance program. SEATTLE — In a park in the middle of a leafy, bohemian neighborhood where homes list for close to $1 million, a tractor’s massive claw scooped up the refuse of the homeless — mattresses, tents, wooden frames, a wicker chair, an outdoor propane heater. Workers in masks and steel-shanked boots plucked used needles and mounds of waste from the underbrush. Just a day before, this corner of Ravenna Park was an illegal home for the down and out, one of 400 such encampments that have popped up in Seattle’s parks, under bridges, on freeway medians and along b

The Fighter The Marine Corps taught John Silva how to shoot. The war in Iraq and Afghanistan taught him how to kill. Nobody taught him how to come home. John Silva was deep in a tequila haze, so staggeringly drunk that he would later say he retained no memory of the crime he was beginning to commit. It was a few minutes after 2 a.m. on April 13, 2004. Silva had just forced his way into a single-story home in Normal, Ill., a college town on the prairie about 130 miles southwest of Chicago. A Marine Corps veteran of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, he was a 24-year-old freshman studying on the G.I. Bill at the university nearby, Illinois State. He had a record of valor in infantry combat and no criminal past. He also had no clear reason to have entered someone else’s home, no motive that prosecutors would be able to point to at trial — no intention to rob, no indication that he knew or had even seen before any of the three young female teaching students who lived inside, or the boyfr