At Waukesha Memorial Hospital, Bella practiced walking again, clutching her father’s hand. She tired easily and spent most of her time sitting in a wheelchair next to her bed. At night, Stacie slept beside her. Already, her pediatric records related to the case totaled more than one thousand pages.
Medical bills were piling up, too. Within three days of Bella’s first life-saving surgery, the Leutners owed Waukesha Memorial $250,000. Charges would continue to accrue even after Bella’s discharge from the hospital. Surgeons had opened her abdomen and her chest cavity. The healing process for surgeries of that scale is long, messy, and costly, and medical interventions needed to sustain Bella’s recovery would be intensive. She required follow-up appointments and physical therapy, and then, of course, there was psychological treatment to consider—the entire family needed it.
Compared with other families in Waukesha, the Leutners were well off. They owned a house, a boat, and a motorcycle. Joe worked at Exciting Events, a local party-planning company. Stacie had a good job in health care. Together, they earned twice the median salary in Waukesha. But as with most middle-class families, their emergency fund was meant to cover a broken boiler or a flooded basement. They could never have predicted facing such a staggering stack of medical bills, and the stack was getting taller every day.
To make ends meet, the Leutners created a charity page on Facebook called Hearts for Healing. They also set up a GoFundMe account. Money rolled in immediately. Twenty dollars was donated “in the name of Jesus.” One anonymous benefactor sent $1,200. Within a week, the Leutners had raised $27,000.
Joe and Stacie posted the address for a private PO Box on Facebook and asked their growing number of followers to send purple paper hearts with notes for Bella to read as she convalesced. A thousand messages poured in from far-flung places in Europe, and the Pure Energy Dance Centre in Sunrise, Florida. The Leutners hired a local artist to paint a mural of a tree on Bella’s bedroom wall, and tacked the paper hearts to its branches like leaves for her to look at when she came home. Over and over again, strangers mailed and uploaded messages to Bella that called her “brave” or “strong” or a hero. (“You Are STronNg And BrAve,” read one of the purple hearts, written in randomly capitalized letters.) But at night, the brave, heroic girl could not sleep unless her mother was lying beside her. Talking, smiling, and listening exhausted Bella. She feared windows—all windows—worried that someone might tackle her through the glass.
On the morning of June 6, 2014, Detectives Thomas Casey and Shelly Fisher visited Bella at the hospital to interview her about the events of the previous weekend.
But Bella didn’t want to talk. She sat in her wheelchair with her face in her hands, refusing to make eye contact. Detective Fisher noticed the stab wounds on her arms.
Unlike Detective Casey, Fisher had been trained in interviewing children. She started with rapport building. She asked Bella about her interests.
Bella whispered that she liked cats. She talked about a family vacation to South Carolina. She took her hands away from her face. She spoke so quietly that later, when transcribing the interview, police would have to turn up the volume on the recording to its highest setting.
But she wouldn’t say Morgan’s and Anissa’s names out loud, as if doing so might conjure them, like the boogeyman. But she referred to Morgan as “the one who did it” and Anissa as “the one who watched.” She told Fisher about the online quizzes Morgan and Anissa had been taking that Saturday morning and how Anissa had asked Bella what she would do if someone stabbed her. (“I thought it was really ironic that a half hour later, I’m being stabbed.”) She recalled feeling closest to Morgan in fourth grade, when Morgan was obsessed with normal things like Harry Potter. By January or February of their sixth grade year, Bella said of Morgan, “She was obsessed with everything that has to do with creepypasta,” so much so, Bella said, that “she talked about it at lunch, too.” A few months later, Bella said Morgan held her down in the woods, “got her face real close,” and whispered in Bella’s ear, “I’m so sorry.”
“I should have stopped being friends with her in fifth grade,” Bella said.
“Can you find some words to describe what Morgan did to you?” Fisher asked.
“I can’t say it. It’s too sad.”
“I understand this is very difficult for you to talk about.”
Bella made a stabbing motion with one hand.
“Then she started, until she eventually stopped … and then they left, and I was feeling left out, because they’re always talking behind my back.” She told Fisher that Morgan should go to jail for the rest of her life and that “Anissa should be jailed, but not for the rest of her life, because she was involved, but just stood there.” She recounted how Morgan had knelt beside her, claiming she had needed to stab Bella or else Morgan would die. “But it was obvious I could have died,” Bella said, as if still trying to win her argument with Morgan. She remembered lying in the dirt for what felt like ten minutes, until something inside told her to stand up “and walk to some grass.” She said she’d stumbled and crawled through the woods and into the sunlight, then lay down again “because it hurt too bad and it was really hard to breathe.”
A few days later, Bella returned home, and the Leutners released a statement saying that Bella was recovering well and “excited to be out of the hospital, see her pets and continue along the road to recovery.”
“Our family is extremely grateful for the outpouring of support and love from not only the local community, but from around the nation, and the world,” the Leutners said in a statement released on CBS News.
They told the press that so far they’d cut short discussions about the stabbing, not wanting to upset Bella by getting into the gritty details of her attack. Instead, they focused on the positive, asking her how she had found the strength to survive.
“Her response was simple,” they told reporters: “‘I wanted to live.’”
The press release painted an inspirational picture of a girl who was moving on. But the family’s later victim impact statement showed there was more to the story. Part of Bella still lived in those woods, with her cheek pressed into the dirt and Morgan sitting on her back. Bella could not say Morgan’s name or be near windows, for fear her former best friend might jump on her at any time. Stacie and Joe struggled to explain to Bella’s younger brother why his sister had been violently attacked. They struggled to understand it themselves. The family supported the DA’s office in prosecuting Morgan to the fullest extent of the law.