In a dim, smoky apartment dominated by chocolate brown springy couches, a barefoot toddler wails. The toddler, whom I’ll call Joey, has a head of loopy curls and knocks over a metal kitchen chair. Another boy picks it up. He knocks it over again and vaults over the chairback several times. There is a TV on in the kitchen. A bowl of soggy Cheerios on the table that no one is eating. Across from me is an adolescent boy with pale skin who is hauntingly quiet. I’ll call him Mark. He is used to the racket by his little brother, who has autism. He also has other siblings with other special needs. The toddler marches into the living room and runs to his mother’s knees, then takes a business card she’s set on the end table beside her. “Joey,” says the detective sitting next to the mother, “Joey, don’t you take that card now.”
Detective Martina Latessa speaks with a kind of generic urban accent. The Bronx, maybe. East Coast, gritty neighborhood speak. Except she’s never lived outside of Cleveland, where we are now. Joey ignores her; it’s unclear if he understands. She’s smiling at the boy. “Yo,” she says, “you hear me, Joey? Don’t you take that card.” Joey skip-hops barefoot back to the kitchen, card in hand. He trampolines on the kitchen floor, falls to his bum, scoots away to where I can’t see him. Detective Latessa’s face is serious again the minute Joey’s out the door, and she turns to the mother, “The reason your case is assigned to me is, I’m out of the domestic violence unit. I’m not out of the fifth district [where this house is located]. I’m what’s called the Homicide Reduction Unit, a task force.” She lets the words vibrate in the atmosphere.
Homicide.
Reduction.
Unit.
She has the woman’s full attention now. I’ll call her Grace. She pulls her oversized sweater down over her hands, shrinks into the couch. Her focus entirely on Martina. Mark sits on the other side of Martina, rubbing his hands between his knobby knees, watching his mother’s face. He is pale as a stone.
“If I handle your case,” Martina says, “you’re at the highest risk of being killed, okay? You understand?”
Tears begin to slide down Grace’s face.
“Is that hard to hear?”
She nods.
In the kitchen, Joey is screeching. Ear-shattering, nerve-racking screeches. We sit on the soft couches, springs worn down from use, and a guinea pig twitches in a cage on a nearby shelf.
“I’m going to need you to let me do my job,” Martina tells her, “so I can protect you and your [kids], okay?”
Grace wipes at her nose with her sleeve, nodding. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail. Someone leads Joey to a back bedroom, where his screeching is muffled, and it’s a relief for a moment. But then, within seconds, he’s back, and he’s jumping again on the back of the chair.
“It’s going to be hard,” Martina says. She seems not only unfazed by Joey, but also as if she can’t hear him at all. “And this is not going to go away. You’re going to take back your life and start taking it back today, okay?”
Grace is nodding, nodding, nodding.
Martina turns, suddenly to Mark. “You pet that thing?”
I’m a beat behind her. Then I see what she means: the jittery guinea pig.
“Yeah,” Mark whispers in a half statement, half question.
“You better not be mean to that animal,” she says. She grins at the boy, pointing with her pen to the guinea pig. It takes a moment to understand how natural this shift was, her emotional read of the room. She’s just told a young boy that his mother is standing on the precipice of being killed, and that mother is sobbing. There is almost nothing more terrifying to a child than seeing an adult—who is meant to be in control, who is meant to have all the answers—break down sobbing. Martina has an organic talent for reading an environment, maneuvering around the delicate emotional edges. She’s lightening the mood. And if you’re someone who has just been told in front of your adolescent son that you are first in line to be the city’s next murder victim—you can now take a beat to gather yourself. “He better have food and water at all times,” Martina says, in her Very Official “police who can kid with kids” voice. Mark’s grinning. He pulls his knees up to his chin and rests his head there, watching her with a blend of awe and shyness.
And then she’s back to Grace, holding out a mug shot: “Is this him?”
To understand how effective Martina Latessa is at her job, it might help to think about a small plastic animal she has on her desk. From the front, it has the body of a frog, from the back, a chameleon, and it is so colorful that it’s futile to search for clues as to its identification. It’s not like anything found in nature. It looks like one thing from one angle, another thing from another angle, and—when viewed as a whole—is something in a category unto itself. It’s disarming, also funny, and a little bit ridiculous.
You don’t have to go far to find metaphors in Martina’s world.
She is one of Cleveland’s two domestic violence detectives dedicated to high risk cases. A high risk domestic violence detective, if you will, though the title is clunky. This position—in a demanding, high volume urban area—is brand new. She and her counterpart, Greg Williams, may well be the only ones in the country. (There are many places that have dedicated domestic violence detectives or police officers, but I have yet to meet one who handles a major city’s high risk cases, only. Kelly Dunne couldn’t confirm that Martina and Greg are the only ones, but she had never come across others.) So the title is also unique.
Martina is preternaturally suited to her job, perhaps the most effective police officer I’ve ever seen on a domestic violence case. When I mention this to her, she says, “You lie!” But her blush gives her away. (When she introduces me around the department, she says, “This is Rachel I-hate-the-Cleveland-police Snyder.” Later, I will learn that my best defense is calling her a Steelers fan.) It’s this chameleon-like quality she has about her—in the space of a few moments, she can communicate the unbelievable danger that Grace is in, joke around with Mark like it’s just another day in the life of an adolescent boy and his pet, and kid around with Joey that he better watch himself. Most people, myself included, when presented with an autistic toddler, would likely just ignore the child. Maybe ask if someone can watch him for a moment. Martina brings him right into the action. It’s a subtle way of telling Grace, “I see how complicated your life is, and it won’t put me off.” Later, she’ll tell me she knew he had autism the second she walked in the door.
That Martina is a woman, frankly, seems entirely meaningful to me, though her supervisor, Shamode Wimberly, disagrees. Gender doesn’t matter, Wimberly believes, if someone is good at her job. And Martina seems to do the work of three people. But in my view, the fact that she is a woman speaking mostly to women is significant. That she meets victims in their own homes, or the homes of friends and family, rather than forcing them through a bureaucratic maze of departments and courthouses and crisis centers, is meaningful. That she jokes around, asks about the rest of their lives, spends as many hours as it takes, is meaningful. That she is only one person, a severely limited resource, is also meaningful.
Martina grew up on Cleveland’s west side in a family of thirteen kids, one set of parents. She has so many nieces and nephews she rounds up (to forty). The first time I meet her, she tells me she grew up in a house that stared into Ariel Castro’s backyard, where he held Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry, and Gina DeJesus for a decade. No one could believe it when the news broke. A house close enough to shoot a damn arrow into. That neighborhood was like a small town; everyone knew someone who knew those girls. The talk of them, how they’d just vanished, came up often throughout the years.
We drive past the house where Martina grew up, a two-story, postwar house, wooden siding, gabled roof. She’s driving a dark blue undercover car, one of those V-8s with plush seats, bouncy springs, a radio in front that occasionally crackles a police code. Her curly hair is pulled back in a ponytail as tight as an Olympic gymnast’s. She slows the car and points across the street to what was Castro’s backyard. The house has since been demolished. Martina, who’s been on the Cleveland police for eighteen years, was already a detective by the time the three were found in 2013.
When Martina was a kid, there was a neighbor murdered right next door to her. A man named Nick who used to eat pigeons and toss the bones into her family’s backyard. She can’t remember his last name. The murderers ended up being Martina’s older sister’s boyfriend and his friends. (“They served their twenty-five years. They’re out now,” she told me.) The murder scared the hell out of her. The street was jammed with police, with emergency medical technicians, and the coroner was there. And then suddenly, they were all leaving and she started to cry. She counted the houses: Nick’s was first on the block, and then her house was second. She thought her family was next. That tomorrow whoever murdered Nick would come and murder her and the rest of her family. A homicide detective saw her crying, and he came over and sat down on her front porch with her. He promised her he’d come and check up on her. She points to that day, that very moment when she made up her mind not just that she wanted to be a police officer, but that she wanted to be a homicide detective.
This is her three-decade-long dream. It sounds apocryphal. A bit put on for an audience of one reporter. Except I return again and again to Cleveland, spend days with Martina Latessa, and the murder of her neighbor, it becomes clear, exists somewhere in the very front of her mind. She’s tried over the years to look up his case, to find out the name of that homicide detective. But homicide paperwork in the 1980s was an entirely different and noncomputerized system, and she’s never found anything. Sometimes she’ll pass someone in the hall that she knows—a special unit officer, a street cop, a newbie in training—and the murder of her next-door neighbor will work its way into the conversation. She took me down to homicide one day, walked in the door and said to the entire room. “You got a space for me yet? This is Rachel I-hate-the-Cleveland-police Snyder.” It’s a running joke, how much she wants to move to the homicide unit. A detective calls out and asks if she ever found that old case file, the one she’s always talking about. She says, “Nah,” but she will one day soon, go marching down to the basement where the old hand-written files are kept. One morning before she is due in court, she runs into one of her old mentors. He’s retired now and works as security for the courthouse now and again. She asks him about her chances to get to homicide, if he thinks she’ll get the next opening. “Why you want to work down there?” he asks her. “There’s nothing to solve. Everyone’s dead.” He tells me he has a T-shirt that reads, My day starts when yours ends. (Months later I recount this slogan to a retired officer in San Diego and he says, “Yeah. I think every PD [police department] has that shirt.”)
Lynn Nesbitt, who is a domestic violence advocate with a desk just over from Martina’s, says they can’t quite bear to think about Martina leaving. And even Martina herself seems torn about it. She won’t say it, but I suspect she knows she’s unique. She blushes at compliments, bats them away with sarcasm. (“You a damn liar” is one of her favorites. Another, “That’s crazy as cat shit.”) She’s always been one of those women operating in a world of men, and now for maybe the first time in her law enforcement history, the fact that she’s a woman is a benefit. She gets victims to talk in ways I’ve never seen from a man. Even some of the detectives in her own unit, as good as they are, are unlikely to get the kind of victim’s cooperation that she manages to get. There are stats that suggest victim cooperation in domestic violence cases is as low as 20% in some jurisdictions. And there are plenty of police around the country who still believe if a victim won’t cooperate, then there’s no point in even writing a report, let alone a prosecutor filing charges.
Martina grew up going to Catholic school, wore the uniform and everything. A good girl. But her neighborhood was gritty, dangerous. She’d walk home from school skipping around used needles. She knew in only a vague way what they were. Other kids would ask her if she wanted to smoke weed, if she wanted to drink beer, if she wanted to try this or that drug, and her answer was always the same: no. No, no, no. Because she had that idea of being a homicide detective planted in her brain at age nine, and she never wavered from it for a day. She kept herself clean. Lived in the ghetto, but was not of the ghetto. Her parents fought, but there was never any violence. She said her father wore the pants in the family, but her mother picked out the ones he was going wear.
One afternoon, when she was ten or eleven, she was at an older relative’s house when the woman’s husband came home and started beating on her. It scared the shit out of Martina. She ran out of the house, down the street to the pay phone. She called her older brother, told him what was happening. “It didn’t even occur to me to call the police,” she said. Her brother came, and they went back to the house, but by then, the husband had left, and Martina’s relative said it was all okay and no big deal, and just forget about it.
The single most defining element of Martina’s life, beyond police work, is sports. Her senior year of high school, she took the rap for something she says a friend of hers did (she won’t tell me what it was), and she was kicked off the basketball team. At the time, she was devastated. Basketball had been her focus ever since junior high. In her family of thirteen kids, she was arguably the most gifted athlete, a natural talent in everything from softball to golf, but basketball was her main love back then. She wound up learning from a friend about a local league run through Cleveland’s public recreation centers. Being the talent that she was, she spent her senior year playing on that league all over the city and for her—a sheltered girl from Catholic school—it was like a crash course in street smarts. Suddenly, neighbors who’d lived around her all her life but who’d always been strangers became her friends. She befriended a local family of sisters named the Koziols—all of whom were as serious about sports as she was—and one of them, Maryanne Koziol, offered her a job at Cudell Recreation to coach kids—the same place a young boy named Tamir Rice would someday be killed.
“Those Koziol sisters toughed me up,” she says. She coached six- and seven-year-olds, the peewee leagues, and ran the summer T-ball program. Then later, she coached young girls and teenagers. Softball, volleyball, wherever she was needed. She met kids who were abused, kids whose parents were drug addicts, kids in foster care. Kids caught in a relentless system of poverty and violence. She heard street lingo for the first time, saw neighborhood drug dealers just hanging around, drumming up business. “Working with [the Koziols] prepared me for what I would face in the police,” she says. “Holy shit. Without that toughness they gave me I would have never, ever, ever made it.”
One of the sisters, Sue Koziol, played women’s flag football and encouraged Martina to try out. She made the team, effortlessly, and they went on to win eleven national championships, playing all over the country for the next decade of her life. From there, she was recruited to play for the Cleveland Fusion, a team in the National Women’s Football Alliance. Tackle football. The first time I Googled her, I found an article on her career with the Fusion and I had not, until that moment, known there was a women’s tackle football league. (She is retired from tackle now, but still coaches.) The lessons she learned playing organized sports—not pickup games, or backyard sports, but on formal teams—became essential in her police work.
“In order to play sports, you have to be coached,” she says. We’re talking in her office, which has the kind of industrial gray desks and brown wheeled office chairs that date back to the Nixon administration. She leans in while we’re talking. I’m camped in a half-broken chair on wheels, sitting awkwardly between her desk and Williams’s, who sits behind her and who once popped his eyeball out and then back in to show me he could do it. “You have to learn to take someone’s advice, criticism. Just shut the fuck up and let them teach you,” she says.
This is one of her tools with survivors, too. Martina doesn’t treat victims as weak or powerless. She doesn’t ask them why they stayed, why they married, why they got pregnant. She’ll let them know the situation they’re in, and the situation their kids are in, but ultimately the most important thing she can do is listen to them. “These victims of domestic, they never have a voice. They can’t have an opinion at home. [Abusers] tell them shut up; don’t talk to me,” she says. “So if I sit down with them you’ll see them struggle to get the story out, same thing with Grace, how she cried and struggled, but sometimes it’s good to get stuff off your shoulders. I try to give them that opportunity.”
On the desk in front of her sits the chameleon-frog-lizard, along with a stack of case files in varying stages of investigation. The beige phones are so old in their office that they date from the Barney Miller era. (“We put people on hold, but we can’t transfer anybody,” she told me earlier. “People think we’re just lazy.”) One of her coworkers has brought in some hummus, which Martina thinks is too damn fussy for food. She’s partial to Mountain Dew and cereal, but every time I was with her, we only ever stopped for a meal once—and then only because I was so hungry I suspect my eyes had drained of life. “If I had to say what makes someone a good investigator, it’s your patience,” she says. Then she adds, presumably for my benefit, “I’m going to cuss right now; you’re going to hear me cuss for the first time [by “first” she means fiftieth] … but sometimes policemen and detectives need to shut the fuck up and just listen.”
On the wall beside her desk is a saying by Calvin Coolidge: Don’t expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong. Beside that is taped a poster of a player from the Cleveland Cavaliers, his body with Martina’s head Photoshopped atop it. If you insult the Cavs, Martina will trounce you. The poster was created by a fellow detective named TJ, who Photoshopped similar posters for everyone in their office. TJ once offered to show me his case files for a single year—2016. We went into a separate office, pulled out a file drawer, then a second, then walked back to his office and he pointed to box after box under a conference table. In their first year of operation, they screened sixteen hundred cases for dangerousness, about half of which were deemed high risk. Prior to the team’s formation, they estimated they’d get roughly thirty high risk cases a month. In fact, in their first month of operations, October 2016, they had more than eighty, which shocked all of them.1 Now they have an average of around fifty every month. Cleveland’s violence is a lot of things—gangs, drugs, thuggery. But above all else, Cleveland’s violence is domestic violence.